Jorge Alejandro Rodriguez Solorzano

This dissertation examines how Indigenous sovereignty is negotiated under conditions of state abandonment, infrastructural investment and failure, and shifting regimes of recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, Mexico, the research analyzes how Indigenous communities participated in a popular community-managed, rural road paving program. It traces how Mexico’s indigenista bureaucracy sought to make Indigenous governance into an object of state definition, and how Indigenous authorities worked within new funding structures and legal frameworks to secure resources, manage road projects, and negotiate local autonomy. While Indigenous bureaucrats saw road projects as engines of regional economic development and “autonomy,” this model of development redistributed administrative responsibility and infrastructural failure onto Indigenous actors. The dissertation further examines legislative activism surrounding Mexico’s 2024 constitutional reform to Article 2, which named this model of infrastructural development a right. In doing so, it highlights the gap between state discourses of constitutional recognition and the reach of state law and authority in remote regions of Mexico. Through research in these field sites, this dissertation shows how contemporary claims to Indigenous sovereignty are shaped through ongoing engagement with the Mexican state, producing tensions between infrastructural development and aspirations for self-determination and local governance.