Performative infrastructures: Populism and the material politics of militarization in contemporary Mexico

Agnes Mondragón-Celis and Tania Islas Weinstein

Environment and Planning C, 2025, vol. 43, issue 8, 1677-1695

Abstract: Upon taking office in December 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) began financing large-scale infrastructural projects across the country, including the Felipe à ngeles International Airport (AIFA), to be built and managed by the Mexican Armed Forces. Over 2 years into its 2022 inauguration, the AIFA has negligible air traffic but an enormous presence in the public sphere. Drawing on literature on populism and the politics of infrastructure, this article explores how the airport’s main role lies less in its logistical operations than in redrawing the relationship between the Mexican Army and “the people.†Through ethnographic and media analysis of the airport’s abundant propaganda—particularly a feature-length documentary—we analyze how this infrastructure serves as a site for ideological work by and for the Army. We argue that, by helping to normalize militarization as they advance it by their construction and operation, infrastructures may possess the performative power to rewrite the boundaries between civilian and military life. By mobilizing the tools of advertisement and propaganda, infrastructures may showcase processes like Mexico’s militarization in sanitized and partial ways. This article thus situates infrastructures not as the product of a political order, but rather as capable of bringing a new such order into existence.

Keywords: Infrastructure; performativity; populism; militarization; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23996544251339896 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:8:p:1677-1695

DOI: 10.1177/23996544251339896

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().