Geographies of Subsumption in Mexico City’s Rainwater Market - Katie Meehan

Abstract

Why are some markets of nature not easily scaled or developed? Why do some kinds of work—even when waged, even when driven by the state toward market logic—resist absorption and organization by capital? Since 2019, in Mexico City, a new rainwater ‘market’ of products and services has emerged in tandem with the city’s first major program to install rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems in nearly 100,000 households and schools without piped water access or reliable service.

Drawing on ethnographic research, I reveal contradictions that arise when harvesting labor is metabolized into products and services—what Alyssa Battistoni (2025: 168) describes as “the class of process that resist real subsumption.” I show that subsumption is complicated by, first, the volatile geographies of rain—those “aguaceros locos” [crazy downpours] and other social and physical qualities that, exacerbated by climate change, make rain difficult to (re)organize, automate, and scale into an industrial and centralized model of water production. Second, I show that firms developed a business model which subsumed select aspects of rainwater production, all of which could be manufactured off-site by wage labor, while socializing the costs of harvesting labor onto households. Third, I spotlight the central role of the capitalist state in actively shaping the geographies of subsumption, both as a subsidy to attract firms and through its government program that pushed the core work of producing water to households.

In contrast to mainstream views that promote RWH as a ‘solution’ to environmental crises, I argue that rainwater harvesting is better understood as one of capitalism’s ‘remainders’—infrastructural labor that is left over once capital, and the capitalist state, has absorbed and reorganized the activities it can make productive. I conclude that it is here, at the messy limits of subsumption and abdication, that geographers can gain sharper clarity of the narrow logics at work in how capital organizes the world toward inequality and planetary devastation.

This talk will be moderated by Scott Prudham (Professor, Department of Geography and Planning, and School of the Environment, University of Toronto).

This event is organized by the and

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