"There was no water left for us," said Jerónimo Gómez Cruz, 79, who steadied himself with a cane as he forlornly watched a water truck climb past his home on a dirt street.

Drivers are required to adhere to an official, compiled list of addresses of people who have waited for days or weeks.

"People blame us for the lack of water, but it's not our fault," said Moisés Pérez Medina, 27, maneuvering a water truck in Iztapalapa and deftly wielding hoses as his companion for the day, his 5-year-old son, Giovanny, watched proudly. "I'm from here, Iztapalapa, and am just trying to help people and make a living for my family."

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The Aztecs are sometimes referred to as the hydraulic wizards of Mesoamerica.

The Indigenous founders of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, built their capital on an island amid a series of lakes, a strategic setting that provided both security and access to water. They crafted a virtuoso matrix of canals, dikes, navigation channels, causeways, aqueducts and floating vegetable gardens (chinampas) — all in a mountain valley almost a mile and a half above sea level where rain, while often torrential, lasts only a few months.

Although they constructed sophisticated water systems, the Mexica, as the Aztecs were known, hedged their bets. After all, they inhabited a precarious cosmos where the prospect of drought menaced entire civilizations. Among the Aztecs' most revered divinities — and the beneficiary of human sacrifices — was Tláloc, the god of rain.

But Spanish invaders obliterated the Aztec capital in the 16th century, smashing dikes and other Indigenous hydraulic works. Thus began a protracted process of draining lakes and waterways to transform the glittering island city into a European-like capital planted on terra firma.

As the city expanded, under both Spanish and Mexican rule, engineers wrestled with a vexing question: how to curb the often-catastrophic floods that regularly inundated the city, typically between May and October. Much of the post-Aztec water infrastructure was focused on finding ways to expel, not save, water.

Rainy season downpours still flood streets and highways each year, sending water cascading into subway tunnels.

"All of the great hydraulic works of this city have been designed to get the water out to avoiding flooding," said Luege, the former national water commissioner. "The paradox is that we are going to be left without water."

When it was inaugurated in 1900, the Great Drainage Canal of the Valley of Mexico, three centuries in the making, was considered an epochal engineering feat. The canal still carries sewage, mixed with rainwater, away from the city on a malodorous, 29-mile course.

"There has been a lack of strategy, not only in the last five years, but in the last 150 years or more," said Eric Morales, a hydrologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "Since the beginning, little thought has been given to separating rainwater from sewage."

Mexico City still gets about 70% of its water from wells reaching deeper and deeper into a sprawling underground aquifer network. But centuries of unchecked development have depleted the subterranean bounty. Rain falling on urban expanses is channeled into drainage conduits, squandered.

"Cities are basically nonporous environments," said Beard, the Cornell professor. "Areas that need to be recharging the water table are smothered in cement and concrete."

And, on the mountains flanking Mexico City, deforestation — a product of haphazard development and clandestine logging — is exacerbating the loss. The tree root pathways that curb soil erosion and help capture rain and snowmelt are being ripped out.

"The aquifer is being over-exploited," Morales said. "We are taking out twice as much each year as can be recharged."

As the aquifer loses water, Mexico City sinks — as much as 15 to 20 inches a year in some areas — in a process known as subsidence.

As vast quantities of water are extracted, the ground can often no longer hold the weight of the urban sprawl above, resulting in buckling streets, sudden sinkholes and the famously crooked appearance of some of downtown Mexico City's most stately buildings — including the National Palace, the Metropolitan Cathedral and the Palace of Bellas Artes.

The neighborhood around the Angel of Independence statue along the elegant Paseo de la Reforma sank so much that authorities had to add more steps just to reach the base of the monument.

Meanwhile academics, politicians and others regularly propose monumental, multibillion-dollar projects to preserve Mexico City's water — to patch the pipeline leaks and build new systems to harvest and recycle rain — while also advocating managed growth, conservation and the expansion of green areas.

"If we were able to appropriate all the water, there would be no water crisis in Mexico City," said David Barkin, an economist at Autonomous Metropolitan University. "This could be a green city."

But Barkin said that would mean "a tremendous urban redesign. It would require massive urban reorientation of people — and huge investments."

President López Obrador brushes off talk of a water crisis. He speaks confidently of fixing the leaks and drilling new wells in distant locales and laying down pipelines at ever-greater distances.

"We understand very well the situation of the water in the city," the president told reporters recently. "We are taking care of it."

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In the contemporary, helter-skelter sweep of Mexico City, there is one place — in the southern borough of Xochimilco — where a vision of a watery, pre-Columbian capital may still be imagined. Here, residents travel via boat and oar along miles of tree-lined canals, transporting flowers, vegetables and other products harvested on the artificial islands known as chinampas that were a mainstay of Aztec agriculture. Pelicans and ducks float alongside farmers' boats and the colorful trajineras that transport tourists.

But even in this incongruously pastoral setting, shortages cast a shadow. Studies show that Xochimilco's canals are shrinking and heavily contaminated.

"When I first came here, the water was crystal clear," said Fortunato Dionisio, 48, who has planted on chinampas for three decades and was recently hauling a load of ornamental plants to market. "Now it's very dirty and the level of the canals is much lower."

A few miles away, in the Xochimilco village of Santa Cruz Acalpixca — known in Aztec times as "the place where canoes are watched over" — most homes lack plumbing. Residents draw on a public well, powered with an electric pump. Some still use burros to lug water from the well uphill to the village.

"I've been doing this for more than 30 years, and it has kept me healthy," said Ana María Sandoval, 53, as she embarked on the climb with four 5¼-gallon containers of well water lashed to her donkey, Pancho.

She guided Pancho up a treacherous final stretch leading to her home, stopping to offer him water.

In recent years, Sandoval said, she has seen ever-larger numbers of users tapping into the well. Some fill up huge containers and load them in pickups, driving off to sell them. She worries it will run dry someday.

"People suffer a lot for water here," Sandoval said. "But the problem in Mexico City is not the water. We have plenty of water. The problem is that so much water is lost, wasted. There's a lot of greed. That is the real pity."

She grasped Pancho's lead rope in one hand and a wooden staff (and burro motivator) in her other. She continued along the dirt road, lined by cactus and brush, passed occasionally by motorbikes and battered Volkswagen Beetles, the water carried on Pancho's sides sloshing as the burro trudged home.

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Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal and Liliana Nieto del Río contributed to this report.

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