Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the unfinished infrastructure projects in a Mexican tourist town, and the possibilities this presents to a mixture of translocal communities, this paper looks at the everyday entanglement of personal transformations with social and economic transformations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the way people's everyday lives are pushed and pulled by infrastructure. I look at a tourist town in Oaxaca, Mexico, where tourism has been synonymous with progress, and where a new super highway promising to link the town to the capital has been half finished and delayed for years. The town is marked by half-finished developmentbe it roads, a faltering electricity grid, or hotelsthat together give the impression of a ruined town that never was. It is also marked by translocal communities: expat retirees, seasonal visitors, or locals with strong family connections to other parts of the country and/or the USA. Amongst these communities there are those that seek greater connection to the outside world, and others that see tourism as killing the very thing that made the place desirable in the first place. Either way everyone attempts to make a life out of these ruins.

Meanwhile, as the major highway work flounders, newer infrastructures such as the internet and budget airlines make it possible for the tourist crowds to bypass not only the road system, but also the local economy. By focusing on the everyday interactions and stories of those that live in or visit the town, I explore the way ideas of personal transformation become entangled with the economic and social transformations of the town itself. I hope to show how these entanglements reveal conflicting ideas of freedom and practices of subjectivity, enabled or disrupted by imposing—yet ever incomplete—infrastructures.