Roads to Prosperity and Ruin: Infrastructure and the Making of Neoliberal Yucatán

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Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

Roads to Prosperity and Ruin

Infrastructure and the Making of Neoliberal Yucatán

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

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English

The University of North Carolina Press
28 October 2025

Indigenous peoples; Anthropology; Political science & theory

In 2022, journalists announced the impending economic death of a small Mexican town. Pisté, gateway to the famed Chichén Itzá archeological site, would be circumvented by the Tren Maya commuter rail megaproject, depriving it of the promise of steady tourist traffic. Instead of ruminating with frustration, locals set to work on negotiations with the state and federal governments. Generations of experience taught them that pragmatic engagement with mainstream political parties was essential in turning into opportunity projects with the potential to kill the local economy.

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero situates the Tren Maya in a long history of roadbuilding and economic development on the Yucatán Peninsula beginning in the 1930s. Drawing together archival research and decades of ethnographic work, Armstrong-Fumero develops the concept of negative infrastructure to show how infrastructural and industrial investments configure rural economic futures as well as how communities seek to mitigate the harms from projects designed to benefit other regions or interests. The push and pull of development reveals the strategies residents use to influence political change through municipal elections and informal protest. Recognizing their life-changing potential, rural Maya Yucatecans recast infrastructural projects as new possibilities for inclusion, agency, and resistance as participants in formal state and economic structures.

By: Fernando Armstrong-Fumero
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 25mm, Spine: 155mm
ISBN: 9781469691213
ISBN 10: 1469691213
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 28 October 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero is associate professor of anthropology at Smith College.

Reviews for Roads to Prosperity and Ruin: Infrastructure and the Making of Neoliberal Yucatán

""Engaging, memorable, and fresh. Armstrong-Fumero highlights the nuances of a politics of prosperity and offers essential new insights about the politics of scale and desire.""--Eric Hirsch, author of Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru