As numerous scholars and theorists have observed, the energopolitics of the twentieth century were dominated by the logics of fossil fuel extraction, processing, distribution and use. These logics constituted a number of distinctive landscapes ranging from dystopian wastelands of resource harvesting (e.g., the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and the Appalachian strip mines) to translocal energy supply systems (e.g., pipelines, high voltage grids, highways and ports) that allowed states to locate energy production centres away from dense human settlements. This pattern of urban centre and ‘energy hinterland’ has served the purpose of reducing direct energy externalities like diminished air quality from coal-fired thermoelectric facilities. But it has also rendered dense energy infrastructure invisible to urban populations. The functional divorce of energy production from the lived experience of the middle- and upper-classes of the global North helped reinforce the strategy of the fossil fuel industry (and their allied petrostates) to encourage an attitude of ‘energy without conscience’, as David Hughes has put it, meaning the belief that the intensification of energy production and consumption could proceed, in theory, infinitely with only minimal negative impacts.

One cannot overstate the bifurcation of urbanism and energy production in the twentieth-century model. Some cities, like Houston where I live, incorporate elaborate energy landscapes within city limits whose production facilities directly neighbour fenceline communities. Unsurprisingly, given the racial and class geographies of the United States, these communities tend to be historically disadvantaged communities of colour that rarely have the resources of finance and expertise to hold nearby oil, gas and petrochemical facilities accountable for toxic exposures. These communities are routinely described by environmental justice activists and advocates as ‘sacrifice zones’ due to the fact that they bear an undemocratic burden of toxicity in order for the rest of the city to enjoy the prosperity of energy wealth and an abundance of inexpensive energy resources.

Among advocates for renewable energy transition, it is generally hoped that the decarbonisation of the global economy will lead to a reformation of the extractivist and dislocated logics of fossil fuels. Such a reformation would likely have a significant impact on urban landscapes. As Hermann Scheer has argued, solar energy forms are optimised for short-supply-chain, hyperlocal use. If every building in the US incorporated rooftop photovoltaics, for example, that would supply 40 percent of the country’s current electricity needs. Such a commitment to distributed energy generation would dramatically reduce the need for centralised energy production and translocal distribution networks like high voltage transmission lines and natural gas pipelines. Imagine, in other words, urban centres with far fewer high voltage lines and fenced off substation complexes and fewer port facilities oriented to the needs of fuel imports and exports. And, if distributed generation were combined with other interventions like electrifying the private automobile fleet, a cityscape without gas stations and petrol pumps would emerge. Even better, a radical shift toward electrified public transportation would steal the urban landscape away from the hegemony of automobility and allow new modes of urban pedestrianism to flourish.

Unfortunately, however, when it comes to the occupation and exploitation of energy landscapes, trends in renewable energy transition have shown that large-scale renewable energy installations (wind parks, hydroelectric dams, concentrated solar farms) often repeat the habits of the twentieth century. As a case in point, I will discuss what happened to a small town in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec when, in the space of only a few years, it came to be surrounded by wind parks.

The Aeolian Politics of Southern Mexico

Facing the twilight of its petrostate, Mexico established, during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006–12), some of the most far-reaching and comprehensive climate legislation in the world. This legislation included setting legally binding targets for renewable energy sources to provide 35 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2024. With over half that electricity projected to come from wind power, state and transnational investor attention turned toward the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec, home to some of the best onshore wind resources anywhere in the world. There, a narrow gap in the Sierra Madre mountains, combined with the barometric pressure differential between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, creates a natural wind tunnel that flirts with tropical storm force winds in the winter months. The first wind parks were proof of concept prototypes deve loped by Mexico’s parastatal electricity utility, CFE. Their extraordinary plant capacity of 51 percent – the measurement of actual electricity production relative to potential energy production – was enough to convince a number of transnational developers (mostly Spanish and US-based) to begin investing in the region, facilitated by the mediation of the Oaxacan state government. The pace of development was rapid. In 2008 there were still only the two CFE parks with a combined capacity of 84.9 MW; only four years later there were 15 parks producing over 1300 MW, a 1,467 percent increase that made Mexico the second largest wind power producer in Latin America after Brazil. Today, there is 2.749 GW of installed wind power capacity in the Isthmus in an area only roughly 450 square kilometres.

Yet wind development has plateaued in recent years in the Isthmus largely because of local political resistance. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the rapid transformation of what was hitherto a predominantly agricultural, ranching and fishing region into a dense industrialised landscape of wind parks did not please everyone. Those in favour wind power talk of global climatological good and local economic development. Those opposed to wind parks make accusations of economic imperialism by foreign capitalists coming, once again, to colonise the region with their extractive methods. Local landowners who receive usufruct rents as well as caciques (local political bosses) and party politicians (who are often accused of taking bribes or embezzling funds) are viewed with ambivalence and suspicion by non-elites. Questions about Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and campesino (farmers) rights also loom large. That much of the wind park development has taken place near the binnizá (Zapotec) city of Juchitán also complicated matters. Juchitán has a centuries-long tradition of fierce Indigenous resistance to federal and state authorities; it also existed in a communal property regime until leadership of its comuna was removed through political violence in the 1970s. This history has made the validity of recent privatised land contracts the source of much contention. The town of La Ventosa is, administratively speaking, a municipal dependency of Juchitán and it came to be encircled by wind parks in the aggressive first phase of wind development (from 2009–13). It now has the luxury of invisible energy, even if wind turbines occupy the horizon from nearly every position and perspective in the settlement.

The Place Where the Wind is Born

La Ventosa is situated in the central wind corridor in the Isthmus. Its Indigenous name is Guidxhi Ra Riale Bii, or ‘the place where the wind is born’. The last federal census listed the settlement’s population as 4,200 but our La Ventosan friends have told us the real population is now closer to 6,000 or even 7,000. Many older La Ventosans are monolingual diidxazá (Zapotec) speakers, but the youngest generation is bilingual, verging on monolingual Spanish. La Ventosa sits at a fork where the highway to Matias Romero branches off the carretera panamerica. Further down the highway to the east are the two CFE wind parks, La Venta I and La Venta II. The highway between La Ventosa and these parks is famous for the fiercest winds in the Isthmus, with gusts reaching above 110km per hour that can effortlessly topple massive semi-trailer trucks. For the reason of its exceptional wind resources, La Ventosa became the epicentre of the dominant model of wind development in the area, privately financed by autoabastecimiento (industrial self-supply) projects. In these projects a large industrial or commercial entity, like Walmart or Cemex, contracts with a foreign developer to build a wind park with CFE acting as a broker for the arrangement. Developers can receive as much as a 10 percent return on their investment, while the companies gain the opportunity to lock in low, long-term electricity rates and green their energy supply. At the same time, CFE usually pressures the developers to help build transmission infrastructure, and the dueños de la tierra (landowners) receive rental payments for the use of their land. Although always championed as a ‘win-win-win’ development scenario by the Mexican government and industry, the arrangement feels less favourable to many La Ventosans since the vast majority do not own land and thus do not qualify to receive land rents despite the fact that they now must adapt to a town that is fully encircled by wind turbines. As one La Ventosan explained, ‘Most of the people who benefit from these parks can live somewhere else. We’re the ones who have to live in the middle of all the turbines.’

La Ventosans routinely describe their settlement as a humble one that has had few opportunities for prosperity. The town was settled by a few ranching families in the 1840s and gradually came under the political sway of Juchitán in the late nineteenth century. Highways, running water and a sewage system only arrived in La Ventosa in the mid-twentieth century under the caudillismo of famed local General Helidoro Charis, the powerbroker of Juchitán. Even then, beyond ranching and farming, economic opportunities were limited. The new highways allowed the possibility of migrant labour to the sugarcane fields of Veracruz or to pick cotton in Chiapas. In the 1970s, the redistribution of national oil wealth brought new federal irrigation projects to the region and a sugar refinery in nearby El Espinal. Suddenly, wealth flowed through La Ventosa for the first time. ‘Think about this. There were 33 cantinas in those days for a town of maybe two thousand people’, recalled one resident, ‘and so every weekend the town was filled with drunks’. During this period, the traditional adobe and palapa houses rapidly disappeared and were replaced by cinderblock and concrete structures.ut the irrigation boom was short-lived. Rice cultivation did not fare well and ceased. The sugarcane was hit by a major rot that wiped out nearly all the local fields. ‘In the 1990s, people went back to ranching again, and from that cheese-making, there was nothing else for them,’ the town historian told us. Fierce winds made it challenging to grow a marketable crop other than sorghum. Like many other pueblos in the Isthmus, La Ventosa experienced short periods of tantalising prosperity interrupted by long periods of struggle for subsistence.

Aqui se falta mucho

The coming of the wind parks – largely orchestrated by the town’s cacique and evangelical leader, Don Porfirio Montero Fuentes – appeared to promise a more lasting kind of prosperity. During our fieldwork in the Isthmus in 2012–13, we spoke to several La Ventosan landowners and all but one declared the development a success. Don José Luis Montaño, for example, described the wind parks as a ‘blessing’. He appreciated that one wind developer, Iberdrola, had worked together with the town government to fund the paving of La Ventosa’s streets, an obra (public work) that was still underway during our time in the Isthmus. ‘You can imagine how the streets were before with the dust and the wind,’ he commented. Still, even Don Montaño felt the companies could be doing more. He wanted to see a local health clinic built so that La Ventosans would not have to travel 20km to Juchitán for basic health care.

Cain Lopez Toledo was the most critical voice we heard among the landholders. He told us bluntly that he felt life was better before, when people worked together in the campo (countryside). ‘So much money divides people, and it’s divided our people.’ He recognises that the rents only go to people like him who have land. Others may get a little out of the construction phase or as trickle-down into their business, but he feels that the amount is negligible. And the easy money from the rents has made the landowners floja (lazy). ‘There are people who just live on the rents now. For me, I live from my cattle. I have my ranch. I grew up in the campo, and I like my life in the campo. Now, our way of life has changed into something different.’

To get a more refined sense of popular opinion, in 2013 we undertook a door-to-door survey of the entire town to gather local reflections on how the wind parks had impacted the community. When we asked if the parks had brought the benefits people hoped for four years ago, only 20 percent said yes, 60 percent said no, and the remaining 20 percent said en parte (partly) or expressed no opinion. Of those we interviewed, 26.3 percent said their families received direct benefits from the wind industry in the form of land contracts or work. And of that percentage, just over half (52.3 percent) rated their experience with the companies as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. Another 28.6 percent rated their contact as asi asi (so so) and 19 percent as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’. When we asked whether the companies and the government provided enough by way of obras for the good of the town, we encountered strongly negative opinions. Twenty-five percent felt the companies were doing enough by providing paving, offering remarks like ‘it’s not nothing with this wind that whips the dust up into your eyes’. But 66.3 percent opined that the companies should be doing more – that the obras were a misería (pittance) or that things that had been promised, like a new school, never appeared. The paving was done on the cheap, without drainage, they said, so when it rained there was more flooding than before. Still, the worst criticism was reserved for the government. Only 13.8 percent said the government had done enough for the community whereas 83.8 percent said it had not. One man laughed: ‘The government? They never do anything for us. Aqui se falta mucho’ – we are lacking a great deal here.

In conversations with friends in town, even those who supported the wind parks commented that it had increased social inequality. Large, multilevel homes were beginning to appear with expensive foreign cars in their driveways. Although indisputably a sign of wind-driven prosperity, critics countered that such wealth was reserved for a very few families and that rather than investing locally in La Ventosa, the wealthy rentier families tended to put their profits into vacation homes for themselves in Huatulco or Mexico City. Meanwhile, they reported that the signs of wealth had attracted ‘a criminal element’ from as far away as Veracruz.

One evening we had a conversation with Rusvel Rasgado, a journalist and one of our closest friends in La Ventosa. His verandah was packed with dozens of sofas, orphans of a tractor-trailer that the wind had blown off the road some miles east of town. Although generally pro-development and connected by marriage to Don Montero’s family, Rusvel had questions about the obras that were supposed to compensate La Ventosans for the industrialisation of their surrounding landscape. ‘For example, this paving of the streets, these are fairly simple obras, they could be aiming for something much more important, like building a primary school. For years the company has promised to build it, but nothing has happened,’ he said. ‘Another example’, he continued, ‘is the fact that the whole town is encircled by turbines now. And I’m looking at this and saying to myself, how is the town going to grow? There are rules about building homes closer than 500 metres to the turbines. It’s not going to be possible to grow the population much more than it is today.’

The image of La Ventosa trapped in a forest of turbines poignantly captures the ambivalent Istmeño experience of aeolian density. The fierce wind now supplies prosperity to some but also denies future growth to the whole community. La Ventosa can certainly be viewed as a tremendous success story for wind power globally. A developer in Mexico City once proudly described the area around La Ventosa and La Venta to us as the ‘densest concentration of terrestrial wind parks anywhere on the planet’. From a certain perspective, La Ventosa appears to epitomise how a world-class resource can – provided ambitious government plans plus inputs of transnational capital and expertise – rapidly achieve multiple goals: improving local economic opportunities and infrastructure, meeting national energy transition targets and biopolitical aspirations for development and addressing the global challenge of decarbonising electricity transmission and remediating climate change.

However, renewable energy development that diminishes public goods and community needs relative to the interests of industrial and financial partners does not deserve to be described as ‘transition’ in any meaningful sense. Istmeño critics of wind power made it very clear to us they were not criticising the energy source per se. They were criticising the extractive, dislocated relationships between energy resource and human settlement that they viewed as continuous with extractive colonial ventures of past like mining and forced agrarian labour. It is not uncommon to this day to hear wind development called the segunda conquista (second conquest) of foreign invaders over the Isthmus. It would be fair to say that a majority of La Ventosans consider themselves part of a ‘sacrifice zone’ for wind power.

It need not be this way. I believe that Scheer’s dream of a positive renewable energy transition is attainable. However, a Scheerian transition would involve a truly revolutionary reimagination of infrastructure and power. What we learn from the case of Mexico is that such a transition must always be oriented to maximising community goods rather than to accumulating private profits. The current model is effective at building wind parks but does nothing to challenge the habits and relations that made the wind parks necessary in the first place.