Since the economic crisis of 1982, Mexican institutions and infrastructures have been meticulously undone to accommodate neoliberal interests and investments. As the dismantling of the Mexican state was underway through massive privatizations and successive deregulation laws, a new kind of ruin emerged. If archeological ruins were rearranged during the postrevolutionary period in museums and historical sites to construct Mexico’s postcolonial identity, “designed ruins” have become the testimony of the undoing of the Mexican nation-state under the close supervision of transnational institutions and corporations. The ruined environments of contemporary Mexico range from the economy of demolition and urban speculation that emerged after the 1985 and 2017 earthquakes in Mexico City to the deregulation of terrestrial transports laws, 1989, and up to the proliferation of mass graves throughout the country. An Atlas of New Mexican Ruins aims, through a series of visual and theoretical case studies, to explore the destructive—although productive—architectural work of neoliberalism in Mexico.

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