At this lecture, Diana J. Montaño (Assistant Professor of History, Washington University in St. Louis) discussed the "technological pilgrims" who crafted Mexico’s hydropower imaginary.

Beginning in 1905, reporters, writers, and artists — primarily from the United States and northern Europe – made pilgrimages to the hydroelectric Necaxa complex in southern Mexico. Developments in hydraulic engineering had made the vision of an electric-powered industrial future for Mexico no longer only desirable but possible. Water technicians who had fanned out across the globe with ideas, methods, and tools to remake the world and put natural resources in circulation set out to redesign rivers to power an electrified Mexico. Necaxa was no small, remote project. It was an undertaking whose numerous innovations commanded the world’s attention, and foreign writers used this interest to recast European and North American ambitions. Through traveler’s accounts, articles in trade magazines, fictional stories, and visual art, these “technological pilgrims” linked a Mexican hydroelectric sociotechnical imaginary, one that reserved a central place for Necaxa, to a global hydropower imaginary. With foreign engineers as leading characters, their romanticized narratives rhetorically naturalized the redesign of rivers and the relations of power that made that possible.

This lecture is presented as part of the Fossil Capitalism in the Global South research project at the Neubauer Collegium.