My paper, framed by the beginning of World War II and the end of the guest worker Bracero Program in 1964, examines the growth of binational transportation and hydraulic networks, industrial agriculture, and rural Mexican outmigration. This study of technocrats and campesinos, industrialized landscapes and bodies, and human movement and hubris analyzes the intersections of the infrastructures, policies, and imaginaries of mobility that entrenched a culture of migration in western Mexico. An official, zealous commitment to postwar public works expansion transformed Mexican realities and notions of spatial and upward mobility as well as perceptions of space, time, and belonging. By imposing statist, modernist visions of order and progress through domestic civil engineering and US-backed agricultural regimes Mexican elites and técnicos helped aggravate land loss, joblessness, debt, and inequality in the Mexican countryside. These policies intensified rural migrant flows and altered migrant trajectories to the United States via rapidly expanding binational highway and transportation networks, informing dehumanizing and criminalizing binational discourses of transnational Mexican migrancy. These narratives, in turn, shaped notions of illegality and race which ultimately restricted Mexican migrant mobility and denied migrants substantive citizenship rights in both polities.
