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

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State, Environment, and Race in Lerma, Mexico IntroductionIn 1942, the Mexico City government began the construction of the Lerma water supply system. Capturing spring waters in the Lerma marshes, located 50 kilometres west of downtown Mexico City, the project fulfilled a long‐held ambition to use this still untapped flow to supply the Mexican capital. Allegedly idle before, the Lerma waters could now be seized and put to work as part of a state‐led push to modernising and industrialising the city (Aboites Aguilar 1998; Perló Cohen 1989). Appropriating these waters was framed as a necessary measure to ensure that Mexico City could continue its demographic and economic growth, sustaining its position as the centre of the Mexican nation‐state (Vizcaino and Bistraín 1952). Almost a century before, in 1850, the same marshes had been the object of another large infrastructural project. This one focused not on urbanisation, but on desiccating the waters to make room for new agricultural land—and a new class of small landowners (Camacho Pichardo 2007). Turning water into land was seen as key in transforming the purportedly unproductive lacustrine economies and livelihoods that Indigenous populations had practised in the area for centuries (Albores Zárate 1995) into fully fledged capitalist relations that could produce a modern nation. In both cases, widespread environmental transformations, new racialised citizens and workers, and changing relations between state, space, and nature were mobilised through infrastructures.Today, the Lerma landscape is no longer dominated by marshes and reeds. The lacustrine environment and economy that once characterised the area has given way to industries, retail parks, and highways (Reis 2014). The Lerma waters have indeed been tapped and used to fuel Mexico City's expansion, with 14% of the daily water of the city coming from the Lerma area (SACMEX 2018). This, alongside industrial use in the Lerma area, has resulted in the overexploitation of the aquifer (Esteller and Diaz‐Delgado 2002; Wester et al. 2009) and the industrial pollution of the Lerma River (Barceló‐Quintal et al. 2013; Sedeño‐Díaz and López‐López 2007), which still flows through the area, disproportionately harming the local population. This population is today overwhelmingly employed in the industrial and service sectors, representing 25.1% and 47.1% of the workforce, respectively (Ayuntamiento de Lerma 2019); a number that includes the workers who maintain and repair these hydraulic infrastructures, and with whom I worked alongside during the fieldwork that underpins this article. Hydraulic infrastructures have transformed the Lerma valley and the livelihoods of people there; they have enabled Mexico City's growth and the possibility of urban life; and they have made forms of exclusion, inequality, and dispossession enduring.In this article, I argue that the hydraulic infrastructures that supply Mexico City by capturing the Lerma waters are productive of a relation of internal colonialism that endures through forms of racialised infrastructural labour. The notion of internal colonialism highlights how the racialised political, economic, environmental, and social relations that structured colonised territories persist, even after their formal independence (González Casanova 1963, 1965, 2003; Moreno Figueroa 2010; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010a, 2010b; Saldívar 2014). Here, I analyse how these relations of subordination and domination are made possible and lasting through hydraulic infrastructures, and through the labour of racialised workers, who have been themselves shaped by their historical and quotidian interactions with these infrastructures. This racialised labour is both the dead one that constitutes infrastructure (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004; Mitchell 2000, 2003) and the living one that, working in the shadows of infrastructural death (Addie 2021), makes internal colonial relations enduring. In making this argument, I contribute to contemporary scholarship that analyses the endurance of colonial and imperial relations through infrastructure (Aalders 2021; Bernards 2022; Distretti 2021; Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Kimari and Ernstson 2020), highlighting the importance of infrastructural labour (Cowen 2020), and the persistence of internal colonialism as an infrastructural process that structures the geographies and sociabilities of postcolonial cities and nation‐states.The article is organised in four sections. The first elaborates on how the arguments presented here contribute to existing literature on the endurances of colonialism through infrastructure. There, I discuss how a focus on racialised labour—both living and dead—can contribute to understanding the durability of colonial relations, and highlight what the concept of internal colonialism can do for the study of this set of relations. The second section discusses the methodological approach that underpins this research and some of its key ethical and epistemological issues. The third section explores the environmental and racial imaginaries of both Lerma projects and how these were mobilised through infrastructures. The fourth section analyses how these internal colonial relations endure today through the labour, and in the lived experiences, of the racialised infrastructural workers that maintain the infrastructures of internal colonialism in Mexico. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on how infrastructural labour can signal modes of producing socio‐environmental relations through infrastructures otherwise.Theorising Internal Colonial EndurancesInfrastructures are simultaneously constitutive of and constituted by imperial and colonial projects and processes. “Constitutive of” insofar as infrastructures enable the spatial separations that constitute race, class, and gender (Candiani 2014; Nemser 2017; Ranganathan 2022; Salamanca and Silver 2022); the forms of socio‐environmental appropriation and dispossession that underpin capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and state power (Bhambra 2022; LaDuke and Cowen 2020; Moore 2015); and the differentiated mobilities and fixities of bodies and resources across imperial space (Distretti 2021). “Constituted by” insofar as their financing relies on imperial and colonial credit flows (Bernards 2022); their design on colonial/modern aesthetic registers and normative goals (Davies 2021); and their construction and operation on racialised forms of labour, which they have in turn produced (Cowen 2020). Infrastructures are therefore integral to colonialism and imperialism as historical and material processes that link the global to the intimate (Ranganathan 2020), and as enduring forms of difference, domination, and exploitation that connect present to past and future.Colonial endurances have been the focus of a growing body of literature. Notions such as afterlives (Cowen 2020), remains and invitations (Kimari and Ernstson 2020), durability (Aalders 2021; Stoler 2016), or mirroring, overlaying, and tethering (Enns and Bersaglio 2020) have been deployed to capture how new and existing infrastructural projects and relations are produced by and productive of colonial relations and logics. These notions focus on how coloniality, as a form of power that continues “to define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production, long after the end of direct colonialism” (Ndlovu‐Gatsheni 2013:16), becomes “tethered” in space and time through infrastructures (Enns and Bersaglio 2020:116). This tethering does not imply a direct continuity of colonial logics (Aalders 2021), but rather a relation of correspondence and similarity. This relation is both material and ideological as new infrastructures both “overlay” and “reflect” colonial antecedents and strategies (Enns and Bersaglio 2020:115), and enable the persistence of colonial and imperial relations and imaginaries, which remain as “hauntings”, “spectres”, or “conditions of possibility” (Kimari and Ernstson 2020). These shape present and future infrastructural projects, reproducing racialised, gendered, and class‐based forms of domination, difference, and exploitation, including labour, at a global scale.Here, I also interrogate how colonial forms of power, difference, and exploitation endure through infrastructure, making two key empirical and conceptual moves. The first one is that I focus not on how infrastructures articulate and are produced by global relations of power. Instead, I analyse how processes of environment and state making within the borders of a postcolonial nation state—Mexico—can be characterised as colonial. I do so by engaging with the concept of internal colonialism (González Casanova 1963, 1965, 2003; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010a, 2010b). Like coloniality, internal colonialism argues that the relations of oppression and domination that existed in the formal colonial period persist after the formal end of direct colonialism. Unlike coloniality, which highlights the epistemic dimensions of colonial power in the making of the modern world (Davies 2021; Maldonado‐Torres 2016; Mignolo 2007; Nemser 2017; Quijano 2000), internal colonialism focuses on the political‐economic and political‐ecological dimensions of colonial power. This does not imply that there are no epistemic dimensions to colonial domination, or that coloniality negates the existence of material forms of domination. Rather, this is a conceptual move that aims to highlight said political‐economic and political‐ecological dimensions, whilst emphasising the structuring role of internal colonialism in the making of postcolonial nation‐states and territories.Following this literature, I understand internal colonialism as having four main axes. First, it implies forms of resource and commodity production and exploitation that subordinate colonial spaces not to metropoles but to urban centres, often by making the former dependent on a predominant sector or product that is needed by the latter (González Casanova 1965). Second, it implies the making of colonial territories into a source of abundant, cheap labour (Moore 2015) through processes of proletarianisation but also through relations of peonage, servitude, and other forms of non‐waged labour. Third, it requires and produces forms of racialisation (Gonzalez Casanova 1965:32), which imply the continued domination of white and mestizo elites and underpins hegemonic projects of whiteness and whitening as mestizaje (Moreno Figueroa 2010, 2022; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016; Saldívar 2014).1 Fourth, that power, citizenship, and political contentions are shaped not only by class but also by race‐centred contradictions and struggles, which entail non‐linear temporal relations between colonial pasts and presents (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010a).The second move is that, complementing and extending existing scholarship, I draw attention to infrastructural labour as necessary in enabling the reproduction of colonial relations of power, difference, and exploitation. This requires conceptualising labour, as process and practice, both as being produced through the logics of colonialism, and as productive and reproductive of colonial relations of spatial production, resource appropriation, commodity production, and state making. In the case discussed here, it involves critically analysing how labouring bodies are relationally constituted through the racial logics of internal colonialism (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Segato 2007); how the historical making of the labour force is itself racialised, signalling a structural entanglement of race and class (Davies 2021; Lugones 2003; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010b); and how this racialised labour makes up infrastructure both as ossified dead labour (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004; Mitchell 2000, 2003), and as the living labour that, through incremental and improvisational practices (Silver 2014; Simone 2013), makes infrastructures work (Addie 2021; De Coss‐Corzo 2021). In doing so, this article suggests that internal colonialism, and colonialism at large, endure through infrastructures and infrastructural labour.Researching the Infrastructures of Internal ColonialismThis article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mexico between 2016 and 2017. In particular, I draw on observations made as I worked alongside four SACMEX repair and maintenance teams in Lerma and Mexico City. Between five and nine people worked in every team, with team members remaining the same throughout the year, which allowed me to develop a working relationship with them, as I describe below. These workers were employed by SACMEX as Operative Assistants in Urban Services, a category used to describe manual workers whose main function is to maintain, repair, and operate hydraulic infrastructures at the public water utility, and which constitutes the lower level of the SACMEX salary scale and organisational chart. As such, they were public workers, with rights to a pension, healthcare, Christmas bonuses, and other rights gained through their union membership. However, some of them also worked outside SACMEX to complement their wages, which at the time of writing averages $6,627 MXN per month, according to public data.2At the beginning, I limited myself to observing how work was being carried out. However, encouraged by workers and engineers, I soon started taking part in it, mainly by carrying spare parts and tools and by aiding with some activities that required many hands, such as assembling or disassembling large pumps. This way of engaging with infrastructural labour allowed me to better understand how it is carried out, and how it underpins the continued functioning of infrastructures in a context of rapid socio‐environmental change and ongoing austerity (De Coss‐Corzo 2021). At the same time, this involvement allowed me to interrogate how workers conceptualise these activities as central to the production and reproduction of forms of resource appropriation, uneven distribution, and ongoing pollution, here analysed as internal colonial endurances enabled through infrastructures and infrastructural labour. Finally, my participation in manual work also helped assuaging workers’ worries that I might have been sent by their supervisors to spy on them, a concern that emerged from my sudden presence in the field, the class differences existing between us, and my clear inability to carry out much of the work they did. Reflections on the intersection of class, race, labour, and infrastructure are informed by this research experience and positionality, although I acknowledge that much more can be said about these in terms of research practice and its epistemological and ethical implications.I did this work for two or three days per week. The rest of the week was spent in two archives in Mexico City, the Historical Water Archive (Archivo Histórico del Agua—AHA) and the Mexico City Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México—AHCDMX). In the former, I consulted the files that detail how the 1942 Lerma project was designed (DDF 1941a) and administratively approved (DDF 1941b). There, I traced how the Lerma project enacted an internal colonial logic of resource appropriation that sought to secure Mexico City's long‐term growth and wealth. At the same time, the project enabled processes of industrialisation and proletarianisation in Lerma, even if these were not central to its aims. Finally, the Lerma project files, alongside relevant secondary literature that promoted and analysed the project at the time of its construction and shortly thereafter (DDF 1949, 1951), shows how specific logics of racialisation were attached to these infrastructures, seen not only as ways of producing space but also as racialised citizens and labouring bodies.However, racialisation, and its structural entanglement with class, was not only present in the archives. The enduring colonial logics that continue shaping how labouring bodies are produced, perceived, and engaged with contemporarily were present in the participant observation component of this research project. More specifically, the differentiated ways in which I was acknowledged by SACMEX workers, engineers, and bureaucrats, and urban dwellers, can be engaged with as moments that bring to the surface the persistence of racialised difference in contemporary Mexico (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Solís et al. 2019). These moments entailed being considered a more reliable interlocutor than workers as a naturalised consequence of how my body was read relationally through the lenses of class and race, or being automatically considered an engineer or supervisor when out on a work call, despite my peripheral role in the actual labour being carried out. In surfacing, these racialised assumptions show another aspect of the persistence of colonial logics in contemporary forms of difference, discrimination, and inequality. In engaging with the historical and the contemporary, this methodological approach aims to hold together the historical and contemporary relations between infrastructure, racialisation, labour, and state and environment making in Mexico.Race, Environment, and Internal Colonialism in the Lerma Projects1850s: Infrastructure, Liberalism, and Internal ColonialismThe Lerma marshes had long been an object of imagined and material interventions before they were finally transformed into an urban water source in the 20th century. It has been suggested that the first projects that proposed draining them were drafted in the 17th century, as agriculture expanded in the region (Albores Zárate 1995). However, the first project to systematically argue for their desiccation and conversion into agricultural plots—thoroughly studied by Mexican historian Gloria Camacho Pichardo (2007)—was put forward between 1850 and 1875. Driven by growing notions of wealth linked to land productivity, the marshes were seen as idle waters that should be drained to promote the development and progress of that area, and of Mexico in general. The project was headed by Manuel Riva Palacio, then governor of the State of Mexico, where the Lerma basin and marshes are located. Besides him, several local landed elites were pushing for the project to be completed. Their goal was to make the newly gained land productive by turning it into small plots, and, allegedly, turn Indigenous populations into modern citizens through the economic and moralising effect of private property.Fuelling this internal colonial imaginary there were two parallel visions regarding water and indios as signs and sites of backwardness. Idle waters were imagined to be not only unproductive but potentially dangerous as sources of miasma and disease; indios were impeding Mexico's path to modernity through their inherent inferiority (Dawson 2004; Raat 1971). Infrastructure was instrumental in how these relations would be transformed. By desiccating the Lerma marshes, the state and interested private actors would be removing the conditions for the Indigenous populations’ supposed idleness and atavistic behaviour, and at the same time creating the ground for capital accumulation and production. Whilst the professed goal of this project was to drive indios into modernity, the aforementioned Camacho Pichardo (2007) has shown that the steep prices and participation required from would‐be landowners in the desiccation process would have deterred or made impossible their involvement. Instead, elites and government officials would have been able to purchase these lands once the Indigenous populations were deemed financially unsuited for ownership and productiveness. This project was fiercely resisted by the various Indigenous towns that surrounded the marshes, and ultimately this opposition, lack of capital, and political strife led to its cancellation in 1875. The Lerma marshes would remain for the time being.The desiccation project mobilised notions of progress, development, and modernity that show the entanglement of logics of internal colonialism and liberal conceptions of capitalism and citizenship. These were hegemonic in Mexico at the time, represented not only in the local Lerma elites but also at the national level (Dawson 2004; Lomnitz 2010; Raat 1971). As mentioned before, these entailed more than economic imaginaries and were also central in the simultaneous production of environment and race. In Lerma, both nature and local Indigenous populations were allegedly marked by their idleness, a direct result of their physical characteristics. Brackish waters were sources of illness; atavistic Indians were doomed to poverty and marginalisation as a result of their very biological composition. These discourses were not created in Lerma; they were being discussed in intellectual circles and high governmental offices at the time, justifying narratives of racial domination and projects of appropriation and dispossession. These logics, projects, and processes of internal colonialism shaped state and environment making, even if hidden behind professed objectives of Indigenous betterment and change. The indios could not be saved, and the best the country could aspire to was to replace them either through racial mixing, thus de‐indigenising them, or through straight out elimination, following settler colonial logics (Mollett 2016). Only then could a nation of landowners be born, heralding the entrance of Mexico to the modern world.Whilst the project ultimately failed, its infrastructural imaginaries can be tools to analyse a “past that has never been present” (see Stoler 2016:33–36), or a historical conjuncture in which other ways of producing environmental and racial relations than the ones that were ultimately made through infrastructure were essayed. In the 1850–1875 project, those relations were hinged on the identity between backwardness, indigeneity, and the potential harm of idle waters and bodies. There, internal colonialism's infrastructural imaginaries group humans and nonhumans together through strategies of segregation, concentration, and classification, themselves constitutive of colonialism at large (Nemser 2017). At the same time, they suggest an entanglement of imaginaries of modernity, logics and practices of colonial rule, and infrastructures as tools to produce environments and populations. Infrastructure and modernity are therefore “not only a question of mud and concrete, but of aesthetics and ideology” (Davies 2021:746) that here aimed to produce land as a source of wealth and power, a process entangled to the long history of colonial rule and capitalist accumulation in Mexico City and its hinterlands (cf. Candiani 2014). This entanglement of racialisation, environment making, and state formation is not particular to Mexico or Latin America, as analogous processes were unfolding in other hemispheric geographies such as the United States or Canada (Curley 2021; Mollett 2021; Van Sant 2021), albeit with a different resolution from the one that was ultimately essayed in Mexico.1942: The Infrastructures of MestizajeThe Lerma waters remained in the infrastructural imaginaries of Mexico City elites throughout the decades following the failure of the 1850–1875 desiccation project. In 1907, engineer Fernando Rosenzweig suggested that the springs that flowed into the Lerma marshes could yield up to 9,483 litres per second (l/s) (DDF 1941b) for urban supply without implying the disappearance of the Lerma River. In 1930, engineers Juan Villarello and Rafael Orozco carried out a similar survey and found that the Lerma springs had a potential flow rate of up to 9,968 l/s (DDF 1941b). By 1931, these engineers submitted an official request to exploit these waters to the Ministry of Agriculture and Development (Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento) both for electricity generation and to supply water to Mexico City.3 The project was not approved, but it set the basis for the Mexico City government's (DDF) own project, submitted for approval to the Ministry of Agriculture in September 1941 (DDF 1941a, 1941b). These projects argued that the Lerma waters were being underutilised, lost to evaporation, and that they could be made productive both for industry and urbanisation.The DDF Lerma project was approved, and its construction began in 1942. The project stipulated the use 10,000 litres of water per second to supply Mexico City. The water would be drawn from the springs on the right margin of the Lerma marshes. Said water would be used to supply households and to provide for public services. To do so, a 21‐kilometre aqueduct was built, from the Almoloyita lagoon, in the south of the wetland system, towards the town of Atarasquillo. There, a 14‐kilometre tunnel was dug from the Las Cruces mountain towards Mexico City, or more specifically, towards a water deposit that was built in the Chapultepec area of city. The original project planned to use these waters for electricity generation before being used to supply households, offices, and industries. Whilst the electrification component was never completed due to technical, legal, and financial impediments, the Lerma waters were indeed collected by these hydraulic infrastructures, and still today supply Mexico City with 14% of its total daily water consumption.In contrast with the 1850–1875 project, water here appears not as a potentially harmful excess that should be disposed of. Rather, water is discursively produced as indeed idle, but potentially productive both as an input for electricity generation and as a resource itself. This transition is part of a broader set of political, environmental, and economic changes in Mexico, where urbanisation and industrialisation became the focus of government development policies in place of agriculture and rural development (Aboites Aguilar 1998; Vitz 2018). Crucially, these transformations in how water was produced and appropriated are entangled with profound changes in how the Indigenous question was analysed and made an object of government intervention. Instead of the biologistic explanations of the 19th century, a novel explanation that centred culture became dominant. Indigenous populations’ poverty and despair was not a consequence of biology, but rather of centuries of violence and marginalisation (Gamio 2010). To reverse this, Indigenous populations should be made part of a new mestizo racial citizenship and identity (Lomnitz 2010; Lund 2012), often through processes of de‐indigenisation (Aguilar Gil 2018; de la Cadena 2000). Here, mestizaje appears as a project and process of whitening and whiteness that claims to overcome indigeneity whilst maintaining it as its constitutive other (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016). Amongst other elements, this project implies not the physical extermination of Indigenous populations, but their making into Spanish‐speaking, self‐identifying mestizos through education and infrastructural rearticulation.Indeed, the 1942 Lerma project included provisions for the construction of schools and roads, and the electrification of the area (DDF 1949). These measures were seen both as a compensation for the appropriation of the Lerma waters and as a way to modernise the area and its inhabitants. As mentioned before, the goal of this 20th century Lerma project was to supply Mexico City with plentiful water (Campos Bravo 1948) that would not only allow its current expansion, but also secure its future existence as the industrial, cultural, political, and even spiritual centre of the nation (García‐Quintero 1951; Vizcaino and Bistraín 1952). Mexico City was being metonymically constructed as Mexico itself, and the modernisation of the city was equated with that of the whole country. For that, not only water as an urban resource was needed. The former indios were also a fundamental input in that making. As potential industrial workers, they held the promise of abundant present and future labour, as copious as the water captured in Lerma. No longer tied to the waters and the land, the Indigenous populations of the area both migrated and became employed in the growing industry in Lerma, including positions within the Lerma water supply system.The link between these racial and environmental transformations and questions of labour is celebrated in the mural that Diego Rivera painted in the building where the Lerma water system once finished. The mural, titled Agua, origen de la vida en la tierra (“Water, Origin of Life on Earth”), is an ambitious reinterpretation of human history from the primordial spark that created microscopic life to mestizaje as the future of human equality and liberation (Rivera 1952; Tostado Gutiérrez 2012; Vargas Parra 2012). In Rivera's mural, workers,4 experts,5 and Mexico City dwellers painted there all have brown skin and the phenotypical traits associated with indigeneity. Yet, they are not depicted as linked to the land according to imaginaries of what being Indigenous means. Instead, they are urban workers, providing water to thirsty citizens through their labour. They are engineers and technicians, using modern science and knowledge to build the infrastructures that allow the Mexican state to fulfil its modernising mission. Here, the imbrication of materiality and aesthetics in the making of modernity and coloniality (Davies 2021) is again present. If on the technical documents that make up the Lerma mestizaje is assumed, in the aesthetic celebration of its building and conclusion it is made central and evident for all to see.Crucially, the identification of the nation‐state with this mestizo historical subject enables the justifications that propel processes and practices of resource making, appropriation, and eventual depletion. Mestizaje as embodiment and producer of a Mexican pathway to modernity functions as an ideological discourse that masks the continuation of internal colonial logics of environmental production and racialisation. The city as the site where the nation resides and reaches its glory needs ever increasing resources, both natural and human, and these are made, articulated, transported, and distributed through infrastructures. These infrastructures, however, did not produce the dream of plentiful water that was promised in the technical and administrative documents that make up the Lerma project. From the onset, reports that the newly built water catchment plants were destroying the springs they meant to preserve appeared. Stories of incorrect calculations, excessive use of explosives, and other destructive practices have been well‐documented (Albores Zárate 1995; Cirelli 1997). Increased demand in Mexico City and Lerma, compounded by said practices, led to the digging of hundreds of artesian wells, which have led to the deepening overexploitation of the aquifer (Esteller and Diaz‐Delgado 2002; Wester et al. 2009) as part of ongoing processes of appropriation and dispossession there. Today, these processes endure through the practices of infrastructural labour I analyse next.Infrastructural Labour and the Endurance of Internal ColonialismIn the previous section, I argued that infrastructures constitute internal colonialism through the joint making of state, space, environment, and race. This implies considering infrastructure not as an object embedded in history, but as producer of historical relations that continue to shape forms of power, inequality, and modes of living today. However, accounting for the durability of internal colonialism requires considering not only infrastructural form but also infrastructural labour. Crucially, this labour is not merely reproductive but adaptive (De Coss‐Corzo 2021), working in the shadow of infrastructural death (Addie 2021). Here, the notion of infrastructural death stands both for the dead labour that constitutes infrastructural form (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004), and for the ways in which infrastructures distribute harm and life unevenly. As I will show in this section, harm and life in Lerma are distributed along the enduring internal colonial logics of dispossession and racialisation. At the same time, these internal colonial durabilities, and their racialised and racialising logics, are themselves productive of labour as a historical process, as a practice, and as an embodied experience (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Segato 2007).“This water was ours and they took it from us”On a crisp October morning, we met Antonio outside his house in an informal neighbourhood in the vicinity of a water pump in Lerma. Encouraged by the SACMEX employees that were showing me what they considered to be the most interesting infrastructures in the area, I tentatively asked him some questions. I wanted to know how he obtained his water, as some informal supply mechanisms were in place due to the absence of piped water. As the neighbourhood was built after and atop the infrastructures that supply water to Mexico City, formal connections were not made from the onset, and were just being built in 2017, when we were there. Antonio said that, so far, they had secured water using hoses connected to faucets in a public laundry built next to the SACMEX‐operated well and pump nearby.6 This was about to change. The Lerma municipality was building water pipes. Soon, they would be rolled out. Antonio was staunchly opposed to this. These pipes would bring water they would have to pay for. This was for him a fundamental injustice. Why should they do so, if water was theirs, and had been taken from them? Why should he have to pay, when his mother had taken as much as she needed from the springs and marshes nearby? Why had all their water been taken to Mexico City, leaving them in a dry place?Antonio's questions were echoed by others in Lerma. Tariffs were being rolled out in the region, and even if these had not been introduced by SACMEX, the connection to the Lerma project was unshakable. At the same time, water shortages were ever more common, amidst ongoing industrialisation, urbanisation, and deepening aquifer depletion. Another point of contention and visible inequality and injustice is the now polluted Lerma River (Barceló‐Quintal et al. 2013; Eakin et al. 2010; Sedeño‐Díaz and López‐López 2007). Flowing from the central State of Mexico towards the west, and ultimately to the Pacific Ocean, the Lerma is fundamental for industry, urbanisation, and agriculture taking place by its course (Boehm de Lameiras and Sandoval Manzo 1999). Therefore, its preservation was a central concern for the engineers and politicians that planned the Lerma projects throughout the centuries. Even if the goal was to dispose of excess water, or to use it as input for urban and industrial growth, the survival of the Lerma River was always ensured. True enough, the river still flows today. It can be smelled from afar before it is seen. As industrialisation and urbanisation took hold in Lerma and the nearby city of Toluca, the river became an open‐air sewer that stands as a material testimony to the profound environmental injustices that are articulated through infrastructure.SACMEX workers were at the forefront of interactions related to these contentions and concerns, being perceived by some in Lerma as representatives of the state and its internal colonial logics. However, their lives were also entangled in these unjust socio‐environmental relations. They were second or even third generation workers within SACMEX; their fathers and grandfathers had maintained, or built, the Lerma system infrastructures. These previous generations were amongst the first groups to be employed in industrial jobs, leaving the fields and marshes behind. Whilst the current workers’ older relatives, as well as some of their wives and daughters, still worked on subsistence farming, the main economic activities were related to industries, or to services associated to them. Many workers had gained their first experience in the big companies in the area; some of them still worked a second shift there or had used their money to buy collective taxis that moved workers around the area. Here, the making of an industrial workforce that the Lerma project entailed is not a statistical but an everyday matter that shapes workers’ lives and practices.In relation to workers’ everyday practices, the ones that dominated my time in Lerma implied maintaining and restoring water flow in the face of infrastructural breakdown. These included fixing leaks, repairing malfunctioning pumps and engines, and reinstalling functioning ones, thus ensuring that water flowed both in Lerma and Mexico City. There, workers had to navigate the often‐conflicting demands of Lerma inhabitants—many of them their neighbours, friends, and families—and those of SACMEX officials, which often gave preference to Mexico City's needs. In doing so, workers faced questions not unlike those posed by Antonio, which highlighted that current issues in accessing water in Lerma were historically and infrastructurally linked to internal colonialism and its endurance.7 Workers often acknowledged these linkages and aimed to restore flow to Lerma neighbourhoods and towns before than to the aqueduct that goes to Mexico City, even if their orders were the opposite. On other occasions, they negotiated with their own supervisors, often engineers who lived in or were from Mexico City, aiming to obtain more speedy resolutions for ongoing problems with water supply. Whilst they did not always succeed in these negotiations and strategies, their presence suggests that workers’ labour is shaped by the conflicting endurances of internal colonialism. In working with hydraulic infrastructures, SACMEX workers both reproduce and unsettle internal colonial logics, relations, and processes, which continue structuring environments, politics, and sociabilities in contemporary Lerma.At the same time, changes in the materiality of infrastructures, aquifers, soils, linked to ongoing processes of urbanisation, austerity, and to the deepening disrepair of hydraulic infrastructures, mean that workers often must improvise to solve the issues they face. This means that infrastructural labour does not aim to return infrastructures to a state of ideal functioning but must adapt them to constant change. Take the following example: in Lerma, water pumps frequently got stuck in mud, sometimes as a consequence of springs drying up. This could affect pumps, engines, and other pieces of equipment, leading to problems both in Lerma and in Mexico City. As the process of repairing these infrastructures through official channels could be lengthy, expensive, and unreliable, workers often crafted new working pumps and pipes out of pieces of malfunctioning equipment—a process that I have elsewhere conceptualised as patchwork (De Coss‐Corzo 2021). In doing so, workers were making the internal colonial relations that have shaped Lerma historically endure through adaptation and contradiction. This internal colonial durability is hinged on the relations between living labour and infrastructures as dead labour (Addie 2021), here understood as a concept that captures how their production implied racialised labour power, as an intimate matter related to workers’ family histories, and as a descriptor of the lives that the Lerma has taken.8Workers often reflected on these contradictory relations and their own role in their making and endurance. One February morning, Ramón, a crane operator at SACMEX, and I discussed what the Lerma infrastructures had meant for the area. Ramón talked about how schools, roads, and electricity supplies had been built at the same time as the Lerma hydraulic infrastructures, as the 1942 project had proposed. “These pipes”, he told me, “brought modernity to our towns”. This modernity is not only characterised by new forms of infrastructural provision. It is also what describes the processes of de‐indigenisation, dispossession, and proletarianisation that shaped not only the area but also their livelihoods and family histories. It also captures the processes of ongoing aquifer overexploitation and environmental pollution that shape their labour and livelihoods. Here, modernity and internal colonialism appear as entangled, producing environment through infrastructure, whilst enacting logics of racialisation that shape the contemporary labour force in Lerma, and indeed beyond. Internal colonialism endures as a living matter that continues to shape identities, environment, politics, and imaginaries, linking personal histories, collective grievances, and past dispossessions with present contentions around water and its uses.“We can't just let anyone in”Infrastructures not only produce labour and environment as constitutive of internal colonial projects and processes. They also mediate and make enduring workers’ embodied experiences of ongoing racialisation. It is in the body where the often‐unspoken logics of racial stratification and racialised power are performed, read, and enforced. If race is indeed a sign carried in the body (Segato 2007), and racism a process with distributed intensities that emerges in specific moments and spaces (Moreno Figueroa 2010), nowhere did this become clearer during my fieldwork than when dealing with those that inhabit the secluded elite neighbourhoods of west Mexico City. These sites, even if usually locations were water provision is constant and reliable, can also experience water shortages from time to time. One of such occasions, I accompanied yet another work team—in Mexico City I worked mostly with two groups of six workers each—to respond to a complaint regarding poor water pressure. The problem was in one of the wealthiest areas of west Mexico City, Bosques de las Lomas, where houses have been built in the ridges and ravines through where the Lerma aqueduct passes.After working for long hours, and potentially having unclogged the specific blockage that was impeding waterflow, the workers needed to check if their intervention had been successful. To do so, they had to go inside one of the houses in the area where the original complaint had been lodged. They walked up a winding street, with enormous mansions on both sides of the road. A car was parking in one of them. The foreman drew the attention of the three men that were getting off the car; two were elderly and white, and the third one was a young, brown‐skinned driver. The foreman asked if they could come inside to check the water pressure. They were, he said, answering a complaint that had been made in the area. One of the elderly men responded by saying that indeed there was a problem but that he could not let them in. He demanded not only to see the identifications of these uniform‐wearing men, but also to speak to their boss. The foreman replied that that was not possible, as the engineer was busy elsewhere, and that this was a question that could be easily and rapidly checked. The elderly man was not convinced.Standing behind them, I weighed my options. If I intervened, would I be considered as a more reliable interlocutor based on racialised and class‐based readings of body, behaviour, speech, and demeanour? And if so, would that be an ethically sound decision in the field? Without knowing the answer to these questions, but sensing that my intervention might in any case resolve this impasse and allow the workers and myself to carry on from that site, I spoke. I reassured the men that these were SACMEX workers, there to solve their problems. They asked if I was an engineer, and I said that I was a researcher who had been working with them for a few months now. The man that was doing the talking thought about it for a few seconds, and finally responded that they could come in. As the workers walked in, he approached me and said, “You understand me, right? We can't just let anyone in”. In this phrase, the persistence of race, and its entanglement with class, becomes unmissable. The word “anyone” demarcates the distance between the workers as the inferior others that constitute the supposed unity of the mestizo national and urban citizen (Lomnitz 2010; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016), here read through the entangled embodiment of class and race.After leaving the house and finally sorting out the water pressure problem, I asked the workers if they encountered that sort of thing usually. They laughed and said it happened all the time. Rich people were normally wary, even if workers were there only because they had requested their intervention. Their IDs were usually requested, often withheld or photocopied, and their bosses often had to be drawn into the situation to allow them to do what they were meant to. I saw this happening on other occasions, usually at the gates of the walled compounds that dot Mexico City's wealthy quarters, where anxieties linked to insecurity, homogeneity, and disorder shape both infrastructure and everyday life (Caprón 2016; Giglia 2008). In those elite spaces, where logics of class, race, and security intersect, the persistence of racial classifications forcefully emerges. Crucially, it does so not only through racialised bodily markers such as skin colour, and other phenotypical characteristics associated to hegemonic notions of the indio. At the same time, it is read through the relations these racialised labouring bodies have with infrastructures and their upkeep. Fixed and fluid, the racial formations of internal colonialism persist. These constitute infrastructural labour—just as infrastructural labour makes the relations that constitute internal colonialism enduring.Infrastructural Labour and the Durability of Internal ColonialismInfrastructure can be enrolled to trace the durability of internal colonialism in Lerma and Mexico City. This implies considering how infrastructures produced a racialised labour force, which today still makes these infrastructures endure through adaptive and creative labour. In maintaining and repairing infrastructures, workers are also making the socio‐environmental relations that constitute internal colonialism enduring. This means that the matter of durability is not only contingent on infrastructural form but also requires human labour. This reproductive role of labour is always already present in the workings of infrastructures, which are themselves constituted by racialised dead labour. In the case analysed here, infrastructural labour is crucial in sustaining internal colonialism as a mode of producing the environment, race, and the modern Mexican state and its territorial logics. The endurance of this internal colonial configuration can be observed in the unequal distribution of resources that the Lerma infrastructures enable and produce, which themselves “are racialized relations of allocation and appropriation” (Stoler 2016:347). At the same time, it is present in the ways in which the lives of the workers that upkeep these infrastructures are entangled with the race and environment‐making role of infrastructures historically and in everyday life.By highlighting the articulation of race and environment‐making in and through the infrastructures of internal colonialism, I also want to suggest that race is not only a distributional problem related to unequal access to resources or unequal exposures to risk (Lund 2012; Pulido 2000; Stoler 2016). It is also a structuring process, made as infrastructures produce the worlds we inhabit as always already socio‐material spaces, relations, and forms (Nemser 2017). The very fabric of space is constituted through racialised relations and differences, and both become and are made and maintained through infrastructure. In the case of Mexico, race is inscribed in the very infrastructures of the contemporary Mexican state. This is articulated with internal colonial forms of environment‐making, which promise(d) a future of racial and social justice that is trumped by their own unfolding. The persistence of racialised inequality, including the question of indigeneity, not only as a relationally defined experience of oppression, but also as a site of contention, political action, and alternative environmental imagination, stands as a counterpoint in the unresolved unfolding of the internal colonial project of the Mexican state (Aguilar Gil 2018; Moreno Figueroa 2010).ConclusionHere I have argued that infrastructure and infrastructural labour constitute and make enduring internal colonial racial and environmental relations and imaginaries. I have traced how past imaginaries of nature and race were articulated, and how they continue unfolding presently as the obdurate effects and composing elements of environmental, racial, and colonial projects and designs. In doing so, I have not only characterised the Mexican state as an internal colonial project, which produces environmental and racial injustices and inequalities in the pursuit of progress for an allegedly mestizo nation (Moreno Figueroa 2010, 2022; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016). I have also suggested that infrastructure can be enrolled in analyses of colonial, imperial, and racial durabilities (Stoler 2016), shedding light on the materiality of these continuities and their lasting effects. Building on existing literature (Aalders 2021; Distretti 2021; Enns and Bersaglio 2020), I have deepened engagements with infrastructural labour, arguing that this labour is what makes the infrastructures of internal colonialism enduring and adaptive. Crucially, I have shown how this infrastructural labour is itself brought into being through the infrastructures of internal colonialism, in Lerma characterised by the dispossession and proletarianisation of the local population, to which the contemporary Lerma workers are both intimately and historically related.Attention to durabilities and transformations can become an important element in formulating critiques of internal colonialism and its environmental and racial dimensions. Yet, it can also become part of the formulation of other practices of environment‐making. Taking on board the contributions from infrastructure studies, these new strategies, tactics, and practices of articulation should not necessarily follow the grand designs of state and private elites, shaping the world in their image and thought. Instead, the tentative, incremental, improvisational, and often contentious practices of infrastructure users—such as those that Antonio and his neighbours put in practice—can be seen as a site of durable change and creative production (Addie 2021; Bhan 2019; Silver 2014; Simone 2004). In the case of internal colonial relations, these sites of alternative making and doing might be found precisely in the sites that were deemed backwards, superfluous, or remnants of a present that would soon be past. If indigeneity and the persistence of the Indigenous are indeed counterpoints to the unresolved unfolding of internal colonialism and racism in Mexico, what forms of producing environments can be found in their thinking and practice? Autonomy (Aguilar Gil 2018), decoloniality (Radcliffe 2017), and other ways of breaking the hegemony of internal colonial projects of race and environment making are already being mobilised. A potential site of powerful cross‐fertilisation might be that which queries how infrastructures can be, and already are, part of anti‐colonial ways of producing the environment.AcknowledgementsI want to thank the panellists and participants in the 2019 RGS session “Natural Slaves: Labour, Race, and Infrastructure” and the 2022 SLAS session “Infrastructure and Coloniality in Latin America: Historical Geographies of Infrastructure, Historical Geographies of Theory”, where previous versions of this paper were presented, for their engagement with its arguments. In particular, I am grateful to the co‐organisers of these two sessions, Austin Zeiderman and Archie Davies, for creating spaces to think infrastructures and their racial and colonial entanglements. Finally, I would like to thank Diana Ojeda, Antipode Editor, Andy Kent, Antipode Managing Editor, and the four anonymous reviewers for their generous and critical feedback.Endnotes1In considering race and racialisation as constitutive of internal colonial relations and processes, I take critical distance from the original formulation made by González Casanova, who often referred to ethnicity and not race, and envisioned that these racial issues would be overcome through mestizaje as assimilation. Instead, I follow Saldívar and Moreno Figueroa in affirming that ongoing racialisation is constitutive of internal colonialism.2Data obtained from the National Transparency Platform (Plataforma Nacional de Transparencia) at https://www.plataformadetransparencia.org.mx3Source: Diario Oficial de la Federación, Mexico City, 1931.4See https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/De-Coss-Corzo-fig1.pdf for a photo (by the author) of workers depicted at the “Water, Origin of Life on Earth” mural, painted by Diego Rivera.5See https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/De-Coss-Corzo-fig2.pdf for a photo (by the author) of experts depicted at the “Water, Origin of Life on Earth” mural, painted by Diego Rivera.6See https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/De-Coss-Corzo-fig3.pdf for a photo (by the author) of informal and incremental water distribution infrastructures in Lerma.7See https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/De-Coss-Corzo-fig4.pdf for a photo (by the author) of workers fixing a broken pump engine in Lerma, under the watchful eye of members of the local water committee.8During the period of archival research that supports this article, I aimed to clarify how many deaths were related to the Lerma project construction. 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The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State, Environment, and Race in Lerma, Mexico

De Coss‐Corzo, Alejandro
Antipode , Volume 55 (3) – May 1, 2023
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Antipode © 2023 Antipode Foundation Ltd
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0066-4812
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10.1111/anti.12918
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Abstract

IntroductionIn 1942, the Mexico City government began the construction of the Lerma water supply system. Capturing spring waters in the Lerma marshes, located 50 kilometres west of downtown Mexico City, the project fulfilled a long‐held ambition to use this still untapped flow to supply the Mexican capital. Allegedly idle before, the Lerma waters could now be seized and put to work as part of a state‐led push to modernising and industrialising the city (Aboites Aguilar 1998; Perló Cohen 1989). Appropriating these waters was framed as a necessary measure to ensure that Mexico City could continue its demographic and economic growth, sustaining its position as the centre of the Mexican nation‐state (Vizcaino and Bistraín 1952). Almost a century before, in 1850, the same marshes had been the object of another large infrastructural project. This one focused not on urbanisation, but on desiccating the waters to make room for new agricultural land—and a new class of small landowners (Camacho Pichardo 2007). Turning water into land was seen as key in transforming the purportedly unproductive lacustrine economies and livelihoods that Indigenous populations had practised in the area for centuries (Albores Zárate 1995) into fully fledged capitalist relations that could produce a modern nation. In both cases, widespread environmental transformations, new racialised citizens and workers, and changing relations between state, space, and nature were mobilised through infrastructures.Today, the Lerma landscape is no longer dominated by marshes and reeds. The lacustrine environment and economy that once characterised the area has given way to industries, retail parks, and highways (Reis 2014). The Lerma waters have indeed been tapped and used to fuel Mexico City's expansion, with 14% of the daily water of the city coming from the Lerma area (SACMEX 2018). This, alongside industrial use in the Lerma area, has resulted in the overexploitation of the aquifer (Esteller and Diaz‐Delgado 2002; Wester et al. 2009) and the industrial pollution of the Lerma River (Barceló‐Quintal et al. 2013; Sedeño‐Díaz and López‐López 2007), which still flows through the area, disproportionately harming the local population. This population is today overwhelmingly employed in the industrial and service sectors, representing 25.1% and 47.1% of the workforce, respectively (Ayuntamiento de Lerma 2019); a number that includes the workers who maintain and repair these hydraulic infrastructures, and with whom I worked alongside during the fieldwork that underpins this article. Hydraulic infrastructures have transformed the Lerma valley and the livelihoods of people there; they have enabled Mexico City's growth and the possibility of urban life; and they have made forms of exclusion, inequality, and dispossession enduring.In this article, I argue that the hydraulic infrastructures that supply Mexico City by capturing the Lerma waters are productive of a relation of internal colonialism that endures through forms of racialised infrastructural labour. The notion of internal colonialism highlights how the racialised political, economic, environmental, and social relations that structured colonised territories persist, even after their formal independence (González Casanova 1963, 1965, 2003; Moreno Figueroa 2010; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010a, 2010b; Saldívar 2014). Here, I analyse how these relations of subordination and domination are made possible and lasting through hydraulic infrastructures, and through the labour of racialised workers, who have been themselves shaped by their historical and quotidian interactions with these infrastructures. This racialised labour is both the dead one that constitutes infrastructure (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004; Mitchell 2000, 2003) and the living one that, working in the shadows of infrastructural death (Addie 2021), makes internal colonial relations enduring. In making this argument, I contribute to contemporary scholarship that analyses the endurance of colonial and imperial relations through infrastructure (Aalders 2021; Bernards 2022; Distretti 2021; Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Kimari and Ernstson 2020), highlighting the importance of infrastructural labour (Cowen 2020), and the persistence of internal colonialism as an infrastructural process that structures the geographies and sociabilities of postcolonial cities and nation‐states.The article is organised in four sections. The first elaborates on how the arguments presented here contribute to existing literature on the endurances of colonialism through infrastructure. There, I discuss how a focus on racialised labour—both living and dead—can contribute to understanding the durability of colonial relations, and highlight what the concept of internal colonialism can do for the study of this set of relations. The second section discusses the methodological approach that underpins this research and some of its key ethical and epistemological issues. The third section explores the environmental and racial imaginaries of both Lerma projects and how these were mobilised through infrastructures. The fourth section analyses how these internal colonial relations endure today through the labour, and in the lived experiences, of the racialised infrastructural workers that maintain the infrastructures of internal colonialism in Mexico. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on how infrastructural labour can signal modes of producing socio‐environmental relations through infrastructures otherwise.Theorising Internal Colonial EndurancesInfrastructures are simultaneously constitutive of and constituted by imperial and colonial projects and processes. “Constitutive of” insofar as infrastructures enable the spatial separations that constitute race, class, and gender (Candiani 2014; Nemser 2017; Ranganathan 2022; Salamanca and Silver 2022); the forms of socio‐environmental appropriation and dispossession that underpin capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and state power (Bhambra 2022; LaDuke and Cowen 2020; Moore 2015); and the differentiated mobilities and fixities of bodies and resources across imperial space (Distretti 2021). “Constituted by” insofar as their financing relies on imperial and colonial credit flows (Bernards 2022); their design on colonial/modern aesthetic registers and normative goals (Davies 2021); and their construction and operation on racialised forms of labour, which they have in turn produced (Cowen 2020). Infrastructures are therefore integral to colonialism and imperialism as historical and material processes that link the global to the intimate (Ranganathan 2020), and as enduring forms of difference, domination, and exploitation that connect present to past and future.Colonial endurances have been the focus of a growing body of literature. Notions such as afterlives (Cowen 2020), remains and invitations (Kimari and Ernstson 2020), durability (Aalders 2021; Stoler 2016), or mirroring, overlaying, and tethering (Enns and Bersaglio 2020) have been deployed to capture how new and existing infrastructural projects and relations are produced by and productive of colonial relations and logics. These notions focus on how coloniality, as a form of power that continues “to define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production, long after the end of direct colonialism” (Ndlovu‐Gatsheni 2013:16), becomes “tethered” in space and time through infrastructures (Enns and Bersaglio 2020:116). This tethering does not imply a direct continuity of colonial logics (Aalders 2021), but rather a relation of correspondence and similarity. This relation is both material and ideological as new infrastructures both “overlay” and “reflect” colonial antecedents and strategies (Enns and Bersaglio 2020:115), and enable the persistence of colonial and imperial relations and imaginaries, which remain as “hauntings”, “spectres”, or “conditions of possibility” (Kimari and Ernstson 2020). These shape present and future infrastructural projects, reproducing racialised, gendered, and class‐based forms of domination, difference, and exploitation, including labour, at a global scale.Here, I also interrogate how colonial forms of power, difference, and exploitation endure through infrastructure, making two key empirical and conceptual moves. The first one is that I focus not on how infrastructures articulate and are produced by global relations of power. Instead, I analyse how processes of environment and state making within the borders of a postcolonial nation state—Mexico—can be characterised as colonial. I do so by engaging with the concept of internal colonialism (González Casanova 1963, 1965, 2003; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010a, 2010b). Like coloniality, internal colonialism argues that the relations of oppression and domination that existed in the formal colonial period persist after the formal end of direct colonialism. Unlike coloniality, which highlights the epistemic dimensions of colonial power in the making of the modern world (Davies 2021; Maldonado‐Torres 2016; Mignolo 2007; Nemser 2017; Quijano 2000), internal colonialism focuses on the political‐economic and political‐ecological dimensions of colonial power. This does not imply that there are no epistemic dimensions to colonial domination, or that coloniality negates the existence of material forms of domination. Rather, this is a conceptual move that aims to highlight said political‐economic and political‐ecological dimensions, whilst emphasising the structuring role of internal colonialism in the making of postcolonial nation‐states and territories.Following this literature, I understand internal colonialism as having four main axes. First, it implies forms of resource and commodity production and exploitation that subordinate colonial spaces not to metropoles but to urban centres, often by making the former dependent on a predominant sector or product that is needed by the latter (González Casanova 1965). Second, it implies the making of colonial territories into a source of abundant, cheap labour (Moore 2015) through processes of proletarianisation but also through relations of peonage, servitude, and other forms of non‐waged labour. Third, it requires and produces forms of racialisation (Gonzalez Casanova 1965:32), which imply the continued domination of white and mestizo elites and underpins hegemonic projects of whiteness and whitening as mestizaje (Moreno Figueroa 2010, 2022; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016; Saldívar 2014).1 Fourth, that power, citizenship, and political contentions are shaped not only by class but also by race‐centred contradictions and struggles, which entail non‐linear temporal relations between colonial pasts and presents (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010a).The second move is that, complementing and extending existing scholarship, I draw attention to infrastructural labour as necessary in enabling the reproduction of colonial relations of power, difference, and exploitation. This requires conceptualising labour, as process and practice, both as being produced through the logics of colonialism, and as productive and reproductive of colonial relations of spatial production, resource appropriation, commodity production, and state making. In the case discussed here, it involves critically analysing how labouring bodies are relationally constituted through the racial logics of internal colonialism (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Segato 2007); how the historical making of the labour force is itself racialised, signalling a structural entanglement of race and class (Davies 2021; Lugones 2003; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010b); and how this racialised labour makes up infrastructure both as ossified dead labour (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004; Mitchell 2000, 2003), and as the living labour that, through incremental and improvisational practices (Silver 2014; Simone 2013), makes infrastructures work (Addie 2021; De Coss‐Corzo 2021). In doing so, this article suggests that internal colonialism, and colonialism at large, endure through infrastructures and infrastructural labour.Researching the Infrastructures of Internal ColonialismThis article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mexico between 2016 and 2017. In particular, I draw on observations made as I worked alongside four SACMEX repair and maintenance teams in Lerma and Mexico City. Between five and nine people worked in every team, with team members remaining the same throughout the year, which allowed me to develop a working relationship with them, as I describe below. These workers were employed by SACMEX as Operative Assistants in Urban Services, a category used to describe manual workers whose main function is to maintain, repair, and operate hydraulic infrastructures at the public water utility, and which constitutes the lower level of the SACMEX salary scale and organisational chart. As such, they were public workers, with rights to a pension, healthcare, Christmas bonuses, and other rights gained through their union membership. However, some of them also worked outside SACMEX to complement their wages, which at the time of writing averages $6,627 MXN per month, according to public data.2At the beginning, I limited myself to observing how work was being carried out. However, encouraged by workers and engineers, I soon started taking part in it, mainly by carrying spare parts and tools and by aiding with some activities that required many hands, such as assembling or disassembling large pumps. This way of engaging with infrastructural labour allowed me to better understand how it is carried out, and how it underpins the continued functioning of infrastructures in a context of rapid socio‐environmental change and ongoing austerity (De Coss‐Corzo 2021). At the same time, this involvement allowed me to interrogate how workers conceptualise these activities as central to the production and reproduction of forms of resource appropriation, uneven distribution, and ongoing pollution, here analysed as internal colonial endurances enabled through infrastructures and infrastructural labour. Finally, my participation in manual work also helped assuaging workers’ worries that I might have been sent by their supervisors to spy on them, a concern that emerged from my sudden presence in the field, the class differences existing between us, and my clear inability to carry out much of the work they did. Reflections on the intersection of class, race, labour, and infrastructure are informed by this research experience and positionality, although I acknowledge that much more can be said about these in terms of research practice and its epistemological and ethical implications.I did this work for two or three days per week. The rest of the week was spent in two archives in Mexico City, the Historical Water Archive (Archivo Histórico del Agua—AHA) and the Mexico City Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México—AHCDMX). In the former, I consulted the files that detail how the 1942 Lerma project was designed (DDF 1941a) and administratively approved (DDF 1941b). There, I traced how the Lerma project enacted an internal colonial logic of resource appropriation that sought to secure Mexico City's long‐term growth and wealth. At the same time, the project enabled processes of industrialisation and proletarianisation in Lerma, even if these were not central to its aims. Finally, the Lerma project files, alongside relevant secondary literature that promoted and analysed the project at the time of its construction and shortly thereafter (DDF 1949, 1951), shows how specific logics of racialisation were attached to these infrastructures, seen not only as ways of producing space but also as racialised citizens and labouring bodies.However, racialisation, and its structural entanglement with class, was not only present in the archives. The enduring colonial logics that continue shaping how labouring bodies are produced, perceived, and engaged with contemporarily were present in the participant observation component of this research project. More specifically, the differentiated ways in which I was acknowledged by SACMEX workers, engineers, and bureaucrats, and urban dwellers, can be engaged with as moments that bring to the surface the persistence of racialised difference in contemporary Mexico (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Solís et al. 2019). These moments entailed being considered a more reliable interlocutor than workers as a naturalised consequence of how my body was read relationally through the lenses of class and race, or being automatically considered an engineer or supervisor when out on a work call, despite my peripheral role in the actual labour being carried out. In surfacing, these racialised assumptions show another aspect of the persistence of colonial logics in contemporary forms of difference, discrimination, and inequality. In engaging with the historical and the contemporary, this methodological approach aims to hold together the historical and contemporary relations between infrastructure, racialisation, labour, and state and environment making in Mexico.Race, Environment, and Internal Colonialism in the Lerma Projects1850s: Infrastructure, Liberalism, and Internal ColonialismThe Lerma marshes had long been an object of imagined and material interventions before they were finally transformed into an urban water source in the 20th century. It has been suggested that the first projects that proposed draining them were drafted in the 17th century, as agriculture expanded in the region (Albores Zárate 1995). However, the first project to systematically argue for their desiccation and conversion into agricultural plots—thoroughly studied by Mexican historian Gloria Camacho Pichardo (2007)—was put forward between 1850 and 1875. Driven by growing notions of wealth linked to land productivity, the marshes were seen as idle waters that should be drained to promote the development and progress of that area, and of Mexico in general. The project was headed by Manuel Riva Palacio, then governor of the State of Mexico, where the Lerma basin and marshes are located. Besides him, several local landed elites were pushing for the project to be completed. Their goal was to make the newly gained land productive by turning it into small plots, and, allegedly, turn Indigenous populations into modern citizens through the economic and moralising effect of private property.Fuelling this internal colonial imaginary there were two parallel visions regarding water and indios as signs and sites of backwardness. Idle waters were imagined to be not only unproductive but potentially dangerous as sources of miasma and disease; indios were impeding Mexico's path to modernity through their inherent inferiority (Dawson 2004; Raat 1971). Infrastructure was instrumental in how these relations would be transformed. By desiccating the Lerma marshes, the state and interested private actors would be removing the conditions for the Indigenous populations’ supposed idleness and atavistic behaviour, and at the same time creating the ground for capital accumulation and production. Whilst the professed goal of this project was to drive indios into modernity, the aforementioned Camacho Pichardo (2007) has shown that the steep prices and participation required from would‐be landowners in the desiccation process would have deterred or made impossible their involvement. Instead, elites and government officials would have been able to purchase these lands once the Indigenous populations were deemed financially unsuited for ownership and productiveness. This project was fiercely resisted by the various Indigenous towns that surrounded the marshes, and ultimately this opposition, lack of capital, and political strife led to its cancellation in 1875. The Lerma marshes would remain for the time being.The desiccation project mobilised notions of progress, development, and modernity that show the entanglement of logics of internal colonialism and liberal conceptions of capitalism and citizenship. These were hegemonic in Mexico at the time, represented not only in the local Lerma elites but also at the national level (Dawson 2004; Lomnitz 2010; Raat 1971). As mentioned before, these entailed more than economic imaginaries and were also central in the simultaneous production of environment and race. In Lerma, both nature and local Indigenous populations were allegedly marked by their idleness, a direct result of their physical characteristics. Brackish waters were sources of illness; atavistic Indians were doomed to poverty and marginalisation as a result of their very biological composition. These discourses were not created in Lerma; they were being discussed in intellectual circles and high governmental offices at the time, justifying narratives of racial domination and projects of appropriation and dispossession. These logics, projects, and processes of internal colonialism shaped state and environment making, even if hidden behind professed objectives of Indigenous betterment and change. The indios could not be saved, and the best the country could aspire to was to replace them either through racial mixing, thus de‐indigenising them, or through straight out elimination, following settler colonial logics (Mollett 2016). Only then could a nation of landowners be born, heralding the entrance of Mexico to the modern world.Whilst the project ultimately failed, its infrastructural imaginaries can be tools to analyse a “past that has never been present” (see Stoler 2016:33–36), or a historical conjuncture in which other ways of producing environmental and racial relations than the ones that were ultimately made through infrastructure were essayed. In the 1850–1875 project, those relations were hinged on the identity between backwardness, indigeneity, and the potential harm of idle waters and bodies. There, internal colonialism's infrastructural imaginaries group humans and nonhumans together through strategies of segregation, concentration, and classification, themselves constitutive of colonialism at large (Nemser 2017). At the same time, they suggest an entanglement of imaginaries of modernity, logics and practices of colonial rule, and infrastructures as tools to produce environments and populations. Infrastructure and modernity are therefore “not only a question of mud and concrete, but of aesthetics and ideology” (Davies 2021:746) that here aimed to produce land as a source of wealth and power, a process entangled to the long history of colonial rule and capitalist accumulation in Mexico City and its hinterlands (cf. Candiani 2014). This entanglement of racialisation, environment making, and state formation is not particular to Mexico or Latin America, as analogous processes were unfolding in other hemispheric geographies such as the United States or Canada (Curley 2021; Mollett 2021; Van Sant 2021), albeit with a different resolution from the one that was ultimately essayed in Mexico.1942: The Infrastructures of MestizajeThe Lerma waters remained in the infrastructural imaginaries of Mexico City elites throughout the decades following the failure of the 1850–1875 desiccation project. In 1907, engineer Fernando Rosenzweig suggested that the springs that flowed into the Lerma marshes could yield up to 9,483 litres per second (l/s) (DDF 1941b) for urban supply without implying the disappearance of the Lerma River. In 1930, engineers Juan Villarello and Rafael Orozco carried out a similar survey and found that the Lerma springs had a potential flow rate of up to 9,968 l/s (DDF 1941b). By 1931, these engineers submitted an official request to exploit these waters to the Ministry of Agriculture and Development (Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento) both for electricity generation and to supply water to Mexico City.3 The project was not approved, but it set the basis for the Mexico City government's (DDF) own project, submitted for approval to the Ministry of Agriculture in September 1941 (DDF 1941a, 1941b). These projects argued that the Lerma waters were being underutilised, lost to evaporation, and that they could be made productive both for industry and urbanisation.The DDF Lerma project was approved, and its construction began in 1942. The project stipulated the use 10,000 litres of water per second to supply Mexico City. The water would be drawn from the springs on the right margin of the Lerma marshes. Said water would be used to supply households and to provide for public services. To do so, a 21‐kilometre aqueduct was built, from the Almoloyita lagoon, in the south of the wetland system, towards the town of Atarasquillo. There, a 14‐kilometre tunnel was dug from the Las Cruces mountain towards Mexico City, or more specifically, towards a water deposit that was built in the Chapultepec area of city. The original project planned to use these waters for electricity generation before being used to supply households, offices, and industries. Whilst the electrification component was never completed due to technical, legal, and financial impediments, the Lerma waters were indeed collected by these hydraulic infrastructures, and still today supply Mexico City with 14% of its total daily water consumption.In contrast with the 1850–1875 project, water here appears not as a potentially harmful excess that should be disposed of. Rather, water is discursively produced as indeed idle, but potentially productive both as an input for electricity generation and as a resource itself. This transition is part of a broader set of political, environmental, and economic changes in Mexico, where urbanisation and industrialisation became the focus of government development policies in place of agriculture and rural development (Aboites Aguilar 1998; Vitz 2018). Crucially, these transformations in how water was produced and appropriated are entangled with profound changes in how the Indigenous question was analysed and made an object of government intervention. Instead of the biologistic explanations of the 19th century, a novel explanation that centred culture became dominant. Indigenous populations’ poverty and despair was not a consequence of biology, but rather of centuries of violence and marginalisation (Gamio 2010). To reverse this, Indigenous populations should be made part of a new mestizo racial citizenship and identity (Lomnitz 2010; Lund 2012), often through processes of de‐indigenisation (Aguilar Gil 2018; de la Cadena 2000). Here, mestizaje appears as a project and process of whitening and whiteness that claims to overcome indigeneity whilst maintaining it as its constitutive other (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016). Amongst other elements, this project implies not the physical extermination of Indigenous populations, but their making into Spanish‐speaking, self‐identifying mestizos through education and infrastructural rearticulation.Indeed, the 1942 Lerma project included provisions for the construction of schools and roads, and the electrification of the area (DDF 1949). These measures were seen both as a compensation for the appropriation of the Lerma waters and as a way to modernise the area and its inhabitants. As mentioned before, the goal of this 20th century Lerma project was to supply Mexico City with plentiful water (Campos Bravo 1948) that would not only allow its current expansion, but also secure its future existence as the industrial, cultural, political, and even spiritual centre of the nation (García‐Quintero 1951; Vizcaino and Bistraín 1952). Mexico City was being metonymically constructed as Mexico itself, and the modernisation of the city was equated with that of the whole country. For that, not only water as an urban resource was needed. The former indios were also a fundamental input in that making. As potential industrial workers, they held the promise of abundant present and future labour, as copious as the water captured in Lerma. No longer tied to the waters and the land, the Indigenous populations of the area both migrated and became employed in the growing industry in Lerma, including positions within the Lerma water supply system.The link between these racial and environmental transformations and questions of labour is celebrated in the mural that Diego Rivera painted in the building where the Lerma water system once finished. The mural, titled Agua, origen de la vida en la tierra (“Water, Origin of Life on Earth”), is an ambitious reinterpretation of human history from the primordial spark that created microscopic life to mestizaje as the future of human equality and liberation (Rivera 1952; Tostado Gutiérrez 2012; Vargas Parra 2012). In Rivera's mural, workers,4 experts,5 and Mexico City dwellers painted there all have brown skin and the phenotypical traits associated with indigeneity. Yet, they are not depicted as linked to the land according to imaginaries of what being Indigenous means. Instead, they are urban workers, providing water to thirsty citizens through their labour. They are engineers and technicians, using modern science and knowledge to build the infrastructures that allow the Mexican state to fulfil its modernising mission. Here, the imbrication of materiality and aesthetics in the making of modernity and coloniality (Davies 2021) is again present. If on the technical documents that make up the Lerma mestizaje is assumed, in the aesthetic celebration of its building and conclusion it is made central and evident for all to see.Crucially, the identification of the nation‐state with this mestizo historical subject enables the justifications that propel processes and practices of resource making, appropriation, and eventual depletion. Mestizaje as embodiment and producer of a Mexican pathway to modernity functions as an ideological discourse that masks the continuation of internal colonial logics of environmental production and racialisation. The city as the site where the nation resides and reaches its glory needs ever increasing resources, both natural and human, and these are made, articulated, transported, and distributed through infrastructures. These infrastructures, however, did not produce the dream of plentiful water that was promised in the technical and administrative documents that make up the Lerma project. From the onset, reports that the newly built water catchment plants were destroying the springs they meant to preserve appeared. Stories of incorrect calculations, excessive use of explosives, and other destructive practices have been well‐documented (Albores Zárate 1995; Cirelli 1997). Increased demand in Mexico City and Lerma, compounded by said practices, led to the digging of hundreds of artesian wells, which have led to the deepening overexploitation of the aquifer (Esteller and Diaz‐Delgado 2002; Wester et al. 2009) as part of ongoing processes of appropriation and dispossession there. Today, these processes endure through the practices of infrastructural labour I analyse next.Infrastructural Labour and the Endurance of Internal ColonialismIn the previous section, I argued that infrastructures constitute internal colonialism through the joint making of state, space, environment, and race. This implies considering infrastructure not as an object embedded in history, but as producer of historical relations that continue to shape forms of power, inequality, and modes of living today. However, accounting for the durability of internal colonialism requires considering not only infrastructural form but also infrastructural labour. Crucially, this labour is not merely reproductive but adaptive (De Coss‐Corzo 2021), working in the shadow of infrastructural death (Addie 2021). Here, the notion of infrastructural death stands both for the dead labour that constitutes infrastructural form (Kirsch and Mitchell 2004), and for the ways in which infrastructures distribute harm and life unevenly. As I will show in this section, harm and life in Lerma are distributed along the enduring internal colonial logics of dispossession and racialisation. At the same time, these internal colonial durabilities, and their racialised and racialising logics, are themselves productive of labour as a historical process, as a practice, and as an embodied experience (Moreno Figueroa 2010; Segato 2007).“This water was ours and they took it from us”On a crisp October morning, we met Antonio outside his house in an informal neighbourhood in the vicinity of a water pump in Lerma. Encouraged by the SACMEX employees that were showing me what they considered to be the most interesting infrastructures in the area, I tentatively asked him some questions. I wanted to know how he obtained his water, as some informal supply mechanisms were in place due to the absence of piped water. As the neighbourhood was built after and atop the infrastructures that supply water to Mexico City, formal connections were not made from the onset, and were just being built in 2017, when we were there. Antonio said that, so far, they had secured water using hoses connected to faucets in a public laundry built next to the SACMEX‐operated well and pump nearby.6 This was about to change. The Lerma municipality was building water pipes. Soon, they would be rolled out. Antonio was staunchly opposed to this. These pipes would bring water they would have to pay for. This was for him a fundamental injustice. Why should they do so, if water was theirs, and had been taken from them? Why should he have to pay, when his mother had taken as much as she needed from the springs and marshes nearby? Why had all their water been taken to Mexico City, leaving them in a dry place?Antonio's questions were echoed by others in Lerma. Tariffs were being rolled out in the region, and even if these had not been introduced by SACMEX, the connection to the Lerma project was unshakable. At the same time, water shortages were ever more common, amidst ongoing industrialisation, urbanisation, and deepening aquifer depletion. Another point of contention and visible inequality and injustice is the now polluted Lerma River (Barceló‐Quintal et al. 2013; Eakin et al. 2010; Sedeño‐Díaz and López‐López 2007). Flowing from the central State of Mexico towards the west, and ultimately to the Pacific Ocean, the Lerma is fundamental for industry, urbanisation, and agriculture taking place by its course (Boehm de Lameiras and Sandoval Manzo 1999). Therefore, its preservation was a central concern for the engineers and politicians that planned the Lerma projects throughout the centuries. Even if the goal was to dispose of excess water, or to use it as input for urban and industrial growth, the survival of the Lerma River was always ensured. True enough, the river still flows today. It can be smelled from afar before it is seen. As industrialisation and urbanisation took hold in Lerma and the nearby city of Toluca, the river became an open‐air sewer that stands as a material testimony to the profound environmental injustices that are articulated through infrastructure.SACMEX workers were at the forefront of interactions related to these contentions and concerns, being perceived by some in Lerma as representatives of the state and its internal colonial logics. However, their lives were also entangled in these unjust socio‐environmental relations. They were second or even third generation workers within SACMEX; their fathers and grandfathers had maintained, or built, the Lerma system infrastructures. These previous generations were amongst the first groups to be employed in industrial jobs, leaving the fields and marshes behind. Whilst the current workers’ older relatives, as well as some of their wives and daughters, still worked on subsistence farming, the main economic activities were related to industries, or to services associated to them. Many workers had gained their first experience in the big companies in the area; some of them still worked a second shift there or had used their money to buy collective taxis that moved workers around the area. Here, the making of an industrial workforce that the Lerma project entailed is not a statistical but an everyday matter that shapes workers’ lives and practices.In relation to workers’ everyday practices, the ones that dominated my time in Lerma implied maintaining and restoring water flow in the face of infrastructural breakdown. These included fixing leaks, repairing malfunctioning pumps and engines, and reinstalling functioning ones, thus ensuring that water flowed both in Lerma and Mexico City. There, workers had to navigate the often‐conflicting demands of Lerma inhabitants—many of them their neighbours, friends, and families—and those of SACMEX officials, which often gave preference to Mexico City's needs. In doing so, workers faced questions not unlike those posed by Antonio, which highlighted that current issues in accessing water in Lerma were historically and infrastructurally linked to internal colonialism and its endurance.7 Workers often acknowledged these linkages and aimed to restore flow to Lerma neighbourhoods and towns before than to the aqueduct that goes to Mexico City, even if their orders were the opposite. On other occasions, they negotiated with their own supervisors, often engineers who lived in or were from Mexico City, aiming to obtain more speedy resolutions for ongoing problems with water supply. Whilst they did not always succeed in these negotiations and strategies, their presence suggests that workers’ labour is shaped by the conflicting endurances of internal colonialism. In working with hydraulic infrastructures, SACMEX workers both reproduce and unsettle internal colonial logics, relations, and processes, which continue structuring environments, politics, and sociabilities in contemporary Lerma.At the same time, changes in the materiality of infrastructures, aquifers, soils, linked to ongoing processes of urbanisation, austerity, and to the deepening disrepair of hydraulic infrastructures, mean that workers often must improvise to solve the issues they face. This means that infrastructural labour does not aim to return infrastructures to a state of ideal functioning but must adapt them to constant change. Take the following example: in Lerma, water pumps frequently got stuck in mud, sometimes as a consequence of springs drying up. This could affect pumps, engines, and other pieces of equipment, leading to problems both in Lerma and in Mexico City. As the process of repairing these infrastructures through official channels could be lengthy, expensive, and unreliable, workers often crafted new working pumps and pipes out of pieces of malfunctioning equipment—a process that I have elsewhere conceptualised as patchwork (De Coss‐Corzo 2021). In doing so, workers were making the internal colonial relations that have shaped Lerma historically endure through adaptation and contradiction. This internal colonial durability is hinged on the relations between living labour and infrastructures as dead labour (Addie 2021), here understood as a concept that captures how their production implied racialised labour power, as an intimate matter related to workers’ family histories, and as a descriptor of the lives that the Lerma has taken.8Workers often reflected on these contradictory relations and their own role in their making and endurance. One February morning, Ramón, a crane operator at SACMEX, and I discussed what the Lerma infrastructures had meant for the area. Ramón talked about how schools, roads, and electricity supplies had been built at the same time as the Lerma hydraulic infrastructures, as the 1942 project had proposed. “These pipes”, he told me, “brought modernity to our towns”. This modernity is not only characterised by new forms of infrastructural provision. It is also what describes the processes of de‐indigenisation, dispossession, and proletarianisation that shaped not only the area but also their livelihoods and family histories. It also captures the processes of ongoing aquifer overexploitation and environmental pollution that shape their labour and livelihoods. Here, modernity and internal colonialism appear as entangled, producing environment through infrastructure, whilst enacting logics of racialisation that shape the contemporary labour force in Lerma, and indeed beyond. Internal colonialism endures as a living matter that continues to shape identities, environment, politics, and imaginaries, linking personal histories, collective grievances, and past dispossessions with present contentions around water and its uses.“We can't just let anyone in”Infrastructures not only produce labour and environment as constitutive of internal colonial projects and processes. They also mediate and make enduring workers’ embodied experiences of ongoing racialisation. It is in the body where the often‐unspoken logics of racial stratification and racialised power are performed, read, and enforced. If race is indeed a sign carried in the body (Segato 2007), and racism a process with distributed intensities that emerges in specific moments and spaces (Moreno Figueroa 2010), nowhere did this become clearer during my fieldwork than when dealing with those that inhabit the secluded elite neighbourhoods of west Mexico City. These sites, even if usually locations were water provision is constant and reliable, can also experience water shortages from time to time. One of such occasions, I accompanied yet another work team—in Mexico City I worked mostly with two groups of six workers each—to respond to a complaint regarding poor water pressure. The problem was in one of the wealthiest areas of west Mexico City, Bosques de las Lomas, where houses have been built in the ridges and ravines through where the Lerma aqueduct passes.After working for long hours, and potentially having unclogged the specific blockage that was impeding waterflow, the workers needed to check if their intervention had been successful. To do so, they had to go inside one of the houses in the area where the original complaint had been lodged. They walked up a winding street, with enormous mansions on both sides of the road. A car was parking in one of them. The foreman drew the attention of the three men that were getting off the car; two were elderly and white, and the third one was a young, brown‐skinned driver. The foreman asked if they could come inside to check the water pressure. They were, he said, answering a complaint that had been made in the area. One of the elderly men responded by saying that indeed there was a problem but that he could not let them in. He demanded not only to see the identifications of these uniform‐wearing men, but also to speak to their boss. The foreman replied that that was not possible, as the engineer was busy elsewhere, and that this was a question that could be easily and rapidly checked. The elderly man was not convinced.Standing behind them, I weighed my options. If I intervened, would I be considered as a more reliable interlocutor based on racialised and class‐based readings of body, behaviour, speech, and demeanour? And if so, would that be an ethically sound decision in the field? Without knowing the answer to these questions, but sensing that my intervention might in any case resolve this impasse and allow the workers and myself to carry on from that site, I spoke. I reassured the men that these were SACMEX workers, there to solve their problems. They asked if I was an engineer, and I said that I was a researcher who had been working with them for a few months now. The man that was doing the talking thought about it for a few seconds, and finally responded that they could come in. As the workers walked in, he approached me and said, “You understand me, right? We can't just let anyone in”. In this phrase, the persistence of race, and its entanglement with class, becomes unmissable. The word “anyone” demarcates the distance between the workers as the inferior others that constitute the supposed unity of the mestizo national and urban citizen (Lomnitz 2010; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016), here read through the entangled embodiment of class and race.After leaving the house and finally sorting out the water pressure problem, I asked the workers if they encountered that sort of thing usually. They laughed and said it happened all the time. Rich people were normally wary, even if workers were there only because they had requested their intervention. Their IDs were usually requested, often withheld or photocopied, and their bosses often had to be drawn into the situation to allow them to do what they were meant to. I saw this happening on other occasions, usually at the gates of the walled compounds that dot Mexico City's wealthy quarters, where anxieties linked to insecurity, homogeneity, and disorder shape both infrastructure and everyday life (Caprón 2016; Giglia 2008). In those elite spaces, where logics of class, race, and security intersect, the persistence of racial classifications forcefully emerges. Crucially, it does so not only through racialised bodily markers such as skin colour, and other phenotypical characteristics associated to hegemonic notions of the indio. At the same time, it is read through the relations these racialised labouring bodies have with infrastructures and their upkeep. Fixed and fluid, the racial formations of internal colonialism persist. These constitute infrastructural labour—just as infrastructural labour makes the relations that constitute internal colonialism enduring.Infrastructural Labour and the Durability of Internal ColonialismInfrastructure can be enrolled to trace the durability of internal colonialism in Lerma and Mexico City. This implies considering how infrastructures produced a racialised labour force, which today still makes these infrastructures endure through adaptive and creative labour. In maintaining and repairing infrastructures, workers are also making the socio‐environmental relations that constitute internal colonialism enduring. This means that the matter of durability is not only contingent on infrastructural form but also requires human labour. This reproductive role of labour is always already present in the workings of infrastructures, which are themselves constituted by racialised dead labour. In the case analysed here, infrastructural labour is crucial in sustaining internal colonialism as a mode of producing the environment, race, and the modern Mexican state and its territorial logics. The endurance of this internal colonial configuration can be observed in the unequal distribution of resources that the Lerma infrastructures enable and produce, which themselves “are racialized relations of allocation and appropriation” (Stoler 2016:347). At the same time, it is present in the ways in which the lives of the workers that upkeep these infrastructures are entangled with the race and environment‐making role of infrastructures historically and in everyday life.By highlighting the articulation of race and environment‐making in and through the infrastructures of internal colonialism, I also want to suggest that race is not only a distributional problem related to unequal access to resources or unequal exposures to risk (Lund 2012; Pulido 2000; Stoler 2016). It is also a structuring process, made as infrastructures produce the worlds we inhabit as always already socio‐material spaces, relations, and forms (Nemser 2017). The very fabric of space is constituted through racialised relations and differences, and both become and are made and maintained through infrastructure. In the case of Mexico, race is inscribed in the very infrastructures of the contemporary Mexican state. This is articulated with internal colonial forms of environment‐making, which promise(d) a future of racial and social justice that is trumped by their own unfolding. The persistence of racialised inequality, including the question of indigeneity, not only as a relationally defined experience of oppression, but also as a site of contention, political action, and alternative environmental imagination, stands as a counterpoint in the unresolved unfolding of the internal colonial project of the Mexican state (Aguilar Gil 2018; Moreno Figueroa 2010).ConclusionHere I have argued that infrastructure and infrastructural labour constitute and make enduring internal colonial racial and environmental relations and imaginaries. I have traced how past imaginaries of nature and race were articulated, and how they continue unfolding presently as the obdurate effects and composing elements of environmental, racial, and colonial projects and designs. In doing so, I have not only characterised the Mexican state as an internal colonial project, which produces environmental and racial injustices and inequalities in the pursuit of progress for an allegedly mestizo nation (Moreno Figueroa 2010, 2022; Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka 2016). I have also suggested that infrastructure can be enrolled in analyses of colonial, imperial, and racial durabilities (Stoler 2016), shedding light on the materiality of these continuities and their lasting effects. Building on existing literature (Aalders 2021; Distretti 2021; Enns and Bersaglio 2020), I have deepened engagements with infrastructural labour, arguing that this labour is what makes the infrastructures of internal colonialism enduring and adaptive. Crucially, I have shown how this infrastructural labour is itself brought into being through the infrastructures of internal colonialism, in Lerma characterised by the dispossession and proletarianisation of the local population, to which the contemporary Lerma workers are both intimately and historically related.Attention to durabilities and transformations can become an important element in formulating critiques of internal colonialism and its environmental and racial dimensions. Yet, it can also become part of the formulation of other practices of environment‐making. Taking on board the contributions from infrastructure studies, these new strategies, tactics, and practices of articulation should not necessarily follow the grand designs of state and private elites, shaping the world in their image and thought. Instead, the tentative, incremental, improvisational, and often contentious practices of infrastructure users—such as those that Antonio and his neighbours put in practice—can be seen as a site of durable change and creative production (Addie 2021; Bhan 2019; Silver 2014; Simone 2004). In the case of internal colonial relations, these sites of alternative making and doing might be found precisely in the sites that were deemed backwards, superfluous, or remnants of a present that would soon be past. If indigeneity and the persistence of the Indigenous are indeed counterpoints to the unresolved unfolding of internal colonialism and racism in Mexico, what forms of producing environments can be found in their thinking and practice? Autonomy (Aguilar Gil 2018), decoloniality (Radcliffe 2017), and other ways of breaking the hegemony of internal colonial projects of race and environment making are already being mobilised. A potential site of powerful cross‐fertilisation might be that which queries how infrastructures can be, and already are, part of anti‐colonial ways of producing the environment.AcknowledgementsI want to thank the panellists and participants in the 2019 RGS session “Natural Slaves: Labour, Race, and Infrastructure” and the 2022 SLAS session “Infrastructure and Coloniality in Latin America: Historical Geographies of Infrastructure, Historical Geographies of Theory”, where previous versions of this paper were presented, for their engagement with its arguments. In particular, I am grateful to the co‐organisers of these two sessions, Austin Zeiderman and Archie Davies, for creating spaces to think infrastructures and their racial and colonial entanglements. Finally, I would like to thank Diana Ojeda, Antipode Editor, Andy Kent, Antipode Managing Editor, and the four anonymous reviewers for their generous and critical feedback.Endnotes1In considering race and racialisation as constitutive of internal colonial relations and processes, I take critical distance from the original formulation made by González Casanova, who often referred to ethnicity and not race, and envisioned that these racial issues would be overcome through mestizaje as assimilation. Instead, I follow Saldívar and Moreno Figueroa in affirming that ongoing racialisation is constitutive of internal colonialism.2Data obtained from the National Transparency Platform (Plataforma Nacional de Transparencia) at https://www.plataformadetransparencia.org.mx3Source: Diario Oficial de la Federación, Mexico City, 1931.4See https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/De-Coss-Corzo-fig1.pdf for a photo (by the author) of workers depicted at the “Water, Origin of Life on Earth” mural, painted by Diego Rivera.5See https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/De-Coss-Corzo-fig2.pdf for a photo (by the author) of experts depicted at the “Water, Origin of Life on Earth” mural, painted by Diego Rivera.6See https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/De-Coss-Corzo-fig3.pdf for a photo (by the author) of informal and incremental water distribution infrastructures in Lerma.7See https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/De-Coss-Corzo-fig4.pdf for a photo (by the author) of workers fixing a broken pump engine in Lerma, under the watchful eye of members of the local water committee.8During the period of archival research that supports this article, I aimed to clarify how many deaths were related to the Lerma project construction. 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Journal

Antipode – Wiley

Published: May 1, 2023

Keywords: environment; infrastructure; internal colonialism; labour; race; medioambiente; infraestructura; colonialismo interno; trabajo; raza

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