Subterranean Sovereignty: The Emergence of the Yucatec Karst Aquifer System as a Political Space in Yucatan, Mexico Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Aguilera Del Castillo, Pablo, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania, degree granting institution.

University of Pennsylvania. Anthropology., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cultural anthropology.

Environmental studies.

Latin American studies.

0326.

0477.

0550.

Local Subjects:

Cultural anthropology.

Environmental studies.

Latin American studies.

0326.

0477.

0550.

Genre:

Academic theses

Physical Description:

1 electronic resource (239 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-03B

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2025

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This dissertation explores the technoscientific construction of the Yucatec Karst Aquifer System as a site of political contestation. Framed by the global concerns about aquifer depletion and contamination and the local concerns about growing industrialism and touristification in the region, this academic work provides a rigorous ethnographic account of how aquifers become matters of concern for various publics and essential sites for collective mobilization and political resignification. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Yucatan Peninsula, this dissertation examines the practices of cartographers, speleologists, chemists, geomorphologists, and lawyers in their collective effort to reconfigure sovereignty, territoriality, and Indigeneity through their representation of the subterranean. By analyzing the rich social life of the largest aquifer in Mexico, this dissertation examines how different forms of territorial sovereignty emerge from the technical arrangements of thousands of sinkholes, geological fractures, large cave systems, and groundwater reservoirs that make territorial, social, and political difference legible to the Mexican State. In a national context where the government has embarked on an ambitious national reform, large-scale infrastructure and widespread agro-industrial growth are transforming the Mexican landscape in previously unseen ways. Amid all of this, this dissertation shows how the aquifer as an environmental object has become central in constituting and controlling the borders, boundaries, and bodies of the Mexican State

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-03, Section: B.

Advisors: Anand, Nikhil Committee members: Petryna, Adriana; Thomas, Deborah; Benson, Etienne

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2025

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798291598115

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license