Revolutionizing Rural Mobility: Technology, Engineers, and Modernity in Mexico, 1925–40

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), Mexican engineers deployed new rural technologies and nationalist ideologies to build the state and construct modern imaginaries of mobility. A new technocrat class, many influenced by the nationalist pedagogy of the National School of Engineers at the National University of Mexico in Mexico City, rose to prominence in the postrevolutionary period. These “técnicos” shaped new federal public works bureaucracies, enshrining road and water infrastructures as paragons of rural progress and national sovereignty. Ensuing rural modernization projects in the 1920s and 1930s, while relatively modest, revealed nation-building processes that sought to dominate rural environments and peoples in order to promote self-sufficiency and glorify the state. This was particularly the case in Mexico’s western and central regions. This paper explores the domestic and hemispheric politics that informed técnicos’ professionalization and practices, and how these factors helped shape the policies of the Secretariat of Communications and Public Works. It analyzes how a largely urban engineer corps wielded rural technology as tools of propaganda and pacification. Moreover, this paper explores how Depression-era agrarian reform and Mexican Repatriation in the United States intrinsically linked Mexican modernity to the mobilization of rural natural resources and peoples. The resulting planning and hierarchies of Mexico’s road and water networks provide insight into técnicos’ incipient globalized visions of rural modernity and spatial/upward mobility in the years before World War II, key factors in the expansion of rural migration to the United States after 1940.