Transportation Infrastructures, Denationalizing Discourses: Rural Roads, Shifting Landscapes, and Contested Citizenship in Postwar Mexico

After World War II engineers and technocrats in Mexico planned and implemented a rural road building program that transformed landscapes and communities throughout the nation. Building the nation via rural road expansion, however, resulted in major social and spatial consequences in western Mexico. New automobile infrastructure reinvigorated denigrating discourses of rural migration that had existed since the early-twentieth century. These narratives, in turn, informed legal and extralegal efforts to confine migrant mobility to rural Mexico while also excluding these migrants from full cultural and civic belonging. In response to the destabilization and dislocation generated by rural industrialization policies fueled by transportation infrastructure, and in the absence of substantive citizenship protections from federal or state governments, postwar tropes of rural mobility and belonging effectively denationalized western migrants.

The transformation of land tenure and the privatization of natural resources via US-sponsored technical assistance programs were key to processes of denationalization in western Mexico. As binational technocrats and technologies imported US-style progress into Mexico’s countryside (irrigation-intensive industrial agriculture in particular) migrants were compelled to navigate not only evolving built and natural environments but shifting political and social terrain at home. The ostracization of migrants by both the state and society during a vital development era empowered non-governmental actors (media, elites, neighbors) to dictate the terms of regional and national belonging. Yet tropes of rural mobility and migrancy functioned not only to delegitimize migrancy but also the technologies of mobility themselves: buses, transportation companies, international bus routes, regional highways, and rural roads. These discourses demonizing mobility technologies and spatial and cultural transformation ultimately served political ends. They condemned the ruling party’s technocratic strategy of privileging economic and technical development over social reform via rural infrastructure.