"Sovereign and Deadly Energy Transition: Communal Life against Extractivism in Mexico"

The Morelos Integral Project (PIM) is a megaproject, part of Mexico’s ‘sovereign energy transition,’ but detractors have called it a ‘Death Project’ for endangering individual and collective lives in Central Mexico. Peasant and indigenous communities fighting the project have linked its construction to human rights violations such as harassment, multiple incarcerations, and two assassinations. Opponents have also embarked on legal processes against PIM, centering Mexico’s ratification of Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (DOF 1991) of the International Labour Organization. Under the

discursive and material proximity of this energy project to death, my research asks: how does a ‘sovereign energy transition’ can threaten (communal) survival?
To answer this question, I investigate: 1) the knowledge production surrounding PIM and what ideas about the region they (re)produce, what futures they enable and which ones they prevent; 2) indigenous consultation to understand the community processes involved; and 3) the regional infrastructural complex PIM engages with.

This research proposal draws from and expands two bodies of literature: 1) a feminist perspective to social reproduction and violence to engage with the relationship between energy infrastructure as ‘Projects of Death’ and the quotidian practices that sustain life and allow for its reproduction; and 2) an anti-extractivism lens on energy transition studies to shed light on the process of value production through extractivism in projects that situated climate change and energy at their core.