Ecatepec and its disappeared (water) bodies: Territory of hope and sacrifice

Abstract

In this article I show how the municipality of Ecatepec de Morelos, in the northeast of the Valley of Mexico, has been historically produced as a territory in sacrifice; this from a documentary review of its territorial reconfigurations, as well as ethnographic walks conducted between 2018 and 2024 in the vicinity of its open-pit drainage infrastructure and neighboring neighborhoods. I show how, unlike other territories in Latin America that have been studied, we are not facing the production of a territory in sacrifice based on an extractive project, but by a project of discardability initiated in the colonial times and that, nevertheless, is functional to contemporary capital accumulation. This project can also be understood as a project of disappearance, which involves from the bodies of water that inhabited the basin even a few decades ago and that were drained thanks to the drainage infrastructure, to the bodies of young women and girls that inhabit this periphery today. I argue that in the bodies of these people who seek, are sought and those who are found lifeless in the canals, is inscribed and sedimented the history of dispossession and multiple violence, through which this periphery of the city has been built. Finally, I propose that, from the experience of the popular sectors that inhabit this territory of sacrifice, paradoxically, it has also been and/or can be understood as a territory of hope.