Every form of territorialization produces its own type of hinterland. The history of the term hinterland speaks of a practice of territorial control which allowed colonial powers to claim sovereignty over the region lying behind a port. In the past, hinterlands were largely rural, but today, due to the extension of the urbanization process, they have become peri-urban areas in which the city never finishes dissolving into the countryside. Hinterlands have proliferated around the increasingly concentrated wealth of networked cities. Where there is a port—a trading center—we often will find a hinterland surrounding it, that is, a subsidiary area that provides resources and people. At the margins of these new hinterlands, we can see how problems that emerged during colonialism are recast in the political language of today’s global economy.

Just as colonial ports, airports are nodes of entanglement between the local and the global. In our research, we consider the construction of a new airport for Mexico City in the lakebed of Texcoco, the plans for which were initiated in the 2000s. In the early twentieth century, large parts of the lake upon which the city stood were dried up through ambitious programs of land reclamation. The emerging land has been at the center of political disputes that pit rural against urban visions of development ever since. In this chapter, we focus on the latest attempts to render parts of the lake productive for the city at the expense of the families of peasants who combine small-scale agriculture with other productive activities or jobs that live and work in this area. The construction of a new airport for Mexico City is yet another iteration of what Matthew Vitz (2012) has dubbed the “Texcoco Problem.”

The official story of the airport must be read against a longer history of the reclamation of the lake by the expanding city. Lake Texcoco is one of the five lakes making up the lake basin of the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City is located. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica empire, was a lake city, built largely on artificial islands. The characteristics of the lakes meant that their waters were not drinkable—because of their salinity or because of the large amount of organic matter they contained. However, they were essential for agriculture. Thanks to a series of hydraulic works, Mexicas were able to avoid flooding and control the waters, which led to the development of an agricultural system of artificial islands called chinampas (Mundy 2015). In addition, vital resources were obtained from the lakes and their surroundings: fish and plants such as the tule (Schoenoplectus acutus), which was used to build chinampas and other objects such as baskets.

Spanish colonization established a completely different relation with the lakes. During the military siege and in the years following the conquest, fundamental elements of the indigenous hydraulic infrastructure were destroyed. An urban vision was imposed that moved away from the lake city. For the city to expand and survive, it had to dry up the lake beneath it. This destabilized the control of water that the indigenous people had before European colonization. Very soon a series of floods began to occur and from the middle of the sixteenth century, plans and projects began to be made to drain the lakes. This was not achieved until 1900, when the Great Drainage Canal was completed (Perló Cohen 1999).

Since then, Mexico City has seen the lakebed as its hinterland and its inhabitants as a surplus population that can perform subsidiary functions in the service of the city’s interests. But, from the perspective of its inhabitants, the expansion of the city should be countered by the restoration of the lakebed to its agricultural origins. At the crossroad between these two visions, one urban, the other rural and peri-urban, we find Lake Texcoco, which continues to manifest itself as a key actor that shapes the forms of territorialization and the different uses of space, whether as agricultural land, as international airport, or as ecological park. We propose to investigate the construction of the New Airport of Mexico City as part of the unresolved history of expansion onto the lake, and to argue that it is the soil—saline, unstable, and shifting due to its condition as a lakebed—that gives meaning to this hinterland.

Machetes Against Airplanes

In August 2002, after nine months of violent protests, the recently elected President of Mexico Vicente Fox had to put a premature end to his most ambitious infrastructure project: the creation of a new airport for Mexico City in the lakebed of Texcoco. Early in his presidency, Fox had issued a decree to expropriate 5376 hectares of land belonging to thirteen ejidos (communal lands that had been created after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to grant agricultural rights to communities of peasants). Among these, five were losing 80% or more of their surface to the national project: San Salvador Atenco, Santa Isabel Ixtapan, colonia Francisco Madero, Acuexcomac, and Tocuila. Leaders of these communities organized an ambitious response that escalated into a full-fledged conflict with the state and gained the attention of national and international audiences. These communities have an ancient history and consider themselves indigenous communities (personal communication with Trinidad Ramírez in February 2022). As they say, “we are native, and therefore, we have the right to this land” (quoted in Ortega Bayona 2005, 16).

Armed with machetes, the images of the people of San Salvador Atenco and other municipalities rose to the front pages of national newspapers. As one of the leaders of the resistance, Ignacio del Valle Medina, told the media: “Machetes are a working tool and a defense tool, they also tell Fox that he was wrong with the decree, that we are not going to surrender in the fight to preserve our lands” (quoted in Izarraraz et al. 2011, 53). The machetes swinging in the air, in a defiant gesture against airplanes, made visible the contradiction between urban and peri-urban realities whose fate had historically been intertwined but rarely coinhabited. On the one hand, there was the logic of the city, with its constant expansion and aperture toward the global economy. For the city, the area of Texcoco oscillated between a hinterland that defined the contours of the city’s future expansion and a wasteland yielding environmental and social ills. On the other hand, we find the logic of the ejidos, which vindicated their rights to the land resisting the expropriation attempt by the government.

At the time President Fox issued his expropriation order, land tenure in Mexico was undergoing an important transformation. As a result of structural shock policies in the 1980s and the establishment of international trade agreements, Mexico had launched an important (although partly concealed) reform of the land with the amendment of Article 27 of its constitution in 1992. Until then, the structure of agricultural land tenure in Mexico resulted from the post-revolutionary model of ejidos. The reform of Article 27 allowed ejidatarios (members of the ejidos) to fracture the communal property and acquire individual rights that could be sold to private actors. The fiduciary relation that the state had established with ejidos had allowed it to expropriate them easily in the past. Under this new structure of land property, however, the task was becoming more complicated as the state had to negotiate with each individual once the ejidos were dismantled.

National authorities had not anticipated the scale of the response to the expropriations in 2001 and 2002. A swift take-over was envisioned. In the eyes of the authorities, the area that was being expropriated was practically valueless: mostly contaminated lands that contained too much saltpeter to be cultivated and were too soft to be built upon. Fox publicly stated that the people of Atenco had “won the lottery” when they were offered to sell their land and relocate (Venegas 2001). The profits of this lottery were, however, miniscule: 26 pesos/m2 for irrigated land and 7 pesos/m2 for all the rest (the currency exchange at the time was 9 pesos/1 USD). Intellectuals and the national media highlighted that this land was being acquired for a different purpose than it was used for at the time, and that the strategy of the government had been one of great contempt for the members of these communities.

According to this master-narrative of the formation of Mexico City, the vast infrastructural projects of the 1910s—1930s dried up the lake basin. Such a process has been variously recounted as an engineering feat, a tale of modernization, a colonial heritage, and an environmental disaster. The “Texcoco Problem,” as it has been dubbed, is a multifaceted reality that highlights the tensions that arise between urban and rural perspectives on agricultural development and city expansion. Recently, Matthew Vitz has shown a long history of contradictory approaches to this land. Since the lake has been dried up it has been imagined as a real-estate opportunity, an ecological barrier for the city, a site for agrarian justice, and a stockhouse for an imagined autarchic city (Vitz 2012).

The protests that followed the attempt to expropriate the land of the thirteen municipalities reenacted the century old “Texcoco Problem.” Just as had happened in the past, through the creation of an airport, the city was envisioning a bright future for the region in which the people of the region had no say and were not allowed to take part. Armed with technical reports and excellent numbers, the governmental agents expected to easily overcome any resistance that they may have found. But it was the extreme contempt with which the expropriation order was launched that led to a substantial escalation of the revolt.

The Atenco movement was deeply marked by local context and its history dates back to the Zapatista movement of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. However, their struggle against the construction of the airport and in defense of their land can be read as a testimony of the recent changes in peasant politics and, in this sense, as part of a broader global phenomenon. The case of Atenco is reminiscent of other cases of resistance to airport construction—the Narita riots in Japan in the 1970s is one of the best known, but there are other examples such as the Notre Dame des Landes in France. In these insurrections we see the inhabitants of the non-urban and peri-urban hinterland turning against the current subsidiary role that cities imagine for them. As Neel has stated, nowadays these movements perform a resistance against becoming a wasteland for global production (2018, 17).

The Tezontle Land Reclamation

On 3 September 2014 an event entitled “Advances and Challenges of the National Plan of Infrastructure” took place. Among the audience were some of the most important public servants and businessmen in Mexico. In his speech, President Enrique Peña Nieto highlighted that the saturation of Mexico City’s airport had peaked in the past years. The population in the metropolitan area had increased and Mexico was increasingly projected onto the rest of the world, seeing itself as a global location and node. These factors were crucial to understanding an uptick in flight traffic that had brought to the limit the carrying capacity of the airport’s infrastructure. The President announced that he had settled for the same location—the Texcoco lakebed—as the 2001 project. Only this time, the government would not expropriate any land, but would build a more contained version of the airport in 4430 hectares of federal land (Peña Nieto 2014).

The winner of the international contest to design the airport was a team consisting of the British architect Norman Foster, the Mexican architect Fernando Romero, and the engineering firm Arup. After the announcement, Romero gave a brief speech. He lauded the figure of Foster, whom he described as “the best designer of airports in the world.” After enlisting the most important prizes that Foster had been awarded, he reminded the audience that he had designed the airport of Hong Kong on an artificial island that had been reclaimed from the sea (Romero 2014). After Romero, Foster took the stage and gave a general presentation on the project of the New Airport of Mexico City. He described his design as the result of an in-depth investigation in the conditions of the territory and the knowledge acquired in other projects such as the Hong Kong and Beijing airports. The shape and structure of Mexico City’s new airport would be previously unseen (Fig. 6.1). There would not be a conventional cover nor vertical walls or columns. It was to be, in his own words, “a sculpture that extents, that flies, a beautiful sculpture” (Foster 2014). However, there was something more important than architecture, Foster said: infrastructure. Without infrastructure cities and nations cannot exist, he went on. The quality of the streets, public spaces, bridges, means of transport are what define the quality of life and our identity. For this reason, he explained, investing in infrastructure “is what allows the formation of a society: it means betting on future generations” (Foster 2014). What Foster or his futuristic renderings did not say was that the new airport in Texcoco posed a territorial and environmental problem of enormous dimensions.

Fig. 6.1
A video still. It presents an aerial view of a design with several elements. They include an hour-glass shaped design with the bottom arch surrounding a circle with radiating spikes inside. The circle is further outlined by an inverted tear-drop shaped design traced with bright dots.

Rendering of Foster and Romero’s airport project. Screenshot from a promotional video produced by the Mexican government. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwsJnNd__1I

Full size image

After President Peña Nieto’s announcement, the communities in the area resumed their protest. Machetes were again brandished on the street. Although this time their lands were not expropriated, they claimed that certain lands had been acquired by the government in an irregular manner and that the project would directly harm them. Ignacio del Valle, the leader of the Front of Peoples in Defense of the Land of San Salvador Atenco, declared: “We repudiate this project of death that directly affects our lands” (Redacción 2014). The protests, however, were not as successful as in 2001–2002. Construction began on the New Mexico City Airport in September 2015, and with it started the production of a new kind of hinterland.

The ground began to be weeded and leveled. About 33 kilometers of perimeter fence were built. But the most significant work was to improve and consolidate the soil in order to start building the runways and platforms. Tons of tezontle, a reddish and porous volcanic stone, and basalt began to be transported on the muddy soil of what was the Lake of Texcoco. To compress the earth with enough weight to squeeze out the water, large pipes were installed on the ground, designed to function as giant straws through which the water could be expelled. Soil engineers devised a method to pump water out by laying alternative beds of tezontle and basalt. Basalt is heavier than tezontle, so the soil was compacted little by little and the water was slowly siphoned out. The idea was to create a firm ground so that, when the runways were built, they would not sink under the weight of the planes. More than 22 million cubic meters of tezontle and 14 million cubic meters of basalt were used to consolidate the soils. The material was extracted from the hills surrounding the land where the airport would be installed. This extraction generated cavities in the quarries of up to 100 meters in length.

Like Foster’s Chek Lap Kok airport, the New Mexico City Airport in Texcoco was a land reclamation project built on an artificial island. However, this time land was not being claimed from the sea, but from the lake. The millions of cubic meters of tezontle and basalt became an iteration of the old attempt to dry out and make Lake Texcoco productive. The aim was to solve the “Texcoco Problem”: to transform the hinterland into a new, fruitful, and profitable space, the architectural emblem of global Mexico. The problem was that this project of a global Mexico literally stood on muddy and unstable ground.

The transformation of the Texcoco hinterland into the space of global Mexico involved the creation of a new hinterland. The terminal and the tracks designed by Foster and his team could only exist thanks to the illegal exploitation of tezontle and basalt, the extraction of which generated devastation in the communities that surrounded the airport. The debris in the air had triggered asthma, constant bleeding, and other illnesses. The noise of the machinery and the cargo trucks never stopped causing psychological damage. Their houses had been damaged and were in danger of collapsing. In addition, there were the environmental effects of felling trees and collapsing hills (Carabaña 2019).

Different specialists also insisted on the impact that the new airport would have on the non-human world. Particularly, it was argued that due to its construction approximately 200,000 birds, of about 250 endemic and migratory species, would stop coming to Lake Texcoco because their habitat would be destroyed with the new infrastructure and the airplanes would drive them away. The construction of the runways, to give only one example, had destroyed nesting sites in temporary ponds for species such as avocets, monjitas, Mexican ducks and snowy plovers, with the latter being a globally threatened species (Escalante and Alcántara 2018).

Ecological Speculations

In October 2021, the Minister of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador government, tweeted a photograph with a short text: “When nature restores its place.” It was a photograph taken from an airplane which showed the construction site of the Texcoco Airport partly inundated (Fig. 6.2). It had rained and you could see a huge X of water tracing the silhouette of the terminal designed by Foster, in the middle of a field completely painted red by the tezontle. Large structures loomed out of the water, which Foster had named foniles (in reference to the word funnel). They were one of the central elements of his design and would serve to support the roof of the X-shaped terminal building, allowing for large openings, and helping ventilation, capturing rain and letting in natural light (Juárez 2018).

Fig. 6.2
A photo. It presents an aerial shot of an airport from the window of an airplane. It has an hour-glass shaped design with greenery around it.

Post on Twitter by Román Meyer Falcón, Minister of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development, 8 October 2021. Twitter.com

Full size image

Ever since Fox’s initial proposal in 2001, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) had spoken out against the airport in Texcoco (Larrosa Haro 2002). When he ran as a candidate for the 2018 presidential elections, the cancellation of the construction of the New Mexico City Airport became one of his main campaign promises. After winning the presidential elections in July 2018, AMLO, as president-elect, organized a popular consultation throughout the country to make a decision on the future of the airport. The plebiscite lasted four days, from 25 to 28 October. The referendum asked, given the saturation of the existing Mexico City airport, which option was best for the country: rebuilding the current Mexico City and Toluca airports and building runways at the Military Air Base Santa Lucía or continue construction in Texcoco and stop using the current airport. The first option won. And so, in the first days of 2019, just a month after he became president, AMLO officially canceled the construction of what would become the New Mexico City International Airport. As one of its first big actions, his government repurchased the project’s financial bonds and began negotiations to terminate existing contracts in advance.

Once the construction of the new airport in Texcoco was canceled, it was announced that an old idea would be taken up to remedy the air congestion (Ruíz Romero 2015, 270–271, 310–311): strengthen and modify airports that were relatively close to Mexico City and create a Metropolitan Airport System. The Santa Lucía Military Air Base, located in Zumpango (State of Mexico), 45 kilometers from the city, was expanded and modified to house a civil airport that was inaugurated in 2022. In addition, a third terminal would be built at the current Mexico City International Airport. Finally, the capacity of the Toluca airport (State of Mexico), some 40 kilometers from the city, would be increased.

Along with the cancellation came another significant announcement. The land where the construction of the New Airport designed by Foster and his team had been underway would be converted into an urban park: the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park. This project, which uses more than 4000 hectares where the airport was going to be built and adds another 8000, has as its main objective to carry out an ecological restoration of the area and generate spaces for public use. Directed by the architect Iñaki Echeverría, and officially described as an “act of historical justice,” it has three axes. The first is environmental protection and entails creating a legal figure that protects the place as an ecological restoration zone, as well as installing refuge areas for aquatic species. The second is the organization of various public activities and events (races, cycling, picnics, kites, open-air cinema, shows) in the fenced-in area where the airport was being built. The third is the creation of spaces for permanent use, including biocultural reserve areas, nurseries, an educational pavilion, bodies of water, and a sports park (Jiménez and Echeverría 2020).

Could canceling the construction of the new airport and creating in its place an urban park, a conservation and recreational space, solve the Texcoco problem? Some claimed that it did not, and the members of the Front of Peoples in Defense of the Land of San Salvador Atenco, the coordinator of the towns #YoPrefieroElLago (“We prefer the lake”) and various activists and academics launched the #ManosALaCuenca (“Hands on the basin”) campaign. With regard to the canceling of the construction of the airport in Texcoco, they pointed out that it did not guarantee that the area would be ecologically and bio-culturally preserved, that they had not been acknowledged during the decision-making process, and that the park concealed the beginning of a process of urbanization and speculation in one of the few places still undeveloped in the area (Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra de San Salvador Atenco y Coordinadora de Pueblos #YoPrefieroElLago 2020a). They asked to be taken into account, to share their knowledge of the site, and to take advantage of past failures in order to avoid future disasters.

The movement insisted that if the government wanted to transform the area, it did not need an airport or a park, but a lake. They demanded that federal land be returned to the towns affected by the airport and that all mining, urban and dewatering projects should be canceled. Their proposal was to create a Community-managed Protected Natural Area. One of their communications read:

[…] the new government has an opportunity emanating from its popular mandate. We ask them: are they going to repeat the same model of the previous administrations? Are they going to ignore those who have defended this place? And especially: what is more important to them, life or money and speculation? (Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra de San Salvador Atenco y Coordinadora de Pueblos #YoPrefieroElLago 2020b)

The members of #ManosALaCuenca pointed out the old problem: an urban project was being generated with the aim of transforming the hinterland into a productive space, this time through an environmental and recreational project, but once again without consulting the inhabitants of the place. They also insisted that building facilities for sports activities and, in general terms human presence, would affect the bird inhabitants of Lake Texcoco. They pointed out the imminent danger of real estate speculation that the well-intentioned urban ecological park could bring. Such speculation was putting them at risk to be displaced into a new hinterland—this time beyond the illegal tezontle mines, somewhere where they would not be seen.

In March 2022, the area was declared a natural protected area in the near future. Some ejidatarios protested against agricultural lands becoming part of the conservation area. As we write this text, the Lago de Texcoco Ecological Park is still under construction. It is not yet known if the project will undergo significant changes and, much less, what consequences it will bring. However, as the communities that inhabit the Lake Texcoco area who have been in resistance for more than a century stated: the dispute is between life and speculation.

Conclusions

One of the ways of interpreting the story told in this chapter has been a defining one for urban geography studies: the idea that the accumulation of wealth in cities generates dispossession on their margins. As cities grow, this dispossession is being transferred to new frontiers. If capitalist relations of production are not changed, the hinterland will be irretrievably displaced as an original sin that cannot be erased. This argument, which we can trace back to Friedrich Engels’s book The Housing Question (1872), has been interpreted as a kind of natural law of urban development (Harvey 1972). The problem with this urban planning law is that, like the acts of the real estate speculators, it makes invisible the demands of the expropriated who inhabit the hinterland.

If we stop to think about it, throughout the long history that begins with the drying up of Lake Texcoco, the demands of the peasants have always been the same: to care for and cultivate their lands, in a way that depends on themselves without having an exterior value assigned to their way of life by others. In the different episodes that we have recounted, the state, investors, developers, and environmentalists have tried to convince these communities that this use is not viable. But the experience and affection they have for their lands tell them that it is. The problem of successive governments has been to deny those who inhabit the hinterland the right to make decisions about their own lands.

In the process of expansion of the hinterland, the reclaimed land resists rapid appropriation by economic interests. Today, Lake Texcoco continues to be a territory laden with saltpeter, unstable and watery, in which the arguments of the city and the countryside come into conflict without finding a simple resolution. A genuine interstitial space, the lake and the surrounding lands resist univocal forms of appropriation. The only thing that is clear is that this complex territory, with its unique material conditions, has generated over time intimate forms of communality and attachment by the people who inhabit it.