New Books in Latino Studies · Marshall Poe

Anne W. Johnson, "Mexico in Space: From La Raza Cósmica to the Space Race" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

March 12, 2026·53 min·4 clips

Mexican artists at MarsArchive.org imagined SpaceX City as a ghost town on Mars — killed by Mars itself — and concluded that survival requires co-habiting with the planet rather than terraforming it.

1. New Books Network host Caleb Zakrin interviews anthropologist Anne W. Johnson about her book "Mexico in Space: From La Raza Cósmica to the Space Race," published by University of Arizona Press in 2026. 2. Johnson is a professor in the graduate program in social anthropology at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and has lived in Mexico for 26 years. 3. The book's central argument is that Mexico's relationship with outer space is long, complex, and structurally underrecognized — encompassing indigenous cosmologies, Cold War diplomacy, satellite telecommunications, robotics, and decolonial art. 4. Johnson stumbled into the project while researching devil masking traditions in Guerrero, when a local mentioned that the municipality Zumpango de Neri was named after an astronaut, prompting her to file the idea away. 5. Years later at a UNAM dark energy lecture, she learned that the university had an experiment on the International Space Station, reconnecting the threads and leading to a series of emails to the Mexican Space Agency, one of which was answered within an hour. 6. Johnson distinguishes pre-Hispanic cosmological practice from modern astronomy: indigenous groups including the Maya observed the sky not to generate objective knowledge but to participate in a cosmos where Earth and sky were mutually affecting systems. 7. During the 1950s and 1960s, Mexico launched suborbital rockets from desert regions north of Mexico City in San Luis Potosí as part of the International Geophysical Year, the same context as the Soviet Sputnik launch. 8. Mexico's most significant Cold War space contribution was diplomatic: the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco, signed in Mexico City, was a nuclear non-proliferation agreement covering all of Latin America and the Caribbean, for which a Mexican diplomat won the Nobel Peace Prize. 9. Rodolfo Neri Vela became the first Mexican astronaut in 1985 when NASA trained him as a payload specialist to accompany the Morelos II telecommunications satellite, launched under a contract between the Mexican government and Hughes Spacecraft. 10. Johnson notes that Neri Vela is still active, giving talks and trying to promote the Mexican space industry, and that many Mexicans she interviewed remembered writing him letters as children and receiving replies. 11. Jose Hernandez, born in the U.S. to migrant farm workers, applied to NASA 13 times before being accepted as a flight engineer, took a Mexican flag and a Virgen de Guadalupe figure to space, and has a documented ongoing social media conflict with Neri Vela over who is the more legitimate Mexican astronaut. 12. Katia Echezarreta, born in Jalisco and later a U.S. citizen, won a contest to fly on a Blue Origin suborbital mission sponsored by the organization Space for Humanity, which promotes the 'overview effect' — seeing Earth without borders from space. 13. The UNAM's LINCS laboratory, led by Argentinian astrophysicist Gustavo Medina-Tanco, developed miniature disk-shaped robots called Colmena designed to self-organize on the lunar surface; these secured a contract with Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, described as the 'FedEx to the moon.' 14. The Colmena mission launched successfully but the Astrobotic lander failed to reach the lunar surface and was deliberately reorbited into Earth's atmosphere; UNAM framed the mission as a partial success because the technology was tested in deep space. 15. In 2016, Elon Musk presented his Mars colonization vision at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, inspiring a generation of young Mexicans who then confronted the structural absence of aerospace engineering programs in Mexico. 16. The Mexican Space Agency has since been downgraded or dissolved, leaving young space enthusiasts without the institutional node that once connected them. 17. MarsArchive.org, founded by Mexican artist and curator Marcela Chao, ran workshops imagining a Mars Tenochtitlan — a Mexican refugee settlement on Mars — and produced a pre-Hispanic-style codex depicting migration from Mexico City to Mars, including a version where the ruins of SpaceX City are found abandoned, killed by Mars itself. 18. Johnson ends the book by centering Earth: she profiles an astrotourism project in the state of Hidalgo, near Mexico City — one of the world's most light-polluted cities — where a biosphere reserve is developing dark-sky tourism to recover the night sky as both an emotional and economic resource. 19. The episode is a measured academic conversation with Zakrin asking structured questions and Johnson providing detailed, analytically dense answers; it runs through the book's chapters roughly in sequence. 20. Historians of science, anthropologists, Latin American studies scholars, and anyone interested in space policy, decolonial art, or the cultural history of space exploration will find this episode substantive.

As heard by us

A thoughtful, wide-ranging look at Mexico's ties to space.

Anne W. Johnson's Mexico in Space takes a broad, steady look at how Mexico has been imagined through science, engineering, politics, migration, and art.

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Mexico's relationship to space, from politics and engineering to astronauts and sci-fi.

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