This paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure to understand the entangled histories of railroad colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and corporate power in the California desert. I examine debates over the Cadiz project, a contemporary water project that proposes to take water from a California desert aquifer and transport it to the California coast. I argue that the life of the Cadiz project depends on Cadiz Inc.’s ability to revive the legal rights and body of a little-used railroad shortline, thus bringing back a legal infrastructure and corporate power from the late nineteenth century in the service of a new corporation. In so doing, the Cadiz project enlivens the racialized dispossession of land and labor that the railroad initially required. Routing the politics of a contemporary infrastructure project through the railroad and its octopus past, I argue, places the politics of infrastructure at the intersection of laws, monstrosity, and dispossession. Drawing on economic and legal geography, this paper proposes the concept of zombie infrastructure, a concept that builds on what activists call zombie projects in order to show the life and death of infrastructure, and reveals how contemporary capitalists enliven old infrastructures for new purposes.

本文提出了僵尸基础设施的概念，以了解加利福尼亚沙漠中铁路殖民主义、土著剥夺和企业权力的纠缠历史。我研究了关于 Cadiz 项目的辩论，这是一个当代的水利项目，提议从加利福尼亚沙漠含水层中取水并将其输送到加利福尼亚海岸。我认为 Cadiz 项目的生命周期取决于 Cadiz Inc. 能否恢复一条很少使用的铁路短线的合法权利和主体，从而从 19 世纪后期恢复法律基础设施和公司权力，以服务于一家新公司。通过这样做，加的斯项目使铁路最初要求的对土地和劳动力的种族化剥夺更加活跃。我认为，通过铁路及其过去的章鱼来路由当代基础设施项目的政治，将基础设施政治置于法律、怪物和剥夺的交叉点。本文借鉴经济和法律地理学，提出了僵尸基础设施的概念，这一概念建立在激进主义者所谓的僵尸项目之上，以展示基础设施的生与死，并揭示当代资本家如何为新目的而活化旧基础设施。