A01=Fernando Armstrong-Fumero
Author_Fernando Armstrong-Fumero
Category=JBSL
Category=JBSL11
Category=JHM
Category=JPA
Cold War in Mexico
cultural heritage in Mexico
democracy in Mexico
elections in Mexico
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
higher education and indigenous Mexicans
higher education in Mexico
indigenous people and neoliberalism
Indigenous politics in Mexico
informal economies
informal economies in Mexico
labor relations in Mexico
Maya identity politics
Mayan archaeology and tourism
municipal politics in Mexico
neoliberalism and education in Mexico
neoliberalism and indigenous identity politics
neoliberalism in Yucatan
politics of infrastructure
road construction
road construction in Mexico
Rural development in Mexico
social media use in rural Mexico
tourism and development
tourism in Yucatan
twentieth-century Mexico
Yucatan
Yucatec Maya People
Product details
- ISBN 9781469691213
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 28 Oct 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
Fernando Armstrong-Fumero is associate professor of anthropology at Smith College.
