Contribution short abstract:

I propose to bring a propaganda poster featuring a mallard duck with a red bandanna, from a campaign against the construction of an airport in Mexico City on the partially-drained Lake Texcoco. The mallards acted as a repository of “nature’s memory,” and human archives were constructed around them.

Contribution long abstract:

I propose to bring a propaganda poster featuring a mallard duck with a red bandanna, which was part of a grassroots campaign to halt the construction of a new international airport for Mexico City on the site of the partially-drained Lake Texcoco. Activists argued that the presence of a large community of migratory birds indicated the unsuitability of the site, both because of the danger of birdstrikes and because their presence—despite centuries of infrastructure projects aimed at draining the lake and developing the land under it—indicated the inescapable “natural vocation” of the lakebed and its potential for regeneration. Multiple human archives—scientific studies to identify the birds and their migratory patterns, historical archives dating back to the Conquest about the ecosystem of the lake, and popular memory regarding duck hunting—were all deployed in fierce debates about the airport project’s fate. But beyond these, the mallards themselves came to be viewed as a repository of “nature’s memory,” evidence that Texcoco will and should remain a lake, despite human pretensions. The addition of the bandana also depicted them as a repository of more than human alliances in social struggle, as it alluded to earlier conflicts over development projects in the same wetland territories. I propose to think through the complexity of the mallard here as archive, as symbol, and as actant.