Paving the Way to an Emigrant Republic: Roads, Agriculture, and Nation Building in Mexico, 1940-1964

• In Event: Contesting Transnational Migrant Mobilities: Resettling Deportees, Building Roads, and Constructing Race in Mexico

Abstract

This paper examines Mexico’s post-revolutionary nation-building project from 1940 to 1964, specifically its road building and agricultural industrialization programs. Using west-central Mexico as a case study, it details how infrastructure modernization policies implemented by federal, state, and local governments exacerbated rural Mexican migration to the United States. The development of Mexico’s interstate and local road networks during this period pursued three objectives: the transformation of communication and mobility; the expansion and integration of local, regional, and national commerce; and the increased inclusion of rural populations in the cultural, political, and socio-economic life of Mexico. Mexican road policy, however, facilitated the exclusion of millions from the polity, economy, and society through mass emigration. I intend to explore the dual role of Mexico’s post-revolutionary highway and road programs as both nation-builders and nation-dividers.
This paper argues that the Mexican government’s commitment to economic modernization through road expansion and agricultural industrialization in the Mexican countryside, coupled with its legacy of conflict with west-central agrarian populations, compelled the state to neglect its road policies’ undesired socio-economic, demographic, and political outcomes. Successive Mexican administrations’ road building policies entrenched a U.S.-sponsored agricultural regime in west-central Mexico, which, in concert with the establishment of Mexican guest worker programs in the United States, resulted in the mass mobilization and emigration of rural Mexicans. These processes intrinsically altered rural Mexican social landscapes and migrant trajectories, paving the way for the sustained outflow of rural Mexican labor and the ultimate failure of the state to consummate its post-revolutionary nation-building project.

Author

• Mateo J Carrillo, Stanford University