Transmuted Grounds: "Rough Topographies" and the Afterlives of Oil Extraction in Mexico's Gulf Coast

In 1917, petroleum geologist Edwin B. Hopkins described the lowlands of northern Veracruz as a
“rough topography,” dismissing the region as geologically unpromising. Two decades later, the
same terrain became home to Poza Rica—one of Mexico’s most celebrated oil fields and a pillar
of postrevolutionary national development. Taking Hopkins’s misreading as a point of departure,
this talk revisits the geological archive to examine how ways of seeing the underground shaped
extractive regimes and the social worlds built upon them.

Building on scholarship on subterranean politics and recent calls to rethink geology’s epistemic
grammar, I repurpose the stratigraphic imagination as method. Rather than deploying geology’s
vertical gaze to identify value, I mobilize it to trace how petro-violence has sedimented into the
region’s social and ecological fabric. Hopkins’s “roughness” thus names not only geological
irregularity but the harsh lifeworlds forged through extraction and exhaustion.

Drawing on geological reports, investors’ memoirs, press accounts, and ethnographic fieldwork
in Poza Rica and surrounding communities, I trace a century of violent transmutations: from the
objectification of racialized labor, to environmental degradation and industrial decline, and, more
recently, to a forensic crisis unfolding in the wake of Mexico’s latest War on Drugs. Today,
abandoned wells and industrial ruins—remnants of an exhausted oil frontier—have become
entangled in practices of disappearance and collective search. By descending into both archive
and ground, this talk reframes extractivism in northern Veracruz not as a closed chapter but as an
ongoing process whose afterlives continue to organize violence and shape contemporary
practices of memory, grief, and protest.