The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State, Environment, and Race in Lerma, Mexico

Abstract

This article explores the relations between infrastructures, labour, and internal colonialism in Lerma, Mexico. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research of two hydraulic projects there, the article argues that infrastructures are productive of the racial, environmental, and political relations that constitute internal colonialism both historically and contemporarily. I show how these infrastructural projects imagined and produced colonial relations between the environment, racialised workers, and the nation‐state, and how these colonial logics endure today through infrastructures and the forms of racialised labour that maintain them. In doing so, this article contributes to literature that interrogates the relations between infrastructure and coloniality by focusing on how infrastructural labour makes internal colonialism enduring. The article concludes by reflecting on how the labour practices that make internal colonialism enduring also point to ways of producing infrastructures otherwise.

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

“…These discussions have challenged normative, positive, or depoliticised accounts of infrastructure as a modernising force, highlighting instead its role in the historical making of race, alongside class. In this literature, infrastructure is key to understanding how the international division of labour is always already racialised (Cowen, 2020), how the performance of everyday labour is too marked by racialised relations and dynamics (De Coss-Corzo, 2023), and how these forms of classification, difference, and domination become themselves infrastructural (Nemser, 2017), supporting processes of urbanisation, capital accumulation, and state-making (Candiani, 2014;Salamanca and Silver, 2022). Here, infrastructure is understood as a techno-political device and analytical lens that allows scholars to untangle how race is produced, how it becomes obdurate, and how it is historically entangled with class both at a structural level and in the everyday practices that constitute infrastructural labour.…”

“…Below, we do so by engaging with five areas of infrastructural research that provide distinct empirical and theoretical entry points to query infrastructural labour. The identified areas of discussion stem from our respective sustained engagements with literature associated with geography’s infrastructural turn and discussions and collaborations with other colleagues thinking about the place of labour in urban infrastructural research and geographies of infrastructure (De Coss-Corzo et al, 2019). As mentioned in the introduction, these areas also allow for an exploration of infrastructural labour that can clarify its characteristics, practices, and relations to infrastructure and other forms of practice.…”

“…In calling for a more thoughtful and careful account of labour within infrastructural research, we must also be cautious not to fall into fetishized or heroic accounts of infrastructural labour. Responding to the strong critiques surrounding settler-colonial and colonial dimensions of infrastructure (De Coss-Corzo, 2023), growing scholarly attention to infrastructure (and labour) must avoid becoming overly positive or fetishising of infrastructural labour. Indeed, a simplistic view can perpetuate a moralising or romanticising view of work while disregarding the ways in which work has been disciplining, exploitative, oppressive, and violent.…”

Volume 26, Número 1

“…Contudo, é preciso compreender que os investimentos em infraestrutura que vêm sendo disseminados e legitimados pelo GIHUB (RODRIGUES, 2021), não são infraestruturas produzidas "para [promover] a justiça ecológica e o florescimento coletivo" (PASTERNAK, et al, 2023, p. 3), mas para atender agentes corporativos, a partir da Os investimentos em infraestrutura constituem uma espécie de agenda de dominação política -uma dominação e extração do ambiente 'natural'. Dominação que vem se realizando por meio da mundialização das fronteiras de commodities, e a incorporação de territórios e regiões a economia capitalista, com a lógica inabalável de abrir, conectar e controlar (SCHOUTEN; BACHMANN, 2022;COSS-CORZO, 2023;LESUTIS, 2023).…”

Expansão e territorialização de infraestruturas portuárias no Brasil e na Amazônia Legal (1993 a 2022)

“…Os investimentos em infraestrutura constituem uma espécie de agenda de dominação política -uma dominação e extração do ambiente 'natural'. Dominação que vem se realizando por meio da mundialização das fronteiras de commodities, e a incorporação de territórios e regiões a economia capitalista, com a lógica inabalável de abrir, conectar e controlar (SCHOUTEN;BACHMANN, 2022;COSS-CORZO, 2023;LESUTIS, 2023).…”