Performative infrastructures: Populism and the material politics of militarization in contemporary Mexico

Abstract

Upon taking office in December 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) began financing large-scale infrastructural projects across the country, including the Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA), to be built and managed by the Mexican Armed Forces. Over 2 years into its 2022 inauguration, the AIFA has negligible air traffic but an enormous presence in the public sphere. Drawing on literature on populism and the politics of infrastructure, this article explores how the airport’s main role lies less in its logistical operations than in redrawing the relationship between the Mexican Army and “the people.” Through ethnographic and media analysis of the airport’s abundant propaganda—particularly a feature-length documentary—we analyze how this infrastructure serves as a site for ideological work by and for the Army. We argue that, by helping to normalize militarization as they advance it by their construction and operation, infrastructures may possess the performative power to rewrite the boundaries between civilian and military life. By mobilizing the tools of advertisement and propaganda, infrastructures may showcase processes like Mexico’s militarization in sanitized and partial ways. This article thus situates infrastructures not as the product of a political order, but rather as capable of bringing a new such order into existence.