Reclaiming the (Hinter)land: Lake Texcoco and the Airport That Never Was

The colonial history of the term “hinterland” speaks of a practice of territorial control allowing colonial powers to claim sovereignty of the region behind a port. In this chapter, we consider the violent history of a construction of a new airport for Mexico City in Texcoco’s Lake as the active production of a hinterland through land reclamation. Although mostly drained in 1900 by what was then the most important engineering works worldwide, Lake Texcoco continues to manifest itself as a key actor that shapes the forms of territorialization and different uses of space, whether as agricultural land, as international airport, or as ecological park. The soil—saline, unstable, and shifting—gives meaning to the multiple conflicts surrounding the failed attempts to construct the new airport.