Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Poza Rica-an emblematic oil town that flourished in the aftermath of the nationalization of the Mexican oil industry in 1938-this article looks at how the material and social visibility and invisibility of failing infrastructure is constantly being renegotiated and achieved by those living amid it. Rather than a given physical quality, I demonstrate how (in)visibility is the outcome of everyday corporate practices, toxic mundane encounters, air technologies, as well as affective attachments that illuminate or obscure the harmful presence of oil and its infrastructure in this industrial town. I suggest that the ways in which different contours of perceptions and imperceptions are negotiated are central to understanding how people living in and on oil endure risk, precariousness, and suffering.
Whereas scholars of postrevolutionary Mexico have long attended to the ideological significance of pre-Hispanic monuments, this article looks at the actual work involved in reconstructing them. Field reports from state archaeologists for the pyramid at Tajín (in the lowlands of northern Veracruz) from the mid-to late twentieth century reveal a parallel between the fragility of the monument and the precariousness of the local population, whose labor refashioned the pyramid. An ethnographic consideration of San Antonio Ojital, a community once located north of the archaeological site, further suggests that the making of monumentality elicited a regime of perceptibility that conceals the ongoing struggles of local residents. By layering these temporally dispersed episodes in the long recovery of the main pyramid in Tajín, I present monumentality as a selective process of reconstruction, which despite privileging wholeness, unity, and containment has only worked on the basis of obscuring social and material fragmentation, destruction, and precariousness. I n March 1929, topographer Agustín García Vega visited the lowland basin of the Tecolutla River in order to pursue a project commissioned by the Office of Pre-Hispanic Monuments: he was to reconstruct a fragile and junglecovered pyramid located only a few miles from the recently created settlement I would like to thank the reviewers and editors of HAHR for their insightful comments and critical suggestions. I also want to thank
Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double-bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flour ishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis-present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as 'crisis ordinariness' and 'impasse', cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm.
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