FLOOD CONTROL POLITICS:

ENGINEERING, URBAN GROWTH, AND DISASTER IN MEXICO CITY

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEAN MOHAMMED CHAHIM

JUNE 2021

Acknowledgements

My doctoral studies at Stanford would not have been possible without the financial support of the Stanford Department of Anthropology and the Stanford Vice Provost for Graduate Education. Fieldwork for this project was funded by an International Dissertation Research Fellowship and a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, as well as a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I was able to dedicate a final year to writing thanks to a Mellon/American Council for Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

I was able to complete this project thanks to the many interlocutors in Mexico City who opened their offices, homes, and tunnels to a curious anthropologist with endless questions. I am especially indebted to the engineers and operation and maintenance workers of the Sistema de Aguas de la Ciudad de México (SACMEX; Mexico City Water System), who told me far more stories than I had room to detail here and whose names I unfortunately cannot mention. While the account presented here is based on interviews of varying lengths with hundreds of individuals, I am particularly grateful for the generosity of the engineers I call Juan Casillas and David Hernández here, who opened doors and offered at times startlingly frank assessments of their work and organization. I am similarly thankful to the drainage maintenance worker I call Raúl and his partner (unnamed here) who helped me get my hands dirty and understand floods firsthand through their experienced eyes. My stance as a critic is, and forever will be, tempered by a profound sense of awe and respect for the often difficult, dirty, and dangerous work that the engineers and workers of SACMEX undertake on a daily basis to keep Mexico City above water.

The librarians at SACMEX also made my work immeasurably easier, particularly Korina Sánchez Reyes, who always seemed to know what other documents might interest me. I am also grateful to the engineers of the Organismo de Cuencas Aguas del Valle de México (OCAVM; Valley of Mexico Water Basin Organization), part of the National Water Commission, CONAGUA (Comisión Nacional del Agua). While I was unable to conduct extensive ethnographic fieldwork in OCAVM, interviews offered me a broader perspective that helped me put my work with SACMEX in context. Their generous permission to let me consult their internal library also led me to stumble upon one of the most important archival sources that I draw on in Chapter One.

Beyond the librarians of SACMEX and OCAVM, I was lucky to have the generous cooperation of archivists and librarians in a number of institutions throughout the city, who often pointed me towards invaluable resources. In particular, I benefitted tremendously from the help of the staff and collections of the Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México, Hemeroteca Nacional, Biblioteca Enzo Leví, Acervo Histórico del Palacio de Minería, and Unidad de Servicios de Información of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Instituto de Ingeniería. The pointers offered by Matthew Vitz and Seth Denizen were crucial in helping me find the incredibly useful collections of the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada and Biblioteca Conjunto de las Ciencias de la Tierra, respectively. Fellow Mexicanists Sam Holley-Kline and Mateo Carrillo also helped me figure out how to navigate the archives in Mexico.

Across the city, victims of flooding were incredibly generous with their time and their stories about the disasters, both spectacular and mundane, that they have faced. I know that this thesis in and of itself may have little impact on their ongoing struggles, but I hope the other work it makes possible might help to slowly shift the narrative about flooding in the city away from victim-blaming and naturalization of what is a thoroughly anthropogenic and avoidable catastrophe.

The origins of any dissertation project are often highly circumstantial but, in my case, I have to thank a number of people for starting me down this path. Carlos Ventura Callejas and Francisco Pulido made me fall in love with their city in 2014, before I even imagined a project there. Angela Garcia first suggested thinking about Mexico City’s relationship to its water, and (indirectly) connected me to Ivonne del Valle, who patiently oriented me when I knew absolutely nothing, connecting me in turn to Manuel Perló Cohen. A brief meeting with him assured me that this project had legs, and his comments and his writings have left a lasting impact on the direction of the project.

In Mexico, a number of academics, activists, and engineers opened doors for me and answered my initial questions when I still had very little idea what I was doing, including Paola Velasco, Luis Aboites, Alfonso Hernández, Adriana Palma, Clara Eugenia Salazar, Gian Delgado, Ramón Domínguez Mora, Mónica Olvera, Brenda Rodríguez, Alejandro Rico Celis, Patricio Buenrostro, Arsenio González, Enrique Ortíz, Luis Zambrano, Fernando Cordova, Marcelo Canteiro, América del Valle, Christina Siebe, Nathalie Seguín, Elena Tudela, Alexander Serrano, Oscar Monroy, Natalia Lara, and Teresa Rojas Rabiela. I have also been lucky to develop my work in conversation with fellow scholars of water, land, and soil in Mexico, including Alejandro de Coss, Elizabeth Roberts, Adriana Salazar, Mónica Olvera, Francisco Trejo Morales, Seth Denizen, Elizabeth Tellman, Marina Reyes Lopez Mautner, Sandra Rozental, and David Palma, all of whom listened to parts of this dissertation’s arguments and offered key suggestions. Francisco Platas has been a particularly generous interlocutor and source of wisdom on the city’s drainage system. Other scholars who have provided crucial feedback and advice at critical points in the development of the project include Julie Livingston, Susan Lindee, Vera Candiani, Shannon Cram, Nikhil Anand, Colin Hoag, Austin Zeiderman, Andrea Ballestero, and Ashley Carse. Allison Kendra, Alize Arican, Emma Shaw Crane, and Maya Wind read, re-read, and, for good measure, read one more time practically everything I’ve written in the past year, and I could not be more thankful to have had their virtual camaraderie amid the isolation of the pandemic and job searches.

I have benefitted furthermore from the comments from audiences at the 2018 and 2019 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the 2020 and 2021 meetings of the American Association of Geographers. In more intimate settings, I have had the privilege to get detailed comments from the participants of the 2019 Fluid Ecologies workshop at Stanford, the Mexico City-based Taller de Etnografía organized by Sandra Rozental and Carlos Mondragón, the Science Technology and Society Graduate Workshop at Stanford, and the Political Anthropology/Political Ecology Working Group at Harvard.

I am particularly indebted to the incredible team of Las Huellas del Agua / Watermarks: Alejandra Hernández, María Fernanda, Alexia Macario, and Juan Manuel Garcia. Alejandra, María and Alexia accompanied me to “the field” on many occasions to talk with communities and the discussions afterwards helped me to process and rethink some of the arguments presented here. Juan’s knowledge of the geography of the city in turn helped me understand the relationships between stories spread across the city. I am also grateful for the support of Isaura Ovando, Olímpia Martínez, and Gabriela Reyes on the project. The project was made possible through the funding from the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and the Stanford Haas Center.

In the Stanford Department of Anthropology, I have had the rare joy of working with a committee of brilliant mentors who have, from the start, believed in this project and in me, even when I wasn’t sure I was prepared to become an anthropologist. Stumbling upon James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine in the Suzzallo-Allen library stacks at the University of Washington as an undergraduate engineering student is no small part of the reason why I decided to study a PhD in anthropology in the first place. His guidance has always been incisive and clear, helping me see the big ideas and questions at stake, both theoretically and politically. He has consistently steered me away from the easy answers and condemnations and towards the much more interesting questions about how things work. Furthermore, his insistence on clarity in thinking and writing is a model I hope to follow. I’ll never forget Miyako Inoue’s call letting me know I’d been admitted to Stanford; from that point on, her excitement and wisdom about the mundane dimensions of bureaucracies and technical things has been a guiding light for me. I am so grateful for her frankness: I always knew when I had a good idea, but she wouldn’t let me run too far with a bad one. Paulla Ebron has been a constant source of inspiration for thinking about the big questions about planning, space, ecologies, and the meaning of modernity. Her wide-ranging reading and constant insistence on finding the “there there” helped me both ground my work and expand my thinking. Paulla and Miyako together were unwavering in their insistence that my engineering training was not a liability but an asset that offered a fresh perspective on my subjects of study. Their support helped me overcome more than one bout of imposter syndrome.

After switching my project from Afghanistan to Mexico at the last minute during my first year, I was lucky enough that Mikael Wolfe was willing to join my committee. His deep knowledge of Mexico’s “envirotechnical” history has indelibly shaped both the ethnographic and historical pieces of my work. Knowing he was going to read my ethnography forced me to think twice about proclaiming the novelty of contemporary practices and the dissertation is all the better for it. I’m deeply grateful for his advice and friendship over the years. Gabrielle Hecht was an early inspiration for the project and reading her work almost made me want to become a historian instead. Her seminar with Paul Edwards at the Anthropocene Curriculum in Berlin remains one of my favorite experiences in graduate school. While she only came to Stanford as I was writing, her undisciplined insights on both the ethnographic and historical pieces of the project have helped me tremendously to hone my arguments.

Beyond my committee, Lochlann Jain and Kabir Tambar both provided critical feedback on drafts as I was just beginning to write the dissertation. Sylvia Yanagisako’s courses and informal advice were transformational as I was trying to figure out what to study and how. Reading Capital with her always incisive commentary was a transformational experience. Matthew Kohrmann’s proposal writing workshop helped me formulate the initial outlines of this project. Sharika Thiranagama provided early encouragement for my project and has always represented a model of committed, politically-engaged scholarship I hope to follow. Thomas Blom Hansen’s discussions with me about the urban, while cut short by unforeseen circumstances, were deeply formative. Duana Fullwiley’s course on medical ethics helped me see the surprising parallels between engineering and medicine.

The staff of the Department of Anthropology have made my life immeasurably easier over the years. Shelly Coughlan anticipated and resolved problems before I even knew about them, and was always a willing ear who offered priceless advice. She and Ellen Christensen are the glue that hold the department together. Behind the scenes, Kaila Jiménez, Emily Bishop, and Maria Manzanares were always extraordinarily helpful and efficient. Claudia Engel was always willing to put her wide-ranging technical skills to work to help me get unstuck.

While at Stanford, I had the wonderful fortune of starting a doctoral program with the best cohort imaginable, many of whom became some of my closest friends, comrades, and colleagues: Alana Springer, Allison Kendra, Byron Gray, Camilla Mazzucato, Gesualdo Busacca, Hannah Moots, Kerem Ussakli, Tianyu Xie, and Torin Jones. This dissertation (and the past seven years) would not have been the same without the intense discussions on early morning BART rides with Samuel Maull and Kerem, and late-night chats with Sam and Carolina Talavera in Berkeley. The three of them, along with Allison, Ángela Castillo, and Tony Marks-Block, always helped me keep my intellectual projects accountable and inspired my political work. Other colleagues (past and present) in Anthropology who have provided wisdom and advice on the project (and navigating the program) are, in no particular order: Nisrin Elamin, Dilshanie Perera, Jessica Auerbach, Grace Zhou, Sam Holley-Kline, Jennifer Hsieh, Nataya Freidan, Nestor Silva, Jacob Doherty, Mark Gardiner, Karem Said, Adela Zhang, Firat Bozcali, Esteban Salmon Perrilliat, Jaime Landinez Aceros, and Zaith López. For their help figuring out what came after the Ph.D., I’m very grateful to Nisrin, Anna West, and Patrick Gallagher.

I’m also very grateful to have wedged my way early on into a circle of wonderful historians who expanded my thinking and were a joy to be around: Madihah Akhter, Daniella Farah, Anubha Anushree, Rebecca Wall, Justine Modica, Mateo Carrillo, and Mejgan Massumi. Mejgan, along with Zainab Taymuree, Somaye Sarvarzade, and our ever-curious friend Lara Palmer, were always happy to serve as my taste-testers for new Afghan recipes that kept me sane during the first couple years. Diana Gúzman, meanwhile, was kind enough to always invite me to lunch with her fellow colombianos and teach me about Latin American politics. I am also tremendously grateful to have overlapped - often in both academic or organizing spaces - with Afroz Algiers, Alexa Russo, Ioanida Costache, Vivek V. Narayan, Teresa Pratt, David Stentiford, Calvin Cheung-Miaw, Katerina Gonzalez, Sahar El Abbadi, Ares Geovanos, Irán Roman, Forest Peterson, and Kari Barclay. Direct action gets the goods.

Beyond Stanford, friends and comrades who kept me sane while living in and around the noxious wealth of Silicon Valley include Asher Kohn, Dan Minter, Julie Mendel, Garrett Strain, Adam Welch, and Karim Mansouri. Dan deserves a special mention, as he was the one who got me to visit Mexico City with him the very first time as a bewildered college student in 2010, arguably planting the first seeds of this thesis. Back home in Seattle and around the country, my longtime friends have constantly supported me, even when that meant bailing - time and again - on hanging out to finish “one last paper”: Kelvin Chau, Alexis Valauri-Orton, Nathan Cermak, Amy Tower, Roderick Yang, Maya Sugarman, Rhiannon Bronstein, Pranoti Hiremath, Kirk Hovenkotter, Sarah Carney, Charmila Ajmera, Orion-Donovan Smith, Thayer Hastings, Michael Reagan, Angie Malorni, Ansel Herz, and Rozanna Fang. Michael, Angie, Ansel, and Rozanna also constantly reminded me, by example, of the need to ground my work through participation in political struggle and not get lost in theory. I hope that I have succeeded.

Along similar lines, I would not be writing this if it was not for the models of public and engaged scholarship I witnessed in my undergraduate mentors at the University of Washington (UW), Stephen Bezruchka, James Pfeiffer, Rachel Chapman, and Matt Sparke. I hope I have succeeded. It is not an understatement to say that Stephen’s unassuming-sounding class on “global population health,” which was really a crash course in critical political economy fused with epidemiology, was a radicalizing experience that changed the direction of my life. He has been a constant source of support and friendship throughout this journey and his commitment to communicating ideas beyond the academy remains a model I hope to follow. Matt gave me free rein to design and teach my first class, an experience that convinced me I wanted to do this for a living. He also generously helped guide me through the mysterious process of applying to graduate schools. James and Rachel have long served as my lodestars, reminders that it is possible to retain your political commitments and engagements in the academy. I’m also indebted to my mentors in Engineers Without Borders at the UW - particularly Susan Bolton, Mark Benjamin, Donee Alexander, Mark Raleigh, and Dave Cook - who saw something in me and helped me, if completely inadvertently, down this path. Eating potatoes (and digging ditches) in Bolivia with Donee and Mark R. changed the path of my life forever.

The Bonderman Travel Fellowship provided through the UW Honors program helped me discover that I loved meeting strangers and writing down their stories. I only realized that this is what anthropologists did afterwards, thanks in no small part to a comrade and fellow anthropologist, David Citrin. After graduating from the UW, I was finally convinced to take the plunge and apply to graduate school after working with Daniel Ullom to develop a course on “Engineering for Social Justice.” The extraordinarily stimulating conversations we had to develop that syllabus and teach each session – and the feedback from students – helped me begin to formulate the questions that drive this dissertation.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to my longtime friends Carolina Corrales and Guillermo Obando, whose discussions in their home in Managua not only helped me learn Spanish properly, but also learn about the lived experience of U.S. imperialism in the Americas. This politicizing experience, along with Stephen’s course, were the sparks that made me email my parents from Managua with terrible news: I no longer wanted to be an engineer.

Other children of immigrants know that we live to make our parents proud - to give reason to their sacrifices. I know my decision to leave the engineering profession was initially baffling to my dear parents, Abdul Jalil Chahim and Shahnaz Timuri Chahim. But they have since become my greatest supporters - and I am grateful they encouraged me not to quit the profession before I learned enough engineering to be sympathetic critic. When I decided to become an anthropologist, I did not initially intend to look back, let alone study engineering itself. But it turns out I couldn’t stray that far away from the family trade. All those weekend afternoons playing with random building parts and calculators in my father’s office and my mothers’ mechanical drawing lessons (and stories about her research on Bangkok’s shophouses)[1] clearly left an impression. So, too, did the riveting tales about life in Afghanistan in the midst of revolution and civil war - issues seemingly far removed from this thesis that nevertheless sparked my early curiosity in history and politics. My sister, Leda Chahim, paved the way in everything in life, always figuring it out first and teaching me. Her environmentalism, furthermore, was an early inspiration for me and awakened my interest in many of the questions that motivate this thesis. Summer drives in California talking about signal timing with my aunt Simin Timuri awakened an early fascination with urban infrastructure in all its sociotechnical complexity. The pages that follow bear the indelible mark of the endless conversations I have had with my family about engineering, politics, cities, and the environment.

Ageo Navarro and Nohemi González welcomed me into their home and have always offered their unwavering support for me and my work. Their own stories of living through much of the period described in this dissertation have helped me put my narrative about the technical details of tunnels and soils in a far broader context. Finally, I know this project would have been immeasurably worse - and far less enjoyable - if it were not for Asminda Navarro González. An improbable series of coincidences brought us together on the Metro and nothing has been able to keep us apart. While doing fieldwork, I watched her and her fellow derechohumaneros face the Mexican political machine head-on taught me far more about how Mexican politics work than any book. Coming home to her - or meeting up in our favorite taquería - was always the highlight of my day, even when I was soaking wet and exhausted from following flood crews all night. During the writing, she has helped me refine countless half-baked ideas and helped me clarify what was really at stake. Her constant encouragement that this project matters has kept me going even when I was convinced I had lost my way, while her insistence that I make it matter (and its findings accessible) for communities fighting against injustice in Mexico City and elsewhere continues to inspire me. I hope this lives up to her expectations. Thank you for building a life with me, Tira, and our little solecito to come. This dissertation is for you, and the residents of the city you and I both love.

[1] (Chahim 1981)