State making at the infrastructural frontier: bureaucratic practices and the techno-politics of hydraulic infrastructure in post-revolutionary Mexico City

This paper analyses the role that bureaucrats play in processes of state-making at the infrastructural frontier. It does so through a close archival analysis of administrative contentions in the building of the Lerma System, an interbasin water transfer built in Central Mexico between 1942 and 1951 to supply Mexico City with fresh water. The Lerma is understood as part of a broader techno-political transition in post-revolutionary Mexico, where large infrastructures were simultaneously territorialising state power and materialising a push for modernisation, urbanisation and industrialisation. In critical dialogue with scholarship that theorises this transition as one of authoritarian centralisation, this paper shows that this process was riddled with contentions within the state apparatus, which shaped the way these infrastructures were built and had profound implications for the historical and contemporary techno-politics of hydraulic infrastructure in Mexico City. By focusing on bureaucrats and administrative practices, this paper contributes to scholarship that theorises the heterogeneity of the state and its effects by highlighting the constrained agency these state workers have in face of profound techno-political changes and political economic and ecological transitions.