Roads to prosperity and ruin : infrastructure and the making of neoliberal Yucatán / Fernando Armstrong-Fumero.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Armstrong-Fumero, Fernando, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tren Maya--Political aspects.

Tren Maya.

Mayas--Political activity--Mexico--Pisté.

Mayas.

Mayas--Mexico--Pisté--Economic conditions.

Rural development projects--Political aspects--Mexico--Yucatán (State).

Rural development projects.

Infrastructure (Economics)--Mexico--Yucatán (State)--History--20th century.

Infrastructure (Economics).

Infrastructure (Economics)--Mexico--Yucatán (State)--History--21st century.

Tourism--Government policy--Mexico--Yucatán (State).

Tourism.

Neoliberalism--Mexico--Yucatán (State).

Neoliberalism.

Mayas--Politics and government.

Mayas--Economic conditions.

Rural development projects--Political aspects.

Tourism--Government policy.

Mexico.

Physical Description:

xii, 232 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2025]

Summary:

"In 2022, journalists announced the impending economic death of a small Mexican town. Pisté, gateway to the famed Chichén Itzá archeological site, would be circumvented by the Tren Maya commuter rail megaproject, depriving it of the promise of steady tourist traffic. Instead of ruminating with frustration, locals set to work on negotiations with the state and federal governments. Generations of experience taught them that pragmatic engagement with mainstream political parties was essential in turning into opportunity projects with the potential to kill the local economy. Fernando Armstrong-Fumero situates the Tren Maya in a long history of roadbuilding and economic development on the Yucatán Peninsula beginning in the 1930s. Drawing together archival research and decades of ethnographic work, Armstrong-Fumero develops the concept of negative infrastructure to show how infrastructural and industrial investments configure rural economic futures as well as how communities seek to mitigate the harms from projects designed to benefit other regions or interests. The push and pull of development reveals the strategies residents use to influence political change through municipal elections and informal protest. Recognizing their life-changing potential, rural Maya Yucatecans recast infrastructural projects as new possibilities for inclusion, agency, and resistance as participants in formal state and economic structures"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Roads to prosperity, and roads that ruin

The creation of a modern geography

Failures of development: the press, politicians, and slow death of henequen

The neoliberal populism (or populist neoliberalism) of Victor Cervera Pacheco

Pesos, dollars, and Maya identity

The promises and pitfalls of higher education

A canceled Maya Disneyland: struggles for access in an age of captive tourism

Facebook in Pisté, or digital politics goes mainstream

Politics as usual and the Fourth Transformation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781469691206

1469691205

9781469691213

1469691213

OCLC:

1512300128

Publisher Number:

CIPO000296549