The digitalizing para-state: epistemic violence and the messiness of everyday life in Tequila, Mexico

In 2014, Jose Cuervo, the largest tequila producer in the world, partnered with IBM and the local government to transform the town of Tequila, in western Mexico, into a smart city by 2040. The project, Smart Tequila, was an ambitious "preventive model" meant to forestall chaotic urban growth and contribute to the corporation's wider tourism promotion and city-branding efforts. By 2023, though, Smart Tequila mainly existed on paper, as high running costs, operational challenges, and the trajectories of other sociospatial processes hindered the project. Despite this apparent failure, the project's vision of urbanism lives on. Inspired by critical interventions that ask us to investigate smart urbanism acknowledging the fabric of everyday life and attending to the privatization of urban governance, this paper seeks to explore the interplay between space, power, and colonial remains in Smart Tequila. Expanding the concept of the "digitalizing state," I argue that Smart Tequila's urbanization efforts enacted epistemic violence through the process of defining what to know, how to know it, and to what end. The digitalizing para-state's experiment with smart urbanism highlights the unexpected turns, contradictions, and enduring effects of epistemic violence that emerge when the smart city intersects with the messiness of everyday life.