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Abstract

In November of 2021, the City of Albuquerque broke ground on the Albuquerque Rail Trail— a placemaking-style pedestrian and cycling path along the railroad corridor. Aiming to “change the landscape” of Downtown, generate “shared prosperity,” and “catalyze redevelopment,” the Rail Trail quite literally builds on landscapes of mobility undergirding previous developmental waves. Subtending former El Camino Real, AT&SF Railway, and Route 66 pathways, the Rail Trail is— in its own terms— the “next expression” of these “essential” tracks. However, taking seriously the Trail’s narrated telos of mobility-oriented (re)vitalization requires attention to the material landscaping beneath it. Through the lens of “overhaul”— a routine AT&SF locomotive maintenance procedure involving complete disassembly and reassembly, required for smooth mobility— this paper examines Indigenous dispossession as a requisite for settler mobility and futurity in Albuquerque. Refusing the innocence of retrofit, overhaul flags the systems of rupture and detachment that propel Albuquerque’s nominally inclusive developmental “metabolism"— one that upholds propertied forms of settler possession. As cities increasingly lay groundwork for rail-to-trail projects, overhaul emerges as a critical lens through which to parse the relationship between the renovation of urban space and the preservation of settler logics.

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