American Scientist

MEXICO IN SPACE: From la Raza Cósmica to the Space Race. Anne W. Johnson. 296 pp. University of Arizona Press, 2026. $35.

“Space is for everyone.” This slogan is everywhere in the global space industry—painted on booths at aerospace expos; threaded through the promotional rhetoric of companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and their government counterparts; even stitched onto the mission patches of international astronaut corps. Growing up Mexican American in Los Angeles, I came to astrophysics with almost no view of the night sky—the city saw to that—yet with a persistent, not entirely explicable sense that the cosmos was not foreign territory. Anne W. Johnson’s Mexico in Space: From la Raza Cósmica to the Space Race helped me understand where that feeling might have come from.

Johnson opens the book by taking the phrase “space is for everyone” seriously—and then systematically dismantling it. Her argument is not that space is for no one, but that the very grammar of “everyone” implies a singular outer space available for appropriation by a singular humanity. That implication, she shows through eight years of ethnographic fieldwork across Mexico, is both politically consequential and empirically wrong.

Johnson’s central conceptual move is to borrow the notion of milieu from the French philosopher of biology Georges Canguilhem—a term she translates as something like a constitutive environment: neither backdrop nor container, but an active medium through which organisms (or, in her usage, people, institutions, and ideas) simultaneously shape and are shaped. She adapts this idea into space milieux: the plural, historically situated, socially embedded contexts through which different communities in Mexico have engaged with outer space, not as a single infinite frontier, but as overlapping, sometimes contradictory places and practices.

The book’s six chapters trace these milieux across strikingly diverse settings. We begin with pre-Hispanic cosmologies and the Aztec calendar stone (the Piedra del Sol), whose astronomical sophistication Johnson treats not as a romantic origin story but as evidence of a long engagement between Mexican peoples and the cosmos that predates and complicates European narratives of “discovery.” We move through the postrevolutionary construction of a nationalist cosmic identity (la raza cósmica)—the early 20th-century Mexican philosopher and education minister José Vasconcelos’s famous and politically fraught vision of a spiritually superior mixed race destined to transcend both Europe and the United States—into Mexico’s little-known Cold War satellite program and its fitful contemporary successor, the Mexican Space Agency (AEM). Along the way, we encounter dark sky activists fighting light pollution in Baja California; a collective of artists and scientists imagining a Mexican city on Mars; and Mennonite farmers in Chihuahua launching amateur rockets whose engines run on the same fuel that powers the pumps used to irrigate crops in a drought.

That last scene—Johnson at a rocket competition in the desert, eating tortillas and corn, watching judges evaluate student projects for compliance with the safety protocols of ENMICE (a high-power rocketry competition in Mexico), while a NASA official frets about heightened tensions in Gaza—is characteristic of the book’s method and its pleasures. The ethnographic detail is dense without being inert. It serves as analysis: These rockets are not pale imitations of U.S. space technology; they are expressions of a specific Mexican space milieu, shot through with local anxieties about water, national identity, and whether Mexico belongs among the spacefaring nations or is, as one interlocutor puts it dryly, still waiting to be invited to the table.

Colonizing Mars replays the same dynamic of dispossession that structured the conquest of the Americas.

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One of the book’s most unexpected threads involves not rockets, but seaweed. Johnson’s field sites include coastal communities in Quintana Roo and Oaxaca that are working with Mar de Sal, a company using satellite imagery to track and manage the massive influxes of Sargassum, a type of macroalgae, that have been washing up on Mexico’s beaches due to climate change and nutrient runoff. The connection to outer space might seem tenuous, but Johnson uses it as one of her most productive analytical moves: showing how satellite data, which originates in the most distant and technologically rarefied of outer space programs, becomes entangled with the most immediate, smelly, and economically devastating ecological problems of the terrestrial milieu.

This kind of analytical surprise is exactly what good ethnography delivers. The Sargassum seaweed is not a metaphor for anything; it is a real problem with real economic consequences for tourism operators and fishing communities. But it is also, Johnson argues, another milieu that connects the biological and the orbital, the human and the nonhuman, in ways that the standard “space is for everyone” narrative—focused on individual heroes launching into the cosmos—entirely misses.

The book’s most theoretically ambitious chapter, “Transhabiting Mars,” is also its most politically charged. Johnson follows the collective Marsarchive.org, a group of Mexican artists, scientists, and writers who have spent years imagining what a Mexican city on Mars might look like. It is not an endorsement of Elon Musk’s “colonization” plans, but a way of asking what it means to project desires and fears about terrestrial life onto an extraterrestrial canvas. The collective’s fictional city, Martenochtitlan, is named for both Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital, now Mexico City) and the Spanish conquest that destroyed it. The allusion is deliberate: Colonizing Mars replays the same dynamic of dispossession that structured the conquest of the Americas, now with Silicon Valley in the role of Cortés. In Marsarchive.org’s telling, the technologies and rhetoric of Martian colonization—terraforming, “unclaimed” land, indigenous populations framed as obstacles or resources—are not neutral engineering problems but a recognizable repertoire inherited from 16th-century European expansion. To recognize Mars as a site of potential conquest, the collective argues, is already to recognize that the conquest of the Americas was not only a historical event, but a template.

This argument is provocative, and Johnson is careful not to flatten it. Many of her interlocutors are deeply ambivalent: They are excited by the prospect of a Mexican presence in the broader conversation about humanity’s future off-Earth, but troubled by the terms on which that presence would have to occur. A telling moment comes when an AEM official, at a diplomatic reception in Chihuahua, uses the language of “investment opportunities” to describe Mexico’s space aspirations while, in the same breath, invoking the legacy of Aztec astronomical genius. The juxtaposition is not lost on Johnson or, one suspects, on the official himself: Mexico’s modern space ambitions are being marketed in the vocabulary of global capital while drawing legitimacy from a pre-Columbian past whose descendants remain largely excluded from the AEM’s boardrooms and budgets.

Mexico in Space is not without its difficulties. The book’s theoretical apparatus draws on a constellation of science studies theorists: Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour on how scientific facts are assembled, Donna Haraway on the politics of knowledge, Anna Tsing on how global systems work through friction and local difference, and Lisa Messeri, whose ethnography of planetary scientists directly anticipates Johnson. But this breadth of perspectives occasionally weighs down the prose in ways that will challenge readers outside the social sciences. The introduction’s extended meditation on milieu as a concept is necessary but demanding, and readers who persevere will be rewarded by later chapters that deploy the concept with considerably more grace. The book also covers a great deal of ground—from pre-Hispanic cosmology to contemporary satellite programs to speculative fiction about Mars—and although the thematic coherence holds, some chapters feel more fully realized than others. The discussion of dark sky communities in the final chapter, in particular, could benefit from the same depth of ethnographic texture that makes the Chihuahua rocket competition and the Sargassum sections so vivid.

These are minor notes about a book that is doing something genuinely difficult: explaining why “Mexico” and “space” are not two separate topics that happen to intersect, but two names for a single, deeply entangled set of historical, political, and material practices. The fact that Johnson largely succeeds is a considerable achievement.

The question in the blurb on the book’s back cover—“Who belongs in outer space?”—turns out to be the wrong question, or at least not quite the right one. What Johnson’s book shows is that the question assumes a singular outer space waiting to be populated by the right kind of people. What she finds instead is a multiplicity of outer spaces—as many as there are communities with skies over their heads, histories behind them, and technologies within reach. The “spaces” of a Baja astronomer, a Chihuahuan Mennonite rocketeer, and a Quintana Roo sargasso-mapper are not competing versions of the same thing; they are genuinely different objects, constituted by different practices.

If it is true—as the recent proliferation of commercial and governmental space programs suggests it is—that humanity is about to spend an enormous amount of money, engineering talent, and political capital on the project of expanding beyond Earth, then the questions this book raises are not merely academic. Who gets to define what “space” means? Whose cosmologies count as knowledge, and whose count as mythology? What kinds of communities and what kinds of futures do we carry with us when we go? I found myself thinking of the children now growing up in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Chihuahua—starved of dark skies but not starved of a cosmos. Mexico in Space does not answer all these questions. But Johnson asks them in ways that should make anyone who cares about the future of space exploration stop and think.