Carolina Iglesias Otero

Grant Type

Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

Institutional Affiliation

Chicago, U. of

Grant number

Gr. 10688

Approve Date

April 15, 2024

Project Title

Iglesias Otero, Carolina (Chicago, U. of) "Attend the Rain: Risk, Negative Value, and the Structuring of Industrial Time in Mexico's Oil Belt"

Based on thirteen months of fieldwork in worksites, neighborhoods, union offices, and labor tribunals in Ciudad del Carmen and Villahermosa — the two cities at the center of Mexico’s offshore oil operations since the 1980s — this project examines the contradictions layered into Mexican southeastern oil towns through three decades of financialization, outsourcing, and the gradual erosion of stable employment. A job in Pemex, Mexico’s oil company, nationalized in 1938, once stood at the center of Mexico’s postrevolutionary project of a dignified working class: family life in an oil town entailed access to education and public space, moderate control over the labor process, unionization, and a form of citizenship mediated by the state. These social relations were remade in cities like Ciudad del Carmen, shaped by a second wave of oil industrialization oriented toward offshore extraction, oil exports, and a company increasingly financed through debt at every scale. This project argues that the port city of Ciudad del Carmen offers us a picture of the sunset of that second era: an industry that is neither privatized nor entirely public, suspended between the dream-image of the national oil worker and the reality of chronic precarity, subcontracting, and economies of obligation.