Josefina’s backyard was hemmed in by the towering, 20-meter curtain of the El Ángulo dam, which cast a shadow over her humble home. Covered in moss and with small plants sprouting between its interlocking masonry blocks, the more than century-old dam might even be beautiful if it were not the source of constant terror for Josefina and her neighbors in Ejidal San Isidro, a poor self-built neighborhood on the far northwestern periphery of Mexico City’s sprawling metropolitan region.

The night before, after heavy rains, the dam operator had opened the spillway gates with little warning and sent a torrent of sewage-laced floodwater raging through the streets of Ejidal San Isidro, inundating dozens of homes, including Josefina’s, before some residents could even shut their doors and try—if largely in vain—to keep the river out of their living rooms. The local government claimed that residents only had themselves to blame, since they had “invaded”—illegally settled—the base of a dam. As one government official told me coldly, “if you sit where the rock is going to fall, who is at fault?”

But residents countered that flooding had never been a concern until the local government allowed the huge warehouses of the San Martin Obispo Industrial Park to be built partially inside the dam’s reservoir. According to most estimates, the industrial park robbed the reservoir of two-thirds of its surface area1Cuatitlán Izcalli, “Plan de Desarrollo Municipal 2009–2012,” 49. The report is also available here thanks to the author. —Ed. and at least half its volume, halving the dam’s capacity to hold back the floodwaters that tore into Ejidal San Isidro (and nearby neighborhoods) the night before. At the same time, it increased the runoff into the dam by paving over a huge, previously undeveloped area. With its enviable location near the intersection of two important freeways, the site is now home to sprawling distribution centers for multinational corporations like Office Depot, FedEx, and Amazon.

As one resident put it, gesturing to the warehouses that now loom over the community: “Now you tell me, who is invading who?”

Figure 1. The concrete line that begins in the foreground is the curtain of the El Ángulo dam, which holds back water from the Ejidal San Isidro neighborhood visible on the left, just below the dam curtain. Part of the new industrial park is visible in the background. Photo courtesy of Dean Chahim.

Invasions of capital

As absurd as it seems, the invasion of drainage infrastructures by transportation and logistics projects is hardly unique to Ejidal San Isidro. Across the metropolitan region, governments at all levels are “devouring” the drainage infrastructures they depend on in pursuit of urban growth.2The El Ángulo dam is unique in that it is technically privately owned—an unusual situation in Mexico. But it is still part of a federal waterway and any construction that substantively modifies the flow of water in (and discharge to) a federal waterway must be approved by the federal government’s water ministry, the National Water Commission. The local municipality must also approve any new urban development. They have allowed dams, canals, and regulation basins to be built over, buried, or otherwise obstructed by new transportation and logistics infrastructures. (The governance of the Mexico City metropolitan region is split between dozens of municipalities, two state entities, and the federal government itself.) These new infrastructures reduce the capacity of the metropolis’ drainage system to handle floodwaters, with potentially disastrous consequences for the city’s residents, as the case of Ejidal San Isidro makes clear. With Julie Livingston’s work in mind, we can think of this tendency as a kind of “self-devouring urbanism,” in which governments enable urban growth by undermining the very survival of the city.

Modern Mexico City is virtually dependent on a series of gargantuan drainage engineering works for its very existence. Built on a series of now-drained lakes,3See Vera Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Manuel Perló Cohen, El paradigma porfiriano: historia del desagüe del valle de México (México: Programa Universitario de Estudios Sobre la Ciudad, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales : M.A. Porrúa Grupo Editorial, 1999); Matthew Vitz, A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). the major rivers of the valley run toward the center of the city—once the bottom of Lake Texcoco—but are diverted, along with stormwater and sewage, into one of the world’s most complex drainage systems. As much water as possible is held back in dams and basins in order to slow the torrent of water into the tunnels and canals of the system. This helps “flatten the curve,” to use the now (too) familiar concept, preventing the overload of the rest of the drainage system. This system then ferries the toxic floodwaters across the city before finally ejecting it from the otherwise closed (endorheic) valley through one of four artificial outlets bored into the side of the mountains that surround the city. Despite its massive size, the drainage system has come under extreme strain in recent decades as the metropolitan region has expanded further while government officials have invested comparatively little in drainage works. The system frequently surpasses its operating capacity during even moderate rain events, making flooding a virtual inevitability.

By obstructing critical elements of the metropolitan drainage system, the construction of new logistics and transportation infrastructures increase the likelihood of potentially devastating flooding. Given this risk, why would governments devour (or allow others to devour) the very critical infrastructures that the metropolis depends on, all in pursuit of growth? The answer revolves around a central contradiction between the imperative of capital mobility on the one hand and the political limitations of a weakened state on the other.

Figure 2. El Ángulo Dam in 2002, before construction of the industrial park. Note the area in green, which was part of the floodable area of the reservoir. Image: Google Earth.
Figure 3. El Ángulo Dam in 2017, after construction of the industrial park. Note the two long warehouses that run almost north-south, which were built directly inside the reservoir. Image: Google Earth.

The spatial fix and the problem of land

Governments in the Mexico City metropolitan region face intense pressure from capitalists to build or authorize the construction of transportation and logistics infrastructures throughout the congested city. These infrastructures, as geographers have argued, serve as a kind of “spatial fix” to stave off crises of overaccumulation of capital. During their construction, these infrastructures use surplus capital that could otherwise not be put to profitable use. Over the long-term, they enable the mobility of capital (in the form of commodities) both within the city and between the city and national and global markets.4→Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesotta Press, 2014).
→Martin Danyluk, “Capital’s Logistical Fix: Accumulation, Globalization, and the Survival of Capitalism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 4 (August 1, 2018): 630–47.
→David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London; New York: Verso, 2006).
If these infrastructures are not built, capitalists threaten to move elsewhere for greener pastures in other cities, or even more likely, other countries.5For example, Cuatitlán Izcalli, the municipality in which the industrial park, the El Ángulo dam, and Ejidal San Isidro are all located, notes that the municipality has lost millions (of pesos) in investment from firms that have left the municipality due to inadequate infrastructure and public services. Cuatitlán Izcalli, “Plan de Desarollo Municipal 2009–2012,” 61.

To avoid this capital flight and the consequently brutal crises of devaluation,6→Harvey, The Limits to Capital.
→Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, 3rd ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
governments have not only approved projects like the industrial park in the El Ángulo reservoir, but also built new privately operated toll highways that crisscross the metropolis. New trains and airports designed for upper-class urbanites are still in the works, part of a comprehensive urban vision that would allow a globe-trotting elite and their capital to glide over (or around) the grinding poverty and traffic that the majority of the city’s residents must suffer.

Yet these new infrastructures meant to appease capitalists require land, a scarce resource in one of the world’s largest and densest metropolises. While developers and governments may be able to convince some landowners to sell voluntarily, buying a parcel here and there is simply not feasible given the topographic requirements of these infrastructures. Trains and highways need either long, straight, and uninterrupted lines running through particular places, while airports and logistics facilities require massive open spaces. A single stubborn property owner could derail a whole project, making expropriation—if construction is to be done on private lands—a virtual necessity.

Nevertheless, mass expropriation is a political “third rail” few officials attempt to touch today.7See Antonio Azuela and Camilo Saavedra, “Uso, desgaste y reuso de la expropriación en la ciudad de México,” in Expropiación y conflicto social en cinco metrópolis latinoamericanas, ed. Antonio Azuela (México: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 2013), 409–54. As government engineers lamented to me, a fractured political landscape and stronger social movements mean that the city can no longer plow through neighborhoods to build boulevards as they did in the 1970s,8In Mexico City of the late 1970s, the federally appointed mayor, Hank González, and a pro-growth coalition within an effectively one-party state displaced over 25,000 residents to build a new system of ejes vials, widened boulevards. See Diane Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 248. much as Robert Moses had done decades earlier in New York City.9New York: Knopf, 1974More Info → At the same time, decades of austerity have made it difficult to afford new, large-scale underground projects, which might tunnel under such political obstacles.

Governments are thus stuck between politically powerful capitalist elites pushing for more infrastructure and intransigent residents, who fight expropriation tooth and nail.10For an account of this fierce resistance in the wake of an earlier attempt to expropriate land to build an airport in the metropolitan region, see Antonio Azuela, “« La Terre Ne Se Vend Pas, Elle s’aime et Se Défend » : La Productivité Sociale Du Conflit Pour Atenco, Mexico,” in Conflits de Proximité et Dynamiques Urbaines, ed. Patrice Melé (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 323–49. To sidestep this otherwise irreconcilable tension, government planners and engineers have turned inwards, using their own drainage infrastructure and water bodies as land on which to build the logistics and transportation infrastructures needed to improve the circulation of commodities and the mobility of elites. This move allows for capital mobility—a crucial spatial fix for capitalism—without mass expropriation. It also represents a deliberate decision to displace water rather than people and to accept the risk of flooding in the future rather than the immediate risk of political backlash.

Figure 4. Water flowing from one of the city’s dams into a diversion tunnel. Photo courtesy of Dean Chahim.

Dispossessing security

Those displacements of water do not take people’s land, but they do dispossess them of something more intangible: a sense of security. Residents of Ejidal San Isidro have now flooded seriously three times—and had many close calls—since the industrial park was built. They not only lose their belongings to noxious, sewage-laced floodwaters, but also live in a constant state of “terror” when it rains, as one of Josefina’s neighbors put it. She described frequently waking up in the middle of the night to walk up to the dam, just to check to see that it wasn’t full. Others described nervous breakdowns during heavy storms, as they were paralyzed by fear and uncertainty, unsure of whether to lift up their meager belongings and hold out or simply run for high ground.

Despite residents’ discontent and suffering, reverting this loss of security is extraordinarily difficult. Either the water from the reservoir must be diverted in an expensive tunnel, or the warehouses must be dismantled, both of which are exceedingly unlikely. The government appears content to deal with the political costs of a frustrated, but largely isolated population, over the extraordinary costs of a new tunnel amid an economic crisis and the political costs of upsetting capitalists and those workers who now depend on the industrial park. In the meantime, while capital flows smoothly in and out of the warehouses above them on semi-trucks, residents are stuck, forced to live amid a perpetual anxiety punctuated by disasters.

This is a pattern repeated throughout the city, but the link between these “self-devouring” urbanistic projects and their consequences is often far less clear-cut, making resistance all the more difficult. Just a few miles from downtown Mexico City, the Ruiz Cortines dam is slated to be paved over in order to make room for the terminal station of a new passenger rail line, pushed by the federal government. It will allow elite commuters to skip over the punishing traffic between Mexico City and Toluca, the nearby state capital. Most importantly, the elevated train line will provide a streamlined connection to the wealthy enclave of Santa Fe, where Mexico’s biggest firms have their headquarters in gleaming skyscrapers that overlook the city. Siting the station in the city’s own reservoir allowed the federal government to avoid displacing working-class residents in the area, many of whom militantly opposed the project from the start, knowing that it was never designed to serve them.

Figure 5. The former reservoir of the Ruiz Cortines Dam, with its spillway visible in the foreground. The dam is now a construction site for the station. Photo courtesy of Dean Chahim.

The destruction of the Ruiz Cortines dam reduces the capacity of the city’s drainage system to hold back floodwaters, a capacity which is already frequently exceeded.11For more on this point, see Dean Chahim, “Engineers Don’t Solve Problems,” Logic Magazine, Fall 2018. But the effects of its removal from the drainage system will not be felt nearby, as in the case of Ejidal San Isidro, precisely due to the interconnections of the drainage system that wind under the city. City drainage engineers are already being forced to divert the floodwaters once held in the Ruiz Cortines toward other dams, all of which are interlinked through a system of tunnels and canals.

While this diversion creates chokepoints elsewhere, engineers are instructed to carefully avoid flooding wealthy regions along the waters’ path. Instead, they shunt water toward zones on the urban periphery where it is more likely to flood the poor. When those residents are finally hit with a flood, linking their suffering to the elimination of a dam miles away will be extraordinarily difficult for residents to understand, let alone to prove. This is due not only to residents’ own limited resources, but also the complex hydraulics and inherent uncertainties of the drainage system. Even if residents are able to organize to resist this dispossession of security, it will likely be, as in Ejidal San Isidro, too late to undo the permanent damage.

Splintering the city

The industrial park and the train described here are just two examples from a broad portfolio of transportation and logistics projects built or permitted by governments which are devouring the very drainage infrastructure Mexico City depends on to stay dry.12These sweeping, stepwise reductions due to logistics and transportation infrastructures become especially worrisome when one considers that they happen alongside the piecemeal reductions in capacity caused by slower processes of sedimentation, maintenance deficits, and urban settlements and developments, all of which eat away at drainage infrastructures’ capacity in much slower, more continuous fashion. The government (at all levels) has promoted these self-devouring projects to enable the mobility of capital in an already dense, gargantuan metropolis with little space for new infrastructure and little public tolerance for expropriation. The result is an increasingly “splintered” urban fabric,13London: Routledge, 2001More Info → in which the rapid circulation of elites and their capital is lubricated by overtopping dams and ruptured levees for the poor, who too often have no idea what hit them until the river is already in their living room.

Banner photo: Residents in flooded home in Ejidal San Isidro talking with government official. Courtesy of Dean Chahim.

References:

1
Cuatitlán Izcalli, “Plan de Desarrollo Municipal 2009–2012,” 49. The report is also available here thanks to the author. —Ed.
2
The El Ángulo dam is unique in that it is technically privately owned—an unusual situation in Mexico. But it is still part of a federal waterway and any construction that substantively modifies the flow of water in (and discharge to) a federal waterway must be approved by the federal government’s water ministry, the National Water Commission. The local municipality must also approve any new urban development.
3
See Vera Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Manuel Perló Cohen, El paradigma porfiriano: historia del desagüe del valle de México (México: Programa Universitario de Estudios Sobre la Ciudad, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales : M.A. Porrúa Grupo Editorial, 1999); Matthew Vitz, A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
4
→Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (University of Minnesotta Press, 2014).
→Martin Danyluk, “Capital’s Logistical Fix: Accumulation, Globalization, and the Survival of Capitalism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 4 (August 1, 2018): 630–47.
→David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London; New York: Verso, 2006).
5
For example, Cuatitlán Izcalli, the municipality in which the industrial park, the El Ángulo dam, and Ejidal San Isidro are all located, notes that the municipality has lost millions (of pesos) in investment from firms that have left the municipality due to inadequate infrastructure and public services. Cuatitlán Izcalli, “Plan de Desarollo Municipal 2009–2012,” 61.
6
→Harvey, The Limits to Capital.
→Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, 3rd ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
7
See Antonio Azuela and Camilo Saavedra, “Uso, desgaste y reuso de la expropriación en la ciudad de México,” in Expropiación y conflicto social en cinco metrópolis latinoamericanas, ed. Antonio Azuela (México: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 2013), 409–54.
8
In Mexico City of the late 1970s, the federally appointed mayor, Hank González, and a pro-growth coalition within an effectively one-party state displaced over 25,000 residents to build a new system of ejes vials, widened boulevards. See Diane Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 248.
9
New York: Knopf, 1974More Info →
10
For an account of this fierce resistance in the wake of an earlier attempt to expropriate land to build an airport in the metropolitan region, see Antonio Azuela, “« La Terre Ne Se Vend Pas, Elle s’aime et Se Défend » : La Productivité Sociale Du Conflit Pour Atenco, Mexico,” in Conflits de Proximité et Dynamiques Urbaines, ed. Patrice Melé (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 323–49.
11
For more on this point, see Dean Chahim, “Engineers Don’t Solve Problems,” Logic Magazine, Fall 2018.
12
These sweeping, stepwise reductions due to logistics and transportation infrastructures become especially worrisome when one considers that they happen alongside the piecemeal reductions in capacity caused by slower processes of sedimentation, maintenance deficits, and urban settlements and developments, all of which eat away at drainage infrastructures’ capacity in much slower, more continuous fashion.
13
London: Routledge, 2001More Info →