Carolina Iglesias Otero

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.