Academic Research

Thesis defended @ Harvard Graduate School of Design 

2022

Advisor Alex Wall

What is the huachiol-scape?

With more than 60% of the population actively participating in the informal economy, in Mexico, what is known as "informality" has become the most accessible mechanism for providing livelihood, income, and service development, especially for disenfranchised populations. 

Fuel theft, known in Mexico as Huachicol (pronounced "watchy-coh-l"), has exponentially increased since the introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. In 2018, the illicit market of stolen gasoline represented a loss of 3 billion dollars to the Mexican state-run oil company. 

This project deploys a three-part critical framework to navigate the multiple identities, landscapes, and architectures of the phenomenon of stolen gasoline, Huachicol. 

It aims to document and describe the unique spatial, socioeconomic, political, and environmental structures that enable an informal gasoline supply chain in central Mexico. 

Rather than seeking a singular or essential understanding of the subject of study, Huachicol, by using this three-part framework, it is possible to discover more edifying to study gasoline theft in relation to other disciplinary and professional fields, for example, politics, economics, architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. 

The three critical frames were built from an opportunistic deployment of clusters of GSD courses and fieldwork supported by the MCI summer fellowship. Each frame is defined by a question: ( 1 ) Is the system of petroleum theft a political-economic strategy? reveals how politically motivated leaders have used the opacity below the shadow of the state to enable and give access to an underground economy —structured parallel to the formal economy— where the citizen accepts subordination to the political will in exchange for privileges and impunity, ( 2 ) Are the diverse spatial strategies and outcomes of Huachicol a form of urbanization? Analyzes and describes the role of space as an agent that has shaped the environments that petroleum and gasoline have made possible, and ( 3 ) Are the social-economic relationships a form of ecology? Investigates extractive environmental and economic systems and public and private impunity to expose the layers of invisible and systemic violence that lay in the foundations of Mexican society.

The goal/method is to use traditional architectural representation tools (diagrams, plans, sections, elevations) to reveal ( 1 ) the symbiosis between informality, the state, and private corporations, ( 2 ) how these materialize into the built environment, and ( 3 ) how ecologically entangled and embedded in the regional landscape. 

Original maps, charts, diagrams, and drawings also support this project. The carefully drafted site plans, buildings, and polluted ground—and air—culminate in architectural plans and sections that illustrate the process and reveal the social and environmental consequences of Huachicol. This research project displays how complex political-economic, historico-spatial, and socio-environmental processes are grounded in a rough, everyday, and—apparently— inconsequential landscape.