
Roads to Prosperity and Ruin
Infrastructure and the Making of Neoliberal Yucatán
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Roads to Prosperity and Ruin
Infrastructure and the Making of Neoliberal Yucatán
About this book
In 2022, journalists announced the impending economic death of a small Mexican town. Pisté, gateway to the famed Chichén Itzá archaeological site, would be circumvented by the Tren Maya commuter rail megaproject and, consequently, deprived of the promise of steady tourist traffic. Instead of ruminating with frustration, locals set to work on negotiations with the state and federal governments. Generations of experience taught them that pragmatic engagement with mainstream political parties was essential in turning into opportunity projects with the potential to kill the local economy.
Fernando Armstrong-Fumero situates the Tren Maya in a long history of roadbuilding and economic development on the Yucatán Peninsula beginning in the 1930s. Drawing together archival research and decades of ethnographic work, Armstrong-Fumero develops the concept of negative infrastructure to show how infrastructural and industrial investments configure rural economic futures as well as how communities seek to mitigate the harms from projects designed to benefit other regions or interests. The push and pull of development reveals the strategies residents use to influence political change through municipal elections and informal protest. Recognizing their life-changing potential, rural Maya Yucatecans recast infrastructural projects as new possibilities for inclusion, agency, and resistance as participants in formal state and economic structures.
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Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Halftitle Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Roads to Prosperity, and Roads That Ruin
- 1 The Creation of a Modern Geography
- 2 Failures of Development: The Press, Politicians, and Slow Death of Henequen
- 3 The Neoliberal Populism (or Populist Neoliberalism) of Víctor Cervera Pacheco
- 4 Pesos, Dollars, and Maya Identity
- 5 The Promises and Pitfalls of Higher Education
- 6 A Canceled Maya Disneyland: Struggles for Access in an Age of Captive Tourism
- 7 Facebook in Pisté, or Digital Politics Goes Mainstream
- Conclusion Politics as Usual and the Fourth Transformation
- Notes
- References
- Index