During the rainy season, the homes and streets of the poor across Mexico City’s urban periphery are routinely flooded with sewage-laced waters that refuse to drain for hours on end. On the surface, these floods seem to represent the failure of the urban drainage system. But drainage engineers in Mexico City offer a different, more provocative explanation: the homes and streets of the poor are, in fact, increasingly integral parts of a drainage system that has long since lost the capacity to function otherwise. By temporarily turning these peripheral neighborhoods into de facto detention basins, engineers reduce the inflow into the drainage system, allowing them to protect the lives and property of the powerful in the city center. This paper traces how engineers reluctantly came to this practice of temporarily “conscripting” the streets and homes of the poor into the drainage system as the pressures of capitalist urbanization have both systematically undermined detention basins and increased runoff into the system. It examines how this infrastructural conscription enables continued capital accumulation in the city by dispossessing residents of their security – their ability to feel (and be) safe in their own homes. This engineered dispossession is far less tangible, and the actors involved far more ambiguous, than the outright seizure of land, leaving residents with few options for demanding reparations.
