Crude residues: The workings of failing oil infrastructure in Poza Rica, Veracruz, Mexico

Abstract

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.

Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution

“…This study also builds on and extends the existing political ecology literature on oil, which has often discussed the shifting temporalities of petrochemicals (Limbert 2010;Rogers 2015;Huber 2017), as well as the material assemblages of chemical infrastructure (Appell 2012;Rodgers 2012;Rodgers and O'Neill 2012;Barry 2013;Larkin 2013;Appell, Mason, and Watts 2015;Landa 2016;Folkers 2017). Huber (2013), for example, drew attention to the unique temporality of fossil fuels, noting how they represent the biological compression of deep time.…”

“…Living alongside this sprawling "oil assemblage" (Watts 2015, 221) had severely affected people's sense of place, and interviewees regularly discussed how they felt "trapped" by the entanglements of pollution and petrochemical infrastructure: the pipes, the freight trains, the storage tanks (Figure 1), and the deep water docks just beyond the levee. For many participants in St. James, the affective "work of infrastructure" (Landa 2016, 2) produced negative emotions. One participant, for example, described being "buried so deep" by the presence of chronic pollution and toxic artefacts, with another remarking, "We're right in the middle of all this mess!"…”

Slow violence and toxic geographies: ‘Out of sight’ to whom?

“…The notion of invisibility is a central concern throughout Nixon’s (2011) book. Indeed, a large amount of empirically driven and theoretically rich scholarship has been committed to revealing the politics of invisibility that sustains toxic environments (Alexis-Martin and Davies, 2017; Auyero and Swistun, 2008; Frickel et al., 2010; Goldstein, 2017; Hecht, 2012; Kuchinskaya, 2014; Landa, 2016). However, we must not overlook the situated knowledges that people who inhabit toxic geographies embody and live with.…”

Governing beyond capacity

“…The causes of this “problem of capacity” (Tousignant 2018) are divergent and mutually reinforcing: austerity, population growth, urbanization, and anthropogenic environmental change itself. Austerity has postponed maintenance and frozen investment, leading to infrastructures that are both insufficient and falling apart (Fortun 2012; Landa 2016; Peck 2012; Schwenkel 2015). Against this backdrop of stagnant or decreasing infrastructural capacity, environmental change is accelerating, increasing the demands placed on these systems.…”