Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo

PABLO AGUILERA DEL CASTILLO, then a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Subterranean Expertise: Emergent Performances of Spatial Sovereignty in the Construction of Political Autonomy in Yucatan, Mexico,” supervised by Dr. Nikhil Anand. Over the last few years, a large number of reports have shown a rapidly growing global water crisis. After analyzing nearly 1,700 aquifers across more than 40 countries, a Nature article notes that scientists have observed that global groundwater levels in half of these studied aquifers have fallen dramatically since 2000. This project investigates this growing water crisis by focusing on the largest aquifer in Mexico, studying the forms of politics that emerge through scientific and legal study of the thousands of sinkholes, geological fractures, cave systems, and underground rivers that comprise the subterranean world of the Yucatec Kart Aquifer System. It traces the specific scientific and legal practices through which aquifer environmentalism makes territorial and social differences legible to the Mexican State. Framed by common concerns about this water crisis, this research project complicates traditional accounts of the depletion and pollution of all aquifers by showing how different forms of scientific and legal expertise on aquifers can lead to drastically different kinds of political claims in Mexico. It illustrates how subterranean experts work with local communities to construct new understandings of the territory and its vulnerabilities to different kinds of erosion, pollution, and degradation. Overall, the ethnographic accounts I offer in my dissertation compel us to consider seriously the capacity of technoscientific expertise to reconfigure territoriality.