Ruinas urbanas como archivos de violencias. Infraestructura, desagüe y violencias territoriales en el Valle de México

Ariana Mendoza-Fragoso

Authors

Ariana Mendoza-Fragoso Institute of Social Research National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIS UNAM) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6354-5433

Keywords:

Ihydraulic infrastructure, Mexico City drainage system, urban ruins, archive, violence.

Abstract

This paper proposes a critical reading of urban ruins as material archives of persistent territorial violence. Based on an ethnography conducted in neighborhoods adjacent to the Gran Canal de Desagüe (Great Drainage Canal) in the municipality of Ecatepec de Morelos, north of the Valley of Mexico, and a documentary review of colonial and modern hydraulic infrastructure, it analyzes how these ruins —not monumentalized— allow us to trace historical processes of dispossession, displacement, and socio-environmental precarity. The text focuses on the case of “El Dique” (The Dike), an urban node where remnants of locks, canals, and causeways converge with new elevated highways and other more recent infrastructure. Through a journey with Isela, a community leader who resisted eviction from her home, a situated perspective unfolds on the urban landscape as an archive of violence. This research challenges the state's heritage language, which tends to monumentalize the past and omit the violence that produced it. Instead, it proposes considering ruins as active traces that condense overlapping temporalities and disputes over memory. Methodologically it combines participant observation, interviews, and a historiographical review of works such as the Gran Canal de Desagüe (Great Drainage Canal), the albarradón de San Cristóbal (San Cristóbal Causeway), and the Casa del Real Desagüe (Royal Drainage House). Theoretically it engages with critical heritage studies, the anthropology of infrastructure, and postcolonial studies of ruins (Stoler, Gordillo, Gnecco, Huyssen, Rufer) to propose a dissident reading of peripheral urbanization. The central argument maintains that these ruins are not passive vestiges or nostalgic objects, but rather material assemblages that allow us to interpret the present as an open, conflictive, and contested time. Thus, it contributes to critical studies of heritage and ruins from marginalized urban contexts in the Global South, showing how the ruins of the drainage system reveal the violence that paradoxically underpins the promise of modernity.

Author Biography

Ariana Mendoza-Fragoso, Institute of Social Research National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIS UNAM)

Full-time Associate Researcher “C” at the Institute of Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. PhD in Anthropology from the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS). Master's in Sustainable Water Management from El Colegio de San Luis (COLSAN) and Bachelor's in Intercultural Development and Management from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), Cuajimalpa campus. Her doctoral dissertation received the 2023 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún Award, granted by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in the area of Social Anthropology. She is a member of the National System of Researchers of the National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (CONAHCYT). She has taught undergraduate courses in various faculties of the UNAM, including the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, and the Faculty of Architecture. At the graduate level, she has taught in the Doctoral Program in Humanities at UAM-Cuajimalpa, the Doctoral Program in Anthropology at CIESAS, and in the graduate programs in Sustainability Sciences and Anthropology at UNAM. She has participated in research and advocacy projects on water and the restoration of socio-ecological systems within the framework of the National Strategic Programs (PRONACES) of CONAHCYT. She is currently developing the project “Water Flows, Sedimentations of Violence: Infrastructure and Drainage as Devices of Inequality in the North of the Valley of Mexico.” Her lines of research are socio-environmental conflicts and problems, political ecology, social studies of water, territory and territorialities, urban environmental history, violence and the environment, anthropology of infrastructure, posthuman anthropology and materialities.

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