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Anne W. Johnson, "Mexico in Space: From La Raza Cósmica to the Space Race" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Anne W. Johnson, professor in the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Universidad Ibero Americana in Mexico City. We're discussing her latest book, Mexico in Space. From La Raza Cosmica to the Space Race. While we might think that on some level outer space and our exploration of it is everyone's domain, we tend to associate the world beyond ours with the global superpowers like the United States and the former Soviet Union. For thousands of years, indigenous inhabitants of Mexico have looked to the stars and oriented aspects of life around it. In the past century, Mexico has mounted its own effort to explore outer space to help us explore Mexico's engagement with the cosmos. I'm pleased today to speak with Anne Johnson. Anne, welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm excited about having this conversation.
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B
This is one of those books on a topic that is just so fascinating on so many levels when the more you dig through this idea of what does space mean for people in Mexico, what has space meant for people in Mexico? And how have Mexicans related to and oriented themselves around outer space? It really does become this very profound meditation on nationalities and borders and just the way that we think about science, science and progress. And I'm wondering if before, you know, talking about the subject of the book, you could just tell us a little bit about your academic career and how you started studying space and found yourself in Mexico.
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C
Yeah, well, the space part was completely unintentional. I've lived in Mexico for 26 years now, and I did come to do fieldwork in 1999, which is my field work for my PhD dissertation. But it was about. Had nothing to do with space. It was about devil masking and popular performance in the state of Guerrero, which is where I started doing research, because I had a background both in anthropology and theater. So I was really interested in sort of combining those two things. And I found this great topic and this sort of great masking tradition that was. It was about nationalism and it was about artisanry and sort of local belonging within the national context and the remembering of history. And as it happened, I was working on this popular tradition of remembering the Mexican War for independence from Spain, which was many, many years ago. But in Guerrero, which is where I was working, is still very much alive in popular memory. So a lot of the municipalities had kind of an insurgents name attached to them, like as a last name. And one of those Municipalities is called Simpango, and it's Simpango de Neri. And so I was asking sort of, who are these, these, these insurgents? Why are they important? And somebody said, oh no, no man, he's not an insurgent. He was an astronaut. I was like, what? What do you mean he was an astronaut? No, yes, he was an astronaut. And that means that Guerrero, the state of Guerrero, was in space. And I, you know, it wasn't my topic. I just kind of put a pit in that and filed it away. And then many years later, after I'd moved to Mexico City, I took my daughter to a talk at the unan, the National Autonomous University that was on, I believe it was on Dark Energy. And some, the person who was giving the talk said, oh yes, the UNAM has an experiment on the International Space Station. The UNAM has been in space. And it just kept this sort of idea that wasn't broadly generalized but just kept coming up over and over again that there's this idea that Mexico has a connection with space started to become really interesting to me. And I had just read Lisa Mercedes book Placing Outer Space, which is great and completely, I completely recommend it, which is about how people in the United States, scientists in the United States, specifically NASA, turn outer spaces into outer places through cartography and other sort of meaning making practices. And I thought, well, what, how would I apply that to Mexico? What would it mean for outer space to somehow contain Mexican places? And so I thought, well, this is a great project. Nobody else is doing this. How could I anthropologically investigate Mexico and outer space? And so I started sending off a bunch of emails because I really had no idea I was not a space person in any way. I sent off a bunch of emails to the unam and it turned out there was a Mexican space agency which I hadn't known. And the first person who answered, and literally an hour after I'd sent the email was this sort of bureau, this higher up in the Mexican space agency, saying, oh yeah, this is a great project, come talk to us. And so the space agency became this node in a huge network of people doing different things and having different experiences with outer space from Mexico. And that's sort of how it all, that's how it all began.
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B
Right? I feel like my experience at least, you know, visiting Mexico and learning a little bit about, you know, the various indigenous inhabitants, like from the Maya and the Aztec civilizations, that they were quite oriented towards space. They thought a lot about constellations and planetary systems. I even remember when I was, you know, younger There was this whole thing around 2012 and the Mayan calendar and this fear that they had predicted the end of the world. So, you know, I guess on some level I was thinking about, you know, Mexico and space before I encountered your book. So can you talk a little about the indigenous approaches and connections that kind of look at that long running history of Mexicans thinking about space?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. Because one thing that became really clear to me sort of right away was even though when I started looking at the space sector and I didn't stay with the space sector, but I sort of started there, people said over and over again, oh, this is nothing new for us, you know, this idea that we've always been there or that our ancestors were astronomers in some way. And so part of what I wanted to do was to sort of take that up, explore it and also kind of interrogate it a little bit like who is this us and what does always mean and what does space mean? So absolutely there are very sort of ancient traditions of astronomical practice of observing the skies, of keeping count, and of being able to do things like predict eclipses or just be very sort of aware of the sky. What did become kind of clear to me though, which is interesting, is that, and it's something that I really wanted to think about was, well, but is cosmos the same as outer space? Because there's this sort of conflation that happens with people who are interested in space saying, oh yeah, we've always been there. But I think there's also a kind of simplifying of the idea of what a pre Hispanic and a modern indigenous cosmos might look like. So part I'm not a, you know, I'm not an archaeologist, I'm not an ethno historian, but I did sort of try to dialogue with people who really know about those kinds of things to think about what a cosmos is and how much more complex pre Hispanic population's relationship with the cosmos, how much more complex those relationships were than just simply saying, oh yeah, we used to be astronomers, we've always been astronomers because it was a kind of relationship to the cosmos that wasn't just observing for observing sake. You know, it wasn't like astronomy in a kind of contemporary scientific sort of objective. We just want to know, you know, about the origin of the universe to like further our knowledge. It was observing because people were participating in the cosmos. What you did on Earth had an impact on the cosmos. What was happening in the cosmos had an impact on Earth. So you people were required to be very aware of the cosmos. And to participate in it in a lot of different ways. And there were also very sort of practical uses of observation for agricultural practice, for example. There were a lot of politics involved. The rulers would connect themselves to cosmic events as a way of justifying their own power. So cosmos was a very, very complex idea and very diverse because there's also not just one way to talk about pre Hispanic Mexico. There were hundreds of different groups, and certainly we know the Mayan astronomers and Mayan observers who are probably the most famous and had the most developed sort of sense of the observation. But there were indigenous groups all over Mexico and getting engaged with the cosmos in different ways. And there continue to be indigenous groups all over Mexico who were engaged with the cosmos in different ways. So part of what I wanted to do at the beginning of the book was to complicate this idea of we of cosmos. And always that was. That was kind of what I was. What I was trying to do.
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B
Yeah. I mean, the thing too is, you know, I think at the Beginning of the Human Condition by Hannah Arenchi kind of characterizes the beginning of the modern age as, you know, the launching of the first satellites into space. But in reality, while that was a momentous moment, at the same time, I. I. It was, you know, really, you know, just barely out there. You know, in the grand scheme, we've barely left the atmosphere, which is funny to think about how what our outer space is now, it's a bit more developed, maybe because we've actually been there. But at the same time too, maybe, you know, we've taken the meaning of the cosmos down just a little bit.
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C
Absolutely. And I think even just calling it outer is. I mean, it's. It's a choice. You know, the idea that it's something outer, that it's not that it's somehow separated from, From. From Earth. And I think a lot of my interlocutors would. Would agree. And both who. Who know about sort of pre Hispanic and modern indigenous cosmologies, there's nothing outer about outer space. We're in space. Right. The Earth is in space. And. But I think even contemporary space artists would say the same thing and have said the same thing, which is another group that I was really interested in that I had no idea existed. Space, Mexican space art was a. Was a world that I discovered in this book that is truly fascinating.
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B
Yeah. I want to get into talking about like the. The artistic representations that you. That you get into. But I also want to talk a little bit about the 1950s. You know, this was a time when The Soviet Union was launching Sputnik and the US was launching Explore. And, and Mexico itself was also, you know, they were developing rockets of their own. What were these early developments like and how did they sort of think of themselves in comparison in relation to these, these, these superpowers that were engaging in the space race?
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C
Yeah, I think the 50s and the 60s were kind of a golden age for Mexican space. And I am talking about outer space now. A golden age for Mexicans, outer space as well as for other countries. There were rocket launches in Mexico around the time of Sputnik. The International Geophysical Year, which was sort of the context of the Sputnik launch as well, was international science project in Mexico was also involved in. So in the sort of desert regions north of Mexico City and San Luis Potosi, scientists were developing rockets and been pretty successful. They launched rockets that were. That were. Didn't go into orbit suborbital rockets, but had a lot of success. The Mexican government as created, what was it exactly, a space agency, but was sort of the first national space organization, the Commission for. The National Commission for Outer Space, and supported a lot of these activities. And I think rockets were a big deal, especially at first. That changed later on in Mexican history and sort of satellites began to replace rockets. But the other, the other field that I think was really important in Mexico and I think this is something that for me, I think is something that needs to be sort of rescued and revived is space diplomacy. Right. It's like space art, space law. And the. The interest in Mexico as kind of a. A backdoor, a witness to the space race and to the Cold War context of the space race was a real interest in promoting the peaceful uses of outer space. So there was a lot of fear involved in thinking about, well, what are these space powers going to do with outer space? Particularly in terms of the potential for weaponizing outer space. So the 1967 Treaty of Platel Lolco, which was signed in Mexico, was a nuclear non proliferation treaty for all of Latin America and the Caribbean. A Mexican won the Nobel Prize for this, for this, for this treaty. And it was very much tied into the space race and very much tied into the treaty for Outer Space and the later Moon Treaty and all of these other sort of international agreements trying to promote the peaceful uses of outer space in this context of the fear of a global war. So Mexico participated in those from the very beginning and continues to do that to a certain extent. And I think that's. That's the part that maybe is less like flashy than Rockets, but was also something that was really important at the
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time, in addition to rockets and just the technical challenges that come with trying to develop them. I feel like for any culture, seeing someone who go into space, this kind of the character, the image of the astronaut or the cosmonaut is so powerful. Especially, I feel for. For younger people, it's very inspirational seeing someone going into the unknown. And you tell the story of Rodolfo Neriva, the first Mexican to go into space. Who was he and what was the impact of his voyage?
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C
Yes. So Rodolfo Nerivella was. Was the Nerivella that I thought that the municipality had been named after many years ago when I was living in Guerrero. And I did get a chance to meet him more recently. And I said, oh, this is amazing. I was working Guerrero, and people talk about you and. And some pango, which is the nettie. And he said, yeah, that's actually not me. That was my, like, distant relative. Not. I'm not that nitty. But it's still fascinating that people, even though he wasn't technically the person for whom the municipality was named after, people had this, this, this. This idea of the importance of having this person who had gone to space. And Annabela was the first Mexican astronaut. Depending on who you ask, he may or may not be the only Mexican astronaut, which is. Which has to do with definitions and is also. Is an interesting debate in itself. But he flew to space aboard a space shuttle in 1985. There was a period after the 50s and 60s which was sort of this boom of space activity. There was a kind of period of decline when the space organization was dissolved for economic and political reasons. And so there was sort of nothing going on for a While until the 80s, when satellite telecommunications became a priority for the government and also for private telecommunications companies in Mexico. So at the Beginning of the 80s, the Mexican government had assigned a slot in orbit for its own satellite so that it could provide its own telecommunications, and contracted with Hughes Spacecraft aircraft to build a satellite. And so this satellite, which was called the Morelos satellite System after an independence hero, ironically or not ironically. And so they launched this satellite, two satellites, more or less one and two. And as part of this agreement with the United States government and with NASA, NASA trained a Mexican astronaut to accompany the second satellite. So in 1985, Nerivella accompanied this satellite and was a payload specialist on this mission. And so he became really famous. And he was, and was really, for many, many years, the only, even close to the only Mexican astronaut to go into space and was very much a hero in the country and to young people. I still. I have friends who are like, oh, yeah, I wrote a letter to Dennis and he wrote me back, and it was a big deal. People loved him, love him. He's still. He's still around still sort of giving talks, trying to sort of inspire and promote the space industry in Mexico. And I think there was a sense at the time also that, oh, he'll be the first of many, right? That there'll be all these other astronauts, Mexican astronauts in space, which has not necessarily been the case. And that's very similar to what happens in other Latin American countries. There has been one Cuban astronaut, there's been one Brazilian cosmonaut, or there's been one astronaut from several countries. And so there's a little bit of tokenism, I think, there of sort of the symbolic importance of this sort of one, this one astronaut. There has. There have been other people in space with a claim to being Mexican and with a claim to being astronauts, which is kind of another story. But Chicano astronauts, astronauts of Mexican ancestry, gone to space with NASA, as well as at least one space tourist, which is also a topic that's pretty fascinating.
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Yeah, we'll definitely get to that
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experience.
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D
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A
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B
But, yeah, you talk about Jose Hernandez and Katya Echezaretta and both of them, you know, just their, their story, personal stories like the, the, the. The kind of. The odds that they overcame to become astronauts is remarkable. And of course, you know, it being interesting that they, you know, are of Mexican descent but end up going to space with the United States.
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Yeah.
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Could you talk about their stories just, just very quickly? Because they're both extremely interesting figures.
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Yeah, very much so. So Jose Hernandez was His parents were migrant workers in California. He was born in the United States and got citizenship by being born in the United States, but traveled back and forth to Mexico for many years, as you know, working in the agricultural fields with his family. Went to school in California and managed again. And this is like as you say, this is very much a story of sort of big dreams with a lot of obstacles. Right. I had always wanted to be an astronaut and went to college, went to graduate school and became a highly qualified engineer and applied to NASA I believe it was 13 times before he finally was accepted into an astronaut class and did go to space as a flight engineer again during the space shuttle program, but as an American, a citizen of the United States, went with NASA but very much sort of recognizing his parents and his parents story and his Mexican ancestry. Took a Mexican flag, not on his uniform, but took a Mexican flag. Took a figure of the version of Guadalupe, had a conversation with the president of Mexico at the time. So very much sort of as a person of Mexican descent went to space. He and Nivella, apparently part of the anthropologist is sort of getting into all the rumors and the gossip about things which is sometimes the most fun. But they don't get along very well. There is some friction over who is more Mexican and who is more an astronaut. And that plays. I mean, there's plenty of evidence on Twitter and other social media platforms of their sort of fights. But both of them wrote memoirs of their time which are very similar in some ways. Sort of the obstacles they had to overcome to get to space. The importance of sort of seeing the Earth from space, the problem of borders on Earth and how space might be a way that we can kind of think beyond borders. Sort of very inspirational stories in both cases. And then the case of Catris de Serreta, who was born in Mexico, was born in Jalisco, also traveled to the United States as a child, as an immigrant and got citizenship as a young person. Also studied in the United States, worked for NASA. She had I believe a job with NASA for a while and also really wanted to be an astronaut. That didn't fulfill the requirements, I guess from NASA, but finally won a contest to be able to go with Blue Origin Jeff Bezos company And so she was. Was sponsored by a. An organization that promotes, called Space for Humanity called which promotes this idea of the overview effect which is exactly looking at the Earth from space and sort of not seeing borders and kind of changing your perspective. So she was sponsored on this trip on a sub orbital flight. So again, born in Mexico. Is she an astronaut? Is she a space tourist? Sort of that, that kind of discourse is. It happens a lot also in social media, not supported by the Mexican government, supported from the United States, but her sort of post flight experience is very much returning to Mexico and trying to use her experience to support the Mexican space industry. So she has a foundation and she does space camps and is very much in dialogue with the administration, the federal administration, about sort of how space can keep being a priority for Mexico.
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B
Every now and then I like to check to see who's on the International Space Station at any given moment. You can always see who's listed and it's always a mixture of Americans, Russians, Chinese astronauts and then, and then that right now there's also one French astronaut. And you talk a little bit about how there is this burgeoning space industry in Mexico, young, young professionals that are involved either as engineers in some capacity, you know, or they, you know, are hoping in the future to, to be more involved in the, the global international space community. What was your experience in talking with various young professionals about how they feel in relation to the broader community engaged in space?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think that field work and those interactions were sort of the most bittersweet in a way of the research that I did. I feel very attached to these kids. When I say kids, they're anywhere from 16 to 35. So maybe kids isn't the right word, but there's a lot of passion around space for young people. And I'm sure this is true outside of Mexico, but in Mexico in particular, young people are really inspired by space. And this is something that I think has come up especially since sort of the rise of new space. Right. And the sort of private investment in space and the sort of Space Race 2.0 or whatever they're calling it these days. In 2016, the International Astronautical Congress was held in Guadalajara in Mexico. And Elon Musk came and he is sort of where he gave his big pitch for going to Mars. And so there were a lot of young people in the audience who were really inspired by this idea of a space generation, of a Mars generation, which are sort of phrases that were being used at the time and started to sort of look for ways to get involved in outer space cubesats. The making some small nanosatellites was one possibility. One of the things people talk about a lot is private investment, but also the way that technology has become miniaturized and sort of more accessible to a lot of different actors, to universities, for example. So a lot of kids were thinking about ways they could get involved in space. They get really passionate about it. But then they also sort of come up against these obstacles which are structural, institutional. There's not a lot of places to study in Mexico, outer space fields. There are more now. There's some that have been recently created, but it's not. Most young people have to leave the country to be able to study aerospace engineering. So they come up against discrimination. They come up against all kinds of sort of different obstacles that have to do with how. How deeply they can get involved in the space industry. Lack of support from the Mexican government. The problem of the Mexican space agency is a whole other topic that were sort of my main interlocutors for a long time. But the space agency has recently been downgraded or dissolved, or something's happening that's made it not a great node for interaction, which is what it used to be. So. So there's this sort of combination of intense passion for outer space and. And a lot of talent and a lot of knowledge and sort of interest in doing things with the structural limitations that make it really hard for young people in MYSQO to actually get involved. And that's sort of what. What I've come across.
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One of the more recent projects is the Colmanna Beehive project. What is this project? I mean, you mentioned a little bit about how like minute miniaturize it, digitization of technologies allowed for more participation. How did this project work and what was your sort of assessment on its success?
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This is a really interesting project, and it was one of the first projects that I started to look at ethnographically. At one point I thought, oh, I'll just do an ethnography of a laboratory. I'm kind of glad I didn't. But that was the original idea. And so there's this laboratory at the National Autonomous University called Lynx, which is a space instrumentation laboratory. It's in the Institute of Nuclear Sciences. And the head of this laboratory is an Argentinian astrophysicist, Gustavo Medina Tanko. Really bright and sort of really inspired to do space things. And so they had started with nanosats, with satellite launches, and also suborbital balloons that would sort of test technology in the stratosphere. And so they had all these sort of space projects. And then the idea came along to kind of go beyond satellites to look at robotics, which is kind of another. I think rockets and satellites and robots are kind of the three main areas for technological innovation in space in Mexico. And so in this lab they started developing robots, but not the kind of, I mean, we imagine, I don't know, Marvin the Martian, I don't know, we imagine robots in a different way. These are very small sort of discs that are sort of miniature robots that, whose function is to kind of auto organize themselves and sort of combine together on the surface of the moon. So this lab works with how can these, how to develop the programming and the engineering and the sort of testing of these robots in analog situations, like in sandboxes and things like that, so that they could be launched to the moon. And sort of thanks to the efforts of Marina Tamko in this lab, they got a contract with Astrobotic. It's a Pittsburgh private company that I believe I've heard is described as sort of the FedEx to the moon kind of thing, where they do have missions for clients who want to send things to the moon. So Lynx along with it, got some financing from a lot of different places and got a space on an Astrobotic mission. NASA was another one of the clients for this Astrobotic mission to go to the moon. There were a lot of other sort of more controversial aspects of this mission. But the point is that this all happened. All of the technology got developed, it was all sort of, all systems go and the launch happened. The launch was successful, but it got to lunar orbit and something happened. And I've heard different things, but I don't know exactly what the problem was. And the mission failed. And there was no, there was no way that it could actually land on the moon. So the company decided to sort of control a reorbit into Earth's atmosphere, to burn up the, the, the payloads and to burn up all of the technology. The way that this is interesting because for, for a lot of different reasons. One is that most people outside of Mexico had no idea that there was a Mexican mission, a Mexican payload on this mission. This was, and a lot of other missions were talked about in an international press. But in Mexico, obviously, the interesting thing was that it was going to be Mexico on the moon, right? Mexico's first mission to the moon and the sort of innovative use of miniature robots that would eventually have other purposes. And so there was a lot of kind of talk around, well, how do we spin this? Like, how is this a failure? Is this just like something that happened? But there can be some success that we talk about. And I think that in unam, what they did was, oh, no, this isn't a failure. This is not. Oh yeah, once again we tried to do something big and it didn't happen, but that it was at least a partial success because the technology was able to be tested in space. And it did go, I forget how many thousands of miles into space. And so this is, this is a big step for Mexico, but there was a lot of, like, talk around, well, what is, what is, what does failure mean in the Mexican context? Right? Like, is this, is this just. Oh, you know, we, we. There's a saying in Mexican soccer and football that's like, oh, yeah, we, we played better than ever and we lost. Like we always do. So it's, that's kind of something that people would say that, yeah, well, once again, we didn't do what we meant to do. But I think in the sort of. The bottom line is that it was this very inspiring, again, this very inspiring possibility for Mexican engineers and Mexican universities and laboratories and students, because there are a lot of students involved in the project to do things that are unexpected, that most people wouldn't expect Mexico to have technology on the Moon. Right. So I think that that's it. And there are sort of future versions of this project that are, that are, are being developed.
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B
Right? Yeah, it's a, it's, it's an interesting story. And I think also, you know, quite literally, any sort of a moonshot is, you know, even, even some degree of failure. You can still learn a lot and there's a lot to, to improve upon.
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C
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B
You talk a lot about the imagination around Mars in Mexico and the depiction of it, the different ways people thought about how Mexico might persist in a age where we have colonized Mars to a certain extent. And of course, Elon Musk being one of the most prominent Martians or future Martians out there, depending on if he makes it, as is his dream. But there are a lot of Mexicans who share his dream, who share his interests in Mexico. What did you learn by studying how Mars has been understood and written about and the ways in which people think about Mexico's place on Mars.
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C
Interesting because it's unlike the Moon and unlike other planets like Venus, Mars was not a big deal for pre Hispanic Mexicans. But again, this 2016 visit of Elon Musk to Mexico where he talked about Mars and terraforming Mars and this sort of big idea that Mars could be a plan B, since we're Messing up Earth. A lot to say about that in itself. But there were all as, as well as people inspired by Musk and Musk's vision for, for new space. There were also people who were very, very critical. Even before the Trump administration and before sort of the. Now pretty much everybody's critical. But at the time, there were. There were people who sort of started off thinking this colonialist vision or extracted this vision of, of what Mars could be for humans is a problem. And so taking the idea of colonizing Mars as something to criticize, as well as this idea of being from a country that was colonized by Spain, sort of taking this experience of being a colonized place and thinking, well, what would it mean to decolonize Mars instead of colonizing Mars? And so one of the organizations that I looked at and worked with pretty closely, which is just so fascinating, is a group called marsarchive.org and it's a curator and cultural worker, an artist, Mexican artist, Marcela Chao, and some of her friends just basically thought, well, what can we do with Mars from here, from Mexico? And they started this organization and had a bunch of events and it's all very sort of festive and playful and absolutely fun. They do workshops. And the first workshop they did was called Mar Tenochtitlan. Mars Tenochtitlan, which was the Mexica settlement before Mexico City, where Mexico City is now located, imagining, trying to think of a collective imagination about what a settlement on Mars might look like if it was settled by refugees from Tenochtitlan or migrants from Tenochtitlan. And so this workshop and a series of other workshops were developed to sort of think together and to kind of have fun, to think, well, if we left for Mexico, why would we leave Mexico? Why would we leave Tenochtitlan? How would we get to Mars? What would we do once we got there? What would the city, if we founded the city, what would that look like? And how would that be different than the sort of plans that Elon Musk has? So, so they made a codex, which is a sort of pre Hispanic document that uses pictures to tell a story, basically. So there was a pre Hispanic inspired codex of the migration from Tenochtitlan to Mars and the founding of Martinochitlan. And sort of all together, the participants in this workshop thought up a story about why we would go and what we would do when we got there. One of the versions of the story was, oh, they found this, the ruins of this city called SpaceX City, and everybody was dead. So, like, Mars had killed the invaders, basically. And so if we want to survive, then we have to think differently. It can't be, let's go and turn Mars into another Earth. But how might we cohabit Mars with Mars itself? Sort of taking into account Mars itself and think that we will be changed by Mars instead of Mars being changed by us? And then sort of all of the aesthetic and artistic part around that of kind of making a Mexican inspired city and Mexican inspired festivals in the city and stuff like that. So that group was fantastic. And they have a great website, if anybody wants to look at it.
- [39:30]
B
Yeah, I'll definitely link to that website. And I do think that the way seeing how different artists approach this topic alongside also how the different scientists are approaching it is a really interesting framing, sort of showing how different people in a similar cultural context are approaching it in different. Approaching this topic in different ways. And one thing I think a lot about in relation to just astronomy and cosmology is that while in many ways we're closer than ever to having space tourism, right. People actually being able to go out into space and get that overhead view at the same time too, the view from Earth is getting, let's just say, a little worse. Whenever I'm out in the country and it's nighttime and I get to look up at the stars and see them, it makes me feel a bit of sadness that I live in a city and I don't get to see these stars when I look out at the night sky. And I think for a lot of people, especially that sort of connection to, you know, if you're thinking about connection to ancestors and people in the past and the relationship that they might have had to the sky, we're seeing a very different sky than they used to see. Not because it's fundamentally different, but because, you know, ours is filled with thousands of satellites and light pollution and things like that. So what work have you seen around, you know, keeping skies dark and preserving this space?
- [41:00]
C
Yeah, one thing that became. That was really interesting to me and the. That sort of guided the way that I wanted to structure the chapters finally was this idea of centering Earth, of making, yes, there's this kind of fun voyage to the Moon and voyage to Mars and what are we thinking outside Earth. But the idea of returning to Earth at the end was really important to me because I feel like that really mirrored what people's experiences and what people's hopes were about. People's hopes aren't really about going to Mars. They're about living better on Earth. So one of the projects that I found that I sort of came across in this sort of moving between different actors who do stuff with outer space, was a project for astrotourism in the state of Hidalgo, in a small community in Hidalgo, where they have a long history of ecotourism because it's a nature preserve, it's a bio reserve. It's been recognized at different international levels. And so there has been interest in this place in sort of recovering the night sky as also as a resource, as a kind of emotional resource, I think, but also as an economic resource. So they've been promoting, with the help of consultants from the UNAM and from other places, the idea of creating this space where people can come from the city, because it's not that far from Mexico City, which is one of the most light contaminated places on Earth. But they can go to Hidango and experience the night sky and kind of live with the night in a different way, because. Absolutely, living in a big city like Mexico City, you're kind of lucky if you see the moon and in a couple of planets, maybe Orion every now and then. So a lot of people have not had that experience of really being wrapped up in the darkness of the night sky. Or there are a lot of migrants as well in Mexico City who miss the experience of their hometowns where you could see a dark sky. So this town, this community promoting its own dark sky as a place for tourism, and they're trying to get a designation from the Dark sky association as a dark country Dark sky Park, which would help bring in tourists and also kind of give them some guidelines about how you could maintain a dark sky. I think is one really interesting project. It's been successful in a lot of ways because it's a community where most of the men at one point were immigrant, had to migrate for work for economic reasons, and have found that ecotourism and astrotourism actually do provide a way of being able to stay, to stay home and to be able to make a living.
- [43:54]
B
Yeah, it's so interesting in this book how you go through these different groups that have and are continuing to engage with space in one way, shape or form. When you look at the kind of current ongoings, whether it be with the Mexican Space Agency or with the other group groups that are interested in some sort of work, whether it's developing these robots that might go to the moon, what do you see as the most sort of interesting or exciting developments, things that you are keeping an eye on, that you want to see people continuing to research and write about?
- [44:34]
C
Yeah, I Think one of the things that I noticed early on was that there are sort of. In some ways, there's sort of two different ways of approaching space. Or that I've seen people approach space from Mexico. And one is kind of trying to copy what people are doing in other countries, specifically the United States. And to kind of say, well, we could do that too. We can also send technology to the moon, or we can launch satellites, or we can have astronauts. But there are also all these other actors, individuals and groups. Who are trying to think differently about space. And I think that's where I think it's the most interesting. How do we change how we think about what it means to be in outer space. Or to be involved with outer space? So certainly the dark sky projects in this community, but also even in the cities, there's sort of interesting projects going on. About how we can change the way we light the city. So that there can even be sort of pockets of slightly darker skies even within a city. I think there's a project and also in Hidango, but in a different part of the state. Where what was the first satellite dish, the first Earth station for satellite communications in Mexico, which is no longer used for telecommunications. Because satellite, that's not the newest technology. It's now sort of fiber optics and other things. So there's sort of this. This old antenna that has just been sort of sitting there for a while. That a group of astronomers and engineers. Are trying to turn into a radio telescope. So sort of repurposing this modernist infrastructure. And turning it into something new and interesting to think about outer space much further away than the orbits. But also to use that telescope not so much for, like, cutting edge science. There is a cutting edge radio telescope in Mexico. But this would be for the community and for local universities to teach radio astronomy. And for the community to be able to kind of appropriate its own technology for its own interest. I think those projects, I think science fiction. I think there are a lot of young people who are writing science fiction or Spahilian fiction from a sort of GD colonial perspective. Incorporating interests in environmental sustainability and gender politics and cultural preservation. And sort of the ways that these. The young artists or that writers are thinking about space as a way to rethink human relationships. And a way to rethink our relationship with the environment. I think those are really interesting. And I think the potential for Mexico to kind of revive its role as in space diplomacy. And revive its role as a country that could have interesting things to say, important things to say about the way that we need to think about laws and regulations in outer space. I think that's. There's a lot of potential there as well. So I think it's. I think we need to. These examples are ways of thinking beyond the idea of let's go and explore space and let's go and exploit space and let's go and mine asteroids. You know, I think there's a lot of other ways that we can think about the idea of space and the idea of humanity's relationship to space. And I think Mexico is a really interesting place from which to look at those. Those topics.
- [48:04]
B
Yeah. One thing I was thinking just in the vein of science fiction is even though it doesn't have anything to do with Mexico, that one of the best films about space produced in the last 15 years was made by Alfonso Cuaron, who's a Mexican filmmaker. So I wonder what his inspiration was there. If he was thinking as well of these astronauts that he had seen. You know, I guess he would have been an adult by the time that the first Mexican astronaut was in space. But it is interesting to think about that connection too.
- [48:41]
C
Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, even. I mean, there are a lot of science fiction connections between Mexico and space that we don't necessarily. That are kind of visible, invisible. And if you saw the first Total Recall, the first with Arnold Schwarzeneg, Schwarzenegger, that was filmed in Mexico City, like the future. Future Mars and future Earth are both. Both current Mexico, you know, and Mexico has its own tradition of science fiction, which is really interesting. So. Yeah, absolutely.
- [49:13]
B
Well, and thank you so much for being a guest in the New Books Network. It was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you about your book, Mexico in Space. There's a lot in here about all the different ways that Mexico has related to space, how individuals have related to it, whether from a scientific perspective, from an engineering perspective, from a political perspective, from just an artistic approach as well. So I really do recommend people check out the book for a lot more, especially if they're interested in this topic. And yeah, thank you so much for being a guest. It was really wonderful to get the chance to speak with you.
- [49:50]
C
Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.
- [49:58]
B
Foreign.
- [50:05]
E
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