Ecological Crisis and Cultural

Representation in Latin America

 Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, California Institute of Integral Studies, USA

Advisory Board:
Joni Adamson, Arizona State University, USA; Mageb Al-adwani, King Saud University,
Saudi Arabia; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Hannes Bergthaller, National
Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Iza-
bel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Univer-
sity of Kansas, USA; Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University, USA; Simão
Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; Julia Fiedorczuk, University of
Warsaw, Poland; Camilo Gomides, University of Puerto Rico—Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico;
Yves-Charles Grandjeat, Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3 University, France; George
Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Neth-
erlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, Univer-
sity of Turin, Italy; Adrian Ivakhiv, University of Vermont, USA; Daniela Kato, Zhong-
nan University of Economics and Law, China; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava,
Czech Republic; Mohammad Nasser Modoodi, Payame Noor University, Iran; Patrick
Murphy, University of Central Florida, USA; Serpil Oppermann, Hacettepe University,
Turkey; Rebecca Raglon, University of British Columbia, Canada; Anuradha Ramanujan,
National University of Singapore, Singapore; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Ros-
tock, Germany; Marian Scholtmeijer, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada;
Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicher-
ry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche,
North-West University, South Africa; Julia Tofantšuk, Tallinn University, Estonia; Jenni-
fer Wawrzinek, Free University of Berlin, Germany; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong Uni-
versity, China; Yuki Masami, Kanazawa University, Japan; Hubert Zapf, University of
Augsburg, Germany

Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of

literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue be-
tween academics and environmental activists.

Recent Titles

Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America, edited by Mark Ander-
son and Zélia M. Bora
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digm, edited by Matthew J.C. Cella
 Ecological Crisis and Cultural
Representation in Latin America

Ecocritical Perspectives
on Art, Film, and Literature

Edited by
Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora

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In memory of Anthony Carrigan,
who inspired us as an ecocritic
and as a person
 Table of Contents

Introduction: The Dimensions of Crisis ix

Mark Anderson

Section 1: Declarations of Ecological Crisis 1

1 Latin America in the World-Ecology: Origins and Crisis 3
Sharae Deckard
2 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 21
Juanita C. Aristizábal
3 Anthropomorphism and Arboricide: The Life and Death of
Trees in the American Tropics 45
Lesley Wylie
4 The “Brevity of the Planet”: Environmental Loss in Recent
Poetry by Contemporary Amazonian Writers 63
Jeremy Larochelle

Section 2: Representational Crises 77

5 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell”: The
Gothic Ecologies of the “Mexican Miracle” 79
Kerstin Oloff
6 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth: Mexico
City in the Anthropocene 99
Mark Anderson
7 A Crisis in Environmental Representation: In-Depth
Reporting in a Brazilian Magazine 125
Simão Farias Almeida
8 The Languages of Ecological Crises in Brazilian
Documentary and Fiction 137
Zélia M. Bora
9 Ecozones of the North and the South: Models of
Development, Extractive Practices, and Tensions in Freedom
and eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición 149
Mirian Carballo

vii
viii Table of Contents

Section 3: Decolonial Ecologies 177

10 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics: The Wirikuta Case 179
Abigail Pérez Aguilera
11 Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in
Jaime Huenún’s Reducciones 199
Ida Day
12 Animales de alquiler: Challenging the Architectures of
Domination 217
Ana Avalos and María Victoria Sánchez
13 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat: Ecological Crisis and
Posthuman Subjectivities in Mempo Giardinelli’s Imposible
equilibrio 235
Diana Dodson Lee

Section 4: Ongoing Crises 255

14 Amazonia: Looking for the Earthly Eden and Finding the
Planet’s Next Landfill 257
Diego Mejía Prado, Juan Carlos Galeano, and Herman Ruiz
Abecasis
15 The Nicaragua Canal and the Shifting Currents of
Sandinista Environmental Policy 269
Adrian Taylor Kane
16 Tourism, Ecology, and Changing US-Cuba Relations 277
Marcela Reales Visbal

Afterword: The Self as Nonhuman Other 291

Zélia M. Bora
Bibliography 299
Index 321
About the Contributors 327
 Introduction
The Dimensions of Crisis

Mark Anderson

Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the

last few decades, driven home by dire warnings in the media from scien-
tists regarding the current and future effects of global climate change.
Concern about massive land cover change, habitat loss, species extinc-
tions, and the “end of nature” as an alternative or equilibrium to industri-
al modernization has become widespread. In the year 2000, the unprece-
dented scope of anthropogenic environmental transformations that have
occurred since the advent of the industrial revolution led scientists Paul
Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to publish their resounding, if initially
surreptitious proposal for the designation of a new geological time peri-
od called the “Anthropocene,” a term intended to capture the “central
role of mankind” in planetary geological and ecological processes since at
least the eighteenth century (17).
Ecofeminists and postcolonial scholars have debated the accuracy of
this characterization, noting that not all humanity is equally responsible
for either the carbon emissions that have led to anthropogenic climate
change, nor the terraforming activities that have wreaked havoc on envi-
ronments around the planet. Despite grounding the concept in empirical
evidence, Crutzen and Stoermer’s anachronistic wording exposes pos-
sible ethical failings in the proposal itself: that reference to “mankind”
was bound to raise contentions about the gendered, racialized social and
geopolitical structures that have underpinned these massive, global envi-
ronmental transformations, not to mention the implicit anthropocentric
negation of nonhuman agency in environmental history. 1 As Ben Dibley
writes, the notion of the Anthropocene “captures the folding of the hu-
man into the air, the sea, the soil, and DNA” (n. pag.). It thereby appears
to uphold the modern Western, colonial worldview in which “mankind”
possesses in not only an economic, but also a sexualized or even demonic
sense a passive and compliant planet. In contrast, the current tendency in
ecological thought is to recognize that human agency is only able to
account partially for history. 2 Setting aside ethical considerations and the
concerns of some scientists over a term that reduces an incredibly com-

ix
x Anderson

plex tangle of phenomena to a pop-science byword, however, the over-

whelming weight of scientific evidence regarding the global scale of hu-
man modifications of the earth’s ecosystems, land masses, atmosphere,
and bodies of water seems to uphold the argument that humans, as a
species, have become a kind of geological “force of nature,” even if we
are largely dependent on nonhuman organisms, chemical reactivity, and
machinery to carry out these transformations. 3 For many, this degree of
human agency represents an unmitigated ecological catastrophe; for oth-
ers, the culmination of religious, social, or evolutionary destiny.

ECOLOGICAL CRISIS FROM LATIN AMERICA

Objectively, there is undeniably an environmental crisis occurring on a

planetary scale that has manifested itself in Latin America in unprece-
dented habitat loss, deforestation, species extinctions, land cover change
due to the expansion of industrialized monoculture and mineral and
hydrocarbon extraction, erosion, melting glaciers, environmental toxicity,
and pollution in cities. 4 At the same time, the current situation can only
be seen as an intensification of processes and practices that have been
developing over centuries. Indeed, some scholars have argued that Latin
America, as a geopolitical region unified by the experience of Iberian
colonialism, is itself the product of ecological crisis. 5 As Anthony Carri-
gan points out, citing Kamau Brathwaite, the “ongoing effects of colonial-
ism” are social and environmental catastrophe, which Brathwaite cap-
tures in the powerful image of the “worldquake” (125). As natural as it
may seem, much of the landscape we know as Latin America today is
actually the result of catastrophic land cover changes wrought through
the dispossession and genocide of millions of indigenous people and the
implementation on a massive scale of extractive colonial land manage-
ment practices such as large-scale mining, sugarcane monoculture, and
cattle ranching. The majority of the cultures that are viewed as “tradition-
ally” Latin American have historically been deeply embedded in these
activities. 6
Furthermore, many of the extractive technologies and land manage-
ment practices that have now been implemented globally were devel-
oped initially in and/or for Latin America during the colonial and postco-
lonial periods, from technologies for export agriculture and mining to
specific methods of capital investment and liberal privatization. 7 As a
case in point, the nineteenth-century “green revolution” that sought to
replace forms of labor-intensive agriculture (largely reliant on slavery)
with more efficient production was made possible primarily through the
massive exportation to Europe of seabird guano fertilizer from the Peru-
vian and Chilean coasts, and it was the exhaustion of those resources that
led to the mid-twentieth-century green revolution in artificial fertilizers
 Introduction xi

and other agrochemicals (Miller 149–55). 8 Likewise, the “hollow frontier”

style of export agriculture developed in Latin America by industrial-scale
coffee growers and transnational agricultural corporations such as the
United Fruit Company has spread from Latin America to locations as far
flung as Southeast Asia and Equatorial Africa. This form of plantation
agriculture, which Miller compares to a blitzkrieg against environments,
is characterized by the clear-cutting of peripheral tropical forests, the
hasty implementation of industrialized plantations, the massive use of
agrochemicals, and then decamping to new sites within a few decades to
escape the spread of pathogens, rising toxicity, labor organization, and
the exhaustion of soil nutrients (Miller 131–35). In the late twentieth cen-
tury, moreover, Latin America served as the laboratory for the neoliberal
economic policies and extractive practices, often implemented violently
through military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, that have now taken
hold globally. In this sense, the legacy of colonial extractivism has contin-
ued unabated from the sixteenth century until the present, with only brief
and partial respites such as the period of widespread import substitution
industrialization from the 1930 worldwide economic crisis up until
World War II. By exporting its profits abroad, this colonial economy of
extraction produces local poverty (as a reserve of cheap labor) and toxic
bodies while it also impoverishes environments, depleting their re-
sources, biodiversity, and cultural and moral value (Castro Herrera 2).
Latin America has undeniably suffered a long history of economic
exploitation and environmental crisis, but the current state of affairs
seems different. Past crises were often viewed as relatively isolated inci-
dents that affected only very specific, local geographies, even if the pat-
tern of extractive practices was evident across national and regional bor-
ders. Causes and effects were visible, traceable to identifiable, local
sources, despite often being owned and operated by transnational corpo-
rations: an oil spill from the derrick up the road, water contamination
from an Andean gold mine, corrupt politicians illegally exporting Ama-
zonian hardwoods. In contrast, intensified globalization has caused local
disasters to become “nonlinear in causation and discontinuous in both
space and time, rendering them inherently unpredictable and substan-
tially less amenable to traditional methods of observation, change, and
adaptation” (Oliver-Smith 45). Up until at least the 1970s, moreover, en-
vironmental crisis was buffered by the trope of nature, the notion of
unlimited, inexhaustible environment. Except for those who were af-
fected directly by local environmental problems, crisis appeared mini-
scule, minor when compared to the infinite scale of nature. For this rea-
son, environmental crises have traditionally been viewed from Latin
America through the lens of socioeconomic theory, as economic crises,
political conflicts, and human rights abuses.
Due to the legacy of colonialism, nevertheless, land has historically
occupied a central position in Latin American sociopolitical discourse, if
xii Anderson

usually as an abstract term denoting property rights. Barring a few excep-

tions, only relatively recently (in the last three decades) has it become
common for Latin American thinkers to acknowledge explicitly the eco-
logical specificity of the land conflicts in question. In short, Latin
American intellectuals only very exceptionally represented environmen-
tal crisis as ecological crisis: that is, as a systemic failure in the relations
between people and their environments at the planetary scale. Modernity
as a utopian global future was rarely questioned from either the political
left or the right; environmental crisis was most often portrayed as an
issue of uneven development, of some workers and some environments
lacking adequate safeguards and legal protections that would surely be
implemented as the Latin American nations moved further along the
road to full modernization.
In contrast, the current crisis seems unlimited in scope: there is no end
in sight, no clear geographical borders, and modernity, at least as it has
been envisioned up until now, seems unlikely to provide viable solutions
to the environmental problems it has generated. Planetary carbon levels
have risen above 400 ppm for the first time in human history and the
consequences of sea level rise and altered weather patterns are having
drastic effects worldwide, even in areas with little or no industrializa-
tion. 9 Global warming has already been linked with a 20 percent to 35
percent reduction in glacier volume in the Peruvian Andes since the
1960s, leading to food insecurity and water scarcity not only for the area’s
primarily indigenous inhabitants, but also for transnational mining cor-
porations, coastal cities, and industrialized agriculture (World Bank 57).
Likewise, ocean acidification is devastating fisheries throughout Latin
America, while temperature fluctuations, the spread of pathogens,
droughts, and flooding are seriously affecting crop yields and livestock
(World Bank 66–69, 75–78). In the midst of globalization, environmental
crisis can no longer be viewed as a local or even regional phenomenon,
nor as something that affects only nonhuman nature.
The notion of Anthropocene reveals the degree to which ecological
crisis has come to dominate the global environmental imagination. The
conceptualization of an anthropogenic geological epoch represents the
culmination of nearly two centuries of concern about the effects of indus-
trialization for “nature” at a global scale. 10 As Bill McKibben had already
proclaimed a few years earlier in The End of Nature (1989), recapitulating a
long series of US declarations of ecological crisis that go back at least as
far as Fairfield Osborn’s racially charged Our Plundered Planet (1948), the
capitalization of environments has reached unprecedented levels over
the last several decades, leading to a situation in which it has become
increasingly difficult to imagine wilderness, in the North American/Euro-
pean colonial sense of environments that appear untouched by human
hands, or nature at all, at least as it has usually been conceived in West-
ern humanism. 11 Beyond fin de siècle anxieties about the end of the
 Introduction xiii

world, the transnational circulation of commodities, people, industrial

waste, and pollution has led to the near complete disintegration of the
conceptual shielding in which some environments seemed untouched by
history, beyond the reach of modernity. In today’s world, at least, nature
can only be conceived of through loss, through the optics of ecological
crisis, as what remains of a broken whole. 12 At the same time, authors
like Enrique Dussel and Stuart Sim prognosticate that the end of nature
also hails the collapse of modernity, as industrial “progress” becomes
unsustainable and exhausts itself in the production of economic and eco-
logical wastelands or “vertederos,” in Gisela Heffes’ idiom. 13 On the oth-
er hand, Idelber Avelar argues that “throughout the twentieth century,
nature has been a constant presence in the humanities, but only negative-
ly, as the object of an operation of denaturalization” (8). From this per-
spective, modernity itself is viewed as a cultural process whose goal is
the erasure of nature in order to permit the emancipation and full emer-
gence of the (Western) human.
In this scenario, Mexican environmental philosopher Enrique Leff’s
assertion, also in 2000, that “environmental crisis is the crisis of our time”
seems wholly justified (“Pensar” 7). Leff’s language underscores not only
the contemporaneousness and urgency of environmental crisis, but also
the threat it poses to a particular way of viewing time. The concept of
ecological crisis denotes a degree of environmental degradation that
verges on irreversible collapse (the destruction of the oikos), which can
only be determined through comparisons with the past, but also a rup-
ture within a logos, that is, a way of conceiving our relationships with the
environments that we inhabit as the product of rational, historical conti-
nuity. The logic that underpins the historical imagination, binding to-
gether events in meaningful chains of causality, has begun to disintegrate
(Chakrabarty 220–22). The global scale of ecological crisis thus places into
question the modern, positivist myth of history as human progress, as a
linear evolution toward the telos of full human agency, that is, total
knowledge of and domination over the material universe. 14 As Leff
frames the matter:
Esta crisis se nos presenta como un límite en lo real que resignifica y
reorienta el curso de la historia: límite de crecimiento económico y
poblacional; límite de los desequilibrios ecológicos y de las capacidades
de sustentación de la vida; límite de la pobreza y la desigualdad social.
Pero también crisis del pensamiento occidental: de la ‘determinación
metafísica’ que al pensar el ser como ente, abrió la vía a la racionalidad
científica e instrumental que produjo la modernidad como un orden
cosificado y fragmentado, como formas de dominio y control sobre el
mundo. (“Pensar” 7)

(This crisis presents itself to us as a limit within the Real that resignifies
and reorients the course of history: the limits of economic and popula-
xiv Anderson

tion growth; limits of ecological imbalances and the possibilities for

sustaining life; limits of poverty and social inequalities. But also a crisis
within Western thought: of the “metaphysical determination” that, by
conceiving of being as entity, set the course for the instrumentalist
scientific rationality that produced modernity as an objectifying and
fragmenting order, as a form of domination and control over the
world.) 15
For Leff, the temporal limits imposed by environmental crisis generate a
crisis within the modern subject; forced to contemplate a kind of species-
wide “finitude,” to borrow Heidegger’s language, new forms of thought,
subjectivity, and agency must arise. The conjunction between the objec-
tivity of environmental crisis and the crisis of the modern subject thus
gives rise to ecological crisis, a fundamental reappraisal of our position
with respect to our environments at every scale.
From a more directly materialist angle, Jorge Reichmann coincides
with Bruno Latour in viewing ecological crisis as a temporal disjunction
in which modernity’s hyperbolic velocity (in terms of communications,
production, and transportation) has opened an irreparable breach with
the body’s biorhythms and planetary geochemical cycles. 16 The formerly
inconceivable rates of extraction of natural resources, production, and
transportation of goods and the near instantaneous global transmission
of information lead to a metabolic rift, in which entropy is accelerated as
energy sources become depleted without the possibility of regenerating
through natural carbon cycles. 17 This temporal disjunction is also en-
twined with a spatial disjunction, evident in the asymmetric geographical
distribution of the causes and effects of ecological crisis, which mirrors
the global map of unequal development. Upon imposing the geopolitical
divide between the first and the third worlds, development discourse
simultaneously generated this temporal disjunction in which sustainable
forms of production working within ecological cycles were framed as
symptomatic of “atraso” (backwardness), of being out of sync with mod-
ernity, that is, the future of humanity.
Planetary ecological crisis thus entails not only the total sum of envi-
ronmental destruction and the loss of biodiversity provoked by the im-
plementation of the homogenizing capitalist world-ecology, as Jason
Moore terms it, but also a fundamental crisis in worldview—the “end of
nature” as an entity separate from culture and perhaps even the end of
humanity as a historical intellectual construct (Danowski and Viveiros
12). 18 As Dipesh Chakrabarty points out, “we humans never experience
ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the
existence of a species, but never experience it as such” (220). Dialoguing
with Chakrabarty, Idelber Avelar draws on Agamben and Derrida to
emphasize that the human itself, particularly in its modern conceptual-
ization, is the result of a process of intellectual “denaturalization” whose
end product is culture (8). From the point of view of humanism, human-
 Introduction xv

ity is the end product of history, the emancipation of culture from the
contingencies of place as it becomes universal, enveloping and explaining
all manifestations and relations of the species, no matter their context.
Nature is the horizon of this division, and biology is its most assiduous
tool, generating that horizon at the molecular level, where DNA becomes
the script that both produces and explains all living things, but is legible
only to human scientists. Ecological crisis—the prospect of the end of
nature—threatens this projected future of total knowledge of nature’s
scripts, the divine destiny of humanity. And humanity cannot be con-
ceived of in the absence of its collective cultural project to dominate na-
ture.
This rupture within the modern humanist imaginary also manifests
itself as a human rights crisis. Under pressure from crisis, the discourse of
species progress and solidarity begins to ring vacuous. As DeLoughrey
and Handley point out, framing the Anthropocene as a species-wide “hu-
man” disaster “has made it possible for countless individual perpetrators
of environmental wrong to hide their actions in the midst of the complex-
ity and collectivity of global processes and thus escape accountability”
(26). Sharae Deckard, citing Jason Moore’s preference for the term “Capi-
talocene,” further develops this point in her essay for this volume, writ-
ing that “symbolically, to name the contemporary crisis of climate change
after the whole species (anthropos) would be to efface the long social
histories of exploitation of both human and extra-human natures that
underlie our current moment and to perpetuate the Cartesian view of
human activity as external to nature. Furthermore, it is to imply that the
species as a whole is biologically doomed to environmental destruction
and to obscure the fact that the humans do not perpetuate ecological
degradation at equal rates across the globe.” In this scenario, humanistic
discourse obscures the real causes and effects of environmental and social
crises under the blanket of species equality.
As environments become increasingly precarious or even uninhabit-
able, moreover, people are displaced on a massive scale, leading to inten-
sified conflict over territory, resources, and political power. These dis-
placed people are often treated as exiles from legality; their exterritorial-
ization transforms them into Agamben’s dehumanized “bare” bodies,
bereft not only of citizenship, but of the most basic human rights. They
find themselves in situations in which they are often subjected to legal
and extralegal violence, incarceration, enslavement, and even death, en-
acted by states as well as individuals. When a collective future can no
longer be conceived, the universality of the human is rescinded from
practice. The declaration of ecological crisis thus obligates us to contem-
plate an end to history quite different from that imagined by either Fran-
cis Fukuyama in his triumphant proclamation of the end of social conflict
under the benign reign of neoliberal capitalism in The End of History and
the Last Man (1992) or that of the socialist workers’ egalitarian industrial
xvi Anderson

paradise that Marx and Engels envisioned as the final stage of economic
history.
As Crutzen and Stroemer’s timeline hints and Jason Moore argues
explicitly, the Anthropocene may well be the product of the capitalist
world-ecology, the only global future that can be extrapolated from the
last few centuries of capital expansion and the current lived environment
of neoliberal consensus. 19 The modern world-ecology exploited the gaps
between local ecologies and the global imaginary, corralling “nature” in
touristic preserves or on the remote borders of capital expansion, where it
remained in reserve as a source of future raw materials. Ironically
enough, nature thus functioned as a key component in this homogeniz-
ing world-ecology: it was the promise of a beyond to development that
belied the need for regulation, to impose limits to extraction and exploita-
tion. As Moore writes, “capital’s dynamism turns on the exhaustion of
the very webs of life necessary to sustain accumulation; the history of
capitalism has been one of recurrent frontier movements to overcome
that exhaustion, through the appropriation of nature’s free gifts hitherto
beyond capital’s reach” (“Ecology” 110). Nature was thus both the condi-
tion for and the beyond to capitalism.
On the other hand, if, as Marx postulated and Giovanni Arrighi dem-
onstrated in depth, capitalism produces crises of various kinds—infla-
tionary and deflationary crises due to fluctuations in production, crises of
unemployment and migration that lower labor costs, financial crises that
redistribute wealth from the middle to the upper classes, and so on—in
the push to maximize capital accumulation, it does not seem at all out-
landish to postulate that it has generated environmental crisis not merely
as a disagreeable by-product of economic growth (capital expansion), but
also as a machine for capitalizing on nature itself. 20 As established mar-
kets become saturated, economic growth requires reductions in produc-
tion costs, the development of new products, and the generation of new
markets. Marginal environments become the frontiers of capital expan-
sion in the search for low-cost raw materials, energy, and labor and as
future markets, but also as commodified tourist destinations. For envi-
ronments to become marketable commodities, their human inhabitants
must be displaced, supply must be restricted, and they must be priva-
tized, whether as reserves of future capital or as services (as in the case of
private concessions in “national” parks or carbon credits). As Ivan Scales
points out, following Karl Polanyi and David Harvey, when “natural”
environments were overly abundant, they were commodified as “land,”
but as they became scarce, capitalism generated new technologies and
institutions dedicated to capitalizing “nature” itself as a “fictitious” or
intangible commodity whose value is virtual rather than the concrete
product of labor (228). In short, the fewer environments that can be
branded “nature” (certain aesthetic and demand requirements must be
met) remaining and the more collective access to them can be restricted,
 Introduction xvii

the more valuable they become as reserves of future wealth, as revenue-

generating conservation easements and/or carbon credits, and as pre-
mium tourist destinations. In this sense, the growing environmental crisis
has generated a vast “green” economy around nature that is clearly not
sustainable in either environmental or economic terms, as it requires re-
striction not only of supply, but of materiality itself to function.
If neoliberal capitalism is currently the face of environmental apoca-
lypse, however, communist governments in the Soviet Union and China
also presided over some of the world’s worst environmental degradation
and disasters. 21 Similarly, all three of the Latin American nations listed
among the ten countries with the highest rates of deforestation in the
world during the decade from 2000 to 2010, Brazil (first on the list), Boliv-
ia (ninth), and Venezuela (tenth), had left-leaning governments during
the majority or all of the decade studied; they relied primarily on unsus-
tainable natural resource extraction to pay for social programs. 22 Further-
more, twentieth-century communism’s international focus promoted a
kind of socialist globalization that seems at best only marginally more
sustainable (in environmental terms) than neoliberal globalization: the
exchange of Cuban sugar for Soviet oil, machinery, and wheat, for exam-
ple, or more recently, that of Venezuelan oil and Argentinean genetically
modified soybeans for Chinese manufactured products. Whether in their
capitalist or socialist forms, modern thought and economic practices ap-
pear to be brushing up against or even have surpassed their environmen-
tal limits.

RESCALING CRISIS

As Dipesh Chakrabarty argued in “The Climate of History” while dis-

cussing Alan Weismann’s thought experiment The World without Us, the
conceptualization of crisis itself poses a challenge to the ability to imagine
history: “the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the present that
disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the
grasp of historical sensibility” leading to a situation in which “our histori-
cal sense of the present . . . has thus become deeply destructive of our
general sense of history” (197). As continuity between human history and
the planet’s future becomes increasingly unimaginable, humanity’s fu-
ture is limited to the Anthropocene, a geological period whose inevitable
close (all geological periods end eventually) entails the extinction of the
human species and, like Gabriel García Marquéz’s Buendía family, the
erasure of all traces of its passage from the face of the earth. 23 “O nosso
presente é o Antropoceno. Este é o nosso tempo,” write Danowski and
Viveiros de Castro, “um presente sem porvenir, um presente passivo (our
present is the Anthropocene. This is our time, a present without a future,
a passive present; 16). The sense of historical agency is lost as the present
xviii Anderson

loses its character as event, as a historical juncture in which human agen-

cy may intervene to shape the future. The rate of change accelerates so
quickly that we come to feel mere spectators of a process that we our-
selves initiated, and discourse, without an event in which to intervene, is
relegated to mere chronicle of the immediate past: “tudo o que pode ser
dito sobre a crise climática se torna, por definição, anacrônico, desfasado”
(everything that can be said about the climate crisis becomes, by defini-
tion, anachronistic, out of sync; Danowski and Viveiros 19). Out of time,
history has been exhausted, consumed by change: “o que tudo isso su-
gere é que aquela aceleração do tempo—e a compressão correlativa do
espaço—vista usualmente como uma condição existencial, psicocultural,
da época contemporânea, acabou por extravasar, sob uma forma objetiva-
mente paradoxal, da história social para a história biogeofísica” (what all
this suggests is that this acceleration of time—and the corresponding
compression of space—in the contemporary period, which is usually
viewed as an existential or psychocultural condition, ended up overflow-
ing, in an objectively paradoxical way, from social history into biogeo-
physical history; Danowski and Viveiros 25). In this reading, ecological
crisis disrupts the historical imagination, displacing it from social history
onto the scale of geological time and causing it to fail in its labor to
relegate the past to the past and project a future.
In its most extreme versions, human life on earth itself is conceived of
as an ecological catastrophe, as the boundaries of the Anthropocene are
pushed back in time from the industrial revolution to the Neolithic revo-
lution or even earlier, to the megafauna hunters of the Pleistocene who
set fire to the savannahs to trap their prey, likely hunting them to extinc-
tion. 24 When viewed through the lens of disaster, the beginning can only
be conceived of as the beginning of the end (Danowski and Viveiros 32).
In this way, humanity itself comes into question in the convergence of
human and environmental history, and the restoration of time seemingly
requires the exhaustion and elimination of history. The Anthropocene is
an epoch without time, an end to the possibility of human history. This
paradox gives rise to a religious sense of living in the end times. Of
course, geological time will continue without us, but it will no longer
have any meaning without human witnesses to its passage.
Ecological crisis is a matter not only of time, however, but also of
space, or more particularly, of scale. The scope of the environmental
modifications that have been carried out worldwide is quite literally in-
conceivable, nor can these changes be accurately measured in real time,
even through the use of satellite surveys and other advanced scientific
tools. As Sharae Deckard points out, commenting on a passage by Rob
Nixon, globality is in itself unimaginable due to its vast spatial and tem-
poral scale; approaching the global produces a “failure of geographical
imagination” (“Editorial” 6). To go beyond the vacuity and false protago-
nism that Mary Louise Pratt diagnoses in the use of the term “globaliza-
 Introduction xix

tion,” more sophisticated forms of cartographic modeling must be en-

gaged to bridge the gaps between the local and the planetary, whether
that of computer models, data visualization techniques, or, more tradi-
tionally, artistic representation. 25 As Deckard writes, “given that the
world-ecology is a thoroughly differentiated physical environment di-
vided between zones of production in cores and peripheries, in which
peripheral environments endure intensified resource extraction, waste
outsourcing, and environmental degradation, developing a critical vo-
cabulary which can register the systemic nature of combined and uneven
development across the planet seems an urgent task” (“Editorial” 8). The
first-world strategy of outsourcing natural resource extraction and the
most toxic forms of industrial production to “underdeveloped” nations,
effectively exporting its own environmental catastrophes abroad, al-
lowed crisis to be envisioned in ambiguous terms, as far away, as the
distant product of someone else’s mismanagement of local environments
(Nixon 35). 26 Now, however, the scale and complexity of Latour’s nature-
culture hybrid problems or Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, ranging
from emissions into the atmosphere and oceans to the global use of toxic
pesticides in export agriculture, do not permit the clear divisions between
the global, the local, and the body that modern thought and economic
practices instituted in the world order. 27 As Derek Woods argues, under-
standing the causes of the Anthropocene means disentangling the “dis-
tributed agency” of an assemblage that is not uniquely human, but rather
a system of human and nonhuman actors (including organisms but also
machines and chemicals) that traverses scales to which the human has
limited or no direct access (139).
Representation thus becomes one of the key problems in ecological
crisis. Pragmatic solutions seem impossible when the dimensions of crisis
exceed our abilities to conceive of them. Despite the paralyzing scope of
the current crisis, however, Patrick Murphy notes that the trope of crisis
in discourse is effectively a declaration of urgency that places an ethical
imperative on the reader/listener/spectator (20–21). Unlike pastoral na-
ture writing, which “takes the reader out of time,” crisis serves in narra-
tive as a Bakhtinean chronotope, drawing time and space together in the
reader’s present and compelling her to take a stance (Murphy 20–21). In
this sense, simply declaring crisis concretizes it, scaling it to the reader’s
level, and restoring at least a modicum of historical agency. Entering into
the horizon of crisis, even if only symbolically (through reading), places
the reader in a position in which she is forced to question her own conti-
nuity as the subject of her self in at least two senses. First, she confronts
the possibility of a traumatic future in which she has become her own
dismembered other due to the experiences of loss, suffering, and death
that crisis threatens. The uncertainty of crisis means that her future self
can only be imagined as unrecognizable and incoherent with her present.
xx Anderson

At the same time, encountering the suffering bodies of geographical

others, even through reading, poses a threat to the dialogical self. If sub-
jectivity can only develop through a dialogic relationship with the other,
necessarily incorporating the traces (language, stories, memory, and so
on) of uncountable others during the continual process of subject forma-
tion, the losses and suffering experienced by the other also threaten the
subject with loss and dissolution. “A subject is a hostage,” writes Levinas
(“Substitution” 101). The encounter with the vulnerable other places us in
a precarious position, and stability can only be imagined by addressing
the other’s vulnerability, whether through affirmation, negation, or anni-
hilation (Butler 26–33). As Levinas phrases it, “one has to respond to
one’s right to be, not by referring to some abstract and anonymous law,
or judicial entity, but because of one’s fear for the Other” (“Ethics” 82). In
this way, crisis becomes embodied at the reader’s own coordinates irre-
spective of her geographical location, and only in assuming an ethical
stance can the future be restored to the subject.
Furthermore, the reader must necessarily recognize that ecological cri-
sis—conceived of as a state of generalized precariousness—exists not
only for her and her locality, but also for seemingly infinite others spread
across the planet, others with whom she has little or no identification
beyond shared vulnerability. And these others are not only human oth-
ers: as Avelar notes, the rift within the humanist imaginary provoked by
ecological crisis, the devaluation of the human as an absolute category,
has opened up the legal field to broader rights that include the more-
than-human world (16–18). He cites the examples of the Bolivian and
Ecuadorian constitutions of 2008 and 2009, both of which grant environ-
ments and nonhuman nature status as legal subjects endowed with rights
(17). Similarly, he notes that in recent litigation in Brazil over the Belo
Monte dam on the Xingu river, the public prosecutor argued that not
only were indigenous citizens’ constitutional and cultural rights being
infringed upon, but he also “explicitly called anthropocentric jurispru-
dence ‘outdated’ and, through an analogy with the 19th century expan-
sion of juridical status to slaves, argued that nature’s rights were being
violated” (17). Following this trend, Mexico City approved legislation to
protect the “rights of nature” in 2013. Yet Erin Fitz-Henry urges caution
when approaching the topic of the legal rights of nature, at least within
the Ecuadorian context, noting that although nature has been given stat-
us akin to “corporate personhood” in US politics, this form of legality
may also serve as a kind of cover for new extractivism (266). For Fitz-
Henry, the rights of nature constitute a gesture towards multicultur-
alism, recognizing the cultural traditions and religious beliefs of Ecua-
dor’s indigenous peoples, but they do not necessarily place those people
in a legal position to assert those rights when they run contrary to eco-
nomic modernization and development (266–67). Avelar, on the other
hand, frames this in more positive terms as the intersection of neoliberal
 Introduction xxi

multiculturalism with the Amerindian “multinaturalism” described by

Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in which humans,
animals, plants, and even some geological features are all assumed to
have their own perspective (subjectivity) and therefore to share a funda-
mental humanity that ties them together in a single society. 28
In any event, the cases cited by Avelar suggest that the confrontation
with representatives and representations of vulnerable human and non-
human collective others, up to and including entire ecosystems, can lead
to a reevaluation of ethical, political, and legal practices. But how does
this work at larger scales, particularly when national politics and legisla-
tion are often superseded by transnational trade agreements? Is the crisis
mechanism really sufficient to catalyze the development of an ethics ca-
pable of working across vast economic, cultural, political, and species
differences? Can the planet be conceived of as a vulnerable other in coun-
ter to the commodified “globe,” the inert object of neoliberal economic
planning and practices? If so, how does concern for local environments
and cultural groups intersect with the vastness of planetary ecological
crisis?
Without a doubt, one of the most important roles of cultural represen-
tations of ecological crisis must be rescaling. The end of history embed-
ded in the notion of the Anthropocene represents the culmination of the
abolition of scale in neoliberal globalization, but it also suggests that time
may be restored if scale is restored. In this sense, nearly all ecological
imaginations of an inhabitable future require some form of bioregional-
ism, of imagining sustainable living over time within local environments,
whether through indigenous frameworks such as buen vivir or Western
back-to-the-land projects. Bioregional cultural representations sketch out
multidimensional cartographies that are disruptive to the Euclidean glo-
bal imaginary of neoliberal capitalism: not only do they reinforce the
specificity of place as the complex entanglement of local environments
and sustainable cultural practices, but they also restore a sense of an
emplaced past and historical agency that is not solely human, but rather
that of ecological assemblages that must work together to construct a
livable future. 29
The recognition of global ecological crisis thus entails a coming into
awareness of the ways in which local environmental processes are inter-
connected not only artificially, as components that can be plugged into or
disconnected at will from globalized economic processes, but also
through migration, species succession, ocean currents, and atmospheric
patterns. Local environments cannot be understood as mere effects of
globality, as products or manifestations of global economic processes
cognized through theories that claim universal presence, but neither can
they be comprehended as discrete, self-contained, and static entities. Fur-
thermore, beyond its geographic coordinates, scale must also be appre-
hended in its volumetric sense as depth. I use depth in both the literal
xxii Anderson

usage of subterranean and atmospheric dimensions, but also in the sense

of historical depth, as human history but also that of species succession
and biodiversity. Scale can only be restored by taking into account local
particularities as they interact with translocal patterns of circulation,
stratification, and sedimentation.
The translocality of global ecological crisis leads to a reevaluation of
the meanings of the local as what is unplugged or disconnected from the
global, but it also makes visible the unsustainable absurdity of globaliza-
tion as a self-destructive way of imagining the planet. Indeed, Ericka
Beckman notes that crisis discloses the fictionality of capitalism as a
world-system: “the capitalist enterprise, even when presenting itself as
the only viable system—as the only ‘real’ in town—cannot help revealing
its imaginative and indeed fictive underpinnings, especially when in the
throes of crisis” (“An Oil Well” 146). Furthermore, it also reveals the
fictionality of the globe as a virtual configuration, inhabited by statistics
but not people (Spivak 71). As Jennifer Wenzel makes clear in her sum-
mary of David Harvey and Tim Ingold’s thought, “the globe is a
bounded, finite object that is visualized as external to the observer”; it is
“what one views from a worldview that can view the entire world” (20).
Following Spivak, Wenzel counters the globe with the planet as an infer-
ence and intermeshing of subaltern subjectivities, a “world-imagining
from below,” from the ground, in contrast to the “satellite or ‘bird’s eye,’
atmospheric, or aerial view” of global perspectives (20). As she sum-
marizes, “in an anti-capitalist, decolonizing, deconstructive reversal of
such [global] thinking, planetary would aim to reveal and undermine the
hegemony of the global; refusing to cede to capitalism the impulse to-
ward totality, but instead thinking totality otherwise, to rethink what it
means for the earth to have a shape like its own, to be a home for all,”
giving rise to “a better kind of borderlessness” in which “embedded, in-
dwelling ethics,” rather than capital, have no borders (21).
Scale is thus key in representations of environmental crisis, but there
is another representational problem that must be accounted for as well:
complexity. As Derek Woods argued in the passage cited above, follow-
ing Deleuze and Guattari, the invalidation of the anthropocentric concep-
tualization of “mankind” as the sole and unique subject of history means
recognizing that historical agency always runs through assemblages that
include humans, but that are more than human. People have never acted
alone; we are always accompanied, moving in concert with our microbes,
pathogens, domestic plants and animals, machines, and all the other
members (actants in Latour’s parlance) of the concrete environments that
persist even when we attempt to render them invisible through exclu-
sionary technologies or virtualization. As Enrique Leff argues, ecological
crisis forces us to rethink ourselves outside of the Manichean human/
nature binomial and recognize the complexity not only of the historical
agency of the species, but of our own bodies as non-essential parts of the
 Introduction xxiii

ecosystem. 30 For Leff, “la trascendencia hacia un futuro sustentable no

aparece como la retotalización del mundo en una conciencia emergente,
como finalidad del uno, sino como fecundidad del mundo desde la
disyunción del ser y el encuentro con el otro” (the transformation to a
sustainable future cannot happen as the retotalization of the world in an
emerging consciousness, as the singularity of the One, but only as the
fecundity of the world through the disjunction of being and the encoun-
ter with the other; 27). In his study of the cultures of the Pacific coast of
Colombia, Arturo Escobar captures this notion of inclusive ecological
assemblages through the description of place as embedded redes, or net-
works, a system of material relations that Tim Morton generalizes as “the
mesh,” a “radically open form without center or edge” (22). As Morton
summarizes, “there is no ‘outside’ of the system of life-forms” (24). From
the point of view of complexity, then, ecological crisis is not merely a
problem of the overexpansion of human agency, but of unintended and
unforeseeable interactions at all levels. Alterations in one area of the
mesh generate pushback in other areas, often giving rise to ecosystems
that are hostile or toxic to humanity—not purely artificial, not only out-
of-place human creations, but also the proliferation of pathogens, inva-
sive species, and so on. In this “ecological rationality,” diversity becomes
the prime organizing principle at all levels of life and thought.
The chapters in this volume focus on the complex, scalar relationships
between the local, the national, and globality as they are both experi-
enced and theorized from Latin America. We are particularly interested
in how local environmental crises in Latin American nations are wit-
nessed and imagined as part of a global system, that is, as part of the
Anthropocene, a global, anthropogenic ecological crisis directly linked to
the rise and expansion of liberal capitalism. We focus on the problems of
scale (in both time and geopolitical space) and complexity as key terms in
imagining the dimensions of crisis. The works we study chart the effects
of capitalization on Latin American environments and their inhabitants,
but also they also provide critical perspectives on ecologies at every scale.
The four chapters in the first section on “Declarations of Ecological
Crisis” examine the ways in which Latin American authors and filmmak-
ers witness and document local crises, as well as the scalar strategies that
they use to locate these crises as part of a system. These chapters scruti-
nize the specific conditions under which the trope of ecological crisis may
be invoked as a transformational tool. The section opens with Sharae
Deckard’s overview of “Latin America in the World-Ecology: Origins and
Crisis,” which details the historical positioning of Latin American envi-
ronments as commodity frontiers within the world economic system. Her
chapter promotes a “world-ecological” reading of Latin American cultu-
ral production as documenting and responding to the economic, environ-
mental, social, and cultural crises generated by historical waves of global
capital expansion. Juanita C. Aristizábal’s chapter on “Mythologies of
xxiv Anderson

Gold in Chocó” puts this methodology into practice, analyzing the roles
that gold and gold mining have played in a series of narratives in Colom-
bia, ranging from nationalism to modernity. She is particularly interested
in the complementarity of the symbolism of remoteness and tropical
abundance with relation to racialized labor exploitation and the econom-
ics of extraction on the Colombian Pacific Coast. Taking a similar “new
materialist” approach, Lesley Wylie’s “Anthropomorphism and Arbori-
cide: The Life and Death of Trees in the American Tropics” studies the
ways in which deforestation has been represented since the nineteenth
century in Latin America. Drawing on several canonical and lesser
known Latin American authors, her essay documents the fraught negoti-
ations between modern economic rationality and animistic perceptions of
trees as beings in their own right during various moments of Latin
American cultural history, among them independence, the end of the
nineteenth-century rubber boom, and the mid-twentieth century. In a
similar vein, Jeremy Larochelle’s “The ‘Brevity of the Planet’: Environ-
mental Loss in Recent Poetry by Contemporary Amazonian Writers”
studies the representational strategies engaged by poets from the Peru-
vian Amazon to respond to water pollution caused by unfettered urban-
ization and industrialization in Iquitos, Peru.
The second section deals more explicitly with the representational
challenges posed by ecological crisis, as well as new aesthetics and forms
of subjectivity that emerge from it. Kerstin Oloff’s “The ‘Monstrous
Head’ and the ‘Mouth of Hell’: The Gothic Ecologies of the ‘Mexican
Miracle’” undertakes an innovative rereading of the gothic aesthetics
present in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and Carlos Fuentes’ Aura
(1962). She locates these novels as a response to agricultural industrializa-
tion, rural displacement, and massive urbanization within the context of
the Green Revolution, which reshaped Mexican agriculture from the
1940s onwards in favor of commercial agriculture and the private sector,
with devastating social and environmental consequences. Despite their
heavy reliance on allegory, argues Oloff, both novels force us to reopen
the question of the relations between the material and the symbolic. Con-
tinuing this focus on the conceptualization of urban environments, Mark
Anderson’s “The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth: Mexico
City in the Anthropocene” examines several artistic and filmic represen-
tations that bring out the full volumetric aspects of the city’s ecological
and social footprint as a counter to the flattening effects of global geopoli-
tics and modern planning. He argues that literary and filmic representa-
tions of Mexico City’s underground and water cycles disrupt neoliberal
capitalism’s conceptual enclosures, leading the city’s inhabitants to con-
ceive of themselves as emplaced within a complex urban ecosystem rath-
er than living beyond nature.
Simão Farias Almeida’s “A Crisis in Environmental Representation:
In-Depth Reporting in a Brazilian Magazine” scrutinizes environmental
 Introduction xxv

reporting and the use of nature symbolism in Brazilian media reports

since the early twentieth century. Using a framework drawn from the
field of political ecology, Farias Almeida focuses on the dynamics be-
tween anthropocentric uses of nature imagery in political discourse and
awareness of ecological crisis, particularly as it relates to environmental
ethics. He argues that a representational crisis emerges in the contrast
between the media’s anthropocentric relegation of plants and animals to
symbols for human traits and social issues and environments’ own irre-
ducible properties; this disjuncture obligates the reader to address it,
thereby generating environmental awareness. Taking a similar approach,
Zélia Bora’s essay on “The Languages of Ecological Crises in Brazilian
Documentary and Fiction” contrasts the documentary impulse of a film
on murdered Brazilian rubber tapper and environmental activist Chico
Mendes with the use of fantasy to describe a dystopian future ecological
wasteland in Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s novel Não verás pais nenhum.
Bora’s contrasting of documentary and fantastic aesthetics draws out the
complementarity of apparently antagonistic modes of representation.
Taking a different tack, Mirian Carballo’s “Ecozones of the North and the
South: Models of Development, Extractive Practices, and Tensions in
Freedom and eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición” contrasts two different forms
for communicating ecological crisis, bringing to bear the geopolitical
North-South divide. Carballo shows how the protagonist of Jonathan
Franzen’s Freedom exemplifies historical tendencies in North American
environmentalism to focus on the individual coming into awareness of
ecological catastrophe, which he blames, in stereotypically North-
American fashion, on overpopulation. She then contrasts this style of
ecological bildungsroman with Argentinean theater collective BiNeural-
Monokultur’s play focusing on economic exploitation in globalized ex-
port agriculture (specifically, the GM soybean trade) as the root of ecolog-
ical crisis.
The third section draws on the first two in their focus on documenting
and representing ecological crisis in Latin America, but it centers more
directly on aesthetics and activism that seek to decolonize worldviews
and material practices, postulating alternative modernities. Abigail Pérez
Aguilera’s essay on “Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics: The Wiriku-
ta Case” examines the representational strategies that Mexico’s Wixaritári
(Huichol) people have used to amass sufficient cultural and political
agency to disrupt a series of mining projects planned by transnational
corporations at Wirikuta, a sacred site in their cosmology. Pérez Aguilera
shows how the Wixaritári’s thought and practices can serve as a model
for decolonization that works by drawing together what Marisol de la
Cadena has called “indigenous cosmopolitics,” that is, reaching out to
create broad alliances for resisting the capitalization of their lands and
culture, and recent feminist “new materialist” thought. In a similar vein,
Ida Day’s “Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Jaime
xxvi Anderson

Huenún’s Reducciones” places Latin America’s indigenous populations as

models for resistance against modern forms of economic and cultural
colonialism as well as for ecological subjectivities that counter extracti-
vism as a model of development. Day shows how mestizo Mapuche poet
Jaime Huenún rewrites Chilean history from the indigenous point of
view, thus disrupting modernity’s myth of progress and positing the
more-than-human sociality that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “Amer-
indian perspectivism” as the counter to Western anthropocentrism that is
absolutely necessary for a sustainable future.
Taking a different approach to decolonial thought, Ana Avalos and
María Victoria Sánchez’s “Animales de alquiler: Challenging the Architec-
tures of Domination” turns to critical animal studies to de-authorize the
colonial human/animal divide that has been used not only to exploit the
natural world but also to marginalize humans. Their essay undertakes a
close reading of Costa Rican filmmaker Pablo Ortega’s mockumentary
Animales de alquiler (Zootizens: A Natural Reserve for Wild Capitalism; 2010),
in which the government has decided to conserve the DNA of extinct
rainforest species by inserting it into the genome of human hosts. The
authors argue that the film’s portrayal of human-animal genetic hybrids
carries out a twofold function: deconstructing the human-nature hierar-
chy that underpins modern thought and economic practices and satiriz-
ing the Costa Rican government’s focus on capitalizing nature through
ecotourism as the answer to sustainable development, a solution that
becomes monstrous in this film. Similarly, Diana Dodson Lee’s “Hippo-
potami, Humans, and Habitat: Ecological Crisis and Posthuman Subjec-
tivities in Mempo Giardinelli’s Imposible equilibrio” analyzes the represen-
tation of misguided state environmental policies and animal rights acti-
vism through the lens of posthumanist theory in the Argentinean au-
thor’s satirical novel.
The final section of the book consists of brief chapters detailing ongo-
ing crises throughout Latin America as they are represented in the media
as well as by artists and writers. Diego Mejía Prado, Juan Carlos Galeano,
and Herman Ruiz Abecasis’ chapter “Amazonia: Looking for the Earthly
Eden and Finding the Planet’s Next Landfill,” details the ecological prob-
lems posed to Amazonian communities by modern patterns of consump-
tion, especially the widespread use of plastic in packaging, in an area in
which there are few safe trash dumps. The authors capture in vivid im-
agery the ways in which waste is transforming the Amazonian land-
scape. Adrian Kane discusses cultural reactions to the transoceanic canal
currently under way in Nicaragua, which many view as a dire threat to
the nation’s ecosystems, especially that of Lake Nicaragua. He focuses on
the discursive shift in Sandinista political rhetoric, which has veered
away from environmental justice toward a neoliberal lexicon of economic
development. In a similar vein, Marcela Reales Visbal discusses possible
social and environmental ramifications as Cuba’s economy opens to out-
 Introduction xxvii

side investment following US President Barack Obama’s relaxing of re-

strictions on travel and trade with the Caribbean nation, using as a model
the impacts of plantation and tourist industries on other Caribbean is-
lands. The second half of her essay discusses current cultural debate and
activism centering on this issue. Finally, Zélia M. Bora’s afterword ties
the chapters together under the aegis of environmental ethics. She argues
that ecological crisis provokes a reevaluation of the human in which we
come to conceive of ourselves as our own nonhuman others.
The chapters in this volume document the scope of environmental
crisis throughout Latin America, but they also frame crisis as a turning
point. Crisis is not the same as apocalypse, from which there is no return.
The works they study look to restore notions of scale and time, and
thereby provide lines of flight from the nihilistic optimism of the Anthro-
pocene as the geological era of humans, the triumphant end of humanity.
Instead, they view ecological crisis as the end of the project of the deifica-
tion of humanity and the beginning of a new history that re-emplaces
people within their environments as only one species among a host of
others, all living in complex, symbiotic relationships. These works pro-
mote a view of ecological crisis as a revolution, not in the sense of a
natural uprising against human order, as another species of nihilist
would have it, but rather as a cyclical return to the common sense of
material life as a life lived on a planet, not a globe.

NOTES

1. Ernesto O. Hernández summarizes the postcolonial point of view when he

writes that “climate change is not only anthropogenic in nature, but also specifically
the product of the industrialized West” (161). Of course, this line of argument is
weakened by the rise in emissions in China and India; nevertheless, there is no deny-
ing that most of the carbon intensive energy technologies that are responsible for this
increase were developed in the West.
2. See, for instance, Derek Woods’ “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” in which
he argues that “the scale-critical subject of the Anthropocene is not our species but the
sum of terraforming assemblages composed of humans, non-human species, and tech-
nics—technics in Bernard Stiegler’s sense of technical systems that ‘cannot be under-
stood as means’” (134).
3. See Whitney J. Autin and John M. Holbrook, “Is the Anthropocene an Issue of
Stratigraphy or of Pop Culture?”
4. There exists a very extensive bibliography on each of these specific facets of
environmental degradation. Due to the vast scope of the problem and the velocity of
the changes, however, there are few general overviews of environmental crisis in Latin
America. Daniel Faber provides a respectable summary of many of the issues as they
played out in the 1990s in his seminal introduction on “The Environmental Crisis in
Latin America” to the special number of Latin American Perspectives dedicated to the
topic. In Trouble in Paradise (2003), J. Timmons Roberts and Nikki Demetria Thanos
undertake a broad examination of the social and environmental effects of the spread of
neoliberal economic policies in Latin American nations during the 1990s. Likewise,
Shawn William Miller provides a good general overview in the final chapters of his An
Environmental History of Latin America (2007).
xxviii Anderson

5. Scott DeVries notes that as early as the sixteenth century, Bartolomé de las Casas
attacked the Spanish imperial “scorched earth” practices that accompanied the whole-
sale slaughter of the indigenous people of the Caribbean, which were transforming “la
más sana tierra del mundo” (the most salubrious lands in the world) into unproduc-
tive wastelands (190–91). Crosby, Melville, Gligo and Morello, and Pádua all provide
extensive evidence of these colonial ecosystemic disruptions and terraforming prac-
tices, many of which French summarizes concisely in “Voices in the Wilderness.” Of
course, many pre-Columbian indigenous peoples used extensive terraforming prac-
tices as well, some of which also led to environmental problems (see Miller’s chapter
on “An Old World Before It Was New” and McClung de Tapia’s article on deforesta-
tion and erosion in Mesoamerica).
6. For a compelling description of the degree to which sugarcane monoculture
infused everyday life in the Caribbean as well as its ecological effects, see Lizbeth
Paravisini Gebert’s “Bagasse.”
7. Mexico in particular has served as a test case for both nineteenth-century liberal
and twentieth-century neoliberal reforms, particularly regarding the procedures by
which foreign debt was leveraged into concessions to international trade and invest-
ment. In the nineteenth century, the unprecedented natural resource extraction by
transnational corporations under Porfirio Díaz was underpinned by liberal reforms
put in place by Benito Juárez and his colleagues, many of which had to do with the
privatization of untaxed communal and church lands in order to pay foreign debt
incurred during the wars for independence. Similarly, the conditions stipulated by the
World Bank for Mexico’s 1982 sovereign debt bailout led to the neoliberalization of the
economy in the 1990s and the 2000s.
8. See also Edward D. Melillo’s “The First Green Revolution.”
9. For a current measure of global carbon dioxide levels, consult the website Trends
in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Monitoring Divi-
sion.
10. This was already an issue of concern in the mid-nineteenth century, as much
Romantic poetry attests, and, early on, Marx linked the dispossession of communal
lands to the rise of industrial capitalism, since “free workers” first had to be sundered
from their dependence on the land in order to be available as industrial laborers (see
Capital, vol. 1, chapters 26 and 27).
11. As William Cronon argued famously in “The Trouble with Wilderness,” wilder-
ness in its modern conceptualization is the result of the depopulation of environments
inhabited by indigenous groups, and the erasure both of their claim to and their
presence from those environments. It is only in retrospect that what Rob Nixon calls
the “myth of empty lands” can be implemented through the intentional deployment of
historical and spatial “amnesia” (236–38). Ramachandra Guha goes even further, ar-
guing that what we now perceive as wilderness was primarily a colonial invention.
Wilderness reserves served as false evidence of historical emptiness: upon visiting a
wilderness reserve, second- and third-generation colonizers could infer that the lands
their ancestors had appropriated and occupied had been fundamentally empty, ripe
for the taking (Guha, Environmentalism 46–47). In the postcolonial period, further com-
ments Guha, national parks and wilderness reserves played an important role in sup-
plementing for cultural nationalism; the beauty of the land substituted for the lack of
an autonomous and extended cultural heritage (Environmentalism 53). Jennifer L.
French provides a concise summary of the problems inherent in translating the Eng-
lish term “wilderness” for Latin American environments and languages in “Voices in
the Wilderness.”
12. Following Jean-Paul Deleage, Daniel Faber points out that, “in the capitalist
economies of Latin America, ‘nature’ is the point of departure for production, but
typically not a point of return, particularly when it comes to waste and pollution”
(“Ecological Crisis” 5). As Guha shows, the notion of wilderness itself is intimately
bound up with that of reserve or park (Environmentalism 46–49). In that sense, the
 Introduction xxix

modern conceptualization of wilderness itself can only come about through the de-
cline of nature.
13. See Stuart Sim, End of Modernity; Enrique Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism: The
World-System and the Limits of Modernity”; and Gisela Heffes, Políticas de la
destrucción.
14. At the same time, Mary Louise Pratt, herself influenced by Joan Martínez Alier,
notes that the modern myth of progress is also disrupted by economic crisis and the
existence of “zones of exclusion” within the global economy, in which “enormous
sectors of humanity live with the awareness of being redundant and unnecessary to
the economic order, of having been expelled from all the narratives of an individual
and collective future that neoliberalism offers, and with no hope of entering (or reen-
tering) the order of production and consumption” (“Globalización” 15).
15. All translations are the author’s unless indicated otherwise.
16. See Jorge Reichmann, “Colisión de tiempos: La crisis ecológica en su dimensión
temporal.”
17. Regarding the concept of metabolic rift, see Jason Moore, “Ecology” 116.
18. Moore defines the “modern world system” as a “capitalist world-ecology,” a
“world-historical matrix of human- and extra-human nature premised on endless
commodification” (“Ecology” 107).
19. In “Putting Nature to Work,” Moore reframes the notion of the Anthropocene
within world economic history as the “Capitalocene.”
20. Sabbatella comes close to making this point when he discusses capitalism’s
production of a “constructed environment” or “second nature,” in Neil Smith’s termi-
nology (74). Regarding different types of crises produced by capitalism, see Marx’s
Capital, Vol. 1, pages 209, 235–36, 350–51, and 776–71. See also Moore’s discussion of
Arrighi in relation to “ecological surplus,” underproduction, and overproduction in
“Ecology, Capital, and the Nature of Our Times.”
21. See Coumel and Elie, “A Belated and Tragic Ecological Revolution: Nature,
Disasters, and Green Activists in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet States,
1960s–2010s,” and Kassiola and Guo’s edited volume on Environmental Crisis in China.
22. See the FAO Global Forest Resources Report regarding the rates of deforestation
and Veltmeyer and Petras’ The New Extractivism regarding the unsustainability of the
economic practices used by “New Left” governments to sustain their social programs,
most of which mirror neoliberal extractivism.
23. In justification of the “Anthropocene” as a valid geological period, Crutzen and
Stroemer argue that the human modifications of the environment are likely to last for
millenia or even millions of years (18).
24. For a summary of different historical horizons that have been proposed as the
beginning of the Anthropocene, see Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Historical and
Conceptual Perspectives.”
25. As Pratt notes, “el término globalización suprime el endendimiento y hasta el
deseo de entendimiento” (the term globalization suppresses comprehension and even
the desire to comprehend) due to its suppression of concrete political and economic
actors (“Globalización” 14).
26. For a Latin American perspective of this exporting of toxicity to Latin America,
see Luis Vitale, Hacia una historia del medio ambiente en América Latina 63.
27. See the introductory chapter of Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, aptly enti-
tled “crisis,” regarding these “hybrid problems” that defy disciplinary categorization
into the natural or the social sciences; and Morton’s book on Hyperobjects.
28. See also Jorge Marcone’s discussion of the indigenous cosmopolitics of buen
vivir (good/sustainable living) in “Filming the Emergence of Popular Environmental-
ism in Latin America.”
29. Regarding the history and meanings associated with the term “bioregionalism,”
see Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster’s introduction to The Biore-
gional Imagination.
30. See the prologue to Leff’s La complejidad ambiental.
xxx Anderson

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 Section 1

Declarations of Ecological Crisis

 ONE
Latin America in the World-Ecology
Origins and Crisis

Sharae Deckard

Integral to the emergence and evolution of the capitalist world-ecology,

Latin America has served both as the original “Great Frontier” for early
modern capitalist expansion and the contemporary site of intensified ap-
propriation of human and extra-human natures in the neoliberal era
(Webb xv). As Eduardo Galeano famously writes, Latin America is “the
region of open veins,” where the whole of nature has been transmuted
into capital and accumulated in distant centers of power: “everything: the
soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to
work and to consume, natural resources and human resources” (Open
Veins 2). The ecological power of Galeano’s metaphor lies in its imagina-
tion of the continent as a body whose life-force is perpetually being
drained away. The web of life in Latin America is indelibly shaped by
peripheral extraction for the benefit of cores: “production methods and
class structure have been successively determined from outside for each
area by meshing it into the universal gearbox of capitalism. To each area
has been assigned a function, always for the benefit of the foreign me-
tropolis of the moment” (Galeano, Open Veins 2). The social legacies of
centuries of colonialism are the sharp internal divisions between wealthy
small elites (usually white, European, or Westernized) who have profited
from export and the larger mass of impoverished peoples (indigenous,
black, or mestizo) who have suffered from the appropriation of their
lands and labor. Yet these relations can be understood not only as social

3
4 Deckard

and economic, but as ecological: reorganizations of nature/society dating

from the genesis of the capitalist oikeois.
Environmental historian Jason W. Moore uses oikeois to designate “the
creative, historical, and dialectical relation between, and also always
within, human and extra-human natures,” a concept that attempts to
transcend Cartesian dichotomies in favor of an understanding of nature
as the matrix in which human activity unfolds and the field upon which
historical agency operates (“From Object” 3). He argues that the capitalist
world-system should be understood not only as a world-economy, but as
a world-ecology, a “world-historical matrix of human and extra-human
nature premised on endless commodification” and constituted through
ecological regimes (Moore, “Ecology” 107). The world-ecological per-
spective of humanity-in-nature enables an extension of environmental
criticism beyond its usual boundaries to encompass the whole historical
range of regimes of organizing nature that constitute the capitalist oikeois.
Finance and maquiladoras, haciendas and mass urbanization, free trade
agreements and resource nationalism, global empires and world markets
are all forms of environment-making that knit together human relations
and extra-human processes, and are thus ripe for analysis with respect to
cultural form. Furthermore, the 500-year vantage point of the world-ecol-
ogy perspective, with its comparative attention to the diachronic and
synchronic scales of capitalism’s evolution, has particular cogency for
environmental studies of Latin America.
The rise of capitalism after 1450 was generated by an ecological revo-
lution in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature that
was made possible by an “epochal shift in the scale, speed, and scope of
landscape transformation” that tore across the American hemisphere, de-
vouring forests, mountains, and soils, flora, fauna, and humans (Moore,
“Capitalocene, Part I” 17). The early modern revolution in labor produc-
tivity within commodity production and exchange turned on the emer-
gence of new technics that constructed nature as external, space as flat and
geometrical, and time as linear and rational, thus rendering the uncom-
modified natures of the Americas ripe for appropriation:
One could conquer the globe only if one could see it. Here the early
forms of external nature, abstract space, and abstract time enabled capi-
talists and empires to construct global webs of exploitation and appro-
priation, calculation and credit, property and profit, on an unprece-
dented scale. The early modern labor productivity revolution turned,
in short, on the Great Frontier, understood simultaneously in land/
labor and symbolic registers. . . . Early capitalism’s technics—its crystal-
lization of tools and power, knowledge and production—were specifi-
cally organized to treat the appropriation of global spaces as the basis for
the accumulation of wealth in its specifically modern form: capital, the
substance of which is abstract social labor. (Moore, “Capitalocene, Part
I” 20–21)
 Latin America in the World-Ecology 5

The invention of new forms of expropriation of surplus human labor—

abstract social labor—were reliant on the appropriation of “cheap nature,”
the “diversity of human and extra-human activity necessary to capitalist
development but not directly valorized (‘paid’) through the money econ-
omy” (Moore, “Capitalocene Part I” 21). The Columbian moment was an
epochal opening, “one of the hinges on which swings the modern
world,” in which new modes of appropriation and European practices
were violently grafted onto “the lives and landscapes of America’s exist-
ing ecological foundations” (Miller 49). These frontiers of appropriation
expanded sectorally across geographies, periodically relocating as each
frontier encountered biophysical exhaustion, whether in silver, sugar, ca-
cao, coffee, bananas, rubber, guano, timber, oil, or tin. However, these
commodity frontiers were not merely about the geographical extension
of commodity relations into new territories, but also about the cultural
proliferation of knowledges and symbolic regimes—“abstract social na-
ture”—that enabled the appropriation of unpaid work in service to com-
modity production (Moore, “Capitalocene Part II” 5). These forms of na-
ture’s “work” were both human and biophysical: the reproductive labor
of women and unpaid work of slaves in the sugar-slave nexus; the fossil
fuels and mineral veins produced by the earth’s biogeological processes;
the alluvial soils, irrigation, and hydro-power of rivers; the nutrient den-
sity and biodiversity of forests; and the energy of nonhuman fauna. The
invention of new forms of value depended on twin relational axes of
strategies of exploitation (within commodification) and strategies of ap-
propriation (outside of commodification) that appropriated the allegedly
“free gifts” of extra-human nature and human life that could be put to
work without cost to the capitalist. Frontier-led appropriations of the
“four cheaps”—labor-power, food, energy, and raw material—sustained
the self-cannibalizing strategy of commodification and produced “eco-
logical regimes” shaped around new technologies and relations: the lati-
fundia, the monoculture, the mine, slave-trade, encomienda, peonage.
As the “ground zero” of the invention of abstract social nature, Latin
America makes powerfully visible the extreme violence and asymmetries
propagated by the technics of capitalist accumulation. Moore argues that
emergence of the capitalist world-ecology was more epochal (not to men-
tion traumatic) than the later rise of the steam engine, and in response to
the recent debate over the renaming of the Holocene era, he proposes that
the term Capitalocene be used rather than the Anthropocene to encom-
pass the era, which he dates from the Columbian exchange rather than
the eighteenth-century “Great Acceleration” (Moore, “Capitalocene, Part
I” 16). Symbolically, to name the contemporary crisis of climate change
after the whole species (anthropos) would be to efface the long social
histories of exploitation of both human and extra-human natures that
underlie our current moment and to perpetuate the Cartesian view of
human activity as external to nature. Furthermore, it is to imply that the
6 Deckard

species as a whole is biologically doomed to environmental destruction

and to obscure the fact that the humans do not perpetuate ecological
degradation at equal rates across the globe. To the contrary, the capitalist
world-ecology is historically striated, divided between peripheral sites of
appropriation of raw materials where ecological exhaustion is most stark-
ly experienced and core sites of accumulation that enjoy environmental
protections and access to clean air and water.
A recent article in Nature by Lewis and Maslin makes a compelling
case for moving the start of the current epoch earlier, coinciding with
Moore’s periodization of the Capitalocene. In contrast to the nuclear-age
or fossil-fuel hypotheses, which designate the Anthropocene as detect-
able from the mid-twentieth-century radio isotopes, or from the Industri-
al Revolution of the eighteenth century, these authors locate a GSSP (glo-
bal boundary stratosphere section and point) in 1610, an ironically
termed “Golden Spike” marking the decades-long decrease in atmos-
pheric carbon dioxide as measured in Arctic ice cores, chillingly pro-
duced by the death of 50 million indigenes of the Americas in the first
century after European contact, as a result of war, slavery, famine, and
epidemiological vectors (Lewis and Maslin 175). By the early seventeenth
century, only six million survivors were left on the North and South
American continents, resulting in a massive decline in carbon from agri-
culture, wood fires, and other human activities. Other geologically specif-
ic evidence for the re-dating includes the loss of biodiversity, the stark
acceleration of species extinction rates, and the transfer of plant and ani-
mals species between Europe and the Americas in the course of what
Alfred Crosby famously called the “Columbian exchange.” Lewis and
Maslin label their intervention the “Orbis hypothesis,” from the Latin for
globe, to emphasize this moment as the origin of a global modernity
marked by anthropogenic climate change and the homogenization of
planetary biota, with its historical roots in the nexus of “colonialism,
global trade, and coal” (177). As Dana Luciano observes, the Orbis
hypothesis is the first proposal for a GSSP that recognizes genocide as a
part of the cause of epochal division, reprioritizing the social history of
global striation over the narrow abstraction of “elite-driven technological
development” (3). It repositions contemporary ecological crisis away
from how ecocritic Timothy Morton imagines climate change, as a
“hyperobject” too big to be conceptualized, into a product of discernible
historical processes rooted in fundamental inequalities that might yet be
changed. 1
 Latin America in the World-Ecology 7

PEAK APPROPRIATION:
THE NEOLIBERAL SCRAMBLE FOR RESOURCES

This debate over the periodization and narrative of global ecological cri-
sis has obvious significance for Latin American cultural critics. The re-
naming of the Holocene—which means “wholly recent” in Latin—is a
kind of temporal legerdemain, which attempts to invoke a dimension of
futurity within the present to see it from a later moment as well as our
own, evading the paralysis of neoliberal presentism (Luciano 2). This
doubled moment has implications for what we see when we look back—
how we historicize Latin America’s structural asymmetry in the world-
ecology—as well as for how we conceive our current planetary crisis, and
the specific configurations of Latin America’s exploitation under the neo-
liberal ecological regime. The early modern appropriation of the “Great
Frontier” in the Americas provided an astonishing wealth of uncom-
moditized ecological surpluses that reduced production costs and in-
creased profitability, jumpstarting and fueling the engine of capitalist
accumulation for centuries. In contrast, the neoliberal era of capitalism
has witnessed a decline in productivity linked to the exhaustion of the
geographical frontiers and socio-ecological relations that made “cheap
nature” possible. Consequently, since 2001, food and primary commodity
prices have spiked, marking the collapse of cheap food and the relations
dependent on it. Moore argues that the neoliberal regime has failed to
produce an agricultural revolution equivalent to earlier phases of capital-
ism, pointing to the low yields and increasing limits to appropriation
faced by agro-biotechnology, which has been bolstered by a new intellec-
tual property regime and pushed forward as the “technological fix” to
the crisis of food security, but which has failed to produce a substantive
yield revolution, even after two decades of dissemination and experi-
mentation (Moore, “Cheap Food” 231). Instead, biotechnology has func-
tioned primarily as a mode of wealth redistribution, transforming sur-
plus capital from small farmers to rich conglomerates and transnationals
by enclosing new vertical and molecular frontiers of life, as in the case of
GMO seeds.
At the same time, capital has been forced to turn to ever-more costly—
in both economic and carbon-intensive terms—forms of “extreme ener-
gy” extraction from tar sands and fracking to deep-sea and rock forma-
tion drilling. The early emergence of the neoliberal regime, roughly be-
ginning in the 1970s, was dependent on the enclosure of modernity’s last
uncommoditized zones with diminishing returns: oil frontiers in the
North Sea, Alaska, West Africa, and the Gulf of Mexico; Green Revolu-
tion agriculture in South Asia and Africa which appropriated fertile soil
and cheap water; the appropriation of cheap metals and energy with the
asset-stripping of the former Soviet Bloc; the expropriation of the Chinese
peasantry as a labor surplus; and the systematic privatization of state and
8 Deckard

public services through structural adjustment and austerity, for which

Latin America has operated as a laboratory (Moore, “Cheap Food” 245).
However, now exhausted, these “free gifts” cannot reoccur in the twenty-
first century, marking the exhaustion of the “Great Frontier” and an end
to capital’s usual “fix” to rising costs of production through geographic
relocation to new, uncommoditized zones. That said, within this context
of intensified competition for resources, Latin America has once more
become a hot zone for resource extraction and imperialism.
As Michael T. Klare points out, the twenty-first century “global scram-
ble for the world’s remaining resources” is distinct from the “400-year-
long-competition for control . . . of resource-rich areas of Africa, Asia and
the Americas” because what is expropriated from the world’s final fron-
tiers represents “all the remains of the planet’s once abundant resource
bounty” (Klare 16).There are no undetected frontiers lying beyond those
under assault: no untilled fields, untapped oil reserves, or undeveloped
lands still awaiting discovery. Instead, virtually all accessible resources
are in production, even those areas newly opened by climate change,
such as the Arctic, or by new high-risk technologies, such as the pre-salt
oil deposits in the vast Tupi field offshore of Brazil in the South Atlantic,
which threaten to release dangerous amounts of natural gas as they are
drilled. Instead of the unprecedented expansion across space that charac-
terized the earlier accumulation of the Great Frontier, the neoliberal re-
gime privileges the expansion of profit-maximization strategies, share-
holder over stakeholder capitalism, and asset-stripping and privatization
over production. Neoliberalism is distinctive for the “impatient” short-
term scope of its profit-making strategies, which manifests as reluctance
towards fixed capital investment or development of new productive ca-
pacities. From the 1970s onwards, neoliberalism in Latin America has
been distinguished by the tendency towards “eco-financial imperialism”
rather than industrial production and the coercive imposition of waves of
ongoing privatization and structural adjustment by supra-national insti-
tutions such as the IMF and World Bank (Bond n.pag.). Favored allies of
Northern capital and pro-corporate regimes have promoted financial glo-
balization in the region, acting as geopolitical gendarmes and regional
platforms for accumulation. In what Ruy Mauro Marini famously de-
scribes as “sub-imperialism,” Southern “National Champions” such as
Brazil collaborate with the expansion of Northern imperialism and trans-
national capital, draining resources from the hinterland and undermining
peripheral productive capacity and economic sovereignty, in exchange
for the position of a privileged actor (Marini 14).
Another key aspect of the penetration of finance capital into the repro-
duction of human and extra-human life throughout Latin America has
included the invention of “ecological commodities” and the manufacture
of scarcity by “allowable natural destruction,” which has created new
markets in ecological “goods” and “bads” (Smith 17). Nature has been
 Latin America in the World-Ecology 9

separated into tradable bundles of capital from biodiversity credits to air

and water pollution credits to carbon credits, traded on environmental
derivatives markets to Northern corporations to offset their continued
pollution and to global financiers speculating on price volatility as eco-
logical crisis accelerates. At the same time, neoliberal free trade policies
have enforced the deregulation of environmental protections and the
right of transnational corporations to outsource waste and heavy-pollut-
ing industries to free trade zones and export enclaves throughout Latin
America, as in the case of maquiladoras in post-NAFTA Mexico. The
financialization of nature has been accompanied by brutal forms of “ac-
cumulation by dispossession,” David Harvey’s term for predatory forms
of profit-making which rely on the enclosure of previously non-commod-
ified goods (74). 2 The specifically environmental dimension of the dis-
possessions entailed in these forms of accumulation, as well as the wide-
spread resistance they have provoked can be clearly seen in the case of
the Cochabamba “water wars” in Bolivia in 2000, where protestors
against water privatization denounced the fact that también la lluvia—
even the rain—was no longer free to all or part of the commons. As
Galeano presciently predicted, the scramble for new, if diminishing, fron-
tiers of appropriation has led to the enclosure of the most fundamental
commons in the web of life: “commodities that are ‘natural’ by defini-
tion—air, light, silence—become ever costlier and costlier” (Open Veins
269).
However, while eco-financialism persists even amongst BRICS na-
tions that profess counter-neoliberal rhetoric, since the 2000s the “pink
tide” of left-populist governments favoring the return of extractivist de-
mocracies and welfare-states funded by the rents of nationalized re-
sources such as Venezuela’s oil, alongside a primary commodities boom
spurred by the rise of China and the industrializing economies of the
BRICS, has resulted in the renewal of a developmental model organized
around resource extraction. This turn from the “Washington Consensus”
emphasis on financialization towards a “Commodities Consensus” strat-
egy for large-scale export of primary products and natural assets without
greater added value is sustained by the boom in international prices for
raw materials and consumer goods (Svampa, “Resource Extractivism”
117). What Veltmeyer and Petras have termed the “new extractivism” has
placed Latin America in the hot zone of the global scramble for resources,
consisting of intensification of earlier commodity monocultures in cash-
crops, oil, and raw materials formed under colonialism; the formation of
new monocultures organized around new vertical frontiers in biocom-
modities; and the enclosure of remaining commons, such as water and
gas. Extractive industries range from mining and hydrocarbons exploita-
tion, to industrial-scale agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture, to forms of
exploitative transport infrastructure (bi-oceanic corridors, waterways,
harbours, forest highways), energy projects such as hydro-electric dams,
10 Deckard

and communication infrastructure projects intended to facilitate extrac-

tion and export of commodities, but often functioning more as opportu-
nities for capital-intensive investment by transnational corporations.
Giant transnational mining firms such as Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, and
Freeport-McMoRan have been particularly aggressive in their scramble
to monopolize dwindling mineral reserves and to obtain new deposits in
hazardous frontiers and territories often inhabited by vulnerable indige-
nous populations.
From agribusiness to timber-logging to mining to the production of
biofuels, the industries and monocultures of the new extractivism have
been dependent on violent waves of dispossession of land and resources,
a twenty-first-century land grab of epic proportions, inevitably accompa-
nied by the loss of food and water sovereignty. The emergence of com-
modity frontiers in “flex crops,” industrial tree-farming, and carbon se-
questration in the “green” bio-economy has had pernicious effects on
indigenous populations and ecologies, resulting in food shortages as land
formerly used for subsistence farming is given over to biofuels produc-
tion and failing to recognize the blood-ties of indigenous peoples to the
expropriated lands. “Green grabbers” include both Northern and Latin
American transnational corporations investing in the bio-economy and
elite oligarchs looking to acquire “wilderness” preserves for recreation.
The “new Latin American conquistadors” participate in forms of re-
source imperialism and biopiracy whose hierarchies run both North/
South and South/South (Pearce 141). In Brazil, Bahia has become known
as “Soylandia” and the Mato Grosso has been converted into a vast desert
of GM maize, soya, cotton, and coffee monocultures, a complex of large-
scale “high-tech, high-output, high-investment” plantations that use five
tons of lime per hectare to neutralize the acid in the cerrado soils (Pearce
114). This model of industrialized agriculture—the farm as roofless facto-
ry—has spread into a host of South American countries. Alongside com-
peting Chinese and Euro-American capitalists, Brazil has been aggressive
in building transport infrastructure into indigenous territories. In Para-
guay, the Chaco has been desertified by timber-felling, cattle ranches,
and agribusinesses in soya, cotton, and maize run by “Brasiguayos” who
sell their Brazilian land to transnationals and use the profits to buy
cheaper ranches in Paraguay. Despite Evo Morales’ professed resource
nationalism, vast tracts of Bolivia have been converted to soy and quinoa
production by Argentine and Brazilian ranchers, with over a quarter of
farms owned by Brazilians, whose profits are repatriated. In Colombia,
land expropriated during the narco land rush of the 1980s, when a com-
plex of cattle ranchers, cocaine barons, and paramilitary groups bought
or seized vast estates, the coca commodity frontier has been replaced
with new cash-crops in palm oil and other monocultures, further institu-
tionalizing the elites of the narco-state (Pearce 144–45).
 Latin America in the World-Ecology 11

Throughout Central America, as Dawn Paley has argued, a neoliberal

variety of “drug war capitalism” that combines “terror with policy-mak-
ing” has been used to “crack open” new territories and social worlds
previously unavailable to capital in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras
(Paley 16). Feeding arms-trade militarization, bolstering the expansion of
US finance, and supporting corrupt political apparatuses, the imposition
of drug war policies benefits transnational petroleum and mining compa-
nies, manufacturing and transportation industries, and retail sectors op-
erating in free trade export zones by terrorizing and dispossessing popu-
lations in cities and rural peripheries so that policies promoting foreign
direct investment and expropriation can be implemented. In this context,
neoliberal strategies of financialization and privatization are imbricated
with explicit violence, pillage, and plunder. These forms of terror have
been particularly effective in clearing the way for mega-projects labelled
“development” by those in power, but called proyectos de muerte—
projects of death—by the indigenous communities affected (Rappo Mi-
guez 206). Large-scale infrastructure and energy projects such as hydro-
electric dams, although often heralded as “green,” displace communities,
often forcibly drowning their villages and fields, exhausting regional wa-
tersheds, and introducing hydrological hierarchies between those who
can access water and energy—often metropolitan elites—and those who
are deprived of their former resources—local indigenes.
Land grabs are motivated not only by mineral exploitation or agri-
business, but also by the rush to acquire the waters that run beneath
them. While oil rents underlie the left-wing axis of extractive democracies
across South America, an accelerating market in “crude water” has gen-
erated forms of corporate hydropiracy and national hydrocolonialism as
transnationals and nation-states scramble to secure water. The opening of
new transport corridors into the Amazon River reservoir has resulted in
the illegal trafficking of millions of gallons of Amazon “crude” water in
former oil tanker ships for transport to Europe, North America, and the
Middle East (McDougall 191). As climate change produces drought and
desertification, countries such as the United States and China face water
scarcity and over-extended hydrological systems in their agricultural
bread-baskets, and national concerns over water security are predicted to
result in a geopolitical contest for the imperial “conquest of water” whose
urgency outstrips even that of the scramble to secure heavy metals, rare
earths, and hydrocarbons (Worster 15). In this context, Gabriel Garcia
Márquez’s novel El otoño del patriarca, in which an aging Central
American dictator sells the Caribbean sea to pay off the national debt and
US hydraulic engineers promptly transport the waters off to Arizona, no
longer seems so much the stuff of apocalyptic satire as reality.
While the new phase of extractivism has produced high growth rates
and profitability in Latin American economies, these frontiers are trivial
in comparison to earlier phases of accumulation, insufficient to prevent
12 Deckard

the mass of capital from rising too quickly in relation to the mass of
appropriated cheap nature, and the focus on re-primarization relies on
the over-exploitation of nonrenewable natural resources and the expan-
sion of frontiers to formerly “unproductive” territories. Although pur-
sued as an antidote to global recession and sometimes hailed as “post-
neoliberal,” new extractivism has done little to challenge the historical
asymmetries between the Global North and South, where the transna-
tional corporations based in the dominant industrial economies of the
North retain their monopoly over the technology and machinery re-
quired to run capital-intensive industries, and Southern economies con-
tinue to function as mere colonies for the export of raw materials. The
approach to redistribution or monopoly of the profits of extractivism is
differently articulated across Latin American nations according to pro-
gressive or conservative political agendas, but even in those left-wing
countries that have adopted constitutional assertions of ecological rights
motivated by indigenous eco-philosophies (as in Ecuador and Bolivia),
national economic policy is still oriented around resource extractivism,
and large-scale extraction projects are inaugurated without democratic
consultation of local communities.
The profits of “neo-developmentalism” are short-term in the context
of the wider crisis of the “four cheaps” and profoundly vulnerable to
price volatility. Nor can they compensate for the immense social and
environmental costs of intensified resource extraction, which far from
suturing the open veins of Latin America, merely revitalizes older mecha-
nisms of (neo)colonial plunder and appropriation that reinforce depen-
dency on the Global North and result in the continued redistribution of
wealth away from the South. Within nation-states, extractivist policy is
enforced by criminalization of resistance and heightened securitization,
and the period between 2009 and 2015 has witnessed a rise of disappear-
ances, deaths, and incarcerations of environmentalist protestors in Latin
America, particularly from indigenous communities in Guatemala, Hon-
duras, and Brazil (Global Witness 7). As Maristella Swampa observes, the
commodity “consensus” is not merely an economic order, but a “system
of domination,” riven with the paradoxes that mark the coexistence of
neoliberal ideology with new progressive development (119).
For Veltmeyer and Petras, the new extractivism is not a development
model for a post-neoliberal world, but rather the dangerous emergence of
a new form of imperialism that has been heavily contested by mass resis-
tance movements led by peasant farmers and indigenous communities
(19). When ecological regimes are near exhaustion, they are more likely to
encounter entwined forms of biophysical and human resistance: super-
weed effects, blights, and biofeedback loops that accelerate the collapse
of monocultures are frequently accompanied by strikes, boycotts, and
other forms of human political agency. Correspondingly, the crisis of
neoliberalism and the intensification of extractivist strategies has been
 Latin America in the World-Ecology 13

met with a surge of popular protests throughout Latin America, from

water wars in Bolivia to struggles against water and mining in Ecuador
and Peru, uprising in southern Chile against Hidroaysén, popular assem-
blies in Argentina, mass resistance to the Belo Monte dam in Brazil, and
the Zapatista movement in Mexico. Raúl Zibechi claims that these move-
ments “signal the birth of a new cycle of struggle that will also breathe
life into new anti-systemic movements, perhaps more radically anti-capi-
talist in the sense that they question developmentalism and hold onto
buen vivir as the principle ethical and political reference point” (15). En-
rique Leff similarly heralds a “process of environmentalization of strug-
gles” across the Latin American hemisphere in response to environmen-
tal degradation and enclosure of remaining commons, as communities
contest their dispossession and lack of resource autonomy (“La ecología
política” n. pag.).
Whether these movements are for better urban housing and rural edu-
cation or for the protection of rivers and mountains from the ravages of
mining and farming, they can all be understood as ecological, if not al-
ways environmentalist. They all demand alternative forms of environ-
ment-making whose conception of human and extra-human nature is not
reduced to exchange value. As anthropologist Arturo Escobar argues,
these movements that take place in “the context of the ecological phase of
capital and the struggles over the world’s biological diversity . . . between
global capital and biotechnology interests, on the one hand, and local
communities and organizations, on the other—constitute the most ad-
vanced stage in which the meanings of development and postdevelop-
ment are being fought over” (Encountering Development 19).
On a global scale, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that the current
crisis of neoliberal capitalism represents a moment of historical bifurca-
tion, when the world to come could take on two very different shapes.
The first is a world-system in the “spirit of Davos” that retains the hierar-
chy, exploitation, and polarization of the current system in an even more
concentrated, neo-feudal form, riven by ecological crisis. The second is a
post-capitalist world-system in “the spirit of Porto Alegre” that is more
democratic and relatively egalitarian, and which brings together a diver-
sity of movements and social coalitions in a horizontal, decentralized
organization that insists on the rights of both collectives and individuals
as permanent features of a reconstructed world (Wallerstein n. pag.).
Even as indigenous and popular movements in Latin America encounter
staggering repression, both from their own states and from transnational
capital, they nonetheless sustain the possibility of post-capitalist world-
ecology and offer alternative ways of conceiving value in a web of life
that encompasses humanity and the whole of nature.
14 Deckard

CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN THE OIKEOIS

But what is the role of cultural production and criticism in the world-
ecology? The surge of explicitly “environmentalist” literary works with
ecology as an organizing principle of ideology such as Luis Sepúlveda’s
Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (The Old Man Who Read Love Stories; 1989)
or Homero Aridjis’ El ojo de la ballena (The Eye of the Whale; 2001) is a fairly
recent phenomenon, which Scott M. DeVries argues has arisen in re-
sponse to a sharpened cognizance of ecological contamination and spe-
cies endangerment (History 150–51). Similarly, only in the last decade
have ecocritical monographs on Latin American literature begun to ap-
pear, joining a recent flush of volumes of collected essays on ecology and
Latin American literature. 3 This environmental turn in criticism is no
doubt related to the crystallization of a larger global consciousness of
planetary environment crisis since the millennium. Yet, the appropriation
of American nature is an ongoing catastrophe which radiates from the
Columbian moment to our present. Its cultural and material legacies suf-
fuse the lifeworlds of Latin America—whether in the slow violence of
monoculture, soil exhaustion, deforestation, desertification, and hydro-
logical disruption, or the structural violence of combined and uneven
development in all its manifestations, from indigenous dispossession to
neocoloniality to export dependency to systemic poverty to dietary mal-
nutrition—and as such, must be expected to suffuse the literary and cul-
tural forms which mediate the Latin American imaginary across the last
five hundred years. As DeVries suggests, while ecocriticism as a form of
textual analysis can only be dated forty years or so as a frame, the starting
point for analysis of the articulation of literary ecology in Latin American
writing must go much farther back, starting from the “very first examples
of fiction, poetry, and essay written in the New World” (3). When Anto-
nio Candido argues that a consciousness of underdevelopment haunts
the literature of Brazil, this is inevitably as much an ecological conscious-
ness as it is economic or social (36). Indeed, as Jennifer French observes,
“the foundational discourses of Spanish America are for good reason
dominated by a rhetoric of nature: nature was to be the economic basis of
the new republics, in the eyes of both European capitalists and the creole
elites who shaped their post-independence development” (Nature 13).
A world-ecological approach to Latin American cultural production
can entail a mimetic reading of the literary registration of the cyclical rise
and fall of commodity chains, stressing the periodicity and geographical
comparability of the world-historical movement of commodities such as
coffee, tea, sugar, rubber, or tobacco within national traditions, across
whole regions, or between macro-regions. That export commodities have
taken on an uncanny life in Latin American culture has oft been recog-
nized by anthropologists, whether in Fernando Ortiz’s famous proclama-
tion that “tobacco and sugar are the most important figures in Cuban
 Latin America in the World-Ecology 15

history”; Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s recognition that in colonial Hispaniola,

King Sugar produced “a social culture: the socially drawn monopoly to
subject to its refraction all other commodities and human beings them-
selves”; or Michael Taussig’s account of the strange personifications of oil
and minerals as the “Devil” amongst contemporary plantation workers
and miners in South America. 4 Accordingly, King Sugar, King Coffee, the
Devil’s Milk (rubber), and a host of other commodities have played a
crucial role in the literary history of Latin America, strutting their uncan-
ny way through a proliferation of novels in the early twentieth century
dedicated to single export commodities such as rubber, bananas, and
coffee, and producing distinct sets of tropes and aesthetics. Ericka Beck-
man’s Capital Fictions offers a salutary model of literary analysis of such
commodity fictions in her study of the “export reveries” attached to com-
modities during Latin America’s period of high economic liberalism in
the late nineteenth century. Tracing commodity discourses throughout
the writing of José Martí, Rubén Darío, José Asunción Silva, Julián del
Casal, José Enrique Rodó, and others, she concludes with an electrifying
reading of the representation of rubber extraction in José Eustasio Ri-
vera’s La vorágine.
The world-historical moment of analysis can be extended beyond the
Export Age of the fin de siecle, whether tracing the progression of re-
gimes in a particular national context, tracking the progressive displace-
ments of crisis across geographies as commodity frontiers are sectorally
relocated, or comparing different epochal and developmental phases of
capitalism. Analysis can contrast the forms of commodity fetishism pecu-
liar to different commodity regimes, whether sugar and rubber, oil and
water, or soy and palm, or compare the foodways and agriculture re-
gimes that underlie the “four cheaps” of a particular phase of capitalism,
as in Kerstin Oloff’s analysis of the literary ecogothic corresponding to
the Mexican green revolution in her chapter in this collection. In the case
of the neoliberal regime, mass floriculture, aquaculture, factory-farming
of meat, oil-based agriculture, corn and soybean hybridization, GM food,
and all the frontiers associated with the bio-economy can be read either in
their local manifestations or comparatively across regions and periods in
order to track the dietary regime of forced overproduction and underpro-
duction which mediates gaps between stagnating productivity and fall-
ing prices via the “forced underconsumption” of the poor (Araghi 40).
Similarly, given the unprecedented conquest of water in the neoliberal
regime, hydrological rifts and droughts could be tracked across the litera-
tures of the Americas. One way to avoid “commodity determinism”
would be to focus on labor and resistance, mapping the literary registra-
tion of resource conflicts in sites where the revolution of socio-ecological
relations is in the process of contestation. Thus, a comparison of “water-
conflict” literatures would give a sense not only of the “hot zones” where
privatization and enclosure of the water commons is producing hydro-
16 Deckard

logical crisis, but also of how “water wars” and other forms of environ-
mental resistance emerging from peripheral communities are in some
instances successful in defeating neoliberal appropriations.
Resistance need not refer only to human political activity, but could
also include extra-human nature’s volatile generation of uncontrollable
diversity in response to radical simplification and molecular manipula-
tions. The rising capacity of extra-human natures to elude capitalist disci-
pline is apparent in the rise of superweeds resistant to pesticides, super-
bugs such as MSA staph infections resistant to antibiotics, avian and
swine influenzas proliferating in factory-farm conditions, and manifold
cancers and autoimmune disorders accelerated by toxification and envi-
ronmental pollution. In literature, the “revolt” of extra-human nature is
often depicted through ecogothic aesthetics as uncanny returns of the
repressed, epidemiological outbreaks, or monstrous excrescences. Thus,
the apocalyptic “rag doll plagues” in the Alejandro Morales novel of the
same title link a world-historical understanding of the mass epidemiolog-
ical flows characterizing the collapse of the pre-capitalist ecology at the
moment of the Columbian exchange with a prognostication of a similar
moment of mass extinctions, epidemiological vectors, and ecological col-
lapse to occur at the end of the neoliberal accumulation regime. In criti-
cally conscious texts, resistance is more likely to be registered in irrealist,
rather than “eco-phobic,” aesthetics that foreground the dialectical con-
stitution of nature, so that the supra-natural transformations are clearly a
product of revolutions or crises in socio-ecological relations rather than of
“malign” nature: as in Salvador Plascencia’s post-NAFTA novel People of
Paper where an entire Mexican border-town suddenly rots away into
nothing, leaving only unbiodegradable plastic behind. Plascencia’s magi-
cal realist treatment of plastic foregrounds the extractive petroleum re-
gime on which neoliberal capitalism depends, and dramatizes the ecolog-
ical vulnerability of Mexico to structural adjustment policies.
However, the ecological consciousness of Latin American literature
derives not only from discourses of “nature” as resource or as nation or
from thematic depiction of specific commodity regimes and environmen-
tal crises, but rather from the contradictory unity of symbolic praxis and
material transformation at work in literary aesthetics, which both repre-
sent material environments and contribute to their making and re-mak-
ing. As Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett suggest, literature of the
Americas should be read not as merely reflective of world-ecological pro-
cesses but as constitutive of them, a “historical agent” in the reconfigura-
tion of human and extra-human natures, whether through “patterns of
land use, of labouring practices,” or “attitudes to ‘nature’” which are at
work in “environment-making” (Campbell and Niblett 5–6). This means
criticism entails more than just reading landscape in literature, or nature
as a metaphor, or counting the appearances of dams and mines, rivers
and forests. Instead of searching only for environment as content, dis-
 Latin America in the World-Ecology 17

course, or theme, it means exploring the way in which literary and cultu-
ral production can act as a “cultural fix” within an oikeois, both imagining,
producing, and stabilizing new social relations, epistemes, and technics.
As such, literary agency can be bound up with the production of oppres-
sive configurations of abstract social nature, as in the Columbian visions
of a gold-laden “New World” that paved the way for the hellish mines
and plantations of the sixteenth century. But of course it can also function
in a more liberatory fashion, as in literatures that advance anti-colonial
and anti-capitalist critiques in tandem with decolonization movements or
articulate alternative epistemes of nature, such as buen vivir and sumac
kawsay, which are rooted in the philosophies of indigenous movements. 5
Literature can act as a barometer, registering atmospheric changes and
predicting storms to come—as in the case of El otoño del patriarca which
anticipated the intensification of water-privatization—but so too can it
contribute to the process of cultural realignment through which different
classes and social factions work towards more emancipatory forms of
environment-making.

NOTES

1. See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects 1.

2. Forms of accumulation by dispossession described by Harvey include biopiracy
of genetic and botanical resources; depletion of the global environmental commons
through extractivism and capital-intensive agriculture; corporatization of previously
public assets including industries, universities, and public utilities; appropriation of
indigenous cultural forms, intellectual creativity, and histories; privatization of land
and expulsion of peasant populations; conversion of common, collective, and state
property rights into private property rights; suppression of indigenous forms of pro-
duction and consumption in favor of commodified labor power; monetization of ex-
change and taxation; and accumulation of fictitious capital through new forms of debt,
speculation, and credit relations (74–75).
3. See, for instance, monographs including Laura Barbas-Rhoden’s Ecological Imag-
inations in Latin American Fiction (2011); Scott M. DeVries’ A History of Ecology and
Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature (2013); Jennifer French’s Nature, Neo-
colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005); and collections including
Carmen Flys Junquera, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez and Julia Barella Vigal’s
Ecocríticas, literatura y medio ambiente (2010); Adrian Taylor Kane’s The Natural World in
Latin American Literature (2010); and Beatriz Rivera-Barnes and Jerry Hoag’s Reading
and Writing in the Latin American Landscape (2009), to name just a few.
4. See Ortiz 12, Trouillot 372, and Taussig 3.
5. In addition to a textual corpus including letters, political communiqués, and
testimonial narratives, the past two decades have witnessed a boom in the production
and publication of literature written by indigenous peoples. Bilingual editions of texts
by writers such as Quiché poet Humberto Ak’abal, Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf,
Mayan theatre company Sna Jtz’ibajom, Huichol short-story writer Gabriel Pacheco
Salvador, Zapotec novelist Javier Castellanos Martínez, and Tzeltal playwright Isabel
Juárez Espinosa are published in indigenous languages with Spanish translations pro-
vided by the authors, thus resisting cultural assimilation through the affirmation of
18 Deckard

native languages and cultures. Written in genres close to the oral tradition, including
drama, poetry, and short fiction, these texts are frequently invested with a political
commitment to ecology that emerges from the proximity to collective struggle.

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 TWO
Mythologies of Gold in Chocó
Juanita C. Aristizábal

In a series of chronicles published in El Espectador in 1954, Gabriel García

Márquez described Chocó as a place inhabited by people who were “po-
bres hasta los huesos a pesar de que sus muertos están sepultados en
polvo de oro” (poor down to the bones even while their dead are buried
in gold dust; n. pag.). As with many of the accounts describing the Co-
lombian Pacific dating back as far as the colonial exploitation of minerals
through slave labor in the sixteenth century, García Márquez’s chronicles
speak of Chocó as a remote space, a litoral recóndito as Sofonías Yacup
called it in 1934, unknown or forgotten by the rest of the nation, where a
lush natural landscape and a vast wealth of natural resources stand as the
backdrop to endemic poverty and exploitation by both national and
foreign extractive enterprises. 1
García Márquez wrote these chronicles during his trip as a correspon-
dent to the region and they record the imprint of gold extraction in the
1950s in Chocó. One of them describes Andagoya, a city founded, devel-
oped, and ruled by the US mining company Chocó-Pacific, which operat-
ed in Colombia between 1916 and 1974. Despite the rest of the country’s
ignorance about who exploits, sells, and buys gold, says García Márquez,
an extractive economy created one of the country’s most modern cities in
the heart of the jungle, a place that he describes as an “international
territory” with electricity and tree-lined streets, where Swedes,
Americans, and Englishmen live more comfortably than in the country’s
capital. But across the river from Andagoya lies Andagoyita, its complete
opposite. A precarious, overcrowded, and poverty-stricken town paved
with waste material from the mining industry, Andagoyita is where peo-
ple from other parts of Chocó settle looking for better opportunities and
21
22 Aristizábal

end up struggling to make ends meet. Bitterness, social tensions, and a

deep sense of injustice loom; miners work for meager salaries, sex work-
ers suffer poor sanitary conditions, and the majority of the population
relies on baraqueo, a physically exhausting traditional mining technique,
even though everyone has long known that no one can make a living
from the shiny clusters of rock that miners collect with their bateas, or
handmade wooden gold pans, in riverbeds previously carved out by the
company’s large dredges.
In his chronicles, García Márquez looks at Chocó through the lens of
an outsider, a journalist embarked on a sort of fabulous adventure to a
remote territory, reporting on a region that at the time was perceived by
the Euro-Andean elites of Colombia as a frontier, and an obstacle to the
country’s path to development and modernization. Indeed, as Margarita
Serje points out, the temperate zones of the Andean “central axis” were
the focus of development throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, while the coastal lowlands were seen almost as blank spaces on the
national map (140). Following earlier Latin American writers like Eu-
clides da Cunha and José Eustasio Rivera, who traveled from urban cen-
ters to frontier regions to document the abuses of extractive industries,
García Márquez’s brief depictions of life in Andagoya, Cascote, Condoto,
Novita, and Tado in the 1950s did not fail to highlight the social and
environmental consequences of the perverse dynamics that have linked
Chocó to global markets since it was colonized by the Spanish in the
1500s. His chronicles stress the paradox historically faced by commu-
nities shaped by extractive enclave economies, the correlation between
natural wealth reaped by outsiders on the one hand, and poverty, exploi-
tation, and economic dependence on the other.
In his study on the relationship of the Afro-Colombian population of
the Chocó to modernity, Carlos Andrés Meza Ramírez defines enclave
economies as large-scale extractive activities that are not linked primarily
to national economies, but rather to transnational, macro-regional com-
modity circuits (31). This situation places the “enclaves” in question in
peripheral economic and political positions within the nation, subordi-
nating them to transnational markets as sites of extraction, but not of
production or consumption (Meza Ramírez 31). In this sense, commu-
nities that have been historically represented as secluded have actually
always been traumatically integrated into economic formations based on
the extraction of natural resources (Meza Ramírez 32).
García Márquez’s account of Chocó in the 1950s is a good point of
departure for a look forward and backwards at some representations in
literature, journalism, oral history, and film by both insiders and outsid-
ers of the social, political, economic, and racial dynamics surrounding the
exploitation and circulation of gold. Gold is a commodity that continues
to shape the fortunes and misfortunes of Chocó well into the twenty-first
century, when, after a constitutional reform in the early 1990s and the rise
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 23

of the “Global Pacific Era,” the region occupies a very different place in
Colombia’s economic, political, and cultural landscape. For the first time
in the country’s history, a new constitution drafted in 1991 declared Co-
lombia a multicultural and pluriethnic nation and recognized the rights
of its indigenous and Afro-descendant populations. The Constitution in-
cluded a transitory article (Art. 55) that became law 70 in 1993. This law
recognized the collective rights of black communities over the “tierras
baldías” (empty lands) of the Pacific Coast and protected their cultural
identity and their rights. 2 At the same time, however, this multicultural
turn accompanied the emergence of transnational economic negotiations
designed to create a “Global Pacific” free trade zone. As Arturo Escobar
has pointed out, in Colombia this movement took the shape of a “rising
rhetoric about the ‘age of the Pacific’ in which this vast, rich rainforested
territory was seen as the platform for an aggressive neoliberal strategy of
integrating the country with the Pacific basin economies” (Territories 3).
Of course, gold would continue to be one of the main commodities stimu-
lating this push for trans-Pacific economic integration.
In a region that, according to Peter Wade, “has always been modern
(or as modern as anywhere else) in the sense that it has always been
integrated into global circuits of commodities and information,” gold is a
commodity through which to approach representations of complex and
shifting relationships with the discourses of Western modernity in the
cultural production on Chocó. 3 Gold is a substance inextricably linked to
the paths of modernity. It mobilized the desire behind the colonization of
the Americas, which for many marked the beginning of modernity, and it
shaped the world order as it fueled development in Europe and, later on,
the United States, making the consolidation of capitalism possible. The
“mother of all commodities,” as Michael Taussig called it in My Cocaine
Museum, gold’s “polyglot heritage” is tainted by the horrors of the slave
trade of the past and the ecological disasters and social hardships im-
posed by mining on marginal communities in the globalized world of the
present. Indeed, Taussig describes gold and cocaine as transgressive sub-
stances, commodities, things through which people were forced “to find
their way” (xix). Gold and cocaine are fetishes and, as such, they are
much more than mineral or vegetable matter; they “play subtle tricks
upon human understanding” and appear to “speak for themselves” and
“carry the weight of human history in the guise of natural history” (Taus-
sig xviii). In Colombia, furthermore, gold and cocaine carry the weight of
the country’s history of violence. They have linked the nation to world
markets, fueled the globe’s longest-running armed conflict, and shaped
the lives of rural and urban communities, not to mention the global per-
ception of the country as the nation of El Dorado and Pablo Escobar.
Along with coffee, emeralds, and cocaine, then, gold underlays the
foundations of Colombian national identity. It is thus, unsurprisingly,
one of the resources involved in debates about the penetration of foreign
24 Aristizábal

capital, money laundering schemes, and acute environmental concerns.

Taussig’s task of collecting objects and stories for his museum—a collec-
tion that includes the objects and narratives of traditional gold miners in
Chocó—is shaped by an awareness of gold’s tainted history. At the be-
ginning of his book, Taussig stands before the delicate gold poporo, that
sophisticated pre-Columbian vessel Colombia elevated to the status of
national icon at the Nation’s Gold Museum. He is disturbed by the cura-
tors’ choosing to allow it to stand alone for aesthetic enjoyment, thus
suppressing any narrative linking this object to the history of genocide,
slavery, and oppression that it channels. “Without even the slightest hint
of irony or self-consciousness,” he writes, “this spotlit poporo has the
following text beneath it: ‘This poporo from the Quimbaya, which began
the collection of the Gold Museum in 1993, identifies Colombians with
their nationality and history’” (Taussig xv). In addition to ignoring the
colonial history of violence, elevating the poporo to the symbol of a fixed
and frozen pre-Columbian past appropriated by a national myth of ori-
gin ignores the fact that, as a transgressive substance, gold does “not
provide much by way of stable form to the world but certainly much by
way of exuberance and perturbation” (Taussig xiii).
One remarkable way in which gold disrupts and disturbs is by mobi-
lizing boundless desire and catalyzing stories, narratives, and histories,
by making us “want to reach for a new language of nature” (Taussig
xviii). Through a reading of a collection of narratives where gold appears
as a commodity embedded in the lives, paths, and destinies of those who
tread the jungle, rivers, and cities of Chocó, this chapter reflects upon
representations in oral storytelling, literature, journalism, and film of the
exuberance and perturbation that this metal has caused and continues to
cause in this region. This collection is by no means exhaustive. I have
chosen a sample of texts (in the broad sense of the term) from the 1940s
and beyond that represent gold through a variety of approaches and
lenses. A common theme in all of them is a reflection on Chocó’s complex
relationship to Western modernity through gold and its mythologies.
Sometimes these works reflect on greed, exploitation, and violence. Other
times they defiantly appropriate and reconfigure discourses imposed by
“civilizing forces” coming from beyond the mountains to make sense of
local circumstances.
The narratives of gold that I analyze participate in the creation of what
Margarita Serje has called political geographies built on projections. Serje
describes representations of wild landscapes, frontiers, and no-man lands
in Colombia that, according to her,
no pueden ser consideradas como ‘geografías físicas’ ni como ‘regiones
naturales,’ sino como espacios de proyección: son objeto de un proceso
de mistificación, . . . geografías imaginadas y conceptualizadas como
un contexto que se ve configurado a partir de un conjunto específico de
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 25

imágenes, nociones y relatos entre los que se teje una relación de inter-
textualidad. Se han visto convertidos en espacios virtuales habitados
por los mitos, los sueños y las pesadillas del mundo moderno. (23)

(cannot be considered simply physical geographies or natural regions,

but rather projected spaces: they are the object of a process of mystifica-
tion, . . . geographies that are imagined and conceptualized as a context
that is configured from a specific set of images, notions, and stories
from which an intertextual relationship is woven. They have been
transformed into virtual spaces inhabited by the myths, dreams, and
nightmares of the modern world.) 4
In the works that I analyze—oral histories recorded by Afredo Vanín and
Nina de Friedemann, novels by Jesús Botero Restrepo and Arnoldo Pala-
cios, journalism by Juan José Hoyos, and a film by Jhonny Hendrix Hi-
nostroza—mythologies of gold are at the root of these projections, malle-
able images crafted from the most malleable of metals. In Chocó: Magia y
leyenda (1991), Andágueda (1946), La selva y la lluvia (1958), El oro y la sangre
(1994), and Chocó (2012), gold is the material for images of untouched
forests and polluted rivers, handmade wooden tools and industrial
dredges operated by rich and empty-handed, greedy and generous, vio-
lent and peaceful, hopeful and hopeless locals and outsiders in crowded
or deserted mines.

EPICS OF GOLD: GOLD IN THE ORAL TRADITION

The oral stories that circulate about gold in Chocó are a good place to
start, as they question the regime of exploitation and accumulation that
has shaped the region’s history. Nina de Friedemann and Alfredo Vanín
collected some of these tales and recorded them in writing in Chocó: Ma-
gia y leyenda. Friedemann was an anthropologist and important precursor
of Afro-Colombian studies, while Vanín is an Afro-Colombian poet and
scholar. They introduce their Chocó: Magia y leyenda as a collection of
“leyendas añejas y recientes” (33). The oral tales, old and new, that they
record are always framed by descriptions of the scenes in which they
were told and comments on their possible significance that remind read-
ers that they are simply written sketches of a rich, living oral tradition.
Chocó exists in and through these legends. 5 “Toda esta región surgió de
la leyenda,” they write in the introduction, “no es extraño pues que pese
a todos los saqueos y a la explotación del hombre por el hombre y el oro,
en estas tierras, aparte de las lluvias, se hayan visto verdaderos aguaceros
de oro” (This whole region was born of legends. It is not surprising then
that, even after all the looting and exploitation of humankind by men and
by gold, people have seen not only rain but actual storms of gold; 35).
26 Aristizábal

Perhaps because of the looting and exploitation that have marked the
region’s insertion into the modern world markets since the seventeenth
century, legends of gold in Chocó are often cautionary tales. They warn
against the accumulation of gold, going against the grain in the global-
ized world of late capitalism. Taussig describes them as a “firewall of
fairy tales” needed to hem in the danger and self-destruction caused by
gold’s stimulation of boundless desire (5–6). Such is the case in “Cuando
los compadres arriaban oro” (“When the Buddies Carried Gold”) in
which an unidentified narrator tells the story of two compadres who end
up buried in gold after following a trail of ants carrying gold into a
crater. 6 The poor compadre had set out to find fortune in the woods and
had found the treasure. He dies after showing it to his rich compadre, who
leaves him to die in the crater after taking all the gold for himself, al-
though not without promising to baptize the other man’s son. Years later,
the rich compadre dies the same death after his poor compadre’s son, whom
he not only baptized but godfathered, takes him to the same crater to
avenge his father. When the vengeance is sealed, heavy rain and thunder
fall on the jungle, taking down trees and forcing the inhabitants of the
riverbeds of the Atrato to take refuge. In the cave, it rained gold and
some of the inhabitants saw a white dove with the son’s gaze disappear
into the air: “desde entonces, en el bosque minero, cuando se ven hormi-
gas arriando oro, nadie trata de seguirles el rastro” (since then, in the
forest of mines, no one tries to follow the path of the ants that carry gold;
137).
According to Vanín, in addition to containing norms for regulating
social and interpersonal conduct in cautionary tales about greed and gold
in the Pacific—as is the case with the story of the compadres—oral tradi-
tion tries to interpret change and diversity by creating new premises to
understand the world. As such, Vanín sees oral tradition as one of the
spaces through which the region assimilates modernity on its own terms;
always playful and allowing the archaic its greatest expression, while at
the same time filling a communication void in the trajectory of forced
exile and marginalization of its men and women with the necessary doses
of nostalgia and social criticism (60). Two other legends recorded by
Vanín and Friedemann speak about the role of gold in Chocó’s assimila-
tion of modernity. “Las semillas del oro” (“Gold’s Seeds”) starts with the
recollection of a story from Ghana told by an anthropologist to a group of
girls in a school in Bagadó: the transgression of the ritual sacrifice of the
most beautiful woman in the kingdom to Uagudú-Bidá, an enormous
serpent, by the King of the Soninké clan in 1062. Reacting to the descrip-
tion of the seven heads of the snake turning various parts of the kingdom
into deserts where only gold can bloom, an old Afro-descendant woman
miner in the audience tells a story that the anthropologist claims to have
already heard in the mouth of other miners. The old woman says she
heard that, prior to the arrival of her people, indigenous people already
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 27

lived in the mines. They dressed in gold, fabricated gold dolls, drank
gold water, ate gold acorns, and fished with gold hooks that could still be
found in the bateas of some miners. “Pero cuando nos vieron llegar,” she
continues, “se hicieron como lombrices y se metieron por debajo de la
tierra y huyeron hacia arriba a los nacimientos de los ríos. Pero antes se
comieron la semilla del oro y volvieron todo lo que tenían polvo de oro.
Pero al salir arriba grandes pájaros blancos que los esperaban se les aba-
lanzaron y muchos indios murieron” (But when they saw us arrive, they
turned into worms and hid underground escaping towards the rivers’
sources. But not before eating gold’s seed and turning everything they
had into gold dust. But when they left, big white birds were waiting for
them and they ambushed them and a lot of them died; 134).
Friedemann, who writes up the stories and describes the scene, fin-
ishes by offering an interpretation of the story told by the old miner as an
“epic of gold.” Through gold, the experience of their African ancestors in
the mines had traveled orally for several centuries, as had the torture and
extermination suffered by the indigenous population at the hands of the
Spanish conquistadors during the colonial era (134). As the anthropolo-
gist herself comments at the scene crafted by Friedemann, the old miner
had retold the history of Colombia (134). Moreover, this story (at least as
recorded by Friedemann) is an example of the ways in which oral histo-
ries, as Vanín stated, could be a space for the assimilation of modernity in
Chocó and of the role that gold plays in such assimilation. In this story,
gold shapes the origin and the fate of the forced encounter of three cul-
tures; it captures the arrival of modernity in the region as well as the
dissolving of the pre-Hispanic past of natural and cultural wealth—gold
fabric, gold water, and gold seeds—into dust.
In addition to ants, serpents, worms, and birds, mechanical animals
also appear in oral histories in which gold is portrayed as tied to the
origins and fate of the inhabitants of the Colombian Pacific. In “Se
querían comer el cementerio” (“They Wanted to Eat the Cemetery”),
Vanín pens the oral tale of Manuel María Moreno, an elderly man from
Opogodó who “deja caer sus palabras con la cadencia de los aguaceros de
su tierra” (lets his words fall with the cadence of the rainfalls of his
homeland; 143). Moreno tells his story with occasional interventions from
his daughter, who arrived after crossing the Tamaná river over a “puente
de hierro, retorcido y decrépito, recuerdo de los tiempos de la
Compañía” (distorted and decrepit iron bridge, a memento of the times
of the Company; 143). The story speaks of the region’s historical struggle
against the exploitative practices of the mining companies starting
around 1918, when the first dredges began to devour their land (144).
Once, around 1963, when the Chocó-Pacific dared to advance one of its
mechanical serpents all the way to the cemetery, Manuel María, along
with the priest, led the town’s successful resistance. A line was drawn,
the cemetery was spared, and others in Condoto later revolted against
28 Aristizábal

the company’s advances as well. But pestilent ponds remained and the
traditional bocachico fish now had to be brought from other Colombian
rivers because the dredges had destroyed fishing in the Tamaná. Notic-
ing the old man fall into a pensive and somber state after telling this
story, Vanín reflects on histories in general and the significance of this
one in particular: “Entonces entiendo que las historias son como los ríos,
que un día no es suficiente para agotarlas, porque ellas se nutren a medi-
da que corren. Pero al menos, él ya puede contar en dos palabras la
historia de su primera lucha victoriosa contra el poder venido de más allá
de las montañas que emergen a lo lejos” (I understand that histories are
like rivers, that one day is not enough to exhaust them, because they
fertilize as they flow. But at least he can tell in a few words the history of
his first victory against the power coming from behind the mountains
that rise in the distance; Friedmann and Vanín 145).

GOLD AND SCRATCHING FOR MODERNITY:

NOVELS OF THE 1940S

As in the story told by Manuel María and transcribed and commented by

Vanín, when it comes to representations of gold in Chocó, the metal
frequently appears as a connector to the power coming from behind the
mountains, from urban centers such as Medellín, Cali, and Bogotá. These
cities concentrate the economic and political power of the Euro-Andean
elites, who have historically run the country and projected their modern-
izing projects onto frontier territories such as Chocó, generating racial-
ized, regional identities in the process. 7 La selva y la lluvia and Andágueda,
two novels published or set in the late 1940s, are the next narratives of
gold that I analyze. In this period, Colombia’s production of gold rose in
the context of the increase of value of the metal in the United States after
the Great Depression, and, in the context of extractive enterprises con-
trolled by foreign companies, the presence of the Chocó-Pacific was
much more extensive than just that faded bridge crossed by Manuel
María’s daughter (as García Márquez’s chronicles made evident). Each
novel is an example of narratives of two distinct trajectories in the circula-
tion of gold in Chocó with relation to this external and extractive power.
Gold lures outsiders, both foreign and national, who come to impose
modernizing enterprises with the purpose of taming the land and extract-
ing its resources, but it also attracts insiders seeking a way out from the
jungle, from gold and the exploitation that surrounds it, insiders for
whom the promises of modernity are always elsewhere.
Andágueda (1947) by Jesús Botero Restrepo is a novel written by an
outsider in Chocó about outsiders in Chocó. In the prologue to the third
edition, Manuel Mejía Vallejo explains that the novel is based on Botero’s
own experiences. Botero was from Jardín, a prosperous area in Antioquia
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 29

popularly known as Colombia’s most beautiful town; he migrated to

Chocó in search of economic opportunities and experienced life as a min-
er firsthand (Mejía Vallejo 2). Drawing on the tradition of the regional
novel and with the profligate descriptions of costumbrista literature, the
novel tells the story of Honorio Ruiz and Francisco Rendón, two outsid-
ers who, echoing Arturo Cova’s experience in José Eustasio Rivera’s La
vorágine (The Vortex; 1924), crossed the mountains to come to the exotic
tropical lowlands of Chocó. The male protagonists look to escape a com-
fortable life in the Andes and seek adventures in Chocó, which seems to
be the shortest path for outdistancing the law and becoming “real men”
in the jungle (Botero Restrepo 29). The land of Chocó was for both men a
breathtaking and enticing spectacle. Referring to Honorio’s first impres-
sions upon his arrival, the verbose narrator states: “no sabía qué lo atraía
más en él: si la majestuosa presencia de las formas vegetales intocadas,
propicias a la vida libérrima y al esfuerzo varonil, o la caparazón de
misterio de que se hallaba investido en multitudes de relatos” (he did not
know what attracted him most: the majestic presence of untouched plant
forms favorable for manly enterprise and the free life of the frontier, or
the shell of mystery surrounding it with a multitude of tales; 72).
It soon becomes clear to the reader that the novel is structured around
the tales of these two characters, focusing on the ways in which they
insert themselves violently into the landscape and the Afro-descendant
and indigenous communities that they encounter as they penetrate deep
into the jungle and get involved in the exploitation of gold in direct and
indirect ways. Honorio and Francisco start as hardworking carriers of
gold and goods between mining camps. They move on to live off the gold
mined by the Afro-descendant and indigenous women that they take as
lovers, and, after crossing paths following their greed and seeking more
gold, they eventually end up lost in the jungle that had lured them to
Chocó in the first place, one dead and the other vanished.
The journey of the characters is controlled entirely by the omniscient
narrator who is—like the main characters of the novel—an outsider. He
creates an image of Chocó through lengthy descriptions of the people,
their daily activities, and the land. Through these descriptions, the narra-
tor constantly projects stereotypical images not only of the jungle’s exu-
berance, but also of the members of the Afro-descendant and indigenous
communities that appear as flat, eroticized, objectified accessories to
Honorio and Francisco’s epic stories. The depiction of indigenous and
Afro-descendants in the novel is a fine example of the projection of mod-
ern dreams and anxieties onto frontier territories, as outlined by Serje.
These territories, considered the reverse or negative of the nation, appear
as “vast solitudes,” and their inhabitants are reduced to “mere represen-
tation” (Serje 17). The narrator’s gaze fits well into what Escobar and
Pedro have identified as the tendency to understand the Pacific “no en
sus propias racionalidades—múltiples, heterogéneas y diversas, así lo
30 Aristizábal

vemos homogéneo—, sino simplemente en relación a lo moderno” (not

through its own multiple, heterogeneous and diverse rationalities, even
when it may seem homogeneous, but instead simply as the negative of
modernity; 41). As the two authors point out, this tendency generates the
imminent perception that this is a land in need of development (Escobar
and Pedro 41). Indeed, the novel’s narrator is constantly borrowing from
the developmentalist imaginary that portrays barbaric, colonial violence
as necessary for implementing civilization in peripheral areas, dwelling
on the roughness instilled by the landscape in the inhabitants of Chocó,
whether mestizo, Afro-descendant, or indigenous. He speaks of the jungle
as a land of predators, of “foxes and hawks,” “donde proliferan las pa-
siones, donde impera el derecho de la fuerza y también la incontrastable
fuerza de la astucia . . . ¿Acaso podía pedírsele otra cosa a la selva?”
(where passions proliferate, and where the rule of force and the insuper-
able strength of cleverness reign. Could one expect anything else from
the jungle? Botero Restrepo 48).
The narrator’s descriptions and projections include several passages
on the lives of Afro-descendant and indigenous artisanal miners, as well
as on the operation of the mines owned by mestizos or foreigners, who use
machinery imported from California. The social aspects of gold mining
are present in his portrayals of men as enslaved by their ambition for
gold. The narrator observes that these miners “cavaban todo el día y
noche intrincados socavones . . . se doblegaban e inclinaban reverentes
ante el esquivo y taimado diosecillo” (dug intricate trenches all day and
all night . . . kneeling and bowing reverently to the elusive and sly god-
ling; 32). He refers to the poor conditions under which miners live in
overcrowded camps, with their gaze towards the city, where they hoped
to pour their earnings and alleviate their exhaustion, malnourishment,
and sickness (49). The narrator also shows a certain degree of environ-
mental awareness. The passages in which he laments the fact that rubber
tapping and deforestation for farming and cattle are draining and drying
the jungle, for example, are more than just material for his flowery prose
(52, 91). One of these passages includes an image that resonates with
Manuel María’s story in which the narrator describes, “las dragas que
hunden como cucharas hambrientas sus palas eléctricas en los cauces y
levantan cual hitos de su ávido paso montones de arena estrujada sobre
las playas” (the dredges, that dig like hungry spoons into the streambeds,
lifting tons of bruised sand onto the beaches as markers of their voracious
passage; 51).
In the midst of descriptions such as this one, the narrator occasionally
has comments to offer on the extraction of gold and minerals by foreign
companies in Chocó, displaying a sense of unfairness in the awareness
that “a manos extrañas, por supuesto, [es] que va a parar tarde o tempra-
no la verdadera riqueza colombiana” (of course, strangers’ hands are
where Colombia’s real wealth always ends up; 51). He laments the fact
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 31

that the Chocó-Pacific Company has hoarded Chocó and its resources:
“por todas las fronteras y hacia todos los puntos cardinales creció el
pulpo de nombres exóticos y se alargaron los ambiciosos tentáculos . . .
absorbe el platino diseminado en la red de los ríos y acapara el oro de
vetas y aluviones” (on all frontiers and in every direction an octopus of
exotic names extended its ambitious tentacles . . . absorbing the platinum
throughout the network of rivers and hoarding veins and streambeds of
gold; 51). The image of the octopus is significant, since this was a meta-
phor commonly used to describe the United Fruit Company and its ex-
tractive activities throughout the Caribbean at that time. 8 The narrator’s
critique of the gold extraction by a foreign enterprise is clear in the repre-
sentation of blond employees who drink whisky and live in sheltered and
fumigated cabins, while “genuine inhabitants” are attacked by malaria,
anemia, and tuberculosis (52). However, a plot line towards the end of
the book that develops as one of the characters becomes the authoritarian
leader of the indigenous group into which he marries complicates this
critique and emphasizes the narrator’s questionable treatment of those he
calls the “genuine inhabitants” of Chocó. Honorio fathers a child with his
indigenous wife Clara Rosa Querégama and from that day on, the narra-
tor tells us, he stubbornly focuses on hoarding as much gold as possible
for the child in order to make up for having brought him to life as a
member of a “fruitless race”:
Un blanco estaba capacitado para escabullirse de ese rudo ambiente
cuando lo desease. Pero ese muchacho no. Llevaba en las venas sangre
india que le proporcionaría impasibilidad y desgano vital, desidia y
pesadumbres nativas. . . . Así pues, no quedaría satisfecho sino el día
en que pudiera meterle en los puños al joven Manuel Ruiz montones
de oro diciéndole: -Tome, tome! Váyase afuera y que no lo vuelva a ver
por aquí . . . Y es que mientras unos están hechos para empuñar maíz
hasta la muerte . . . otros tienen por qué exigir oro, puesto que llevan
sangre de conquista hasta en las manos vacías. (110)

(A white man was capable of escaping that rough environment when

he wished to do so. But not this kid. He carried in his veins indigenous
blood that would instill in him impassivity, existential malaise, and
native sorrow. . . . He would not be satisfied until the day in which he
could stuff loads of gold into his son’s hands, telling him—“Get out of
here and don’t ever come back!” . . . While some are made to handle
corn until their death . . . others have the right to demand gold, they
carry the blood of the conquerors even in their empty hands.)
Arnoldo Palacios’ La selva y la lluvia (The Jungle and the Rain; 1958) focuses
on those who have historically been deprived of this alleged right to
“demand gold.” The novel was published in Moscow as part of a series of
world revolutionary authors in 1958 (Santos Molano 13). Ironically, Pala-
cios’ writing made visible both the rich cultural traditions and the exploi-
32 Aristizábal

tative economy of extraction in Chocó (his home region) at the interna-

tional level just a year before a Colombian law declared that the Pacific
was a vast, empty natural reserve (Meza Ramírez 45). La selva y la lluvia
was recently reedited in Colombia for the first time in the context of an
increase in interest in Afro-Colombian cultural production after critics
declared Palacios’ Las estrellas son negras (Stars Are Black; 1940) to be one
of the most important twentieth-century Colombian novels.
The novel tells the story of Pedro José and Luis Aníbal, two young
men from mining regions of Chocó, who cross paths in Quibdó as they
struggle to escape poverty, get an education, and migrate to Bogotá,
where they both believe revolution is needed. The second part of the
novel focuses on the experience of Luis Aníbal as a revolutionary leader
in Bogotá in the late 1940s, a time marked by labor unrest and political
tensions that led to the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán in 1948. That
episode, known as the Bogotazo, led to a period of acute political vio-
lence, simply called “La Violencia,” that lasted for decades. Pedro José
never makes it to Bogotá, and at the end of the novel the reader learns
that a life of achievements is suddenly truncated when he is forced out of
his job as a schoolteacher in Tado due to his affiliation with the liberal
party and accusations by the town’s priest and conservative gamonales
(landowning political bosses) that he instilled atheism in his students.
In the tradition of social realism, the first part of the novel paints a
grim picture of the schoolteacher’s origins that serves as the background
for the revolutionary ideology that guides the actions of the characters
throughout the text. Pedro José is the son of an illiterate family of tradi-
tional miners linked to a history of endemic poverty and exploitation, a
history that he has been trying to overcome since his childhood days
mining the rivers. This grim picture is used in the novel as a backdrop to
highlight the distance that he travels following his thirst for everything
that comes from beyond the jungle. The shiny threads of the telegraph
that allow people to talk with others far away seem fantastical to him. He
is also bedazzled by the presence of those who had been “outside,” as
when he meets Felipito, the son of a family friend who has just returned
from working for the Chocó-Pacific in Andagoya and who reports on the
poor conditions that workers had to endure at the hands of the foreigners
who managed the company’s operations:
Yo, lo único que pure economizá jué pa adquerí éte pantaloncito, y éta
jraela, y éta camisa que tengo puejta. Dejando e comé puré comprále
éte coltecito e calamaco a mi mamá y éta camisa pa er viejo . . . no
quería gorvéme a casa con laj mano enteramente vacíaj. . . . Y vea usté,
ayel no má un gringo me levantó la voz y quiso pegáme, er mú
dejgraciáo . . . Me le encaré a mistel Geraldo, y aquí me tiene, er gerente
me echó de su empresa . . . En Andagoya laj mismísimas autoritares de
Colombia, con sé qu’é la paria e nojotro, no valen nara em comparación
de un gringo . . . Al revé, er dispertó y loj policía defienden a loj
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 33

gringo . . . Yo no li aconsejo a naire de pasá lo que yo pase en Anda-

goya, de arrajtráme como me arrajtré allí, peó que un perro, y me
peldonan la comparación. (45)

(I only managed to save enough to buy the pants and shirt I am wear-
ing. By not eating, I was able to buy these jeans and fabric for my
mother and a shirt for the old man . . . I didn’t want to go home with
completely empty hands . . . Just yesterday a god-damned gringo
raised his voice at me and wanted to hit me . . . I stood up to Mr.
Geraldo, and here you have me, the manager fired me . . . In Andagoya,
supposedly part of our nation, Colombian authorities themselves are
worthless compared to a gringo . . . On the contrary, if they stand up to
them, the police defend the gringos. What I suffered in Andagoya I
don’t recommend to anyone, I had to grovel as if I were less than a dog,
and I hope the dogs excuse me for such a comparison.)
Listening to these stories of suffering from “outside” unsettle Pedro
José’s mind, calling him to action: “Felipito se le aparecía cual la
revelación casi definida de ese algo que lo llamaba, encendía en él esa
llama que lo empujaba a ser otra cosa . . . ‘Yo me iré al pueblo, pero . . . Yo
no quiero irme a pasar las peripecias de Felipito, no . . . Sin embargo yo sé
que me puero í’” (Felipito seemed to him like an almost tangible revela-
tion of that unknown something that kept calling him, that lit inside him
the flame that pushed him to be something else . . . ’I will leave town,
but . . . I do not want to go to suffer the same ordeals that Felipito
suffered, no . . . Nevertheless I know that I can leave’; 45).
In addition to figuring indirectly in stories about the poor conditions
of those who work the mines in Andagoya, gold appears in the novel in
the form of the nuggets of metal on which Pedro José’s family rely for
their daily subsistence. One of these nuggets of gold literally ends up
pushing him to leave his life as an artisanal miner or a potential future as
a worker in the mines exploited by the Chocó-Pacific in Andagoya. Gold
was scarce; the family could count with their fingers the days in which
they had found enough gold to trade for food at the local store, where
they could not even go themselves because they were ashamed of their
lack of appropriate clothing. During a torrential rainstorm, Pedro José is
charged with the mission of trading an unusually large nugget, but he
slips and loses the nugget and with it the family’s only source of income.
Devastated and terrified of the consequences of his loss, he decides to
leave, escaping his life in the mines and following a call to pursue a path
towards what was beyond the jungle.
This journey, which eventually leads him to become an educated man
with a revolutionary consciousness, begins at the very moment when he
drops gold in the most literal sense. It also starts with the realization of
the widespread discontent with the exploitation of gold by foreigners
fluttering in his young and inexperienced mind (66). As the boat on
34 Aristizábal

which he was escaping to Istmina—another large Chocó-Pacific mining

town—was rocked abruptly by the current raised by more powerful
boats, the captain cursed: “God damned gringos” (66). According to the
narrator, Pedro José already knew “que esas lanchas eran de los nortea-
mericanos, dueños, además, de esas dragas enormes que sacan el oro y el
platino. Todo mundo allí había llegado a odiar a esa gente perversa” (that
those boats belonged to the Americans, who were also the owners of
those enormous dredges that extract gold and platinum. Everyone had
come to hate those perverse people; 66). But even in the context of the
novel’s critical stance towards American imperialism—a stance that sure-
ly attracted its publisher in Moscow in the late 1950s—Pedro José’s ha-
tred is not just directed towards the gringos and the powerful mining
operations that they ran throughout the Chocó-Pacific. During his jour-
ney, when he evoked the bitter past in which he “había vivido en la selva
casi a la par que las bestias” (had lived in the jungle almost as if he were a
beast), the narrator says that he became possessed by hatred: “evocar ese
pasado amargo, trágico, lo inundaba de odio hacia algo, hacia alguien
que sin embargo no localizaba con precisión. Tal vez el ‘Gobierno’. Pero
no sabía a ciencia cierta por qué el ‘Gobierno’ precisamente . . . No
comprendía bien . . . existían aquí dos bandos de liberales y el partido
conservador . . . pase lo que pasare, somos los perseguidos, vegetamos en
la miseria” (Evoking that bitter and tragic past flooded him with hatred
towards something or someone that he could not precisely define. Per-
haps the ‘Government.’ But he didn’t know exactly why . . . Here, there
were two liberal groups and the conservative party . . . and no matter
what happens, we are persecuted, we vegetate in misery; 85).

BLOOD AND GOLD IN THE 1970S

Jumping forward to the 1970s and the rivalry between liberals and con-
servatives, the political violence that Pedro José perceived as a fruitless
dynamic in which the underprivileged are trapped continued to manifest
itself in the war over a gold mine in the Alto Andágueda region of Chocó.
Juan José Hoyos’ chronicle El oro y la sangre, published in 1994 after it
won a journalistic award granted by Editorial Planeta, is a detailed ac-
count of the conflict, which spanned more than a decade. The war starts
with a resistance movement against the dubious mining rights that al-
lowed a powerful miner from Antioquia to displace several indigenous
communities of Emberá Indians, polluting their water and depriving
them of the right to mine gold found on their ancestral lands in 1975. The
fight for the rights to exploit the mine—which involved traditionally
powerful families of whites and mestizos from Antioquia, Afro-descen-
dants from Chocó, the local police, the national government, the Catholic
Church, armed rebel groups, and governmental and non-governmental
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 35

organizations—eventually divided the indigenous communities into dif-

ferent factions.
In one of the multiple testimonies and letters through which Hoyos
reconstructs the story, an insurgent of the EPL (Ejercito Popular de
Liberación), a left-leaning rebel armed group that played a role in the
reconciliation of the divided Emberás after years of confrontations, says
that he came to understand that the divisiveness the gold mine had
caused among the indigenous groups was quite symptomatic of the
country’s political landscape: “those from above” were liberals and
“those from below” were conservatives (271). In the testimony, the leader
goes on to declare that: “los indígenas son muy ingenuos y cualquiera
que llegue de afuera los divide” (the indigenous are very naïve and any-
one from the outside has the power to divide them; 271). In the chronicle,
the notion of the Emberás as gullible and subject to the interests of the
many outsiders attracted by the discovery of the gold mine in the Alto
Andágueda is not limited to this previous testimony. It is, in fact, a motif
that cuts across Hoyos’ representation of this indigenous group and that
he often presents as crucial to understanding not just how the conflict
had fallen out of their hands, but also the ways in which increased con-
tact with modernity through the exploitation and circulation of gold had
profoundly disturbed the social fabric of the Emberás.
Hoyos’ chronicle of the war surely succeeds in giving the reader
enough context to understand the sources and the main phases of the
conflict, chronicling it thoroughly and thoughtfully using a mix of narra-
tion, historical context, transcriptions of letters, official documents, and
interviews. He offers insights into the ways in which gold violently trans-
formed this region of Chocó, pointing at the historical sources of the
oppression and exploitation that the Emberás endure. There are passages
in which, for instance, he reminds the reader that the attack on a helicop-
ter loaded with gold that sparked the conflict was not the first armed
attack of the Emberás on an emblem of white civilization, but rather yet
another episode in an old war that started in the sixteenth century (26).
Ever since the first Spanish explorers arrived seeking gold, the indige-
nous had resisted with spears, knives, poisoned darts, and blowguns,
and gold, he says, “ha estado unido a la sangre y la leyenda” (has been
bound up with blood and legend; 26). The chronicle presents multiple
perspectives on the conflict and reflects on the narrator’s own perspective
as a journalist in the region. As a journalist who accompanied one of the
commissions sent by the government to investigate the claims that the
Emberás were making on the mine and their petition to declare their
territory a reservation ruled by their leaders, he declares that he was
entering this experience with mixed feelings: “de un lado, quería empe-
zar a caminar de una vez, monte adentro, como si una voz me estuviera
llamando desde allá hace muchos años. De otro lado, sentía miedo y
quería devolverme. Sabía que las selvas del Alto Andágueda estaban
36 Aristizábal

llenas de indios armados que no habían recibido de los blancos más que
miseria y vejaciones” (on the one hand I wanted to walk into the jungle
right away, as if a voice had been calling me there for many years. On the
other, I felt fear and I wanted to back out. I knew that the jungles of the
Alto Andágueda were full of armed Indians that had not received any-
thing but misery and vexations from the whites; 66). From such a posi-
tion, even this sympathetic and well-documented narrator, with the truth
claims characteristic of journalistic discourse, ends up reproducing prob-
lematic representations of the actors in the conflict, such as that oft-in-
voked image of the Emberás as naïve. These images call attention to the
limitations of the narrator’s position as an outside observer from beyond
the mountains.
The narrator privileges some voices over others. He devotes dozens of
pages to telling the story of Father Betancourt, a Catholic priest who had
become a powerful local authority after setting up a mission in the region
with the purpose of “civilizing” the Emberás through an education that
detached them from their native tongue, religion, and culture. Even
though the narrator is often critical of Father Betancourt—especially of
his role as buyer of gold from the indigenous—the narrator nevertheless
almost turns him into a “civilizing” hero and victim of the war. At times
he even approaches a presentation of the priest’s “rationality,” of his
order, as some sort of better past disrupted by the bloodshed caused by a
boundless ambition for gold in the Alto Andágueda:
En el momento de su retiro . . . sabía todo de los indios Emberá. Había
derrotado a sus jaibanás. Conocía a sus mujeres. Les había impuesto la
lengua de la madre España. Los había bautizado, casado y enterrado.
Los había visto armados de cuchillos o machetes, y borrachos, pelean-
do con sus hermanos o amenazándolo a él. Y hasta había aprendido de
ellos todos los secretos para dominar las culebras. Sin embargo, al final
de sus días no podía entender lo que pasaba. Fue como un eclipse de
sol . . . comenzaron a ocurrir las primeras matanzas y veía llegar, con
un fusil al hombro y la ropa llena de sangre, a los indígenas que él
mismo había bautizado. . . . Estaba seguro de que el oro que él compra-
ba a los indígenas y pesaba en la tienda de la misión lo había desorde-
nado todo. Además, lo había bajado a él mismo de su trono de misione-
ro, no sabía cuándo. (259)

(At the time of his retirement . . . he knew everything about the

Emberás. He had defeated their jaibanás. He knew their women. He
had imposed the tongue of mother Spain on them. He had baptized,
married, and buried them. He had seen them drunk and armed with
knives or machetes, fighting with their brothers or threatening him.
And he had even learned all their secrets to tame serpents. Neverthe-
less, in his final days he could not understand what was happening. It
was like a solar eclipse . . . the slaughtering started happening and he
was seeing those he had baptized himself arrive carrying guns, their
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 37

clothes covered in blood. . . . He was sure that the gold that he bought
from the indigenous, that he weighed at the mission’s store, had dis-
turbed everything. It had even taken away his throne as a missionary,
he wasn’t sure when.)
This passage is but a sample of the many devoted to Father Betancourt,
who is a much more visible and nuanced character in the chronicle than
any of the indigenous actors who appear in the chronicle in images that
reduce them once more into “mere representation” (Serje 17).
Of Aníbal Murillo, the indigenous person who found the mine that
started the conflict, for instance, the chronicle offers little more than a
reference: “de Aníbal Murillo se cuentan muchas historias en el Alto
Andágueda” (many stories are told about Aníbal Murillo in the Alto
Andágueda) and the following picturesque description based on hearsay:
“cuando uno lo mira, lo único distinto que descubre en su cara, apenas
sonríe, es el brillo de algunos dientes forrados en oro. Nada más. Pero la
gente asegura que es el único Emberá capaz de oler el oro aunque esté
enterrado muchos metros debajo de la tierra” (when one looks at him, the
only distinct thing noticeable about his face when he smiles is the shine of
some gold-plated teeth. That’s it. But people believe that he is the only
Emberá capable of smelling gold even when it is buried meters deep into
the ground; 40). This flashy image of Murillo’s teeth and reputation is an
embellished representation of the Emberás crafted for us as outside read-
ers. It is a kind of representation that overwhelms the narration of the
Emberás’ interactions with modernity in the form of the cultural changes
brought by gold to this community. This is particularly visible in the last
chapter of the first part of the book, entitled simply “Gold.” While in
most of the chronicle the narrator shows a willingness to dig deep into
the causes and consequences of the war over the mine, in this chapter,
which appears right in the middle of the chronicle, he focuses on eye-
catching aspects of the interactions triggered by gold among the
Emberás. The narrator chronicles a rather caricaturized and pointless
consumerist spree caused in their communities by sudden access to mod-
ern objects and amenities such as currency, guns, cars, appliances, alco-
hol, watches, eyeglasses, sowing machines, hair products, and airplanes,
displaying a monolithic view of what he idealizes as “el mundo pequeño
y pobre—pero, hasta hace unos años, apacible—de los Emberá del Alto
Andágueda” (a small and poor world—but a placid one until recently—
upset by the many things brought by gold; 150).

GOLD IN NUANCE:
GOLD AS DESTROYER, GOLD AS DISTANT SAVIOR

The film Chocó (2012)—written and directed by Jhonny Hendrix, a young

filmmaker from Quibdó—presents a much more nuanced image of gold
38 Aristizábal

and the relationship of a marginal community to modernity dominated

by the lure of consumer items than the Emberás embody in Hoyos’
chronicle. In the film, Chocó, a hardworking, poor Afro-descendant
woman from a small town in Chocó married to an abusive and idle man,
goes to great lengths to keep the promise of buying a cake for her daugh-
ter’s seventh birthday. Focusing almost entirely on the experience of the
female protagonist, the film paints a picture of the racial and cultural
dynamics of both mechanized and artisanal mining in a small town in
Chocó through the episode of the cake, which involves sexual exploita-
tion by the mestizo paisa, or Antioquian, who runs the town’s store and
takes advantage of Chocó’s precarious situation.
The faded newspaper clippings that line the walls of the family’s bare-
bones cabin by a flowing river indicate that the story takes place some-
time after 2010. During this period, there was a sharp rise in the price of
gold and, as a result of 2001 legislation that allowed for laxly granted
mining licenses and concessions, there was a surge in foreign and nation-
al investment in mining, a “mining fever” as María Teresa Ronderos
called it in a 2011 investigative journalistic piece on the subject. Indeed,
according to Ronderos: “esta fiebre minera llevó al gobierno anterior a
otorgar casi 9.000 títulos sin respetar parques nacionales ni reservas
indígenas. El crimen organizado también encontró allí una vía para repa-
triar sus utilidades de la droga y lavar dinero” (this mining fever led the
former government to grant almost 9,000 titles to mineral rights without
respecting national parks or indigenous reservations. Organized crime
also used it to bring drug profits back to Colombia and to launder mon-
ey). 9
This mining fever, perceived by some as a potential path to develop-
ment for the country, has had a strong impact on Chocó, a region rich not
only in gold and other minerals but also strategically located as a gate-
way to the markets of the Pacific Rim. A public discussion surrounding
the social and environmental impacts of mining made its way into the
media and called attention to Chocó through images of large dredges,
mountains of debris, and polluted rivers threatening lush rainforests.
This national debate on the environmental impact of mining in Chocó
added to an ongoing process of increased visibility of the region in the
national imaginary. This increased visibility was prompted by the social
movements that emerged around the constitutional reform of 1991 and
the subsequent law 70 of 1993, which recognized and promised to protect
the right of Afro-descendants to their ancestral lands and their contribu-
tions to the cultural and ethnic diversity of Colombia through their alter-
native practices and knowledge.
In the film, however, not much seems to have changed since that grim
image of the miner’s life in Chocó painted by Palacios in La selva y la
lluvia. The plot highlights the precariousness that surrounds Chocó’s life,
coupling the domestic abuse she suffers with the exploitation and mis-
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 39

treatment she endures at the hands of outsiders settled in Chocó, first as a

worker in the mine owned by the paisa Jiménez, and later on at the hands
of the paisa who owns the town’s store and who takes advantage of his
control of desired goods to coerce her into having sex with him. Hinos-
troza’s choice of name for the female protagonist suggests that her story
stands for the history of exploitation and abuse inflicted upon the land of
Chocó. With this metonymic relationship the film constantly risks falling
into a reproduction of the oppressive patriarchal operation of coupling of
the feminine with the telluric, the land with a vulnerable female body
subject to male civilizing forces, a discourse that has been unmasked and
subverted by ecofeminism. 10
In the first sequence of the movie dealing with mining, we see Chocó
among a large group of women being transported to the mine in the back
of a large truck. The lyrics of the traditional song that the women sing on
their way to the mine—“Aunque mi amo me mate a la mina no voy. Yo
no quiero morir en un socavón” (Even if my master kills me I am not
going to the mine. I don’t want to die in a hole)—point to the historical
nature of the harsh conditions that these women endure. They perform a
physically demanding job and are berated as they mine the riverbed
carved by the paisa’s dredge with their bateas. After Chocó is fired and left
to find her way back to the town on foot, we learn that the money she
made was not enough to buy her food for the day and that the water in
which the women are mining is polluted with harmful chemicals. This
sequence is the only part of the movie in which we see actual gold on the
screen, dust barely shining in one of the women’s bateas. Gold is elusive.
Just as we see but a blurry and distant image of the scene in which Chocó
trades the gold she has collected for the day with the paisa, the represen-
tation of gold in the film is created through what is impalpable, through
visions of the violent trace left by the dredges that extract it, of the prom-
ises it creates, and the illusions it shatters.
In a scene in which Chocó is crying on the edge of a pond in the forest,
she runs into a little girl named Florencia. The girl leads her into a “magic
hiding place” and there they have a conversation that serves as a short
glimpse of one of the effects of gold mining in the film. When they sit
down the girl asks:
-¿Cuántos dedos tengo aquí?
-Pues cinco.
-No, son seis. Mamá dice que es por el mercurio.
-¿Cuál mercurio?
-Porque mi mamá cuando estaba embarazada le tocó trabajar en la
mina porque mi papá la dejó sola.

(-How many toes do you see?

-Well, five.
-No, there are six. My mom says its because of the mercury.
40 Aristizábal

-What mercury?
-Because when my mom was pregnant she had to work in the mine
because my dad abandoned her.)
Even though the scene seems very concrete as the camera zooms in on
Florencia’s abnormal foot, it quickly fades into a vision after the camera
returns abruptly to the image of Chocó sitting alone in exactly the same
place by the pond.
Another scene in the film in which gold appears through symbolical-
ly-charged, impalpable projections involves one of the large yellow
dredges that have become part of the landscape in Chocó. Chocó’s son
skips school with one of his friends and as the two kids wander through
the forest they come across a large dredge that sits unattended in a min-
ing site. They quickly climb on it and start playing, making sounds pre-
tending they are operating it and having the following charged conversa-
tion that suggests what the machine represents in their world:
-¿Y esta máquina de quién es?
-Esta máquina no tiene dueño, está abandonada. Cuando sea grande
quiero una máquina.
-Yo también.
-Yo quiero tumbar cuarenta palos para sacarme un castellano y medio.
-Con cuarenta palos vos no te sacás eso.
-Me saco más.
-Y ¿cómo vas a manejar?
-Solo.

(-Whose machine is this?

-It doesn’t have an owner, it is abandoned. When I grow up I want one.
-Me too.
-I want to knock down forty trees to earn one and a half castellanos. 11
-I will make more than you.
-And how are you going to drive it?
-By myself.)
The game happens at dawn and the playful conversation is juxtaposed
with images of the dredge in actual operation, digging the river and
disturbing an otherwise silent and peaceful landscape with mechanical
sounds that mirror the ones that the kids are making. Through the irrup-
tion of this violent image and sounds in the kids’ childish game of illu-
sions, the film seems to suggest that younger generations are destined to
become part of these aggressions to the landscape that have resulted in a
history of exploitation for Chocó.
But the alternative to this history, the only sunny side in Chocó’s
experience and in the movie overall, also has to do with mining. It in-
volves a secluded and safe space detached from the town and the
dredges, an artisanal mine run by Américo, a man Chocó meets in the
forest. After hearing that Chocó has been fired and is struggling to make
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 41

a living, Américo invites her to work with him. He describes his mine in
the following terms: “Yo trabajo minería pero no trabajo con máquinas ni
con mercurio, yo trabajo en minería artesanal, la que tradicionalmente
han venido trabajando los mayores” (I mine, but not with machines or
mercury, I practice artisanal mining, the type of mining that our elders
have traditionally done). The following day, as her son skips school to go
work in one of the mines dredged by the paisas, Chocó goes to work in
Américo’s mine. The film exploits the contrast between both kinds of
operations, painting a peaceful and harmonious picture of the lives of
artisanal miners in stark contrast with the insensitive paisas that mind-
lessly exploit the land and its inhabitants to maximize their profits.
Américo is a calm, wise, and proud Afro-Colombian man who mines
gold in a collaborative small-scale operation with the help of his wife,
son, and neighbor. Echoing the cautionary tales of ambition tied to gold
that I analyzed towards the beginning of this essay and articulating a
worldview opposed to the capitalist notion of maximizing profit, he ex-
plains to Chocó that:
Aquí trabajamos con las manos y con el corazón porque en la mina
artesanal no podemos ser egoístas, si usted lleva mucha ambición, no
consigue nada. Entonces hay que trabajar con tranquilidad, nada de
pensar que aquí voy a hacer una cantidad de plata, que ahora entonces
voy a pagar aquí, voy a comprar acá, nada de eso. Hay que trabajar
solo pensando en Dios que nos ayude y nos dé la suerte para salir
adelante.

(Here we work with our hands and hearts because in the artisanal mine
we cannot be selfish. If you harbor ambition you achieve nothing. So
we have to work peacefully, not thinking “here I am going to make a
bundle of cash, I am going to pay for this or that with this money,”
none of that. We have to work only with God in mind, trusting that he
will help us and give us the luck to overcome our difficulties.)
Regardless of how idealized or accurate a picture of actual artisanal min-
ing techniques the film paints, through this image of Américo’s mine, the
only safe space for the female protagonist, the film presents the ancestral
knowledge of Afro-Colombians and a thoughtful relationship with the
land’s wealth of resources as the only option for breaking the chain of
abuse, exploitation, and poverty tied to gold in the region. Hinostroza is
not very optimistic, however. Américo’s mine stands out for its unique-
ness and is not integrated into the town’s life; both paisas in the movie get
their way; Chocó’s son seems destined to be a part of the world of the
dredges; and, faced with despair and fed up with so much abuse, Chocó
resorts to violence and ends up castrating her husband and burning her
house down.
42 Aristizábal

EXTENSIONS

Some of the threads linking the works I have analyzed come in the form
of stark contrasts, such as the one that Hinostroza draws between Améri-
co’s mine and everything else that surrounds Chocó. More broadly, these
works pose natural wealth against endemic poverty, collective efforts
against boundless greed, and environmental awareness against violent
aggressions against the landscape. Often the contrasts are aggregated
into the trajectories and experiences of “genuine inhabitants” versus
those of reckless newcomers. Read together, these portrayals begin to
give us insight into the impositions and missteps of the discourses com-
ing from beyond the mountains, as well as the burdens, allures, and,
always, the glittering potential of gold in Chocó.
The works discussed in this chapter also contribute to the long history
of constructing Chocó as what Serje called a “virtual space” through the
transmission of stories about gold in a region that hides its elusive wealth
in plain sight and where people are doomed to fulfill the demands of an
extractive economy. The texts that I have analyzed transform alluring
tropes about the seemingly infinite wealth of a region where ants carry
gold and natives once wore golden garments and even drank the metal
into cautionary tales or examples of human barbarity, exposing the histo-
ry of Chocó’s relentless and violent exploitation, and calling attention to
the dangers of modernity and “development.” They are all texts that
participate in what Laura Barbas-Rhoden, dialoguing with Lawrence
Buell’s use of the term, has called the “environmental imaginary” of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin America. According to Bar-
bas-Rhoden, this imaginary questions, defies, and dismantles the exploi-
tation of people and nature by juxtaposing the reality of a dominant class
of national and foreign elites that have imposed a European or Anglo-
centric vision over the epistemologies, knowledge, and practices of those
who represent an alternative to Western modernity. Barbas-Rhoden
speaks of voices that “by pointing towards a crisis, recuperate an alterna-
tive history of modernity, explore the environmental consequences of the
marginalization of alternative forms of knowledge, and denounce the
instrumentalism of the economic systems (mercantilism and capitalism)
that have shaped Latin American realities for five centuries” (86). Build-
ing on Serje’s notion of “imagined geographies” created through “inter-
textual relationships,” the mythologies of gold shared by and disseminat-
ed throughout the texts discussed in this essay at many points operate to
question and dismantle the developmentalist fantasies of wealth and ex-
ploitation tied to gold, as is clearly the case in the stories collected by
Vanín and Friedemann, Palacios’ novel, and Hinostroza’s film. On the
other hand, El oro y la sangre and Andágueda display another side to that
Latin American environmental imaginary, one that cannot escape serving
 Mythologies of Gold in Chocó 43

as a reaffirmation of the violent impositions of those same fantasies and

projections.
This chapter is a first scratching. Possible themes for future study of
representations of Chocó lit by gold include the region’s role as a physical
space connected to modernity through the limited lines of extractive in-
dustries; a place where trajectories are opposite and extreme, where ten-
sions between the contrasts discussed above are negotiated daily and yet
remain fixed in place by both caricature and reality; and as a place where
ancestral knowledge and a thoughtful relationship with the wealth of
resources are opposed as the only and yet distant solution, a Pollyanna’s
dream standing small next to enormous dredges.

NOTES

1. Arturo Escobar, who has studied the region in depth, refers to the extraction of
gold, platinum, rubber, and wood as “boom and bust cycles . . . which have left an
indelible imprint on the social, economic, ecological, and cultural makeup of the
place” (Territories 4).
2. See Kiran Asher’s Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in
the Pacific Lowlands for a discussion of what was at stake in this process, including the
role of social movements, the economic motivations, and the environmental discus-
sions behind the transformation of the relationship of the nation with its Pacific region.
3. See Wade 20.
4. All translations are the author’s own unless noted otherwise.
5. Vanín explains that the weight that oral traditions carry in the Pacific is the
result of both the heritage of African cultures and the lack of access to literacy in the
region during slavery as well as for a long period after independence (59). Vanín sees
oral tradition as filling a communication void in the Pacific by infusing the “espacios
de transhumancia del hombre y la mujer ribereños con la necesaria carga de nostalgia
y crítica social por la condición de desterrados y luego marginados” (nomadic spaces
of riverbank-dwelling men and women with a necessary charge of nostalgia and a
social critique of their displaced and marginalized condition; 60).
6. Gold-carrying ants are a familiar trope in the Western tradition. They are fa-
mously found in the writings of Herodotus, who placed them in India (Histories, Book
III 102–105). They also appear in a Yoruba legend.
7. Applebaum elaborates on the project of these elites as one of regional identities
that served to “organize and comprehend a scattered and diverse population that did
not conform to idealized visions of a racially unified modern nation” (207). As she
notes, regional mystiques, such as the one that is iconic of Colombia’s coffee region,
are particular manifestations of racialized notions of modernity that associate progress
with whiteness, excluding the black and indigenous populations (207).
8. See, for instance, Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg’s edited volume on Banana
Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas.
9. This quote is from an electronic version of the text containing no page numbers.
10. María Ospina discusses the implications of this association in depth in a forth-
coming piece on “Natural Plots: The Rural Turn in Contemporary Colombian Cine-
ma.”
11. A castellano is a unit of measurement for weighing gold that dates to the colonial
period.
44 Aristizábal

WORKS CITED

Appelbaum, Nancy P. Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia,
1846–1948. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.
Asher, Kiran. Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific
Lowlands. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Print.
Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. “Hacia una ecocrítica transnacional: Aportes de la filosofía y
crítica cultural latinoamericanas a la práctica ecocrítica.” Revista de Crítica Literaria
Latinoamericana 79 (2014): 79–96. Print.
Botero Restrepo, Jesús. Andágueda y Café exasperación. Medellín: Autores antioqueños,
1986. Print.
Chocó. Dir. Jhonny Hendrix Hinestroza. 2012. Film.
Escobar, Arturo. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008. Print.
Escobar, Arturo y Álvaro Pedro. “Modernización: Una propuesta alternativa para el
Pacífico colombiano.” América Latina Hoy 7 (1994): 39–48. Print.
Friedemann, Nina de, Alfredo Vanín, and Diego Samper. El Chocó: Magia y leyenda.
Bogotá: Litografia Arco, 1991. Print.
García Márquez, Gabriel. “El Chocó que Colombia desconoce.” El Espectador Septem-
ber 1954: n. pag. Web.
Hoyos, Juan José. El oro y la sangre. Bogotá: Planeta, 1994. Print.
Mejía Vallejo, Manuel. “Introducción.” Andágueda y Café exasperación. Medellín:
Autores antioqueños, 1986. 1–7. Print.
Meza Ramírez, Carlos Andrés. Tradiciones elaboradas y modernizaciones vividas por pue-
blos afrochocóanos en la vía al mar. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e
Historia, 2010. Print.
Palacios, Arnoldo. La selva y la lluvia. Bogotá: Intermedio, 2014. Print.
Palacios, Marco. Entre la legitimidad y la violencia: Colombia 1875–1994. Bogotá: Editorial
Norma, 2003. Print.
Ronderos, María Teresa. “La fiebre minera se apoderó de Colombia.” Revista Semana.
September 6, 2011: n. pag. Web.
Santos Molano, Enrique. Introducción. La selva y la lluvia by Arnoldo Palacios. Bogotá:
Intermedio, 2014. 13–24. Print.
Serje, Margarita. El revés de la nación: Territorios salvajes, fronteras y tierras de nadie.
Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2005. Print.
Striffler, Steve and Mark Moberg, ed. Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the
Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.
Taussig, Michael. My Cocaine Museum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Print.
Vanín, Alfredo. “Lenguaje y modernidad.” Pacífico ¿Desarrollo o diversidad? Estado,
capital y movimientos sociales en el Pacífico Colombiano. Ed. Arturo Escobar and Alvaro
Pedrosa. Bogotá: Cerec y Ecofondo, 1996. 41–65. Print.
Wade, Peter. “Introduction: The Colombian Pacific in Perspective.” Journal of Latin
American Anthropology 7.2 (2002): 2–33. Print.
Yacup, Sofonías. Litoral recóndito. Medellín: Drake, 1993. Print.
 THREE
Anthropomorphism and Arboricide
The Life and Death of Trees in the American Tropics

Lesley Wylie

But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards
and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a
man is to be cut down and made into manure. There is a higher law
affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down is not
more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.
—Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods
Juan Carlos Galeano’s documentary film, The Trees Have a Mother (2008),
pieces together the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a
young man in the forests of the Peruvian Amazon near Iquitos and, in
particular, his mother’s unwavering search for him, aided by a shaman.
Much of the film is concerned with the persistence of mythical belief in
the Amazon: the young man’s disappearance is attributed by many locals
to a supernatural forest being with uneven-sized feet, the Chullachaqui,
“amigo de los árboles” (friend of the trees) who is credited with being
responsible for leading hunters deep into the forest until they get lost. 1
Nevertheless, towards the end of the documentary the focus shifts to
environmental damage in the Amazon—unchecked logging, water pollu-
tion, overfishing—which threatens, according to Galeano’s informants, to
displace even the supernatural denizens of the forest. The Chullachaqui, it
is reported, though still in existence, has retreated further into the jungle
away from human contact.
Galeano’s documentary exemplifies the important role that myth
plays in conservation in the Amazon. The work of the Colombian-born

45
46 Wylie

poet, including a collection of folktales from across the Amazon basin,

recuperates the Amazonian mythical imagination at a time of increasing
environmental crisis, where the Chullachaqui and his kin must struggle to
preserve the forest against not only solitary hunters, but also multination-
al corporations. Since pre-Columbian times such entities have, as Charles
Wagley and others have shown, acted as a check against the “exploitation
of the forest” (Wagley 134; Smith 99–100). In the Amazon, widespread
belief in the tutelary spirits of trees as well as “lugares encantados” (en-
chanted places) have preserved tracts of land that would otherwise have
been obliterated during periods of intense exploitation such as the rubber
boom (Smith 57).
In many of Galeano’s poems and stories, trees suffer the brunt of
environmental damage: rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) are drained of
latex, renacos (Ficus americana) have their habitat encroached upon, and in
the story “Lupuna” (Ceiba petandra), the eponymous tree is beaten by a
logger to invoke rain. In a recent poem, “Historia” (“History”), Galeano
writes apocalyptically of the complete destruction of the Amazon’s
forests:
en la selva nos dijeron que para traer más luz
le echáramos más árboles al fogón del sol.

Un día se nos fue la mano, y le echamos toda la selva

con sus pájaros, los peces, y los ríos. (Amazonia 2012, 32)

(in the jungle they told us that to bring more light

we should throw more trees into the sun’s furnace.

One day, our hand slipped and tossed in the entire jungle
with its birds, fish, and rivers.) (Amazonia 2012, 33)
By the same token, trees are also invested with a great deal of power in
Galeano’s work; in Cuentos Amazónicos (Folktales of the Amazon; 2007) they
bring on storms (“Renacal”), cause illness (“Lupuna”), and even kill peo-
ple who harm them (“Chullachaqui”). Unsurprisingly, Galeano’s poetry
is regarded as reflecting “explicit ecological concerns” (Larochelle, “Writ-
ing” 201). Joni Adamson has argued that his folktales “illuminat[e] the
consequences of global economic development for local humans, ani-
mals, and non-humans” (173). Galeano’s work reveals a world in which
Amazonian flora and fauna, as well as people, are fighting for survival.
Harnessing mythical belief is an important armament in this ecological
battle.
The environmental inflections of Galeano’s work correspond with
what Cynthia Deitering has called the “toxic consciousness” of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 2 In particular, his turn away
from an anthropocentric view of nature to one that advocates the respect
 Anthropomorphism and Arboricide 47

and protection of trees, flowers, and animals is in line with the deep
ecological movement. 3 Yet this essay wishes to explore how the concern
with the destruction of trees in Latin American literature started much
earlier and was also modulated through myth. Just a few years after
independence, Andrés Bello included the central image of an ancient tree
being hacked to the ground to make way for agricultural progress in his
1826 poem, “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida” (“Ode to Tropical
Agriculture”) and a century later, José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (The
Vortex; 1924) lamented widespread deforestation during the rubber
boom. The images of dying trees in these works are united not only by
environmental imperatives (even in Bello’s seemingly pro-development
poem, there is regret for the loss of habitat), but also for their recourse to
anthropomorphism. Whilst anthropomorphism was commonly em-
ployed by Romantic writers, who influenced both Bello and Rivera, this
essay will explore the ways in which images of trees dying, and, concom-
itantly, as being alive, also owe much to indigenous American views of
nature. Far from being estranged from ecological thinking, it will show
that the works of Bello and Rivera were both engaged with questions of
environmental damage as well as the relationship between the human
and the nonhuman, thus setting the stage for interventions by Amazo-
nian authors like Galeano.

“EL CEIBO ANCIANO”

Bello’s “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida” was published in 1826,

just as the focus of the independence movement in Latin America was
shifting from revolution to reconstruction. Bello wrote the poem sur-
rounded not by the lush tropical nature it describes, but in London,
where he was employed as a diplomat by a number of the new repub-
lics. 4 His physical distance from South America did nothing to dull the
exuberance of the recollected nature of the “Silva,” however. In the open-
ing stanzas, this “fecunda zona” (fertile zone) is shown to abound in both
new world and old world crops: sugarcane, maize, cocoa beans, and, the
epitome of tropical superabundance, the banana (Bello, Silvas 47; Selected
Writings 29). 5 The classical motif of the Golden Age is invoked at the start
of the “Silva” to convey the beneficence of tropical nature, which does
not require human toil but generously supplies all man’s needs (Meyer-
Minnemann 80–81). Nevertheless, much of the remainder of Bello’s poem
works to contain the profuse nature extolled in the opening stanzas; as
the title makes clear, the focus of the “Silva” is agriculture and in it Bello
advocates hard work and the ordering and control of wild nature, partic-
ularly trees.
Bello’s poem, closely modeled on Virgil’s Georgics, has been read by a
number of critics as proposing Republican Rome as a model for Latin
48 Wylie

America, with agriculture at the center of future prosperity (Cussen 126;

Hoeg 63–64). In the “Silva,” the epic tone of works such as the 1823
“Alocución a la Poesía” (“Allocution to Poetry”) is substituted for the
georgic mode, which viewed farming as “a cultural and a civilizing activ-
ity” tied to state-building and economic prosperity (Low 8). 6 As such, the
poem calls on the citizens of the new Latin American republics to forsake
the “ocio pestilente ciudadano” (“city’s evil idleness”; Bello, Silvas 49;
Selected Writings 30) and move to the countryside where they will find
health and contentment by effecting a transformation of the landscape,
grown “áspero . . . y bravo” (“harsh and wild”) during the years of
conflict (Bello, Silvas 53; Selected Writings 33).
The culmination of this vision of agricultural progress comes approxi-
mately halfway through the poem with the obliteration of an area of
“intricado bosque” (“matted trees”; Bello, Silvas 53; Selected Writings 33).
As Jerry Hoeg has observed, this episode seems to advocate “a slash and
burn policy” for the new republics (59). Using an extended martial meta-
phor, the poet describes a troop of men “invading” the forest “armed”
with sickles and felling an ancient tree:
la caterva
servil armada va de corvas hoces.
Mírola ya que invade la espesura
de la floresta opaca; oigo las voces,
siento el rumor confuso; el hierro suena,
los golpes el lejano
eco redobla; gime el ceibo anciano,
que a numerosa tropa
largo tiempo fatiga;
batido de cien hachas, se estremece,
estalla al fin, y rinde el ancha copa.
Huyó la fiera; deja el caro nido,
deja la prole implume
el ave, y otro bosque no sabido
de los humanos va a buscar doliente . . .
¿Qué miro? Alto torrente
de sonora llama
corre, y sobre las áridas rüinas
de la postrada selva se derrama. (Silvas 53–54)

(now comes the servile crowd

with curving sickles armed.
It bursts into the dark wood’s tangled growth.
I hear voices and distant sounds, the axe’s noise.
Far off, echo repeats its blows; the ancient tree
for long the challenge of the laboring crowd,
groans, and trembles from a hundred axes,
topples at last, and its tall summit falls.
 Anthropomorphism and Arboricide 49

The wild beast flees; the doleful bird

leaves its sweet nest, its fledgling brood,
seeking a wood unknown to humankind.
What do I see? A tall and crackling flame
spills over the dry ruins of the conquered forest.) (Selected Writings 34)
This episode is jarring in a poem that, on the surface at least, is concerned
with restoration and reconciliation. At the moment of death, nature has
never seemed more alive. The tree groans and shakes as it is hacked to
the ground and the reader’s sympathy for it is heightened not only by the
personification of nature, but also the disproportionate use of a hundred
axes against a single tree. The detail of a bird fleeing her young in terror
as well as the delineation of the desolate aftermath of the scene—“sólo
difuntos troncos, / sólo cenizas” (“only dead trunks, only ashes”; Silvas
54; Selected Writings 34)—make it difficult for any reader to take the side
of agricultural progress here. As Alex Regier affirms, the trope of anthro-
pomorphism “poses some of the oldest and most fundamental philo-
sophical and theological questions dealing with the relation and status of
the human subject vis-à-vis the physical world” (53). In this sense, the
poem’s anthropomorphism insists on the felling of the tree being re-
garded not simply as a horticultural act, but, in the words of the Peruvian
Amazonian poet Javier Dávila Durand, “arboricide.” 7
The tree in question is a “ceibo anciano.” However, it is likely that
Bello is referring not to the Ceibo erythrina or coral tree, which is not of
large proportions, but the Ceiba petandra or silk-cotton tree (popularly
called a “ceibo”) which can reach heights of 70 meters and diameters of
up to three (Salazar, I 61). 8 The Ceiba is considered a cosmic tree in many
parts of the Americas, known as the “Tree of Life,” and appearing in
Mayan mythology as the “axis” that held the world—the heavens and
earth—together (García-Goyco 363). In Central America, early modern
Spanish settlers acknowledged the indigenous peoples’ reverence for the
tree by including them in many colonial urban centers. 9 Some one hun-
dred years after Bello’s poem a Ceiba tree was symbolically planted dur-
ing a 1928 inauguration ceremony for El Parque de la Fraternidad
Americana in Havana by then president of Cuba, Gerardo Machado, ex-
emplifying its importance not only to pre-Columbian culture (the tree
was associated closely with the indigenous population of the Caribbean,
the Taíno people) but also to twentieth-century Afro-Cuban identity
(Hartmann 16–18).
The felling of the Ceiba in Bello’s “Silva,” then, is more than a shocking
instance of environmental destruction; it is, in fact, an act of desecra-
tion. 10 The fact that this tree was held sacred to the pre-Columbian peo-
ples suggests that, despite the recent overthrow of their colonial fathers,
this new generation of Latin Americans continues to engage in a “bárbara
conquista” (“savage conquest”) of both nature and culture in the Ameri-
50 Wylie

cas (Bello, Silvas 55; Selected Writings 35). The poet moves breezily on
from this scene of ruination, proudly presenting the methodical planta-
tions—“en muestra ufana de ordenadas haces” (“[in] proud rows and
orderly design”)—that grow in the wake of the charred forest (Silvas 54;
Selected Writings 34). The apparent orderliness of nature at the end of the
poem has led Hoeg, for one, to propose the following reading of the
“Silva”: “Man and Nature reverse their relative positions in terms of
freedom and slavery. Initially, nature is free and supplies Man’s needs
without cultivation. It is Man who is a slave to Nature. But by the post-
independence period, however, Nature has become a slave to Man who
is now free thanks to his control over nature” (64). Yet Bello’s poem also
lends itself to another interpretation. Far from being in control of nature,
man’s hold over it arguably remains at the end of the work as tenuous as
at the beginning. Whilst the poem thematically moves from disorder to
order, it is noteworthy that its form—the silva, which has no rhythmic or
strophic regularity—does not. 11 The freeness of the silva form, which
Marsha Collins has called a “structureless structure,” contradicts the
poem’s ordered vision of nature to create a work of prosodic unpredict-
ability (Collins 54). Indeed, the etymological coincidence between the
silva form and the poem’s subject matter, the selva, suggests the resilience
of the very entity which the poem attempts to defeat (Gomes 189).
It is also noteworthy that the penultimate stanza of the “Silva,” not-
withstanding the rather forensic account of the processes of land clear-
ance and crop planting in the preceding verses, includes an invocation to
God to protect “la gente agricultora / del ecuador” (“the Equator’s farm-
ing folk”; Silvas 54; Selected Writings 35):
intempestiva lluvia no maltrate
el delicado embrión; el diente impío
de insecto roedor no lo devore;
sañudo vendaval no lo arrebate,
ni agote al árbol el materno jugo
la calurosa sed de largo estío. (Silvas 55)

(Let not unseasonable rains

ruin the tender crops; let not the pitiless tooth
of gnawing insects devour them.
Let not the savage storm destroy,
or the tree’s maternal sap
dry up in summer’s long and heated thirst.) (Selected Writings 35)
A twenty-first-century reader of these lines might well make the connec-
tion between extreme weather or insect infestations and the harmful ef-
fects of deforestation on climate, but even without the benefit of modern
science it is clear that the future of these Latin American farmers is not at
all secure. The prayer at the end of the poem not only suggests the vul-
nerability of the agricultural project to natural forces, but its reliance on
 Anthropomorphism and Arboricide 51

the goodwill of the supernatural, a goodwill that has been cast in doubt
by the farmers’ pitiless sacrilege of the hallowed Ceiba tree. In The Golden
Bough, J. G. Frazer notes the belief that trees “exercise a quickening influ-
ence upon the growth of crops,” thus explaining the custom in some
parts of the world of making sacrifices to trees in order to secure good
harvests (Frazer 451). In Bello’s poem, the farmers not only fail to propiti-
ate nature, but treat it with violence and derision.
A final confirmation of the potential failure of Bello’s georgic vision of
productive farming is provided by a postscript from the 1950s—an eth-
nography of rural Afro-Cubans by Lydia Cabrera, El monte, which con-
tains a chapter on the Ceiba, “el árbol sagrado por excelencia” (the sacred
tree par excellence; 149). 12 Although the fieldwork for this book was
undertaken in the 1930s, more than a century after Bello completed his
Silva, and among a population whose beliefs about the tree owed much to
their African lineage, the prognostications it contains about the fate of
anyone who chops down a Ceiba are suggestive:
Un oscuro terror le impide al campesino descargar su hacha sobre el
tronco sagrado. . . . Sólo un temerario, un irresponsable, consentirá en
cortar la ceiba, que materializa, más que simboliza, a sus ojos, la terrible
omnipotencia de Dios. . . . Echarles abajo es pecado, con todos los
agravantes de un pecado mortal. Las ceibas se vengan. Las ceibas no
perdonan. . . . “Prefiero pasar miseria, dejar a mis hijos sin comer,
¡antes morirnos de hambre! que tumbar un ceiba,” es la exclamación
invariable del hombre rústico cuando se trata de suprimir el “árbol de
la Virgen María,” del Santísimo, el de Oddúdua o Aggayú, el árbol de
los espíritus. (Cabrera 191–92)

(An obscure fear prevents the peasant from raising his axe against the
sacred trunk. . . . Only a reckless or irresponsible person would agree to
cut down the Ceiba, which materializes more than symbolizes, in their
eyes, the terrible omnipotence of God. . . . To fell them is a sin, with all
the unfortunate circumstances of a mortal sin. Ceibas take revenge. Cei-
bas do not forgive. . . . “I prefer to live in misery, to leave my children
with no food, to have us die of hunger before I would chop down a
Ceiba” is the unvarying exclamation of the rural man when one tries to
remove the “tree of the Virgin Mary,” of the most holy one, of
Oddúdua or Aggayú, the tree of spirits.)
As Joe Hartmann observes, “the true destructive force of la ceiba is evoked
when one cuts down or defiles the tree” (25). Galeano’s Cuentos
amazónicos likewise refer to the vengeful nature of the Ceiba by associat-
ing the tree with the Curupira, a spirit protector characterized by “un pie
mirando adelante y el otro para atrás” (one foot facing forward and the
other facing backward) and a kin of the Chullachaqui, who punishes peo-
ple for destroying the rainforest. 13 Through the prism of such beliefs, the
felling of the tree in Bello’s poem is encoded not as an act of national
52 Wylie

consolidation but of cosmic defiance. If agriculture rests on man’s supe-

riority over nature, then these mythical beliefs suggest it is doomed to
failure in the Americas, where nature is not only uncontrollable but
endowed with a dangerous animism.

“PALMERA HEROICA”

Towards the end of José Eustasio Rivera’s 1924 novel, La vorágine, the
protagonist, Arturo Cova, deep in the disputed no-man’s-lands of the
Colombian Amazon, makes a pronouncement that shows marked ecolog-
ical foresight: “los caucheros que hay en Colombia destruyen anualmente
millones de árboles. En los territorios de Venezuela el balata desapareció.
De este suerte ejercen el fraude contra las generaciones del porvenir”
(“every year the rubber workers in Colombia destroy millions of trees,
while in Venezuela the balatá rubber tree has disappeared. In this way,
they defraud the coming generations”; La vorágine 272; The Vortex 298).
This statement no doubt contributed to the early reception of the novel as
a factual indictment of the Amazonian rubber industry. Carlos Alonso
affirms that, in the lead-up to the novel’s publication, Rivera coordinated
its reception as a documento de denuncia (legal denunciation) by publishing
a notice in three Colombian newspapers declaring its concern with “ac-
tividades peruanas en la Chorrera y en el Encanto y de la esclavitud
cauchera en las selvas de Colombia, Venezuela y Brasil” (Peruvian activ-
ities in La Chorrera and El Encanto and the slavery of rubber workers in
the jungles of Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil; Neale-Silva, Horizonte
298). 14 This was later compounded by a number of public statements by
the author insisting on the veracity of his account. 15 Whilst several critics
have recently revisited what Eduardo Neale-Silva has called the “factual
bases” of La vorágine, establishing the author’s concern with the neo-
colonial undercurrents of the rubber boom or questions of border secur-
ity in Colombia, the matter-of-fact description of deforestation in the
above passage is not typical of the novel as a whole. 16 Rather, as in Bello’s
“Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida,” trees are often treated anthro-
pomorphically and humans are likened to trees, which not only blurs the
boundary between the human and the nonhuman, but powerfully chal-
lenges anthropocentric views of nature as an economic resource.
La vorágine is replete with images of dying trees. One of the most
celebrated descriptions of the novel relates to the striking of a palm tree
by lightning: “era bello y aterrador el espectáculo de aquella palmera
heroica, que agitaba alrededor del hendido tronco las fibras del penacho
flamante y moría en su sitio, sin humillarse ni enmudecer” (“it was a
beautiful yet awesome sight to see that heroic tree waving the plumes of
its flaming crest around its ripped trunk, dying unrooted, proudly and
bravely”; La vorágine 170; The Vortex 121). The reference to the simultane-
 Anthropomorphism and Arboricide 53

ous terror and awe experienced by the observer encodes this moment as
archetypally Romantic: this is the sublime par excellence, anticipating
what Cova perceives to be the beautiful “spectacle” of two indigenous
oarsmen being sucked into a whirlpool later in the novel (Rivera, La
vorágine 233; The Vortex 191). 17 As well as being an established trope of
classical literature, anthropomorphism was common in Romantic writing
and Cova’s characterization of this tree as “heroic” confirms his fidelity
to this tradition. 18 Anthropomorphism is widespread in the novel, and in
the early sections it bestows on nature, particularly on trees, idealized
human characteristics such as bravery and loyalty. In the famous apos-
trophe to the selva that opens the second part of La vorágine, Cova adopts
a familial metaphor to convey the close ties of the trees: “tus vegetales
forman sobre la tierra la poderosa familia que no se traiciona nunca. El
abrazo que no pueden darse tus ramazones lo llevan las enredaderas y
los bejucos, y eres solidaria hasta en el dolor de la hoja que cae. Tus
multísonas voces forman un solo eco al llorar por los troncos que se
desploman” (“your vegetation is a family that never betrays itself. The
embrace your bows cannot give is carried by creepers and lianas. You
share even in the pain of the leaf that falls. Your multisonous voices rise
like a chorus bewailing the giants [trunks] that crash to earth”; La vorágine
189–90; The Vortex 143–44). In this passage there is not only a strong sense
of the sentience of nature but of its solidarity, as the creepers, elsewhere
in the novel represented as asphyxiating and uncontrollable, extend an
embrace that its branches cannot. 19
William Bull notes the presence of two kinds of anthropomorphism in
Rivera’s work. The first is Cova’s poetic use of the trope in the early part
of the novel “simply for stylistic effects” (316). The second relates to a
genuine belief on the part of the poet-protagonist in the aliveness of
nature, brought on, according to Bull, by his inability to distinguish fan-
tasy from reality. In line with this, throughout much of the latter sections
of La vorágine, the personification of trees works to reveal not a heroic
flora but one as downtrodden and ailing as the Amazonian caucheros
condemned to live among it. Clemente Silva, whose surname invokes the
“selva” through which he is trekking in search of his lost son (an anticipa-
tion of the plot of Galeano’s The Trees Have a Mother), describes the dam-
aging process of latex collection in the Amazon—a boom which annihi-
lated tens of thousands of people as well as trees in the first years of the
twentieth century: “por entonces se trabajaba el caucho negro tanto como
el siringa, llamado goma borracha por los brasileños; para sacar éste, se
hacen incisiones en la corteza, se recoge la leche en petaquillas y se cuaja
al humo; la extracción de aquél exigía tumbar el árbol, hacerle lacraduras
de cuarta en cuarta, recoger el jugo y depositarlo en hoyos ventilados”
(“black rubber was then as much sought as the siringa, called ‘drunken
rubber’ by the Brazilians; to get the latter, as you know, incisions are
made in the bark, the latex is gathered in cups, and then smoked. Black
54 Wylie

rubber, on the other hand, was collected by cutting down the tree. Inci-
sions were then made around the trunk at about a handbreadth apart, the
sap was collected and then put into ventilated holes”; La vorágine 262–63;
The Vortex 223). Although the language is factual—almost technical—in
its presentation of the process of rubber extraction and storage, the noun
“lacradura” (a Colombian provincialism meaning “señal ó reliquia de
una enfermedad,” a sign or after-effect of an illness) is an example of the
widespread use of anatomical discourse in the description of the tapping
or felling of trees in the novel. 20 Whilst in the Putumayo rubber zone
accompanying a French naturalist and explorer, Clemente comes across a
disfigured tree: “el árbol, castrado antiguamente por los gomeros, era un
siringo enorme, cuya corteza quedó llena de cicatrices, gruesas, protube-
rantes, tumefactas, como lobanillos apretujados” (“the tree, hacked in the
past by rubber workers, was a gigantic siringo, the bark of which was a
mass of scars, thick, proturberant, swollen, like squeezed tumors”; La
vorágine 266; The Vortex 228). 21 Like Bello’s “ceibo anciano,” this “siringo
enorme” is both old and of large stature—two qualities which, as Kit
Anderson notes, often lead to the veneration of trees in human society
(7). Although in La vorágine the tree is not felled, it has been severely
damaged by the process of rubber extraction. The simile comparing its
rutted bark to a ganglion as well as the references to scars, tumefaction,
and castration are part of the generalized medical lexicon that Charlotte
Rogers has identified in the novel (91–117).
This discourse is intensified following Clemente’s realization that this
tree was the very one on which, years before, he had inscribed a message
to his missing son, Luciano—a message which, against all odds, the son
had read and responded to. This discovery precipitates a strong sense of
cohesion with nature in Silva, who compares his injuries at the hands of
his bosses to those of the mutilated tree: “‘Señor, diga si mi espalda ha
sufrido menos que ese árbol.’ Y, levantándome la camisa, le enseñé mis
carnes laceradas. Momentos después, el árbol y yo perpetuamos en la
Kodak nuestras heridas, que vertieron para igual amo distintos jugos:
siringa y sangre” (“‘Señor, tell me if my back has suffered less than that
tree.’ And raising my shirt, I showed him my lacerated flesh. A moment
later the tree and I perpetuated our wounds in the camera, wounds that
for the same master shed different juices: rubber and blood”; La vorágine
266–67; The Vortex 229). Here and elsewhere in the novel the fluids of
trees and men—“siringa y sangre”—coalesce, blurring the boundary be-
tween plants and humans. 22 In the famous lament that opens the third
part of the novel, an unnamed cauchero describes a fight over tapped
latex, in which “la leche disputada se salpica de gotas enrojecidas” (“the
disputed latex is splashed with red”); but, he concludes, “¿qué importa
que nuestras venas aumenten la savia de vegetal?” (“what does it matter
if our veins increase the supply of sap?” (La vorágine 289; The Vortex 261).
Here and throughout the novel the “sangre blanca” (“white blood”) of
 Anthropomorphism and Arboricide 55

the forest trees is literally and metaphorically augmented by human

blood to meet the world demand for rubber (La vorágine 287; The Vortex
259).
The comparison of sap to blood in La vorágine has, as Seymour Menton
has noted, clear echoes of Canto XIII of Dante’s Inferno:
I reached my hand
A little in front of me and twisted off

One shoot of a mighty thornbush— and it moaned,

“Why do you break me?” Then after it had grown
Darker with blood, it began again and mourned,

“Why have you torn me? Have you no pity, then?

Once we were men, now we are stumps of wood.[”] (131) 23
This has close parallels not only with the merging of “sangre y siringa”
above, but a sequence early in La vorágine when, before entering the jun-
gle, Cova has a nightmare in which he pursues his naked lover, Alicia,
through a nocturnal forest, armed with a rubber tapper’s axe and collect-
ing jar. He stops before an Araucaria tree and, as he scores the bark to
extract rubber, hears a voice saying, “¿Por qué me desangras? Yo soy tu
Alicia y me he convertido en una parásita” (“Why do you bleed me? . . . I
am your Alicia, now but a parasite”; La vorágine 112; The Vortex 51). 24
Indeed, throughout the novel there are several instances of human trans-
figuration into vegetal form. Silva’s co-extensiveness with the jungle is
drawn out not only by his surname and the comparison of his mutilated
body to a scarred rubber tree, but his reference to an angry rubber work-
er’s attempt to “destroncar[le]” (La vorágine 263). “Destroncar” means
both to mutilate and, when applied to trees, to chop down.
In the final pages of the novel, in what is perhaps the most explicit
instance of phytomorphism, Cova imagines himself turning into a tree
when he loses sensation in one side of his body during an attack of beri-
beri:
lo demás no era mío, ni la pierna, ni el brazo, ni la muñeca; era algo
postizo, horrible, estorboso, a la par ausente y presente, que me
producía un fastidio único, como el que puede sentir el árbol que ve
pegada en su parte viva una rama seca. . . . me sentía sembrado en el
suelo, y por mi pierna, hinchada, fofa y deforme como las raíces de
ciertas palmeras, acendía una savia caliente, petrificante. Quise mo-
verme y la tierra no me soltaba. ¡Un grito de espanto! ¡Vacilé! ¡Caí! (La
vorágine 374)

(The rest of me was not mine, neither my leg, nor my arm, nor my
wrist. They were something false, horrible, bothersome, present and
absent at one time, producing an annoyance such as a tree must feel on
having a dead bough clinging to its living trunk. . . . I felt myself rooted
56 Wylie

to the earth; and up to my leg, swollen, spongy, deformed like the

tubers of palms, I felt a hot, petrifying sap creeping. I wanted to move,
but my leg wouldn’t let me go. A cry of fear! I swayed! I fell!) (The
Vortex 366)
Here Cova not only finds himself rooted to the ground, but feels the
warm sap of latex running down his leg (once more invoking the connec-
tions between latex, blood, and, in this instance, semen); the medical
interventions of his companion, who calls for him to be bled, does noth-
ing to offset this slip, quite literally, into a vegetative state. His reference
to the gripping earth is reminiscent of an earlier description of a person-
ified nature by another of Cova’s guides, El Pipa, who shares a vision of
talking and gesticulating trees after imbibing the Amazonian hallucino-
gen yagé. In Pipa’s hallucination, the trees are unable to move because “la
tierra los agarraba por los tobillos y les infundía la perpetua inmovili-
dad” (“the earth held them fast by their ankles, motionless for ever”; La
vorágine 213; The Vortex 166).
James C. McKusick has observed the lack of “a strong sense of onto-
logical difference” between humans and nature in the work of Henry
David Thoreau, who provides the epigraph for this essay (165). This ero-
sion of a traditional anthropocentric view of nature is also evident in La
vorágine where, as discussed above, there is a persistent interplay be-
tween human and arboreal fluids, tree trunks, legs, and torsos. Neverthe-
less, unlike in Thoreau, where oneness with nature is invoked pantheisti-
cally—a token of the immanence of God—the animistic nature of La
vorágine can be frightening and hostile. Jean Franco argues that whilst in
the jungle Cova finds himself “in the grip of a powerful material force. . . .
Not only do the trees physically hem him in but the jungle determines his
thoughts and sensations” (107). As Cova and his companions wend their
way through the Colombian Amazon, the protagonist notes that the trees
“iban creciendo a cada segundo, con una apariencia de hombres acuclilla-
dos, que se empinaban desperezándose hasta elevar los brazos verdosos
por encima de la cabeza” (“the trees were growing taller every second,
like men who have been crouching and rise and stretch until their arms
are high above their heads”; La vorágine 293; The Vortex 267). Just as Cab-
rera’s informants in El Monte affirm that “de noche las ceibas conversan,
andan y se trasladan” (at night the ceibas talk, walk and move about), La
vorágine includes descriptions of trees talking, gesticulating, and danc-
ing. 25 Clemente Silva ascribes such views to “el embrujamiento de la
selva” (“the witchery of the jungle”), a condition through which trees
enchant travelers and cause them to get lost in the jungle or engage in
heinous acts (La vorágine 294; The Vortex 268). 26 According to Silva’s ac-
count, “cualquiera de estos árboles se amansaría, tornándose amistoso y
hasta risueño, en un parque, en un camino, en una llanura, donde nadie
lo sangrara ni lo persiguiera; mas aquí todos son perversos, o agresivos, o
 Anthropomorphism and Arboricide 57

hipnotizantes” (“any of these trees would seem tame, friendly, even smil-
ing in a park, along a road, on a plain, where nobody would bleed it or
persecute it; yet here they are all perverse, or aggressive, or hypnotizing”;
La vorágine 294; The Vortex 268–69). The novel abounds in examples of the
forest’s aggressive acts against men. When Clemente is lost in the jungle,
he describes how the very vines that earlier anthropomorphically em-
braced each other “no le dejaban abrir la trocha” (“resist his efforts to
blaze a trail”), and when he tries to flee from his menacing companions
“un árbol cómplice lo enlazó por las piernas con un bejuco y lo tiró al
suelo” (“the treacherous lianas of a tree caught his legs and tripped him”;
La vorágine 308–309; The Vortex 284–85). Another mysterious Amazonian
tree is said to exude an irresistible perfume that attracts men and leaves
their bodies “veteado de rojo, con una comezón desesperante, y van apar-
eciendo lamparones que se supuran y luego cicatrices arrugando la piel”
(“mottled with red, itching frightfully. Then large red spots appear that
fester, and then dry up leaving the skin scarred and wrinkled”; La
vorágine 270; The Vortex 233). And some suffer even worse fates: the body
of Clemente’s son, killed by a falling tree, is finally located “contra las
raíces de un jacarandá” (“against the roots of a rosewood tree”; La
vorágine 286; The Vortex 254), and in the novel’s indeterminate ending, the
reader is given to believe that Cova and his companions have also died at
the hands of nature: “¡Los devoró la selva!” (“The jungle has swallowed
[lit. devoured] them”; La vorágine 385; The Vortex 379).
This image of an anthropophagous forest, which echoes the phrasing
of Silva’s anguished lament for his son upon learning of his death: “Lo
mató un árbol” (“A tree killed him”), suggests not only a willful deviance
on the part of nature, but a reversal of the usual power dynamics be-
tween men and trees (La vorágine 286; The Vortex 255). Despite the grave
reminders of deforestation which punctuate the novel, trees in La vorágine
are ultimately shown to resist death. As Cova professes in a characteristi-
cally mournful tone: “más que a la encina de fornido gajo, aprendió a
amar a la orquídea lánguida, porque es efímera como el hombre” (“in-
stead of loving the stout and rugged oak, I have learned to love the
languid orchid because it is ephemeral like man”; La vorágine 190; The
Vortex 144). The transience of human life in the Amazonian jungle—in
contrast to that of the trees “siempre condenados a retoñar, a florecer, a
gemir, a perpetuar . . . su especie formidable” (“condemned to flourish,
flower, grow, perpetuate their formidable species”; La vorágine 213; The
Vortex 166)—is borne out in the final pages of the novel when Cova and
his party disappear. Whilst Bello’s lofty Ceibo falls at the hands of loggers,
one hundred years later, it is man who succumbs to a powerfully animate
nature.
58 Wylie

ECOCENTRIC PERSONIFICATION

Bryan L. Moore has identified personification as a significant trope in

ecocentric writing: “it represents the relationship between human and
nonhuman, challenges anthropocentrism, and extends ‘moral consider-
ability to nonhuman beings’“ (10). Carolyn Merchant likewise argues that
“the image of the earth as a living organism . . . serve[s] as a cultural
constraint restricting the actions of human beings” (Death 3). Yet in the
Latin American texts discussed in this chapter, the attaching of human
characteristics to nature is only part of the story. Whilst the personifica-
tion of the ancient tree in Bello’s “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida”
invokes sympathy for nature, it is the mythology surrounding the Ceiba
tree that finally undermines the confident discourse of agricultural
progress that propels the text. In the case of La vorágine, anthropomor-
phism arguably makes nature appear not human but “inhumana” (“in-
human”; La vorágine 295; The Vortex 269), where the personified trees are
shown to be capable not only of cursing “la mano que los hería, del hacha
que los derribaba” (“the hand that scored them, the axe that felled them”;
La vorágine 213; The Vortex 166), but rising up against their oppressors, the
rubber workers, with whom they are portrayed as engaging in a mortal
combat. 27 In The Trees Have a Mother, the film with which this essay
opened, as in many of Galeano’s poems and stories, the spirit protectors
of trees are powerful shape shifters capable of avenging the over-exploi-
tation of nature. Personification in all these works goes well beyond the
Romantic reflex of seeing nature as a mirror of man’s emotions. The
condition of humanity is not held up as the highest form of being in these
texts, particularly in Rivera where the personification of trees is matched
by a persistent mythological transformation of humans into plant-form.
Rather the images of dying—and living—trees destabilize Western onto-
logical distinctions between animate and inanimate matter and provide
an ecologically charged defense of the rights of nature.
Transformations of trees into men and vice versa in post-Indepen-
dence Latin American writing do not only recall classical myths of phyto-
morphism or ancient beliefs in the sympathy between the human and the
nonhuman, but more specifically indigenous American beliefs in the co-
extensiveness of the human with the nonhuman, theorized by Philippe
Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro among others. 28 Descola notes
the flexibility of ontological categories among a number of Amazonian
communities, including the Makuna, who classify “human beings,
plants, and animals as ‘people’ (masa), whose main attributes—mortality,
social and ceremonial life, intentionality, and knowledge—are in every
way identical” (8). Viveiros de Castro observes that Amerindian myths
“inextricably mix human and animal attributes in a common context of
intercommunicability” (“Cosmological Deixis” 471). His theory of multi-
naturalism identifies a belief in a “metaphysical continuity” between hu-
 Anthropomorphism and Arboricide 59

mans and nonhumans that underpins the Amazonian worldview and

posits an originary core of humanity in all living things, including ani-
mals and plants. 29 In all the texts discussed in this chapter, the dissolu-
tion of boundaries between the human and the nonhuman plays an im-
portant role in the codification of man’s relationship with nature—a rela-
tionship which, it is made clear, should be unhierarchical and unexploita-
tive. In “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida” and La vorágine, anthro-
pomorphism, mythology, and ecology converge to challenge anthropo-
centrism and denounce the destruction of South America’s tropical
forests.

NOTES

1. This is the description of the Chullachaqui in Galeano’s Cuentos amazónicos 99.

The English translation is from Galeano, Folktales of the Amazon 43.
2. Regarding this term, see Deitering’s “The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Conscious-
ness in Fiction of the 1980s.”
3. For an account of the deep ecological movement see Drengson, Devall, and
Schroll, “The Deep Ecology Movement.”
4. I also discuss the ecological dimensions of Bello’s poem in the forthcoming
chapter, “The Poetics of Plants in Latin American Literature.”
5. Whilst maize and cocoa were native to South America, sugarcane and bananas
were not; see Crosby’s Columbian Exchange.
6. Cussen 118 refers to the Georgic mode in the poem.
7. Cited in Larochelle, “Writing” 201.
8. The fact that Bello is referring to a Ceiba not a Ceibo is confirmed not only by the
description of the tree’s large stature, but also other references to these trees in Bello’s
poem. Ten lines before the mention of the “ceibo anciano,” Bello refers to the role of
the “bucare” (Ceibo erythrina) as a good source of shade for young cacao plants. In
contrast, an unpublished fragment of the “Silva” includes a description of a group of
imposing trees including Ceibas and laurels which “ramas a ramas / pugnando por
gozar de las felices / auras y de la luz, hacen la guerra” (branch to branch / struggling
to enjoy the fortuitous / breezes and the light, wage war) (Bello, Silvas 70). This frag-
ment has a number of parallels with the section of the poem describing the “ceibo
anciano,” not least a reference to a “tronco anciano” (ancient trunk; Bello, Silvas 70).
9. See Kit Anderson 105–107.
10. Kit Anderson argues that “trees are intimately tied to notions of the sacred” (5).
11. For an account of the Silva form, see Clarke 1306.
12. The translation into English of Cabrera’s El monte is my own.
13. A note in Cuentos amazónicos refers to this vengeful nature (141–42). The descrip-
tion of the Curupira is from the poem of the same name in Galeano, Amazonia 2012, 55.
14. See Alonso 142.
15. For instance, “Al componer mi libro no obedecí a otro móvil que el de buscar la
redención de esos infelices que tienen la selva por cárcel” (When writing my book my
sole motivation was to seek the redemption of those wretches who were imprisoned in
the jungle; Neale-Silva, Horizonte 306) and “Yo vi todas esas cosas. Los personajes que
allí figuran son todos entes vivos y aun algunos de ellos llevan sus nombres propios”
(I saw all of those things. The people who are featured are all real and some of them
even go by their actual names; Neale-Silva, Horizonte 305). See also Wylie, Colonial
Tropes 23–24.
60 Wylie

16. See Neale-Silva, “The Factual Bases.” Regarding the question of neo-imperial-
ism, see French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers; on
border security, see Wylie, Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier 132–45.
17. The influence of Romanticism on Rivera has been noted by a number of critics.
See, for example, Jean Franco’s “Image and Experience in La vorágine” and Otto Olive-
ra’s “El romanticismo de La vorágine.”
18. See Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp and De Man’s “Anthropomorphism and
Trope in the Lyric.”
19. For instance, in an equally famous passage from the novel in which Cova de-
scribes the horror of the “selva inhumana” (“inhuman jungle”), he refers to the vine of
the “matapalo,” which suffocates and kills other trees by wrapping itself around them
(La vorágine 295; The Vortex 269).
20. The definition is from Uribe Uribe 242.
21. The French naturalist character has been likened to real-life traveler Eugene
Robuchon, who disappeared in this notorious region in 1906 (see Rivera, La vorágine
265n87; Goodman 45–48).
22. Kit Anderson observes that the “dividing line between humans and trees can
become thin,” citing John Evelyn’s “homo is but arbor inversa” (4).
23. See Menton 432.
24. Seymour Menton quotes this passage from Dante in Spanish to draw attention
to the similarities between it and this dream-sequence, particularly the line, from
Dante, “¿Por qué me desgarras?” (Menton 432).
25. See Cabrera 154 and Rivera 213, 306, and 308–309.
26. For instance, Clemente describes an act of fratricide after two brothers get lost in
the jungle. The “embrujamiento de la selva” is a common trope in the novela de la selva,
a tradition of writing on the Amazon from the 1920s to the mid-1950s, of which La
vorágine is the supreme example. In Rómulo Gallegos’ Canaima (1935), the protagonist
Marcos Vargas also goes mad in the jungle.
27. There are several references to the combat between men and trees in the novel.
At the end of the rubber worker’s lament, the first-person narrator comments: “Así el
árbol y yo, con tormento vario, somos lacrimatorios ante la muerte y nos combatire-
mos hasta sucumbir” (“Thus both the tree and I, suffering, are tearful in the face of
death: and both of us struggle until we succumb”; La vorágine 289; The Vortex 261) and
later “teniendo a la selva por enemigo, no saben a quién combatir” (“although the
jungle is their enemy, they don’t know who to fight”; La vorágine 298; The Vortex 272).
28. Regarding classical phytomorphic myths, see Buell 183.
29. Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis” 479. Cormier gives an example of
Viveiros’ multinaturalism in her fieldwork on the Guajá community in Eastern Ama-
zonia who view plants as having the same social structures as human beings: “For
example, neighbouring babassu palms may be described as wife and husband to each
other” (88). Isabelle Stengers also forwards the notion of interaction between humans
and nonhumans in her conception of a cosmopolitical network; see Cosmopolitics.

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———. “The Factual Bases of La vorágine.” PMLA 54 (1939): 316–31. Print.
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Wylie, Lesley. Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the novela
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 FOUR
The “Brevity of the Planet”
Environmental Loss in Recent Poetry
by Contemporary Amazonian Writers

Jeremy Larochelle

In The Trees Have a Mother, a recent documentary by Amazonian poet

Juan Carlos Galeano, an unsettling scene remains imprinted upon my
memory: row upon row of clear-cut old-growth trees are being fed
through a large saw, shadows of their former, animate selves, while the
oil-stained hands of workers standing by push them through. The voice
in the background recites part of “History,” one of Galeano’s most com-
pelling poems:
But in the jungle they told us that for there to be more light,
we should throw more trees into the sun’s furnace.

One day our hand slipped and we tossed in the entire jungle
with its birds, fish, and rivers.

Now we spend a lot of time gazing at the stars

and our daily menu almost never changes.

Today we hunted down a cloud

that was going to become winter in New York City. (Galeano, Amazonía 33)
Although this image clearly delineates the devastating fate of the envi-
ronment in much of the region, what makes this scene all the more poig-
nant is the way in which the documentary provides the viewer a glimpse
into a specifically Amazonian way of viewing the relationship between

63
64 Larochelle

humans and the more-than-human world. For native Amazonians, the

clear-cutting of trees and the destruction of the local environment is
made all the more devastating because they constitute not only a loss of
habitat and biodiversity, but also the loss of the spirits and protectors
who inhabit those trees and animals. This uniquely Amazonian world-
view is also present in recent poetry from throughout the Amazon region
and serves to raise environmental awareness in readers and engage them
in an animistic view of the world. Their poetic work directly confronts
stereotypes about the region, making it essential reading in courses on
literature and environment.
In the Amazonian worldview and its varied representations, the
more-than-human world has agency and is inhabited by both protective
and defensive spirits. The physical and spirit worlds are experienced as
inseparable. In his introduction to El ojo verde: Cosmovisiones amazónicas
(The Green Eye: Amazonian Worldviews), anthropologist Fernando Santos
Granero articulates the fluidity between multiple spheres of reality
present in this worldview: “instead of establishing rigid boundaries be-
tween nature and society, human and animal, the sacred and the pro-
fane,” the world that exists consists not only of that which can be seen
and felt but of multiple “spheres of reality” that exist outside the bounds
of our immediate, tangible reality (29). As Santos Graneros writes, “indig-
enous worldviews are based on the multiplicity of spheres of reality, the
permeability of borders, and the active interaction among all the beings
that inhabit these spheres. The survival of human beings depends in
large measure on maintaining a harmonious balance among the inhabi-
tants of these different worlds” (29). According to anthropologist Michael
Uzendoski, Amazonian thought implies a profound questioning of the
notion of modernity and proposes alternatives: “on the one hand, moder-
nity objectifies nature as a domain of extractable resources. On the other,
Amazonian perspectives insist that nature is a living and sentient being
whose actions and multiple personalities impact the daily lives of human
actors in complex ways” (2). As Uzendoski articulates, the Amazonian
view of the more-than-human world is that of a living, breathing being
with “multiple personalities” that has a dynamic effect on the lives of
humans. When that natural environment inhabited by spirits is de-
stroyed, there is not simply a loss of habitat and resources, but rather a
more profound loss that includes protective spirits and others with
whom many Amazonians enter into a rapport. 1
Several authors from the Amazonian region of Peru, among them Ana
Varela Tafur, Percy Vílchez Vela, and Carlos Reyes Ramírez, enter into
dialogue with a non-Western approach to the relationship between the
human and more-than-human world inspired by Amazonian indigenous
cosmologies. These writers view the more-than-human world not as sim-
ply “so much scenery,” as David Abram lays out artfully in his assess-
ment of a Western approach to landscape when referring to the role of
 The “Brevity of the Planet” 65

the shaman, but rather as a sentient, living, breathing world populated by

spirits both concrete and intangible: “the deeply mysterious powers and
entities with whom the shaman enters into a rapport are ultimately the
same forces—the same plants, animals, forests, and winds—that to liter-
ate, ‘civilized’ Europeans are just so much scenery, the pleasant backdrop
of our more pressing human concerns” (Abram 9). These recent texts
engage with issues of environmental loss occurring in and around cities
in the Amazon, delineating the waste contaminating local waterways as a
result of industrialization, oil extraction, and consumer waste.
The Amazon region has long been described and analyzed by outsid-
ers who nearly always leave out the perspective of those who call Ama-
zonia home. 2 Recent poetry from throughout the Amazon basin allows
the reader a glimpse into alternative perspectives on the region and
serves to question these stereotypes. 3 Ana Varela Tafur, a poet from Iqui-
tos, Perú, confronts stereotypes and misconceptions about the Amazon
region in her most recent book of poetry, Brevedad del planeta (The Brevity
of the Planet; 2012). Varela Tafur won the prestigious premio Copé for her
book of poetry, Lo que no veo en visiones (What I Cannot See in Visions; 1991)
and founded the cultural group Urcututu along with fellow poets Percy
Vílchez Vela and Carlos Reyes Ramírez. In the three-part poem “Tres
estancias para hablar de la Amazonía” (“Three Stages for Speaking about
Amazonia”) Varela Tafur discusses the fables about the region created by
outsiders, which began with Fraile Gaspar de Carvajal’s sixteenth-centu-
ry chronicles:
Dicen que devora hombres, personajes y naves.
Que es un bosque fluvial, un libro de fantasías, un tema del nuevo cine.
Que es el pulmón del mundo, la salvación.
El reciente descubrimiento del mercado mundial.
Es inenarrable sobre todo en la ficción cinematográfica.
Para algunos es un mito.
Una fábula, un nombre que viene de Occidente.
De Grecia antigua donde lo sagrado tenía poder.

(They say that it devours men, protagonists, and ships.

That it is a riverine forest, a book of fantasies, a theme from the new cinema.
That it is the lungs of the planet, salvation.
The world market’s most recent discovery.
It is indescribable, above all, in cinematic fiction.
For some it is a myth.
A fable, a name that originated in the West.
From Ancient Greece where the sacred had power.)
As this poem makes clear, the Amazon has long been described and
defined by outsiders, who attempted to overwrite it with meanings taken
from the Western tradition. In this first section of the poem, Varela articu-
lates the long history of colonialism in Amazonia, beginning with having
66 Larochelle

been given a name that “originated in the West” and extending to its
current representation as the “lungs of the planet,” needing to be pro-
tected by and for the benefit of outsiders.
Some of these ways of representing the region, such as its ability to
“devour men,” are predominant in the novela de la selva (jungle novel)
genre of Latin American narrative. The memorable final line of Colom-
bian José Eustasio Rivera’s classic novel, La vorágine (The Vortex, 1924)
sums up the cultural imaginary about the jungle held by many outsiders,
in a few short words: “Y los devoró la selva” (And the jungle devoured
them; 385). La vorágine and other novels from the jungle novel tradition,
such as Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps;
1953), represent the region simultaneously as Green Cathedral and Green
Hell (Slater, Entangled Edens 8). The protagonists of the two celebrated
novels share a common fascination for the unknown, which includes
both the frightening and exotic aspects of the jungle. In both novels and
others from the novela de la selva tradition, the protagonists embark on a
return-to-nature trip, which holds different meaning for each of the male
protagonists. As Scott DeVries comments, “here the image of la selva is
construed as a destination for proving one’s full worth in a one-on-one
encounter with nature; thus we inevitably return to the romantic ideal of
the escape to nature” (“Swallowed” 540). Portrayed as a place of great
peril for outsiders, primarily intellectual city-dwellers who decide to “re-
turn to nature,” local Amazonian cultural production has remained large-
ly off the radar of Latin American literary criticism, as has, in many ways,
a focus on the people who call the region home. Indeed, despite the large
number of writers who were born in or reside in Amazonia, only a hand-
ful have received more than passing national or international recognition,
among them Brazilian writers Inglês de Sousa and Milton Hatoum.
Varela Tafur’s poem captured the problematic nature of these outside
representations—at once “myth” and “lungs of the planet”—ideas that
do little to promote more complex environmental and cultural awareness
about Amazonia. Similarly, Candace Slater provides an illuminating per-
spective on outside representations of Amazonia in Entangled Edens: Vi-
sions of the Amazon. Slater opens her book with a reaction to the IMAX
film Amazon (1997), which initiates an analysis of how the region is repre-
sented in the West. The film characterizes the region as an “immense
ecological machine of global importance,” at the same time that it high-
lights native healers and indigenous people in their traditional garb—all
aspects that fit the neatly constructed, preconceived notions of the specta-
tors at the Natural History Museum:
Where were the thorny issues of justice and injustice that scenes of a
marvelous nature too often cloak? . . . My problem with the IMAX
movie was not just that it was simplistic. It also was that the movie’s
presentation of exotic plants and animals together with a select group
 The “Brevity of the Planet” 67

of “natural” people encouraged outsiders to follow a long tradition of

seeing the Amazon as a realm of nature that it was their mission or
their right—and not the mission or right of Amazonians—to protect.
And this protection, no matter how well intentioned, was a form of
outside control, and therefore suspect. (Slater, Entangled Edens 3–4)
In the second part of Varela Tafur’s poem “Tres estancias para hablar de
la Amazonía,” she takes up precisely this concern and the often irrepara-
ble consequences of outside decision-makers taking control:
“Hay que desviar los cauces de los ríos,” dicen los modernos
visionarios.
Y en sus sueños habita una central hidroeléctrica.
Una maquinaria espeluznante donde van a morir los delfines.
El equilibrio del mundo acuático es un espejo roto en esos sueños.
Son visionarios que no duermen porque asaltan la prensa amarilla
o la compran.
Y sus proyectos son cifras millonarias que viajan por ministerios
Y suenan a verdades en el congreso de las mentiras abundantes.
En nombre de la economía y el bienestar de la patria hablan.
En nombre de nosotros los habitantes del bosque hablan.
En nombre de los peces y las plantas acuáticas hablan.
En sus discursos proclaman el triunfo de la tecnología
Y asesinan con vasta ignorancia la naturaleza del planeta. (192)

(“It is necessary to deviate the flow of the rivers,” proclaim the

modern visionaries.
And in their dreams dwell hydroelectric dams.
A shocking machinery where dolphins will meet their death.
The balance of the aquatic world is a broken mirror in these dreams.
They are visionaries who don’t sleep because they assault the
sensationalist presses or they buy them out.
And they sound like indisputable truths in the congress of abundant
lies.
They speak in the name of the economy and the well-being of the
nation.
In our names, the inhabitants of the forest, they speak.
They speak in the name of the fish and the aquatic plants.
In their speeches they proclaim the triumph of technology.
And they assassinate with vast ignorance the nature of the planet.)
As both Slater and Varela Tafur warn, the dangers of the misrepresenta-
tions of Amazonia and the tendency of outsiders to envision changes
based on their ideology of expansion and development can have disas-
trous consequences for both the human and nonhuman residents of Ama-
zonia.
Varela Tafur captures the double-speak of those who claim to speak
on behalf of the natural world, but at the same time advocate for more
technology that inevitably destroys the natural world. She articulates the
68 Larochelle

stark contrast between the rhetoric of development and Amazonian per-

spectives: outsiders speak “in the name of” the economy, the well-being
of the nation, the fish and aquatic plants, and even the human inhabitants
of the forest—all the while ignoring the perspective of the insider who
calls Amazonia home. These “visionaries,” with their “vast ignorance,”
“asesinan la naturaleza del planeta” (assassinate the planet’s nature), a
term that refers to both the tangible nonhuman world there but also to
the unseen world of spirits that inhabits the sentient landscape, de-
stroyed by those who proclaim the “triumph of technology.”
Varela Tafur concludes her three-part poem with a lyrical account of
an insider’s material experience of the river. She describes in first person
the poetic voice’s interconnection with the nonhuman on the banks of the
river, her moments of quiet disturbed by oil staining the river, dead fish,
and trash:
En la orilla
He cruzado el río.
Mi espalda mojada se seca al sol.
En esta orilla me esperan restos de viajeros:
Un cuchillo, los dientes de un mamífero muerto,
Y botellas de coca cola vacías.
Cansada, he puesto mi cuerpo a dormir.
Y duermo abandonanda en la intemperie.
En esta orilla nadie me ve.
Duermo y un insecto vuela sobre mi cabeza.
¿Es mi pesadilla? No, es el petróleo manchando el río.
¿Quién puede dormir aquí?
En este río de gentes y peces moribundos.
Soy yo y todos los transeúntes de este viaje.
Cambio de espinas o de caudal. Me dejo llevar.
Migro con la orilla que deja el desagüe
O los desperdicios de una ciudad que mancha mi espalda.
Mis ojos buscan todavía la tierra sin mal y siguen su viaje. (192–93)

(On the bank

I’ve crossed the river.
My wet back dries in the sun.
On this shore I find what travelers have discarded:
A knife, the teeth of a dead mammal,
and empty bottles of Coca Cola.
Tired, I prepare to go to sleep.
And I sleep alone out in the open.
On this shore, no one sees me.
I sleep and an insect flies over my head.
Is it a nightmare? No, it is oil staining the river.
Who can possibly sleep here?
On this river of dying people and fish.
I am here along with the other travelers here, both fish and human.
 The “Brevity of the Planet” 69

To resist the toxicity I transform my fishbody or I seek out a different

river flow.
I allow the current to take me.
I migrate with the shore that leaves the drainage
or the waste from the city that stains my back.
Yet my eyes still search for a land without ills,
and they continue their search.)
What begins as a moment of interconnectedness with the natural world
on the banks of the river is tainted by the contamination along the river,
the oil and trash that stain her back as she lies down by the water to rest.
Far from being an outside observer seeking to appreciate the beauty of
the natural world from a distance, she experiences this contamination
firsthand, with stained clothes and disrupted rest. She also writes from
the perspective of the fish, imagining how a fish would respond to the
contamination in the river by changing its body to resist the toxicity
entering its system. Humans, on the other hand, have the option of leav-
ing in search of other rivers and have many ways of protecting them-
selves that are unavailable to fish. In a recent e-mail, Ana Varela Tafur
wrote the following related to this verse, her answer quite illuminating:
“En el poema hablo de peces y gentes indirectamente, como seres que
cambian de cuerpo o de río (caudal por río). Entonces cuando digo ‘cam-
bio de espinas o de caudal’ se refiere a que el cuerpo de un pez cambia
como forma de resistir a la contaminación. Imaginé que así pensaría un
pez, tendría que cambiar internamente para soportar la invasión de los
tóxicos en su cuerpo. La gente emigra, sale, cambia de caudal” (In the
poem, I speak of fish and people indirectly, as beings that change bodies
or riverbeds [riverbed standing in for river]. So when I say “cambio de
espinas o de caudal,” it refers to the body of a fish changing as a way of
resisting the contamination. I imagined that a fish would think this way,
it would have to change internally in order to deal with the toxins in its
body. People emigrate, leave, or change rivers).
As Varela Tafur articulates the experience of a fish in these contami-
nated waters, she captures the fluidity between the human and nonhu-
man, a key part of Amazonian cosmology. While the IMAX film and
other distanced, romanticized representations of Amazonia paint a pic-
ture of pristine waters teeming with life in a healthy riverine ecosystem,
the speaker of the poem certainly does not experience anything akin to
“la tierra sin mal”—a land without ills/evil—yet she continues with some
hope that she may find it. This hope seems to lie with a certain Amazo-
nian vision of evolution, with the poetic voice imagining shape-shifting
fish able to adapt to protect themselves from contamination. As an insid-
er she does not distance herself from the river’s flow, nor from the sub-
stances that contaminate it, but rather experiences the fragility and brev-
ity of life for fish and people on a visceral level.
70 Larochelle

Carlos Reyes Ramírez also writes of life along the many rivers and
tributaries that comprise the Amazon basin. Like Varela Tafur’s work, his
poetry describes the natural world around him and feelings of intercon-
nectedness with it, but the contamination of the local environment is
palpable. A poem entitled “El puerto de viejas barcazas,” from his latest
collection Animal de lenguaje (Animal of Language; 2011), clearly delineates
this desire for connectedness with the natural world undercut by the
reality of the contamination around him:
Llegué del río colmado de aire vegetal, de miríadas de
árboles en las pupilas y pisé los tablones del viejo puerto.
Sobre el lomo de un barco, sobre su lengua de hierro
escuché los gritos de la vida al amanecer: mugidos de
animales hambrientos, ronquidos de hombres en
hamacas multicolores, patadas como desayunos,
y el río que pasa conteniéndolo todo, dominándolo todo.
El viento arrastra olor de pescado y óxido de viejas
barcazas atrapadas en el fango.
Entre la pira de armazones y las aguas inmundas, un
preludio de truenos y plagas se levanta del hocico de la tarde.

(I returned from the river filled to the brim with vegetal air, with myriads of
trees in my pupils and I stepped up onto the planks of the old port.
Over the flanks of a boat, over its iron tongue,
I heard the shouts of life at dawn: grunts of hungry animals,
snoring of men in multicolored hammocks, twitches like breakfasts,
and the river that passes by containing everything, dominating everything.
The wind drags in the odor of fish and the rust from old barges
trapped in the mud.
Amid the pyre of industrial framework and filthy water, a prelude of
thunder and plagues rises up from the afternoon’s snout.)
The poetic voice returns from the river after an experience of close con-
nectedness with the more-than-human world: intoxicated with scents
and sights of the Amazonian environment. Yet as he steps onto the
planks of the dock in the port, he smells the rust from old barges and
dead fish, the polluted waters and signs of industry around the city. The
last line of the brief poem drives home the destruction that will come as a
result of industrialization: “a prelude of thunder and plagues.”
As the water is contaminated by runoff from the city, from oil spills
and trash, the natural world is in severe danger, but from the perspective
of Amazonian cosmology the world of the spirits is also gravely affected.
Indeed, Reyes concludes another poem, “Para hablar del río Amazonas”
(“To Talk About the Amazon River”), by describing the spirit world’s
reaction to the ecological destruction: “Ese río nada tiene de misterioso.
Espera que hombres y / mujeres mojen sus cabellos en sus terrosas aguas.
/ Ese río se ha teñido de rojo y ha gritado por su enorme / boca de reptil
 The “Brevity of the Planet” 71

Yacumama” (This river is not mysterious at all. It hopes that men / and
women will wet their hair in its earthy waters. / This river has dyed itself
red and screamed from its enormous, reptilian Yacumama mouth). Evok-
ing the Yacumama, the mythical anaconda mother-of-the-waters that
protects the rivers’ nonhuman inhabitants in indigenous cosmologies,
endows the river with consciousness, hopes, and agency; it acquires be-
ing and a voice capable of protesting its contamination. It is capable of
shape-shifting and “screams” from its “enormous reptilian mouth.” From
the Western perspective, it may seem “mysterious” for a river to have
hopes and desires, and speak up for itself. However, from a local Amazo-
nian perspective, the river’s desire to be healthy and have people wash
their hair in its waters is anything but mysterious. Despite the power and
agency of the river, its desire is simply to be clean enough for bathing.
Another Peruvian poet, Percy Vílchez Vela, also provides the reader
with a non-Western view of Amazonian waters; however, the waters of
Lake Morona would not be ones in which people would willingly wash
their hair. Vílchez Vela is likely the poet from the Peruvian Amazon
whose work most directly confronts ecological destruction, addressing its
grave effects not only on the tangible local environment but also on the
spirit world. In keeping with the perspective of native Amazonians, the
guardians of the forests and rivers also suffer the consequences of envi-
ronmental problems in Vílchez Vela’s poetry. In “Zozobra en el lago
moribundo” (“Anguish on a Dying Lake”), from his book Santuario de
peregrinos (Sanctuary of Pilgrims; 2007), Vílchez Vela writes of el Lago
Morona, a lake located just outside of the bustling city of Iquitos, Perú.
Far from the idealized view of the Amazon as “untouched by civiliza-
tion,” a “Green Cathedral,” or “la tierra sin mal” (following Varela Ta-
fur’s poem), Vílchez Vela describes a dying lake, the result of industrial-
ization around the city (Larochelle, “Writing” 202). The lake’s ecology
has been so gravely destroyed that the Yacurunas, the guardian spirits of
the water, are nowhere to be found: “ni los yacurunas pueden entrar a
este lugar para salvarnos” (not even the Yacurunas can enter this place to
save us). He writes from the perspective of a passenger on a boat that is
mired in the mud. Bored, he observes the many things that float in the
water. He chooses the word “cesspool” rather than “lake” to describe
what he sees:
En este horrible cauce podrían quedar las cosas que vienen
de la metrópoli al campo:
las gaseosas tibias, las bandejas de plástico, el azúcar rubia,
las linternas, los calendarios.
Los botes, que parecían venir a salvarnos,
también se detienen
entre los putuputales y gramalotes.
Hemos caído en una celada de las aguas moribundas.
Aguas de letrina, donde el cielo no se refleja,
72 Larochelle

ni refleja tu rostro.

(Things that come from the metropolis to the country

wallow in this cesspool:
lukewarm soda bottles, plastic trays, sugar,
flashlights, calendars.
The boats that seemed to be coming to save us
are also mired among the putuputales and gramalote grasses.
We’ve fallen into a snare of dying waters.
Latrine waters that don’t reflect the sky
or the reflection of your face.)
Far from being celebrated as products that have arrived due to modern-
ization and globalization, these excesses of consumer culture—all items
that people in the United States throw away daily without thinking
twice—“wallow” in the cesspool that is now Lake Morona. While water
has often been used as a trope for purity in the poetic tradition, the
waters of the lake have become “latrine waters” incapable of inspiring
reflection in either the physical or the sublime sense. Like Varela Tafur
and Reyes Ramírez, the speaker fears that the worst is yet to come.
Knowing that the Yacurunas can no longer come to the rescue, he pon-
ders the end not only of his own life and those of the myriad human and
nonhuman residents of the Amazon, but also of life in the city:
Pero no, estoy de malas como caído en un pantano.
En un segundo pienso en la desesperación de los ahogados,
en el último latido.
Ni los yacurunas pueden entrar a este lugar
para rescatarnos.
El Nanay se aleja desde hace tiempo con sus aldeas,
sus promontorios y sus playas blancas.
Desde su canoa la pescadora busca algo en la orilla y ni nos mira.
En qué instante desaparecerá la ciudad y sus molinos
abandonados, sus hoteles pestíferos, sus iglesias descuidadas,
sus aserraderos que exterminan la madera,
sus pompas pasadas de moda.
¿A qué hora cantará el pájaro ataulero, anunciando el fin?

(But no, I’m as sick as if I’d fallen in a bog.

In a second’s time I think of the desperation of the drowned,
of the last heartbeat.
Not even the Yacurunas can enter this place
to save us.
The Nanay river has been moving away for some time with its villages,
promontories, and white-sand beaches.
From her canoe, the fisherwoman is looking for something on the
shore and doesn’t even glance at us.
When will the city and its abandoned mills disappear, its
pest-ridden hotels, its neglected churches
 The “Brevity of the Planet” 73

its sawmills that exterminate wood,

its pomp that has gone out of style?
When will the funerary bird sing, pronouncing the end?) 4
The pollution the poem describes is caused by industrial and residential
runoff from the city of Iquitos and from the many objects that are dis-
carded by city residents. A recent report from the Instituto de
Investigación de la Amazonía Peruana (Institute for Research in the Peru-
vian Amazon; ILAP) reveals that Lake Morona contains a high concentra-
tion of fecal coliforms among other contaminants, well beyond the limit
for the human consumption of fish (“Loreto” n. pag.). The speaker in
Percy Vílchez Vela’s poem imagines the situation getting progressively
worse—so much so that the protective spirits, the Yacurunas, are unable
to “enter this place to save us.”
While the situation is indeed dire, I wish to end with a more positive
narrative, since there can be little hope for change if it appears there is
nothing to be done to improve the situation. 5 I conclude, then, with an-
other poem by Colombian Juan Carlos Galeano, who often employs a
playful tone when writing about Amazonia. In the poem “Peces”
(“Fish”), Galeano addresses the issue of overfishing by writing from the
perspective of the fish. In Amazonian cosmology, both humans and non-
humans exist in a web of connections and form part of a sentient, animate
ecology. From this uniquely Amazonian perspective, “the trees have a
mother” and all beings have agency. In this view of the world, pink
dolphins have the power to shape-shift and turn into a fisherman’s girl-
friend and kidnap him and take him down to live in cities on the river
bottom. Fish, likewise, also have agency and may occasionally need some
advice when their children are too quick to fall for the fishermen’s bait:
En el Amazonas, los tucunarés, gamitanas y otros peces, me cuentan
que están muy preocupados por los peligros que amenazan a sus hijos.

“Nuestros pececitos no saben distinguir el biel del mal; ya casi no obe-

decen
y los pescan fácilmente con anzuelos disfrazados como frutas.”

“Estos peces tienen toda la razón,” pienso, al ver cómo se les llena el
Amazonas
con los botes de los hombres trayéndoles carnadas de muchísimos col-
ores.

“Últimamente, para que nuestros hijos no coman de esas frutas,” me

dicen,
“hemos tenido que asustarlos con las mismas historias y fábulas que
tienen allá afuera.” (Galeano, Amazonía 2011)

(On the Amazon river, the tucunarés, gamitanas and other fish tell me
74 Larochelle

that they are very worried about the dangers that threaten their chil-
dren.

“Our little fishies don’t know how to tell the difference between good
and evil;
they almost never obey us anymore and they are taken so easily with
hooks disguised as fruit.”

“Those fish are completely right,” I think, seeing how the Amazon
has become filled with boats bringing the little fish bait of many colors.

“In the end, so that our children don’t eat those fruits,” they tell me,
“we have had to scare them with the same stories and fables that you
all have out there.”)
Galeano quite playfully causes us to move away from our accustomed
anthropocentric ways of viewing environmental issues and urges us to
think from the fish’s perspective. In this worldview, the same fables and
stories that have characterized outsiders’ representations of Amazonia,
which Ana Varela Tafur criticized as reductive and patronizing, may be
used as threats to help the young fish not fall for the fishermen’s ploys.
Perhaps this also suggests some need for a more harmonious, though
complex, coexistence between outsider and insider perspectives or cos-
mologies.
In these recent poetic texts by Amazonian poets, the poets deal direct-
ly with the realities of environmental contamination occurring around
the city of Iquitos, Perú, along the contaminated waters of the Amazon
and nearby tributaries. While the poets delineate the ecological crisis in
their waterways, they do so within the framework of a uniquely Amazo-
nian way of viewing the interconnections between the human and non-
human worlds. While the destruction of the local environment directly
affects the human and nonhuman beings who live there and depend
upon the health of the natural world to survive, the ecological crisis also
constitutes great losses in the spirit world in Amazonian cosmology. The
guardian spirits of the water and forest are also affected by the destruc-
tion and, as the poets note, are no longer nearby to come to their rescue.
Whether or not one holds the animistic beliefs common in Amazonia, the
region’s inherently non-anthropocentric worldview provides a unique
viewpoint on ecological crisis and environmental ethics. Amazonian
poetry requires the reader to view local environments from multiple,
interconnected perspectives that take into account nonhuman as well as
human points of view. Ultimately, they also reveal that sustainable cul-
tural perspectives are also victims of ecological crisis, and that preserving
these points of view may be the only way to preserve the environments
from which they emerged.
 The “Brevity of the Planet” 75

NOTES

1. While many in the Western world may conclude that perspectives such as these
are present-day examples of mythology, these views do in fact constitute a way of
viewing and being in the world shared by many Amazonians across the basin. As
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro points out, “we must remember that if there is a virtually
universal Amerindian notion, it is that of an original state of undifferentiation or
‘undifference’ between humans and animals described in mythology” (Cosmological
Perspectivism 55).
2. See Jorge Marcone’s “Cultural Criticism and Sustainable Development in Ama-
zonia,” in which he problematizes the novela de la selva tradition that features protago-
nists who abandon city life and move to the jungle—a move that consistently ends
tragically.
3. Despite the fact that José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la
realidad peruana was originally published nearly a century ago, in 1924, it continues to
serve as a point of departure for discussing the literary tradition of indigenismo and
indigenous politics in Peru. His discussion of the shift toward a literatura autóctona
(autochthonous literature) is particularly relevant with regard to Amazonian litera-
ture. In discussing Amazonian poetry, the importance of the author’s place of origin
(being born in Amazonia), regardless of current geographical location, is paramount
for inclusion in the corpus of Amazonian letters. Given the history of writing about
Amazonia by non-native Amazonians, the question of insider and outsider perspec-
tives continues to be a highly relevant issue.
4. Poems by Percy Vílchez Vela with translations will be published in the new
edition of Luis Eduardo Luna and Steven F. White’s Ayahuasca Reader, being released
at the end of 2015. Ayahuasca is central both with the shamans and their role in
communicating with the spirit world and for writers such as Vílchez Vela, who wrote
some of his poetry under the influence of the “Amazon’s sacred vine.” This is part of
the Amazonian perspective that is present in his poetic work.
5. See Jonathan Bate’s Song of the Earth for examples of how positive narratives,
even idealized images of healthy ecosystems, can function to combat the tendency to
resignation when there appear to be no signs of improvement. See also Eduardo
Galeano’s Úselo y tírelo: El mundo del fin del milenio visto desde una ecología latinoamerica
(Use It, Then Throw It Away: The End of the Millennium from a Latin American Ecology;
1994). Galeano discusses the myth that all are equally responsible for environmental
problems and the paralysis that follows the logical conclusion that if everyone is
responsible, nobody is (11–13).

WORKS CITED

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human
World. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.
Bate, Jonathan. Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Print.
Carpentier, Alejo. Los pasos perdidos. 1953. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.
DeVries, Scott. “Swallowed: Political Ecology and Environmentalism in the Spanish-
American novela de la selva.” Hispania 93.4 (2010): 535–46. Print.
Galeano, Eduardo. Úselo y tírelo: El mundo del fin del milenio visto desde una ecología
latinoamericana. Buenos Aires: Booket; Grupo Editorial Planeta, 2011. Print.
Galeano, Juan Carlos. Amazonia y otros poemas. Bogotá: Universidad Externado de
Colombia, 2011. Print.
———. Amazonia. Trans. James Kimbrell and Rebecca Morgan. Iquitos: Centro de
Estudios Tecnológicos de la Amazonía, 2012. Print.
76 Larochelle

Galeano, Juan Carlos and Valliere Richard Auzenne. The Trees Have a Mother: Amazo-
nian Cosmologies, Folktales, and Mystery. Films for the Humanities and the Sciences.
2009. Film.
Larochelle, Jeremy. “Writing Under the Shadow of the Chullachaqui: Amazonian Dis-
course and Ecological Thought in Recent Amazonian Poetry.” Review: Literature and
Arts of the Americas 45.85 (2012): 198–206. Print.
“Loreto: Informe revela que peces de laguna Moronacocha no son aptos para consumo
humano.” Actualidad Ambiental. March 10, 2014. Web.
Marcone, Jorge. “Cultural Criticism and Sustainable Development in Amazonia: A
Reading from the Spanish-American Romance of the Jungle.” Hispanic Journal 19.2
(1998): 281–94. Print.
Mariátegui, José Carlos. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. 1928. Lima:
Amauta, 1979. Print.
Reyes Ramírez, Carlos. Animal de lenguaje. Iquitos: Tierra Nueva, 2011. Print.
Rivera, José Eustasio. La vorágine. 1924. Madrid: Cátedra, 2006. Print.
Santos Granero, Fernando. El ojo verde: Cosmovisiones amazónicas. Iquitos Fundación
Telefónica del Perú, 2000. Print.
Slater, Candace. Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon. Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2002. Print.
Uzendoski, Michael. “Making Amazonia: Shape-Shifters, Giants, and Alternative
Modernities.” Latin American Research Review 40.1: 223–36. Print.
Varela Tafur, Ana. “Tres estancias para hablar del Amazonas.” ¡Más aplausos para la
lluvia! Antología de poesía amazónica reciente. Ed. Jeremy Larochelle. Iquitos: Tierra
Nueva, 2014. 191–93. Print.
Vílchez Vela, Percy. Santuario de peregrinos. Iquitos: Tierra Nueva, 2007. Print.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere.
Manchester, UK: HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, 2012. Web.
White, Steven and Luis Eduardo Luna, eds. The Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the
Amazon’s Sacred Vine. Gardena, CA: Synergetic, 2000. Print.
 Section 2

Representational Crises
 FIVE
The “Monstrous Head” and
the “Mouth of Hell”
The Gothic Ecologies of the “Mexican Miracle”

Kerstin Oloff

The iconic rural town evoked by Juan Rulfo in his 1955 novel Pedro
Páramo, Comala, lacks water and fruitful soils and is suffocated by un-
bearable heat. It is described as “la mera boca del infierno,” deserted by
the living and inhabited by melancholic, ghostly figures without agency
(Rulfo, Pedro 67). Seven years after its first publication, Carlos Fuentes—
an avid reader and early promoter of Rulfo’s novel—published his novel-
la Aura (1962). In contrast with Pedro Páramo’s rural environment, Aura is
set in Mexico City, the megalopolis referred to by Octavio Paz as Mexi-
co’s “monstrous inflated head, crushing the frail body that holds it up”
(344). The scope of the nightmarish tale it offers is seemingly much more
contained: a powerful and wealthy witch named Consuelo lives in an
anachronistic urban space, to which she lures a young historian named
Felipe (who eventually turns into her long dead husband) with the help
of a younger version of herself called Aura. As I will argue, within this
narrative, a mysteriously vanishing garden, Consuelo’s inability to have
children and consequent magic reproduction, her employment of plants
for black magic, her ritual sacrifice of a goat, all combine into a powerful
engagement with an ecophobic monstrous-feminine imaginary.
Through the gothic mode, both novels arguably register the ecological
unconscious of the economic “Mexican Miracle” of the mid-twentieth
century, drawing attention to its devastating socio-ecological conse-
quences. While seemingly quite different, the two novels respond to the
79
80 Oloff

intertwined processes of rapid urbanization, de-peasantization, and the

increasing capitalization of the countryside. Read alongside one another,
they thus demand engagement with the country-city dynamic that is
fundamental to the history of capitalism. In my examination of these
novels, I adopt a world-ecological perspective that seeks to transcend the
structural dualism of the capitalist world-system, which internalizes hu-
man natures as social/economic/political and externalizes extra-human
natures as “natural.” 1 In this view, then, cities and factories are also “na-
ture,” in that they organize nature-society relations in historically specific
ways. Further, capitalism—and thus colonialism, imperialism, racism,
and industrialization—is understood not merely as impacting on “na-
ture,” but rather as an ecological regime. Socio-ecological degradation is
one of the long-term tendencies of the capitalist world-ecology, which
develops through the plunder of the “free gifts” of nature and cheap
labor, through waves of primitive accumulation that extend the law of
value. One such wave was the oil-fueled Mexican Miracle, with its Rocke-
feller-funded, capital-extensive Green Revolution and its city-oriented in-
dustrialization.
Written during a time when the ecology of Mexico was being radically
transformed, Rulfo’s and Fuentes’ texts enable us to think through the
ecology of the gothic and its relation to the capitalist world-ecology. Both
writers were acutely aware of the rapid urbanization/industrialization
transforming Mexico’s landscapes: Fuentes is well known for his urban
novels and Rulfo wrote powerfully about his experiences as a factory
foreman in his private letters to Clara Aparicio. Aura and Pedro Páramo
think through the reorganization of ecology, but they do so from two
different, if interdependent, locations: the archetypal rural town and
Mexico City. Both novels also register the logic of processes that charac-
terize capitalism in its longue durée, such as the increasing commoditiza-
tion and destruction of lands, labor, and communities, which have be-
come particularly visible in the Americas due to the disastrous socio-
ecological consequences of its brutal integration into the world market. In
this sense, the Gothic mode is profoundly world-literary, responding to
dynamics fundamental to capitalism (appropriation, exploitation, and ex-
haustion) and, therefore, it is likely prophetic of crises to come.

FROM COMALA TO MEXICO D.F.:

METABOLIC RIFTS, ENERGY REGIMES, AND THE GOTHIC MODE

It is well established that gothic fears tend to evolve around the pressure
points of capitalist modernity, constructing “a monster out of the traits
which ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality and capital want to
disavow” (Halberstam 102). 2 Furthermore, the understanding that gothic
vocabularies and imaginaries have tended to flourish at moments of in-
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 81

creased capitalization and waves of primitive accumulation is not new. 3

Yet what has become more visible in recent years is the fact that ecopho-
bia, defined by Simon Estok as the “groundless hatred or fear of the
natural world,” is one of these central pressure points, arguably even the
most fundamental one. 4 In order to understand this gothic ecophobia and
estrangement, we need to conceptualize capitalism as a world-ecology,
that is, as a historically specific way of organizing nature-society rela-
tions, one in which “nature” is externalized as a resource to be
plundered. The gothic mode tends to center around anxieties that emerge
as “capitalism separates laborers from any means of production (agricul-
tural, crafts-oriented) that might sustain them outside of or in tension
with a system that produces commodities only for their profit-generating
potential” (Shapiro 30). This process is arguably fundamentally ecologi-
cal: capitalism develops through a series of metabolic rifts, that is, the
increasing alienation of the mass of the population from the lands they
live on, the food they consume, and their own bodies. 5 The anxieties that
the gothic mode registers thus revolve around re-organizations of nature-
society relations, which, under capitalism, require the radical rift between
extra-human and human natures. Arguably, then, if the gothic constructs
its monsters out of the disavowed processes of capitalism, gothic econo-
mies of signification will necessarily be ecological. It is not surprising,
then, that certain dynamics have played a significant role in gothic imagi-
naries, among them racialized and gendered metabolic rifts between the
center and the periphery, as resources are plundered from peripheralized
agricultural spaces for the benefit of metropolitan spaces.
Leaning on Jameson’s well-known formulation of the political uncon-
scious, one might then argue that the gothic mode makes manifest the
ecological unconscious. 6 From a world-ecological perspective, capitalism
is an ecological regime, implying a reconceptualization of the political
unconscious itself as consisting of “messy bundles of human and extra-
human relations” (Moore, “Transcending” 42). On a conceptual level, this
world-ecological totality is occluded by a series of “symbolic enclosures”:
nature is conceptualized as external to humans, as separate from process-
es that are categorized as social, cultural, political, or economic (Moore,
“Transcending” 3). These symbolic enclosures are inscribed by and, in
turn, reinforce racialization, proletarianization, and gendering: in coloni-
alist-capitalist discourse, “nature” has routinely been feminized and ra-
cialized. Within the Americas, which were subject to the sustained
plunder of “resources” by colonial and neocolonial powers, this inter-
twining has been very visible. The plantation system’s devastating im-
pact cannot be conceived of without slavery; the destruction of American
landscapes cannot be addressed without reference to the devastation of
indigenous communities and their agricultural knowledges; and the
emergence of a world-market cannot be thought of without peripheral
sites of natural resource extraction and labor exploitation. The coloniza-
82 Oloff

tion of the Americas and the radical, catastrophic transformation of local

eco-systems through multiple commodity frontiers, such as those ad-
vanced by silver, sugar, cattle, and timber, played a key role in the emer-
gence of capitalism as a world-ecology. In turn, the implementation of the
capitalist world-ecology resulted in and developed through overgrazing,
deforestation, climate change, and soil erosion. Throughout this process,
indigenous peasants were torn away “from their traditional lands and
communities, permanently or temporarily, and set . . . to work in mines
and plantations or haciendas established to supply the mines and planta-
tions,” which produced commodities for the market rather than local
needs (Wright 143–44). Increasing internationalization emerged as the
long-term trend, transforming local agricultural practices, economies,
and environments (Sonnenfeld 30). Sustainable agricultural practices
such as the bean-squash-maize complex that had been developed over
the course of centuries were progressively eroded through the commodit-
ization of natural resources and the shift to monoculture, which is often
promoted as more efficient, but is ecologically unsustainable in the long
term.
Yet, while it is crucial to keep in view the longue durée of the capitalist
world-ecology, we need to pay attention to the effects of ongoing eco-
logical revolutions and the emergence of new energy regimes. 7 Indeed,
they are fundamental for taking an ecocritical approach to the mid-
twentieth-century Mexican gothic aesthetic. Nature-society relations
have undergone cyclical, radical transformations since the nineteenth
century: “as new technologies . . . revolutionized resource extraction,
organic fuels . . . ceded to fossil fuels, and Mexico [became] an urban
nation” (Boyer 3). Infrastructural advances like the nineteenth-century
railroad boom, which enabled the reopening of silver mines on the North
Central plateau by foreign investors, made peripheral regions accessible
to renewed waves of primitive accumulation. The emergence of petromo-
dernity with the commercial exploitation of oil in Mexico toward the end
of the nineteenth century further sped up these processes and, by the
1940s, the country was traversed by modern infrastructure: railways,
roads, and air routes, which opened up new areas to exploitation (Ortiz
Monasterio 227). One must add that oil drove not only cars and planes: it
saturated industries, from plastics and petrochemicals to textiles (Ortiz
Monasterio 157–58). Nationalized in 1938, it provided cheap energy for
industrialization and fueled an agricultural “Green Revolution,” power-
ing tractors and the transportation of agricultural goods as well as serv-
ing as a key ingredient in pesticides and fertilizers.
During the so-called Mexican Miracle, the export boom associated
with World War II and the heyday of import substitution industrializa-
tion in Mexico, these processes intensified, rapidly expanding the fron-
tiers of industrialized agriculture through “Green Revolution” technolo-
gies, which contributed to large-scale changes under way in Mexico. 8
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 83

These technologies were initiated in the early 1940s and financed by the
Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program, which by 1945
was spending nearly $100,000 per year (Sonnenfeld 32; Perkins 116). 9
Local ecologies were drastically transformed, while the nation’s cities
urbanized at an incredible pace due to mass migration from rural areas.
In turn, this migration left millions of hectares of agricultural ejido lands
abandoned. As Sonnenfeld notes, the changes transforming rural and
urban landscapes were thus profoundly interrelated: “rapid, unmanaged
urbanization [is] the flip side of rural out-migration. People were inten-
tionally driven out of the countryside and into the cities as part of Mexi-
co’s agricultural modernization strategy” (43). Indeed, industrialization
was financed primarily by agriculture: the manipulation of financial and
trade markets enabled the “transfer of resources” from the agrarian sec-
tor to industry (Sonnenfeld 31).
Capital-intensive chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds were proposed
as the solution to poverty from the 1950s onwards, but in reality they
were destroying sustainable agricultural practices like crop rotation, as
well as small-scale and communal farming. Agricultural modernization
ignored the campesinos’ centuries-old knowledge of sustainable land
management, which allowed them to avoid the nutrient exhaustion and
topsoil erosion that became enormous problems in industrial farming.
Furthermore, the swelling of the big cities, especially Mexico City, pro-
duced a whole array of new environmental problems ranging from pollu-
tion and over-crowding to water and resource scarcity and even ground
subsidence.
Both Pedro Páramo and Aura are Gothic texts that foreground the
nightmarish effects of post-1940 oil-fueled development on local land-
scapes. I argue that this is so even though the narrative timeframes they
construct largely precede it, as they evoke longer trends that became
exacerbated and, therefore, more visible, from the 1940s onwards. It is the
oil-driven Mexican Miracle that is registered in the haunting of a past that
destroys temporal and spatial distinctions, in the horrors that haunt the
living dead protagonists of Pedro Páramo’s wasted rural spaces, and in the
escape from traffic-congested Mexico City into Aura’s anachronistic man-
sion, trapped in the imperial past.
In this context, one might take a cue from recent reflections on how oil
registers in works of fiction. As Graeme McDonald suggests, “given the
global cultural reach of an oil and gas dominated world energy system,
all fiction is petro-fiction to various removes” (“Research” n. pag.). The
emergence of oil as the dominant energy source completely reshaped
world-ecology; it saturates not only everyday life but also the ways in
which the world-system is knitted together. Oil thus becomes inescap-
able. Along with McDonald, we might ask how an energy-conscious ap-
proach would transform our reading of texts in which “oil is not in the
foreground—or indeed anywhere mentioned,” a line of questioning that
84 Oloff

challenges the way in which we read these two canonical texts during an
era fueled and saturated by oil. 10

IN THE “MOUTH OF HELL”:

PEDRO PÁRAMO, THE LIVING DEAD, AND THE RUINED EARTH

Having come to political and intellectual maturity during the years of

Lázaro Cárdenas’ land reforms, Rulfo was critical of the modernization,
deruralization, and urban immiseration that followed under Miguel
Alemán’s policies (Vital Díaz and Vital 107). During that time, Rulfo was
working for Goodrich Tire Co. in Mexico City, first as a foreman for the
first two months of 1947 and as a salesman covering large distances
throughout Mexico by car from 1947 to 1952. For Rulfo, this experience
was profoundly isolating and alienating (Vital Díaz and Vital 200). In a
letter to Clara Aparicio from February of 1947, he offers intriguing de-
scriptions of the working conditions of the employees of Goodrich Tire
Co: “ellos no pueden ver el Cielo. Viven sumidos en la sombra, hecha
más oscura por el humo. Viven ennegrecidos durante ocho horas . . .
como si no existiera el sol ni nubes en el cielo para que ellos las vean, ni
aire limpio para que ellos lo sientan . . . en este mundo extraño el hombre
es una máquina y la máquina está considerada como hombre” (They
cannot see the sky. They live submerged in shadows that are further
darkened by smoke. They live in blackness for eight hours . . . as if neither
the sun nor the clouds in the sky existed for them to see, nor fresh air for
them to breathe, . . . In this strange world, man is a machine and the
machine is considered man; Rulfo, Aire 53). 11 Like the Comalans in his
later work, these industrial workers lack autonomy and agency; “el cielo”
(sky/heaven) is out of sight. Things such as the machines fetishistically
appear to possess more power over destinies than humans, who live in
the smoky shadows of the factory. This petromodern industrial purgato-
ry is removed from direct access to plant and animal environments, mir-
roring the Comalans’ ghostly alienation from their lands. If Pedro
Páramo’s Juan Preciado cannot breathe in the rural inferno because of the
heat, the Goodrich Tire workers asphyxiate from the smell of rubber. As
paradoxical as it may seem, the gothic descriptions of the tire factory thus
bear unmistakable resemblances to those of Rulfo’s Comala, the purgato-
rial village that powerfully evokes socio-ecological catastrophe.
Comala is deserted, disturbingly silent, surrounded by the wastelands
captured in Pedro’s last name, and overgrown by weeds—plants that
thrive on degraded, overgrazed soils. It is populated by entrapped echoes
of dispossessed and murdered farmers and the ghostly screams of raped,
abused, and commodified women as well as nostalgic and idealized
memories of Comala’s past, which was characterized by fertile soils and a
thriving local agricultural economy. The novel demarcates a time period
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 85

beginning with Pedro Páramo’s birth in the late 1850s through the mid-
1930s, when Juan Preciado returns to Comala, but that is prolonged into a
never-ending purgatorial present (Wilson 241). In this way, it presents a
historical perspective that, as is oft noted, circumvents nationalist narra-
tives emphasizing the 1910–1917 Revolution as a turning point in modern
Mexican history.
Through the figure of Pedro Páramo, whose very name points to the
inextricability of environmental and social histories, Rulfo evokes the
longue durée of colonial land relations as well as more recent waves of
primitive accumulation. Indeed, in interviews, Rulfo described Pedro as
an archetypal cacique representative of post-conquest inequality (Vital
Díaz and Vital 200). Nonetheless, the timeframe coinciding with the char-
acter’s lifespan also encompasses the liberalization of the Mexican econo-
my that began in the 1850s. While most agricultural labor had not been
marketized at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the liberal consti-
tution enacted in 1857 under Benito Juárez expropriated communal lands
and absorbed them into the hacienda economy in a process of
“expropiación masiva a los productores directos de sus medios de
producción” (massive expropriation of the means of production from the
direct producers; Ortiz Monasterio 193). Additionally, the novel’s date of
publication links the colonial and postcolonial economic histories to the
Mexican Miracle of the author’s present, thereby forging a continuum
encompassing what are often presented as discrete historical periods.
In this sense, the deepening metabolic rifts provoked by ongoing pro-
cesses of “accumulation and monopolization of women, lands, and
goods,” as Patrick Dove describes them, are depicted retrospectively
through gothic haunting, which underscores the relations between the
novel’s wastelands and the heaps of accumulated commodities that char-
acterized the local economy under Pedro Páramo. 12 These metabolic rifts
appear in a narrative present of socio-ecological degradation in images of
a ruined Eden populated by ghostly inhabitants, a monstrous father, a
dead mother’s dislocated memories, and the disembodied voices of com-
modified and raped women. As Ilka Kressner argues, Comala is a “reso-
nating chamber for a chorus of voices,” in which the characters are per-
manently estranged from the space they inhabit (90). The characters are
“lost in space,” “unable to find a spatial referent [and] lose their own
boundaries” (Kressner 90). Juan, for instance, feels that he is “en un mun-
do lejano” (in a faraway world) and that his body “había soltado sus
amarras y cualquiera podía jugar con él como si fuera un trapo” (had lost
its moorings and that anyone could play with him as though he were a
ragdoll; Rulfo, Pedro Páramo 73).
Most powerfully, perhaps, this process is condensed in the much-
studied fragment number thirty, which contrasts the narrative present of
empty carts and people who walk as if they were asleep with Juan’s
mother’s lyrical nostalgic evocations of a thriving rural community and
86 Oloff

local economy living in sync with rhythms of the weather, a harmony

evoked in the images of the lively local market filled with noises and ox-
drawn carts full of maize and fodder. The Comalans’ “melancholic paral-
ysis,” as García Moreno calls it, becomes particularly visible in this frag-
ment through the breakdown of syntax (487). Furthermore, as Deborah
Cohn argues, it is portrayed as a direct result of the intertwined traumas
of caciquismo and the Revolution (262). It is important to emphasize that
these traumas are inherently ecological; the agency-less living dead thus
also, and most fundamentally, encapsulate the traumas of deepening
metabolic rifts. 13 They are living dead because their moorings to their
lands have been severed. 14
Significantly, Rulfo introduces a postlapsarian revision of the myth of
Eden within the same fragment, arguably as a comment on how these
metabolic rifts are remembered. Myths of “edenic nature” waiting to be
exploited have been invoked by many in the context of capitalist expan-
sion, ranging from sixteenth-century conquistadors to twentieth-century
oil companies. Furthermore, myths of a pre-capitalist rural Eden have
come to fulfill a significant function in modern state formation at a time
of rapid industrialization. Is Rulfo’s invocation, then, at risk of becoming
merely an “indigenization” of the colonial and imperial trope of the “in-
fernal paradise”? 15 Is the poverty of the soil encapsulated by this trope
(falsely) accepted as an “original condition,” a position internalized by
many early twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals? 16 It seems clear that
Rulfo evokes those tropes in a critical mode that sets out to debunk their
foundations: Rulfo’s Eden is a half-collapsed house inhabited by an inces-
tuous couple and furnished only with a bed, a chair, and, significantly, an
“aparato de petróleo” (oil lamp; 107). As Jean Franco notes, the couple is
stuck in the static but paradoxically deteriorating present, with nowhere
to go (769). They live in a world clearly signposted as post-oil.
The context in which this “Eden” is invoked frames it as a nightmarish
hallucination produced by the capitalization of nature, including hu-
mans. The specific histories of Mexican ecology—crossed by colonialism,
neo-imperialism, and unequal development—have given rise to various
myths and stereotypes that have, in turn, played their role in co-produc-
ing particular ecologies. These include the myth of Eden, the melancholic
campesino, the infernal countryside, and the pelado, all of which have been
reified and instrumentalized in colonialist, imperialist, primitivist, and
nationalist imaginaries. Yet it is important to emphasize that, as integral
parts of these processes, these tropes can be used critically as well as
hegemonically, like gothic and monstrous figures. In a critical mode, they
can enable intellectual engagement through distancing effects, thereby
denaturalizing ideology.
Pedro Páramo gives these tropes a historical context that consciously
makes visible class struggles and waves of primitive accumulation. Both
the anti-Eden and the quest narrative that leads Juan to Comala are ex-
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 87

pressed in language thoroughly shaped by the law of value: “Exígele lo

nuestro” (Demand what is ours), his mother famously tells Juan; “Lo que
estuvo obligado a darme y nunca me dio. . . . El olvido en que nos tuvo,
mi hijo, cóbraselo caro” (What he was obligated to give me and never
did. . . . Make him pay dearly for neglecting us, my son; 65). The language
she employs is dominated by the semantic field of debt, dispossession,
and compensation. In Comala, everything has a price, even the redemp-
tion of one’s soul, sold by Padre Rentería to those who can afford it.
Juan’s last name, Preciado, also etymologically refers to “precio,” the
monetary expression of the value form. In that sense, Juan’s narrative is
ironically shaped by his father’s “mercantilización de la vida” (commod-
ification of life), the subordination of emotions and life in general to the
law of value (Jiménez, Juan Rulfo 137). Indeed, what Juan finds in Co-
mala—wasted earth, wasted people, and a whole lot of “tiliches” (useless
things)—are the remains left by a process of production that relied on
devaluing and degrading the basis for its own reproduction (of land and
labor). Value is immaterial yet objective: it manifests itself through ob-
jects, in this case, the things left behind in Eduviges’ house, which bear
the spectral marks of their former owners. As Bastos suggests, these “ti-
liches” are things that possess “una dimensión espectral . . . están casi
desmaterializadas, recubriéndose de aquella piel que tienen las
mercancías en su cuerpo metafísicamente físico” (a spectral dimen-
sion . . . they are almost dematerialized, enveloping themselves in that
skin that commodities possess in their metaphysically physical bodies;
18).
If the narrative present mirrors Pedro Páramo’s expansion of the law
of value, then Pedro is best understood not as an individual character,
but as a process that references the emergence from the mid-nineteenth
century onwards of new ecological regimes that develop through ex-
panding the zone of appropriation and commodification. 17 Abusing the
law and cultural institutions (marriage), he expands his landed empire
until he possesses all the lands surrounding Comala. Acting as an agri-
cultural capitalist, he plants maize on a large scale, which is partly used
as livestock feed for his cattle export business. The violence of these pro-
cesses is rendered through gothic images, such as the entrapped screams
of Toribio Aldrete, who was murdered over a boundary dispute. In Pedro
Páramo’s economy, human life can be measured in hectoliters of maize:
Fulgor offers fifty to compensate for murder. What the novel most
strongly highlights is the environmental and social degradation through
which these processes advance.
Pedro practices monocultural farming, as opposed to the traditional
system that relied on corn-bean-squash intercropping. Monocultural
farming is much more prone to pests, diseases, flooding, runoff, and soil
erosion and thus not sustainable in the long term, as is captured in the
following passage describing the Comalans’ struggle to save the harvest
88 Oloff

from the impact of heavy rains: “entre los surcos, donde está naciendo el
maíz, corre el agua en ríos. Los hombres no han venido hoy al mercado,
ocupados en romper los surcos para que el agua busque nuevos cauces y
no arrastre la milpa tierna” (among the furrows, where the young corn is
budding, run rivers of water. The men have not come to the market
today; they are busy breaching the furrows so that the water can find new
routes and not sweep away the tender seedlings; 143). The environmental
impact of monoculture’s radical simplification of nature is amply regis-
tered throughout the novel; the hills are barren and are being further
depleted each year by the use of the plow (98).
If the living dead inhabitants may be read as Rulfo’s local engagement
with metabolic rifts, Pedro Páramo is their vampiric counterpart who
sucks the life forces out of Comala and destroys its basic conditions for
continued existence; indeed, his last name refers to the degradation of
lands. He is the capitalist agri-businessman-gone-mad; like the miser,
who refuses to circulate wealth, Pedro accumulates lands and then lets
them go to ruin: “desde entonces la tierra se quedó baldía y como en
ruinas . . . se consumió la gente; se desbandaron los hombres en busca de
otros bebederos” (From then on, the land remained untilled and as if in
ruins . . . people were wasting away; they left in search of other watering
holes; 137). Through Pedro Páramo, in other words, the narrative exposes
capitalism’s tendency to degrade its own conditions of existence. While
this is a long-term tendency present already during the colonial period,
the novel’s timeframe evokes the legacies of the Porfiriato—the period
when the infrastructure for export agriculture was beginning to be
built. 18
Despite the novel’s setting at the turn of the twentieth century, these
larger processes became particularly evident during the years of the nov-
el’s conception, when they were further entrenched by the Mexican Mira-
cle. During these years, the region where the novel takes place, los Altos
de Jalisco, became increasingly dominated by the dairy industry, as milk
companies made their foray into the area, starting with Nestlé in 1940.
This influx of industrialized dairy production restructured nature-society
relations, favoring large-scale over small-scale farmers. Likewise, integra-
tion into national and global markets resulted in the orientation of agri-
culture towards cattle feed, the introduction of fertilizers and tractors,
and the transformation of cultivated land into pasture (Leonardo and
Espín 82).
As has been amply documented, abundant soils and an externalized
and idealized “nature” are associated with women within the novel, par-
ticularly Dolores Preciado and Susana San Juan. 19 To contextualize this,
metabolic rifts have historically been gendered: under patriarchal capital-
ism, women are affected differently and more devastatingly than men by
the expansion of the law of value and the enclosures of common lands, as
reproductive work is non-labor. Furthermore, women’s positions in the
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 89

capitalist world system are further inflected by race and class. In the
binary capitalist imaginary, women are associated with “nature” as op-
posed to the masculinized realm of culture. In Rulfo’s novel, this is ren-
dered through Pedro’s accumulation of both lands and women, who are
commodified and interchangeable, and his obsession with Susana-as-na-
ture. In other words, Pedro seeks to monopolize the forces of production,
as well as the more expansive relations of reproduction on which the
former depend.
While Susana symbolically marks the limits of Pedro’s power, she is
an object violently passed from father to husband. Interestingly, her own
perceptions of her surroundings proffer some of the most powerful goth-
ic images of the world produced by Pedro-as-process: “en el comienzo
del amanecer, el día va dándose vuelta, a pausas; casi se oyen los goznes
de la tierra que giran enmohecidos; la vibración de esta tierra vieja que
vuelca su oscuridad” (at the beginning of dawn, the day turns little by
little; one can almost hear the rusty hinges of the earth rotate; the vibra-
tion of this ancient earth that pours out darkness; 164). 20 This description,
focalized through her consciousness, is echoed shortly after by a question
she asks that pinpoints her as another “madwoman” of gothic literature:
“¿No oyes cómo rechina la tierra?” (Don’t you hear how the earth is
creaking?; 164). From her perspective, the earth is a creaking machine
that needs oiling. Indeed, the question reveals her as the novel’s most
perceptive character, who is responding to the drastic changes heralded
in by Pedro, as well as to a landscape transformed by the impact of the
new energy regime of oil.
If the character of Susana crystallizes conflicting conceptions of na-
ture, it is significant that her memories are profoundly marked by various
commodity frontiers and associated traumas that have reshaped Mexican
landscapes over the course of centuries. In one of her most horrifying
memories, she recalls her father sending her down into the Andromeda
mines in search of gold coins. 21 Descending metaphorically into depths
of the mining past—both of the colonial times and the imperial nine-
teenth-century revival—she discovers a skull and skeleton, which dis-
solve upon touch: “el cadáver se deshizo en canillas; la quijada se
desprendió como si fuera de azúcar. Le fue dando pedazo a pedazo. . . .
Busca algo más, Susana. Dinero. Ruedas redondas de oro” (the corpse fell
apart into bones; the jawbone fell off as if it were made of sugar. She
handed it to him piece by piece. . . . Keep searching, Susana. Money.
Round coins of gold; 147). The cadaver metonymically represents the
trauma that was constitutive of the mining frontier, driven by the search
for profit, as rendered explicit through Bartolomé’s obsession with gold,
the dominant measure for value. As Rulfo wrote in “México y los mexica-
nos,” Latin American silver mines “hicieron la riqueza de Europa . . . y
dejaron una tierra sin verdadero desarrollo agrícola, sin industria ni co-
mercio” (made Europe’s wealth . . . and left a land without real agricul-
90 Oloff

tural development, without industry or commerce; 401). Furthermore, he

notes, this dynamic was to repeat itself with the oil boom (401). Yet, there
is another aspect that is noteworthy in the imagery employed in this
scene: the jawbone detaches itself as easily “as if it were made of sugar.”
Sugar—one of the original commodities of the emergent capitalist world-
ecology—is not evoked innocently here; the sugar frontier developed
through a radical disruption of local eco-systems, the degradation of
lands, and the brutal exploitation of an enslaved labor-force across the
Caribbean and Mexico. This gothic scene thus resonates with the horrors
and traumas of various commodity frontiers and its importance in the
novel as a whole cannot be overstated. Bastos proposes that the miner
Bartolomé is as significant as capitalist farmer Pedro, emphasizing that
“[e]l acto de cavar la tierra en busca de minerales define la condición
humana mercantilizada” (the act of digging the earth in search of ore
defines the condition of commodified humanity; 75). Like Pedro, Bartolo-
mé treats nature as a resource that is transformed into value. Susana, who
is a patriarchal object of exchange subordinated to value as well as a
symbolic reference to notions of idyllic nature and ideal womanhood, is
passed on from one to the other. In this way, she encodes simultaneously
the shift in ecological regimes and their continuity. Significantly, it is
Susana, shaped by this past, who understands in her “madness” the hor-
ror of the mechanization of the countryside that was to define the Mexi-
can Miracle years.

URBAN NIGHTMARES:
AURA, THE WITCH, AND THE VANISHING GARDEN

If idealized notions of woman-as-nature play a key role in the rural hell

that is Pedro Páramo, in Aura’s urban inferno, the monstrous-feminine
takes center stage, which, as we shall see, is inextricably intertwined with
monstrous nature. 22 Consuelo combines a variety of patriarchal mon-
strous-feminine tropes: she is sexually active and dominant; she is an
“unnatural” mother who cannot conceive biologically; she is economical-
ly independent and holds the purse strings; she is an old woman, vam-
pirizing time, youth, and beauty; and she is a witch using plants and
magic. 23 Through the creation of a younger double, Aura, as well as the
promise of a well-paid non-manual job, Consuelo is able to tempt Felipe
into her house on Donceles Street. As signposted by the doorknocker,
“semejante a la cabeza de un feto canino en los museos de ciencias natu-
rales” (similar to the head of a canine fetus in natural science museums),
human efforts to rationalize and study an externalized nature are about
to be overturned (Fuentes, Aura 11). The canine doorknocker signals the
passage into a mythic underworld, which recalls the tropological con-
junction womb-tomb, evocative of women’s perceived uncanny other-
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 91

ness. From the beginning of Felipe’s emasculating “penetration,” this

womb-tomb strongly invokes nature-as-monstrous: “intentas penetrar la
oscuridad de ese callejón techado—patio, porque puedes oler el musgo,
la humedad de las plantas, las raíces podridas, el perfume adormecedor y
espeso” (you try to penetrate the darkness of this roofed alley—or per-
haps a patio, because you can smell the moss, the humidity of the plants,
rotten roots, the heavy, soporific scent; 12). The ecology of monstrous-
feminine space is here close to the surface: the womb does not reproduce
naturally, but only through the use of potions made of plants; the tomb
does not put the dead to rest, as they are reincarnated with the help of
satanic rituals such as the slaughtering of a goat, itself an act of symbolic
castration.
As in Comala, monstrous nature possesses a particular temporality,
marked by the collapse of time and the invasion of the present by the
past. Both Consuelo and Pedro are vampiric of time: Pedro brings an end
to time-as-progression, while the 104-year-old woman steals time from
those who possess more of it than she. Both invoke the horror of usurped
and stolen time (value, under capitalism, is “socially necessary labor
time”): the agency-less Comalans from whom time has been extracted are
now stuck in time, while the future of Felipe, hired by Consuelo, is even-
tually erased. Consuelo’s vampirism is characterized by a feminine-mon-
strous twist, as her obsession with youth highlights the patriarchal fetish-
ization of the youthful female body and the correlative abjection of older
female bodies. The difference between Consuelo and Pedro, between im-
ages of male and female vampirism, between the city and the country,
offers a useful entry point for thinking through ecology in relation to the
city-country dynamic. Furthermore, it foregrounds the gendering of
these processes, since the Mexican Miracle did not benefit men and wom-
en equally in terms of wages and benefits. Capital circulates through the
laboring body as well as through the soils, but occludes both the repro-
ductive work and nature’s “free gifts” that enable its circulation.
What Fuentes’ text renders visible is the extent to which women and
nature, gynophobia and ecophobia, have been historically intertwined on
a conceptual level. Ideas of nature are inextricably bound up with patriar-
chal tropes of both monstrous and idealized femininity. Witches, like
women more generally, were historically associated with nature, which
in modern societies came to be seen as the opposite of culture/civilization
rather than as matrix. In witches, the association of women with nature
turns into a threat to the dominant order. In Jules Michelet’s Satanism and
Witchcraft (originally published in 1862), a source text for Aura, witches
are associated with the threat of the lower classes and externalized na-
ture, which is monstrous, satanic, and unrestrained. According to Miche-
let, the witch procreates unnaturally and lives in the “untracked wilds, in
impenetrable forests of bramble, on blasted heaths” (n. pag.). She is asso-
ciated with various animals such as cats (linked to the devil) and plants
92 Oloff

with poisonous qualities. Fuentes’ witch, misplaced into the context of

petromodern Mexico, lives not in the wilds, but in the city, immured in
her house. She is not lower-class, but rather, through her husband, the
late General Llorente, she is linked to the imperial French intervention in
Mexico (1864–1867), which ostensibly took place in response to Juárez’s
suspension of debt payments to European firms, but in fact constituted
Napoleon III’s attempt to consolidate France’s position as a core capitalist
power alongside Britain. British-French imperial hegemony in the nine-
teenth century was based on a particular world-ecological regime fueled
by coal and dependent on the industrialization of the core, the renewed
plunder of colonies, and the rational organization of natures in encyclo-
pedias, collections, and gardens. Consuelo’s attempts to resurrect the
spirit of Llorente take place during a new ecological regime, dominated
by US hegemony and oil. A nineteenth-century imaginary of feminine-
monstrous natures is revived in the heart of Mexico City, straining under
the weight of demographic explosion.
Aura places a great deal of emphasis on setting. In fact, it is the setting
in mid-twentieth-century Mexico City that Consuelo seeks to obliterate.
The gothic house is evoked as contrasting with the modern urban space
Felipe inhabits, which is structured and suffused by oil, as Felipe’s last
glance over his shoulder makes abundantly clear: “miras por última vez
sobre tu hombro, frunces el ceño porque la larga fila detenida de cami-
ones y autos gruñe, pita, suelta el humo insano de su prisa” (you glance
for the last time over your shoulder and furrow your brow at the large
row of trucks and cars, stuck in traffic, that growl, blow their horns, and
release the unhealthy smoke of their haste; 10). The anthropomorphic
description captures the transformative impact of oil on modern life-
styles, resulting in a subjective speeding up of temporality, as well as the
atomization of communities into individuals, both of which appear to be
beyond individual control, since machines appear to have taken over. It
also visualizes the environmental degradation that characterizes contem-
porary Mexico City. 24 Within the house, Felipe—a hubristic historian in-
tent on summarizing all existing chronicles—seemingly escapes the pet-
romodern city, in which he occupied a marginal position within the dom-
inant class. The anachronistic monstrous-feminine witch living in the
claustrophobic womb-tomb and invoking infertility and unnatural pro-
creation is thus in a very clear sense signposted as deriving from Felipe’s
disenchantment with modern urban space.
The monstrous nature of the house is dominated by Consuelo’s urban
garden. While Consuelo claims that there is no garden as the surround-
ing houses are encroaching upon them, Felipe catches a glimpse of it,
describing it as a “cubo de tejos y zarzas enmarañados donde cinco, seis,
siete gatos . . . encadenados unos con otros, se revuelcan envueltos en
fuego, desprenden un humo opaco, un olor de pelambre incendiada”
(cube of tangled yew trees and brambles, where five, six, seven cats . . .
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 93

chained to one another, are flailing on fire, sending out an opaque smoke,
a smell of burned body hair; 29). It is an infernal space, associated with
witchcraft and satanism through the burning cats: according to Michelet,
witches were believed to be able to transform into cats, and cats were
therefore often burnt by overzealous villagers. The garden is also asso-
ciated with unnatural means of reproduction, as witches were believed to
be biologically infertile. The infernal garden is not merely overgrown, as
Felipe’s description suggests; Consuelo grows plants of Eurasian origin,
including henbane, belladona, bittersweet, and great mullein (Cull 21).
These plants are not for sustenance, but rather enable the creation of
Aura, who, like Susana San Juan, is associated with visions of an “un-
spoilt nature” that Felipe sees in her eyes, described as “ojos de mar que
fluyen, se hacen espuma, vuelven a la calma verde, vuelven a inflamarse
como una ola” (eyes that flow like the sea, becoming foam, returning to
green calm, and then inflamed again like a wave; 18). While the ebb and
flow suggest natural rhythms free of human influence, it is an illusion
produced by Consuelo to appeal to Felipe, the post-revolutionary nostal-
gic intellectual, and evoked to ensure a prolongation of her reign. The
trope of paradise-as-enclosed-garden, which has been traditionally repre-
sented as a feminized space, is here inverted into a hallucinatory inferno.
In the context of the populace’s increasing alienation from the means of
reproduction, then, this text offers images of a monstrous nature, inextri-
cably intertwined with the monstrous-feminine. Geographically, these
nightmares are situated at the very center of power in Mexico City: Don-
celes Street is within walking distance of the seat of government, the
Palacio Nacional. 25 The nightmares of that “monstrous head” converge
around ecophobic anxieties of plants, animals, and disappearing gar-
dens, inextricably intertwined with patriarchal fears of the feminine-
monstrous.
It is useful here to contextualize the history of gardens within Mexico
City. Prior to the monumental ecological destruction wrought by coloni-
zation, Tenochtitlán’s ecosystem was based on access to water, producing
its food primarily on labor-intensive, sustainable chinampas, highly-
productive raised beds in lakes or canals (Ortiz Monasterio 115; Wright
159). One might say that the colonial Mexican Royal Botanical Garden
embodied the opposite of the chinampas, codifying the colonial elite’s
rational organization of nature, discrediting indigenous plant names, eco-
logical practices, and forms of environmental knowledge. 26 As is well
known, colonialism spelt an unprecedented ecological catastrophe for the
Americas. It was particularly disastrous for Tenochtitlán’s carefully bal-
anced urban ecosystem. Colonial environmental modifications did not,
however, completely eradicate chinampa culture; indigenous urban dwell-
ers continued to plant their own food, a trend that the colonial govern-
ment fought by outlawing urban gardens, and the chinampas continued to
be a predominant source of food well into the twentieth century (Wright
94 Oloff

145–59). However, by the twenty-first century, “most of the chinampa

lands [had been] turned into urban developments” (Ezcurra et al., “So-
cioeconomic Change” 36). The Mexican Miracle quickened processes of
urbanization, industrialization, pollution, environmental degradation,
and the over-exploitation of the city’s aquifers. As Ortiz Monasterio re-
minds us, modern cities in the twentieth century are “sistemas que de-
penden por completo de los ecosistemas de fuera y que requieren de
grandes suministros de materia y energía” (systems that depend entirely
on external ecosystems and require large supplies of raw materials and
energy; 231). While Tenochtitlán had received raw materials and energy
from other areas as a partly subsidized ecosystem, the Basin of Mexico’s
lack of self-sufficiency reached extreme proportions over the course of
the twentieth century, fueled by the unsustainable consumption of re-
sources including space, water, and energy (Ezcurra et al., “Socioeconom-
ic Change” 36). Mexico City is now “the hub of an immense system of
concentration of power and work force, and also of appropriation of
natural resources” (Ezcurra et al., “Socioeconomic Change” 36).
Aura, a famously claustrophobic novella, offers no alternative histo-
ries or spaces, which produces the intensity of its nightmarish quality. It
is therefore instructive to read it within the context of Fuentes’ oeuvre,
particularly alongside La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio
Cruz), which was published in the same year, 1962. As García Gutiérrez
notes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz looks back to Pedro Páramo, featuring an
all-powerful urban cacique. 27 Artemio’s ascent from illegitimate off-
spring of rape living in a shack on a plantation near Veracruz to business
tycoon in Mexico City depended on social and environmental degrada-
tion (mining, logging, acquisition of communal properties, loans and fi-
nancial speculation, and so forth), supported by US capital and his tight
relations with the political elite. The delayed environmental costs of his
ascent are deftly allegorized in the image of the dying Artemio poisoned
by his own excrements, which he vomits up, evoking, perhaps somewhat
too literally, Mexico City’s sewage disposal problems. Unlike Aura, this
novel offers a whole range of different routes that Artemio could have
taken, which most centrally involve a different approach to land rela-
tions. What this comparison highlights is that the feminine-monstrous
witch in Aura cannot be dehistoricized as an archetype without specific
context: she is located in terms of geography, politics, and class; she is the
returning nightmare animated during a renewed turn of the screw of
capitalist nature-society relations.
Both Aura and Pedro Páramo are often described as “universal,” a term
that has rightly been problematized in recent decades. Rather than mere-
ly discarding this notion, it can be reanimated and grounded through
current debates around the “worlding” of literary studies. It has been
argued that capitalism provides a “certain baseline of universality,” a
shared interpretive horizon that arises with the modern world-system
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 95

and that is particularly visible on the peripheries of capitalism, which

have been on the receiving end of extractivist practices. 28 According to
the world-ecology perspective, this horizon is necessarily ecological; such
a perspective thus profoundly alters the way in which we can approach
the gothic, a mode that renders tangible the ecological unconscious
through the monstrous and that has flourished at moments of increased
capitalization. In this light, one might say that Rulfo’s novel indeed
transcends the local in a meaningful way, one that is not reducible to a
de-historicized human experience. If we approach the gothic compara-
tively, we can move beyond the notion of literary influences to focus on
the particular processes to which these texts are responding. Pedro Páramo
is a purgatorial allegory of ecological devastation that one might read
alongside, say, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which
arguably registered similar processes in the United States, including the
implementation of Green Revolution techniques and their devastating
impact on small-scale farming. Likewise, Aura speaks to the processes of
externalization and abjection of nature in the wake of urbanization and
industrialization, and it could hence usefully be compared to the nine-
teenth-century European gothic, which has produced similar images of
feminine-monstrous imprisonment registering the temporally distinct ex-
perience of industrialization. Within the context of Mexican literature, the
reading of these two texts alongside each other helps to foreground liter-
ary engagements with the ecological unconscious of a period of increased
industrialization and deruralization. If Comala’s ghosts are the human
“waste” left by modernization, dispossessed and alienated from their
physical surroundings and from a sense of time rooted in earthly cycles,
Consuelo is the urban nightmare of an environment where “reproduc-
tion” turns into a threat.

NOTES

1. This perspective builds on Jason W. Moore’s understanding of capitalism as

world-ecology in “End of the Road?” as well as the work of Marcone and Solis in
“Mexican and Chicana/o Environmental Writing” and Niblett’s world-ecological
methodology for literary studies, summarized in “World-Economy, World-Ecology,
World Literature.”
2. I am not interested here in policing the generic boundaries of the gothic or in
tracing its influences. Rather, I want to think through the upheavals to which gothic
imaginaries respond and to examine in what contexts (sometimes pre-existing) figures
of horror are revived. A narrow definition of the gothic would preclude discussions of
a figure such as La Llorona, for example.
3. Regarding this point, see Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South
America and Shapiro’s “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic
Periodicity.”
4. See Estok, “The Ecophobia Hypothesis” 74.
5. The “metabolic rift” is here understood as “the world-shaking material divorce
of the direct producers from the means of production,” which historically expressed
itself most powerfully in the city-country divide (Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life
96 Oloff

76). This divorce, or rift, found expression in, and developed through, an epistemic rift
between the two Cartesian abstractions of “Nature” and “Society.” When employing
the term “metabolic rift,” then, one must avoid falling back into a Cartesian dualism; it
is not, in other words, simply a rift between “Nature” and “Society”/Capitalism.
6. See Jameson, The Political Unconscious 76.
7. However, long-term trends “do not add up to a one-way history of relentlessly
increasing exploitation of natural resources” (Boyer 3). Rather, seemingly oppositional
tendencies (centralizing/nationalist versus decentralizing/globalized) can be divided
into distinct periods of development: the Bourbon reforms, Independence, the Porfiri-
ato, the Revolution and Reconstruction, the Mexican Miracle, and the post-1980s neo-
liberal turn.
8. The production of fertilizers had begun in 1905 in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, and
by 1925, 4482 tons of fertilizers were used; by the 1950s, the usage of fertilizers and
insecticides had become common nation-wide (Ortiz Monasterio 206).
9. As is well known, John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) made his fortune in the oil
business.
10. See McDonald, “Oil and World Literature” 31.
11. All translations are the author’s own, unless indicated otherwise.
12. See Dove, The Catastrophe of Modernity 137.
13. Regarding this point, consult Marcone and Solis’ “Mexican and Chicana/o Envi-
ronmental Writing.”
14. On literary representations of dispossession and primitive accumulation, see
Moreira, “La modernidad y lo local en las Américas” 170.
15. Regarding the colonial trope of the infernal paradise, see Sharae Deckard’s Para-
dise Discourse 71.
16. On this point, see Wright’s The Death of Ramón González 32.
17. See Moore, “Transcending the Metabolic Rift.”
18. Regarding capitalism’s tendency to degrade its own conditions for production,
see Melville’s Plague of the Sheep.
19. See Jiménez, “Génesis y escritura en Pedro Páramo.”
20. Jiménez points out the similarities between Rulfo’s descriptions of the factory
workers and Susana’s worldview (“Génesis” 26–31).
21. Los Altos de Jalisco produced foodstuff and primary materials for the mines in
Zacatecas, “discovered” in 1548 (Leonardo and Espín 47–50).
22. I follow Barbara Creed in using the phrase “monstrous-feminine” to indicate
“the importance of gender in the construction of [the female monster’s] monstrosity”
(Creed 3).
23. Rodríguez discusses some of the gothic aspects of this character in “Seducción
gótica vs modernidad en Aura de Carlos Fuentes” 21.
24. Cars first entered Mexico in 1898. As Ezcurra and his collaborators note, be-
tween 1940 and 1980, the “number of cars has grown at an even higher rate than the
population, doubling every decade” (“Socioeconomic Change” 38).
25. In it, muralist Diego Rivera painted his famous Historia de México. The changing
ecological regimes are a central concern in these murals, as pre-Columbian agricultu-
ral practices contrast negatively with the ecological regime heralded by Cortés, as well
as with the industrialized present.
26. Regarding the history of the colonial gardens, see López’s “Nature as Subject
and Citizen in the Mexican Botanical Garden, 1787–1829.”
27. See García Gutiérrez, “Lector de Juan Rulfo.”
28. See Brown, cited in Niblett 19.
 The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell” 97

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 SIX
The Grounds of Crisis and the
Geopolitics of Depth
Mexico City in the Anthropocene

Mark Anderson

Although it has perhaps been upstaged in recent years by Asian mega-

cities such as Mumbai and Beijing, Mexico City symbolized the environ-
mental and social dangers of megalopoli in the global imaginary from at
least the 1970s through the 1990s. One group of researchers summarized
this trend in exemplary fashion in the introduction to their 1999 study of
environmental crisis in the Anahuac basin surrounding Mexico City,
writing that “old Tenochtitlan, the proud pre-Hispanic capital of the Az-
tec Empire, the ‘colonial city of palaces’ that astounded Alexander von
Humboldt in 1811, is today the paradigm of urban disaster, the archetype
of the growing environmental and social problems of third-world coun-
tries” (Ezcurra et al., The Basin 1). A decade earlier, Peter Ward had
wrapped up his seminal Mexico City: The Production and Reproduction of an
Urban Environment (1990) with an afterword entitled, “Mexico City: A
Conclusion or Epitaph?” He saw little need to revise this funereal con-
cluding title when he released the second edition of the book in 1998,
although he did amend the final sentence, adding “and hopefully never”
after “my optimism, my admiration for the resourcefulness of Mexican
people, and my analysis of Mexico City’s recent past suggest that I
should not write its epitaph; at least, not yet” (237). And in his essay on
Mexico City’s Metro, Juan Villoro writes, not without a note of humor,
that “those of us who live here know that our city is a disaster,” which he
follows with “although all cities are bastions against nature, few have
99
100 Anderson

matched the destructive fury of Mexico’s capital. The struggle against the
elements has been pursued with fanatical thoroughness” (126–27). Clear-
ly, there is something about Mexico City’s modern form that provokes
alarm in residents and travelers alike, leaving them with the sense that it
is teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Over the last half century, at least,
the city has increasingly been portrayed through the optics of apocalypse.
This has certainly not always been the case. From Bernardo de Balbue-
na’s hyperbolic praises of the colonial capital in La grandeza mexicana (The
Grandeur of Mexico; 1604) up through the exuberant urban novels and
films of the 1950s and 1960s, Mexico City was long represented as a
bastion of modern cosmopolitanism and urbane living in an otherwise
underdeveloped region. Intellectuals’ enthusiasm for urbanization
waned with the hyperbolic growth that the metropolitan area experi-
enced in the twentieth century, however, swelling from around 350,000
people in 1900 to 3 million in 1950 to nearly 20 million today. 1 A single
generation witnessed the drastic transformation of the Anahuac environ-
ment from turn-of-the-twentieth-century philosopher Alfonso Reyes’
quintessential “región más transparente del aire,” a description that cor-
related the basin’s erstwhile atmospheric clarity with the lucid thinking
required for modern rational planning, to a bustling, electrified small city
surrounded by idyllic rural spaces and traditional villages, and again to a
vast, polluted sea of concrete that has engulfed everything in its vicinity.
The central position of Mexico City in the nation’s thriving culture
industry and the difficulty of apprehending the scope and velocity of
these transformations, or even of measuring them accurately, made them
a potent and highly popular theme in art, film, and literature depicting
the region. Some of Mexico’s most respected writers and filmmakers
have portrayed Mexico City through the lens of apocalypse, from Luis
Buñuel and Carlos Fuentes to Homero Aridjis, Alejandro González
Iñárritu, Vicente Leñero, Carlos Monsiváis, and José Emilio Pacheco. This
trend has become even more pronounced since the 1985 earthquake and
the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the science
fiction doomsday scenarios of authors like Carmen Boullosa, Ricardo
Chávez Castañeda, Gonzalo Martré, Mauricio Molina, César Rojas, Héc-
tor Toledano, director Francisco Laresgoiti, and graphic novelists Edgar
Clement and Bernardo Fernández. These artists’ works, characterized by
an aesthetics of exhaustion and decay, depict a city that has become an
unlivable environment due to pollution, overcrowding, traffic conges-
tion, crime, political and judicial corruption, lack of water and other ser-
vices, and the constant threat of natural disasters from flooding and
earthquakes to volcanic eruptions. They imply that Mexico City is peren-
nially on the verge of collapse and must soon be abandoned, following
the trajectory of a sizeable number of historical settlements and cities in
the area, from iconic pre-Columbian centers like Cuicuilco and Teotihua-
can to the colonial capital itself, which was at least partially evacuated
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 101

several times due to flooding. 2 As Carlos Monsiváis wrote in his charac-

teristically seriocomic Apocalipstick (2009), “la Ciudad de México día a día
se precipita a su final y, también a diario, se reconstruye con la energía de
las multitudes convencidas de que no hay ningún otro sitio a donde ir”
(Mexico City rushes day by day toward its demise, and it is also recon-
structed daily with the energy of the multitudes convinced that there is
nowhere else to go; 30). 3 In the apocalyptic imaginary, Mexico City has
become a perpetual catastrophe that has yet to reach its final breaking
point, a sluggish disaster whose full effects are staved off precariously by
the heroic, if Sisyphean daily lives of the city’s inhabitants.
The apocalyptic imaginary is, of course, a rhetorical strategy calling
for action more than any kind of reality in itself. As Lawrence Buell stated
famously, “apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that
the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal” (275).
Inasmuch as apocalypse—the “catastrophe with no remainder,” Derrida
calls it—has never and can never be experienced, it can only exist textual-
ly, as something that is spoken and written about (Derrida, “No Apoca-
lypse” 23). 4 And while apocalyptic discourse is highly effective in draw-
ing attention to the myriad environmental and social problems that
plague metropoli of the size of Mexico City, it is not, for obvious reasons,
effective in proposing solutions or even in opening a space in which
solutions may be imagined. Indeed, Greg Garrard notes that “the rhetoric
of catastrophe tends to ‘produce’ the crisis it describes,” or at least repro-
duce it (105). Moreover, apocalyptic discourse and representation have
already been studied quite extensively both within and beyond Mexico. 5
Rather than the apocalyptic imaginary itself, then, I am interested in
the way in which it delineates a cognitive problem or blind spot that
many scholars believe to be constitutive to the worldwide ecological cri-
sis that we are currently experiencing. I refer to the “flattening” effects of
modern planning, which originated with the cartographic tradition but
continue to feature prominently in data-based and satellite representa-
tions of the world such as Google Earth. As paradoxical as it may seem, I
concur with Frank Kermode that the apocalyptic imagination is not only
intimately bound up with, but actually constitutive of the modern world-
view. This relationship goes beyond the negative sense of apocalypse,
that is, the apocalyptic imaginary as a conservative reaction to the radical
changes wrought by modernization. In his chapter on “The Modern
Apocalypse,” Kermode argues that there is a “powerful eschatological
element in modern thought” itself that relies on crisis as both the motor
and end of history (95). Further on, he notes that “the sense of an ending”
is “as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to
political revolution” (98). Not only does modernism rely on the trope of
perpetual crisis to evidence its Sisyphean break with the past, but as the
reverse or “dark side” of modern planning, apocalypse delineates moder-
nity’s blindness towards any future that deviates from its own calcula-
102 Anderson

tions. In the twenty-first century, at least, modernity’s contours depend

not on its own utopian projections for a livable future, but on the discur-
sive limits of its own continuity, which it assesses through probabilistic
risk assessments extrapolated from past experience. And the rising prob-
ability that modernity will precipitate or has already precipitated a global
ecological catastrophe that connotes the impossibility of the continuation
of human life as we know it also erases any concept of the past as a
history leading to a livable future. Modern planning and the apocalyptic
imagination merge into the single timeframe that some have called the
Anthropocene, a present with no past and no future (Danowski and Vi-
veiros 16). In this sense, the apocalyptic imagination’s flatness with re-
spect to time is symptomatic of modernity in general.
Perhaps more explanation is warranted. The basic premise, which I
share with a very large number of scholars going back at least as far as
Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, is that the serially homogeneous
forms generated by the drastic cultural and environmental transforma-
tions that modernity has wrought globally correspond to a way of think-
ing designed to reduce biological, cultural, and geographical diversity to
manageable proportions by rendering it schematically. As Enrique Leff
frames it,
La hegemonía homogeneizante del mercado como razón última del
progreso se enlazó con la unificación del logos, la superespecialización
de la ciencia y la eficiencia tecnológica. El fraccionamiento del conoci-
miento en sus aplicaciones prácticas para el dominio de la naturaleza
indujo así la interrupción de la complejidad ecosistémica para la
apropriación discreta de los recursos naturales como materia prima y
objetos de trabajo. (“Pensar” 33)

(The homogenizing hegemony of the market as the ultimate goal of

progress became tied to the unification of the logos, superspecialization
in science, and technological efficiency. The subdividing of knowledge
into its practical applications for the domination of nature induced the
disruption of ecosystemic complexity in order to appropriate discrete
natural resources as raw materials and the object of labor.)
In the realm of species and cultural diversity, then, this process functions
by denaturing interdependent relationships and subordinating their con-
stituents to abstract biological, geological, and racial categories. 6 In the
realm of geography, it renders complex, volumetric environments into
static, scalar planes or areas (Graham and Hewitt 73). As Eyal Weizman’s
seminal formulation of the problem makes clear, “geopolitics is a flat
discourse. It largely ignores the vertical dimension and tends to look
across rather than cut through the landscape. This was the cartographic
imagination inherited from the military and political spacialities of the
modern state” (n. pag.). 7 In this flattening process, what is excluded or
scaled out of maps, diagrams, charts, blueprints, and satellite photo-
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 103

graphs is even more telling than what one finds on them: those are the
elements that must be eliminated or at least neutralized in order for the
projects that they encode to be implemented. Such clarity and transparen-
cy, to return to Alfonso Reyes’ metaphor for enlightened thought, can
only be achieved by reducing convoluted ecologies to the parsimonious
economy of the symbol. In short, modern forms of geopolitics work by
diminishing ecologically complex volumes to schematic areas that can be
subdivided, capitalized, and surveilled with systematic ease.
The apocalyptic imaginary illustrates this dynamic because, as the end
of time, the trope of apocalypse has the effect of eliminating the dimen-
sion of time from representation, reducing four dimensions into three.
While the concept of apocalypse clearly predates modernity, rooted as it
is in the horror of death (the end of time of the subject), it has neverthe-
less acquired unprecedented prominence in the modern logic of the eter-
nal present. 8 The end of time—really the end of (human) history, since
physical time can only end with the collapse of the universe billions of
years from now, if ever—has a double valence within our current cultural
horizon. On the one hand, neoliberal capitalism’s discourse of full con-
sensus—of total encompassment—cannot imagine a future that is not
identical to itself: everything can and must be incorporated into the neo-
liberal material democracy. Neoliberal ideology’s constitutive negation of
communist thought insists that human history has reached its final stage
in neoliberal consensus; any kind of disturbance can therefore only be
read within the framework of disaster. As Fredric Jameson once pointed
out, citing an anonymous source, “it is easier to imagine the end of the
world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (“Future City” 76). A corol-
lary to this pithy statement might be that, in neoliberal capitalism, social
change has only become imaginable via the apocalyptic threat posed by
ecological crisis, as Žižek’s book on Living in the End Times appears to
demonstrate. As the case may be, the patent unsustainability of current
resource extraction, labor exploitation, and mass consumption makes it
glaringly obvious that the present developmentalist consensus, whose
constitutive incompleteness has already become quite apparent, cannot
possibly hold far into the future. 9 Apocalypse is the resolution of this
contradiction; living in the end times means inhabiting a space without
time (Danowksi and Viveiros 28–30).
In apocalypse, the velocity of modernity’s transformations and rate of
resource consumption has reached such a steep grade in its hyperbolic
progression that time seems to become exhausted, flatlined in what Der-
rida, speaking of the threat of nuclear apocalypse, once called the “aporia
of speed” (“No Apocalypse” 21). Discursively, the future is collapsed into
the present as discontinuity, while the past is irremediably lost to disas-
ter, its traces legible only through nostalgia. Apocalypse thus constitutes
the reverse of modern planning, whose goal is also to erase the traces of
the past (at best, preserving them in museums and tourist attractions,
104 Anderson

thereby highlighting their out-of-placeness in everyday practice) and to

extend the present indefinitely into the future as the persistent accelera-
tion of “growth” as a permanent state beyond any material limits.
Apocalyptic Mexico City is a city that is out of time, beyond redemp-
tion, but it is also an unfamiliar or even unrecognizable city for people
who have lived or spent time there. When compared to the lived experi-
ence of the real city, the dystopian novelistic descriptions and film sets
come across like Hollywood mockups, the flat shadow of lived reality.
Despite all its problems, the real Mexico City is actually a quite livable
and vibrant metropolis, if perhaps not by the standards or aesthetic pred-
ilections of some well-traveled members of the global elite. As Villoro
puts it with characteristic humor, “it is not ignorance that keeps us on
this carousal of rats and stray dogs. To be honest, we like Mexico City”
(126). Furthermore, as Monsiváis pointed out in the quote above, aban-
donment is simply not a viable option for the majority of the metropoli-
tan area’s residents. Flight from the city is not what is needed, but rather
a cultural deterritorialization, an abandonment not of the place, but rath-
er of the unsustainable, colonial forms and practices that have imbued
the city with the sense of apocalypse.
Both colonialism and neoliberalism function by collapsing the dimen-
sion of depth, transforming geology and time into stratified surfaces in
the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari use the word: overcoded, crys-
tallized structures organized around a single “unity of composition,”
which is, in this case, the economy of extraction. 10 This form of territorial-
ization produces in turn a social stratification that is projected back over
time, transforming an environment that is/was lived holistically (volu-
metrically) into a series of distinct, flat layers that are perceived as dis-
continuous and detachable from one another: discrete historical periods
in natural and human history, private property demarcated by geometric
borders rather than bioregional frontiers, labor hierarchies and levels of
management, social and racial demographics parceled into pyramid and
pie charts, distributions of capital, all forms of stratification that are pro-
jected back over the past to legitimize the colonial project as simultane-
ously within history and timeless. The past becomes a mere variation on
the present; there is no historical depth. Territory is thus perceived and
naturalized as an outcome, often the only possible outcome, rather than a
process (Elden 2).
In this scenario, the work of an ecological humanities becomes to re-
store to environments their full dimensions. As Nigel Clark has argued,
“perhaps the most crucial lesson of the Anthropocene is that the Earth
itself must be understood as much more than a mere surface or stage on
which political contests take place: it must acquire a volumetric or verti-
cal dimension. . . . That is to say, the ‘geopolitical’ can no longer simply
refer to a horizontal and synchronous globality” (31). In this chapter, I am
interested in perspectives that reconceive Mexico City, viewing it not
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 105

through the flattening optics of modern planning and neoliberal econom-

ics, but taking instead a volumetric perspective that at least hints at the
true complexity of the city’s intensely entangled and fluid geographies,
as well as of the political alliances and ecological agency of the myriad
species that call it home. I examine several works that promote a recon-
ceptualization of Mexico City’s ecological networks as existing in expan-
sive volume, rather than discrete areas. This volumetric perspective is
grounded in “subaltern planetary subjectivities,” the cosmopolitan, yet
“embedded, in-dwelling ethics” that, according to Jennifer Wenzel, arise
from the ground-level experience of the capitalist world ecology to coun-
ter the flat screens of the globalizing aerial perspective (21). And it is
engrained with a sense of historical depth and continuity that counteracts
the neoliberal apocalyptic mind-set, allowing one to imagine a livable,
sustainable future.
In what follows, this chapter provides a theoretical framework for
approaching the problem of volume in urban territoriality, particularly as
a tool for resisting and refuting the flattening impulse of the neoliberal
“global perspective.” I examine briefly the notion of the ecological foot-
print as a conceptual tool that both exposes and reproduces the colonial-
ity of cartographic territorializations, showing that cities are not con-
tained by their cartographic borders, but still flattening them into sche-
matic representations that fail to evoke the full volume of urban ecolo-
gies. The next section problematizes the notion of the footprint by going
underground. I draw on a series of crónicas on life in Mexico City’s Metro
to show how the authors reject the modern conceptualization of the
underground as mere site of extraction; Mexico City’s underground is an
inhabited space, a human environment. At the same time, however, the
Metro also reproduces modern forms of territorialization, transforming
the ground into the subterranean (what is subordinated to the terra, the
territory or property) and incorporating it as yet another plane in the
stratified layering of surfaces that modernity imposes over volumes.
Paradoxically, it is extractivism itself that reveals the literal fault lines
in this form of territorialization. The excessive pumping of water from
Mexico City’s aquifers has resulted in a situation in which the city’s
ground routinely, if unevenly, subsides fifteen or more centimeters per
year. Subsidence provokes a collapsing into volume of the distinct scales
of planning, as the border between the surface and the underground
becomes increasingly porous. The ongoing sinking of large portions of
the city forces us to recognize that we are always on unstable ground and
that the effects of the unfettered extractivism associated with neoliberal-
ism are to create a generalized situation of precariousness that forces us
to rethink our relationship with our environments. Subsidence makes it
undeniable that we live in volumes and not in areas.
The final part of my chapter follows the transversal flow of water
through volume in representations of Mexico City’s hydrology. Even
106 Anderson

when its flows are necessarily channeled and confined in modern geopol-
itics, water’s fluid movement through conceptually distinct planes serves
to destabilize the crystallization of strata as discrete areas of homogene-
ous content, reminding us that environments never exist in discontinu-
ous planes. Following the fluid movement of water between atmosphere,
surface, and subterranean levels generates a volumetric perspective that
disavows the drawing of clear scalar borders. In this way, hydrological
representations muddy the grounds of forms of territorialization that de-
pend on the delimitation of discrete areas. Hydrology thus restores the
premodern sense of the lacustrine city, captured in the Náhuatl place
name “Mexico,” which is commonly believed to be derived from the
words meztli (moon), xictli (navel), and co (place): moon because of the
shape and reflective qualities of the Lake of Texcoco as well as the resem-
blance of the configuration of the region’s interlinked lakes as a whole to
the “rabbit” shape of the moon’s craters; the navel, the position of Te-
nochtitlan’s island in the lakes’ and lunar rabbit’s center. 11 In this topo-
nym, there are no clear scalar divisions, the earth/moon becomes the
navel of the lake/sky. On the other hand, Mexico City’s flowing water
dissolves chemicals, bodily excretions, and other substances, transferring
them directly and indirectly (through crop irrigation, for example) into
our own bodies, and it also catches up trash and debris within its flows,
carrying them beyond their designated areas. The materiality of water
thus disrupts the conceptual enclosures with which modernity has
sought to abstract life from environment, and it reveals itself to have a
being of its own that disrupts its instrumentalization as mere resource for
human consumption.

THE PROBLEM OF VOLUME IN URBAN TERRITORIALITY

When megacities were first approached from an ecocentric standpoint,

they were viewed primarily as blights on the landscape, as vast, apoca-
lyptic machines that produced the end of natural history, vacuuming in
resources from surrounding areas and spewing them back out as ephem-
eral consumer products, trash, and pollution. More pragmatic and less
moralistic approaches soon reevaluated these cities in material rather
than symbolic terms, examining them not as mere icons of the environ-
mental impacts of modernity, but rather as enmeshed environments in
themselves, thus giving rise to the field of “urban ecology.” Urban ecolo-
gy examines the specific material environments that are generated by
modern urbanization, recognizing them as unique places that are inhabit-
ed by a diversity of species, rather than purely artificial environments
that segregate or abstract humans from the experience of the material
world. The reevaluation of the connections between the city and its far-
flung constituencies led to the notion of the “ecological footprint.” The
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 107

city was not the end product of a mechanized production line known as
modernity, but rather a node in a system in which people, animals,
plants, and minerals circulated in multiple directions, transforming every
place along the circuit.
Even the notion of the ecological footprint, however, depends on the
kind of two-dimensional, cartographic conceptualization of space that
geographers such as Graham and Hewitt associate with what Donna
Haraway once called the colonial “God trick,” the generation of a top-
down aerial gaze that subordinates everyone and everything within its
scope as subaltern objects of planning, mere geographic features of the
landscape (72–73). As Galli and his collaborators make clear in their sum-
mary of the ecological footprint as “an accounting tool designed to track
human demand on the biosphere’s regenerative capacity,” it is conceived
primarily as a measure of surface territorialization, of the ways and de-
gree to which specific sociopolitical systems occupy “bioproductive
land” (102). While the process of delineating a city’s ecological footprint
succeeds in making visible the coloniality of urban space, exposing the
way in which cities constitute themselves as central nodes of production
and consumption through generating peripheral sites of extraction, it still
replicates the geopolitical logic of territorialization rooted in the denatur-
ing (decontextualizing) power of cartography. Indeed, as Galli et al.’s
definition reveals, the footprint is designed to account for “natural capi-
tal,” conceived somewhat idealistically as the sum total of global environ-
ments’ productive and reproductive capacities, as if such a thing could be
measured accurately or even usefully.
The base unit used to measure the ecological footprint is the “global
hectare per capita” (gha), which stresses again the coloniality of con-
sumption, as individuals of specific cities and nations territorialize, if in
an indirect or mediated fashion, land far beyond their range of habita-
tion. Yet this formulation also obscures the possibility of local sustainabil-
ity as well as political change, since these “global hectares” exist only
diffusely in the real world, as an uncanny kind of property that is pos-
sessed and exploited in a secondhand, splintered, and nomadic fashion,
disconnected from specific material geographies and social realities. 12
Furthermore, scholars such as Tim Ingold and Gayatri Spivak have
pointed out that the globe itself can only be conceived as such from
above, from a position of technological abstraction from the lived experi-
ence of the planet. 13 The ecological footprint, in reducing all scale to the
global, effectively suppresses any sense of geographical, biological, or
historical depth; it therefore can only be read through the same colonial
cartographic logic that it exposes.
Simon Dalby stresses that “geopolitics is quite literally about how the
world is made known” (38). Specific ways of imagining the world and
disseminating that worldview are inextricably bound up with particular
forms of governance. The global imagination, which is transparently the
108 Anderson

legacy of European colonialism culminating in the global expansion of

neoliberal capitalism, therefore corresponds to the particular kind of eco-
nomic and political practices that disempower local governance through
transnational trade agreements and subordination to global financial in-
stitutions that have become common worldwide in the last fifty years.
The implementation of the global imagination—of a “world without bor-
ders”—thus consists in a rescaling machinery that functions, paradoxical-
ly, through invalidating scale as a measure. As Ingold points out, the
invention of the globe was primarily a technique for calculating surface
area, dimensions that cannot be conceived of from within (“Globes” 34).
In globality, local topographies are flattened into surface territorialities,
losing all depth, that is, the ontological being generated through histori-
cal experience and the passage through geological time. Nested within
the globe, their only meaning becomes their coordinates with respect to
the totality.
With no volume of its own, the local becomes the micro that is subor-
dinated to the macro, the default setting. We see ourselves and all organ-
isms as mere pixels as the earth becomes a single, seamless, static, sterile
map, interactive but not affective. There are only dimensions without
mass, layer upon layer of flat images in which topographic lines substi-
tute for narrative depth. And it is this two-dimensional flatness, this ac-
counting for area as an abstract form of presence and possession, that one
finds in the notion of the global hectare per capita. In this sense, it seems
undeniable that the footprint supports the kind of technocratic govern-
ance rooted in global surveillance that, despite the flatness with which it
views the world, inhibits horizontal, democratic self-governance, social
equality, and sustainable living.
As Wenzel observes, “conceptually, globe, planet, and world are dif-
ferent determinations of the shape of the earth, each shaping our under-
standing in different ways” (27). If the global imagination emerged pri-
marily through distinct phases of European colonialism, reaching its cul-
mination with the global implementation of neoliberal capitalism, the
notion of the “world” arose as a cosmopolitan, humanist recognition of
the role of symbolic mediation in our apprehension of spaces beyond our
own experience, as well as a check on the globe’s objectifying effects, a
reminder that the globe is inhabited by people and conceived of through
cultural history. The planet, on the other hand, can be seen as an environ-
mentally conscious addendum or reframing of the world, one that rein-
states the materiality of the real world but that also incorporates the
internal positionality that the globe attempts to efface. As Spivak points
out, “the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system;
and yet we inhabit it, on loan” (72). Tellingly, Wenzel associates this
planetary perspective with a reinstatement of depth, of verticality—a see-
ing from within (20). For Wenzel, dialoguing with Spivak, the planet
connotes “the other of nature, once humans are brought back within the
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 109

fold of nature” (25). Planetary thought would thus resist Western human
exceptionalism and its colonization of the world as globe, recognizing an
“unknowable totality” that is the “repository of deep time” beyond hu-
man history (Wenzel 25). In this sense, viewing the world as planet im-
plies restoring to environments and their inhabitants their full dimen-
sionality, their being in complex, historic volume.
Tenochtitlan-Mexico City has always been a cosmopolitan center of
regional or even global commerce, but since the neoliberal turn of the
1980s it has become a global city, an “alpha world city” as ranked by the
Globalization and World Cities Research Network, on a par with Los
Angeles, Moscow, Mumbai, and São Paolo with regards to connectivity
within the world economic system and positioning within the transna-
tional flow of capital, goods, and services. 14 On this map, Mexico City
becomes the node that links northern Latin America with the global econ-
omy, a conduit for the vast flows of capital that traverse Latin America
and transform it from a geography of interconnected, unique, and inhab-
itable environments into a series of interchangeable, peripheral sites of
extraction, production, and consumption. And it is precisely this reliance
on transient capital and labor flows and contingency on the global market
that have generated Mexico City’s apocalyptic sense of unsustainability.
Rather than the “navel of the moon” conjoining earth and sky, modern
Mexico City floats unmoored on a sea of capital and transient, disposable
bodies. The works I study below look to break the hold of the global
imagination over Mexico City’s urban spaces and restore its being in
volume, as a place from which to perceive the planet.

INHABITING THE UNDERGROUND

The neoliberal worldview requires rescaling the underground as an un-

historied, flat space, a layer that is discontinuous with the layers above, if
nested within them. In neoliberal private property ownership, the surface
is owned separately from the minerals that lie below and the water that
flows over, while the atmosphere is territorialized as air space and capi-
talized through carbon credits; they are all separate planes. A similar
dynamic is at work in what Graham and Hewitt call the “secessionary
vertical landscapes” of skyscrapers, which they view as “vertically strat-
ified gated ‘communities’ which residualize the surface city as powerful-
ly as the exurban gated communities residualized traditional public
street systems” (79). Vertical architecture has become increasingly segre-
gated from the city as a whole, sometimes even connecting buildings by
skyways that permit one never to set foot on the ground. In the neoliberal
conceptualization of space, then, both the underground and the sky are
detached from the surface as their own planes; none of them are seen as
having any constitutive social, ecological, or even definitive architectural
110 Anderson

relation. In this setting, mining is not viewed in terms of vertical depth or

geological time, but rather as a question of retrieving elements that are
proper to the surface and crystallizing them into the configurations of the
present. The underground is a mere vault, a sub-terra, a non-environ-
ment whose only purpose is to store commodities until future demand
endows them with sufficient value to warrant extraction or to house
waste so that it does not reduce the value of surface land.
In modernity, the underground rarely appears in representation. Its
function is to remain invisible, to place things out of sight and out of
mind. This contrasts drastically with older imaginaries, in which the
underground had powerful religious connotations. In the Mesoamerican
tradition, as in many others, both the skies and underworld were inhabit-
ed by deities and ancestors. Unlike the abstract Christian Hell, Mictlan
and Xibalbá were real, earthly places with their own underground, mate-
rial geographies. No dimension was detachable from the others; they
were all connected by genealogical bonds and spiritual architectures that
allowed movement between them. In the nineteenth century, this animis-
tic perspective was appropriated for romantic nationalism, when the land
served to evoke the nation’s body, and the underground became the
mother’s bowels that gave birth to the national citizen and native idio-
syncrasy. Even in more rationalist, neoclassical formulations of national-
ism, the perspective of land as the cornerstone of the national edifice
extended to the underground, the foundations. In Mexico, these common
nineteenth-century conceptualizations of the underground continued
into the twentieth century post-Revolution period in murals such as Die-
go Rivera’s “The Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilizing the
Earth” (Autonomous University of Chapingo, 1926), which depicts dark-
skinned men shrouded in red and buried beneath thriving cornfields,
and “Subterranean Forces” (National School of Agriculture, 1927), in
which nude women ascend from the underground in a volcanic flow, the
life forces of the nation.
In the neoliberal worldview, in contrast, simply representing the
underground generates a sense of instability. Mapping the underground
using modern technologies like core sampling, satellite imaging, radar,
and sonar reveals that it is riddled with cavities, excavations, fault lines. 15
The opaqueness that is read as density suddenly becomes hollow and we
begin to question: what lies beneath? Are we standing on solid ground?
In order to counter this destabilization, then, the underground must be
conceived of as a series of separate planes, each with its own map. Even
cross-sections depict these planes as discontinuous stratification, each
layer with its own name and scale, the cross-section itself diminishing
volume into the flatness of a single dimension: the vertical.
Unlike cartographic representations of the subterranean, writing
about the underground is an exercise in burrowing, a digging down into
volume. This movement is evident in the many crónicas published in
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 111

newspapers and cultural magazines depicting life in Mexico City’s Me-

tro, which transform the underground into an inhabitable place, that is,
an environment. Rejecting the bird’s-eye cartographic perspective, the
narrative voices in these crónicas emplace both narrator and reader within
the underground, which is shown to be continuous with the surface not
only in a geographic but also a historical sense. In “Línea 7: Dentro del
agujero del conejo” (“Line 7: Inside the Rabbit Hole”), Elisa Corona Agui-
lar compares descending a stairway into a station on the orange line,
Mexico City’s deepest Metro route, with an epic journey into the under-
world that evokes Dante’s Inferno as well as the Popol Vuh. To enter the
underground is to sense corporeally the depth of Mexico’s transcultural
history as well as its political history: many of the line’s riders recount
appearances of ghosts from the Mexican revolution at the Barranca del
Muerto station and children’s laughter echoing through empty passages
(Corona Aguilar n. pag.). In these stories, pre-modern perspectives of the
underground persist, showing it to be a space haunted by the genealog-
ical traces of historical others. Indeed, the ghostly past rematerializes
unexpectedly, obstructing the building of the modern present’s discrete,
planar enclosures; forgotten ruins suddenly reemerge in excavations,
halting the machinery and putting construction projects on hold until
archeological studies are completed. As Villoro frames it, “aside from
bumping against pyramid steps, building downward precipitates an en-
counter with a symbolic order” (127). The present is forced to confront
historical depth; the surface is shown to be continuous with the under-
ground. And these traces of the past acquire new life as they are incorpo-
rated into the daily experience of Mexico City’s materiality. Walking past
ruins like the temple base in the Pino Suárez station and displays of
mammoth bones at the Talismán station on line 4 gives Metro users the
sense of moving through a dense history that is geological as well as
human, a “deep Mexico” as Villoro asserts with a nod to Bonfil Batalla
(127). Indeed, it is modernity that becomes ghostly, as the mechanical
squeaking of the escalators takes the place of the creaking doors of tradi-
tional ghost stories (Corona Aguilar n. pag.). Being underground gener-
ates the sense of living in a historically dense time that belies the superfi-
cial fixation with the present that rules the surface. And yet, the geologi-
cal surfaces themselves are covered with a veneer of modernity, the geo-
logical morphology that allows us to conceive of deep time existing only
in allusion, in the sensation of depth. 16
To a degree, at least, the Metro plays the counter to the stratification of
space in the neoliberal world city. The Metro has become a commons that
substitutes for the increasingly segregated shared spaces of the surface
city. As many sections of the urban center gentrify and are policed by a
variety of exclusionary practices, the streets feel less and less like “la
calle,” public space open to all, and become heavily surveilled byways for
the private vehicles of the middle and upper classes. The Metro wagons,
112 Anderson

its stations, and their immediate vicinity are nodes where students, bu-
reaucrats, homeless people, domestic workers, middle-class lawyers,
street vendors, and bank employees comingle. 17 The Metro’s subterra-
nean commons preserve the spirit of Article 27 of the revolutionary con-
stitution of 1917, which reintegrated the “subsuelo” (underground) into
the national territory following Porfirio Díaz’s fire sale of Mexico’s min-
eral resources to foreign corporations. The Metro is the affirmation of the
right to presence and free movement of all Mexican citizens, the inheri-
tance of los de abajo (the revolutionary underdogs). As Monsiváis writes,
“el Metro es la ciudad, y en el Metro se escenifica el sentido de la ciudad”
(the Metro is the city, and in the Metro the sense/meaning of the city is
staged; Rituales 111). His concluding lines drive home this “sense of the
city” as a free, horizontal assemblage in which none of the elements are
essential or even fully unique: “en el Metro, la novedad perenne es la
nación que cabe en un metro cuadrado. . . . En el Metro, se disuelven las
fronteras entre un cuerpo y otro, y allí todos se acomodan” (in the Metro,
the perennial novelty is the nation that fits within a single cubic meter. . . .
In the Metro, the borders between one body and another dissolve, and
everyone fits; Rituales 113). In this sense, the Metro preserves the horizon-
tality of social relations that cannot exist on the surface in the neoliberal
world city with its stark class and racial divisions between industrial,
financial, commercial, cultural, and residential districts.
In literal and figurative terms, the underground becomes the location
of a postmodern, nomadic pueblo that cannot assemble freely in the
open. As Jorge Ricardo wrote in his article covering the Ayotzinapa pro-
tests in Mexico City:
Los revolucionarios de hace 104 años llegaban a caballo. Los nuevos
revolucionarios llegan en el Metro. Traen cartulinas, aerosol, marca-
dores, cordones para cercar el grupo y no perderse, banderas enrolla-
das, celulares listos para tuitear la foto, dejan vacíos los trenes cuando
salen y suben las escaleras de la estación contando sus pasos hasta
llegar a 43, el número de estudiantes de Ayotzinapa desaparecidos, y
con un grito: “¡Justicia!” (n. pag.)

(The revolutionaries of 104 years ago arrived on horseback. The new

revolutionaries take the Metro. They bring cardboard, paint, markers,
rope to cordon the group off and not lose anyone, rolled-up banners,
cell phones ready to tweet the photos, they leave the trains empty
when they disembark and they climb the station stairs counting the
steps until they get to 43, the number of disappeared students from
Ayotzinapa, and they shout: “Justice!”)
The Metro is simultaneously the point of assembly and the means for the
nomadic territorialization of public spaces, for the occupation of and de-
camping from sites of political struggle that cannot be held permanently
due to their exclusive spatial configurations, sustained by the exclusion-
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 113

ary tactics of state biopolitics. As Villoro muses, “perhaps the one real
compensation of the subterranean world is to picture the surface from
down there. Perhaps the lesson of the tunnels is to bestow a different
value on the streets, to demonstrate, in secret, that the city is the heaven
of the subway” (132). The subway embodies the promise of reclaiming
the streets as public space.
Despite its role as an underground commons, however, the Metro
does not elude either capitalization or political hegemony. As reasonable
as the ticket price may be compared to private transportation, the Metro
now costs five pesos per ride. The Metro stations are full of kiosks and
fast-food stands, its walls and those of the Metro wagons themselves
replete with advertisements. Indeed, as Cynthia Ramírez’s fascinating
crónicas reveal, the Metro is fully integrated into the material economy of
the surface in both its formal and informal aspects, from the leasing of
advertising space to the vendors selling CDs and candy, the presence of
labor unions, even the materiality of the seemingly ephemeral Metro
tickets themselves, which, in the end, are consumer products that must
be bought and disposed of as waste. Ramírez’s crónicas make it clear that
the virtuality of consumer capitalism extends into the perceived solidity
and solemnity of the earth.
Similarly, Iván García Gárate comments in “Línea 3 y la juricidad de la
vida cotidiana” (“Line 3 and the Legality of Daily Life”) on the way in
which the Metro functions as a meticulously regulated space, even when
it replicates the surface’s discrepancy between the application of the law
and social norms and practices. Writing of “usos y costumbres under-
ground” in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek style, García Gárate notes how
despite the existence of official rules that prohibit “street vending,” in the
underground these become “letra muetra” (mere words): “aquí no se
aplica el Derecho, sino la ley de los paraderos, la de los andenes y el
derecho del vagón, que ha sido creado por quienes viven en este espacio
ante la omisión o la permisividad de las autoridades” (here the Law does
not apply, but rather the rule of the stop, the platforms, and “wagon
rights,” which have been created by those who live in these spaces due to
the omission or tolerance of the authorities; n. pag.). Like the calle, the
underground is an ambivalent space in which regulations imposed by
the state enter into contradiction with the social practices of civil society,
thus generating volumetric ambiguity in the flat application of the law.
On the macro level, García Gárate cites the indigenous toponyms of
stations like Copilco, Tlatelolco, and Coyoacán as evidence of the depth
of Mexico’s heterogeneous, pluricultural history, which generate another
kind of ambivalence with the official post-Revolution multiculturalism of
stations like Indios Verdes and La Raza that sought to collapse those
cultural and historical differences into the homogenizing discourse of
mestizo nationalism. Indeed, Georgina Sebey argues in “Línea 9: Arquitec-
tura del subsuelo” (“Line 9: Architecture of the Underground”) that the
114 Anderson

Pantitlán-Tacubaya line (with stops like Patriotismo, Chilpancingo,

Lázaro Cárdenas, Centro Médico, and Ciudad Deportiva) was designed
precisely as a monument to the ideology and achievements of the Partido
de la Revolución Institucionalizada (PRI). This certainly seems likely
since it was inaugurated in 1987, in a moment in which the PRI’s legiti-
macy as the ruling party had come into question with the 1982 collapse of
the peso and the inefficiency of the response to the 1985 Mexico City
earthquake. García Gárate disrupts this PRI-ista topography of the Metro
by associating the stations instead with post-PRI institutions associated
with democratic governance, human rights, constitutional guarantees,
and political transparency (n. pag.). Nevertheless, even these regulatory
institutions are shown to be incomplete, since the law flattens social real-
ity by subordinating it to an ostensibly democratic symbolic order that
claims horizontality where clear social divisions not only persist, but
have actually intensified following the neoliberal turn of the 1980s and
1990s. He closes the crónica by underscoring that: “Potrero, Eugenia y
Miguel Ángel Quevedo nada dicen del Derecho ni sus manifestaciones.
Está bien. Afortunadamente, en la línea 3 como en la vida cotidiana, hay
espacios no juridificados” (Potrero, Eugenia, and Miguel Ángel Quevedo
say nothing of the Law and its manifestations. This is fine. Fortunately,
on line 3 as in daily life, there are still unregulated spaces; n. pag.). In this
way, García Gárate captures the complex ways in which the subterranean
topography of the Metro both reproduces and disrupts the legal topogra-
phy through which neoliberalism seeks to reconcile juridical equality
with structural social inequality. The depth of social relations thus dis-
rupts the superficiality of the rule of law.
If the Metro generates a sense of inhabitability, collectivity, and histor-
ical and institutional depth, it is nevertheless primarily a subsidiary space
of transportation. In his “Línea 6: Un grito sordo y compartido” (“Line 6:
A Deafening, Collective Cry”), Alonso Ruvalcaba writes that “La línea 6
es la casa de la brevedad” (Line 6 is the home of brevity), deploying a
poignant metaphor that captures the hyperbolic velocity of modern life.
As Villoro frames it, “bastion of the country’s informal economy, hall of
exhibitions, concerts, and book fairs, land of sex-cruisers, suicides, and
premature births, the metro is a city on the move” (130). The Metro may
be a way of inhabiting the underground, but only briefly, transitorily. If
some people catch up on their sleep on the ride or in station hallways, the
gates are locked from midnight until 5 a.m. As Sebey notes, the Metro
generates forms of territorialization that can only be impermanent:
“miles de usuarios al día hacen del subsuelo un territorio de tránsitos e
itinerarios en donde el espacio se consolida como un escenario para la
movilidad” (each day, thousands of users make the underground a terri-
tory of transit and itineraries in which space is collapsed into a setting for
mobility; n. pag.). This transitoriness undermines the sense of emplace-
ment, as the underground is once again subordinated to the surface, a
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 115

simple means of movement to distinct points on the surface, where

meaning itself resides.
If the Metro generates a sense of inhabiting volume only transitorily,
another phenomenon makes it visible in a more permanent fashion.
Walking throughout the city, it is common to encounter buildings that
have sunk two meters or more below street level. Indeed, Enrique San-
toyo Villa notes that the iconic cathedral located on Mexico City’s zócalo
has sunk 9 meters since 1856, while some parts of the metropolitan area
continue to sink up to 40 cm per year (n. pag.). Cabral-Cano et al. place
the average subsidence of the city as a whole between 1895 and 2002 at
9.7 meters (1557). There are many reasons for the ground subsidence that
has occurred in Mexico City since the Spanish began draining the sur-
rounding lakes in the seventeenth century, but the rapid increase in the
rates of subsidence over the last century is transparently due to the mas-
sive, unsustainable extraction of fossil water from the aquifers underly-
ing the city and the Anahuac basin as a whole. Despite the construction of
aqueducts connecting the city to the neighboring Cutzamala and Lerma
watersheds, Legorreta and his collaborators note that the rate of extrac-
tion in 2007 was more than 46 cubic meters per second from nearly 3,000
wells in the Valley of Mexico, exceeding the rate of replenishment by at
least 50 percent and lowering the water table from 0.1 to 1.5 meters per
year (Legorreta et al. n. pag.; Cabral-Cano 1557).
Beyond the visible sinking of buildings, Legorreta and company diag-
nose six grave effects on the city from subsidence: the Gran Canal, the
city’s main drainage for street runoff as well as sewage, is now running
nearly level or even uphill in some areas, leading to frequent flooding;
localized flooding in subsided areas; structural damage to buildings,
monuments, and streets as the ground shifts; the fracturing of water,
sewage, and gas lines and the resulting contamination of ground water
supplies; the large-scale loss of already scarce water from leaks and
breakages of water mainlines; and sinkholes, some of which have been
quite large, swallowing people, vehicles, and even buildings (n. pag.).
Fissures and sinkholes disrupt the city’s smooth geometric surfaces, pro-
viding dramatic glimpses into the “bowels of the earth.” The city’s rela-
tion to its own geomorphology becomes impossible to ignore, as do the
effects of extraction, when broken tubes jut out from the edges of these
chasms like fractured bones, spewing water and sewage into the depths
or onto the street.
The damage from subsidence has become so extensive that Cabral-
Cano and his collaborators compare it to a massive, if gradual earthquake
(1556). In his “Ciudad en reisgo,” Martín Morales uses an even more
evocative, if somewhat mixed metaphor, describing Mexico City as a
sinking ship: “una enorme barca—en realidad una plancha de concreto—
en proceso gradual de hundimiento y en permanente riesgo de inunda-
ciones y resquebrajamientos estructurales debido a que flota sobre un
116 Anderson

subsuelo inestable . . . ” (an enormous ship—in reality a slab of con-

crete—in a gradual process of sinking and in permanent risk of flooding
and breaking up due to the fact that it floats over unstable ground; n.
pag.). Whatever metaphor one chooses to describe them, subsidence and
flooding are twin facets of an ecological crisis that makes very visible the
effects of unfettered extraction of water from the city’s aquifers. The “de-
snivel” or “unevenness” due to subsidence of the city’s streets and struc-
tures cannot help put emplace one within volume and make one question
whether or not unlimited extraction is really worth the ultimate price of
being swallowed by the earth.

RESTORING VOLUME: WATER’S LOGIC

As the problem of subsidence makes clear, hydrology has always been

key in Mexico City’s history. The city’s form has shifted dramatically due
to different understandings of water, from that of the Aztecs and their
famous water works to that of the Spanish colonizers, who attempted to
transform the city into a reflection of the arid Iberian environments to
which they were accustomed, up through the modern perspective, in
which water was hidden away underground as a resource for a growing
city built over land reclaimed from the lakes. 18 The massive colonial and
postcolonial drainage projects and the city’s vertiginous expansion over
the former lakebeds generated subsidence and scarcity, which led to the
foundation of the Comisión Hidrológica del Valle de México in 1952,
charged with inventorying and managing the city’s water resources.
Since the colonial period, then, the hydrology governing Mexico
City’s water policy has been oriented almost exclusively toward its use
by humans, destined to maintain the economic and population growth of
the city with little or no consideration for other species or even future
inhabitants of the area. Nevertheless, a new, ecological conceptualization
of water has emerged in Mexico City in recent decades, in which water,
rather than a service or natural resource, is understood as an integral part
of ecosystems at every scale (Lezama and Graizbord 13). This emergent
hydrology breaks with the logic of extraction, revealing that water fol-
lows its own tenets derived from its unique physical properties as well as
the range of positions it occupies within diverse ecosystems. The final
section of this chapter examines the 2014 documentary film H2Omx, di-
rected by José Cohen in collaboration with Lorenzo Hagerman, as an
example of this tendency. I argue that this film guides its viewers to
“think like water,” not in the sense of conscious cognition, but rather in
that of following water’s logic as it moves through volumetric spaces, all
the while maintaining its own being. Water invariably overflows contain-
ment, whether geophysical or symbolic.
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 117

H2Omx, winner of the 2014 Margaret Mead Documentary Filmmaker

Award and the 2015 Ariel Prize in the documentary category, details the
many challenges that the Mexico City metropolitan area faces in supply-
ing its approximately 20 million residents with potable water. The film’s
thematic focus is placed almost exclusively on the human costs of the
over-extraction of water from the city’s aquifers and surrounding water-
sheds, which is underpinned by a somewhat technocratic narrative sug-
gesting that the root of the problem hinges on the axis connecting over-
population with underdevelopment. The social conditions leading to the
rapid urbanization of Mexico City are touched on only tangentially, and
the effects of the overexploitation of the region’s water resources for non-
human inhabitants of the region’s environments are beyond its scope,
although they do appear in allusion in the scenes featuring the remnants
of Lake Texcoco. In this sense, the film’s primary focus is social justice
rather than environmental justice. Nevertheless, the filmography tech-
niques used provide a broader perspective than the narrative itself, fore-
grounding a systemic perspective of the city’s ecological footprint
through the volumetric disruption of the divide between verticality and
horizontality.
This volumetric perspective is developed from the onset, when the
film juxtaposes images of what is left of Lake Texcoco with a variety of
cityscapes. The opening scene of raindrops falling into rippled water cap-
tures immediately the seamless conjunction of horizontal and vertical
planes, drawing the atmosphere into the flat surface of the water, whose
opacity also hints at unsoundable depths. In a continuous sequence, this
scene fades into one in which the camera zooms over Lake Texcoco at an
oblique panoramic angle shot from a helicopter, capturing in a single
plane the horizontal and vertical dimensions. The lake’s flat blue-green
surfaces are punctuated by stands of trees and mountains in the distance
that suggest a natural coordination of horizontal and vertical flows. This
scene is endowed with historical depth as well when two narrative voices
discuss the competing foundational visions for Mexico City: the Aztecs’
carefully coordinated lacustrine city versus the Spanish colonial transfor-
mation of the city into a dry metropolis extending over the drained lakes’
parched beds. These narrative voices, one renowned writer and environ-
mental activist Homero Aridjis and the other anthropologist Teresa Rojas
Rabiela, provide continuity to the sequence, whose images shift abruptly
into a bird’s-eye view of Mexico City’s urban density.
Viewed from above, the city’s uniform surface complements that of
the lake, but the lake’s colorfulness contrasts strikingly with the greyness
of the dry city and Aridjis’ query as to “how can a culture that was born
in the water, that developed in water, live without water?” (1:17). Both
the uniformity of the city surface and the color contrast are quickly dis-
rupted, however, as the camera drops to an oblique angle similar to that
used to capture the volume of the lake: the city’s flat surface suddenly
118 Anderson

gains relief as it is shown to follow the mountainous lay of the land, while
a blue-green house similar in color to the lake is foregrounded in a pano-
ramic rotation with the grey city as backdrop. In this way, both the lake
and the city are shown to exist in volume, not merely as surface territory
or abstracted cartographic symbols.
The film’s visual and textual narratives maintain a rigid, dramatic
contrast between natural and unnatural configurations of volume, in
which the city’s volumetric ecology is portrayed as unsustainable and
distorted. This perspective is reinforced by a dissonant soundtrack that
serves as a defamiliarizing device, placing in a strange light what are,
after all, commonplace images of water distribution in much of Mexico.
From the opening scenes, the film shifts into a reverse chronology illus-
trating the laborious manner in which water is extracted, distributed, and
consumed within the city and its geospatial footprint, beginning with
destitute children selling bottled water in the streets and following a pipa,
or water truck, as it delivers water to marginalized neighborhoods on the
city’s periphery. From the city limits, the film moves outwards to one of
the water’s sources, the Cutzamala watershed, in which the river’s water
is siphoned off into an immense reservoir surrounded by barbed wire
and concrete-lined canals, leaving the area’s rural residents and vegeta-
tion high and dry. From there, the film returns to the city, contrasting
massive drilling projects with a local water catchment program. Inter-
woven with elements from earlier scenes, the second half of the film
focuses primarily on the movement of wastewater, spillage and pollu-
tion, and the remaining water’s journey back out into the fields in Hidal-
go state, where it is reused for irrigation.
The city’s unnatural geophysical footprint is portrayed as existing in a
constitutive relation with an unjust social distribution of wealth, living
space, and access to services, generating a monstrous urban ecology that
devalues not only human life, rendering it tenuous, but also the ontologi-
cal being of water as a substance governed by its own internal mandates,
its own natural way of being-in-the-world. Indeed, throughout the film,
water constantly appears out of place, degraded in ways that are not
gauged solely in terms of human consumption and use, but rather in the
abjection of water as itself. The images of rivers of trash-, chemical-, and
sewage-filled water coursing through the city serve to underscore a fun-
damental lack generated by the city’s modern hydrology.
Despite the depictions of abjected waste and wasted water, nonethe-
less, water retains its mystique, a mystique that eludes full objectification
or containment in either a material or symbolic sense. This property of
water does not depend on the ambivalence of symbolism, on its inability
to recuperate the real fully into the symbol, but rather on the paradoxical
play between water’s pure affectivity for human life, its ineludible effects
on our bodies, and its inherent potentiality to form flows that traverse all
the city’s volumes, even the human body. Indeed, despite the overarch-
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 119

ing narrative of scarcity and unsustainable consumption, there is a pow-

erful secondary narrative about the persistence of flows and the aesthet-
ics of flow itself as a natural, gravitational force. The sequences focusing
on trash and sewage are clearly designed to communicate the trope of
contamination; they capture the temporal disjunction produced by mod-
ernity, where millennial geological processes are reversed or disrupted.
Nevertheless, the persistence and uncanny beauty of flows exceeds their
representation as waste. The film captures the beauty and power in the
affective qualities of natural forces that are beyond human manipulation,
even when environments have been rendered wastelands.
Although H2Omx centers on the social consequences of water manage-
ment in Mexico City, the portrayal of the interplay between water, waste,
and people in the film brings into relief larger questions regarding the
geopolitics of territorialization, not only in the way that the city’s volu-
metric ecological footprint extends far below the city into the geological
substrata as well as outwards to the Cutzamala watershed, but also in the
relations between people and water on an ontological level. As a fluid
and unindividuated substance, water can never be territorialized entire-
ly; and the imposition of unnatural patterns of flow over water is seen as
generating an entropic culture of waste and toxicity and thereby a crisis
in livability that prognosticates an apocalyptic end to the city. As the
scenes portraying the construction of local rain catchment systems under-
score, this representation of the out-of-placeness of water in Mexico City
is clearly designed to promote a sustainable, bioregional approach to
water distribution, in which water is captured and consumed locally,
keeping it as close as possible to its natural flow patterns through the
environment and the inhabitants’ bodies.
The aesthetics of flow in this film thus offer hope for change. The
images of “natural flows” of trash, toxic foam, pollution, and traffic are
all parallel and yet subordinated to the mandate of flow itself. Flow can
never be territorialized completely, only channeled temporarily. Further-
more, flows always exist in volume; they are never confined to a single
plane; they thus reveal and delegitimize the social and geographical strat-
ification upon which the global, flat perspective relies to carry out its
terraforming projects without consideration of their environmental and
social consequences. The fluidity of flows show the impermanence of
territoriality and the possibilities, even inevitability, of transformation.
Flows will always persist; it is we who will disappear if we are unable to
conform to them.

NOTES

1. See the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI)’s chart on

“Población total de la Ciudad de México, años seleccionados de 1790 a 2005” (Cuadro
1.54) regarding the Metropolitan Area’s demographic growth.
120 Anderson

2. The most famous of these floods was the catastrophic deluge of 1629, but major
flooding occurred several times a century in the sixteenth through the eighteenth
centuries, and minor flooding persists even today (Candiani 286–90).
3. All translations are the author’s own, unless noted otherwise.
4. An apocalypse could never be “experienced” for at least two reasons. First, the
notion of experience requires an after; for an event to constitute an experience, it must
be internalized by a surviving body (this is why we cannot experience death). Second,
even if we could experience an apocalypse, even if that internalization of the event
into the body were perfectly simultaneous, the event would be so fully traumatic that
it would always remain beyond apprehension as experience, that is, as what could be
narrated as part of the body’s experience.
5. Recent studies of apocalyptic discourse include Fabry, Logie, and Decock’s Los
imaginarios apocalípticos en la literatura hispanoamericana contemporánea; Germanà and
Mousoutzanis’ Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture; Larochelle’s “A City on
the Brink of Apocalypse”; López Lozano’s Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares:
Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative; Manickam’s “Apocalyptic Vi-
sions in Contemporary Mexican Science Fiction”; Parkinson Zamora’s Writing the
Apocalypse; Sánchez Prado’s “La utopía apocalíptica del México neoliberal”; Itala
Schmeltz’s “El DF en tono apocalíptico”; and Yar’s Crime and the Imaginary of Disaster:
Post-Apocalyptic Fictions and the Crisis of the Social Order, to name only a few titles.
6. As Foucault wrote in the preface to The Order of Things, “there is no similitude
and no distinction, even for the wholly untrained perception, that is not the result of a
precise operation and of the application of a preliminary criterion. . . . Order is, at one
and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network
that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no exis-
tence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only
in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already
there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression” (xx).
7. Similarly, Elden states, “We all-too-often think of the spaces of geography as
areas, not volumes. Territories are bordered, divided and demarcated, but not under-
stood in terms of height and depth” (1).
8. Seminal sociologist Georg Simmel was one of the first to theorize the way in
which the sense of “fleetingness” inherent in modern life led to the sensation of living
in an eternal present. For a summary of Simmel’s thought on the subject, see chapter
two of David Frisby’s Fragments of Modernity.
9. Sánchez Prado argues that apocalyptic representations of Mexico City corre-
spond to “un imaginario del desastre que la cultura mexicana ha usado como una
estrategia de resistencia ante los embates de la hegemonía neoliberal” (an imaginary of
disaster that Mexican culture has used as a strategy of resistance against the neoliberal
hegemony’s incursions; 10). Likewise, López Lozano writes that “dystopian fiction
provides the means for Mexican and Chicano authors to question fundamental tenets
of Latin American culture such as the Western model of industrialized capitalism as
the only possible pattern for the economic development of the hemisphere” (3). This
perspective does not contradict my thesis, however, since the apocalyptic imaginary is
still intimately bound up with neoliberalism, as the grounds from which it may be
conceived.
10. See the third chapter of A Thousand Plateaus regarding Deleuze and Guattari’s
conceptualization of stratification as a process of “double-articulation,” in which “the
first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecu-
lar or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of
connections and successions (forms),” while “the second articulation establishes func-
tional, compact, stable structures (forms), and constructs the molar compounds in
which these structures are simultaneously actualized (substances)” (41). This process
provides insight in the ways into which colonial practices rescale both environments
and their inhabitants, which then reflect back the structures that are imposed on them.
 The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth 121

11. As Barbara E. Mundy points out, there is no clear consensus among linguists
regarding the etymology of “Mexico” (331). Nevertheless, the popular account, which
is the most germane to my discussion of the collective conceptualization of space, is
the one which I have cited. As Gutierre Tibón notes, despite competing with seventy-
one different etymologies, this version has found support in the mapping of the re-
gion’s ancient lakebeds, which reveals that the former lakes resembled the configura-
tion of the moon’s craters (257).
12. I concur with Žižek’s criticism in Organs Without Bodies of Deleuze and Guatta-
ri’s concept of nomadic desire as complementary to neoliberal capitalism, even if I
myself feel drawn to the concept’s liberation from Oedipal modes of subjectivity and
political action.
13. Spivak writes that “the globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows
us to think that we can aim to control it” (72). See also Ingold, “Globes” 29.
14. See the Globalization and World Cities Research Network’s ranking in “The
World According to GaWC, 2012.”
15. See, for example, the chapter on the stratigraphy of Mexico City in Marsal and
Mazari’s El subsuelo de la ciudad de México. Tellingly, this work also shows how social
stratification is closely related or even contingent to a degree on geological stratigra-
phy, since affluent neighborhoods like Las Lomas de Chapultepec are generally built
over more stable, rocky soils, while the poorer neighborhoods were usually built on
the sandy soils of the former lake bed. Nevertheless, the authors note that the histori-
cal mining of gravel and sand for construction has undermined even many of Las
Lomas’ structures, placing them on shaky ground (21).
16. The term “deep time” was coined by Scottish geologist James Hutton in the
eighteenth century to refer to geological time; it has become a key term in ecocritical
circles in recent years to counter the hyperbolic velocity that predominates in modern
notions of time, in which events that happened only a year or two ago abruptly
become “ancient history,” thereby disrupting any sense of causality and historical
continuity.
17. At the same time, many upwardly mobile people refuse to take the Metro. As
Villoro describes it, “despite their numbers, [the Metro riders] have been unerringly
selected; to descend the escalator is to cross a line of racial segregation. The under-
ground city is populated by—pick your slur—nacos, Indians, Mexicans. Hic sunt le-
ones” (131). This class and racial divide is illustrated perfectly in the condescending
tone taken by Ricardo Garibay’s and José Joaquín Blanco’s crónicas in the same collec-
tion, although Garibay does bring up valid concerns about sexual harassment in Metro
wagons.
18. Regarding these shifting conceptualizations of Mexico City’s hydrology, see
Vera Candiani’s Dreaming of Dry Land, particularly chapter one, entitled “Living in a
Fluid Landscape.”

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 SEVEN
A Crisis in Environmental
Representation
In-Depth Reporting in a Brazilian Magazine

Simão Farias Almeida

Anthropocentric eco-ethics in the media generate conflicting interpreta-

tions of how humans attribute value to nonhuman nature (Maxwell and
Miller 33). Furthermore, journalism hierarchizes and supersedes dis-
courses and meanings (Duarte Rodrigues 224–27). As our study reveals,
Brazilian literary journalists such as Euclides da Cunha and Zuenir Ven-
tura have often represented the environment through the lens of native
subjugation in literary-journalistic narratives involving ideologies re-
garding nature. Likewise, authors like Lima Barreto and Monteiro Lobato
sometimes use animals and minority groups as metaphors for the de-
struction of natural ecosystems, thus establishing a crisis of environmen-
tal representation arising from the problematic mediation of social and
political crises. On the other hand, twenty-first-century journalists such
as Sônia Bridi have begun to take a bioethical perspective within journal-
ism, giving voice to animals that have become oppressed by the conse-
quences of global warming, despite the prevalence of anthropocentric
perspectives in other narratives. Finally, we examine Pieter Zalis and
André Petry’s in-depth report “Estado de desordem” (“The State of Dis-
order”), published in the weekly magazine Veja in May of 2014, which
exemplifies the ongoing precariousness of this tradition by mixing fiction
and non-fiction in its use of a national fruit as a metaphor for institutional
bureaucracy and social inefficiency. We demonstrate that such narratives
hierarchize political criticism to the detriment of ecological ideologies.
125
126 Almeida

Nonetheless, we conclude that emptying the metaphor of its meanings in

the news report does not undermine social critique and could also safe-
guard environmental ethics.
Ecocritical analysis of literature and the media shows that representa-
tions often project forms of human oppression of social minorities over
nature (Maxwell and Miller 138; Nixon 23; Ruffin 164). They advocate
environmental citizenship in its broadest sense so as to safeguard the
rights of humans, oppressed animals, and ecosystems. This also includes
a critique of anthropocentric perspectives of nature. The history of Brazil-
ian environmental narratives demonstrates that journalists writing in
genres such as chronicles and opinion articles and reporting in book for-
mat reveal a hierarchy of oppression, in which nature appears in the final
stages of subjugation, brought about by the exploitation of poor, mestizo
labor.
On the other hand, the representation of nature, its subjects, and their
inhabited spaces has become problematic in journalism, since it has been
taken over by an anthropocentric ideology, over which men hold power
of voice and destruction against ecosystems. The manner of treating facts
concerning the devastation and exploitation of the environment is per-
meated by class, ethnicity, and gender ideologies that are very often not
superseded in the planes of narrative, opinion, and interpretation, thus
generating a representational crisis. On the other hand, as we shall see
throughout this chapter, narratives such as those by journalist Sônia Bri-
di, published in 2012, are proof that bioethical representation is possible,
democratizing the perspectives of humans and animals.
Since at least the early twentieth century, meanings and discourses
relating to environments and ecosystems have appeared precariously la-
den with metaphors and allegories that somatize political and social cri-
ses, rendering them analogous to environmental problems of devastation
and destruction and to human problems of adapting to natural spaces
and of subjugation to patriarchal powers and the ruling classes. Thus, a
crisis in environmental representation unfolds in which nature is very
often portrayed as victim, but at other times it threatens people, urban
spaces, cultural customs, and the collective imaginary.
In articles published posthumously in Amazônia: Terra sem história (The
Amazon: Land without History; 1909), literary journalist Euclides da Cunha
declared that both the poor and nature are exploited, writing that Ama-
zonian rubber tappers were “reificado em menos um homem que uma
bola de caucho” (reified into less a man than a ball of rubber; da Cunha
74). 1 In this way, he established a metaphor in which the product ex-
tracted from the environment by rubber tappers became a metaphor for
the near slave labor that characterized the latex industry at that time.
Furthermore, da Cunha opted for an anthropocentric viewpoint when
endeavoring to grasp the significance of the Amazonian rainforest, treat-
ing it as a “tenebrous paradise” and a “diabolical paradise of rubber
 A Crisis in Environmental Representation 127

plantations,” thereby transferring a social crisis arising from labor rela-

tions onto the natural ecosystem (52). 2 The anthropocentric perspective
on the Amazon has also been common to foreign explorers since the
sixteenth century. Da Cunha uses both sublimated and pejorative view-
points arising from his own particular perspective as well as those of the
traveling scientists and adventurers whose accounts he had read, thereby
legitimizing the tradition of previous narratives and the fragmentation of
different experiences of Amazonian nature.
In the story “Velha praga” (“The Old Plague”; 1914), journalistic writ-
er and farmer Monteiro Lobato depicted fire-ravaged nature as the body
of a woman, thereby subjugating both within the field of meaning to the
hierarchized powers of a rural patriarchal society. Monteiro Lobato criti-
cized the custom often adopted by poor country people of burning scrub-
land in preparation for planting, ostensibly damaging soil health. 3 How-
ever, he failed to mention the fact that these people lacked the necessary
machinery for plowing, which was used exclusively by the economically
better-off agriculturalists. His environmental criticism is beset with class
prejudice, privileging the point of view of wealthy landowners to the
detriment of the simple planters.
In the same literary journalistic tradition of expressing anthropocen-
tric perspectives through metaphors, Lima Barreto, in his chronicle “So-
bre o desastre” (“On Disaster”; 1917), spoke out against the urban vertical
colonization of the hills in the city of Rio de Janeiro and likened the
architectural buildings, which obstructed the view of the natural environ-
ment, to “the heads of pigs” (n. pag.). In other words, he assigned pejora-
tively animal characteristics to anti-ecological actions of humans and to
urban geography, as well as hierarchizing the anthropocentric vision of
the collective imaginary.
This mode of representation has remained intact after nearly a centu-
ry. In his Chico Mendes: Crime e castigo (Chico Mendes: Crime and Punish-
ment; 2003), Zuenir Ventura returns to the perspective of Euclides da
Cunha by conflating the exploitation of people and ecosystems, arguing
that the death of Mendes, the rubber tapper leader and campaigner
against deforestation, was akin to the death of nature. According to Ven-
tura, Darly Alves da Silva, the man who murdered the rubber tapper
leader, said that “o dia que matasse o Chico Mendes, eles matavam uma
vaca” (the day they killed Chico Mendes, they would be killing a fatted
cow; Ventura 30), thereby creating an equivalence between man and ani-
mal, even if a pejorative one. In turn, Ventura compares Chico Mendes’
killer with a venomous snake (159). On the other hand, the rubber tap-
pers carried out “equalizing actions” such as placing themselves around
the trees so that they could not be cut down, thereby conflating the lives
of trees and those of humans. This action was organized by Mendes with
“ares de epopéia” (an epic air) in order to prevent the deforestation that
Alves da Silva planned (Ventura 200).
128 Almeida

A comprehensive analysis of these narratives in previous papers al-

lows us to suggest that the representations employed by these journalistic
writers generally swing between the superimposition of an anthropocen-
tric vision and an attempt to balance it with a more ecological, if frustrat-
ed defense, since it submits animals, ecosystems, and social minorities to
pejorative characteristics, as was the case in Lima Barreto’s and Monteiro
Lobato’s texts. 4 Others have employed a system of hierarchical dis-
courses that rely on metaphors to legitimize meanings aimed at defend-
ing preservation in a paradoxical manner by extending the idea of the
Amazon as a “green hell” (Euclides da Cunha), and/or by representing
the interests of political and economic elites (Monteiro Lobato). There are
also authors who value the ends and means of environmental discourses
despite engaging the popular, ecophobic linguistic-cultural repertoire as-
sociating negative human actions with those of animals, as when Ventura
compared Chico Mendes’ killer to a venomous snake.
Lima Barreto’s chronicle and Monteiro Lobato’s article were early
twentieth-century pioneers in denouncing humans’ destruction of nature.
However, they do so from different perspectives: Barreto takes an anthro-
pocentric approach, associating building with pigs, and Monteiro Loba-
to’s text is eco-anthropocentric in its aim to criticize deforestation while
making use of class and gender ideologies. Euclides da Cunha adopts the
anthropocentric perspective by treating the forest as an oppressor that
colludes with rubber plantation owners in the exploitation of rubber
workers. Zuenir Ventura, in a context where environmental scientists
denounce the way in which man destroys the ecosystem and becomes the
victim of this very destruction, criticizes the anthropocentric perspective
of Chico Mendes’ killers, although he does not do this when representing
them as animals.
In contrast, journalist Sônia Bridi’s Diário do clima (Climate Diary; 2012)
takes a critical post-colonial, eco-anthropocentric and bioethical stance in
order to represent nature as a place of shelter and sustainable life for the
poor (Bridi 72). Furthermore, she gives a voice to animals when she fore-
grounds the consequences they suffer from global warming: “Sempre
relacionamos esse aquecimento a coisas ruins. E é ruim, mas depende de
para quem você pergunta. Se você perguntar a um urso polar, essa
mudança é péssima, porque vai derreter a casa dele, pois o urso vive no
mar congelado” (We always associate global warming with bad things.
And it is bad, but it depends on who you ask. If you ask a polar bear, the
change is terrible, because it is going to melt his home, since bears live on
the frozen sea; Bridi 112). As simple as this example may seem, assigning
a perspective to an animal illustrates how a bioethical approach is pos-
sible in journalism, even if anthropocentric perspectives still prevail in
nearly all narratives in newspapers and magazines.
Despite the emergence and expansion in twenty-first-century journal-
ism of more eco-anthropocentric or ecological perspectives such as that
 A Crisis in Environmental Representation 129

taken by Bridi, in-depth journalistic reporting and books have main-

tained a tradition of precarious mediation, insisting on metaphors that do
not contribute to bioethical engagement. According to Maxwell and Mill-
er, anthropocentric eco-ethics in the media include conflicting interpreta-
tions of human values with respect to the nature of nonhumans, intro-
ducing ideologies regarding this nature (33). However, the authors do
not problematize the environmental debate within a scenario where jour-
nalism mediates facts, ideas, and opinions, hierarchizing their meanings,
which obligates us to depart from academic-scientific references about
ecomedia and return to the discussion after investigating the ideological-
discursive regime of journalism as a cultural practice.
Adriano Duarte Rodrigues offers a number of insights regarding jour-
nalistic mediation, although his theoretical and critical construct is also
marked by restrictions, since it is limited to its object of study: journalistic
narratives in which the disposition and confrontation of discourses run
counter to the compatibility of meanings defended by their paradigms.
Duarte Rodrigues argues that while the media’s discursive practice con-
sists primarily in using metaphor to assimilate part of the discursive
dimensions of other institutions, it is not limited to the boundaries of a
restricted domain of experience, thus fulfilling its functions of mediation
(220–22). While the discourses of other social fields are opaque because
they strive for the authenticity of specialization, the media is transparent
in its task of countering or supporting the legitimacy of other institutions,
traversing and allowing itself to become “infected” by their meanings.
Duarte Rodrigues illustrates his argument with evidence from reports
in the Brazilian weekly magazine Veja demonstrating, for example, the
metaphorical discourse of journalism in transferring religious rhetoric to
dealing with a health problem in animals: “Pecados da carne. Doença da
vaca louca arrasa pecuária britânica e a ciência tem poucas respostas
sobre o mal” (Sins of the flesh. Mad cow disease devastates British live-
stock and science provides few answers regarding this evil/sickness; cited
in Duarte Rodrigues 222). In this case, the religious value of the expres-
sion “sins of the flesh” is undermined by the description of a public
health scenario and transversality with scientific discourse.
The critical-theoretical construct of the author excels in the analysis of
journalistic narrative, but stumbles over the problematic attribution of
transparency to media discourse and opacity to discourse from other
institutions (political, economic, military, etc.). However, if Duarte Ro-
drigues himself indicates that the media system naturalizes, reinforces,
reconciles, or exacerbates the differences in certain areas of experience, it
is because its metaphorizing nature is hierarchical and even cancels out
certain political, cultural, and social meanings. Thus, it may sometimes be
transparent, others opaque. Moreover, how may we guarantee that this
metaphorizing nature is always transparent and perceived by all readers
of the news media? Wouldn’t discourses from other institutions very
130 Almeida

often appear even more metaphorical, transparent, and hierarchical than

media discourse? 5 These questions will not be addressed in this chapter,
but stand as encouragement for us to qualify further Duarte Rodrigues’
theoretical proposal.
In this chapter, we use Duarte Rodrigues’ critical paradigm cautiously
in order to analyze the spaces and gaps within environmental discourse
presented by the media, since we are aware of how far we may advance
within it to investigate the reinforcement, compatibility, or differences of
anthropocentric eco-ethics or bioethics when compared to other non-en-
vironmental experiences. The problem herein introduced is to identify
the extent to which ecologically metaphoric discourse is transparent or
opaque compared with those that are delimited, created, or deficient
from political, economic, cultural, and social areas. Greg Garrard indi-
cates that eco-criticism should be aware of how nature is culturally con-
structed and presented in the origins of our discourse (10). Thus, we will
investigate its cultural apprehension and the political engagement ca-
pable of denouncing and transforming the ideologies socially constructed
by journalism.
To this end, we review Pieter Zalis and André Petry’s report “Estado
de desordem” (“State of Disorder”), published in Veja magazine, on May
28, 2014, which uses the metaphor of jabuticaba, a typical Brazilian fruit,
to deplore bureaucratic inefficiency. 6 The goal is to understand how jour-
nalistic authors establish a crisis of environmental representation, and
thus collaborate with the fraught tradition of anthropocentric symbolism
with respect to nature. The magazine’s editorial column, entitled “Carta
ao leitor” (“Letter to the Reader”), lists the characteristics of the fruit
attributed to Brazilian bureaucracy: proliferation, high visibility, and par-
alysis (12). It argues that the country must uncomplicate its daily life so as
not to jeopardize the stay of foreign visitors and their perception of na-
tional institutions during the World Cup. It is no coincidence that jour-
nalists Zalis and Petry, authors of in-depth reports that combine fiction
with non-fiction, chose a foreign character invented to mediate any com-
plaints arising from our social crises caused by bureaucracy.
The fictional character John Doe, a US-born citizen from Brooklyn,
claims in the mini-biography at the beginning of the narrative that the
report engendered by his foreign viewpoint is all true, despite being
journalistic. He engages journalism through the use of factual truths,
while, at the same time, working with a selection of witnesses and frag-
ments of experiences and opinions (Zalis and Petry 83). This fifteen-page
report reproduces interview statements, generally with victims of bu-
reaucratic processes from within the entrepreneurial, commercial, legal,
medical, real estate, and social fields. The metaphorized speech regarding
jabuticaba is present throughout all the domains of experience and does
not survive the political hierarchization of its meanings, to the detriment
of the environment.
 A Crisis in Environmental Representation 131

The journalists bespeak how bureaucratic demands multiply and par-

alyze everyday activities and processes, dragging them out for months,
even years. They make use of illustrations of jabuticabas in many sections
to indicate the analogy between the fruit and the Brazilian “mal” (evil/
illness). They invite readers to extend their reading to the second section
of the long report, in which they encounter short texts, illustrated with
cartoons, denouncing the national “jabuticabal” (i.e., the bureaucratic
problems). By pointing out that “o brasileiro chama de jabuticaba tudo o
que só existe no Brasil” (Brazilians use jabuticaba to describe everything
that exists only in Brazil), the fictional character informs readers that they
will come across “pequenas jabuticabas como esta [ilustração da fruta] no
texto” (small jabuticabas like this [illustration of the fruit] in the text; 83).
This little fruit appears in grievances regarding misleading advertise-
ments from internet providers, who promise to deliver much faster
speeds, but never do; the need for a doctor’s stamp to appear on prescrip-
tions; public service appointments with lengthy, redundant, over-special-
ized titles; the obsession for bureaucracy even in practices that already
function well, much like the biometric re-registering to collect voters’
fingerprints, even though the existing electronic voting machines have
thus far never demonstrated any substantial allegations of fraud; forcing
Brazilians to change all the electrical sockets in their homes for a new
three-pin plug; the fact that an identity card does not enable Brazilians to
perform any civil, legal, or military functions; the Brazilian craze of dis-
trusting any service without an official stamp; and delays of domestic
flights. The metaphor is also used to condemn the need to provide proof
of age when physical appearance may well be sufficient; the slow clear-
ance of cargo at the country’s ports, which jeopardizes company profits
and the Brazilian economy; the Federal Government’s delay in launching
safety standards for work undertaken on the FIFA World Cup less than a
month before the championship started, when the stadiums were almost
finished; the difficulty in applying to the relevant government depart-
ment requesting a home inspection for dengue mosquito larvae; exces-
sive laws and regulations that clash with recurrent cases of corruption;
and a lack of punitive actions.
The journalists reserve the final illustration of the fruit for the critical
observation that “uma burocracia de boa qualidade—funcional, simples,
eficiente—melhora o governo, os serviços públicos e a vida dos cidadãos,
além de trazer crescimento econômico, libertar a criatividade, aumentar o
tempo livre [ilustração da jabuticaba]. Permite, enfim, que a vida seja mais
produtiva e feliz. Que o futuro do Brasil seja gostoso como a jabuticaba”
(a high-quality bureaucracy—functional, simple, and efficient—improves
government, public services and the lives of citizens, as well as stimulat-
ing economic growth, encouraging creativity and increasing free time [illus-
tration of a jabuticaba]. It ultimately allows life to be more productive and
happier. Here’s hoping that the future of Brazil is as tasty as jabuticaba;
132 Almeida

99). This passage indicates that the in-depth report does not disqualify
bureaucracy as a whole, but only that which paralyzes the life of citizens.
The real attributes of this delicious fruit, described in the section “Um
passeio no jabuticabal” (“A Stroll Around the Jabuticaba Grove”), are thus
reduced by the analogy of the jabuticaba as a symbol of Brazil’s good and
bad bureaucratic singularities. The term “jabuticabal,” in turn, becomes
synonymous with “everyday hell,” reinforcing a narrative hierarchy in
which the political connotations take precedence at the expense of envi-
ronment ethics.
The same section reinforces the appeal of political journalism over an
ecological perspective; after condemning the bureaucratic process in elic-
iting the city council to prune its trees, an illustration is presented in
which the branches of a tree have grown into an apartment building, thus
expressing the popular Brazilian imaginary marked by ecophobia,
whereby branches may fall into the streets and avenues and invade the
spaces “reserved” for cars and humans (Zalis and Petry 88). In another
illustration, the figure of a snail represents a broadband monitor, equip-
ment that exists in Brazil exclusively for measuring the speed of the inter-
net service, which is characterized through association with the sluggish
animal; thus, “o consumidor poderá saber em que intensidade está sendo
ludibriado pelo seu provedor” (consumers may know to what extent they
are being cheated by their providers; 88). The cartoon of a rat wearing a
tie is representative of corrupt politicians (89). Thus, animal and vegetal
discourses are undermined, their environmental meanings diminished in
favor of political and social protest.
The discourse criticizing Brazilian bureaucracy appears elsewhere in
the in-depth report as well, and when the authors do not refer to the
central metaphor of the jabuticaba, they engage other domains of exper-
tise. When criticizing the difficulties encountered when attempting to
cancel telephone and internet services, the journalists resort to a religious
discourse: “cancelar um serviço no Brasil é um calvário” (canceling ser-
vice in Brazil is a Calvary; Zalis and Petry 84). In this case, the metaphori-
cal scheme preserves the meaning of Calvary as an experience of pain
and suffering despite diminishing its spiritual value, thus forging recon-
ciliation between religious discourse and that of political complaints.
Further on, Zalis and Petry indicate through the mediation of the
fictional character that “closing down a business is an epic task,” taking
advantage of the literary genre to express the “adventurous” struggle, in
fact the inglorious battle, of the discontented entrepreneur (85). The fac-
tual information that it took 136 days for an engineer to close down a
consultancy company serves to legitimize the compatibility of artistic and
political discourses through satire, since the passage does not recover the
sense of glory and reward of epic heroes. Thus, as in the previous section,
political criticism supersedes religious discourse. A strong bias towards
the superstitious popular culture of spirits is also overlapped by political
 A Crisis in Environmental Representation 133

discourse when comparing the difficulty of using a web application to an

“analogue ghost” (85–86).
Another passage derides a smartphone app used to access São Paulo’s
subway map, which includes all existing lines and even those still to be
built, although as yet undefined. Once again, the authors incorporate
religious discourse precariously into Brazilian political discourse: “Eu
nunca tinha visto aplicativo com promessa” (I had never seen an app that
makes vows; 8). This term no longer refers only to a vow made religious-
ly to God or a saint within the national linguistic culture, but also to the
promises made to voters and citizens by politicians, who will probably
never fulfill them.
Journalistic discourse is also reconciled with political critique. The
term “eyewitness,” widely used by broadcasters and reporters on Brazil-
ian TV to indicate sources of information who witness events, is captured
in its sense of loyalty so as to ensure the factual critical discourse of the
journalists in the magazine article: “uma testemunha ocular contou que
um senhor idoso, com vasta barba grisalha, não pôde retirar sua cerveja
por que não tinha no pulso a fita dos 18 anos. Isso é amor incondicional à
burocracia” (an eyewitness said that an elderly gentleman with a long
gray beard was not served his beer since he was not wearing his over-18
[years old] wrist band. This is unconditional love of bureaucracy; Zalis
and Petry 95).
In these examples, we observe how in-depth reporting establishes
compatibility between political discourse and other domains of experi-
ence. Metaphorical transparency is not guaranteed, since it relies on the
linguistic-cultural repertoire of the readers to recognize degrees of loyal-
ty to one type of speech in relation to others. In fact, there is an editorial
overlap of political journalism in the narrative. The same is true of the
jabuticaba metaphor: the anthropocentric ideology that dominates the en-
tire report submits the meanings of “proliferation, high visibility, para-
lyzing, delicious” to the political regime of journalistic reporting, point-
ing out the roles of laws, institutions, businesses, and the general public
in the spread of bureaucratic culture despite aversion to its means, pro-
cesses, and purposes.
On the other hand, the preference for non-anthropocentric, ecological
ethics in media demonstrates that diminishing the meaning of the meta-
phor does not jeopardize the over-valuation of political discourse. Other
referential discourses introduced during different sections of the same
report replace the anti-ecological discourse: in the first section, it is stated
that an official stamp in Brazil is “igual a selo de autenticidade” (like a
seal of authenticity; Zalis and Petry 86); in the second, the expression
“everyday hell” maintains fidelity to the compatibility with religious dis-
course in this narrative (88); in the third section, the “bureaucratic head”
is a metaphor for the mentality that stifles civil and legal processes (90).
The metaphorizing discourses regarding “the seal,” “everyday hell,” and
134 Almeida

“the bureaucratic head” relate to political discourse, reinforcing its hier-

archical position within journalistic discourse and, therefore, the anthro-
pocentric ideology of in-depth reporting. A bioethical perspective, how-
ever, calls for the disclosure of its opacity, including the indication of a
gap in the journalistic narrative, by not itemizing the environmental con-
sequences of Brazilian bureaucracy.
In the view of Bob Wyss, an environmental report should indicate the
quantitative and qualitative consequences of environmental problems
(52). Likewise, Michael Frome argues that it should highlight not only
problems but also solutions (101). If the in-depth report by Zalis and
Petry were more environmentally appealing, while still taking in account
the political, economic and social aspects, it might have argued that limit-
ing the expenditure of paper for paperwork would also significantly re-
duce bureaucracy by eliminating the time taken up with manual filing
and the assessment of files and printed documents. They could also have
highlighted the importance of digitizing legal proceedings as a way of
reducing waste. But this lack in journalistic information transfers the task
of generating a committed environmental discourse onto the reader. A
photograph of large volumes of legal proceedings printed on paper with
an accompanying caption concerning the “papelão da burocracia nas
repartições públicas” (endless reams of bureaucratic paper/roles in the
civil service) certainly leads readers to surmise the environmental issue
involved with the accumulation of paper, but the in-depth report retains
it in the limbo of opacity by focusing only on political discourse (Zalis
and Petry 85).
For Margarethe Born Steinburger-Elias, journalistic gaps are deter-
mined by a number of factors, ranging from the media source’s ideologi-
cal stance to text editing choices made when considering the volume of
information collected by the journalist (89). In the case of the report from
the Brazilian magazine analyzed here, the gap in reporting on the envi-
ronmental consequences of bureaucracy expresses the lack of commit-
ment demonstrated by the verticalizing political discourse in relation to
other editorial possibilities, including environmental journalism. It takes
on the role of protecting specialized journalism, despite permeating the
meanings of religious and artistic experiences, and presenting the eco-
nomic consequences of bureaucracy. It is proof that media discourse can
be both metaphorical and opaque, and problematic in its function of
mediating and hierarchizing different social and cultural experiences.
Media ecocritic Sean Cubitt argues that the spheres of economic,
political, and educational activities, among others, are both the in-
formants and the informed in ecological mediation, contributing to the
public’s awareness of environmental complexity (138–39). Thus, eco-
anthropocentric discourse does not fully exclude or supersede other do-
mains of expertise. From this perspective, environmental journalism
 A Crisis in Environmental Representation 135

negotiates with other types of discourse, but it is not necessarily deval-

ued or incomplete.
Bioethics in the media, moving in the opposite direction of anthropo-
centric bias, places human and nonhuman nature in their proper places.
Dealing with bioethics in the media is feasible, but it depends on the
willingness of media owners and editors, as well as the demands of polit-
ical and economic elites in defining environmental protection in the dis-
cursive and ideological arrangement of narratives. Bioethical, eco-anthro-
pocentric, and anthropocentric thinking are able to coexist on the Brazil-
ian TV program Globo Reporter (on TV Globo), for example. This program
shows animals in their natural habitat and refers to their behavior from
the viewpoint of the actual animals themselves. Nevertheless, the editori-
al policy reflected by the presenter and reporters’ narrative also transfers
human qualities onto them, thus demonstrating how eco-anthropocentric
or anthropocentric thinking may still resist an exclusively bioethical per-
spective. As we have already seen, however, Sônia Bridi demonstrated
that this perspective is also possible in journalism in her Diário do clima.
The ecological bias of the in-depth report in the Brazilian magazine
Veja, on the other hand, is underestimated. Despite its twenty-first-
century context, when environmental scientists have made quite clear the
problems and consequences of destroying nature and deforestation, the
in-depth report by Zalis and Petry follows the tradition of Lima Barreto,
Euclides da Cunha, Monteiro Lobato, and Zuenir Ventura in assigning
human characteristics and actions to nature that have been denounced
and criticized. If bioethical thought were given greater value, the true
pleasure of the tropical fruit would remain in the jabuticabas of their re-
port; that is, its unique taste.

NOTES

1. All translations are the author’s unless noted otherwise.

2. Arthur Ferreira Reis provides a precise summary of the perspectives from four
centuries of impressions in chronicles and travel reports: “Se tôda uma vasta e interes-
sante literatura, ficcionista ou não, já se escreveu fixando aspectos, tipos, momentos
regionais. Dessa literatura vem resultando, é certo, um interêsse permanente em tôrno
daqueles chãos selváticos e daquelas águas impressionantemente volumosas. Só, na
verdade, o interêsse. Porque, na generalidade, essa literatura é que tem prejudicado o
conhecimento exato de sua realidade. Exagerada, sem limitações na exaltação ou na
negação, perturba as análises que se queiram fazer, como prejudica, profundamente,
tôda e qualquer avaliação do que significa ou promete ser” (Throughout this vast,
thought-provoking literature, whether fictional or non-fictional, a great deal has been
written to record aspects, types, and regional moments. This literature has resulted, of
course, in a permanent interest surrounding these jungle wilds and these impressive
volumes of water. But in fact, only an interest, because, in general, it is the very
literature itself that has jeopardized the precise knowledge of these realities. Exaggera-
tion and limitless exaltation or denial have been obstacles for the necessary analyses,
and have seriously put at risk any assessment of what it signifies or what it promises
to be; Ferreira Reis 14–15).
136 Almeida

3. There are, in fact, short-term benefits for soil health of swidden agriculture,
although it can damage important microbes, and it can also cause serious problems
with erosion.
4. See Farias Almeida, Jornalismo ambiental em formato livro: Alegorias e subjetivi-
dades.
5. For instance, discourse by representatives from non-governmental organiza-
tions with sustainable projects, including those presented by Brazilian TV stations, do
not shy away from indicating political, economic, social, and environmental perspec-
tives of proposals for recycling solid waste. They use the coverage offered by the
media to ensure the legitimacy of a plural ecological rhetoric that, by referring to
activities within community policy organizations and popular, cooperative, sustain-
able economics, become as metaphorizing as media discourse.
6. The jabuticaba is native to the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest, but may also be seen
in other regions of the country. The fruit is formed along the trunks and branches of
the tree. It is rich in mineral salts and low in calories, and is used for making sweets,
juices, jams, liqueurs, and wines (Jabuticaba n. pag.).

WORKS CITED

Almeida, Simão Farias. Jornalismo ambiental em formato livro: Alegorias e subjetividades.

João Pessoa: Ideia, 2014. Print.
Bridi, Sônia. Diário do clima. Efeitos do aquecimento global: Um relato em cinco continentes.
São Paulo: Globo, 2012. Print.
Cubitt, Sean. Ecomedia. New York: Rodopi, 2005. Print.
Cunha, Euclides da. À margem da história. São Paulo: Cultrix; Brasília: INL,1975. Print.
Duarte Rodrigues, Adriano. “Delimitação, natureza e funções do discurso midiático.”
O jornal: Da forma ao sentido. Ed. Sérgio Dayrell Porto. 2nd ed. Brasília: UNB, 2002.
217–33. Print.
Ferreira Reis, Arthur Cezar. A Amazônia que os portugueses revelaram. Rio de Janeiro:
Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1956. Print.
Frome, Michael. Green Ink: An Introduction to Environmental Journalism. Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 2001. Print.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocrítica. Brasília: Ed. Unb, 2006. Print.
“Jabuticaba.” Concept. Sua pesquisa.com. Web.
Lima Barreto, Afonso Henriques de. “Sobre o desastre.” Crônicas Lima Barreto. Bibliote-
ca Virtual de Literatura. Web.
Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012. Print.
Monteiro Lobato, José Bento Renato. Urupês. 37th ed. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense,
1994. Print.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2013. Print.
Ruffin, Kimberly N. Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions. Athens, GA:
University of Georgia Press, 2010. Print.
Steinburger-Elias, Margarethe Born. Discursos geopolíticos da mídia: Jornalismo e
imaginário internacional na América Latina. São Paulo: FAPESP, 2005. Print.
“Susto é custo.” Veja Magazine. May 28, 2014: 12. Print.
Ventura, Zuenir. Chico Mendes: Crime e castigo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003.
Print.
Wyss, Bob. Covering the Environment: How Journalists Work the Green Beat. New York;
London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Zalis, Pieter, and Petry, André. “Estado de desordem.” Veja Magazine. May 28, 2014:
82–99. Print.
 EIGHT
The Languages of Ecological Crises in
Brazilian Documentary and Fiction
Zélia M. Bora

The last two hundred years have been associated with the growing hu-
man domination of the Earth. This domination has entailed not only an
increasing world population, but also rising and unequal wealth—all of
which has been accelerated by the regime of capital. 1 According to Ricar-
do Dobrovolsky, such domination of the environment is expressed by the
change in the flux of elements and substances in global biogeochemical
cycles, of which the most well-known manifestations are the rising level
of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases responsible for climate
change; the growing threat of species extinction; and massive land cover
change (LCC)—the replacement of natural habitats such as forests,
swamps, and grasslands by cropland, pasture, roads, and urban areas (n.
pag.).
In Latin America, ongoing processes of globalization have had drastic
impacts on natural and social landscapes at every scale. The destruction
of forests and the extinction of thousands of species have become serious
issues for discussion, especially in countries like Brazil, which currently
has the highest rate of deforestation in the world. According to Rhett
Butler, “since 1978, over 750,000 square kilometers (289,000 square miles)
of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed across Brazil, Peru, Colombia,
Bolivia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana” (n. pag.).
Despite efforts to prevent deforestation, environmental discussions on
the subject are always entangled with the political and economic interests
of individuals and private and public corporations, often giving rise to
violent conflict. States like Pará, Amazonas, Rondonia, Acre, and

137
138 Bora

Maranhão have become virtual war zones due to the escalation of violent
crimes related to deforestation, development projects, and the extralegal
occupation of lands by dispossessed groups. Throughout Brazil, the is-
sues are the same: the exploitation of the land as a means of profit and
near total lack of concern about sustainability. Nevertheless, groups af-
fected by environmental devastation such as native Brazilians, seringuei-
ros (rubber harvesters), and farmers all have their own ways of interpret-
ing these problems. The convergence of these elements led to the concept
of environmental crises, which may be considered a critical construction
through which governmental agencies and extra-governmental groups
such as NGOs, educational institutions, and individuals elaborate proj-
ects committed to the sustainability of the planet. These projects are
mostly related to the recovery of degraded areas and the preservation of
flora and fauna in danger of extinction.
Mass media and literature have played important roles in denouncing
different forms of environmental destruction and in promoting conserva-
tion initiatives. In this chapter, I examine two works related to Brazilian
cultural discussions of environmental crisis: Adrian Cowell and Vicente
Rios’ film documentary Chico Mendes: Eu quero viver (Chico Mendes: I Want
to Live; 1989) and Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s novel Não verás país nen-
hum (And Still the Earth; 1981). These narratives exemplify the growth in
Brazilian environmental awareness that began in the 1970s. Since then,
environmental problems have been occupying the news, school curricula,
and academic debates. Although the destruction of the environment is
portrayed as a secondary theme in the narratives, they demonstrate, sym-
bolically, the vulnerability of Brazilian models of development, particu-
larly with regard to environmental issues. Both narratives take critical if
divergent approaches to Brazilian development projects.
Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s novel formulates a critique of the socio-
political state of Brazilian society during the era of military dictatorship
between 1964 and 1985. The novel’s setting foregrounds filth and corrup-
tion, and it is underpinned by an authoritarian regime reminiscent of
Orwell’s 1984. Besides questioning the authoritarian regime, the problem
of environmental degradation emerges as a main theme through the dys-
topian representation of living conditions in the post-apocalyptic city. In
fact, Brandão’s concerns with environmental problems extended beyond
his novelistic production when he published his Manifesto verde: O pre-
sente é o futuro (Green Manifesto: The Present Is the Future) in 1985. The
Manifesto verde is an open letter to his children and a public plea for the
planet’s preservation in order to safeguard future generations.
Similar preoccupations with environment issues led political activist
Francisco “Chico” Alves Mendes Filho to denounce the destruction of the
Amazonian rainforest. As a matter of fact, Chico Mendes’ struggle to
protect the Amazonian environment was related not only to his own
survival as a rubber gatherer, but also to the survival of his entire com-
 The Languages of Ecological Crises in Brazilian Documentary and Fiction 139

munity. Living in a small Amazonian village in the state of Acre, Chico

and his community relied on the forest for their livelihood. Subjected to
growing social pressures exercised primarily by the expansion of the
cattle industry into the area, the community of rubber tappers began
working to bring visibility to deforestation in the Amazonian region.
They knew that life in the forest depended on sustainability to guarantee
the balance between organic and inorganic lives.
In the 1970s, a significant ecological disaster took place: the controver-
sial construction of the Trans-Amazonian highway. Although few people
were fully aware of the serious impacts of megaprojects like the Trans-
Amazonian highway on the Amazonian and Mata Atlântica forests, the
signs of ecological crises became more pronounced during this period.
From the fluvial regions of Amazonia to densely populated areas like the
city of São Paulo, progress became synonymous with environmental de-
struction. The clash between ecological preservation and modernity
transformed “ambientalistas” (environmental activists) into perceived
“antagonists” of modernization. Nearly 4,500 km long and transecting
different regions of Brazil, the construction of the Trans-Amazonian
highway exacerbated the disparities between regions, especially the
North and Northeast on one side and the Southeast on the other. Ironical-
ly, the road to development became a route to nature’s demise. Similarly,
the ecological devastation of São Paulo in Não verás país nenhum seems to
be the result of the greenhouse effect and the rising levels of carbon
dioxide as well as rapid urbanization and overconsumption.
In the 1990s, contemporary Latin American cultural criticism became
more sensitive to environmental problems. However, the greatest chal-
lenge to fictional works was to balance different levels of reality. In this
sense, the role of language is crucial in representing critical realities. Tak-
ing into account the concept of language, one can ask if it is possible to
speak of a language of ecological crisis and, if so, what are the basic steps
for balancing artistic aesthetics with the representation of reality? Before
answering these questions in relation to the proposed corpora, it is rele-
vant to add a few comments on Brazilian economic history.
According to Lisa Edwards, the six decades between 1870 and 1930
saw rapid changes in Latin America. 2 Although there is an ongoing de-
bate among Latin American historians about the best way to periodize
the region’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, there is also a
general consensus that these years mark a distinct historical era in the
region (Edwards n. pag.). In general, this era was marked by the liberal
victory in the ideological struggles that followed independence. It ended
with the 1929 crash of the US stock market and global economic depres-
sion. As a consequence, Latin American elites pushed to modernize their
nations. Industrialization, new technologies, immigration, and the delib-
erate construction of nationalism by politicians and intellectuals charac-
terized the modernity that emerged. Although the elites saw modernity
140 Bora

as an integral opportunity to transform their nations, the effects of mod-

ernization created a perpetual chain of social inequalities as well as a
continuous struggle against the unsustainable exploitation of the natural
environment, leading countries like Brazil to face a major dilemma: to
balance economic development with environmental protections. Thus,
modernity and, more appropriately today, globalization became key
terms for understanding the social impacts of industrialization and the
origins of ecological crises in different Latin American societies.
Historically, the term “globalization” is associated with different
flows of modernity. Although colonial enterprises were different in var-
ied parts of the American continent, the exploitation of natural resources
in a variety of ways became the key economic strategy for guaranteeing
the survival of the colonial enterprise. Unlike Latin America, the Euro-
pean economic system had completed its transformation from a feudal
system to capitalist societies by the second half of the nineteenth century.
Indeed, the recent history of Western colonization is associated with the
period corresponding to the Industrial Revolution (seventeenth to nine-
teenth centuries), in which the expansion of European capitalism re-
quired both new markets and low-cost sources of raw materials and la-
bor.
Although Latin American history reveals many legacies of colonial-
ism, its economic dimensions have often been seen as defining the devel-
opmental trajectory of Latin American countries even up through the
present. Traces of the colonial economy of extraction persist even today
in the economic practices and ideological perspectives that regulate de-
velopment in Latin America. However, the technological means for capi-
talizing environments have increased exponentially, leading to a situa-
tion in which the frontiers of development have expanded so rapidly that
there remain few environments not threatened with destruction.
In the 1950s, Brazilian economist Celso Furtado introduced a new
paradigm for interpreting the nation’s economic evolution, providing a
young generation of scholars with an analytical framework for under-
standing Brazil’s economic history. In his classical Formação econômica do
Brasil (The Economic Growth of Brazil; 1970), Furtado elaborated a theory
for problematizing the notion of “underdevelopment.” He reached the
conclusion that, in Brazil, underdevelopment was a result of the persis-
tence of colonial modes of production in a global economic system. In his
view, wealthy European nations (and the United States), which had be-
come wealthy as colonial centers of finance and industrial production,
continued to marginalize former colonies as sites of resource extraction,
low-cost labor, and markets for manufactured goods, thus placing them
within a position of economic dependency within the world system de-
spite their political independence. Thus, the economic model of global-
ization was designed to serve as a source of inexpensive labor and natu-
ral resources in monopolistic trade-relations for the benefit of the econo-
 The Languages of Ecological Crises in Brazilian Documentary and Fiction 141

mies of former colonial powers. To ensure these privileges, the neo-colo-

nial powers forcibly shaped the social and economic dynamics of the
former colonies.
Although many aspects of Furtado’s “dependency theory” have been
disputed over the years, the essential arguments have held true. Despite
the apparent geographic specificity of environmental problems in Brazil
and other Latin American nations, they can only be fully understood
within the context of the world economic system, as the result of wealthy
nations’ outsourcing of environmental destruction and social problems.
Nevertheless, this systemic perception of environmental problems has
only very recently been taken into consideration by either foreign enter-
prises or national monopolies, who tend to disassociate themselves from
the actions of their subsidiaries.
I am not interested in demonstrating the validity of or contradictions
in Furtado’s perspective, but it is important to emphasize that the world
economic system characterized Brazil primarily as a provider of raw ma-
terials. This fact “justified” the exploitation of Brazil’s natural environ-
ment by national and international corporations; it was framed as the
only possible economy for Brazil. In this framework, the systematic de-
struction of the environment was not considered a priority by either
foreign enterprises or national monopolies.

THE LANGUAGES OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

Brazilian debate on environmental destruction was influenced by ongo-

ing discussions that took place in the 1970s. Although the dynamics of
land exploitation changed throughout the centuries, the effects of de-
struction on human and nonhuman lives are today undeniable. Much has
been written about these themes. There is a competitive universe of nar-
ratives on environmental issues, whose interests vary by agent. If scientif-
ic language is inaccessible to many, literature and cinema in general work
to ameliorate the effects of destruction by calling attention to the problem
through critical perspectives and affective strategies. Art transforms itself
into the voice of the oppressed, while language acquires Derrida’s sense
of “différance,” deconstructing the modern sign that marginalized na-
ture. 3
The Amazonian region gained significant media attention at both the
national and international scales following the assassination of Chico
Mendes in 1988. Soon after his death, the documentary film Chico Mendes:
I Want to Live (1989) was released. It encompasses the trajectory of Chico
Mendes’ life between the years of 1985 and 1988. The film was directed
by Adrian Cowell and Vicente Rios, and it is based mainly on quotations
of the rubber tapper before his assassination, on December 22, 1988.
142 Bora

The film opens with images of the Amazonian forest burning. These
images are both of splendor and horror. Subsequently, the film cuts to a
ceremony for the death of Chico Mendes organized by American ecolo-
gists in Washington, DC. The film explains how and why Chico Mendes
was assassinated and it shows clearly the relationship between his life
and his political struggle to defend the Amazonian rainforest. Today, it is
impossible to think of Amazonia without relating it with Chico Mendes’
struggle to preserve the forest.
An Amazonian sense of sustainability is incorporated into the dis-
course of Chico Mendes, whose objectives are clear: to protect nature and
guarantee the survival of his community in the Amazonian rainforest.
The economic transitions in the region, however, perpetuated social vices
and tragedies of the past, especially the tension between soybean farmers
and cattle ranchers and the inhabitants of the forest, including the serin-
gueiros (rubber tappers). According to the documentary, Chico Mendes,
a seringueiro himself, not only assumed the leadership of a movement in
defense of the Amazonian rainforest, but died for taking a position in the
name of his community. In this sense, the emblematic figure of Chico
Mendes assumes the status of an “epic” hero, whose saga leads him to
fulfill his destiny. He not only lived this reality in his life, but also “repre-
sented” it in Adrian Cowell and Vicente Rios’ film documentary. In the
end, the film documentary achieved Mendes’ goal: to bring media atten-
tion to the problem of deforestation in Amazonia and to his work as an
environmentalist.
In aesthetic terms, it has always been a challenge to theorize film
documentary, especially when truth and reality become life and death
events. Chico Mendes: I Want to Live falls within the generic category of
non-fictional, social documentary. According to Bill Nichols, “documen-
taries, then, offer aural and visual likenesses and representations of the
historical world. They stand for or represent the views of individuals,
groups, and institutions. They also convey impressions, make proposals,
mount arguments, or offer perspectives of their own, setting out to per-
suade us to accept their views” (45). This preliminary definition separates
the domains of the real world as we know it from the fictional world,
although fictional qualities can also be introduced in documentary film.
Technically speaking, documentary is structured through the use of a
narrator, text characters, and a discourse that claims truth. 4 Language
and perception are two basic cognitive systems that interact constantly
with each other in our daily experience. Umberto Eco’s theory of textual
cooperation gives the reader an essential role in the process of making
meaning from perception. All texts in general create a model reader ca-
pable of actualizing the various meaning-contents in order to decode the
possible worlds of the narrative. The reader fills in many gaps in the text,
which is never completely explicit, using anything from simple linguistic
inferences to more complex deductive reasoning that applies to the entire
 The Languages of Ecological Crises in Brazilian Documentary and Fiction 143

narrative. The reader’s role is thus essential to the process of producing

new narratives. I am not interested primarily in the viewer’s role in con-
structing meaning from the documentary, however, but rather in the way
in which the Chico Mendes documentary transforms real-life events into
an epic literary plot with the help of the viewer.
To convey the passage between truth and fictionalization, one has to
return to the concept of archetypical narrative. An archetypical narrative
accesses the imaginary level by attaining the status of a myth. It is also an
exemplary narrative that propagates social norms. Although the concept
of mythical narrative is largely disregarded today, according to Camp-
bell, “the heroes and the deeds of myth survive into modern times” (4).
Taking into consideration this affirmation, my basic assumption here is
that the Chico Mendes documentary constructs the protagonist’s life sto-
ry by addressing several aspects related to the conceptualization of a
mythical hero and the acquisition of archetypal language. Popularized by
Jung and discussed by Campbell, the mythical narrative model centers
on the hero’s adventure. Campbell states that
the standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a mag-
nification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separa-
tion—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the
monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into
a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered
and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysteri-
ous adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. (30)
Applying these concepts to the Chico Mendes narrative, one notices that
the documentary follows this heroic pattern of “separation—initiation—
return.” First, it uses flashback techniques to introduce images of envi-
ronmental destruction (separation from nature). Subsequently, it details
Chico’s initiation into political struggle and, finally, the announcement of
his death—the definitive return to nature. In this way, the documentary’s
presentation of his life story constructs an identification between Chico
Mendes and the forest that presents him as environmental hero. Unlike
mythological heroes, however, Chico Mendes’ enemies were human and
he did not have supernatural powers. Therefore, he had to rely on his
own capacity to struggle against these forces. In the end, he lost the
battle, but became a martyr for the cause and a symbol of resistance.
The most significant of Campbell’s stages of epic narrative for this
documentary is the concept of return. Return means coming back to the
origins. In this case, I consider the word “return” in the context of Blan-
chot’s notion, retaken by Derrida, in which language is considered to
exist in the “wild” (Derrida 109). Thus, the return of language here is also
associated with what Derrida expressed as the relationship between
thought and life (109). At the moment of return, language is transformed
into poetical language. In his reading of Antonin Artaud’s poems, Derri-
144 Bora

da conceived of Artaud’s poetic language as an Other that alludes or

refers back, in the internal and external senses, to the limits of Hegelian
“rationality” (111).
If the documentary’s narrative of Chico Mendes’ life depends primari-
ly on the epic rhetorical form, it becomes possible to question the aesthet-
ic representation of the hero in terms of poetic language by associating
his death with the tragic death of the forest, a connection made implicit in
the documentary through the juxtaposition of imagery. The film’s lan-
guage of ecological destruction is thus a critical discourse that revitalizes
the sense of environmental defense activated by the exemplary narrative
of Chico Mendes. In this way, the documentary film reengages with envi-
ronmental language present in prior Brazilian narrative aesthetics such as
romanticism, realism, positivism, and modernism. In this sense, the motif
and language of environmental destruction introduced by the film docu-
mentary reemerged in Brazilian culture as a genre, consciously and un-
ambiguously critical in its questioning of multiple sources of power and
their relationship to environmental preservation.

THE NOVEL AND THE NARRATIVE OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

Ignácio de Loyola Brandão is prominent among contemporary Brazilian

novelists in foregrounding concern with pervasive problems such as de-
forestation, water pollution, and toxic waste. Não verás país nenhum, his
fourth novel, was first interpreted as a reference to the authoritarian state
under the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 through 1985.
Much more can be said about the novel today, however. In spite of its
futuristic style, the novel evokes past experiences such as the nuclear
bombardment of Hiroshima and Three Mile Island’s nuclear accident as
well as predicting symbolically later toxic catastrophes like the Union
Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal and the 1996 Chernobyl accident. Be-
yond sporadic fictional attempts such as J. J. Veiga’s short stories, Ignácio
de Loyola Brandão’s novel represents a turning point in Brazilian fiction
in its representation of a historical consciousness of people’s relation to
the natural world and its ecosystems.
Written during the period of democratic transition, the novel is narrat-
ed by Souza, a retired university professor living in the devastated city of
São Paulo. On the edge of emotional collapse, Souza somehow finds the
inner strength to narrate the chaotic situation of the city, where he has
been living together with his wife, Adelaide. The novel’s first paragraphs
introduce the atmosphere of death and decay that envelop the city. Souza
describes, without emotion, the pathetic atmosphere that characterizes
the city. The reader has the impression that all the characters, including
Souza and Adelaide, are in a state of mental and physical numbness.
From the initial pages, the reader wonders what happened to the city and
 The Languages of Ecological Crises in Brazilian Documentary and Fiction 145

begins to question the accuracy of Souza’s memories. Debris, excrement,

and worst of all, corpses fill the world beyond the compound that Souza
calls home. Cleaning products are useless for dealing with the stench of
decay left by a century of pollution of the air, water, and soil. There is no
escape from this oppressive and corrupt atmosphere. According to Sou-
za, those who survived the tragedy live in poverty, deprived of adequate
food or any sort of comfort. Death becomes routine. Everything is dead,
including animals and plants. Only fear is left. No matter where the
protagonist turns, he cannot rid himself of the smell of death, which
becomes a symbol for society’s fears in general about its collective future.
Representations of space and time are key for introducing action in
literature. Space in Não verás país nenhum is characterized by rampant
destruction, while time is fragmented. It is the time of memory, which is
made whole only in the act of enunciation. For the reader, chaos and
destruction are predictions of a dying present that culminates in the like-
ly death of the narrator. The novel’s emphasis on unending devastation,
achieved through the repetition of images of destruction throughout the
narrative, leads the reader to conclude that there is no escape for the
inhabitants of São Paulo except in death, the real protagonist of the novel.
As a fable about the nation, Não verás país nenhum is also a novel about
the end of the nation, represented by the city of São Paulo. Characterized
by apocalyptic images, the trope of the end of the world is effective in
conveying the notion of environmental crises. Besides evoking a world of
destruction and chaos, the term “apocalypse” also denotes revelation
(Chauvin 115). The very definition of the term suggests a context asso-
ciated with innumerable mythic narratives. But the novel itself intro-
duces a specific version of the term by associating it with a particular
conjuncture emphasized by a definite time and space. Contrary to the
biblical version of apocalypse, the notion of apocalypse in the novel leads
to no future or promise of salvation for either the protagonist or the other
characters. If we take into consideration, for example, the root and the
primary meaning of the word, the narrative action will be based on the
narrator’s “prophetic” vision of the future. If not, the action takes place in
the narrator’s mind in his present or in a not-too-distant past. If the sec-
ond possibility is accepted, the narrator probably narrates the action be-
fore his death, as a prisoner of the system. This possibility is suggested by
the last pages of the novel.
If we accept this possibility, there is no massive break in the order of
the city. On the contrary, violence, death, and pain are natural states for a
population unable to protest or revolt against its reality. To complete the
apocalyptic atmosphere, the position of the “Anti-Christ” is occupied by
the ruling State that knows and sees all, but, like everybody else, is un-
able to modify the social and emotional scenario in the city. In this case,
death seals the gradual annihilation of the individuals, uniting and re-
ducing each individual reality to a common end. The appalling conse-
146 Bora

quences that befall the entire city are the final judgment over the city and
its inhabitants, captured in the hellish atmosphere that hovers in the sky.
The narrative confirms the sense that there is no way out. A dystopian
atmosphere characterizes the novel similar to that of many filmic narra-
tives associated with environmental apocalypses, such as The Walking
Dead and the Mad Max series.
The nihilistic sense introduced by the narrator through the social dis-
continuities and the catastrophe that befalls the city runs contrary to the
representation of environmental crisis in the Chico Mendes documen-
tary. If the film documentary tends to be optimistic even though the hero
is dead, all hope is extinguished in the novel. In this case, any possibility
of returning or creating another narrative collapses. The existence of time
is suppressed in the novel, although the protagonist’s memories are time-
less. The ecological crisis is permanent, if fictional. Or, perhaps, the novel
is a prophecy of Brazil’s future. As the case may be, for the city’s inhabi-
tants, death is real and the only hope. As the narrator drives home: “Pela
manhã, muitos estarão mortos. As mudanças de temperatura são rápidas.
Assim que o dia esquentar, vamos jogar os cadáveres ao sol, para que
sejam incinerados pela luz. Tais coisas fazem parte de nosso dia a dia. O
horror deixa de ser, quando se transforma em cotidiano (In the morning,
many will be dead. The changes in temperature are rapid. As soon as the
day heats up, we will throw the dead bodies outside, to be incinerated by
the sunlight. These things are part of daily life. Horror ceases to exist
when it becomes part of everyday life; 353).

CONCLUSION

The novel Não verás país nenhum and the film documentary Chico Mendes:
Eu quero viver provide two different narrative forms for exploring the
limits between reality and imagination in environmental crisis. In es-
sence, the novel introduces a very pessimistic vision for the future of
megacities like São Paulo and the nation itself. Souza, the narrator, repre-
sents society’s inability to overcome the tragedy of environmental degra-
dation and its consequences for people’s lives. If the meaning of apoca-
lypse as a synonym of prophetic revelation persists, the destruction of the
city may happen in the future. The film documentary, on the other hand,
is based on real facts dealing with the life and death of environmentalist
Chico Mendes. Despite the tragic assassination of Chico Mendes, the im-
ages selected have the capacity to evoke hope and a spirit of resistance
and respect towards nature. Perhaps there is still time to avoid the apoca-
lyptic degradation of the environmental space, preserving it for humans
as well as nonhumans. Belonging to the realm of real life and not to
fiction, the documentary tends to solidify the reader’s expectations and
 The Languages of Ecological Crises in Brazilian Documentary and Fiction 147

commitment to life and defense of the environment. In this sense, only

reality is capable of interfering with or fulfilling man’s dreams.
Chico Mendes was a man of dreams, but also a man of action, as the
last words he wrote before his assassination make clear:
Meu sonho é ver toda a floresta conservada porque nós sabemos que
ela pode garantir o futuro das pessoas que vivem nela. E não é só isso.
Eu acredito que em alguns anos a Amazônia pode se tornar uma região
economicamente viável, não apenas para nós mas para a nação, toda a
humanidade e todo o planeta. Não quero flores em meu funeral porque
sei que elas seriam tiradas da floresta. Só desejo que meu assassinato
sirva para por fim à impunidade de pistoleiros que são protegidos pela
Polícia Federal do Acre. Se um mensageiro descesse do céu e garantisse
que minha sorte ajudaria a fortalecer nossa luta, ela até valeria a pena.
A experiência nos ensina o contrário. Não é com grandes funerais e
manifestações de apoio que iremos salvar a Amazônia. Eu quero viver.
(Chico Mendes)

(My dream is to see the entire forest protected because we know that it
can ensure the future of the people living in it. And that’s not all. I
believe that in a few years the Amazon can become an economically
successful region, not only for us, but for the nation, all mankind, and
the entire planet. I do not want flowers at my funeral because I know
that they would be taken from the forest. I only hope that my murder
may serve to put an end to the impunity of gunmen who are protected
by the Federal Police of Acre. If a messenger came down from Heaven
to tell me that my death would help strengthen our struggle, it would
be worth dying. Experience teaches us the opposite. It is not with great
funerals and demonstrations of support that we will save the Amazon.
I want to live.)
Chico Mendes’ desire to survive was real. Unfortunately, besides Chico
Mendes, many other defenders of the forest have been killed. His death
was not in vain, nonetheless; his is a narrative of resistance that will
certainly survive whenever his story is retold, intensifying intellectual
and juridical resistance.

NOTES

1. See Ricardo Dobrovolsky, “Marx’s Ecology and the Understanding of Land

Cover Change.”
2. See Lisa Edwards, “Path to Progress in Modern Latin America.”
3. I use différance here in the Derridean conception of language as repressed.
4. See Randolph Jordan, “The Gap: Documentary Truth between Reality and Per-
ception.”
148 Bora

WORKS CITED

Butler, Rhett. “Amazon Destruction. Rainforests: Facts, Figures, News.” Monga-

bay.com. Web.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero of a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1973. Print.
Chauvin, Danièle. “Apocalypse.” Dictionnaire des mythes littéraires. Ed. Pierre Brunel.
Monaco: Rocher, 1988. 106–27. Print.
Chico Mendes: Eu quero viver. Dir. Adrian Cowell and Vicente Rios. Universidade
Católica de Goiás and Verbo Films, 1989. Film.
Derrida, Jacques. A escritura e a diferença. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1995. Print.
Dobrovolsky, Ricardo. “Marx’s Ecology and the Understanding of Land Cover
Change.” Monthly Review 64.1 (2012): n. pag. Web.
Edwards, Lisa M. “Paths to Progress in Modern Latin America.” World History Con-
nected. 2010. Web
Jordan, Randolph. “The Gap: Documentary Truth between Reality and Perception:
The Notion of Documentary Truth.” Off Screen 7.1 (2003): n. pag. Web.
Loyola Brandão, Ignácio de. Manifesto verde: O presente é o futuro. São Paulo: Global,
1999. Print.
———. Não verás país nenhum. Rio de Janeiro: Codecri, 1981. Print.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2010. Print.
Ventura, Zuenir. Chico Mendes: Crime e castigo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003.
Print.
 NINE
Ecozones of the North and the South
Models of Development, Extractive
Practices, and Tensions in
Freedom and eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición

Mirian Carballo

Extractivism is one of the most controversial practices of human interven-

tion in the environment. It generally refers to mining activity, that is, the
extraction of minerals from the earth’s crust, but, in a broader sense, it
also includes the extraction of soil nutrients in industrialized agricultural
production. At the macroeconomic level, it is associated with neoextracti-
vist development, which has generated mounting concerns in bioregional
economies. As Svampa writes, neoextractivism may be defined as, “the
pattern of accumulation based on the over-exploitation of natural re-
sources, nonrenewable in large measure, as well as the expansion of the
frontiers of capital to territories previously considered unproductive”
(“Consenso” 4). 1 In Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010) and the play
eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición (eRRor, a Traditional/Traitorous Game; 2011),
a production by Argentinian performance collective BiNeural-Monokul-
tur, there are references to extractive activities presented from different
positions and by means of varied rhetorical devices. This chapter exam-
ines the tensions provoked by extractive activities and the different strat-
egies used by both texts to represent these practices. It establishes rela-
tions between the texts’ positions toward extractivism and underlying
conceptions regarding interactions between humans and nonhumans, as
well as the intersections between individual, social, and environmental
rights.
149
150 Carballo

The field of ecocriticism emerged in the 1980s as a series of related

methodologies for analyzing how literary and cultural texts communi-
cate ecological concerns and raise environmental awareness as well as a
space for developing theoretical approaches that enable the reader to
interpret texts from an ecocentric perspective. 2 Ecocritics explore what
Lawrence Buell calls the “environmental imagination” in order to draw
attention to anthropocentric environmental practices, ecological prob-
lems, and environmental crises in cultural texts, underscoring rhetorical
strategies, themes, and motifs that contribute to unmasking these issues. 3
The focus in all cases has been warning about the deteriorating condi-
tions of the nonhuman world and the degree to which humans can be
held responsible or act to prevent these environmental threats.
Although there may be general problems that affect all of the planet’s
residents equally, there are many environmental crises that manifest
themselves in specific regions and historical periods. In the first decades
of the twenty-first century, the consequences of modern life and industri-
al practices, including the overconsumption of natural resources such as
oil, gas, wood, and water, and, in the long run, the depletion of the ozone
layer and global climate change, continue to cast a long shadow over the
possibilities of the renewal rate, survival, and remedial strategies of the
natural world.
While nothing new, extractive activities are one of the practices most
easily identifiable with the new century. Indeed, the global expansion of
neoliberal capitalism since World War II has intensified greatly the rate
and scale of extraction. Nonetheless, extractivism has traditionally been
closely related to colonial economic practices dating back to the earliest
waves of European colonialism. As Natanson points out, the term “ex-
tractivism” was originally “created to define the dynamics of natural
resource extraction (mainly gold and silver) and their transportation
from the American colonies to the European metropoles” (2). In general,
it refers to “economic activities that remove large volumes of resources
that are not processed (or are processed in a limited manner) and are
mainly destined to be exported” (Natanson 2). In this broad definition,
extractive activities are “not restricted to minerals, gas or oil, but they
also comprise agricultural, forest, or even fish-based raw materials” (Na-
tanson 2). Matthes and Zeljco note that extractivism “has come to de-
scribe a way of running the economy in resource exporting countries,
especially in Latin America” (n. pag.). As Natanson notes, this places
Latin American economies in a disadvantaged position, since they have
adapted to the division of world labor as “exporters of nature” rather
than producer economies (2). Yet, it must be added that extractivism is a
global phenomenon. Indeed, there are fracking and oil sand extractions
in the United States and Canada and intensive mining activities through-
out Africa and Asia; oppositional voices can be heard around the world. 4
 Ecozones of the North and the South 151

In Latin America, particularly, there is a long-standing critique that con-

nects extractivism with imperial practices. 5
As Natanson observes, extractivism “alludes to a type of economy
that depends basically on the generosity of nature” rather than industrial
production, which places Latin America and other extractive regional
economies in a disadvantaged position within the division of world la-
bor, since they are primarily charged with supplying raw materials and
agricultural commodities to industrialized Western nations and the rap-
idly expanding Chinese economy (2). Natanson’s ironic term “exporters
of nature” underscores their critical and vulnerable position since it
stresses not only the high cost on natural resources, but also the lack of
manufactured, technological, and service exports (2). An economy de-
pendent on exporting commodities that relies on variable external
circumstances (the climate, global market fluctuations, etc.) and raw ma-
terials with no value-added worth cannot assure any continuous and
independent rent. Additionally, extractive models of development en-
danger the stock of nonrenewable resources, in the case of hydrocarbons
and minerals, and risk the resilience of natural environments, given the
exploitation of large tracts of land in industrial agriculture and the conse-
quential deforestation and exhaustion of soil nutrients. From the point of
view of politics, the communities expelled from the advancing commod-
ity frontiers, nearby populations affected by the use of pesticides, and
ecological militants reject this model of production, whereas most Latin
American progressive governments (Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Argen-
tina) support these extractive projects due to the fact that they represent
an important source of revenue for social programs and economic
projects.
On the other hand, the United States has a larger scope for action since
it is an advanced and highly industrialized country with services, indus-
try, and finance as crucial sources of income. While extractivism is still an
important part of the US economy, it does not depend fully on it for
growth. Furthermore, it has acquired the power to impose conditions on
the international market. This is quite different from the Global South,
which is integrated by countries that are said not to have entered moder-
nity completely—in the sense that they are unequally or marginally in-
dustrialized—and which have found an opportunity to increase signifi-
cantly the export of primary commodities in the “spiraling increase in
demand in countries such as China and India” (Acosta 64). All the same,
given the voices of dissent against the extractivist model—from the pop-
ulations affected by it and from environmentalists—the United States has
been obligated to rethink its energy policies. At the same time, it can
afford to think about other models of development that are less aggres-
sive toward the environment without risking its citizens’ economic well-
being, particularly when it can outsource the most destructive extractive
practices to the Global South. As the case may be, Natanson points out
152 Carballo

that “in recent years, de-growth and post-development theories that pro-
pose the need to abandon economic expansion as the state’s main aim
and to advance towards a new model of society, in which consumption
loses its priority status and relations between human beings and nature
become more balanced, have been gaining force in Europe and the Unit-
ed States” (3). Indeed, Serge Latouche, a proponent of “a-growthism,”
advocates reconceiving development, which, in his view, is quite ethno-
centric and has been imposed globally without taking into account local
histories and conditions or the real needs of particular localities and pop-
ulations (n. pag.). In general terms, he also suggests the eradication of
consumption-oriented economies, which create needs where there are
none: “growth needs a constant supply of markets to survive, so, like a
drug dealer, it deliberately creates needs and dependencies that did not
exist before” (n. pag.). Latouche is not as optimistic as Natanson regard-
ing the adherence to this trend in the Global North, acknowledging that
the closest the North has come to accepting degrowth programs thus far
is to engage in some versions of slower development (n. pag.).
Literary and cultural texts have engaged an assortment of responses
to these problems, varying in degree of commitment as well as the strate-
gies they use for making these problems visible. Fictional narratives un-
questionably play an irreplaceable role in imagining unthinkable conse-
quences, as well as providing insights into complex social dynamics con-
cerning representations of power relations, subjectivities, and ethical
matters that quite often remain hidden or unnoticed in the data provided
by scientific studies. This chapter contrasts two texts from different artis-
tic genres and different parts of the world, a North American novel and a
South American play, in order to examine the intricate ecological con-
cerns arising from two distinct extractive economies. I compare and
contrast the different rhetorical possibilities these texts offer for generat-
ing discursive ecozones that may proscribe endangering environmental
practices or, at least, raise awareness about the consequences of extrac-
tivism. Both texts deal with large-scale resource extraction projects and
place them under scrutiny by questioning these projects in terms of their
local ecological impacts, as well as their broader geopolitical implica-
tions. A key point of contact is the relation of local ecological concerns
and developmental plans to global economic models. Both works include
references to North-South hemispheric dynamics as they relate to global
circuits of production and consumption. At the same time, there are obvi-
ous generic differences between these two works involving the use of
distinctive semiotic and rhetorical resources; therefore, the range of pos-
sibilities for constructing meaning through various resources for each
text varies significantly. This study is restricted to the linguistic strategies
that contribute to expressing regional environmental concerns and their
attendant ideological determinants, which explain the dissimilar interests
or approaches to environmental issues.
 Ecozones of the North and the South 153

The two objects of study of this chapter, US novelist Jonathan Fran-

zen’s Freedom (2010) and Argentinean theater collective BiNeural-Mono-
kultur’s eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición (2011), expose the unsustainable
ecological debt in the regions from which they proceed: Appalachian
United States and the interior region of Córdoba, Argentina, respectively.
Jonathan Franzen’s novel, Freedom, narrates the story of the Berglund
family (Patty, Walter, and their two children, Joey and Jessica) and the
unprecedented difficulties each of them confronts in his or her individual
life and economic projects. Among these initiatives, Walter supports
“Haven’s Hundred,” a questionable conservationist undertaking pro-
moted by Vin Haven, a millionaire tycoon from the energy industry.
Haven’s plan consists in implementing an extractive coal strip mining
operation, which he will subsequently remediate by building a bird sanc-
tuary over the mine’s site. In a similar ironic interplay between capitalism
and the denunciation of environmental injustice, the artistic ensemble,
eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición, recreates the traditional board game
Monopoly. Two actors perform the role of players, who advance around
the game board at the mercy of luck and error (or fate). Contrasting
ironically with the play’s goal of building a business empire, there is a
sequence of episodes that refer to soy crops, the use of pesticides, the fate
of fumigated towns and villages, biotechnology, and Monsanto, the
multinational corporation that produces genetically modified (GM) seeds
and agrochemicals. 6 This chapter analyzes the rhetorical strategies used
by each of these texts, the environmental problems they present, and the
social tensions the latter provoke. Additionally, it establishes relations
between the positions and perspectives that underlie each text regarding
individual, social, and environmental rights.

RHETORICAL STRATEGIES IN FREEDOM:

ECOLANGUAGE AND IRONY

In ecocritical studies, the starting point of analysis is the relation of repre-

sentational strategies to eco-oriented perspectives. As Lawrence Buell
points out, citing Harré, Brockmeier, and Mühlhaüsler, language is “the
instrument through which we acquire knowledge about the environment
and through which we acquire or change attitudes toward it” (Buell,
Future 45). Furthermore, “rhetoric has been of strong interest for environ-
mental critics from the start of the ecocritical movement,” Buell states,
following Brown and Hendl in arguing that, “as such it not only ‘repre-
sents the world’ but also ‘positions us in relation to the rest of the world’”
(Buell, Future 45). Acknowledging that language is ideologically laden
and that it construes worlds by means of the persuasive and pragmatic
force of its rhetorical devices, we find in Buell’s references a strong rec-
ommendation to look into linguistic strategies in order to determine a
154 Carballo

text’s position with respect to ecocritical concerns. The first aspect to be

analyzed in Franzen’s novel, then, will be the use of an ecolanguage, that
is, a semantic network that foregrounds ecological concerns in either a
direct or figurative manner. 7 Within that network, there can be references
to identifiable ecological problems—animal extinction, the exhaustion of
natural resources, pollution, energy shortages, overpopulation, and so
on—or issues related to biological cycles, the landscape, or the nonhu-
man world. The commonality in either type of reference is an awareness
of the problematic turn these ecological concerns take when examined in
connection with the human world and representational systems.
In Freedom, the ecolanguage is mainly developed by Walter Berglund,
who has become ecologically aware through early, pleasant experiences
with the natural world in Minnesota, his original territory, and through
his personal and formal education, in which he has researched negative
human impacts on the environment and the causes of ecological destruc-
tion and imbalances. His analytical capacity and his long-standing appre-
hension about the impacts of global population growth on the planet’s
resources feed his pessimistic perception of the external world in terms of
humans’ ecological footprint. While stuck in a traffic jam near where
“Haven’s Hundred” is about to be implemented, Walter thinks the fol-
lowing:
He sat for more than an hour, fiddling with his non-receiving BlackBer-
ry and listening to the mindless waste of fossil fuels as the blackshoe
behind him idled. When the driver thought to turn it off, he heard a
chorus of engines from farther back—another four or five heavy trucks
and earthmovers were backed up now. . . . To pass the time, Walter did
mental tallies of what had gone wrong in the world in the hours since
he’d awakened in the Days Inn. Net population gain: 60,000. New acres
of American sprawl: 1,000. Birds killed by domestic and feral cats in the
United States: 500,000. Barrels of oil burned worldwide: 12,000,000.
Metric tons of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere: 11,000,000.
Sharks murdered for their fins and left floating finless in the water:
150,000. (363–64)
Freedom’s protagonist is very much aware of the impact of humans, the
modern life-style, and “progress” on the natural environment, an aware-
ness that comes not only from a holistic impression, but also from scien-
tifically measurable consequences. This is why he cannot take ecological
disturbances lightly, nor can he help evaluating environmental damage
in terms of figures. In this sense, his ecospeech is built on scientific
grounds. From the point of view of the reader, the use of statistics makes
an abstract and sometimes silent problem more concrete and easier to
grasp and visualize.
Although Berglund’s estimates may sound exaggerated, it must be
said that his perception of American cities illustrates that his apprehen-
sion about environmental degradation is not merely speculative, but that
 Ecozones of the North and the South 155

empirically observable damage exists. The result is the decline of the

natural environment and its eradication from landscape design: “[Walter
awakened] to an overcast April sky and a biotically desolate country-
scape of the sort that America had come to specialize in. Vinyl-sided
megachurches, a Walmart, a Wendy’s capacious left-turn lanes, white
automotive fortresses. Nothing for a wild bird to like here unless the bird
was a starling or a crow” (512).
Furthermore, the ecolanguage in Freedom is not only used to allude to
environmental damage or dangers and to describe the degraded land-
scape. It also appears in other, more oblique references, thus contributing
to construe reality in an ecosystemic sense, as a biological paradigm. For
instance, Walter himself is portrayed and defined through biological lan-
guage, as a member of a species in “the process of extinction.” The social
Darwinist jargon, which alludes to the survival of the fittest in the natural
world, speaks of his marginal condition in the social “jungle,” when one
takes into account his discordant ideas regarding the generalized
American ideology of fierce consumerism and high productivity. Walter
is aware that he has little probability of shifting public thought towards
ecological awareness or finding a prominent niche from which to fight
against ecological damage. He cannot adapt to the outward demands,
thus he is defeated and runs the risk of disappearing: “the world was
moving ahead, the world was full of winners . . . while Walter was left
behind with the dead and dying and forgotten, the endangered species of
the world, the nonadaptive.” (510–11). Freedom calls the reader’s attention
to the manner in which the American way of life is leaving a negative
footprint on the environment, as well as to the generalized unawareness
or indifference to this problem through these ecological references that
appear in the text mainly in connection with the main protagonist’s con-
cerns and which, in their totality, configure the text’s ecolanguage.
Yet, if we think about Freedom in terms of Franzen’s usual depiction of
contemporary America’s key issues in his long novels, it is possible to
assert that the presence of these strong urges speaks of an increasing
consciousness about these matters and may constitute a contribution to-
ward building an ecozone, that is, a space in which the nonhuman world
is valued in itself and becomes an important issue to defend and protect.
Furthermore, given the fact that Franzen is an outstanding contemporary
American novelist, it is auspicious that extensive attention is devoted to
ecological care and an ample discussion of environmental ethics, since
this may result in increased understanding and concern. In this sense,
Franzen writes in keeping with the centrality of environmental crisis,
which Buell compares to the racial “color line” that DuBois announced
was going to be the most important consideration in the twentieth centu-
ry: “a still more pressing question may prove to be whether planetary life
will remain viable for most of the earth’s inhabitants without major
changes in the way we live now” (Buell, Future vi).
156 Carballo

While Walter’s ecolanguage is central to the text, the most important

resource in Franzen’s novel for raising awareness and critiquing environ-
mental problems is the use of situational irony related to Vin Haven’s
undertaking. The millionaire intends to make money first out of the ex-
traction of coal at a very high environmental cost and, secondly, he pro-
poses to greenwash that negative environmental footprint by reforesting
the area with other tree species in order to promote the settlement of
native birds, particularly the migrant cerulean warblers. The proposal
involves the extraction of coal by means of the MTR (Mountain Top
Removal) technique, a very aggressive extractivist intervention which
assumes that nature is a mere resource to be exploited and that massive
environmental damage can be undone by future repair. The great situa-
tional irony in the text lies in the fact that the proposal for this seemingly
ecologically-minded conservation project is fostered by an oil tycoon, an
individual who has built his fortune through extractive practices, culmi-
nating in this strip mining project. When Eduardo Gudynas, one of the
most renowned Latin American analysts of environmental policies and
economies, examines the behavior of neo-extractivist models of develop-
ment in Latin America, he includes the following observation that may be
applicable here as well: “the primary objective of mercantilist environ-
mental policies is to maintain an efficient mode of functioning of the
economy and not the preservation of Nature as a primary goal” (134).
Haven’s remedial reforestation plan certainly has the feel of dressing a
wolf in sheep skin.
Needless to say, Haven’s project arouses fierce resistance from envi-
ronmental groups. As Walter deplores, MTR is synonymous with ecolog-
ical catastrophe: “ridgetop rock blasted away to expose the underlying
seams of coal, surrounding valleys with rubble, biologically rich streams
obliterated” (224–25). Regarding its unpopularity, Walter notes that the
press (in particular, the New York Times) may accept Bush-Cheney’s war
on Iraq, but it remains adamantly opposed to the evils of MTR (227). He
adds: “nobody state, federal, or private wants to touch a project that
involves sacrificing mountain ridges and displacing poor families from
their ancestral homes” (227). Even though Walter, paradoxically, agrees
to serve as Haven’s aide and manager in this undertaking, he is revolted
by it due to his own interests in the defense of environmental protection
and equilibrium. This situation arises from a fundamental dilemma. On
the one hand, Walter is convinced that he should abandon working for
Haven in this scheme and should not endeavor to get the land for this
double-edged project with such contradictory aims: a coal mine and a
bird sanctuary. Yet, getting close to Haven may mean funds for the cam-
paign for birth restrictions, his most important cause, since he believes
that overpopulation is responsible for the greatest and most profound
damage to the planet. Walter’s main interest in working for the protec-
tion of the environment is thus centered on restricting demographic
 Ecozones of the North and the South 157

growth, which he views as the only measure that could significantly

reverse the progressive deterioration of the nonhuman world. Eventual-
ly, Walter chooses the most pragmatic option: to support the fateful
project in view of a greater good in the long run, embarking on compen-
satory tasks that may remedy the immediate negative ecological impact
and leaving open the possibility of working intensely on some concrete
measures against population growth whenever the circumstances allow.
The path taken by Walter Berglund exemplifies the logic of capitalist
pragmatism underpinning neoliberal ideology. He follows the general-
ized tendency to proceed with decisions that are initially harmful to the
environment, finding justification in later aims that purport to be morally
sound. This is a similar rationale to that which guides Vin Haven in his
proposal. Once again, the mercantilist drive prevails over environmental
common sense. The male protagonist’s deep belief that the main cause of
all cases of environmental degradation and destruction lies in the lack of
population controls leads him to concentrate all his efforts on this issue.
As I have discussed in greater depth elsewhere, Walter adheres to the
1968 Club of Rome’s formulation of ecological crisis, which renewed
interest in Malthus’ thesis on the central role of overpopulation in envi-
ronmental degradation (Carballo 146–53). In one passage, he states this
explicitly: “the Club of Rome was seeking more rational and humane
ways of putting the brakes on growth than simply destroying the planet
and letting everybody starve to death or kill each other” (Freedom 129).
These neo-Malthusian policies popular in the 1970s intended to exert
some control over growth and, therefore, can be seen as an early bud of
more recent de-growth proposals. Notwithstanding, analysts like En-
rique Leff have pointed out the deficiencies in that program, associated
with what has been called eco-development, not only in its lack of popu-
larity, but also in that it did not elaborate a clear political model. It relied
mainly on voluntary action rather than clear, strategic planning based on
solid theories connecting social, economic, and political processes (Leff,
Ecología y capital 314). In fact, Leff sees it as another example of an eco-
nomic rationality that subordinates all variables to the economic one:
The objectives of eco-development respond to the necessity of readjust-
ing the international order to dissolve the externalities of capitalist de-
velopment: marginality, poverty, the plundering of resources, environ-
mental contamination. The strategy of action has been defined by the
principle “Think globally, act locally” believing that the efficacy of the
required transformations could be trusted to individual consciences
and governments’ actions. (Ecología y capital 315)
Walter embodies the individualist spirit of eco-development. He acts
practically on his own, thinking that he can redirect funds from Haven’s
project to fight population growth. Still, by doing so, he is coopted by the
neoliberal matrix that struggles for the prevalence of a developmental
158 Carballo

model that depends on the intense exploitation of nature and hydrocar-

bons as the main source of energy and profit.
Within this model, economic profits take precedence over environ-
mental protection. The text unveils a number of unscrupulous proce-
dures and the connivance of powerful political and economic cadres that
act without restrictions on the exploitation of nature for the sake of un-
suitable but profitable individual initiatives. With the aid of local and
national politicians, Haven manages to buy vast tracts of land in West
Virginia, thus revealing the clientelistic relationship between big business
and corporate politicians. Indeed, Haven frequents the Bush and Cheney
circle, where he is told by the vice-president himself that certain taxes
will be altered in West Virginia, “to render natural-gas extraction eco-
nomically feasible in the Appalachians” (229). Walter Berglund is not
aware of these private conversations and thinks that Haven has acquired
all of these lands and mineral rights for the Cerulean Warbler Trust,
whereas, in fact, the millionaire plans to sell those mineral rights to open
those lands for development or drilling. Although extensive properties
will be kept for the project, there will still be a lot of fragmentation due to
the sale of lands to different owners. There will be “new roads every-
where, thousands of wellheads, noisy equipment running night and day,
blazing lights all night” (230). This is precisely what they sought to avoid
for the birds to settle down and to preserve the habitat undisturbed.
Another situation that shows how pro-environmental actions and po-
sitions are tinted by larger issues and political considerations is the mo-
ment when Walter discusses with his friends and daughter his ideas on
how to gain public support for restricting population growth. Based on
different principles, the characters foresee a variety of obstacles to the
acceptance of Walter’s proposals. Walter himself predicts the resistance
of the American people to strict birth control measures on the basis of the
principle of freedom. As a related example, he mentions the current de-
bate over arms control, a situation in which the damage weapons cause to
society is clear, yet Americans resist their prohibition in order not to cede
any degree of their individual rights. In sum, Berglund believes that
America’s philosophical and political foundations will be compromised if
one tries to impose restrictions that pro-environmental policies such as
demographic control may require.
On the other hand, aware of the preeminence of right-wing politics
during Bush and Cheney’s administration, Walter’s rocker friend from
his youth, Richard, cites the free market as the principle that American
society defends with great passion and devotion, even more than free-
dom itself:
“The real problem, though,” Katz said, “is free market capitalism.
Right? Unless you are talking about outlawing reproduction, your
problem isn’t civil liberties. The real reason you can’t get any cultural
 Ecozones of the North and the South 159

traction with overpopulation is that talking about fewer babies means

talking about limits to growth. Right? And growth isn’t some side issue
in free-market ideology. It’s the entire essence. Right? In free-market
economic theory, you have to leave stuff like the environment out of
the equation. What was the word you used to love? ‘Externalities’?”
(383)
Katz’s remark is an incisive ironic commentary on the exacerbated value
of the market and the underlying currents that keep things flowing in a
free-market economy, such as growth and the principle of measuring and
valuing everything in economic terms. Katz suggests that, during the
novel’s period of reference (George W. Bush’s presidency, from 2001 to
2009), neoliberal politics tint every decision and sustain the idea that
economic interests are higher stakes than freedom. As Slavoj Žižek mor-
dantly affirms, citing Fredric Jameson: “it is easier to imagine ‘the end of
the World’ than a more modest change in the mode of production, as if
capitalism was the ‘real’ that will somehow survive, even under an eco-
logical disaster” (Ideología 7).
Katz’s casual reference to externalities is another effective ironic de-
vice. The seemingly off-handed remark on this economic term referring
to the external consequences that an act, operation, or condition may
have on other agents who are not responsible for the action is a blow to
the abstract concept of freedom and acts as a reminder of the crude sums
that often do not add up in neoliberalism. Indeed, Ramachandra Guha
has pointed out the externalities or unexpected environmental and social
costs of rapid economic development in India and China, among them
energy crisis and intensified global climate change, which have led to a
third-wave “environmentalism of the poor.” 8 In this case, Katz argues
that it is very difficult to propose a plan restricting population growth
because that may affect the expansion of the market and accrual, which is
the main goal of capitalism. The environmental consequences of over-
population, the increasing burden on the planet’s resources, becomes an
externality for the American government as well as entrepreneurs, who
are mainly concerned about expanding their power or profits. Katz’s
ironic critique, then, reveals the incompatibility of nature and capital,
which can never be reconciled in a single equation.
This fundamental incompatibility between nature and capital has
been the point of departure for a variety of theories of radical ecological
change, ranging from ecosocialism to Enrique Leff’s “environmental ra-
tionality.” As a current of thought and a program of ecological change,
ecosocialism rules out the logic of the market and accrual since it finds it
entirely irreconcilable with the protection of the environment. Indeed,
Michael Löwy identifies two main principles within ecosocialism: the
rejection of capitalist modes of production and consumption, due both to
their environmental dangers and the social alienation they provoke, and
the repudiation of capitalist notions of progress or development that re-
160 Carballo

quire the continual expansion of the market at the same time that they
threaten the continued survival of the human species (30–31). In a similar
direction, Enrique Leff proposes replacing the prevailing economic ra-
tionality for an environmental one. Blaming capitalist economies for the
degradation of the environment, he calls for new ways of managing our
relationships with our environments by taking into account alternative
modes of production based on local knowledges and the integration of
groups and regions that have been traditionally marginalized or exploit-
ed by current models of capitalism. 9
The name that Jonathan Franzen chose for his novel, Freedom, which
designates one of the main aspirations for human beings’ full develop-
ment and one of the chief foundations of the American social and legal
covenant, underlies all the text’s conflicts. The decisions each of the char-
acters takes in relation to their own personal conflicts expose the manner
in which “freedom”—the essential Enlightenment principle that guided
the foundational project of the United States—has been belittled and
soiled in the face of high-sounding, short-term economic undertakings
and individual achievements that keep citizens busy at the beginning of
the twenty-first century and make them defend absolute freedom of ac-
tion. The freedom to which most of the characters in Franzen’s novel
allude does not appear here as the philosophical principle that assures
full development to each individual in the nation and that may guarantee
and contribute to the betterment of the community, be it national or
global. Rather, it makes reference to total permissiveness that may au-
thorize the limitless display of interests large and small, motivations
tinted by selfishness or driven by the engine of personal economic gain.
In this sense, Katz provides a penetrating analysis of the relationship
between the apparent defense of freedom and the expansion of economic
liberalism.
Most of the discordant voices against “Haven’s Hundred” are those of
the local residents of the area where the MTR will take place. At the
beginning, there is a united and strong general resistance, but later on
only a reduced group resists. Eventually these opposing voices are “dis-
armed” with the promise of new homes and work in a body-armor plant
that is partially owned by Haven and financed by federal government
contracts. The irony lies in the fact that, with their work, they will con-
tribute to protecting American soldiers in Iraq at the cost of bringing
death and environmental destruction to another territory (Carballo 150).
Indeed, Walter Berglund’s speech at the plant’s opening ceremony brings
to light the global environmental consequences of actions taken in the
United States. When addressing the Foster Hollow residents who have
been displaced, he ironically states: “and I want to welcome you all,
because it’s a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It’s the main-
stay of economies all around the globe! . . . And now that you’ve got these
jobs at this body-armor plant . . . you’re going to be able to participate in
 Ecozones of the North and the South 161

those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native
habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America!” (514). He also emphasizes
the relationship between consumerism, environmental deterioration, na-
tional security, and imperialism: “The reason this country needs so much
body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don’t want
us stealing their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your
vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to
be!” (514).
The critical and sardonic attitude Walter displays towards the
American majority’s indifference to environmental concerns and human
suffering, as well as the ease with which local residents are manipulated
to the will of capitalist entrepreneurs despite local environmental de-
struction that affects them directly, reappears in the critique of corporate
agriculture in Argentina in eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición. This work
satirizes the multiple agents implicated in the lack of environmental and
public health protections in the soy-producing regions of Central Argen-
tina. Freedom and eRRor share not only a critical take on indifferent, ignor-
ant, and/or greedy individuals’ attitudes toward their environment, but
also how the neoliberal economic rationality is eroding environmental
responsibility and concerns simultaneously at local, regional, and inter-
national scales.

ERROR, UN JUEGO CON TRA(D)ICIÓN:

RHETORICAL STRATEGIES AND THEIR EFFECTS

eRRor was staged for the first time by Argentinean theater collective Bi-
Neural-Monokultur (Ariel Dávila, Christina Ruf, Laura Gallo, and
Hernán Rossi) on September 2, 2011, at the Goethe Institute in Córdoba,
Argentina, funded by a grant from the Province of Córdoba and the
National Institute of Theater. The play belongs to a cycle called “the
materialization of error,” which focuses mainly on dismantling what the
group views as erroneous perceptions and dangerous misinformation
regarding genetically modified crops and their impact and repercussions
at the local, national, and international scales. Tellingly, the first word of
the play’s title, “eRRor,” is a pun on “Roundup Ready” (RR) soybeans,
the dominant GM crop in Argentina. “Roundup Ready” soybeans were
developed and marketed by infamous transnational agricultural corpora-
tion Monsanto, the same company that manufactures the herbicide itself.
Indeed, Roundup sales increased substantially following the launch of
GM technology (Qaim and Traxler 74).
The spectacular growth of soy crops in Argentina, which has taken
place since the 1990s, has placed the nation as the second soy producer in
the world. By 2007–2008, soybean crops occupied up to 50 percent of the
nation’s farmlands (Cadenazzi 1). This remarkable development has oc-
162 Carballo

curred due to advances in biotechnology (GM soybean varieties that re-

sist both harsher climate conditions and powerful glyphosate herbicides),
the increase in price and international demand (coming from China
mainly), higher revenue over other crops and rural activities, and inter-
national trade advantages (Cadenazzi 9). The flip side of the coin has
been the concentration of capital that has accompanied this process,
which has turned most small and middle-sized agricultural producers
into renters of land to large agribusiness companies, as well as negative
ecological impacts ranging from the exhaustion of soil nutrients due to
monoculture practices, the felling of native species to clear lands for
farming, and the health dangers to humans in contact with agrochemi-
cals. These economic and ecological issues have become highly politi-
cized, particularly in Córdoba, and the most active agents in this respect
are concerned neighbors and individuals associated with small organiza-
tions, rather than political parties, who have largely benefited from the
soy boom.
The play stands out for its docudrama techniques and manifold per-
formance strategies. It is structured with concentric levels of representa-
tion nested within each other in a Chinese-box structure, which empha-
sizes the interconnections between multiple scales in contemporary social
and environmental issues. The play enacts multiple formats including
soap opera, public interviews, autobiographical discourse, and sketches
through which the audience can refine their understanding of several
problems related to GM seeds and the consequences of the careless use of
agrochemicals. Each of these representational modes appears within the
overarching frame of the board game Monopoly (El Estanciero in Argen-
tina), the main level of the performance, to which the audience returns
after each episode. At the same time, the overall rhizomatic pattern al-
lows the viewing public to perceive the complex entanglement of a prob-
lem that involves political manipulation, health hazards, ignorance, indif-
ference or neglect, consumerism and advertising, and bureaucratic mis-
management. eRRor also engages a variety of semiotic configurations in-
cluding body language, images in film sequences, audio input from inter-
views, and oral language in the reading aloud of written texts that appear
on the screen behind the actors. The multiplicity of formats generates a
dynamic effect, favoring the construction of a polyphonic text that com-
plicates and enriches the coding of conflicts as well as the act of reception.
These conditions allow the great variety of topics included in this collec-
tive work—such as environmental health risks; political, economic, and
corporate interests that interfere with pro-environmental decisions; the
expansion of agribusiness; and a generalized lack of “environmental con-
sciousness”—to unfold and account for the variegated spaces of social
discourse, within which there are echoes of environmental problems.
In eRRor, humorous irony is the chief rhetorical resource for the con-
struction of the conflicts as well as critical socio-ecological reflection. The
 Ecozones of the North and the South 163

parodic form plays an essential role. One of the most hilarious parts of
eRRor is the parody of Mexican soap operas, which appears simultane-
ously at two levels: as a performance onstage and as a film on a screen
that is produced by shooting what is taking place onstage at that very
moment. The parodic imitation is primarily based on the adoption of the
typical conventions of the soap opera format. The soap opera in eRRor,
called “Amor sin patente” (“Love without a Patent”) opens with the usu-
al melodic music track that most soap operas feature, together with a
mélange of the most romantic moments that the lead couple will stage
throughout the play. The latter include the romantic performances of
love gestures, such as deep looks into one another’s eyes, the lovers’
dreamy expressions, the female lover rushing repeatedly into her fiancé’s
embracing arms, and a hide-and-seek scene performed by the female
protagonist, in which she hides behind a tree only to startle her male
partner, thus conveying the accelerated heart rate that a surprise encoun-
ter between lovers may prompt. Together, these scenes reproduce soap
operas’ melodramatic quality to the point of ridicule, as they are shown
in their formulaic character and the exaggerated performance of court-
ship.
Initially, the parody here is aimed at the artificiality of the soap opera
genre, the emptiness and banality of a format that does not explore deep-
ly the effects and conflicts of human relationships, but instead repro-
duces the most generalized clichés about romantic love. However, the
ridiculous soap opera format is also used to make known certain prac-
tices in the agricultural production world, which end up being ridiculed
and questioned as well. The couple’s love is threatened by a secret the
male protagonist has kept hidden from his beloved in order not to “con-
taminate” their growing love. Making use of one of the most common
prevailing motifs in soap operas, it turns out that the male protagonist
has approached the female character as a spy—which positions them as
antagonists—but the power of love leads him to abandon his original role
and objectives and follow the dictates of his heart. In a dramatic revela-
tion, he unmasks his occupation: he is a Monsanto agent for the detection
of agricultural producers who make use of licensed genetically modified
seeds without paying the corresponding fees to the biotechnological en-
terprise. He has been “planted” as an industrial spy to assure the income
of the patented seeds for the company, but instead, upon coming into
contact with the simple farming surroundings, it is the unlicensed seeds
of love that have grown stronger, the “Amor sin patente” (“Love Without
a Patent”).
The moral dilemma for the male protagonist is whether to fulfill his
duty and accuse his beloved’s father of not complying with the payment
and risk losing her, or disregard her father’s breach of contract and betray
the company. As a solution, the couple decide to emigrate from Mexico,
together with the female protagonist’s family, to Argentina, “a place
164 Carballo

where nobody pays Monsanto licenses and where farmers have luxuri-
ous four-by-four vehicles and beautiful residences,” in the couple’s
words. Argentinian farmlands, which from the nineties onwards have
vigorously expanded due to the high profitability of soy crops, appear to
be a paradise. Despite the fact that Argentina is actually the world’s
second-largest user by area of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready (RR) soy-
beans since the late 1990s, behind only the United States, RR technology
is not patented in Argentina, and, under national law, Argentinean farm-
ers pay relatively low prices for RR soybeans. Furthermore, growers are
allowed to use farm-saved seeds (Qaim and Traxler 73–74). In this sense,
Argentinean GM farmers have greater economic protections than their
counterparts in Mexico, even if they face the same environmental and
public health concerns.
In any case, the humorous response prompted by the soap opera’s
ironic reference to the wealthy Argentinian agricultural producers is
chiefly based on two counts. It lies in the contradictions and inadequate
behavior of Argentina’s farm culture and in Monsanto’s absurd and ethi-
cally questionable global intervention, which in its obsessive preoccupa-
tion with controlling the agro-market resorts to procedures more akin to
an intelligence service than a chemical and biotech company. “Amor sin
Patente,” then, humorously critiques soap opera clichés, but at the same
time, it construes a critical view of the new model of agricultural devel-
opment based on technological advances that include genetically mod-
ified seeds, the corresponding herbicides, and the innovative transnation-
al corporations as overseers. By embodying in Monsanto the ominous
antagonist against the simple couple, the play suggests that the “evil
giant” threatens the most simple and ingenuous farmers, who cherish the
simple dream of cultivating the land with their own seeds. The latter
vision responds to the simple Mexican farmer’s daughter, who plans to
reproduce the bucolic, middle-sized economic unit model on her arrival
in Argentina. However, the Argentinian farming groups alluded to above
are far from that scenario; if they oppose the large biotechnological com-
panies, it is primarily to avoid paying the royalties for the use of the
technology developed by the latter (Scaletta 5). In reality, they constitute
an entrepreneurial class that only pays lip service to the “ancestral right
of farmers to use their own seeds.” From an ideological point of view,
nevertheless, the resistance against the multinationals’ demands for roy-
alties also represents a situated struggle from the South to block a neo-
colonial attempt.
When placed alongside Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, eRRor’s reference
to Monsanto, a transnational company with its headquarters in the Unit-
ed States, prompts two immediate associations. The first applies to Vin
Haven’s extractive company. Although Haven’s company is involved
primarily with carbon extraction for the energy industry and Monsanto is
an agricultural corporation, they both exploit nonrenewable resources
 Ecozones of the North and the South 165

with little concern about the consequences of their business methods for
the natural environment or human populations. We have already seen
how, in eRRor, Monsanto resorts to a “spy,” a Monsanto “agent,” to de-
tect those who fail to pay its royalties, a position that corresponds to a
degree to Walter’s position within Haven’s corporation as a reluctant
spokesperson. Likewise, Haven’s pressures on residents resistant to be-
ing displaced or even employing them in a plant involved in protective
war equipment for the highly debatable war against Iraq is repeated in
the displacement of the Mexican farming family to Argentina, where they
will doubtlessly end up working with massive amounts of agrochemicals
in the GM soybean industry. The profit motif seems so powerful as to
compel these companies to engage in environmentally hazardous activ-
ities and questionable treatment of people for the sole purpose of in-
creased earnings.
The second convergence of Monsanto with Haven’s extractive enter-
prise has to do with the global scale of extractivism as a form of neocolo-
nial geopolitics. Both corporations act across national borders, penetrat-
ing Latin American territory as well as other continents, imposing their
economic conditions and upsetting local cultures and environments. In
Freedom, Walter Berglund invests part of the Cerulean Mountain Trust’s
funds on lands in the Colombian Andes in order to assure the migration
and settlement of cerulean warblers escaping the Northern winters. What
is more, he encourages ecotourism there and helps the peasants to “re-
place their wood-burning stoves with solar and electric heating” (Freedom
225). In spite of Walter’s honest intentions to preserve this bird species,
the corporation’s move to invest in foreign property recalls Latin Ameri-
ca’s long history of social conflict and human rights abuses related to
foreign investment in fertile lands and mineral rights, not to mention the
painful experience of colonialism. In a similar vein, the visible technologi-
cal “advances” brought by successive waves of modernization, in this
case, the transformation of local methods for producing energy and the
stimulation of ecotourism in the Andes, very often provoke in reality
significant alterations of natural and socio-cultural environments that
may not be absorbed painlessly. In eRRor’s embedded soap opera, “Amor
sin Patente,” this is exactly the situation: the farmers have been deprived
of the traditional right to keep their own seed stock due to Monsanto’s
intervention in their agricultural system. The introduction of GM seeds
has meant the end of a specific bond between the farmers and their lands,
the end of love without a patent.
Within eRRor’s ironic mode, one can also mention the parodic space
allotted to the creation and presentation of Monsanto advertisements. In
the play, as in the real world, the company designs its publicity under the
premise of communicating care for the natural world, portraying an al-
most bucolic contact with nature and collaboration with local agricultural
workers across the globe. The play includes a real commercial for trans-
166 Carballo

genic seeds to be sold in India; the message is that the modernization of

cultivating techniques with transgenic seeds is within everybody’s reach
and that it is “friendly.” Hence, the commercial features amenable robots
recognizable from American science fiction films that aid “unsophisticat-
ed and naive” Indian farmers (as they are represented in the commercial);
the latter, then, are “enlightened” when they get help from the represen-
tatives of American progress. The clip at the end places the farmers
beside the robots in a fraternal and collaborative embrace. At the meta-
phorical level, the embrace stands for the proximity to and possibility of
modernity if the Indian farmers accept the biotechnology offered by
Monsanto.
The misleading message generates irony between what the company
purports to sell and what it actually trades, which becomes patent in the
scene featuring a parodic meeting of the “TRANSgeniA” advertising
company. The fictional advertising company’s name, “TRANSgeniA,”
which could be translated as “TRANSgeniuS” without the feminine
marker that Spanish allows at the end of the word, ironizes the absurdity
of transgenic products themselves through association with the compa-
ny’s extravagant advertising proposals. It also plays with the prefix
“trans,” alluding to the transnational character of the company they are
working for as much as how genes are radically transformed by them.
The actors in this scene, whose primary role is the Monopoly game, per-
form the role of a pair of creative publicity agents with extravagant ideas,
who are in charge of designing Monsanto commercials for India and
Brazil. All their outrageous, warming-up ideas appear to be unattainable,
laughable, and absurd in the audience’s perception, and the audience
laughs loudly at the extravagance of the publicists’ brainstorming pro-
cess. Therefore, there is a great surprise when the spectators watch the
real Monsanto TV commercials, which are actually shown in several
countries, and find out that they are made up with the script proposed by
TRANSgeniA’s creative campaign. Monsanto’s commercial discourse,
which really circulates on TV networks all over the world, is absorbed
within this performance and seems like a false, hypocritical product, al-
most from science fiction. The parody, in its imitation of the absurd, thus
works to reveal the haziness of the boundaries between reality and fic-
tion. The manipulation and twisting of Monsanto’s advertising language
which, apparently, is based on real facts, is unveiled in its fictionality, to
put it mildly, or plain falsity, if one chooses to be more dramatic. Parody
thus becomes a tool for unveiling the unscrupulous interests of agribusi-
ness.
Freedom also includes some situations that exemplify the hazy
boundaries between that which is and that which is not, between truth
and fiction, in the discourse of extractivism, drawing attention to deceit-
ful maneuvers and the lack of scruples of entrepreneurs involved in ex-
tractive enterprises. Vin Haven has a superficial interest in bird-watching
 Ecozones of the North and the South 167

and the preservation of biodiversity; he is apparently willing to use a

sizeable percentage of his fortune for the purchase of lands to build a
hundred square miles of wild land for the warblers. Curiously, he recurs
to his friends in the nonrenewable energy industry to help him with this
project, which is not precisely the most pro-ecological oriented group.
The explanation lies in the fact that “the coal companies had reason to
fear that the warbler would soon be listed under the Endangered Species
Act, with potentially deleterious effects on their freedom to cut down
forests and blow up mountains. Vin believed that they could be per-
suaded to help the warbler, to keep the bird off the Threatened list and
garner some much-needed press, as long as they were allowed to contin-
ue extracting coal” (224). The ironic combination of “deleterious” with
“their freedom to cut down forests and blow up mountains” underscores
the extractive entrepreneurs’ lack of commitment to the preservation of
the nonhuman world and the banalization of freedom, which is con-
ceived solely as the lack of governmental regulation in the interest of
personal financial gain. In the same way, Monsanto engages a discourse
in which it purports to be helping humanity and the environment, when
its only interest is expanding its business and generating profit.
Beyond the economic imperialism of transnational corporations, eR-
Ror foregrounds the ecological and health crises provoked by the expan-
sion of genetically-modified monocultures. The play presents the ten-
sions prompted by the neglect of their duties and noncompliance of civil
servants charged with regulating toxic chemical substances, the irrespon-
sibility of town dwellers, and the lack of protections for affected citizens,
who gather in a communal organization called “Pueblos Fumigados de
Córdoba” (Fumigated Peoples of Córdoba). These groups are all present
in eRRor in the parody not only of fictional accounts but also of real social
discourse. In the latter case, the parody stresses the seriousness of the
matter under scrutiny, since a fictional strategy unfolds to imitate a real-
life situation. Consequently, the real acquires fictional status out of absur-
dity and, at the same time, this operation of inversion underscores the
irony of the situation.
This dynamic is captured in an episode featuring a real-life dialogue
that is dramatized as part of the Monopoly game by the lead actress,
Laura Gallo. This dialogue takes place between the actress and an agri-
cultural producer, who is applying Roundup indiscriminately in his
home’s yard, despite local ordinances prohibiting the use of the chemical
in residential areas. Furthermore, the man fails to use even minimal pre-
cautions, such as wearing gloves. The character played by Laura, who
happens to walk by, tries to make the careless man see the product’s
dangers, but he remains indifferent to the young lady’s claims and ad-
vice. She embodies the voice of an ecological aware citizen concerned
about health care and rights. The absurd extent of his indifference is
communicated when he asserts: “Well . . . one way or another, we have to
168 Carballo

die anyway.” Confronted with the farmer’s impermeability to her at-

tempts at reasoning with him, she reports him and files a complaint
about the undue use of herbicides in a residential area at the correspond-
ing public office. There she finds a similar reaction: apathy, neglect, and
even tacit support for the actions carried out by the lawbreaker, since the
civil servant insists on “the impossibility of changing elderly people’s
habits.” Both the agricultural producer using the herbicide and the civil
servant, who treats the young lady in a condescending and mother-like
way, as if her concerns were the product of childish worry, are ridiculed.
The reenactment of that real episode construes a humorous space, but it
also critically underscores the ignorance and carelessness of the agents
responsible for dangerous and inadequate environmental behavior. The
farmer carries his working habits and practices from open country lands
to his urban residential area, foregrounding the conflicts that arise on the
borders between rural and urban interests and practices. In order to pro-
tect the rights of each group, there emerges a need to demarcate clearly
the boundaries of agricultural spaces and practices in order to avoid con-
taminating densely-populated urban spaces, as well as to create and en-
force rules for the handling of dangerous herbicides for the agricultural
workers’ own protection.
In other humorous instances, the play offers further insight into the
dangers that the toxic substances used in biotechnologies pose to the
environment as well as human beings. In a piece of docudrama, the male
lead, who is a real-life geneticist, performs an actual dialogue he had with
some rural workers, who had been handling plastic pesticide containers
and left them scattered on the ground. When asked about the content and
the risk of using those products, the workers affirm they know the dan-
gers very well: they are “cancerioosos” (a funny oral distortion of the
Spanish word meaning “carcinogenic”). When explaining the meaning of
“canceriooso,” they assert that it means they have to keep those products
away from the children. This instance of dramatic irony makes manifest
the risks of ignorance and the lack of awareness about environmental
justice. The workers’ lives are expendable, while the farmer’s children’s
health has to be preserved.
One of the final humorous scenes consists of an advertisement for
“Darwin” overalls. In a television commercial, the actors appear in those
overalls and air masks that protect them completely. The overalls are
advertised to be worn everywhere in the towns near the GM soybean
crops under the assumption that the fumigation of herbicides is so potent
that it has contaminated all surrounding areas. The actors walk in a hap-
py-go-lucky way and they even work in an animated manner inside the
house in those “Darwin” outfits. Darwin’s name, usually associated with
the theory of evolution, is subverted here to present this situation as a
case of “de-evolution” caused by humans’ irresponsible behavior. Once
again, the parody unveils a dangerous situation, that is, contamination
 Ecozones of the North and the South 169

and the likely health hazards due to the mishandling of toxic substances
in agricultural production.
Humor and irony are not the only tactics for alerting the viewing
public to the variety of problems the people in the interior of Córdoba
face as a consequence of the vertiginous expansion of GM soybean mono-
culture. eRRor also features speeches and shorts from real talks by “Fumi-
gated Peoples of Córdoba,” which are meant to educate and pull away
the veil of ignorance as to the health and environmental problems the
farming areas and the nearby populations face. As in Freedom, where
Walter makes references to concrete statistics and enumerates the diverse
environmental problems the United States should confront, eRRor
presents statistics related to the deforestation of native species due to the
advance of the soybean crops’ border, and it shows speeches by real-life
scientists that denounce the health effects of chemical products used in
modern farming. Likewise, it includes actions taken by popular move-
ments to pressure legislators to pass environmental legislation. This
touch of realism lends a sense of urgency to the situation, and it aims to
mobilize people in political action in contrast with the scenes of comic
relief that run the risk of soothing consciences, relegating the environ-
mental discourse to a strictly informative level.

CONCLUSIONS

Both Freedom and eRRor rely on mordant irony to unmask deep contra-
dictions in thought, actions, and policies regarding the environment. This
double-edged rhetorical strategy functions well in revealing the “other
side” of the human relationship with the nonhuman world, in which a
casual, thoughtless, and blind approach to environmental issues has last-
ing, and, at times, irreversible results for the environment as well as for
human populations. At the same time, reading these works in geographi-
cal dialogue allows us to map the complexity of extractive practices in
their relation to global dynamics of neoliberal capitalism that are often
obscured at the local or national levels. In particular, they reveal specific
tactics engaged by transnational corporations in the expansion of the
neoliberal commodity frontier, whether that of coal mining in West Vir-
ginia or that of GM soy in Córdoba, Argentina. At the same time, both
works model and problematize local residents’ strategies for resisting
and/or negotiating agency as their cultures and environments confront
successive waves of capitalization. In this way, these works bring into
relief a global perspective that allows us to trace transnational circuits of
inequality, in which actions initiated in one place have drastic effects in
geographically remote places, even at opposite ends of the earth. For
instance, Argentina’s soybean monoculture has developed as an extrac-
tive activity, since the vast majority of Argentina’s soybeans are destined
170 Carballo

for export as animal feed to nations such as China and India. In this
sense, the consumer nations effectively outsource the environmental and
health effects of GM soybean production to Argentina.
eRRor, un Juego con Tra(d)ición, delves thoroughly into the health and
environmental consequences of the expanding soybean monoculture in
Córdoba, Argentina, which, in order to meet increasing demands for ex-
port, applies itself to maximize the yield with biotechnology (GM seeds
and glyphosate) that have been demonstrated to be hazardous for human
health. The play stages the political debate on the health effects that agro-
chemicals have on local populations, a debate that also played out in
court a year later, in 2012, when a fumigator and an agricultural producer
were found guilty for illegal fumigations that did not respect the 500- or
1,500-meter distance range from populated areas, affecting the health of
the local population, especially children. The play’s title captures the
double-sidedness of soy monoculture. As the bracketed “d” in Tra(d)ición
implies, “error” and “traición” (treason) are combined in this apparently
joyful game of growing soybeans for export: error because a general lack
of cognizance drives agricultural producers into making mistakes with
regards to the appropriate care with herbicides and treason because ill-
advised farmers are betrayed in their good faith as to the benefits of using
GM seeds, which require a dangerous herbicide. Furthermore, the state
betrays its citizens both in promoting extractive practices in order to
increase its ability to pay for social programs and in failing to exercise its
role of responsible control.
While Freedom and eRRor share a common focus on the social and
environmental consequences of economies of extraction, there are also
significant differences between the two works. In Freedom, the main
theme is not the environmental problem, but rather Walter’s personal
identity conflicts. Few of the novel’s characters are committed to the
green cause, and the latter is not dealt with in an integral way. Even
when Walter Berglund is highly motivated to work for the environmental
cause, he mainly focuses on overpopulation, disregarding all other types
of ecological and socially related matters that also require urgent atten-
tion. In fact, the text insinuates that, more than a defense of the planet
and the nonhuman, his unfailing concern about demographic growth
may be a sign of a deep misanthropy. Though never explicitly uttered,
this unconscious discontent becomes manifest in his thoughts when con-
templating a solitary natural space invaded by humans:
He’d come openhearted to nature, and nature, in its weakness, which
was like his mother’s awareness, had let him down. Had allowed itself
so easily to be overrun by noisy idiots. He loved nature, but only ab-
stractly, and no more than he loved good novels or foreign movies, and
less than he came to love Patty and his kids, and so, for the next twenty
years, he made himself a city person. Even when he left 3M to do
conservation work, his primary interest in working for the Conservan-
 Ecozones of the North and the South 171

cy, and later for the Trust, was to safeguard pockets of nature from
loutish country people like his brother. The love he felt for the creatures
whose habitat he was protecting was founded on projection: on iden-
tification with their own wish to be left alone by noisy human beings.
(486)
Walter feels he stands in the same relationship of alterity in this world as
nonhumans, which is what compels him to defend them. His green com-
mitment is more an individual project than an eco-social one, a way of
stopping human beings from spreading. Indeed, large portions of Free-
dom are dedicated to the characters’ inner conflicts and psychological
makeup; in fact, all the main characters have conflictive personal rela-
tions and unresolved family and social issues that have little or nothing
to do with environmental concerns. And, in the end, Walter’s discomfort
with people, more than disinterested identification with the environ-
ment, is traced back to his deep sorrow with having been betrayed by his
wife and his mother long ago.
Nevertheless, even the fact that Walter’s environmental commitment
is somewhat egotistical and shortsighted does not detract from Freedom’s
success in raising environmental awareness in its readers. Beyond its
characters’ neuroses, Franzen’s novel foregrounds environmental prob-
lems as an important object of concern for the nation and the world, and
it makes a consequential statement as to where to begin with projects for
environmental justice. It shows that, regardless of the personal matters
invested in a cause, there are philosophical and ideological principles
that are essential to understand and build in order to modify discourses
and practices. In his struggle to implement population control measures,
Walter becomes aware that the price for constructing a pro-ecological
conscience in the United States is restrictions on individual freedoms and
rights. Furthermore, Katz’s comments relate ideological principles to eco-
nomic and political practices, pointing out the impossibility of changing
American indifference to ecological matters without replacing the “free
market” ideology of development for a post-development one, in other
words, with an emphasis on degrowth. 10 At the same time, the novel
seems to suggest that immediate environmental solutions are impossible,
since the environmental problems are rooted in principles and practices
that Americans will be very reluctant to relinquish.
In contrast, eRRor, un Juego con Tra(d)ición, constitutes a text of envi-
ronmental defense, condemning anti-ecological practices from beginning
to end despite its seeming privileging of social discourse over explicitly
environmental discourse. The critique of neoliberal extractive practices
responsible for environmental degradation extends through every level
of the play. The overarching plot and Monopoly board-game theme stage
the relation between extractive practices and specific economic interests,
ideologies, non-sustainable models of development, environmental deg-
172 Carballo

radation, and harmful public health consequences. Through humor, par-

ody, and absurdity, the text advances over a new semiotic territory that
unmasks the specific political agents’ discourse of indifference to prob-
lems of environmental justice and the practices associated with it: the
careless use of chemical products that spread through the water, soil, and
air; the indifference of public servants who are responsible for regulating
agrochemicals; and farmers’ ignorance about the use of and risks posed
by agrochemicals. In this way, the play as a whole draws the viewing
public into awareness of environmental inequality and the “slow vio-
lence” of toxicity, to borrow Rob Nixon’s lexicon. 11 In this way, the play
makes a demand for environmental justice that does not appear in mass
media, since these problems are not immediately visible as a catastrophe
due to the time lapse between chemical exposure and the appearance of
symptoms in the affected populations. The play’s representation of a plu-
rality of circumstances, voices, and bodies referring to these problems,
responding to them, and struggling for change articulate an ecozone of
integral environmental defense.
The disparities between the two ecozones constructed in these texts
do not depend exclusively on the different approaches of the texts but, to
a great degree, on the ecological practices and the ideologies that sustain
them in the regions to which they pertain. Postcolonial theorists like
Ramachandra Guha, Rob Nixon, Vandana Shiva, Elizabeth Deloughrey,
and Pablo Mukherjee, among others, have observed a range of differ-
ences regarding needs, practices, and beliefs between the global (coloniz-
er) North and the global (colonized) South, which have led to distinctive
environmental discourses in the two hemispheres. For instance, Timothy
Clark holds that European environmentalism is conservationist on ac-
count of a nationalist or nostalgic politics that intend to recover their
unpolluted lands from the past (96). Paradoxically, Northern environ-
mentalism does not often concern itself with the environmental damage
inflicted on former colonies during the colonial period (Clark 96). Envi-
ronmentalism of the South is closer to an ecosocial and political perspec-
tive, removed from “deep ecology” in absolute terms. 12 In these move-
ments, environmental justice takes a much more prominent role, focusing
on environmental protection as well, but in close relationship to the fair
distribution of environmental “costs,” that is, to share in the benefits of
clean, harmonious, and biodiverse surroundings as well as distributing
equally the collateral problems of the current development model with
its pollution and increasing exhaustion of nonrenewable sources at the
national and transnational scales. Another powerful, more radicalized
stance within the environmentalism of the South focuses on land and soil
issues, particularly regarding the possession rights of the original own-
ers, more sustainable farming methods, and careful attention to the non-
human world. 13 The underlying worldview here assumes an equal stand-
 Ecozones of the North and the South 173

ing between humans and nonhumans, which is, in fact, one of the basic
principles of deep ecology.
Nevertheless, there are clearly geosocial differences between the two
types of environmentalisms, which are reflected in these works’ treat-
ment of extractivism. In Freedom there is only a lateral critique of the
extractive project Haven proposes to carry out: the marginal voices of
anonymous green activists and Walter’s feeble rejection. There is no em-
phatic condemnation of the underlying, exploitative ideology of nature
implied in Haven’s proposal, nor the type of economy that supports this
initiative (except for Katz). Most of the actors involved are more con-
cerned about economic advantages than the careless and neglectful treat-
ment of nature. Case in point, Haven cannot escape his instinct as a
pragmatic businessman and, in his investment in a sanctuary for birds, he
is primarily after his “gift bag,” either in the initial coal mining project
that will enlarge his fortune or in the later tips he gets from politicians to
buy West Virginia mineral rights before the widespread exploitation of
subterranean resources begins, which also allows him to pocket great
sums of money. 14 Similarly, the displaced local residents do not object to
the project as long as they get jobs and new houses, and Walter condones
the destructive actions on nature for the sake of getting money from
Haven to combat overpopulation, the greatest cause of environmental
dangers. Besides, he is satisfied because the landscape will look pristine
again once the remedial measures are taken and the destroyed landscape
is re-forested.
In eRRor, the critique against extractivism is extensive and definitive.
Monsanto’s transgenic seeds and agrochemicals and the royalties they
expect to collect are considered unacceptable on the grounds of the dan-
gers they pose to both the human and nonhuman worlds. Furthermore,
this neo-extractive enterprise is portrayed as a renewed attempt to colo-
nize countries with weaker economies and fewer technological advances,
following in the footsteps of earlier colonial practices, in which the coun-
tries in the Northern hemisphere extracted raw materials from the colo-
nies, transformed them into manufactured goods, and sold the final
product back to the colonies. Both in the parody of the soap opera and of
TRANSgeniA’s publicity campaign, eRRor uses humor to expose the real
principles and aims that guide the multinational company in its dealings.
In short, the ideological assumptions and perspective of the nonhu-
man world of the environmentalist from the North, Walter, and the envi-
ronmentalists from the South, Fumigated Peoples of Córdoba, are shown
to be quite opposite in their orientation. But there are two important
lessons that both texts suggest (in the case of Freedom) or state explicitly
(in eRRor). The first is that neo-extractivism is based on the same princi-
ple as the original extractivist model of colonial times and reproduces the
pattern of economic and environmental inequality, whether at the region-
al or global scale. The second is that externalities such as the environmen-
174 Carballo

tal and social costs of the present model of development, which has capi-
tal at its center and, therefore, construes nature as capital, are incongru-
ent with sustainability. Both must be addressed in order to reverse the
present global environmental crisis.

NOTES

1. All translations are the author’s own, unless noted otherwise.

2. For some seminal works in ecocritical thought, see Buell’s The Future of Environ-
mental Criticism, McDowell’s “The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight,” and Love’s
“Revealing Nature.”
3. For a discussion of the term, see the introduction to Buell’s The Environmental
Imagination.
4. See Gensler’s edited volume on Energy Policy and Resource Extractivism: Resis-
tances and Alternatives for a general overview of the contradictory issues related to
global extractive practices, including their environmental consequences.
5. As Brailovsky and Foguelman note: “the colonial economy was oriented to-
wards the extraction of precious metals. Its acquisition conditions all other activities. It
strongly influences the spatial distribution of the population and generates particular
quality-of-life conditions” (41). Another seminal text critiquing the colonial enterprise
as an extractivist project was Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1971),
whose title captures eloquently the despoliation of Latin America’s resources. Ana
María Vara’s Sangre que se nos va: Naturaleza, literatura y protesta social en América Latina
(Losing Blood: Nature, Literature, and Social Protest in Latin America; 2013) is a recent
critical text analyzing the voices of protest and denunciation of the “dispossession,”
“looting,” and “pillaging” of natural resources in Latin American literature and films.
6. In Argentina, this game is called “El Estanciero” (equivalent to “the rancher” in
the United States), a name which suits quite well one of the main activities of this
country, since some of the richest men of the country have made their fortunes in rural
economic development, whether in farming, agriculture, cattle ranching, or the own-
ership and leasing of very large tracts of land.
7. What I am calling ecolanguage or ecodiscourse may be included within what
Buell and others have denominated “ecospeak” or “greenspeak,” which could be
understood as environmental rhetoric. However, attention should be paid to discrep-
ant understandings of the kind of rhetoric that can be called “environmental,” as well
as its effects.
8. See Guha’s interview on “Three Waves of Environmentalism.”
9. See Leff’s Ecología y capital, chapters 11 and 12.
10. Katz never explicitly states that he favors a post-development model, but from
the way he attacks consumerism and its negative consequences together with those of
excessive growth, one can infer that his ideas resonate with post-development dis-
course. However, it is worth noticing that he does not mention the relationships be-
tween development and American growth in relation to underdeveloped countries.
He does not seem interested in the impact of the traditional model of development for
countries in the Southern hemisphere.
11. As Rob Nixon defines it, “by slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradu-
ally and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time
and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2).
12. Regarding this point, see Guha and Martínez-Alier’s introduction to Varieties of
Environmentalism: Essays North and South.
13. See, for example, Zaffaroni’s discussion in La Pachamama y el humano of how
Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution incorporated the indigenous notion of “buen vivir” (the
good life), which establishes a more symmetrical contract between humans and the
nonhuman world, granting certain legal rights to the nonhuman world.
 Ecozones of the North and the South 175

14. Lalitha, Walter’s assistant, explains that when fund-raising parties were orga-
nized by Conservancy “the rich people were happy to buy a table for twenty thousand
dollars, but only if they got their gift bag at the end of the night, the gift bags were full
of worthless garbage donated by somebody else, but if they didn’t get their gift bags,
they wouldn’t donate twenty thousand again the next year” (Freedom 229). This is the
underlying logic behind Haven’s “good will” to buy lands for Haven’s Hundred
which would, after coal extraction, become a large extension of roadless land for
wildlife. He is willing to collaborate as long as he gets something in return, a “gift bag”
that, in this case, is not symbolic but represents substantial profits.

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Vara, Ana María. Sangre que se nos va: Naturaleza, literatura y protesta social en América
Latina. Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2013. Print.
Zaffaroni, Eugenio Raúl. La Pachamama y el humano. Buenos Aires: Madres de Plaza de
Mayo, 2012. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj, ed. Ideología: Un Mapa de la Cuestión. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura
Económica Argentina, 2008. Print.
 Section 3

Decolonial Ecologies
 TEN
Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics
The Wirikuta Case

Abigail Pérez Aguilera

Ecological crises and socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America are

often connected to the forced displacement and territorial dispossession
of human populations. Social scientists and environmental humanities
scholars must therefore reevaluate their approaches to researching social
conflict and environmental degradation. Once we acknowledge that the
lives of both humans and nonhumans are bounded by anthropocentric
and androcentric perspectives, it is possible to conceive of a “non socio-
centric” approach to environmental conflicts. 1 Such an approach is neces-
sary in order to consider pluriverses, that is, worldviews that incorporate a
multiplicity of views and include the agency of nonhuman actors in the
realm of politics. 2
Following a series of marches, protests, and legal maneuvers, Mexi-
co’s Supreme Court of Justice (SCJN) issued an injunction in 2013 deter-
mining that mining operations in Wirikuta, Mexico, be halted temporari-
ly out of respect for the Wixáritari (Huichol people). 3 Wirikuta, near Real
de Catorce in San Luis Potosí state, is sacred to the Wixáritari because it is
the final destination of a traditional spiritual pilgrimage that recreates the
Wixárika origin myth, in which people emerged from the sea and jour-
neyed to Wirikuta, where the sun rose for the first time. As the UNESCO
Intergovernmental Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage sum-
marizes in its decision paper regarding the nomination to include Wiri-
kuta on a list of endangered sites, “the pilgrimage acts as a social mecha-
nism that reproduces an ancestral worldview and an agricultural produc-

179
180 Aguilera

tion system based on corn and the seasonal cycles according to which the
pilgrims draw the rains with them on their return. This signals the start of
the agricultural season. The pilgrimage—which involves the consump-
tion of peyote from cactuses grown in the desert, ceremonial dances, and
ritual designs—is an important part of the initiation process for novices
training to become traditional healers” (n. pag.). Despite the 2013 Su-
preme Court decision in favor of the Wixáritari, however, the dispute is
ongoing. On a technicality, the UNESCO committee decided against in-
cluding Wirikuta on its list of cultural sites for safeguarding, and, al-
though the Mexican Supreme Court halted mining operations, it did not
hold transnational mining corporation First Majestic Silver responsible
for any damages or remediation for the environmental destruction, pollu-
tion, and political corruption associated with the Wirikuta project. First
Majestic Silver, faced with negative publicity, ceded of its own accord the
rights to 761 hectares to the Mexican government for the creation of a
reserve, but this amounted to only 0.5 percent of the total mining conces-
sions in Wirikuta (Macías Vásquez 383). Furthermore, another transna-
tional mining consortium, Revolution Resources, has developed a plan
called “Proyecto Universo,” in which it proposes to mine up to 43 percent
of the lands in the Wirikuta Natural Protected Area. 4
Most of the legal discourse surrounding the Wirikuta conflict has been
based on human rights law, particularly as it relates to constitutional law,
consuetudinary rights, and the communal rights of indigenous people
according to both Mexican law and the UN Declaration of the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples. 5 From within this institutional framework, the
Wixáritari themselves have little political agency beyond appealing for
the government to uphold the cultural protections to which they are
entitled according to national and international law. These cultural pro-
tections, however, do not include collective property rights. Indeed, the
Mexican state has generally tried to address indigenous rights through a
neoliberal, multicultural framework, focusing only on cultural, social,
and political discrimination rather than addressing the land ownership
and use conflicts that are often at the heart of indigenous movements.
Nonetheless, as the Supreme Court injunction showed, the Wixáritari
clearly exercised political agency that went beyond multiculturalism,
since they were ultimately able to renegotiate the meanings of “territory”
in a way that undermined and even superseded neoliberal notions of
property and mineral rights. The contentions presented by the Wixáritari
were based on the sacredness of their ancestral lands, the illegality of the
extraction of gold and silver, the contamination of aquifers, and the
Wixáritari’s inability to complete their yearly pilgrimage due to mining
activity. 6 In their arguments, they fused cultural and human rights with
land rights in such a way that none could be disentangled from the others
by neoliberalism’s customary sequestering machinery. Despite privileg-
ing discursively the economic benefits of the mining industry, the Su-
 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics 181

preme Court acknowledged the validity of the Wixáritari’s arguments in

its decision to halt the mining operations, thereby exceeding the scope of
both international agreements such as Convention 169 of the Internation-
al Labor Organization (ILO) and the Mexican Federal Constitution itself.
In this sense, the reinterpretation of constitutional law that the Wirikuta
conflict provoked forces a reevaluation of the multicultural approach to
legal studies.
Wixárika activism corresponds to what Marisol de la Cadena calls
“indigenous cosmopolitics.” Going beyond more standard definitions of
cosmopolitics as broad, intercultural alliances, de la Cadena theorizes
indigenous cosmopolitics in direct opposition to the neoliberal politics of
multiculturalism: “[indigenous] activism is interpreted as a quest to
make cultural rights prevail. Yet, what if ‘culture’ is insufficient, even an
inadequate notion, to think the challenge that indigenous politics repre-
sents?” (363). Indeed, she notes that ethnographic studies of indigenous
peoples have been “habitually rich in ritual and symbolic analysis and
oblivious to politics”; indigenous peoples have been glorified as cultural
artifacts, while the political and economic position of indigenous cultures
and knowledges has often been marginalized or ignored (340). Hence, the
notion of indigenous cosmopolitics calls for an academic discussion of
what has often been dismissed in discussions of indigenous rights in
ethnic studies, anthropology, and legal studies: materiality. The concern
with matter in this case enters the realm of politics through indigenous
cosmopolitics, in which, like Isabel Stengers’ formulation of cosmopoli-
tics, “what makes us human is not ours: it is the relation we are able to
entertain with something that is not our creation” (Stengers, “Including
Nonhumans” 47). The nonhuman or more-than-human, as David Abram
calls it, manifests itself in the Wirikuta case in the Wixáritari’s lived expe-
rience of the environment, an environment that is not viewed as a passive
resource, but as a living, symbiotic, and biosemiotic world. 7 As I discuss
below, by denying the Cartesian separation between matter and culture,
the Wixáritari forced the Mexican state to rewrite the legal meaning of
“territory” from property (to which culture is ancillary and detachable) to
lived environment. In this sense, Wixárika activism works through the
convergence of indigenous cosmopolitics and what Jane Bennett and oth-
ers are calling a “politics of matter.” 8
This chapter examines how socio-environmental cases such as Wiri-
kuta, which involve nonhuman presences and other pluriverses, intersect
with recent discussions of new materialisms. As William Connolly sum-
marizes, “new materialisms” allude to a general movement in a variety of
academic disciplines towards ontological perspectives that criticize
anthropocentrism and attempt to reevaluate matter’s ability to affect hu-
man and nonhuman others in a variety of physical ways (399). I am
particularly interested in what some authors have called the “material
turn” in the humanities, which broadens the feminist concern with bod-
182 Aguilera

ies to include decolonial perspectives towards the matter that constitutes

us and is part of our daily lives. Arising in large part from advances in
the cognitive sciences that have revealed the materiality of identity, this
paradigm shift has been the subject of multiple ongoing debates in the
humanities, all of them referring to the interactions of the human body
with “non-human forces,” as well as degrees of nonhuman agency. 9
I argue that although feminist new materialisms converge with indig-
enous cosmopolitics in recognizing a plurality of worldviews, a broader
recognition of the contributions of indigenous and marginalized episte-
mologies is needed in order to understand fully environmental conflicts.
Drawing on both approaches, I advocate for acknowledgment that eco-
logical crises arise from the implementation of a set of values that margi-
nalizes other corporealities’ knowledges and experiences and dismisses
the existence of nonhuman actors. The same capitalist world-system that
produces the neocolonial economy of dependence, in which transnational
mining corporations extract resources from developing nations, often on
land belonging to indigenous peoples or other marginalized groups, also
produces a “discursive colonization” of knowledges and academic prac-
tices that extract raw data from Latin America to produce abstract, dis-
embodied theories in Europe and North America. 10 This discursive colo-
nization rooted in geopolitical academic privilege appears within Latin
American feminisms as a dependency on a unidirectional flow of critical
perspectives from North to South. 11 On the other hand, collaborative
projects such as Yderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Gómez Correal, and
Karina Ochoa Muñoz’s edited volume Tejiendo de otro modo (Weaving in a
Different Way) show that it is possible to engage in a conversation in
which theories emerging from different loci of enunciation avoid the
marginalization of knowledges and bodies and contribute to projects of
decolonization and emancipation, acknowledging the racialization and
gendering of socio-environmental conflicts.

MINING AND INDIGENOUS POLITICS OF MATERIALITY

To gain a sense of the problems created by foreign mining companies on

indigenous lands in Mexico as well as in other parts of the world, we
must take into consideration the history of displacement, slavery, geno-
cide, and environmental depredation that has accompanied mining oper-
ations since they were implemented in New Spain in the sixteenth centu-
ry. 12 Furthermore, the number of mining projects in Mexico only in-
creased following independence in 1821; extractive megaprojects contin-
ued to be central to the construction of the Mexican economy and nation-
al culture. This was particularly the case during the heyday of liberalism
under Porfirio Díaz’s rule (1876–1911) and the neoliberal turn in the Mex-
ican economy from the 1982 peso crisis until the present, but the post-
 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics 183

revolution government of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)

also relied heavily on mineral (especially hydrocarbon) extraction in or-
der to maintain its social programs and a degree of economic indepen-
dence from the 1920s up through the 1980s. As today, prior mining oper-
ations were often located on or near indigenous lands and employed
indigenous and lower-class mestizo labor, resulting in a racialization of
the environmental consequences of mining in which indigenous people
and lower-class mestizos were affected disproportionately.
Although legal provisions for indigenous rights have existed in Mexi-
co in different forms since the colonial period, they are quite often side-
stepped through corruption or legal loopholes, leading to a situation in
which indigenous people must mobilize in order to obtain recognition of
their legal guarantees. As a result of recent mobilizations, of which the
most visible case was the 1994 Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
(EZLN) uprising in Chiapas, the Mexican government approved a 2001
constitutional amendment recognizing the cultural and political rights of
indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, in his analysis of this constitutional
amendment, César Nava Escudero notes that the Mexican government
did not address the issues of collective ownership of common lands or
the mineral rights underlying them nor indigenous peoples’ close rela-
tionship to and role in preserving biodiversity, which became key points
of contention in the Wirikuta case. 13
Let us begin our discussion of the relations between indigenous cos-
mopolitics and the new materialisms by considering the specificity of the
Wirikuta conflict when compared to similar extractive projects in Mexico
and Latin America as a whole. This difference stems from two related
phenomena: the significance of Wirikuta in the Wixárika cultural imagi-
nary and the Wixáritari and their allies’ strategy of engaging national and
international agencies and law in their struggle to protect their cultural
territory, including the successful campaign to have Wirikuta designated
a UNESCO Sacred Natural Site in 1988, as well as the unsuccessful nomi-
nation to have it placed on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heri-
tage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in 2013. The Wixáritari live in the
Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico in the states of Jalisco, Durango, Za-
catecas, and Nayarit, and, like most indigenous people, they have been
subject to marginalization and displacement. Wirikuta, which is located
in San Luis Potosí state, is the destination of the annual pilgrimage that
takes place during the dry season, between March and October. The Wiri-
kuta Natural Protected Area and Sacred Cultural Site, consisting of
140,000 hectares, was designated by the state government in 1994. The
federal government has only recognized 30 percent of this as a National
Mineral Reserve, although, ceding to international pressure, it has com-
missioned preliminary studies for declaring a national protected area of
200,000 hectares. 14 Furthermore, the notion of “mineral reserve” is sus-
pect, since it only defers mining until a later date, continuing to frame the
184 Aguilera

area as a reserve of mineral wealth and not as an environment that is

valuable in and of itself due to its biodiversity and its cultural signifi-
cance for the Wixáritari. Mining companies currently occupy 85,000 hec-
tares within the Protected Area and the buffer zone surrounding it, while
65,000 hectares have been recovered by activists and non-governmental
organizations after twenty years of struggle, culminating in the 2013 deci-
sion of the SCJN. As this history of political struggle indicates, the con-
struction and re-creation of Wirikuta as a landscape and territory is influ-
enced directly by the decisions and operations of mining companies,
tourism, ecotourism, and the legal inscriptions made on the place by local
and national governments. On the other hand, these legal inscriptions
most often emanate from the state and do not take generally into account
indigenous perspectives of their own situation, relying instead on “expert
testimony” that is often skewed toward economic interests.
As I have mentioned, the Wixáritari applied for Wirikuta to be placed
on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent
Safeguarding at the 2013 Convention in Azerbaijan. 15 Despite declining
the nomination, the UNESCO committee’s decision statement reflected
that “the annual Pilgrimage to Wirikuta connects the Huichol community
to its founding myths, thereby providing them a sense of belonging and
continuity; the associated worldview and ritual procedures are transmit-
ted from generation to generation through practice and initiation and
serve to orient the community’s agricultural work” (Intergovernmental
Committee n. pag.). The yearly gathering is especially important cultural-
ly given the fact that the Wixáritari live in highly dispersed villages
throughout the mountains. Additionally, the UNESCO statement recog-
nized that mining projects in Wirikuta and the surrounding region repre-
sent a real threat to aquifers connected to the Wixáritari’s traditional
practices and lifestyle (Intergovernmental Committee n. pag.). In Wiriku-
ta, then, the mining corporations’ disruptive environmental practices
force a reconceptualization of environment beyond the oppositional per-
spectives of viewing it either as a distinct entity transcending human
connection or a storehouse of future natural resources, waiting in reserve
until they are required by modern civilization. The negative impacts and
damage mining companies are causing to indigenous people as well as
mestizos (mixed-race people) in the Wirikuta region illustrate more than
the lack of legal instruments for protecting the land and its inhabitants:
they also reveal a direct threat to material practices and worldviews that
have sustained themselves in the region over hundreds, even thousands
of years.
The twenty-two mining concessions granted to First Majestic Silver
Corp. and the launch of Proyecto Universo were not the first cases to
generate resistance to unlawful and unethical exploitation on Wixárika
lands. 16 This time was somewhat different, however, in part because it
came after the 1994 Zapatista uprising and the constitutional reforms of
 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics 185

2001. The Wirikuta case generated widespread attention in Mexican mass

media, which denounced the corruption and lack of accountability of the
Mexican state. These media representations generally followed the dis-
course of multiculturalism, however, upholding the Wixáritari’s human
and cultural rights, but only seldom emphasizing the relevance of more-
than-human agency in the realm of politics. Nevertheless, this conflict
did open up a space for the possibility of “taking matter seriously,” since
inserting indigenous discourses and environmental discourses such as
toxicity into public discourse provokes a “thorough rethinking of the
fundamental categories of Western culture,” particularly regarding the
separation between body/matter and soul/mind (Alaimo and Hekman
17).
Another tool the Wixáritari and their allies used to raise awareness
about the conflict as well as to engage in a politics of matter was a series
of public events held in Mexico City. Two of these used affective mecha-
nisms to engage spectators on a material level. The first was a 2011 reen-
actment of the sacred pilgrimage to Wirikuta, in which Wixárika sha-
mans involved onlookers in traditional chants and the handling of ritual
objects. This pilgrimage converged with the tradition of political protest
marches in Mexico City, since it began on La Reforma Avenue and ended
at Los Pinos, the presidential residence, where the Wixárika elders pre-
sented president Felipe Calderón with their petition. A year later, the
Wirikuta Fest was held at the Foro Sol concert hall in order to raise funds
for the litigation with the Mexican government. The festival used music
to recreate the sensorial landscape of Wirikuta for the attendees, generat-
ing a powerful affective experience in which their bodies felt emplaced
within a network of matter. As Iovino points out, the concept of land-
scape always evokes the fusion of matter and culture in the construction
of a territory: “landscape is not meant here as mere scenery, but as a
balance of nature and culture stratified through centuries of mutual ad-
aptation. It is a ‘warehouse’ of common memories to humanity and na-
ture, in which human and natural life are dialectically interlaced in the
form of a co-presence” (“Ecocriticism” 29). The concert created a sonic
landscape that drew bodies into contact within a politicized cultural
framework.
On the other hand, even if the reenactment of the Wirikuta pilgrimage
and Wirikuta Fest were able to generate politicized sensorial experiences
(a politics of matter), they were also removed geographically from the
real environment of Wirikuta. In this sense, their ability to generate an
affective understanding of indigenous cosmopolitics was necessarily lim-
ited. The political impact of these events and the politics of matter were
nevertheless driven home by a two-day public debate held at the national
senate, where Wixáritari presented their legal case, but also their world-
view, before senators from Mexico’s three main political parties, all of
which promised to take up the case in legislation (Baltazar Macías 145).
186 Aguilera

The 2013 Supreme Court decision was thus a state response to a broad
range of popular political acts at every scale, including the application for
inclusion on the UNESCO list, internet activism through the Frente en
Defensa de Wirikuta Tamatsima Wahaa website and supporters’ blogs, a
broad media presence, cultural activities in Mexico City, congressional
appearances, and public declarations such as the 2012 Declaration for the
Defense of Wirikuta. Furthermore, with such a weighty political appara-
tus surrounding it, the yearly pilgrimage to Wirikuta itself became politi-
cized, taking on the characteristics of a protest march.
When viewed in relation with the Wixáritari and their allies’ political
activism leading up to the 2013 SCJN decision, the material practices
associated with Wirikuta emerge as a specific kind of political practice
that is closely tied to perceptions of the environment as a society of sym-
biotic beings. Wixárika activism related to the Wirikuta dispute must
thus be understood as a politics of matter, since it places material prac-
tices at the center of the discussion of human interactions with nonhu-
man presences and reveals how the disruption of those material prac-
tices, which constitute a form of ritual mediation that emplaces humans
within their environment, leads to environmental conflict and crisis. The
Wirikuta case shows that indigenous cosmopolitics, collective politics al-
lying different cultural groups as well as nonhuman actants, have an
important place in conceptualizing new materialisms and environmental
justice. 17 Indeed, the Wixáritari were successful in creating broad alli-
ances at the local, national, and international scales, but also in politiciz-
ing the land itself, as well as the bodies, human and nonhuman, that
inhabit it. Furthermore, taking the politics of matter into account can also
help us understand why conventional, legalistic intercultural approaches
to both indigenous rights and environmental conservation have usually
failed to meet their objectives.
In her doctoral dissertation on Wixárika activism related to the Wiri-
kuta conflict, María Julia Lamberti proposes that the introduction of non-
human actors in the study of mining conflict in Latin America requires a
reconsideration of the subject in sociological research, which is anthropo-
centric (“Abajo del amanecer” 4–5). According to the database created by
the Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros en Latinoamérica, there are cur-
rently at least thirty-five ‘social conflicts’ related to mining operations in
Mexico (“Conflictos mineros en México” n. pag.). These conflicts are re-
lated to the deaths of environmental activists, forced displacement, toxic
pollution, and devastation of the ways of life of indigenous, mestizo, and
non-indigenous populations. 18 Following Lamberti, I have suggested that
these social conflicts cannot be understood without taking into account a
politics of matter that brings the decolonial perspective of indigenous
cosmopolitics into dialogue with new materialisms. 19
The 2013 SCJN decision on Wirikuta can be considered groundbreak-
ing in that it recognized the rights of nonhuman subjects, not only as a
 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics 187

traditional adscription to indigenous rights, but as a recognition of the

existence within the juridical discourse of a more-than-human world
within the context of environmental depredation by mining companies.
Even when most of the legal debate centered around constitutional and
international law regarding indigenous territorial rights, there was a
clear sense that “territory” referred not to property, since the Wixáritari
were not the owners of the property in question in capitalistic terms, but
rather to the environment in its totality. As the Wixáritari testified before
the national senate in their arguments for legislation protecting their
“derecho a lo sagrado” (right to the sacred) on April 19, 2012:
El territorio, desde la concepción indígena, constituye el espacio natu-
ral de la vida, concebido como una unidad ecológica fundamental
donde se desarrolla la vida en sus múltiples expresiones y formas; este
espacio natural es fuente de saberes y conocimientos, de cultura, identi-
dad, tradiciones y derechos. Así, el territorio integra los elementos de la
vida en toda su diversidad natural y espiritual: la tierra con su diversi-
dad de suelos, ecosistemas y bosques, la diversidad de los animales y
las plantas, los ríos, lagunas y esteros. Los ecosistemas naturales son
considerados por los pueblos indígenas como habitat de los dioses pro-
tectores de la diversidad de la vida y, gracias a ellos, se mantiene la
integridad y el equilibrio del bosque, de los ríos, de las lagunas y la
fertilidad del suelo, lo que permite que las plantas y animales puedan
vivir y reproducirse. (“Pronunciamiento” n. pag.)

(Territory, from an indigenous perspective, constitutes the natural

space of life, conceived as a fundamental ecological unity, in which life
develops in its multiple expressions and forms; this natural space is the
source of knowledge and wisdom, culture, identity, tradition, and
rights. In this sense, a territory integrates all of life’s elements in its
natural and spiritual diversity: the land with its diversity of soils, eco-
systems, and forests, the diversity of plants and animals, the rivers,
lakes, and marshes. Natural ecosystems are considered by indigenous
peoples to be the habitat of gods that protect this diversity of life and
who maintain the integrity and balance of the forest, the rivers, and the
lakes, as well as the soil’s fertility, which allows the plants and animals
to live and reproduce.)
In this understanding of territory, the Wixáritari’s struggle for legal rec-
ognition of their territorial rights to the Wirikuta region does not imply
ownership of natural resources, but rather a politics of matter that goes
far beyond claiming equal rights in a multicultural society. By acknowl-
edging the Wixáritari’s territorial claims, the Supreme Court upheld an
integral notion of indigenous rights that included the rights of nature as a
legal entity.
It is not coincidental that the same year, the Federal District’s (Mexico
City’s) legislature approved environmental laws that granted “la Tierra”
(the land/Earth) legal personhood. As the third addendum to Article 86
188 Aguilera

states: “para efectos de la protección y tutela de sus recursos naturales, la

Tierra adopta el carácter de ente colectivo sujeto de la protección del
interés público” (for the effect of the protection and care of natural re-
sources, the Earth shall be considered a collective being subject to protec-
tions in the public interest; Órgano de Difusión 8). The following adden-
dum further specifies that “todas las personas, al formar parte de la co-
munidad de seres que componen la Tierra, ejercen los derechos estableci-
dos en la presente ley, de forma armónica con sus derechos individuales
y colectivos” (All persons, since they form part of the community of
beings that make up the Earth, exercise the rights established in this law,
in a way consistent with their individual and collective rights; Órgano de
Difusión 8). The extension of the indigenous perspective to the legal
sphere suggests a ground shift in the way in which the relationship be-
tween humans and the environment has been conceived throughout
modernity. Indeed, this may indicate the rise of a post-humanist perspec-
tive that rejects anthropocentrism and draws together indigenous cosmo-
politics and new materialisms, reconceptualizing traditional notions of
lives that matter, that is, which lives warrant saving and which lives are
neglected. 20 In this case, the Wirikuta case emerges as a key site for a
critical conversation on extractive practices as a whole and on the devel-
opmentalist ideologies that underpin them, particularly with regard to
violent dispossession and its effects on human and nonhuman bodies. As
Lamberti argues, this case thus gives rise to key questions regarding the
integration of indigenous cosmopolitics within social science research as
well as the environmental humanities. 21

FROM MULTICULTURALISM TO DECOLONIAL THOUGHT

The Wixáritari’s indigenous cosmopolitics revealed the insufficiency of

multiculturalism as a framework for resolving environmental conflicts,
particularly in the Mexican context, in which notions of racial equality are
complicated by the somewhat blurred lines between racial categories.
The body politic in Mexico experiences race primarily through the coloni-
al categories of whiteness, mestizaje, and indigeneity, which are cultural
as well as phenotypic. During the colonial period, each of these categories
corresponded to specific laws, social practices, and geographical spaces.
The legal segregation was abolished following independence in 1821, but
racial polarization has persisted as a social institution, with indigenous
people suffering frequent discrimination in education, employment,
housing, and other areas of public life. This continued marginalization
corresponds at least in part to the state-sponsored formulation of the
idealized “Mexican citizen” as mestizo, or mixed-race, in the post-Revo-
lution years (after 1920). Although the official discourse of mestizaje was
designed primarily to mitigate the colonial racial tensions that some be-
 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics 189

lieved had led to the 1910–1917 Mexican Revolution, its focus on hybrid-
ity as a form of racial homogeneity led to indigenous people being per-
ceived as being somehow less Mexican, particularly if they did not speak
Spanish or wore traditional rather than contemporary Western clothing.
Following the 1994 indigenous uprising in Chiapas, however, the
Mexican government was forced to address the persistence of racial in-
equalities. Not coincidently, this uprising began on the day in which the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) entered into effect; the
EZLN viewed their movement in part as a revolt against the marginaliza-
tion of indigenous peoples from modern political and economic process-
es, but, even more importantly, as a protest against the destructive effects
of global capital on indigenous communities and local environments, as
well as the exclusion of indigenous knowledges and cultural practices
from modern academic institutions. In the 1996 San Andrés Accords that
ended the armed conflict with the Zapatistas and posterior negotiations
with indigenous movements, the Mexican government recurred to the
neoliberal playbook for dealing with racial conflict; rather than address-
ing the economic inequalities and environmental injustice that were the
central concerns of most indigenous movements, the government refor-
mulated its notion of national mestizaje to coalesce around multicultural-
ism rather than mestizo racial homogeneity.
The process of remaking Mexico as a multicultural nation entailed
what Hernández and her collaborators call “neo-indigenismo,” in which
the state restructured itself, combining the neoliberal discourse of multi-
culturalism with early PRI-era (1930s through the 1960s) strategies for
incorporating indigeneity into the structure of the state discursively and
institutionally. The governmental response thus involved blending “the
exaltation of cultural diversity with programs to form ‘human capital’
and to boost the development of businesses throughout indigenous com-
munities” (Hernández et al. 10). This new Mexican multiculturalism was
promoted primarily through the creation of a broad range of educational
programs, cultural institutions, and microfinance programs, as well as an
ongoing mass media campaign.
The reconstruction of the national subject as ethnically plural, but
essentially Mexican relied on identity politics, that is, the process of delin-
eating degrees of acceptable difference within the nation-state. In this
framework, cultural and racial differences were acceptable, but they were
disembodied discursively from the social differences that had under-
pinned the construction of race since the colonial period. The nation’s
blatant social inequalities were thus labeled unacceptable difference, but
due to the Mexican government’s adherence to neoliberal economic poli-
cies since the 1980s, those social inequalities could not be addressed by
the government in any way other than promoting economic growth. In
Mexico, as in other nations, neoliberal pro-growth policies led to an over-
all increase in the Gross Domestic Product, but rather than improving
190 Aguilera

social inequalities, the wealth gap persisted or even worsened, particular-

ly when the outflow of migrants is taken into account. Furthermore, this
growth came largely at the expense of Mexican workers and the environ-
ment, as in the case of the extractive projects in Wirikuta.
While the multiculturalist strategy for dealing with indigenous differ-
ence was developed by the PRI during Ernesto Zedillo’s presidency
(1994–2000), it was maintained by successive administrations even after
the PRI lost the presidency to Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) candi-
date Vicente Fox in 2000, after seventy-one years in power. During his
presidential campaign, Fox had proclaimed a break with all facets of PRI
governance, which he labeled as corrupt and undemocratic. Using a
highly publicized march to Mexico City to draw visibility to their cause,
the Zapatistas forced him to include indigenous movements’ concerns in
this language of rupture. Upon announcing the creation of a new Nation-
al Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, he gave a
speech promising a new relationship between the national state, indige-
nous peoples, and the national society based on economic development
and cultural diversity: “[acorde] a los nuevos tiempos en que vivimos, en
México vamos a lograr que sus comunidades cuenten con nuevas y me-
jores oportunidades de progreso que hasta ahora han sido insuficientes.
Lo haremos respetando en todo momento no sólo sus derechos, sino
también sus formas de vida, su diversidad cultural” (in keeping with the
new times in which we live, in Mexico, we are going to make sure your
communities have more and better opportunities to progress, since they
have been insufficient up until now. We will do it respecting always not
only your rights, but also your way of life and your cultural diversity;
Fox n. pag.). Throughout this speech and others dealing with indigenous
peoples, he repeatedly used the terms “pluricultural” and “pluriethnic”
to describe the Mexican national body; however, this language was not in
fact new, but was actually drawn directly from the 1996 San Andrés
Accords. Furthermore, a former Coca-Cola executive, Fox’s development
program for indigenous people did not acknowledge their concerns
about the effects of globalized capitalism on their communities and envi-
ronments. Fox’s nod to multiculturalism thus focused on indigenous peo-
ples’ constitutional guarantees of legal equality and access to capital and
economic markets, but did nothing to address the indigenous worldview
summarized in the Wixárika quote above: namely, that, for indigenous
peoples, there is no property without environment and there are no hu-
man rights without nonhuman rights.
The rise of multiculturalism in Mexico functioned as a postcolonial
strategy for mitigating the racial tensions that colonialism generated. In
the sense in which postcolonialism necessarily follows colonialism,
multiculturalism reproduces the colonial racial divisions in the way in
which it addresses them, here by underscoring the “underdevelopment”
of indigenous peoples according to the capitalist paradigm. Despite its
 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics 191

rhetoric of cultural inclusiveness, it takes no interest in reformulating

itself to incorporate aspects of indigenous knowledges that threaten its
core precepts, such as the human separation from nature and the for-
mer’s right to exploit the latter in an unlimited manner. That kind of
indigenous knowledge is unacceptable difference.
In this way, multiculturalism reveals the way in which a colonial,
Eurocentric, patriarchal rationality continues to pervade the world eco-
nomic system. As Aníbal Quijano has pointed out, the forms of knowl-
edge that underpin globalization became globally hegemonic by coloniz-
ing and subordinating all “previous or different conceptual formations
and their respective concrete knowledges” (“Coloniality” 549). As Walter
Mignolo notes in his summary of Quijano’s thought, the “coloniality of
power” is constituted as follows:
1. The classification and reclassification of the planet’s population—
the concept of culture becomes crucial in this task of classifying
and reclassifying.
2. An institutional structure functional to articulate and manage such
classifications (state apparatus, universities, church, etc.).
3. The definitions of spaces appropriate to such goals.
4. An epistemological perspective from which to articulate the mean-
ing and the profile of the new matrix of power and from which the
new production of knowledge could be channeled. (17)
Power is thus constituted continuously through this process of ongoing
subordination of non-Western knowledges to Western science and the
humanities, which locates non-Western cultures as consumers of succes-
sive waves of Western knowledge and technological innovations. The
coloniality of power thus defines what Foucault called the “order of
things.” 22 These colonial material relations were naturalized within the
capitalist framework through the ongoing classification of bodies as dis-
crete entities pertaining to specific economic orders and hierarchies of
knowledge.
The Eurocentricity of the colonial order of things has been contested
in Latin America and other former colonies as part of the process of
decolonization. These forms of resistance have often stemmed from the
rejection of the commodification of material bodies in the globalized
economy, which followed colonialism in assigning bodies abstract sym-
bolic values in the capitalization of labor and natural resources. As Quija-
no writes, commodification is the end product of Cartesian rationality,
which separates personhood from the body in order that the body may be
objectified, that is, subordinated as the object of power (“Coloniality”
555). He clarifies this point in another essay, in a section dealing with
racism: “la corporalidad es el nivel decisivo de las relaciones de poder.
Porque el ‘cuerpo’ menta a la ‘persona’ si se libera el concepto de ‘cuerpo’
de las implicaciones mistificatorias del antiguo dualismo judeocristiano
192 Aguilera

(alma-cuerpo, psiquis-cuerpo, etcétera). Y eso es lo que hace posible la

‘naturalización’ de tales relaciones sociales” (corporality is the decisive
level of power relations. Because the “body” alludes to the “person” if the
concept of “body” is liberated from the mystifying implications of the
ancient Judeo-Christian dualism [soul-body, psyche-body, etc.]. And this
is what makes the “naturalization” of these social relations possible; “Co-
lonialidad” 324). In other words, the co-presence of the body-subject is
ruptured, but the body still alludes to the person; the subordination of
the body in power relations and economic production thus translates into
the subalternity of the person, of that particular category of personhood
and subjectivity as a subaltern category or race. As he drives home, “en la
explotación, es el cuerpo el que es usado y consumido en el trabajo y, en
la mayor parte del mundo, en la pobreza, en el hambre, en la
malnutrición, en la enfermedad. Es el cuerpo el implicado en el castigo,
en la represión, en las torturas y en las masacres durante las luchas contra
los explotadores” (in exploitation, it is the body that is used and con-
sumed in work and, in most of the world, in poverty, in hunger, in
malnutrition, in sickness. It is the body that is implicated in punishment,
in repression, in torture, and massacres during struggles against exploit-
ers; “Colonialidad” 324).
For Quijano, the body is inseparable from specific modes of produc-
tion and the subjectivities they produce because “the body was and could
be nothing but an object of knowledge” divorced from subjectivity, that
is, rationality (“Coloniality” 555). Indeed, Quijano’s later work questions
traditional Latin American perspectives on material relations, whether
those based on liberal notions of human rights or those related to Marxist
thought. In addition to his critique of the Western, Cartesian logic that
generates this rift within the body-person complex to produce the non-
body (mind-reason-subject), he expands his own work by focusing on the
subjugation and production of particular kinds of subaltern bodies. Sev-
eral other authors had previously viewed the body as the center of in-
quiry, but within the discipline of Latin American political economy,
Quijano’s arguments were groundbreaking in the sense that they destabi-
lized entrenched definitions and approaches to the problem of material
relations and brought them together in a single analytical paradigm: that
of colonial power relations. For the first time, social classifications, con-
trolled labor, the reproduction of a patriarchal system, control over and
the making of nature, and the human and the nonhuman were analyzed
under a clearly delineated problem.
Quijano’s proposal for an analysis of the body as the site where colo-
nial power relations are enacted paralleled the rise of the “new material-
isms” or material feminisms, which constitute a feminist critical reevalua-
tion of Marxian material dialectics, thereby reconfiguring the feminist
discourse of the body. 23 In contrast with the deconstructive perspective
of culture as an inescapable symbolic matrix that prevailed in the 1980s
 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics 193

and 1990s, emerging material feminist models redefine the body as the
sole locus of cultural production. As Diane Coole notes, “the predomi-
nant sense of matter in modern Western culture has been that it is essen-
tially passive stuff, set in motion by human agents who use it as a means
of survival, modify it as a vehicle of aesthetic expression, and impose
subjective meaning upon it” (“Inertia” 92). By taking the affective proper-
ties of bodies of all kinds into account, new materialisms integrate non-
human agents, or “actants” in Latour’s parlance, into the making of the
world. In this sense, the new materialisms resist the colonial impulse to
annihilate all traces of other civilizations’ cultures from colonized bodies,
including nonhuman ones (if one takes into account colonial terraform-
ing projects). 24 Human and nonhuman bodies are thus the site of both the
experience of coloniality and of resistance to it.
As many scholars have pointed out, the concept of nature is itself
directly implicated in this process of the implementation of colonial pow-
er over colonized bodies. Nature is a Eurocentric form of thinking and
knowledge production that subjugates the body to the non-body, matter
to idea, human nature to the ideal. The concept of human and nonhuman
nature was used to create hierarchies of knowledge designed specifically
for subordinating the bodies of human and nonhuman others. Indeed,
scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt have shown that naturalism, the prac-
tice of implementing the “nature” category, was a fundamental mecha-
nism in colonization, serving to naturalize Eurocentric coloniality as ra-
tional and coherent. 25 In this way, the naturalistic order of things placed
matter in discursive formations that subordinated it to its symbolic value
within the colonial economy.
In this scenario, both new materialisms and indigenous cosmopolitics
become important tools for resisting colonial power relations at the site at
which they are implemented: the body. For decolonial scholars in the
Global South, the re-emergence and acknowledgment of non-Western
cosmovisions is essential for a larger plan of decoloniality. Decoloniza-
tion is not limited to indigenous peoples; it is a process in which non-
Western cosmovisions open a space for critiquing colonial formations
governing the social construction of bodies, gender, race, and the state,
but also environments and the human/nature divide. As the texts in-
cluded in Tejiendo de otro modo demonstrate, the process of decolonization
cannot be completed without depatriarchalization and a re-consideration
of the epistemic dominance that has permeated critical approaches with-
in Latin American critical perspectives. Furthermore, decolonial perspec-
tives such as new materialisms and indigenous cosmopolitics allow us to
envision alternative material practices and state formations that liberate
bodies from the colonial power relations imposed by these categories. In
this sense, decolonial thought is what permits pluriverses to emerge as
multiple, covalent worldviews that are capable of coexisting within a
single geographic area.
194 Aguilera

TOWARD A SOCIAL JUSTICE THAT MATTERS

As the Wirikuta case has shown, developmentalism, as a worldview, and

the extractive practices that are associated with it often result in the geo-
graphical displacement and cultural dispossession of indigenous groups.
In this sense, sites of development are frequently foci of racialized physi-
cal and cultural violence. Nevertheless, indigenous groups like the
Wixáritari are able to engage in alliances with human and nonhuman
actors in order to defend their territory and cultural rights. Up until now,
at least, the Wixáritari have been successful in engaging in a politics of
matter that obligated the Mexican legal system to move beyond anthro-
pocentric multiculturalism and recognize, at least provisionally, nonhu-
man rights along with human ones.
The Wixáritari’s indigenous cosmopolitics coincide with the new ma-
terialisms in viewing matter as a potentiality and a becoming, thereby
creating a space of reflection and possibilities for emancipatory practices
within institutionalized academia, but also in the broader social and legal
spheres. This discussion is essential to decolonial thought, since colonial
power is constituted through the denial not only of any agency to nonhu-
man beings, but also the negation of ontology in general, especially of
ontologies that contradict its own modern concept of being as a uniquely
human property that is not proper to nonhuman nature. In this sense,
modern knowledge itself relies on a very fundamental form of violent
dispossession, one that strips being, and therefore personhood, from all
nonhuman entities and even many humans, if we take into consideration
the persistent racialization and commodification of human bodies that
characterizes both colonial and modern economies.
A politics of matter, whether indigenous or not, sets the stage for the
social and legal acknowledgment of pluriverses, that is, infinite points of
view, and the recognition of the legal personhood of environments and
their inhabitants. This kind of politics has become paramount given the
enormity of the global ecological crisis that we are currently facing. In
Latin America, federal governments’ efforts to foster intercultural di-
alogues with indigenous citizens within the framework of neoliberal
multiculturalism have clearly been insufficient, given the massive scale of
dispossession of indigenous and other groups in the construction of
infrastructure, megaprojects, and extractive enterprises. Whether the de-
velopment projects come from the political right or the political left, the
results are most often the same: the consistent annihilation of environ-
ments and sustainable ways of life in favor of short-term profit. For this
reason, it is necessary to depart from mainstream multiculturalism in
order to understand and resolve environmental justice cases in the Amer-
icas. As I have argued throughout this essay, I believe that environmental
conflicts can be analyzed more fruitfully through the notion of pluri-
verses, which entail a defiant ontological standpoint that recognizes the
 Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics 195

interconnectedness that material feminists, new materialisms, and indig-

enous cosmopolitics place at the forefront. Furthermore, the notion of the
pluriverse has been elaborated from the Global South, thus constituting a
decolonial theoretical tool that is capable of providing a constructive cri-
tique to the conceptualization of cosmopolitics and new materialisms
from Europe and the United States.

NOTES

1. Regarding this point, see Rafi Youatt, “Interspecies Relations, International Re-
lations: Rethinking Anthropocentric Politics” and María Julieta Lamberti, “¿El Avatar
mexicano? Una sociología no sociocéntrica de los conflictos derivados de la instalación
de empresas mineras en territorios indígenas.”
2. César Carrillo Trueba promotes this perspective in Pluriverso: Un ensayo sobre el
conocimiento indígena contemporáneo.
3. Wixáritari is the name for the ethnic group in its language (commonly Huichol
in Spanish); Wixárika is the singular form, the adjectival form, and the group’s own
name for its language (Negrín n. pag.).
4. See the Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta Tamatsima Wahaa’s website “Para en-
tender Wirikuta” for more information on these projects and the threats they pose to
the local environment and the Wixárika cultural heritage.
5. See Pedro Nikken, “La protección de los derechos humanos.”
6. For a more in-depth history of this conflict, see Liffman’s Huichol Territory and
the Mexican Nation: Indigenous Ritual, Land Conflict, and Sovereignty Claims.
7. As Abram writes in The Spell of the Sensuous, “to the sensing body, nothing
presents itself as utterly passive or inert. Only by affirming the animateness of per-
ceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our
ongoing reciprocity with the world” (56).
8. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
9. See Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, ” Introducing the New Materialisms.”
10. See Ramón Grosfoguel, “Colonial Difference, Geopolitics of Knowledge, and
Global Coloniality in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist World-System.”
11. See Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, “Etnocentricidad y colonialismos en el feminis-
mo latinoamericano.”
12. On this point, see Félix Báez-Jorge, Memorial del etnocidio.
13. See César Nava Escudero, “Indigenous Environmental Rights in Mexico.”
14. See CNN Mexico’s report on “Minera canadiense cede concesiones en el territo-
rio protegido de Wirikuta.”
15. See the Wixárika Ceremonial Centers Union’s nomination for inclusion on this
list.
16. See Guillermo de la Peña, “Ethnographies of Indigenous Exclusion in Western
Mexico.”
17. Regarding the notion and practice of indigenous cosmopolitics, see Isabelle
Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”; Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmo-
politics in the Andes”; and Catherine Walsh, “Interculturalidad y (de)colonialidad:
Diferencia y nación de otro modo.”
18. For a general discussion of extractivism in Latin America see Maristella Svam-
pa’s “Consenso de los commodities.”
19. Regarding some of the implications of a “politics of matter,” consult Stengers,
“Including Nonhumans in Political Theory.” For a discussion of decolonial thought
and practice, see Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.”
196 Aguilera

20. On this topic, consult Nicolás Ellison and Mónica Martínez Mauri’s edited vol-
ume on Paisaje, espacio y territorio: Reelaboraciones simbólicas y reconstrucciones identitarias
en América Latina.
21. Regarding this point, see Lamberti’s “¿El Avatar mexicano?”
22. See Foucault, The Order of Things.
23. Regarding this genealogy, see Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of
Femininity.”
24. On this colonial violence, see Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.
25. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

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 ELEVEN
Ecological Crisis and the
Re-Enchantment of Nature in
Jaime Huenún’s Reducciones
Ida Day

Chilean poet Jaime Huenún’s Reducciones (Reductions; 2012) explores the

social and environmental consequences of European colonization since
the second half of the nineteenth century, when southern Chile received
thousands of German immigrants as part of a state-sponsored coloniza-
tion plan. Confronted with large stretches of impenetrable native forests,
the colonists began a deforestation process in order to prepare the land
for agriculture and livestock farming, which left a profound impact on
the society, economy, and geography of the region. In less than a century,
the region spanning La Araucanía to Chiloé lost at least three million
hectares of native forests. 1 The massive destruction of indigenous forests
and their recent replacement with pine plantations caused the ecological
degradation of regional ecosystems, forcing local farmers to leave their
land and join a population of migrant temporary workers. Indigenous
territories shifted considerably due to private expropriations of land and
forced labor migrations. 2
An ecological perspective of this history of colonization is present
throughout Huenún’s work, addressing the interplay between the Ma-
puche-Huilliche people, the colonists, and the natural world. Huenún is
deeply engaged with a central mission of Latin American indigenous
writers and cultural activists: resisting the ecological crises provoked by
the expansion of neoliberal capitalism. Their work criticizes the homoge-
nizing effects of globalization on local communities and environments,
which have resulted in the loss of biodiversity as well as the sacred con-
199
200 Day

nection between indigenous people and the natural world. They also
focus on protecting traditional knowledge from commercial exploitation
in the service of bioprospecting and cultural tourism, which perpetuates
the indigenist myths that idealize native peoples’ attitudes toward na-
ture. As Huenún frames it, “las expresiones de arte y los conocimientos
originarios han sido rotulados como charlatanería, folklore o simple co-
stumbrismo nativista apto . . . para ser transado en el mercado del turis-
mo” (indigenous knowledge and artistic expressions have been labeled
as charlatanism, folklore, or a simple nativist costumbrismo . . . in order to
be traded on the tourist market; cited in Rojas 67). 3 In response, these
indigenous activists’ view on the environmental consequences of coloni-
alism and modern industrial society is often marked by an anticolonial
approach to ecological crisis (Huenún, “Sobre Reducciones” 314).
This chapter focuses on the decolonial ecological aspects of Huenún’s
Reducciones, which explores the history of Mapuche-Huilliche commu-
nities in Chile that has traditionally been silenced in colonial historical
discourse. The title refers to native territories; similar to North American
“Indian reservations,” the “reducciones” are fragmented territories used
by the state to corral indigenous peoples since the sixteenth century.
However, the term also implies various ways of “reducing” native peo-
ples materially and symbolically, implying not only a reduction in the
extent of their traditional territories, but also of their languages, histories,
and cultural traditions. Ironically, given this colonial dynamic of reduc-
tion, indigenous peoples’ cultural traditions emphasizing the unity of
spirit and matter have often been used to enrich Western environmental
thought. 4 In particular, they have contributed to the reevaluation of the
concept of ecology as a purely scientific field, redefining it as a “funda-
mentally holistic” knowledge that “cannot truly be reduced” (Carrol 11).
In this sense, Jaime Huenún’s Reducciones combats colonial territorial and
cultural reductivism by offering a spiritually based ecological model that
engages central aspects of indigenous ecologies, such as the relationship
of mutual respect with local ecosystems and the understanding of knowl-
edge as holistic and embodied, uniting material and spiritual experience.
I examine how Huenún’s work addresses the concept of ecological crisis
in terms of the loss of indigenous culture and its sacred relationship to
nature. Also, I highlight its contribution to “a global and cross-cultural
phenomenon” of spiritual ecology, which calls for responses to ecological
crisis that include spiritual awareness and reverence for the natural
world (Sponsel xi).
Jaime Huenún, born in 1967 in Valdivia, considers himself a mestizo
poet: “mi padre es huilliche y mi madre chilena, por lo que mi vida y mi
poesía están entre las dos realidades” (my father is Huilliche and my
mother Chilean, and that is why my life and my poetry are between the
two realities; “Poesía mapuche actual” n. pag.). Like the majority of con-
temporary Mapuche-Huilliche, Huenún grew up in the city (Osorno),
 Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Reducciones 201

and did not learn his ancestral language, Tsezungun. His collection Puer-
to Trakl (2001) portrays this loss of cultural/indigenous identity in mod-
ern urban communities, which has resulted in “una orfandad que vive la
población indígena del país” (an orphanhood suffered by the indigenous
population of the country; Huenún, “Huenún” n. pag.). Huenún is also
the author of Ceremonias (Ceremonies; 1999), Fanon City meu (2014), and
two edited anthologies: La memoria iluminada: Poesía mapuche
contemporánea (Illuminated Memories: Contemporary Mapuche Poetry; 2007)
and Antología de poesía indígena latinoamericana: Los cantos ocultos (Antholo-
gy of Latin American Indigenous Poetry: The Hidden Songs; 2008). His work
represents a collective voice of Mapuche-Huilliche communities and
foregrounds their complex, pluricultural reality: “los artistas indígenas y
mestizos de Chile consideramos que nuestros trabajos conjugan espiritu-
alidad y materialidad, tradición e innovación, arraigo y diáspora, memor-
ia mítica y memoria histórica” (the indigenous and mestizo artists of
Chile believe that our work combines spirituality and materiality, tradi-
tion and innovation, rootedness and the diaspora, mythical memory and
historical memory; Huenún, “Carta abierta” 274). In accordance with the
postcolonial denunciation of Western essentialism, which rejects “the
simplistic binary oppositions upon which much of colonialist and postco-
lonialist discourse is predicated,” Huenún maintains a critical distance
from exotic stereotypes that trivialize indigenous communities and ex-
clude them from global discourses (Liebmann 73). Even though the poet
rejects the idea of returning to the origin, citing “la imposibilidad de
volver a los lugares antiguos del ser” (the impossibility of returning to
bygone places of being), he recurs to indigenous history in order to high-
light the roots of the current ecological imbalance (Huenún, Ceremonias
11). His work foregrounds the evidences and effects of past practices that
lie at the root of material conditions in the present. It offers a deeper
understanding of the crisis, which has not only material but also spiritual
dimensions.
Shawn William Miller observes in Environmental History of Latin Amer-
ica (2007) that, “only by putting nature in our official past can we poten-
tially grasp its substantially altered place in our present and future” (5).
Accordingly, Miller casts “both nature and culture in the roles of the
protagonists,” giving nonhuman life (animal and plant species) and natu-
ral resources a place in his historiography (2). Huenún’s protagonists also
come from human and nonhuman worlds; however, the nonhuman sub-
jects of Reducciones include not only material but also nonmaterial ele-
ments. The work enriches the environmental outlook on history with the
sacred dimension of spiritual ecology. Using a Mapuche dialogue,
nütram, the poet “entrelaza ratazos de mitos, recetas medicinales e histor-
ias de parientes y vecinos vivos y difuntos” (interlaces pieces of myths,
medicinal knowledge, histories of living and dead relatives and neigh-
bors), emphasizing the spiritual/sacred aspects of his indigenous tradi-
202 Day

tion (Reducciones 118). Huenún integrates the voices of nature, ancestors,

and spirits in his work in order to demonstrate the intimate material and
spiritual bonds between indigenous people, their cultural traditions, and
the natural world, the loss of which has resulted in ecological crisis.
In contrast to indigenous poetry focused on traditional, rural forms of
existence, Huenún’s work includes a reflection on the position of contem-
porary Mapuche-Huilliche in a globalized world: “el paisaje mapuche . . .
no puede ser en mi poesía sino el escenario de una degradación perma-
nente y no el lugar ameno que muchos snobs amantes de lo exótico
buscan en la lírica escrita por autores indígenas” (In my poetry . . . the
Mapuche landscape cannot be but a scene of permanent degradation, not
the idealized pastoral setting that many aficionados of the exotic look for
in lyric poetry written by indigenous authors; Huenún, “Jaime Huenún”
4). Since most contemporary Mapuche-Hulliche live in urban areas and
do not speak their people’s native language, the author problematizes the
conventional, exotic view of indigenous cultures and their environ-
ments. 5 As Rodrigo Rojas notes, Reducciones combines different poetic
voices including European colonists, indigenous people, spirits, and the
author himself, as well as mixing indigenous oral tradition with Western
literary sources, as ways of opposing “la reducción del individuo ma-
puche a un ser unidimensional, cuya esencia está ligada a la oralidad y al
ámbito rural” (the reduction of the Mapuche individual to a one-dimen-
sional being, whose existence is linked to orality and the rural setting; 34).
Reducciones’ opening section, “Entrada a Chauracahuin” (“Entrance to
Chauracahuin”), which refers to the original name of the contemporary
city of Osorno, recounts the history of colonization of this region and the
emergence of new cultural identities. It also describes the transformations
of the natural environment from native forests to the current farmland:
“abrir a incendio y hacha la húmeda e impenetrable selva del pellín y del
laurel, chamuscar el pelaje pardo del pudú, derretir los pequeños cuernos
del huemul con las brasas del coigüe derribado, fueron algunos de los
afanes que permitieron convertir los campos de los huilliche en haciendas
y llanuras productivas. Ahora en las grandes praderas de los fundos
osorninos pastan las vacas Holstein y los rojos toros Hereford (To open
the humid and impenetrable jungle of pellín and laurel, to singe the
pudú’s dark fur, to melt small antlers of huemul with the embers of a
felled coigüe, these were some of the desires that motivated the transfor-
mation of the Huilliche countryside into haciendas and productive
plains. Today, Holstein cows and red Hereford bulls graze in the vast
grasslands of Osorno’s estates; 23). As is evident in this description, the
Osorno region of Chile exemplifies the European imperialistic practice of
terraforming its colonies to make them resemble European environ-
ments, a global phenomenon studied by Alfred Crosby in Ecological Impe-
rialism (1986). Huenún demonstrates how slash-and-burn agriculture ap-
plied to the Valdivian temperate rainforest has produced “a German or
 Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Reducciones 203

Swiss farm,” as well as enormous biodiversity and cultural losses: “la

explotación civilizada terminó con uno de los territorios más bellos de la
tierra, con ríos, montañas y bosques interminables, inmensos, misterio-
sos” (civilized exploitation put an end to one of the world’s most beauti-
ful territories, with rivers, mountains, and unending, immense, mysteri-
ous forests). 6
Contrary to the myth of a pristine pre-Columbian America, however,
these forests had a long history of human intervention and management
before the arrival of the Europeans. The indigenous people also used
slash-and-burn agriculture that affected local forests, but their seasonal
migrations from habitat to habitat minimized their ecological footprints.
Thomas Miller Klubock points out that while European colonizers
viewed the Mapuches “as a vagrant population of barbarian nomads
with no fixed relationship to territory or land, their mobility was part of
an extensive agricultural economy that reflected a dynamic engagement
with southern Chile’s ecological landscape” (13). This form of land use
did not endanger the overall ecological health of the land even after
centuries of habitation and use. In contrast, the European colonists ex-
panded and distorted the indigenous agricultural techniques, while the
importation of nonnative cattle and plant species and the application of
Western notions of private property made impractical any process of
rotation that might have allowed the land to regenerate. “Entrance to
Chauracahuin” illustrates how the colonization of the Huilliche territory
transformed the biodiverse endemic ecosystem into ecological impover-
ished “haciendas and productive plains,” although even these estates
were marked by hybrids of cultures and species.
Much more devastating consequences of colonization are revealed in
the poem “Trumao,” which describes land degraded by agriculture, log-
ging, and ranching. If, as Mansilla Torres affirms, “Entrance to Chauraca-
huin” problematizes the implications of colonization in the emergence of
“mestizajes múltiples, dinámicos, subversivos, dolorosos a veces” (multi-
ple, dynamic, subversive, and sometimes painful mestizajes), “Trumao”
focuses exclusively on its negative effects, particularly the ecological cri-
sis that it provoked. 7 In the Mapuche language, trumao refers to the fertile
volcanic soil. It is also the name of a small town in Los Lagos region,
which was an important center of economic development between the
end of the nineteenth century and the 1960s, providing a port and a train
station for transporting agricultural products, animals, and lumber. The
opening verse of the poem, “venganza de la tierra, venganza de las aguas
solas” (vengeance of the earth, vengeance of solitary waters), communi-
cates the exploitation and abuse of the once fertile land, which is now
eroded and cannot be used productively (134). The personalization of
nature and the use of word “vengeance” imply an interdependent rela-
tionship between the natural and human worlds, symbolizing the nega-
tive consequences for people of exploitative attitudes and actions toward
204 Day

nature. The images of the degraded environment in the poem are charged
with feelings of loss and alienation: “botellas de plástico en la vía férrea,
durmientes como corchos podridos donde zumban y anidan sin descanso
las avispas asesinas” (plastic bottles on the railway, sleeping like rotten
corks where assassin wasps tirelessly buzz and nest; 134). The ecological
crisis described in “Trumao” is the result of economic imperialism,
which, as observed by Miller, turned “ecologically diverse landscapes
into monocultural regimes . . . spreading cancer, ravaging everything at
its perimeter and leaving a black, dead core characterized by deforesta-
tion, erosion, and ghost towns” (131). Huenún’s poem makes allusions to
this colonial dynamic, presenting economic violence against the natural
world as acts of profanation. He uses negative imagery to capture de-
forestation, referring to “los invisibles bosques de la profanación” (the
invisible profaned forests; 134). In the author’s perspective, the natural
environment is sacred and should be treated with great respect and rev-
erence.
Similar environmental and cultural desolation is the theme of the
poem, “Campamento de Pampa Schilling” (“The Settlement of Pampa
Schilling”), which addresses the material and spiritual consequences of
economic development and colonization: “ya viudos de nuestros dioses,
viudos del sol, del agua y de la luna llena. Adentro, frente al bracero,
quemamos lengua y memoria” (already widowed of our gods, widowed
of the sun, of the water, and the full moon. Inside, before the fire, we burn
language and memory; 112). Campamento Pampa Schilling in Osorno
(paradoxically named after the German landowner) refers to the resettle-
ment of indigenous people displaced from their territories in the 1970s.
During the forestry export boom that began following Pinochet’s 1973
coup d’état, Mapuche peasants were expelled from their lands through-
out southern Chile. The rural zones dedicated to pine forestry production
became “the poorest in the country, with unemployment rates that ex-
ceeded the national average of more than 20 percent (in some zones it
approached 50 percent) and a ballooning population of landless peasants
who lived in rural poblaciones (shantytowns) along the sides of roads and
highways” (Klubock 240). Pampa Schilling is an example of this miser-
able settlement on a constricted allotment of land, colloquially referred to
as a “población callampa” (mushroom town).
Huenún’s poem alludes to the relationship between the inhabitants of
the camp, their environment, tradition, and cultural memory. It illus-
trates the social and ecological costs of the neoliberal economic system,
which generates “avasalladoras economías extractivas, sin considera-
ciones mayores por el medio ambiente y las propiedades indígenas”
(devastating extractive economies, without the slightest consideration for
the environment or indigenous property rights). 8 The export-oriented
pine forestry production has resulted in ecological crisis, characterized by
the destruction of native forests, the erosion of local ecosystems, and the
 Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Reducciones 205

dislocation of indigenous communities. The poem describes the native

trees (ulmo and laurel) outside of Pampa Schilling, posing the question:
“¿Para quién brilla el laurel?” (for whom does the laurel shine?), thereby
capturing the Mapuche communities’ exclusion from their customary
uses of native forests (112). As Klubock notes, state policies defined in-
digenous people as a “threat to the forest and restricted their access to the
basic forest resources necessary to subsistence” (5). Confronted with
these restrictions, Mapuche communities made claims to the land they
considered public or Mapuche ancestral lands, basing themselves on
“long histories of possession since time immemorial” (Klubock 19). At
the same time, the native trees in Huenún’s poem also allude to the
biodiversity of southern Chile’s temperate forests destroyed by colonial
exploitation and monoculture pine plantations. 9 The loss of biodiversity
is parallel here to the loss of indigenous culture, since both are threatened
by the homogenizing impacts of the neoliberal system.
Apart from being deprived of their land, fauna, and flora, the inhabi-
tants of Pampa Schilling are also losing their language and traditions,
which is metaphorically expressed in the verse: “quemamos lengua y
memoria” (we are burning language and memory; 112). The reference to
“burning” evokes the destruction of both indigenous culture and territo-
ries and culture due to the overuse of slash-and-burn agriculture. In her
reflection on Huenún’s work, Elvira Hernández links the disappearance
of indigenous traditions to the loss of reverence for the natural world,
stating that the environment of contemporary Mapuche-Huilliche “no
permite conversar con la sabiduría de la tierra—con la que rompió su
alianza” (does not allow one to converse with the wisdom of the earth—
with which it has broken its alliance; 61). Like many other contemporary
indigenous authors, who consider the disconnection from nature and
tradition one of the major causes of ecological and spiritual crisis,
Huenún illuminates the loss of local beliefs and practices in “Settlement
of Pampa Schilling.” The spiritual loss is expressed in the poem through
the symbolic representation of death, particularly through the use of the
term “viudos” (widowed). The residents of the población are permeated
by a sense of deprivation and desolation, and the natural world outside
of the camp communicates these feelings: “afuera brilla el laurel a
relámpagos y a sangre. El monte es una neblina y el agua del mar se arde
(outside, the laurel shines with lightning and blood. The mountain is a
mist and the sea’s water burns; 112). The images of blood, lightning, and
burning water imply the violent events in Huilliche history, “witnessed”
by the local environment. In “Settlement of Pampa Schilling,” natural
phenomena revive the voices/spirits of the past as a denunciation of in-
justices committed against the Huilliche community. The poem presents
the land as a spiritual being with a soul, “what the ancients called the
anima mundi [which] was forgotten, banished even from our collective
206 Day

memories” (Vaughan-Lee, “Spiritual Ecology” n. pag.). As in spiritual

ecology, the nature here is a living being, which needs healing.
Huenún turns to spiritual ecology as a remedy to the crisis. The eco-
logical crisis in his poetry is the result of economic exploitation of native
communities and the environmental devastation of their ancestral lands.
It is not only a physical crisis but also a spiritual one, manifested by
“human alienation from nature combined with disenchantment, objectifi-
cation, and commodification of nature” (Sponsel xv). Huenún responds
to it by proposing a spiritual ecology, which re-enchants nature and ex-
pands the scope of scientific ecology with a spiritual dimension. Since
scientific ecology refers to the study of physical interrelations in an eco-
system, it does not address the root of the ecological crisis, which is the
disregard for the sacred nature of life.
According to the principles of spiritual ecology, ecological imbalance
is caused by the idea that human beings are separate from the world, and
“the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetful-
ness of its sacred nature” (Vaughan-Lee, Spiritual Ecology 1). As observed
by Tony Watling, this modern, Cartesian Western worldview has created
a “disenchantment of the world, an eclipse of magical and spiritual
forces, denying creativity and sacredness to nature” (16). Humanity has
become alienated from the natural world and has lost a sense of nature as
a place of belonging and worship. According to Marx, this alienation
from nature occurred with the shift toward industrialized production.
Since Marx was a materialist, however, his analysis downplayed any
spiritual dimension as a mystification of the modes of economic produc-
tion. Given the ecological crisis generated by modern modes of produc-
tion, however, many advocates of spiritual ecology consider indigenous
traditions to be a source of ideals, attitudes, and values for remedying the
destructive effects of modern worldviews. Especially influential is ani-
mism (from Latin animus referring to “spirit, soul”), a belief system that
attributes a spiritual essence to nonhuman entities. The principles of ani-
mism are manifest in spiritual ecology, emphasizing the reverence for the
natural world, as well as the interdependences and interconnectedness
within environmental systems. Thomas Berry, one of the leading figures
in spiritual ecology, refers to the human disconnection from the natural
world as “spiritual autism,” stating that: “we are talking only to our-
selves. We are not talking to the rivers, we are not listening to the wind
and stars. We have broken that great conversation” (cited in
Vaughan-Lee, Spiritual Ecology 59). The author calls for regaining the inti-
mate connection between human beings and nature, present in indige-
nous worldviews.
Jaime Huenún’s poetry reflects the sacred link between the Mapuche
people and their environment: “todo el mundo espiritual mapuche está
vinculado a la naturaleza. . . . No se entiende la cultura mapuche sin esta
vinculación porque ya ‘mapuche’ significa ‘gente de la tierra’” (the entire
 Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Reducciones 207

Mapuche spiritual world is linked to nature. . . . The Mapuche culture

cannot be understood without this link since “Mapuche” itself means
“people of the earth”; Huenún, “Huenún” n. pag.). Resuming the “great
conversation” described by Berry, the elements of nature are protagonists
in Reducciones—they feel, speak, listen, and respond: “Cantan árboles
canciones de un nublado y ciego amor” (Trees sing songs of a clouded
and blind love; 94). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describes this kind of
universal communication between people, animals, and other elements
of the cosmos as a kind of “multinaturalism” consisting in “a spiritual
unity and a corporeal diversity,” where the spirit is universal and the
body particular (“Cosmological Deixis” 470). It thus contrasts with West-
ern cosmology, which postulates the metaphysical particularity (spirit or
mind as what differentiates the human) and unity of physical matter. The
Amerindian idea that the metaphysical is the integrator in the universe is
the foundational concept in animism, which attributes to nonhumans the
soul or spirit and therefore perspective, or subjectivity.
Animated forces and beings inhabit the enchanted nature represented
in Huenún’s poems. The author emphasizes the spiritual link between
human beings and the universe through the use of poetry, which, accord-
ing to him, has always been related to the sacred: “la poesía es el canto
que el hombre todavía no logra entender o descifrar completamente, el
canto a través del cual el universo le habla y a través del cual los espíritus
de la memoria están tratando de comunicarse” (poetry is the song that
man has still not completely comprehended or deciphered, the song
through which the universe speaks to him and through which the spirits
of memory attempt to communicate with us; “Poesía Mapuche” 9).
Transcending cultural boundaries, poetry communicates directly as an
expression of the universal spiritual society. John Felstiner expresses a
similar view in Can Poetry Save the Earth? (2009), which discusses the role
of poetry in spiritual ecology and environmental activism, arguing that
while science and policies focus on solutions, poetry can change our val-
ues by “stirring the spirit” and awaking the awareness of being an inte-
gral part of the universe. Huenún’s poems, in which nature and spirit are
inseparable, aim to awaken this awareness (Reducciones xiii).
“Parlamento de Huenteao en la Isla Pucatrihue” (“Huenteao’s Parley
on Pucatrihue Island”) is one example of a poem that articulates the
communication with the spirits of the universe. In Huilliche mythology,
Huenteao is a spirit living on the rocky island of Pucatrihue, in Osorno
Province. 10 According to the most popular version of the story of Abueli-
to Huenteao, the old man left for the sea because of accusations of incest
with his daughter-in-law. 11 After wandering for several days, he married
a mermaid and was turned into a rock. This marriage generated an alli-
ance between the sea and the Huilliche people, which granted them ac-
cess to marine natural resources. Huenún’s poem talks about the offer-
ings left on the rocks for Abuelito Huenteao (bread, tobacco, flowers) in
208 Day

order to ask permission to fish and to collect seaweed: “pronto partirán

con sus cosechas de algas y pescado, la pobre ración de sus afanes. El pan
y el tabaco que dejan en mis rocas serán para las olas; los ramos de trigo y
de flores caerán en las oscuras almas de la profundidad” (soon they will
depart with their harvest of seaweed and fish, the meager ration of their
labor. The bread and tobacco left on my rocks will be for the waves; the
bunches of wheat and flowers will fall into the dark souls of the depths;
115). Huenún emphasizes the communication between human beings
and the elements of the universe, facilitated here through the poetic voice
of Huenteao, a spirit in the form of a rock. This image finds its expression
in indigenous traditions, in which natural elements play an important
role in communications between living people and ancestral spirits (Petit-
Breuilh 142). In oral Huilliche tradition, Abuelito Huenteao is an “encan-
to,” which refers to “a sacred place, ruled by an atemporality and geo-
graphically localized, [where] the ancestors live in symbiosis with na-
ture” (Alvarez-Santullano and Barraza 9). By recurring to this tradition,
Huenún “re-enchants” nature, offering a response to the environmental
crisis, which is characterized by Watling as “a disenchantment of the
world” (16). The relationship between Huenteao and the local people
reflects the concept of indigenous kinship with the land, which is current-
ly considered an important aspect in management of ecosystems. Since
habitat fragmentation is a major factor endangering ecosystems, the in-
digenous notions of connectivity or kinship with nature “work against
fragmentation in all its forms, environmental and social” (Rose et al. 76).
In “Parlamento de Huenteao en la Isla Pucatrihue,” there is an inti-
mate spiritual and material interdependence and reciprocity between the
human and nonhuman worlds. As observed by Viveiros de Castro,
myths tell stories about physically diverse but spiritually equivalent be-
ings that “inextricably mix in a common context of intercommunicabil-
ity” (“Cosmological Deixis” 472). In this worldview, the original condi-
tion of all natural beings is not animality (as in modern biology), but
humanity (subjectivity or perspective, as Viveiros calls it); animals and
geographical features are often conceived of as existing within human
genealogies. In this sense, there is no clear distinction between nature and
culture: the natural world is also fundamentally human (472). Abuelito
Huenteao, an ex-human representing nature, receives rituals, respect,
and offerings from his former community in exchange for food. This
relationship represents indigenous peoples’ moral responsibilities to the
environments they inhabit. As Whitt and her collaborators state: just as
the land sustains them, “[native peoples] are obligated to provide their
lands with sustenance, to sustain them by means of practices and ceremo-
nies” (10). Unlike the Western/modern attitude towards nature character-
ized by use and exploitation, the indigenous attitude implies not only
use, but also care and respect. Therefore, the “sacred geography,” like
 Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Reducciones 209

Huenteao, is a “source of spiritual as well as physical sustenance” (Spon-

sel 14).
The practices described in Huenún’s poem demonstrate an attitude of
reverence toward nature and a sense of belonging to place. Such indige-
nous attitudes and ceremonies have served as influential sources in the
field of spiritual ecology. Winona LaDuke underscores the difference be-
tween the Western sense of place as an object of empire, “historically one
of conquest, of utilitarian relationship, of anthropocentric taking of
wealth,” and the indigenous notion of places as spirits or sacred beings
(86). She argues that, in the light of ecological crisis, it is important to
reexamine the scientific attitude to the physical world as a mere object
and to recognize our interconnectedness with the earth as a spiritual and
living being. The worship of sacred places by indigenous people reaf-
firms this interconnectedness.
The sacred sites in Huenún’s work also play a crucial role in preserv-
ing indigenous communities’ cultural identity since their histories and
human life experiences are woven into them. Such is the case of the
cemetery of San Juan in Osorno Province, which Huenún commemorates
in his poem, “En el cementerio de San Juan” (“In San Juan’s Cementery”).
The historical background of this work is the 1912 Forrahue massacre, in
which fifteen Huilliches were murdered in a protest against a violent
usurpation of their land. The cemetery of San Juan is a place of their
burial, where their spirits are believed to continue living. The poem de-
scribes this sacred site, composed of little wooden houses, in the time of
celebration: “el tiempo de las cruces, de las largas ofrendas” (the time of
the crosses, of the long offerings) when relatives come to visit their ances-
tors, eating, drinking, and conversing with them (114). Their dialogue is
facilitated through rituals and ceremonies. The cemetery thus preserves
the memory of the past, reconnecting the contemporary Huilliche with
their history. As Huenún frames it, “sin los ancestros nosotros no existi-
mos, . . . y la poesía que nosotros hacemos como autores mapuche-huil-
liche es un ejercicio de restitución de la voz de nuestros muertos” (with-
out ancestors we do not exist, . . . and the poetry that we create as Ma-
puche-Huilliche authors is an exercise in restituting the voices of our
dead; “Sobre Reducciones” 309). This statement reflects how indigenous
tradition relies on poetry and rituals transmitted through generations for
millennia. Ritual is designed to bring the past to life in the present, to
establish cyclical connections with the past; therefore, it plays a crucial
role in preserving tradition. The author shares this view with other con-
temporary Mapuche poets such as Elicura Chihuailaf, according to
whom the memory of the past helps indigenous people build a future in
which their voice will have greater impact: “somos presentes porque
somos pasado (tenemos memoria) y por eso somos futuro” (we are
present because we are the past [we have memory], and that is why we
are the future; “Elicura Chihuailaf” n. pag.). In both perspectives, poet-
210 Day

ry’s function is to revive traditions and values that not only affirm indige-
nous identity but also promote ecological awareness. 12 While both poets
recognize the importance of reconnecting with Mapuche traditions in
order to address the impact of globalization on indigenous communities,
Huenún’s Reducciones focuses on the role of colonialism in destroying
these traditions. Huenún’s poetry is heavily marked by the denunciation
of colonial injustices; in this sense, his poetry becomes an anti-colonial
tool (Huenún, “Poesía mapuche” 5). It addresses indigenous history in
the context of colonization, dismantling colonial stereotypes of native
people, as well as activating cultural awareness.
Since postcolonial criticism is committed primarily to the struggle for
social justice, it has been criticized for being human-centered and “insuf-
ficiently attuned to life-centered (eco- or biocentric) issues and concerns”
at a time of global environmental crisis (Huggan 702). However, there
has been growing interest in exploring the intersections between postco-
lonial and ecological concerns in recent decades. 13 Writers and scholars
have analyzed the ecological problems as a result of imperialistic exploi-
tation of communities and their environments. As observed by DeLough-
rey and Handley in Postcolonial Ecologies, “historicization has been a pri-
mary tool of postcolonial studies and . . . it is central to our understand-
ing of land and, by extension, the earth” (4). The natural world in these
works functions as a “participant in the historical process rather than a
bystander to a human experience” (DeLoughrey and Handley 4). This
perspective finds its expression in indigenous traditions, where nature
plays an important role in communications between people and the spir-
its of their ancestors.
Huenún’s Reducciones expresses this tendency poetically, demonstrat-
ing how historical violence and traumas are communicated through the
natural environment. Huenún’s poem “Huenchantü” reflects how nature
participates in the human experience of crisis: “escucha el silencio de los
campos, Abraham, ningún animalito ya nos habla. Los bosques en silen-
cio, como piedras, los pájaros sin voz. Huenchantü, huenchantü. Debajo
de la tierra el sol se pierde, debajo del frío remolino de las almas en pena”
(listen to the silence of the fields, Abraham, none of the animals speaks to
us. The forests in silence, like stones, the birds without voice.
Huenchantü, huenchantü. Under the earth the sun disappears, under the
cold swirl of lost souls; Reducciones 125). The silence of nature in the poem
is a literary trope of absence that implies the experience of loss and trau-
ma, which is incommunicable. According to Dominick LaCapra, the un-
speakable losses of the past are often impossible to express or articulate,
since trauma is a “disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and
creates holes in existence” (41). The experience of trauma in Huenún’s
poem is linked to the notion of “huenchantü,” which in mapudungun
refers to a “time of crisis, war and hunger, period of conflict.” 14 In this
case, the title refers to the effects in Chile of the 1929–1939 global political
 Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Reducciones 211

and economic crisis, which was characterized by unemployment and de-

spair, especially among the working class and peasants, and by violent
usurpations of indigenous territories. In the poem, the impact of this
crisis is not only felt by people, but also reflected in the natural world: “el
agua respiraba bajo tierra. . . . La tierra nuevamente ardía y nuestros
muertos, boca abajo, cubrían con sus sombras la extensa sombra de su
corazón” (the water was breathing under the earth. . . . The earth was
burning again, and our dead, face down, covered with their shadows the
extensive shadow of their hearts; 124). Contrasted with the dead bodies,
the water and the earth in the poem are breathing and feeling. This im-
agery suggests that the environment is a living organism, and conse-
quently it can suffer the experience of trauma. In “Huenchantü,” the
memory of historical events and human experiences is embedded in the
land and sea.
Huenún also uses autobiographical memory, challenging the Euro-
centric perspective that, in the words of Víctor de la Cruz, “relegated the
indigenous peoples’ past to the distant and poetic zone of myth” (29).
Huenún writes that “mi antigua parentela aborigen remontaba sus traba-
jos y sus días con ocasionales fiestas comunitarias. . . . Pero la rueda de
los tiempos, los soles y las lunas girando sobre vivos y difuntos, ha echa-
do sombra a esas viejas sabidurías. . . . Quedan en la tierra, corazón de
boqui y la memoria resistente . . . y los ríos: el Rahue, el Pilmaiquén, el
Bueno, buscándose por valles y declives, destellando con los peces que
brincan los remansos del atardecer” (my ancient indigenous family
transcended their work and their daily lives with occasional communal
celebrations. . . . But the wheel of time, suns and moons spinning over the
living and the dead, has cast a shadow over this old wisdom. . . . What is
left on the earth, is the heart of boqui and resistant memory . . . and the
rivers: Rahue, Pilmaiquén, Bueno, chasing one another through valleys
and slopes, glinting with the fish that jump over the still waters of dusk;
Reducciones 99). By disclosing personal memories and experiences, the
author connects native history with contemporary conditions and in-
creases the intimacy between the reader and Huilliche culture. Despite
the note of nostalgia, the main function of the work is to preserve tradi-
tions that are disappearing.
Huenún’s approach forms a contrast with the Latin American tradi-
tion of indigenismo, which focused on the return to the origin and ideal-
ized the indigenous past. As Rebecca Earle observes in The Return to the
Native, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century indigenist authors cele-
brated the precolonial past in their works without exploring any connec-
tions between the history and the present reality of the indigenous peo-
ple: “constant throughout was the use of pre-Columbian history to con-
struct national past that accorded little place to the contemporary indige-
nous population. In other words, preconquest Indians were good to build
nations with, contemporary Indians were not” (183). A similar view is
212 Day

expressed by Florencia Mallon in Decolonizing Native Histories, criticizing

the European/colonial perspective that excluded indigenous histories
from global discourses: “indigenous histories themselves have never
really been local, except in the eyes of the colonizers. Rather, they have
from the very beginning participated and been embedded in, trans-
formed by, and resistant to globalization” (220). Huenún’s work reflects
this view—his perspective on indigenous history is both local and global,
since it emphasizes the place of native histories in the construction of the
global present. By revitalizing memories and traditions, Reducciones acti-
vates awareness of and resistance to the reduction of Mapuche culture by
colonial historical discourse.
Reducciones introduces an alternative vision of care for the environ-
ment into debates over environmental ethics, redefining nature within a
spiritualized framework. It contributes to the emerging field of spiritual
ecology by manifesting intimate and dynamic connections with the natu-
ral and spirit worlds. Since spiritual ecology questions modernism’s dis-
enchantment of nature, it is antithetical to the environmental ethics of
modern colonial societies, which tend to objectify nature “as if it were no
more than a warehouse of material resources to exploit for consumption,
commerce, and profit” (Sponsel 17). Huenún’s postcolonial perspective
challenges this view by re-enchanting nature, reviving native traditions,
and reexamining the environmental history of Mapuche-Huilliche and
mestizo societies of Chile, thereby offering insight into the current eco-
logical crisis. Reducciones revisits the indigenous past not solely to lament
what has been lost, but also to propose a return to the traditional aware-
ness of the sacredness of life and nature that may ameliorate the crisis
provoked by the modern separation of culture and nature.

NOTES

1. This estimation was provided to the author by Jaime Huenún in e-mail corre-
spondence from October 29, 2014.
2. For a detailed study of the colonization of Mapuche territory see José Bengoa,
Historia del pueblo mapuche, siglo XIX y XX.
3. The commercial exploitation of indigenous traditions has become common
worldwide, as Lisa Aldred demonstrates in “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun
Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality.”
4. See John A. Grim’s Indigenous Traditions and Ecology, Roger S. Gottlieb’s Religion
and Ecology, and Leslie E. Sponsel’s Spiritual Ecology.
5. Many contemporary Mapuches rebel against these stereotypes, redefining their
indigenous identities as complex and diverse. In “Our Struggle Has Just Begun,”
Claudia Briones demonstrates how young Mapuches live “in friction with the idea
that Mapucheness is centrally linked to the countryside and rural life” and assert their
indigenous identity as punk rock and heavy metal fans and musicians (105).
6. Quote from Huenún, e-mail correspondence with the author dated October 5,
2011.
7. See Mansilla Torres 20.
 Ecological Crisis and the Re-Enchantment of Nature in Reducciones 213

8. Quote from Huenún, e-mail correspondence with the author dated October 25,
2014.
9. For a historical study of the destruction of southern Chilean forests, see Luis
Otero Durán, La huella del fuego.
10. Rolf Foerster examines numerous myths and legends relating to the transforma-
tions of humans (spirits of ancestors) into stones in Vida religiosa de los huilliches de la
costa.
11. See Pilar Alvarez-Santullano and Eduardo Barraza, “Escrituras de ‘encanto’ y
parlamento en la poesía huilliche.”
12. See also Elicura Chihuailaf, Recado confidencial a los chilenos.
13. Among the works that link the interests of postcolonial and ecological dis-
courses in literary studies, it is worth mentioning Caribbean Literature and the Envi-
ronment (2005), edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Reneé K. Gosson, and George B.
Handley, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (2010) by Gra-
ham Huggan and Helen Tiffin.
14. E-mail correspondence between Huenún and the author dated November 16,
2014.

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 TWELVE
Animales de alquiler
Challenging the Architectures of Domination

Ana Avalos and María Victoria Sánchez

The short film Animales de Alquiler (Zootizens: A Natural Reserve for Wild
Capitalism; 2010) uses a futuristic setting to examine the dreadful conse-
quences of environmental and social crises in developing countries. An
incisive critique of capitalism, Zootizens explores a not-so-distant future—
the year 2078—in Costa Rica, in which many rainforest animal species
have perished due to human over-exploitation of the environment. How-
ever, commercial laboratories have managed to store and patent genetic
samples of some of the species indigenous to this habitat. Engaging an
ecocritical framework, we view this film as denouncing the exploitation
of both human and nonhuman nature, as well as the logic of the system
that legitimizes such exploitation. Profiting from the rise in poverty and
unemployment levels and the ensuing social turmoil, these labs—which
are portrayed as big pharmaceutical corporations—develop a controver-
sial project: to implant the genetic material taken from the perished spe-
cies in people willing to become hybrid individuals in exchange for finan-
cial compensation. The term “beneficio”—which, in Spanish, can allude
to a financial benefit but also to an advantage—soon comes into question
as the mock documentary presents the negative effects behind the altruis-
tic façade of this project, as well as the reasons that drove these people to
become zootizens.
This fictional work was directed by Costa Rican filmmaker, university
professor, and philosopher Pablo Ortega, who incorporated stop-motion
animation into his filmmaking. The film has won several awards since its

217
218 Avalos and Sánchez

opening in 2010, and has been described by Ortega as a reflection on a

society in which “estamos siendo valorados no por nuestra humanidad
sino por lo que aportemos al sistema” (we are valued not for our human-
ity but for the profits we yield for the system; cited in O’Neal Coto, n.
pag.). 1 In our view, this short film can be read as an eco-narrative that
reflects on not only the state of the environment, but also the way in
which power is exerted over others and performed materially. The logic
of domination associated with late capitalism is exposed in all its raw-
ness: humans who happily conform to the role assigned them in the chain
of production-consumption as cheap manual labor and a natural ecosys-
tem that has been tampered with by humans for their own benefit. These
hybrid beings embody the harm of a system that creates new, subjugated
material subjects, which, in addition to their marginality, remain frag-
mented, unable to constitute a united front against their oppressor.
Contrary to what could be expected, however, these beings uphold
that system and its logic of domination. Through this logic, nature be-
comes one more element to be subdued and controlled in two ways: by
destroying the environment as a whole and by controlling the continuity
of individual species, modifying them at will. What’s more, the manipu-
lation of both genetic material and the result of that manipulation sup-
port and emphasize both anthropocentric and class-oriented exploitation.
As Serenella Iovino underscores, literature, as a space of wider imagina-
tive potential, is endowed with the ability to become “the site of a con-
stant, creative renewal of language, perception, communication, and
imagination” (“Ecocriticism” 36). Such is the case in this filmic text that
uses irony to make a mockery of commonplace arguments by which the
oppressed legitimize their own oppression. We contend that this irony
problematizes anthropocentric perspectives, thereby endorsing biocen-
tric discourse.
In this way, Zootizens promotes a rethinking of the place of the human
within nature, in which a horizontal relationship emerges between hu-
mans and their fellow inhabitants of the planet, whether animate or inan-
imate. Furthermore, it provides a niche for exploring and problematizing
the roles that the natural world plays in our culture. Such perspectives
become of utmost importance in times of profound ecological and social
crises, since at the root of all these different crises we can trace a system of
power and an associated logic of domination that generates inequalities
and the overexploitation of all “resources,” human and nonhuman alike.
While recognizing the value and centeredness of the natural world,
such a biocentric perspective also considers and analyzes hierarchical
social structures within our own human world. Building on feminist and
postcolonial studies, this view asserts that the construction of otherness
generates human as well as nonhuman others. Ecofeminism, postcolonial
ecology, and social ecology expose the processes by which the subjuga-
tion of the natural world is mirrored in the subjugation of certain groups.
 Animales de alquiler 219

Gender, race, and class, to name just a few categories, become markers of
differentiation and subjugation “in line with the hierarchy that opposes
nature to a dominating and conquering humankind,” explains Iovino
(“Ecocriticism” 37). This inquiry, thus, aims at “demystifying, on every
level and in the light of ecological interdependence, the conceptual archi-
tectures of domination . . . such as colonialism, industrialism, liberalism,
and consumerism” (37). 2 The term “architectures” highlights the con-
structed nature of the relationships between humans and nonhumans,
but also those that conform humans as a whole. Notably, Iovino borrows
the term from the semantic field of architecture, thereby highlighting
human agency in this particular matter, which involves not only material
practices, but also the abstract and imaginative creation of meanings con-
veyed through an innately human system of signs, a semiotics of func-
tional and aesthetic purpose.
On the other hand, the colonial foray has revealed these designs of
domination most blatantly by exposing the symbolic construction of a
human other, who had to be civilized and indoctrinated, its identity sup-
pressed. All of this was originally done for the cultural and political
benefit of a European metropolis and the reaffirmation of its legitimizing
values. Along the same lines, the distant colonies, with their exuberant
natural resources, were thought of as empty and ripe for the taking.
Using this logic, they were conquered for the economic benefit of the
metropolis. In the words of social ecologist Murray Bookchin, “the hier-
archical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate
society are what has given rise to the very idea of dominating the natural
world” (354). Both people and places were shaped and transformed to
mirror their European other, to represent and reproduce it.
The mock documentary film Zootizens presents a new social panora-
ma, in which old subjects interact with new bioengineered ones in the
context of social and ecological exploitation. The opening credits explain
this situation; following the title Zootizens: A Natural Reserve for Wild Capi-
talism, we find that the film is supposedly sponsored by the “Fundación
Salvemos al Pájaro DODO” (Save the DODO Bird Foundation). The allu-
sion to this fictional foundation prefigures the tampering with the genes
of extinct animals to preserve valuable—and profitable—genetic materi-
al. The dodo is already extinct and has been for more than three hundred
years, but the genetic material that might turn out profitable is not lost.
This suggests that the real interest is not so much in preserving the ani-
mals as in profiting from them. Another important detail in the opening
sequence is the word “Laboratorios,” which is capitalized. The use of the
capital case categorizes these labs as a proper noun, implying that they
are entities driven by their own impulses independent from the people
that make them up. Since the main function of a corporation is yielding
earnings for its shareholders, the profit-making drive provides a justifica-
tion for the intention to exploit animal species in the guise of conserving
220 Avalos and Sánchez

biodiversity. It may also be interpreted as an indicator of status: they are

powerful enough to be capitalized, and therefore highlighted. The pow-
erful “Laboratorios” are able to carry out this project despite its contro-
versial nature, overpowering any opposition.
Years later in the film’s chronology, the fictional documentary film-
makers interview several people who underwent the gene therapy and
benefited from the financial compensation provided to them. All of the
subjects interviewed belong to the working classes: a tapir man, Mario
Araya, who owns a small restaurant; a red-eyed tree frog woman, Yorleni
Zumbado, who works in a factory; and a brown-throated sloth man,
Carlos, who was fired from his office job and now begs and steals cables
to sell the copper. Another important character is a police officer mixed
with a fossil glyptodont, Aníbal Matamoros, who represents the author-
ities as part of a complementary project, “Hueso Duro Contra el Hampa”
(literally “Hard Bone Against Crime,” which suggests the use of violence
as a means for controlling social deviance).

THE DIALOGUE OF LANGUAGE AND MATTER

Given the decline in the legitimacy of the totalizing modern narratives

after World War II, philosophical and sociological reflections such as
post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and culturalism, which centered
their analyses on the linguistic construction of reality, dominated aca-
demic thought in the humanities. Karen Barad simultaneously sum-
marizes and critiques this perspective in “Posthumanist Performativity:
Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” writing
that: “language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn,
the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that
at every turn lately, every ‘thing’—even materiality—is turned into a
matter of language or some other form of cultural representation” (801).
Semiotic approaches focused mainly on the constitutive role that lan-
guage has in the representation of reality, the self, and in the construction
of social interactions. Some of the most important theories about the dis-
cursive nature of reality involve studies on how relationships of power
and dominance are built and established through linguistic mediation.
During the twentieth-century, the focus of philosophical analysis thus
changed from the study of the world in itself—ontology—to the study of
the discursive fields that mediate the world and human perception—
epistemology.
The impact of the theories that emerged from this epistemological
“dominant,” to borrow Brian McHale’s terminology, marked a paradigm
shift not only toward a view of texts as socio-linguistic constructions, but
also as refractions of the way in which power relations and worldview
are constructed. These productive paradigms allowed the disentangle-
 Animales de alquiler 221

ment and criticism of race, gender, and class hierarchies (and, more re-
cently, environmental subjects) in order to resist the exploitation of the
other. However, discursive paradigms became more and more detached
from material reality, to the point in which they could conceive of the
world solely as a discursive construct. In the words of Barad, “there is an
important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter
anymore is matter” (801). Beginning with the third-wave feminist recov-
ery of the body and the emergence of performance studies in the 1990s, a
“material turn” arose in the humanities that has begun to reinstate “mat-
ter,” whether animate or inanimate, at the core of things.
This new paradigm responds to a variety of technological discoveries
and significant scientific advances in medical and biological fields. As
Iovino summarizes, “the material constitution of nature and the nature of
matter are at the center of the so-called ‘material turn,’ an interdiscipli-
nary debate involving environmental philosophy, ecological humanities,
and ecocriticism” (“Material Ecocriticism” 51). Ecocriticism is, thus, at the
core of this new ontological and epistemological paradigm, which at-
tempts to return materiality to critical analysis while paying attention to
the discursive nature of the interpretation of material reality. Such an
outlook necessarily views matter in its affective potential, that is, its abil-
ity to transform other types of matter, and, in doing so, engage in a
relationship of permanent and dialectical transformation of the environ-
ment, including human as well as nonhuman beings. In this sense, Bruno
Latour’s term “actant” becomes an important concept for analyzing the
relationships between nature and humans, as well as human actions,
their consequences, and their resonances. As Jane Bennet summarizes,
actant refers to a source of energy, a potential for action that can be
human or nonhuman and, above all, has “efficacy, can do things, has
sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course
of events” (viii). This term, then, allows us to change our way of looking
at inert matter: through this theoretical lens, elements like rubbish, rocks,
chemicals, and gases possess the potential to transform their surround-
ings, whether human or nonhuman. As an example, polluted water has a
material effect on a human’s life. Matter then is seen from a different
perspective, one that enlarges our scope of analysis and incorporates new
elements.
In Zootizens, the person affected most negatively by his bodily changes
is Carlos, the only interviewed character who does not have a last name.
Since last names refer us back to a civic order of citizenship, the fact that
he does not have one reinforces his significant social and economic exclu-
sion. As a sloth, his natural speed became slower which cost him his
office job as a cashier in the “fast lane.” Moreover, his new claws make it
very difficult for him to work with a computer keyboard. He was not
warned about these side effects and now he has been reduced to begging
and stealing copper. Although the character states that he does not want
222 Avalos and Sánchez

to blame the project for what happened to him, footage showing his life
story is very telling of the ruthless application of the project (3:25). Conse-
quently, his discursive and material exclusion from the social order are a
direct effect of his bodily transformations.
The presence of these materially and discursively new subjects brings
to the forefront a complex situation of exploitation. On the one hand,
what could be an attempt to preserve extinct species is distorted into a
scheme whereby the “Laboratorios” manage to profit from the patents of
the genetic material of these species, while pushing disadvantaged peo-
ple into the controversial program, creating subjects that are doubly sub-
jugated: as animals and as disadvantaged citizens. On the other hand, the
uses of the genetic material without any regard for the results of their
actions hint at a view of matter as passive and inactive on the part of the
corporations. Nonetheless, the unpredictable consequences depicted in
the short film point to a role assigned to matter as actant. Although the
“Laboratorios” act without any concern or consideration for the potential
effects that tempering with genes might produce, since they are modified
as if there would be no further effects other than those “programmed,”
matter proves to have and expose other effects in the course of its action.
In fact, the reinvigoration of material processes that affect identities and
behavior can be read through the bodily aspects of the social, ecological,
and economic interaction of the characters. Thus, there are new and un-
foreseen consequences to the application of this project (the fact that the
sloth-man is an outcast from society due to his inability to perform his
work at a “normal” pace, the fact that there are migrant birds, etc.), which
reflect the power and agency of matter. From a new materialist reading,
the unexpected effects of matter belie the myth of total human agency
and force us into a more inclusive outlook of the world as a place created
through agency distributed between human and nonhuman actants.
Since the bodily modifications from which the subjects of the project
suffer affect them on a very material level, it is of utmost importance to
understand how these material effects are conveyed through the fictional
text. The different characters’ bodies provide an interesting sample for
analyzing how fiction portrays matter and material concerns. These bod-
ies not only resemble the animals, but they also feature altered bodily
functions. Mario Araya, for example, has been turned into a tapir man
who holds that his business was able to prosper partly due to the fact that
he eats leftovers at his restaurant, leaving the proper food for the clients.
He even admits cheerfully that now he does not eat anything unless he
has first thrown it on the floor and played with it a little using his snout
(2:22). Jefferson, Yorleni’s teenage son, sticks his tongue out and eats a fly
at one point. His mother hits him and tells him not to eat rubbish (2:45).
Mario seems to have assimilated his new eating habits which benefit him
economically, while, in Jefferson’s case, it is natural for a frog to eat
insects, something that has not been assimilated by Yorleni’s cultural
 Animales de alquiler 223

frame of mind. This reflects the negative consequences of the material

tampering with matter: habits and responses that seem inadequate for
humans, thereby leading to further discrimination and marginalization of
both humans and animals alike.
These new bodily changes affect not only the way the characters look,
but their very living conditions. This fits the scheme of subjugation that
the system establishes: people and nature are seen from an instrumental
perspective and, thus, exploited by and for the benefit of an elite minor-
ity. As Gisela Heffes explains, “people have not only been catalogued as
part of an exploitable nature—and therefore treated in an instrumental
manner, just as animals, flora and fauna, and all available resources—but
also forced to abandon their own values and perspectives about the envi-
ronment and the universe” (62). In this process of cataloging people and
nature as exploitable resources, the hegemonic center, those with the
economic and symbolic power to make collective decisions and guaran-
tee the continuity of the project, is exposed. The film engages with the
new materialist theories by making visible—through irony, choice of
characters, and a futuristic setting—this object-oriented ontology, in
which matter (not just human matter, but matter as a whole) is a deter-
mining actant, full of potential to transform reality.
These changes enacted by the genes that were inserted in a chaotic
manner bring about other unforeseeable organic changes. In fact, not
only do their eating habits change, their reproductive cycles and even
their housing needs have to be reformulated. When Yorleni describes her
coworkers sleeping while at work, there is an image of a basket holding
multiple tadpole babies which might suggest that the reproductive pat-
terns of women have been altered, and now they have a lot of children for
every birthing (5:26). Indeed, Yorleni was angry that she got a house
without a roof until she understood the rain was good for her new frog
self and eventually accepted it, albeit reluctantly (1:40).
Nevertheless, considering that we are analyzing texts that are pro-
duced by and that circulate in a particular culture, a reading of the mate-
rial aspects of the relationship between human and nonhuman nature
must necessarily consider the discursive nature of social life. In this
sense, discourses have a very material effect on the world as they anchor,
for instance, the logics that allow for different forms of domination and
interplays of power. Thus, for the purpose of methodological accuracy,
we take an inclusive approach that considers the importance of matter
and the undeniable material effects of discourse, as well as the relevance
of language in all its symbolic capacity to refract and to construct reality.
Of special interest within this intersection of theories is the resistance
to the logic that underlies different forms of oppression: the binary model
upon which Western modern thought is based. This concept, with its
roots in Saussurean linguistics, entails that the value and meaning of a
term is constructed through contrast and acceptance of its opposite. Thus,
224 Avalos and Sánchez

a presence is only understood through an absence, and something is valu-

ated as good in the presence of its opposite bad. Post-structuralism elab-
orated on this concept as a way to expose the binary construction of
cultural hierarchies, and how the latter expressed a worldview in which
the white, Western male represented the dominant position.
According to ecofeminist critic Val Plumwood, this way of rationaliz-
ing and understanding the world has traditionally naturalized a world-
view that results in the effective ideological domination of others. In
other words, these binarisms not only divide beings, but they also grade
them into levels of importance, in which the nonhuman, female, and non-
European can be legitimately exploited, subdued, and dominated. By the
same reasoning, “male,” “civilized,” and “reason” have been located
above “female,” “primitive,” and “nature.” This process is what Plum-
wood identifies as the logical structure of the discursive architectures of
domination. 3 Given this frame, the new materialisms informing our posi-
tion allow for an analysis that takes into account the materiality of hu-
mans and nonhumans alike considering, at the same time, the con-
structed nature of language and language use, as well as the ways in
which both matter and language interact dialectically to shape each oth-
er. By setting these two paradigms—linguistic and materialist—into di-
alogue, we can “deconstruct the language/reality dichotomy by defining
a theoretical position that does not privilege either language or reality but
instead explains and builds on their intimate interaction” (Hekman 3). A
second aspect of incorporating this dialogical intersection of theories is
that of horizontality: by bringing matter into our theoretical frame we can
analyze not just the human conceptualization of reality, but matter as a
significant part of human and nonhuman agents, all of which shape,
transform, and (de)stabilize reality. This analysis therefore echoes the
objectives of new materialism expressed by Elizabeth Barrett and Barbara
Bolt in the introduction to Carnal Knowledge, in that it “questions the
anthropocentric narrative that has underpinned our view of humans-in-
the-world since the Enlightenment, a view that posits humans as makers
of the world and the world as a resource for human endeavors. The new
materialist discourse derives its urgency from the ethical, ecological and
political imperatives that loom as a consequence of this view of the
world” (2–3). By including these perspectives, all actors, whether animate
or inanimate, are considered participants in the interactions that, as a
whole, comprise our environment. In so doing, there is an empowerment
of nonhuman others, a recognition of the role and agency of the nonhu-
man world in the future of the planet, and, finally, an awareness and
consciousness about our responsibility in the current condition of the
planet. By recognizing the agency and transformative power in all mat-
ter, we distance ourselves from an anthropocentric vision of the world in
order to include, recognize, and respect the whole natural world. At the
same time, we can understand in all its implications the consequences
 Animales de alquiler 225

and effects that our actions have on the material world surrounding us,
human and nonhuman alike.
Nevertheless, despite being part animal themselves and victims of
oppression, the conceptualizations that emerge in the interviewees’ use
of language in the film show that they still abide by the logic that legiti-
mizes the domination of human and nonhuman nature. As Val Plum-
wood pointed out in the quote above, the particular modern rationaliza-
tion of the world has been traditionally naturalized as the premise for the
arguments that shape a worldview that results in the effective ideological
domination of the other. This is illustrated in the mock documentary by
the use of language on the part of the different hybrid citizens. For in-
stance, Mario Araya says that he was happy when the animals went
extinct because now people like him could live better. The idiomatic ex-
pression in Spanish is “vivir como la gente” (literally, “live like people”),
which means live properly or in a civilized manner, but at the same time
plays with the idea of being human. In order to live like people, somehow
Mario needs to stop being a person as thought of in the humanist tradition
(0:47). The character later makes a comment that reinforces this idea
when he notes that “the project has given us better tools to survive. Life
has become something wild” (2:55). He later goes on to talk about his
half-boar cousin, who went to Italy to dig truffles, which he viewed as a
great opportunity to work abroad.
Furthermore, Yorleni Zumbado, when referring to her co-workers
sleeping on the job, states that: “we have to be competitive. One cannot
let herself be driven by nature” (5:20), while footage shows a factory
worker accompanied by a basket full of tadpole babies. These observa-
tions reinforce the subtitle: “A Natural Reserve for Wild Capitalism.” The
common idea throughout is that work is a space where civic rules—the
rules governing collective human living—do not apply. As the filmmaker
commented in the interview cited at the beginning of this essay, the char-
acters are not valued for who they are but by the profits they generate. In
practice, this is mirrored in Carlos’ story, since the project did not warn
him about the effects of his genetic modification, forcing him, in the end,
to resort to crime in order to survive.
All things considered, cultural assumptions also create a level of du-
plicity between how matter changes and how language addresses these
changes. Mario Araya makes one such reference when he challenges any-
one to call him an “animal” to his face: “let’s see what he has done to feel
more like a man” (8:47). This is clear evidence that despite the fact that
they are already animals, they still believe being compared with animals
is insulting, while being human is dignifying. On the other hand, Yorleni
declares that the fossil-human hybrid police resent the zootizens because
nobody can even call them “animals” (7:58). Inadvertently, Yorleni is
reinforcing the idea that animals are below humans—even when she is
part animal—at the same time that she establishes a gradation between
226 Avalos and Sánchez

modern animals and prehistoric fossils. She thus reproduces the logic of
her own exclusion in order to marginalize another subject.
There is also an ironic reference to social hypocrisy when Carlos men-
tions that when he begs people for money, they do not even look at him
because he is part human: “if I was a sloth, people would pet me, but
because I’m human they don’t even come near” (4:19). Since animals are
subject to protection, people would help an actual sloth, but if he is hu-
man it means he is a vagabond. This has at least one important logical
derivation: that animals are passive, so they cannot be blamed for not
having food, while humans are active, so being impoverished is their
own fault. There is thus a clear reinforcement of two legitimizing princi-
ples of domination: the passivity of animals, which makes them malle-
able, and the fallacy that human poverty is caused by individual lack of
initiative rather than a system of exclusions.
Due to these contradictions between social discourses and practices,
another aspect surfaces from this complex audiovisual text: the workings
of power and the mechanisms for its assertion. The mockumentary fore-
grounds the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and domination in its rep-
resentation of power relations. 4 According to Gramsci, power can be ex-
erted through violent coercion-domination or consent-hegemony. The
latter includes the interplay between culture as a total social system with-
in which subjects live, and ideology as a value system that projects a
particular class interest. Many comments of the zootizens, for example,
point to the characters’ consent to participate in the project, while their
reasoning illustrates how they justify their own exploitation as well as
that of people in the same situation. The most enthusiastic defender of
the program as a model of economic progress is Mario Araya, the shop
owner-tapir man. In fact, when asked about the opinion of some people
who believe the program is degrading, he reacts in a hostile manner:
“communist troublemakers,” he shouts while angrily wielding a knife in
the air (4:15). This attitude captures his firm adherence to the system that
maintains the status quo. Araya is portrayed as a lower-middle-class zoo-
tizen who accepts and strongly defends the project. Moreover, he criti-
cizes or disqualifies those who oppose it calling them “slackers who
spend the economic aid money on liquor” (3:18). This perception
contrasts greatly with the subsequent footage of Carlos, whose tragic
story portrays the unfairness of the system that Mario defends.
Yorleni, on the other hand, opens her interview stating she is very
grateful to the project (1:19). She admits that it took her a while to accept
her new self, since at first she was ridiculed and the house provided to
her and her family does not have a roof (1:38). She also acknowledges
that there are people who say the project takes advantage of destitute
people, yet she goes on to disparage her co-workers for sleeping on the
job (5:04). In the end, she claims that without the project everything
would be worse; then, she thanks the project again (9:05). Carlos, for his
 Animales de alquiler 227

part, frames his tragic story by saying: “I won’t blame the project for
what happened to me, but one should be warned about some conse-
quences” (3:27). This is as close as a character gets to criticizing the
project, which is nevertheless far from being an open display of dissent.
The hegemonic domination is consolidated by a system of coercion,
however. The pharmaceutical corporations are hired to create a police
force to control the wave of crime that took place after the creation of the
zootizens (5:40). As part of the project “Hueso Duro Contra el Hampa,”
new hybrids are created combining humans with prehistoric fossils from
America. Paradoxically, the emblem of the project is a fossil police officer
posing with two terrified children (who should actually be reassured by
its presence) surrounded by the Costa Rican flag. A slogan reads: “Public
Force. Costa Rica” (6:30). This ironic visual statement of the fear that the
new police inspire in citizens mirrors Yorleni’s statements about them
being the worst part of the project.
According to Coronel Aníbal Matamoros, one of the key considera-
tions behind the project was that having a heart is not particularly useful
in his line of work (7:06). The testimony of Matamoros clarifies that the
old police force “had few resources and a lot of scruples, but the new
modernized police will reestablish order in the country” (7:01). The jour-
nalist then mentions that people have complained that the police are too
“wild and primitive,” to which the Coronel reacts aggressively (7:05). It is
important to mention that, on a metaphorical level, the fact that the police
are fossils implies an obsoleteness of the police authorities in the country.
Moreover, the parody of current security discourse insinuates that the
opinions of the glyptodont coronel are not far from the current state of
affairs.
The fossil policemen seem to be also the most politically conservative
of the project subjects, condoning violence against illegal immigration,
juvenile crime, and prostitution. It is also noticeable that their use of
ruthless violence causes deaths among innocent civilians, which the glyp-
todont-police call “non-lethal deaths” (8:17). The use of the euphemism
seems to claim legitimacy for the murders of some law-abiding citizens.
The police are thus the clearest representatives of coercion in the mock
documentary.

HUMAN TO HYBRID: PHYSIOLOGICAL CHANGES AND THE

PERMANENCE OF DISCURSIVE LEGITIMACY

Textual analysis can be used in a broad sense to consider literary and

non-literary cultural and artistic constructs. The values that circulate
through societies of production and consumption become visible when
we consider texts as cultural artifacts within specific sociocultural con-
texts. At the same time, heterogeneity in such cultural texts speaks of a
228 Avalos and Sánchez

diversity of groups that find a textual space for inscribing their world-
views. The concept of “architectures of domination” also applies to this
field; only through a struggle for representational power have the differ-
ent groups found a representational place in the textual, and therefore,
cultural and social realm. In turn, this shift toward pluralistic representa-
tion has brought about changes in society, marking the dialectical rela-
tionship between society, literature, and language. In this context, the
study of fiction allows for a better comprehension of the often contradic-
tory values that circulate in any society and the tensions between the
different communities that constitute it, values representing a system in
which nature and underprivileged actors can be subdued on the basis of
their instrumental value or values that aim at subverting that very logic
through the exposure of the system’s workings. At the same time, fiction
provides the possibility of furthering biocentric discourses that aim to
highlight the consequences of the exploitation of the environment, ani-
mals, and humans. In these fictional worlds, we can find and detect the
logics behind the organization of communities.
In the present text, we attempt to deconstruct a particular instance of
discourse to shed light on current reflections on the state of the environ-
ment and human responsibilities for that state. Environment refers not
only to the other beings in the world, but rather all living and non-living
organisms in the biosphere. In this sense, we examine the ways in which
a restricted group within a community asserts its right and power to
control not just the natural resources around it (including living and non-
living organisms), but also other groups within that community that rep-
resent a less powerful and therefore marginalized minority. By describ-
ing the workings through which these actions are executed, we attempt
to unveil the ethnocentric and class-oriented logics behind the system.
This logic of control of the other, whether human or nonhuman, can be
traced back to the origins of the early capitalist and modernist industrial
societies. In the words of Carolyn Merchant, this mechanistic worldview
“replaced the Renaissance worldview of nature as a living organism with
a nurturing earth at its center,” and, in its place, implemented a logic
viewing nature as instrumental and functional to human beings and their
enterprises (Radical Ecology 11). This logic replaced the relationship of
reciprocity between humans and nature with one that asserts absolute
human control and domination over nature. Accordingly, “this mecha-
nism and its ethic of domination legitimates the use of nature as a com-
modity, a central tenet of industrial capitalism” (Merchant, Radical Ecolo-
gy 11). However, in our view it is important to highlight that it is not only
the domination of nature that such a view entails, but also that of any
other form of other, including that of other humans. The architecture of
domination places the members of communities in a marginal position,
where they are subjected to exploitation.
 Animales de alquiler 229

An analysis that rethinks the place of humans in the environment and

their ecological relationship with animate or inanimate beings requires a
problematization of the system of power and its logic of domination.
Zootizens imagines a situation that materializes particular architectures of
domination into discreet bodies of hybrids of extinct animals—the epito-
me of nature exploited to the point of disappearance—and disadvan-
taged humans in need of economic aid to survive. The fact that this
happens in a developing country like Costa Rica, also a former colony,
does not lack significance. Referring to his disadvantaged situation, Car-
los states that he understands that this is the “our country’s model of
development, but it has its costs” (9:05). Carlos, a new subject who is
notoriously vulnerable to legitimized exploitation, is the only one to men-
tion openly this point.
From the very beginning, the Spanish title Animales de alquiler, which
means “Animals for Rent,” illustrates this exploitation of human and
animal genetic material and embodiment. This title is very telling of what
it is done to their bodies, since the main characters rent their bodies out to
pharmaceutical corporations in exchange for economic aid that they
greatly need. At the same time, the use of extinct species’ patented genet-
ic material indicates the economic profit that pharmaceuticals make from
bioprospecting. Some hybrid subjects suffer more than others, like Car-
los, a man whose genetic modifications cost him his job because he was
unaware of the secondary effects of becoming a sloth. Therefore, he has
no choice but to beg and steal copper (4:19).
On the other hand, the topic of labor exploitation is present through-
out the mock documentary, and in many cases, the genetic modifications
expand the workers’ productivity and efficiency. Ironically, the zooti-
zens’ situation is not so different from the effects of contemporary biopol-
itics on developing world societies. Mario Araya, for instance, explains
how his cousin was mixed with a boar and went to work in Italy finding
truffles (3:09). This migration to work is seen as legitimate by Carlos,
since it is “skilled labor,” which is not far from the situation of many
Latin American societies where professionals migrate in search for better
opportunities. Meanwhile, there is also some labor immigration that is
not legal: the migratory birds (7:20). This hybridization with birds could
suggest that the immigrants cannot control their drive to migrate; very
much how current illegal immigrants often migrate out of a desperate
situation beyond their control. The public glyptodont authorities perse-
cute them and beat them to prevent them from moving (7:18). The images
show defeated looking bird-men in the back of a police truck. Ironically,
this conversion of immigrants into birds materializes common animal
metaphors about the “flight” of immigrants, which finds a parallel in the
subsequent reference to juvenile delinquents as “packs clambering every-
where,” while showing monkey and weasel men in jail snapshots (7:33).
This clear reference to the ways in which language constructs marginality
230 Avalos and Sánchez

as the realm of the wild materializes in the film and strongly illustrates
these mechanisms of exploitation. Through this process, both human and
nonhuman others “become objects apt for domination, domestication,
and exploitation” (Heffes 61). In such a logic, “a questioning of the West-
ern hegemonic subjugation of nature prevails, which by extension objec-
tivizes nature, as much as any Other—reducing the latter through catego-
ries such as barbarian or wild” (61). Such a view allows us to see not just
the process of material subjugation, but, at the same time, the linguistic
means by which reality is also constructed into a certain worldview.
The presence of female working-class factory workers, represented by
Yorleni Zumbado, marks another form of bodily exploitation. Yorleni
accepts that sweatshop work is stressful, particularly after her supervisor
also became a zootizen in order to surveil their work more effectively: he
is a stork who eyes his amphibian workers hungrily. Nevertheless, she
also criticizes her co-workers for sleeping on the job in a competitive
environment, while the footage depicts the workers with a number of
small tadpole children in a basket next to them (5:20). Factory-worker
mothers are therefore exhausted by their dual responsibility as workers
and mothers. Animal females are also prostituted in what Coronel Mata-
moros calls “sexual ecological tourism” (7:44). The images show a pan-
ther woman, while the coronel indignantly describes how this ruins the
country’s reputation. Therefore, as with previous examples, the gendered
labor exploitation of zootizens does not differ greatly from the current
conditions of working-class women in developing countries.

CHALLENGING ARCHITECTURES OF DOMINATION

This interplay between mechanisms of domination that mark contempo-

rary experiences of oppression cannot be analyzed independently. Eco-
criticism, postcolonialism, social ecology, and ecofeminism intersect since
they connect the common experience of domination and resistance of
subaltern subjects to the binary model particular to modern thought. As
Iovino puts it: “the anthropocentric model of the exploitation of nature
reflects an attitude which is classist and anti-emancipatory (for social
ecology) or sexist and patriarchal (for ecofeminism)” (“Non-Anthropo-
centric Humanism” 36). In that sense, these mechanisms are not only
connected by individual experiences, but also by the logic that underlies
them: by the same reasoning, some social actors are entitled to property
and development, while others are conceptualized as resources. Zootizens
uses irony to render evident the contradictions that arise from this situa-
tion.
Furthermore, an inclusive approach to the text considers the material-
ity and embodiedness of matter, as well as the symbolic constructions
that refract values, construct reality, and influence perception. In this
 Animales de alquiler 231

way, this approach promotes a better understanding of the complexity of

cultural texts that would be incomplete when analyzed from the point of
view of the environment, class relations, colonialism, or patriarchy alone.
The complexities presented in Zootizens lend themselves to an analysis
that benefits from the intimate interaction of language and matter. On the
one hand, the mock documentary exposes how the characters’ bodily
functions such as eating habits, reproductive cycles, housing needs, natu-
ral speed, and manual precision are affected. These material modifica-
tions have specifically material consequences, like the improvement in
business in Mario Araya’s case or the descent into poverty in that of
Carlos. Nevertheless, language does not seem to register fully these mate-
rial changes, since the characters’ comments uphold profit as the most
important value. Indeed, this perspective overrides solidarity with fellow
animals, as in Araya’s initial comments on his happiness about animals
going extinct; it diminishes the importance of family in the case of Yorle-
ni’s comments about her fellow factory workers; and it justifies the exile
from homeland as in the case of Araya’s cousin and the migratory birds.
Zootizens displays a world in which enforced architectures of domina-
tion still stand despite very visible material changes in ecosystems and
subjectivities. This can be seen in the animal/human hybrids’ use of lan-
guage. On the one hand, it evidences that they feel insulted when called
animals, as shown by Mario Araya’s outrage, while Yorleni comments
that being an animal is still better than being a fossil. In contrast, being
part human can also be negative as Carlos’ case shows: he is not animal
enough to be petted and helped; rather he is considered to be responsible
for his own impoverishment. The fictional universe thus foregrounds two
principles that legitimize ecological and class oppression: that animals
are passive and thus must be protected and/or put to use, while humans’
poverty is the consequence of individual lack of commitment and hard
work rather than the result of a system of exclusion.
Zootizens successfully displays the materialization of coordinates of
domination into discreet bodies of extinct animals and disadvantaged
human hybrids in a developing country under the false pretense of a
model of economic progress. Labor exploitation, illegal immigration, and
sexual commerce are all present in the narrative. All in all, Zootizens
presents a discursive panorama in which the underlying arguments to
justify domination do not differ greatly from some current premises in
the contemporary developing world. It becomes inevitable to recur to the
categories of consent and coercion. In an ironic twist, technological ad-
vances permit dramatic material bodily changes, but power structures
and the discursive mechanisms by which they are endorsed do not
change; in fact, they are only intensified. When asked about the possibil-
ity that the project takes advantage of people, the interviewees respond
with arguments that undermine their own situation with different levels
of enthusiasm. Mario Araya defends the project and criticizes its detrac-
232 Avalos and Sánchez

tors, and this enters into a filmic dialogue with Carlos’ story of deception
and descent onto poverty. Yorleni undermines her own situation by criti-
cizing factory workers without realizing that she could be in their same
situation, deprived of sleep by her multiple responsibilities. Carlos is the
one who somehow manages to criticize the project, but he does so mildly,
always acknowledging it is the model of economic development as if he
understands it is for a greater good.
Nevertheless, a police force is created for those who are left outside
the system by their material changes coupled with their destitute social
status, like the migratory bird illegal immigrants, exotic animal prosti-
tutes, and pack-like youth gangs. Thus, public violence is exerted by
fossil law enforcement with retrograde methods. Once again, the perma-
nence of arguments to justify violence is pervasive despite the material
changes presented in the fictional universe. The glyptodont Coronel Mat-
amoros condones assaulting illegal immigrants in the name of possible
misbehaviors, and condemns exotic prostitution claiming that it ruins the
image of the same country whose adherence to the project makes it pos-
sible for it to exist. The presence of the oxymoron “non-lethal deaths”
points to the same type of contradiction created by the duplicity between
the material context and the linguistic construct.
All of this suggests a reading of this short film as an econarrative in
that it portrays ironically the oppression of the environment as a whole,
including society. The logics that underlie domination in late capitalism
are depicted in the form of assertions that promote the legitimacy of
exploitation. On the one hand, nature is subjected to the will of the pow-
erful corporations that first destroy the environment, then later use spe-
cies’ genes for profit. As a criticism of exploitation and the values at-
tached to it, Zootizens can be seen as a contribution to new biocentric
discourses that horizontally oppose the domination of and violence
against the environment—human and nonhuman nature.
Finally, Zootizens: A Natural Reserve for Wild Capitalism successfully
portrays a future in which technological advances have led to nothing
new. A disrupted ecosystem is only the excuse for a new patented gene
splice to generate profit for big corporations. The oppressed lower and
middle classes still consent to their domination through their compliance
and defense of the oppression of their fellow animals and humans. The
stagnant police forces still use raw violence coupled with a legitimizing
discourse. The wild capitalism depicted in the short film only adapts
matter to fit its drive for profit, not for any altruistic purpose, whether
conservation or social well-being. Despite the film’s parodic tone, it pro-
vides a striking cautionary tale that there can be no change until social
consciousness understands the value of standing together against op-
pression as a class, as a kind, and as part of an ecosystem.
 Animales de alquiler 233

NOTES

1. All translations from Spanish are the authors’ own.

2. The emphasis is the authors’.
3. See Val Plumwood’s introduction to Feminism and the Mastery of Nature.
4. We follow Raymond Williams’ interpretation of Gramsci’s concept in Marxismo
y literatura.

WORKS CITED

Animales de alquiler (Zootizens: A Natural Reserve for Wild Capitalism). Dir. Pablo Ortega.
Universidad de Costa Rica, 2010. Video. Web.
Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Mat-
ter Comes to Matter.” Material Feminisms. Ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. 801–31. Print.
Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt. Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism”
Through the Arts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.
Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010. Print.
Bookchin, Murray. “What Is Social Ecology?” Environmental Philosophy: From Animal
Rights to Radical Ecology. Ed. Michael Zimmerman. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1993. 354–73. Print.
Heffes, Gisela. Políticas de la destrucción, poéticas de la preservación: Apuntes de una lectura
(eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2013. Print.
Hekman, Susan. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010. Print.
Iovino, Serenella. “Ecocriticism and a Non-Anthropocentric Humanism: Reflections
on Local Natures and Global Responsibilities.” Local Natures, Global Responsibilities:
Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures. Ed. Laurenz Volkmann, Nancy
Grimm, Ines Detmers, and Katrin Thomson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 29–53.
Print.
———. “Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics.” Literature, Ecolo-
gy and Ethics: Recent Trends in European Ecocriticism. Ed. Timo Müller and Michael
Sauter. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2012. 51–68. Print.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987. Print.
Merchant, Carolyn. Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2005. Print.
O’Neal Coto, Katzy. “Cortometraje Animales de Alquiler obtiene premio en Festival del
Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano.” Noticias. Universidad de Costa Rica. February 2, 2012.
Web.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Williams, Raymond. Marxismo y literatura. Barcelona: Península, 1980. Print.
 THIRTEEN
Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat
Ecological Crisis and Posthuman Subjectivities in
Mempo Giardinelli’s Imposible equilibrio

Diana Dodson Lee

Contemporary Argentine literature addressing ecological themes builds

on a tradition stemming from the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, in which authors described and interpreted natural landscapes and
resources as part of the nation-building process. One of these first foun-
dational texts regarding nature was Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Fa-
cundo o civilización y barbarie (Facundo; 1845). Facundo posited that barbar-
ity emanated from the undeveloped Argentine pampas (plains) and their
gaucho (cowboy) and indigenous inhabitants, whom he associated with
violence. The work is a political treatise in which Sarmiento, in order to
combat the alleged savagery of the pampas, advocates the development
of Argentina’s rural areas and the utilization of the country’s natural
resources for modernization. Contrasting with Facundo, José Hernández’s
Martín Fierro (1872, 1879) defends the gauchos and their rural way of life.
In Martín Fierro, the “civilized” authorities infringe upon the territorial
rights of the gauchos and the figure of the gaucho becomes an important
ideal for seeking justice against corruption. As Doris Sommer contends,
“Hernández wrote it when the gauchos had all but disappeared because
of government policies, both military and economic. . . . They were con-
fined to narrowing spaces between modernized, privatized ranches on a
once vast pampa” (111). During the nineteenth century, Sarmiento and
Hernández were key figures in the debate over allocation of natural re-

235
236 Lee

sources and the balance between modernization and the protection of

rural spaces and people.
In the early twentieth century, Latin American novelas de la tierra and
novelas de la selva became important models for writing about nature and
the land. Again, much of this literature emphasized the link between
natural resources and the economic advancement of the nation. In 1924,
Benito Lynch published an important novela de la tierra under the title El
inglés de los güesos (The Englishman of the Bones). The narrative portrays the
consequences of rural development on the poor classes. Jennifer L.
French remarks that Lynch’s works are more critical than other novelas
gauchesas (gaucho novels) about the socio-economic structures in the
pampas during this time period. In her estimation, Lynch’s criticism was
aimed at models of development that favored British interests and influ-
ence: “El inglés de los güesos demonstrates the multivalent effects of Brit-
ain’s informal imperialism in Argentina, linking the transculturation of
the Europhile land-owning elite to the rapid modernization of ranching
and agriculture by foreign capital and the impoverishment of the tradi-
tional working class” (Nature 72).
Perhaps the most famous Argentine novela de la tierra is Don Segundo
Sombra, published in 1926 by Ricardo Güiraldes. Don Segundo Sombra is
narrated from the point of view of a gaucho in the Argentine plains
(pampas). In Güiraldes’ novel, descriptions of environment and ranching
tasks are central to the story, and as Raymond L. Williams indicates, “the
pampa is an aspect of the very essence of authentic Argentine identity”
(72). While most canonical novelas de la selva originate from outside of
Argentina, Scott M. DeVries argues that the lesser known 1951 Argentine
work El mensú que triunfó en la selva (The Peasant Who Triumphed in the
Jungle) by Valentín Barrios expresses the ambivalence about the environ-
ment and its resources through the main character’s perspective: “Tris-
tan’s plurality of perception is illustrative of the challenges for a defini-
tive representation of Latin American selva, which in turn is allegorical of
the very real conflicts that arise when negotiations of access to resources
rest upon definitions and perceptions of value, sacredness, rights, author-
ity, and ownership of the natural world” (154). During the first half of the
twentieth century the dialogue regarding modernization and resources
continued as the novelas de la tierra and novelas de la selva nuanced the way
in which nature and the environment were treated and perceived in Ar-
gentina.
While many contemporary Argentine authors have published narra-
tives with strong natural elements, Mempo Giardinelli stands out as an
internationally recognized author who has published significant works of
fiction representing environmental degradation and ecological imbal-
ances. 1 Comparing him to other Argentine writers, Martín Camps
argues, “perhaps Giardinelli is the author who most clearly represents
the ecological conscience in his precautionary tone and denouncement of
 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat 237

ecological devastation” (155). Born in Resistencia, Argentina, in 1947,

Giardinelli’s authorial career spans the gamut of literary genres: he has
published novels, short stories, poetry, and essays. He is perhaps best
known for his narrative and in particular his novel, Santo oficio de la
memoria (The Holy Office of Memory; 1991), which won the Rómulo Galle-
gos Prize in 1993. His literary works also include the novels La revolución
en bicicleta (Revolution on a Bicycle; 1980), El cielo con las manos (Grasping the
Sky; 1981), ¿Por qué prohibieron el circo? (Why Did They Ban the Circus?;
1983), Luna caliente (Hot Moon; 1983), Qué solos se quedan los muertos (Lone-
ly Are the Dead; 1985), Imposible equilibrio (An Impossible Balance; 1995), El
décimo infierno (Tenth Circle; 1999), Final de novela en Patagonia (End of the
Novel in Patagonia; 2000), Visitas después de hora (Afterhour Visits; 2001), and
Cuestiones interiores (Inside Questions; 2003), as well as several volumes of
stories and selected essays.
Two of Giardinelli’s novels in particular portray ecological crises. In
Final de novela en Patagonia, the narrator figure travels throughout the
region of Patagonia and in the process expresses his criticism of the Ar-
gentine government for its inability to protect the country’s natural re-
sources. Furthermore, he condemns practices such as leaving garbage
dumps exposed to wind and allowing private business to build oil pipe-
lines in order to exploit Argentina’s abundant natural reserves. The novel
champions sustainable development in the Patagonian region and pro-
tection from nature’s worst enemy: human beings.
Giardinelli’s other novel of ecological importance is the focus of this
chapter. Published in 1995, Imposible equilibrio weaves together two op-
posing discourses: in one discursive thread, the government and media
represent humanist efforts to address human-made ecological threats to
human culture. In the other, a group of resisters combats the anthropo-
centrism of the authorities and moves closer to a posthumanist frame-
work for approaching the environment. I argue that Imposible equili-
brio uses these two discourses to signal the ecological imbalance in the
environment caused by anthropocentric actions and to propose that solu-
tions that continue to be based solely on human-centered interests will
fail to address adequately the systemic causes of ecological destruction.
In order to support this project, the novel describes in detail the effects
of human industry on the environment. Furthermore, it links the ecologi-
cal imbalance with the treatment of animals; the act of resistance against
the authorities revolves around the theft of four hippopotamuses im-
ported to Argentina by the government. Giardinelli incorporates the hip-
po characters to examine the relationship between humans and animals,
questioning traditional conceptions of subjectivities and calling attention
to posthumanistic modes of thinking. In this chapter, I first review Cary
Wolfe’s engagement of posthumanism as a critical framework for assay-
ing the novel’s conceptualization of nonhuman subjectivities. I then ana-
lyze the link between ecological damage and human industry in the nov-
238 Lee

el. Finally, I demonstrate that through its exploration of human/animal

relations, Imposible equilibrio critiques human-centered subjectivities and,
in the process, condemns the environmental imbalance that such episte-
mologies have engendered.

SUBJECTIVITY, POSTHUMANISM,
AND CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES

Since humanism often assumes that subjectivity is a uniquely human

property, any posthumanist consideration of animals must necessarily
address the twin problems of subjectivity and agency. In this project, I
use the term “subjectivity” not in the uniquely linguistic sense of a speak-
ing subject, but rather to indicate the ability to act and possess control
over the self. My conception of subjectivity is thus similar to the idea of
agency; however, Susan McHugh argues that in the literary analyses of
animals, the two terms are not necessarily interchangeable. For McHugh,
agency communicates a broader approach to the representation of ani-
mals, since the term acknowledges a more complex interdependence be-
tween species. McHugh gives the example of chemical interactions, in
which there is no straightforward subject-object relationship between
interacting elements. She argues that this is pertinent to literary studies of
animals because “this extremely localized registering, or interaction of
what happens between at least two properties, provides an altogether
different problematic for companion-species relations, helping to explain
how other creatures become important not as supplements to human
subject forms, but rather as actors joining us in continuously shaping this
one alongside a range of other narrative forms” (3). However, in
McHugh’s own estimation, although “animal narratives prove critical to
aesthetic explorations of others’ contributions to the fiction of the human
subject, I hesitate to claim that distinguishing agency from subjectivity
simply resolves concerns about deconstructive and other refutations of
the foundational discourses of the humanist subject” (2). McHugh recog-
nizes the difficulties in separating the terms, even as she defends the
importance of moving beyond the reductionism of humanist thinking.
For the purposes of my argument, I will use the word “subjectivity,”
although I have in mind a broader definition of the word that includes
the idea of exercising agency.
Posthumanism itself evokes ambiguous and opposing definitions. As
Francesca Ferrando argues, “the label ‘posthuman’ is often evoked in a
generic and all-inclusive way, to indicate . . . different perspectives, creat-
ing methodological and theoretical confusion between experts and non-
experts alike” (26). Ferrando goes on to explain that there are several
points of confusion, but that the two that are most often muddled are that
of transhumanism and posthumanism. Transhumanism refers to the dis-
 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat 239

cipline that focuses on scientific and technological advancements that

may in the future eliminate human physical limitations. Posthumanism,
on the other hand, explores a post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic
approach to critical studies, philosophy, and culture. In Ferrando’s as-
sessment, “posthumanism can be seen as a post-exclusivism: an empirical
philosophy of mediation that offers a reconciliation of existence in its
broadest significations. Posthumanism does not employ any frontal dual-
ism or antithesis, demystifying any ontological polarization through the
postmodern practice of deconstruction” (29).
In his discussion of posthumanism, Cary Wolfe coincides with Ferran-
do’s delineation of the category and its goal of deconstructing the central-
ity of anthropocentric understandings of perception and cognition. Wolfe
rejects popular definitions of subjectivity that conceptualize the markers
of the subject as exceeding the bonds of materiality and the physical
body. Instead, he promotes posthumanism as a method for dispelling
certain myths of humanism by recognizing the very inescapability of
human centrality. According to Wolfe, “posthumanism in my sense isn’t
posthuman at all—in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been
transcended—but it is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the
fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy inherited from humanism it-
self” (What Is Posthumanism? xv). Wolfe opposes the Cartesian way of
conceiving of materiality in which reason and logic supersede the physi-
cal body and its place within the environment precisely because this type
of thinking enables the centering of the human as the normative subject
and relegates nonhuman actors (such as animals) to the periphery of
consideration. In a similar vein, Undine Sellbach frames this problem in
the following way: “our accounts of animals are always, to a certain
extent, anthropomorphic, for they are mediated by human perceptions,
concepts, gestures, feelings, and imaginings” (308).
Wolfe insists that it is possible to overcome this type of human/animal
binary by first recognizing our limitations and then pushing past them
through interdisciplinary practices. He identifies two levels of studying
animals in representation, arguing that both levels are essential to analy-
sis if theorists are to go beyond traditional human-centered paradigms.
As he writes, anthropocentric subjectivities “can be addressed adequately
only if we confront them on not just one level but two: not just the level of
content, thematics, and the object of knowledge (the ‘animal’ studied by
animal studies) but also the level of theoretical and methodological ap-
proach (how animal studies studies ‘the animal’)” (What Is Posthumanism?
99). The precautionary implications of Wolfe’s categorization indict any
reader who, while appearing to legitimately analyze animal subjectivities
at the first level (content or theme) of animal studies, may end up with
anthropocentric conclusions. It is at the second level, that of methodology
and theory, where the scope of the humanistic and posthumanistic ap-
proaches are more clearly evident in animal studies.
240 Lee

Wolfe’s critique of the subject/object dualisms is directed at Western

cultures in particular. However, as Tim Ingold points out, this binary
opposition does not necessarily describe the way non-Western cultures
conceive of the world; for instance, hunter-gatherer cultures often do not
share this perception of nature and animals. According to him, the per-
ception of the social world in hunter-gatherer societies is one of intimacy
with nature and nonhuman actors that “is grounded in the direct, mutu-
ally attentive involvement of self and other in shared contexts of experi-
ence. . . . But in Western anthropological and psychological discourse,
such involvement continues to be apprehended within the terms of the
orthodox dualisms of subjects and objects, persons, and things” (Ingold,
“Hunting” 40–41). Ingold nuances the discussion about the subject/object
divide when regarding humans and animals.
Imposible equilibrio, however, presents a society with a historically
Western outlook, in which animals are most often subordinated to hu-
mans as objects of human agency. In order to undertake a posthumanist
analysis of animals in the novel, then, we must begin by focusing on the
novel’s representation of animals as subjects. In this sense, Wolfe’s dis-
cussion of posthumanism and its connection to animal studies facilitates
a comprehension of the role of hippopotami in Imposible equilibrio. Build-
ing on Wolfe’s framework, I argue that the novel situates the hippopota-
mi at the forefront of discussion by contrasting two discourses: one hu-
manist and the other posthumanist. From the point of view of the govern-
ment and media, the hippos are objects, beings under the dominion of
human interests and desires. The resisters, however, challenge this situa-
tion in an attempt to recognize the hippos’ subjectivity and undermine
the government’s actions. By examining these two frames of reference, I
demonstrate that at the thematic level animal subjectivities are integral to
the novel and that at the methodological level, the resisters challenge
traditional dualisms between humans and animals.

ECOLOGICAL IMBALANCE AND HUMAN INDUSTRY

Giardinelli’s story begins in Resistencia, Argentina, with an anxious

group of friends observing from a distance the celebratory crowd await-
ing the arrival of four hippopotamuses by boat from Africa. The narrator,
Cardozo, explains that an engineer working in the Chaco province of
Argentina has convinced the authorities to acquire these African hippos
and import them to the area in order to help with the purification of dirty
rivers and streams. The engineer is under the questionable scientific sup-
position that the beasts will decontaminate the waterways by eating
aquatic plants and reeds that, according to him, threaten the ecological
equilibrium of the region. After much fanfare, the hippos disembark from
a ship into a trailer. Once they arrive on land, a series of bombs planted
 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat 241

by Cardozo’s friend, Victorio Lagomarsino, explode and distract the

crowd. The ensuing tumult provides Victorio the opportunity to seize the
vehicle containing the hippopotami. As he is fleeing, Clelia Riganti, a
young woman from the city, boards the trailer unexpectedly, deciding
that she wants to participate in the action. Victorio, with Clelia now in
tow, drives to meet Pura Solanas and Frank Woodyard, a couple who
have committed to aiding Victorio in achieving his goal of liberating the
hippos. The remainder of the novel relays the group’s journey through
the interior of the Chaco and the governmental pursuit of the resisters.
Giardinelli’s novel conveys in several passages the origins of the eco-
logical difficulties facing the Chaco. In the opening chapter, Cardozo
summarizes an environmental imbalance, articulating the problem in the
same way that the media and the government understand it—from a
humanist point of view. From this human-centered perspective, Cardozo
clearly links the ecological imbalance with human industry and produc-
tion in the region:
It was a fact . . . that for many years the Chaco had been experiencing
too much rain and floods had become chronic. Vast jungles, senselessly
cut down, had in twenty years become deserts covering millions of
hectares while the more humid and fertile zones had now become im-
measurable mirrors of fetid water, ponds and marshlands, estuaries,
and pools. In all these blotches of wetland there was an overabundance
of reeds and water hyacinths. . . . Although the fauna in the Chaco had
never been particularly cordial, of late these floating islands teemed
with every type of dangerous creature: vipers, spiders, alligators, pi-
ranhas and other aquatic vermin, in addition to otters and capybara,
gnats, and mosquitos. The advance of these plant structures was such
they said that even the enormous bridge that joins Resistencia and
Corrientes might be at risk. (17) 2
In chapter one, Imposible equilibrio hints at the flaw in the plan to address
the supposed environmental problems. The growth of wetlands, while
problematic for human industry, may not necessarily be considered envi-
ronmental devastation, since the plant and animal species are native to
the area. Bringing non-native species, however, has the potential to cause
serious consequences for the habitat.
It almost impossible to predict the long-term effects of the introduc-
tion of non-native species into environments. In a recent study on this
topic, Simões Vitule and his collaborators cite the example of the intro-
duction of kokanee salmon and lake trout into a Montana river in the
early twentieth century. Due to the fluctuations in quantities of different
types of fish, other species such as the bald eagle and grizzly bear suf-
fered declines and the lake’s population of bull trout faced extinction as
of 2011. These authors argue that those who support importing non-
native species to solve ecological imbalances downplay the danger of
species introductions and that not planning for long-term consequences
242 Lee

of non-native species introduction “could encourage decision makers . . .

to approve introductions that carry a high risk of adverse consequences”
(Simões Vitule et al. 1154). Scientifically, the decision to introduce non-
native species does not necessarily guarantee ecologically sound results.
The short-term approach by decision makers in Imposible equilibrio dem-
onstrates the same failures that these scientists point out; they seek to
alleviate the ecological problems because they are affecting negatively the
Chaco’s human population, not out of any real concern for the overall
health of the local environment.
From the outset, the novel describes the crisis to human society from
an anthropocentric perspective. The deforestation leading to the in-
creased flooding is caused by humans, it is human society that now suf-
fers the magnitude of the consequences. Furthermore, the solutions to
these problems do not take into account the long-term effects for the
environment. As Estok points out, initiatives to repair the environment
often reveal a human-focused paradigm mired in self-interest because “a
failure to engage in preservation of the natural world will invariably
cause suffering to humanity” (“Theorizing” 207). In several sections, Im-
posible equilibrio exposes the behaviors of a society entrenched in human-
ist modes of thinking about the environment. For instance, in the passage
above, with the exception of the descriptions of the symptoms of destruc-
tion (such as the decimated forests), the narrative centers on how the
crisis threatens the amenability of the region to human life and moder-
nity, and is not actually concerned about habitat loss. Furthermore, it
reveals a fundamental ecophobia with regards to many of the native
species it enumerates, calling them “dangerous creatures” and “aquatic
vermin.”
Still, despite these anthropocentric tendencies, the novel strongly criti-
cizes the types of actions that have ostensibly led to environmental imbal-
ances. In the above quote, the use of the word “senselessly” notifies the
reader of a concept central to Imposible equilibrio: the novel inculpates
human industry for the environmental imbalances. In doing so, it en-
gages in an ecocentric critique of development. In this sense, the novel
lends itself to an ecocritical reading. As Ursula K. Heise argues, ecocritics
“aim their critique of modernity at its presumption to know the natural
world scientifically, to manipulate it technologically and exploit it eco-
nomically. . . . This domination strips nature of any value other than as a
material resource and commodity and leads to a gradual destruction that
may in the end deprive humanity of its basis for subsistence” (507). The
figure of Cardozo embodies the novel’s ecocritical consciousness, high-
lighting the irresponsible actions of people who decimated the vast
forests and insisting that the ecological threat to human infrastructure
was precipitated by the human exploitation of natural resources.
Cardozo views the chopping down of vast forests as unwise, indicat-
ing a negative judgment against those who caused the crisis. However,
 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat 243

his description of the consequences of the environmental crisis remains

relatively detached; Cardozo’s enumeration of the swarming flora and
fauna engages a scientific register. Furthermore, although he links the
threat of the ecological crisis to the potential damage it could cause to a
bridge between two cities, the consequences for human society and even
the natural world seem relatively remote. The ecological imbalance in the
opening chapter begins as an abstraction that, while threatening, does not
seem to have potency as a real disaster. In fact, J. Andrew Brown argues
that the question of the balance of the Chaco ecosystem serves as more of
an excuse for the subsequent development of the novel than as a central
theme: “the far-from-equilibrium system that the Chaco natural environ-
ment represents shifts then to the group of friends at the bar La Estrella
that comes to symbolize this same non-equilibrium system through a
metonymic identification fueled by their constant discussion of the hip-
popotami. In a sense, they become what they discuss” (30). Brown is
correct in recognizing that the opening chapters serve as the backdrop for
the action of the plot; however, he does not appreciate the full signifi-
cance of the environmental themes for the novel.
The importance of the ecological imbalance becomes more salient as
Imposible equilibrio progresses. Whereas in the opening chapter, there is a
certain detachment in the descriptions of the crisis, the intensity of the
discussion shifts during the resisters’ trek through the interior of the
province. The theoretical problem of environmental damage becomes a
concrete issue when the team witnesses firsthand the ramifications of
deforestation and industry. In one clear example, the group traverses an
area filled with quebracho tree trunks, signposts of the despoilment of
the region. Victorio explains to Clelia that quebrachos require several
years to mature and that the indiscriminate cutting and pillaging of the
trees have condemned them to extinction. By caring about the loss of the
habitat, Victorio begins to hint at the way in which the resisters value
nonhuman interests as well as human culture.
After seeing the quebracho stumps, Clelia merely feigns interest; her
apathy gives way to real compassion only when she sees the people in
the town near the destroyed forest: “almost everyone has moved away
and many houses are abandoned, as is the case throughout the country-
side of the Chaco. . . . In some houses you can see people: skinny, hag-
gard, sad people. Their faces look dead. Perhaps many of them are dead”
(90). Victorio informs Clelia that this is just a sample of what is happen-
ing in the entire Chaco, to which Clelia responds that one would have to
be a horrible person not to become depressed at the sight. Victorio re-
plies, “you’d be surprised. You can’t imagine how many happy people
drive by here and don’t notice a thing” (91). Victorio’s tirade against
those who ignore the consequences of felling vast forests adumbrates his
general opinion about those in power: not only do they not care about the
244 Lee

environment, but they also turn a blind eye to the suffering that industri-
al extractivism causes to humans.
The descriptions of deforestation in Giardinelli’s novel consistently
link environmental imbalances with human endeavors. Giardinelli’s fic-
tional images are founded in solid scientific research. As Boletta and his
collaborators comment in a recent scientific report:
The Argentine Chaco, a semi-arid region with a xerophytic deciduous
forest, has been affected by extensive deforestation. A representative
area (the Moreno Department in the province of Santiago del Estero
covering more than a million hectares) was surveyed using LANDSAT
MSS and TM satellite imagery from 1975 to 1999. In the 7 years from
1992 to 1999, more than 273,000 ha were found to have been deforested
at an annual rate of 5%. A physiographic analysis of change identified
the reduction of the area of native trees and the increase of agricultural
land, the degraded areas of abandoned agricultural land and the un-
productive shrub land. (108)
Deforestation is just one human-made environmental threat prominent in
the novel, however. The passages about the journey through the country-
side are also littered with examples of industry poisoning the environ-
ment. For instance, as the group journeys, they observe a tanning factory
that once was an industrial emporium. The factory, now barely surviv-
ing, “is the only factory that has not died yet, although its pollution kills
everything. At the very entrance of the town, the bridge that spans what
used to be the Negro River now shows a huge trench the color of wine
dregs, putrefied and smelling of sulfur and tannin” (58). The characters
grieve this degradation, yet they are not the only witnesses to the de-
struction. Human-engineered development also cooperates in the cen-
sure of industrial pollution: “even the dusty streets are dyed red, as if in
impotent denunciation of the years and decades of incessant depredation
of the forests” (58). The novel forcefully condemns the consistent felling
of forests for industrial production, as well as the industrial waste con-
taminating the environment, underscoring a panorama in which destruc-
tion is ubiquitous.
Still, in spite of the inclusion of the streets in the above example, as the
narrative develops and the crisis shifts from an abstract problem to a
concrete one, the focus of the issue lingers on the repercussions of the
ecological changes for human culture. The narrator’s reprimand of the
destruction of natural habitat is still humanist in approach. The novel
problematizes this interpretation, however, by including hippopotami in
the plot in the form of characters and beings with their own subjectivity.
The hippos disclose a more nuanced method of understanding subjectiv-
ity as the work moves towards a posthumanist approach in theorizing
the environment.
 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat 245

HIPPOPOTAMI AND THE CHAQUEÑO IMAGINARY

The centrality of the hippos in the narration facilitates an interpretation of

the novel that addresses the way in which animal subjectivity is repre-
sented. From a thematic point of view, Giardinelli’s work reinforces
Aaron Gross’ observation that, across cultures and time “animals mat-
ter,” not only “as subjects in their own right (a point still in need of
emphasis), but also that animal subjects and ideas about them are critical
sites through which we imagine ourselves” (4). In his discussion of ani-
mals and the human imagination, Gross outlines his goals as twofold.
First, he wishes to contribute to the conversation about the shifting boun-
daries between the animal and human divide by bringing new perspec-
tives of agency into question. Second, he desires to avoid the problem of
rendering animals “absent” with approaches that are too narrowly fo-
cused on aspects of humanity related to animals. By maintaining a critical
attitude towards literary exercises that fail to make “present” animal sub-
jectivity, Gross echoes Wolfe’s insistence on methodological approaches
that push past anthropocentric modes of thought regarding animals.
The novel addresses very explicitly the anthropomorphization of ani-
mals, particularly in the way in which the media and the government
attempt to humanize the hippos. By exploring the mediated representa-
tion of the hippos, Imposible equilibrio depicts the way that these beasts
become involved in the national political discourse, objectified by the
government and media. Originally the administrators who decide to im-
port the hippos envision a mechanical/utilitarian purpose for the animals:
they are meant to purify the water systems in the area. As the discussion
regarding their arrival progresses, however, the hippos begin to take on a
personified existence in the ways in which individuals and the media
perceive them.
Several sections of Cardozo’s narration weave a colloquial picture of
the manner in which he and his friends spend their evenings chatting
about the topic of hippos in the local bar, La Estrella. Adjacent to the
public’s conversations about these animals are the ploys of the media and
government to popularize the image of the hippo. In his descriptions,
Cardozo accentuates the frivolous quality of the national discourse. In
one amusing example he relays an attempt by the government to foster
enthusiasm for the upcoming arrival of the animals: “the government
sponsored a veritable bombardment of ads in the papers, radio and tele-
vision. There were posters plastered all over the streets, and free t-shirts
were handed out at public events with the slogan, ‘Welcome to the Cha-
co’ over the drawing of a huge, open red mouth, with square white teeth
as large as soap bars, and underneath another slogan, ‘I love hippos, do
you?’” (28). The picture of an ambiguous, enormous red mouth with
square white teeth lends itself to more than one interpretation. The
mouth could be a human mouth; it could be the mouth of a hippopota-
246 Lee

mus; or it could be one that has been altered to resemble both types. By
connecting the hippos to a large, open mouth, and the word “love,” the
creatures are sexualized, much in the same way that the media sexualizes
pop culture figures. By appealing to the sexual desire of the general pop-
ulace, the government disseminates visual icons that anthropomorphize
the animals. In this way the authorities blur the boundaries between
animals and humans, insinuating that the hippos resemble human cul-
ture and desire.
The state authorities are not the only agents clouding the distinction
between animals and humans by using pop culture to exploit the event.
Bar owners rename their properties with titles involving the new addi-
tions to the country and a soda called Hipo-cola is marketed. For the
narrator, however, “what really topped everything . . . was that the team
Club Atlético Chaco For Ever played all that year in the Second Division
of the National Soccer League wearing jerseys which bore a photograph
of two hippos copulating printed over the glorious black and white
stripes” (28). The infusion of sexualized hippos in the media signals the
tactics that the authorities and venders employ in the hopes that
Chaqueños will accept the hippos into their culture, thus dispelling any
doubts about the importation of these creatures.
In many ways, the governmental aspirations are effective. The mediat-
ed depictions of the hippos grant them a unique position in the imagi-
nary of the people: the animals assume a visual and representational
significance that would otherwise be difficult to produce in a region
without an autochthonous species of hippopotamus. 3 The push to incul-
cate the Chaqueño community towards one of acceptance and apprecia-
tion for the hippos succeeds; Cardozo observes that, “during that year,
slowly but surely, the hippos became part of our lives” (30). The hippos
become familiar in the minds and hearts of the people in El Chaco
through ubiquitous advertising in pop culture. Indeed, the connection
between human life and hippo life concatenates into an ambience that
personifies the four beings in such a way as to incorporate them into the
daily life of the region; throughout this process, the hippos take on a
presence of their own and become integral members of Chaqueño cul-
ture.
The commodification and sexualization of the hippos, however,
problematizes the idea that they are subjects in their own right. Their
mediated images call attention to the critique very often brought forth by
those who discuss gender and the media. As many feminist scholars have
argued regarding the sexualization of women in media representations,
the fetishized female body becomes a signifier (idealized object of desire)
for male subjects, who are able to live out their fantasies and desires in
the patriarchal order. As Laura Mulvey contends: “in a world ordered by
sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male
and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto
 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat 247

the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibi-

tionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with
their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they
can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (62–63). This order of society
places male/female in a subject/object dichotomy, and although women
are humans, they become objectified in the media for the purpose of
producing desire.
The hippos too are converted into objects of desire, leading to con-
sumption of products with their likeness. A feminist reading of the novel
exposes how the government machinations foster human desire for the
hippos by objectifying the latter, much in the same way that the media
often objectifies women. Along the lines of Wolfe’s argument, the hippos
become the object of human observation and consumption in this frame-
work but they do not in any real fashion become subjects in their own
right. However, as I will discuss shortly, the actions of Victorio and his
crew demonstrate resistance against this type of objectification.
The glorification of the hippos in the provincial media also relates to
the political implications of their arrival. This is the case not merely be-
cause they become the focus for policy adjustments, but also because
their story becomes a metaphor for human conflict and interests. In an
episode that illustrates the ways in which humans project their culture
onto animals, the government calls for a contest for children under
twelve to name the beasts. The results unmask the friction between pro-
ponents of globalization and critics of foreign influence in Latin America,
a human concern that now involves the hippos:
The results were voided because the government thought it would be
an international embarrassment to reveal the most popular names
which were Christian, Jonathan, Jennifer, and Vanina, “which shows
the degree of cultural colonialization among our children,” as Victorio
remarked when the matter was discussed at La Estrella. The truth is no
one ever knew for certain why nor who named the adults Alberto and
Lidia and their offspring Pepe and Josefina. (30) 4
The irony of the incident (i.e., that four animals imported from another
continent would cause an international embarrassment if they had
foreign names) does more than just make the reader chuckle. It also es-
tablishes a rhetoric in which the animals not only take on human names
but also human-defined nationalities. There is no doubt that with names
like Alberto, Lidia, Pepe, and Josefina these creatures are Hispanic. By
bequeathing both names and nationalities, the novel distances the ani-
mals from their functional condition as ecological tools and it appears
that they have acquired a form of subjectivity at the national scale. This
corresponds to Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities.
While few are ever likely to meet or see these hippos, the nation imagines
them as part of the community and, as Benedict Anderson argues, this
248 Lee

makes them part of an emotionally powerful milieu (50). The outpouring

of enthusiasm for the arrival of the hippos in conjunction with the man-
hunt to find their captors is proof that the issue of nationality evokes
deeply seated sentiments when people imagine themselves connected
with these animals, even if they have never even seen them in person.
However, the act of naming is inherently problematic in terms of the
relationships between humans and animals: this gesture exposes a failure
to take into account whether the hippos have ways of naming themselves
or perceiving themselves as individuals. Naming is indicative of a sub-
ject-object relationship; in naming, humans visualize themselves as ca-
pable of bestowing individuality to animals. Without our intervention,
they are only a class: “hippos.” This mind-set once again neglects consid-
erations of animals that recognize that they do not need human names,
because they are fully capable of setting their own frameworks of iden-
tity.
Ultimately, the attempts to make the hippos welcome in the Chaco
region succeed; still, this welcome does not necessarily imply a recogni-
tion of the hippos’ subjectivity. Linking their images to sexual desire and
naming them removes them from positions as subjects and relegates
them to the objects in the minds of those buying and selling their like-
nesses. It is this very situation that the resisters seek to remedy.

SUBJECTIVE RESISTANCE

Imposible equilibrio dedicates a great deal of space to describing the man-

ner in which the media and the authorities maneuver to integrate hippos
into the Chaqueño imaginary. The personification of the hippos may
seem to grant them a certain degree of political agency: they have names,
nationalities, and community recognition. However, in spite of the ubiq-
uitous presence of hippopotami in the media and public discourse, the
novel stresses the process by which the creatures are objectified as well as
challenging this objectification by emphasizing the significance of the act
of resistance against the government. The resisters steal the hippos to
defy the anthropocentrism of a society that caused environmental dam-
age and now wishes to exploit animals to solve that problem. While
Victorio and his colleagues are not opposed to solutions to the environ-
mental crisis, they do voice fierce opposition to the governmental manip-
ulation of the situation.
For Victorio and his colleagues, the story of the hippos correlates to
the history of oppression exercised by the Argentine government, espe-
cially during the military dictatorship and upheavals of the 1960s–1980s.
Victorio’s concern harkens back to the days in which the government
usurped mass communications to promulgate their own agenda in the
midst of atrocious violations of human rights. Marguerite Feitlowitz
 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat 249

argues that during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, the
ruling junta appropriated language as part of its strategy to maintain
control over the people’s perceptions: “from the moment of the coup,
there was a constant torrent of speeches, proclamations, and inter-
views. . . . Newspapers and magazines, radio and television all were
flooded with messages from the junta” (20). According to Feitlowitz, the
regime used language to accomplish five goals: “(1) shroud in mystery its
true actions and intentions, (2) say the opposite of what it meant, (3)
inspire trust, both at home and abroad, (4) instill guilt, especially in moth-
ers, to seal their complicity, and (5) sow paralyzing terror and confusion”
(20). Victorio’s wariness about the ostensible innocuousness of the impor-
tation of the hippos has much to do with the ways in which the military
junta systematically exploited mass communications for its own pur-
poses. In a debate with his friends, Victorio argues that the original idea
of bringing the hippos was fine and even noble; however, just like all
ideas in Argentina during his lifetime, the state apparatus appropriated
the event and perverted it for the government’s own interests. For Victo-
rio, these interests are quite clear: “if the government gets behind this
thing it’s because they’ve found a utilitarian side to it. They are going to
make some political circus out of it and on top of that, get rich” (21).
In response to his pessimism, one of his friends asks Victorio whether,
according to his own logic, it isn’t better to forgo having any ideas at all.
Victorio’s response is forceful and grim: “what I mean is that our genera-
tion first had a surplus of ideas and then a surplus of corpses” (50).
Victorio connects the past violence of the state to the current usurpation
of the popularity of the hippos because, just as in the past, the govern-
ment utilizes media and popular discourse to obscure their own self-
seeking intentions. In some ways, Imposible equilibrio may seem to imply
that the resisters are simply exercising a kind of nostalgia for their former
Marxist guerrilla activity: both Victorio and Pura Solanas served as resis-
tance fighters during the Reorganización Nacional. However, the novel
moves past mere political activism and lays out a web of moves, in which
Victorio and his colleagues prove that conceptually the resisters value the
hippos as subjects who deserve the freedom to assert their own agency.
Victorio’s desire to do what is best for the animals is clear from the
beginning when he discusses his getaway driving tactics with Clelia after
commandeering the hippo trailer. She becomes concerned that the ani-
mals will have difficulty surviving Victorio’s erratic steering and scolds
him saying, “you’re going to kill those poor animals” to which he re-
sponds, “better than leaving them in the hands of those buzzards” (35).
For Victorio, it is actually the human players who take on characteristics
associated with animality, since he links them with buzzards, a bird
known for feeding off the death and suffering of other animals. In Victo-
rio’s mind, the animals deserve the freedom to live without government
involvement; the hippos should be their own agents. The metaphor of
250 Lee

birds of prey demonstrates Victorio’s rejection of paradigms of animal-

human relationships that maintain a strict separation between the two
groups. Buzzards feed off dead animals and, for Victorio, this animal
kingdom scenario aptly depicts the morality of the government. The re-
sisters are the voice of opposition against the use of animals for selfish
human endeavors; they steal the hippos to undermine the promulgation
of an animal/human binary which relegates animals to objectivity and
oppression.
Victorio’s diatribe against governmental dealings emphasizes the ab-
surdity of the situation and brings up the idea of a highly problematic
human-centered institution, infamous for its mistreatment of animals: the
circus. In his second mention of the idea of a circus, Victorio purports,
“the only thing I want is to give those animals freedom and screw over
the party of the traitors. . . . We can’t stop them from bringing the hippos
from Africa, snatching them from their natural habitat, but we can pre-
vent them from making it into a circus. And it doesn’t seem to me that
my idea is any more absurd and extravagant than importing hippopota-
mi” (51). The use of the word “circus” evinces the issue of animals in
captivity. Randy Malamud contends that exhibitions of animals in captiv-
ity represent the paradigm of anthropocentrism and objectification of the
animal other. In Malamud’s perspective, when society destines animals
to confinement for the purpose of peoples’ viewing pleasure, humans
subsume these places “and their captive animals within various anthro-
pocentrist social structures and systems of culture, thus misrepresenting
the realities of animals’ existence and their role on this planet” (1). 5 Victo-
rio’s antagonism illustrates his concern for the well-being of the animals
in this tyrannical milieu; although they seem to be free, in reality the
importation of the hippos and subsequent diffusion of their likeness in
society symbolizes their subjugation in anthropocentric social structures
as well as alluding to the history of state violence against the Argentine
people. The circus, with its sparkle and shine, obscures the reality of
caged animals, whose existence is limited to entertaining ignorant cus-
tomers. Victorio’s rescue plan aims to free the animals and to undermine
those who seek to subjugate the hippos to anthropocentric power struc-
tures.
It is within this context that Victorio and his team justify the violence
against people that they commit during the bombing. Victorio, Frank,
and Pura are not misanthropes, nor do they relish bloodshed. Rather,
they have created a new paradigm in which animal lives matter as much
as human lives. They all share a conviction that freeing the hippos is the
right thing to do for the creatures and that the hippos should be granted
consideration apart from human-driven interests. The group’s struggle
relates to the idea of control of the animals, as Victorio and his colleagues
consistently articulate that they do recognize the disparity between what
seems to be best for the area ecologically and their dissatisfaction towards
 Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat 251

those who exercise domination over the bodies of the hippos. What sur-
faces from the act of resistance against the subjugation of the hippos is a
narrative questioning the relationship between humans, animal others,
and violence. On this topic, Cary Wolfe comments that “violence against
human others (and particularly racially marked others) has often operat-
ed by means of a double movement that animalizes them for the purpose
of domination, oppression, or even genocide—a maneuver that is effec-
tive because we take for granted the prior assumption that violence
against the animal is ethically permissible” (“Human” 567). While the
bombing is morally questionable, the act itself calls into question what is
ethically permissible. The willingness to use violence against humans to
save the hippos starkly contrasts a world in which human lives are val-
ued over other entities in nature. The novel here undermines classic bi-
nary oppositions and calls into question the supremacy of those who
have threatened nature within these traditional frameworks.
The team’s efforts to undercut human-centered structures culminate
with the release of the hippos into the wild. In this brief but meaningful
passage the hippos are not only freed but they are also granted the type
of subjectivity that identifies them as actors in the scenario. Right after
they are let out of their cages and led to a river, the hippos begin to swim
away while the humans bear witness to their newfound liberty: “the four
continue looking at them, emotional, and they wave at them. One of the
hippos directs a subtle closing of its eyes as if to thank them for having
saved its life, and later it submerges under water. After a few seconds
they see it reappear several meters away, towards the South . . . the four
feel as if they had together birthed something majestic” (122). The hippo’s
nod towards the humans is a symbolic nod towards their overall resis-
tance; together the four have contested anthropocentric structures that
pollute the environment and objectify nonhuman actors. The four feel
that they have birthed a new paradigm, one that values animal lives and
resists the insidiousness of corrupt government institutions.
The plot of Imposible equilibrio, while quite humorous, depicts a darker
side to the difficulties of solving ecological crises brought on by human
production. The novel insists on the connection between the destruction
of the environment and industry in order to contextualize the crisis with-
in its anthropocentric modes. The authorities calculate a way to amelio-
rate the damage but the resisters’ act of opposition exposes the human-
centered approaches to thinking that ultimately led to the ecological
threat in the first place. The theft of the hippos exposes the objectification
of the hippos in pop culture and calls attention to the corruption of a
government that actually cares very little for environmental issues. In this
way, the characters involved in the resistance exemplify the line of post-
humanism that advocates a more nuanced way of perceiving the relation-
ship between humans and animals in order to avoid environmental dam-
age.
252 Lee

My study of Giardinelli’s novel shows that it addresses both levels

that Wolfe identifies in his treatise. By thematically including hippopota-
mi, Imposible equilibrio poses the question of shifting subjectivities in ani-
mal and human relationships. Moreover, by establishing the question of
animal subjectivity within the context of resistance against organizational
systems that objectify the animals, the novel exhibits the type of method-
ological thinking that Wolfe champions. Throughout the novel, resisters
go beyond just discussing animals, attempting to address their subjectiv-
ity in the face of the narrow, destructive anthropocentrism of those in
power. The power struggle between those who wish to objectify the hip-
pos in pop culture and those who wish to acknowledge their subjectivity
exposes the epistemological bases of both groups. Imposible equilibrio ex-
plores new ways of perceiving subjectivities and in the process offers an
alternative to attitudes that continue to see the environment and nonhu-
man actors as secondary to human interests and as objects to be exploit-
ed.

NOTES

1. Other examples of contemporary Argentinean narrative with strong environ-

mental themes include Osvaldo Soriano’s Una sombra ya pronto serás and La hora sin
sombra, Héctor Tizón’s La luz de las crueles provincias, and Juan Jose Saer’s Las nubes.
2. I use Gustavo Pellón’s translation of Giardinelli’s work unless otherwise noted.
3. A reminder that the novel was published in 1995, before the widespread use of
the internet, contextualizes the impact of these mass media efforts, since the characters
would not have had access to global electronic data regarding the appearance and
habits of hippopotami.
4. In this translation, I add the words “international embarrassment” to Pellón’s
translation; in the original Giardinelli writes, “al gobierno le pareció que sería un
papelón internacional dar a conocer los nombres más votados” (29). Pellón leaves out
the word “international,” which is quintessential to my argument.
5. Malamud’s argument focuses specifically on zoos; however his reprobation of
the culture of spectatorship applies directly to circus culture as well. See Malamud
225–267.

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 Section 4

Ongoing Crises
 FOURTEEN
Amazonia
Looking for the Earthly Eden
and Finding the Planet’s Next Landfill

Diego Mejía Prado, Juan Carlos Galeano,

and Herman Ruiz Abecasis

In exchange for rotten fish, the circling vultures let strings

be tied around their necks
and served as kites for the Indians.
—“Kites” by Juan Carlos Galeano
The most well-known entrance to Peruvian Amazonia is Iquitos, a city of
approximately 500,000 inhabitants located in the northwestern part of the
country. Despite its position in the middle of Amazonia, the endless noise
from the mob of motocars, modified motorcycles used to carry passengers
and other cargo, hinders the ability to hear the sounds of the few birds
that dare enter the clouds of smog enveloping the city. In Iquitos, the
dominant presence of concrete, brick, and zinc intensifies the heat and
humidity in the city, which has few remaining trees to sequester carbon
and lower the temperature. As in all cities, modernization gives way to
the forces of destruction in Iquitos.
The motocars produce a deafening noise that doesn’t cease at night,
and, at all hours, one hears music at a high volume throughout the city.
Iquitos is an island surrounded by three rivers: the Nanay, the Itaya, and
the Amazon. However, due to pollution and boat traffic, the water in
these rivers cannot be used in the city to cool hot bodies. “Vivir en las
riberas de nuestros ríos no es precisamente vivir en el paraíso, no es lo

257
258 Prado, Galeano, and Abecasis

que la gente después de dar un paseo cree” (life on the banks of our rivers
isn’t exactly living in paradise, it isn’t what people think it is after going
on a tour), says an editorial that appeared in the Iquitos newspaper, La
Región on July 15, 2015, “solo el alma alegre del amazónico hace posible,
con su contraste, convertir el entorno en que vive en un refugio de espe-
ranzas” (only the happy soul of the Amazonian, that contrarian, converts
its surroundings into a refuge of hope; “Nuevo calendario” n. pag.). The
same editorial says that, in Amazonia, “la vida transcurre en creciente o
en vaciante” (life goes on, rising and falling with the river). Iquitos occu-
pies a floodplain, and homes are built on stilts in the neighborhoods near
rivers and lakes. Life in these riverside communities changes with the
cycles of the river; in the rainy season, the river covers several kilometers
of the rainforest, flooding highways, paths, and farms, while in the dry
season, fish seek refuge in riverbeds and marshlands, making them easy
to catch.
Motivated by our own longing for the rainforest and its multitude of
sounds, we decided that the time was right to take to the rivers to find
areas in the rainforest that have not been affected by the intensive exploi-
tation of resources. However, few of these areas remain near Iquitos or
even in the rest of Amazonia. Upon inquiring in the city, the best option
we were offered was a visit to the zoo, located approximately one hour
from the center of Iquitos, where one can see anacondas, jaguars, and
pink dolphins in captivity. But this was not what we wanted. What we
were after were the images of Amazonia to which Candace Slater alludes
critically in her book, Entangled Edens: our second Eden, our personal
representation of wilderness, our own Dorado, an earthly paradise, even
if such a place has never been found. 1
We were on a personal journey, not attempting to find the “reality” of
the Amazon, but rather our own reality in the rainforest, as if we were
traveling to our own internal garden. All of the representations of Ama-
zonia exercise their own influence on us: that of the earthly Eden free
from pollution, a paradise lost that invites exploration before it disap-
pears, and even the green inferno described in the novelas de la selva
(jungle novels), which manifests itself as an impenetrable thicket that
repels every attempt at domination and control. 2
Nevertheless, if the novels that describe Amazonia as a green inferno
are left out of the equation, in recent years the predominant message has
been that of Amazonia as an earthly Eden, as an inexhaustible source of
natural resources or as a mythic and romanticized place due to the con-
stant allusions to jaguars, anacondas, and indigenous communities that
are isolated from the corrupting influence of the West. 3 The idea of Ama-
zonia as an earthly Eden can be observed in its descriptions as a place
rich in natural resources, as the most biologically diverse place on Earth,
and as a source of pristine waters originating in the remote, snowy peaks
of the Andes. But man does not live on water alone; the Amazonian
 Amazonia 259

novels also speak of extensive cultural wealth found in thousand-year-

old communities that protect themselves in the bush from the corrupting
advances of the West, mythical stories that give meaning to human na-
ture, medicinal plants protected with suspicion by shamans with super-
natural wisdom, and natural resources to supply the entire planet. Hard-
wood, nutrients, medicine, exotic treatments, animals to be domesticated,
minerals, rubber, and . . . petroleum, all in the same place, within every-
one’s reach and for everyone because Amazonia is seen as a reserve for
the entire planet. It is a place that, as the patrimony of humankind, can be
invaded and exploited by all, but whose responsibilities of protection and
conservation fall upon its inhabitants.
However, this Eden of unlimited wealth has received and continues to
receive the worst pressures from modern life. At the end of the nine-
teenth century, the rubber boom brought explorers and soldiers of for-
tune to some of the most remote corners of Amazonia with the goal of
exploiting what, at the time, seemed like a limitless plot of unique re-
sources. After the rubber boom, the mass exploitation continued with
other resources found in Amazonia: gold, cotton, barbasco, rosewood oil,
cocaine, and mahogany. These cycles of extraction do not only affect the
exploited species. The impact is severe if one considers not only the few
remaining specimens after the international markets have satiated them-
selves with these resources, but that in order to successfully extract them,
it is necessary to construct highways, bridges, docks, and other infra-
structure that, with time, affect the region not only by destroying ecosys-
tems, but also because frequently these projects are abandoned and end
up being used to enter clandestinely and remove resources from the rain-
forest.
What is more, the Amazonian rainforest also possesses the source of
energy that moves the world: oil. The presence of oil in the Amazonian
subsoil satisfies the demand from economically wealthy countries, while
its biodiversity satisfies a different image: it is an indigenous paradise, so
diverse and sacred that it should be protected from the abuse of global-
ized markets, corrupted locals, and political and economic authorities.
For this reason, Amazonia represents bivalent ideas. In Entangled Edens,
Candace Slater uses the terminology “green inferno” and “green cathe-
dral” to allude to these paradoxical representations of Amazonia. Given
that these two images are the antithesis of each other, and knowing that
oil desacralizes the image of the cathedral, Amazonia has been denomi-
nated a paradise with oil. For some, the fact that oil courses through its
veins would constitute an opposition, since it seems oil could not exist in
paradise, possibly due to its relationship with capital and avarice or,
maybe, because of the constant risk that extracting oil could stain the
immaculate visualization of such an imagined paradise.
However, it was to look for this so-called paradise and its complex-
ities, with the objective of unraveling some of its secrets, that we decided
260 Prado, Galeano, and Abecasis

to set sail on a journey through Amazonian waters, whose splendor so

many explorers had glorified. We boarded the boat in the Bellavista Na-
nay neighborhood in Iquitos. It was a cool July morning, and our expec-
tations overshadowed our senses. We cruised tranquilly, filling our lungs
with air from the celebrated “lungs of the Earth.” After the first few
bends, we observed in the distance what appeared to be an enormous
crowd of birds perched on the branches that stood out above the water on
one of the riverbanks. From a distance, it was difficult to specify what
type of birds were there, but by their colors we assumed that they were
herons and vultures drawn to what we believed were a group of fish in a
feeding frenzy in the bank.
We continued toward the group of birds, ready to launch themselves
over the water at any moment to hunt, but upon approaching the river-
bank, one can imagine our surprise at discovering that what appeared to
be birds of white plumage were nothing more than plastic bags that the
flowing waters had left entangled in dry tree branches, and what seemed
to be fish frantically eating on the river’s surface were nothing more than
pieces of plastic carried by the current. There it was—what historically
had been denominated a paradise with oil was nothing more than the
image we observe daily in the vast majority of water resources in the
world’s cities: rivers of plastic and garbage.
In his poem “In the Ports,” Carlos Reyes Ramirez refers to this reality
of the Amazon as a garbage dump:
The winds drag in the smell of refrigerated fish and rust from
old barges trapped in mud.
Over old steel frameworks lying on their side, the waters emerge
contaminated,
and, like a prelude to thunder and plagues, the afternoon raises
its snout.
Wind carries in the shivering of fishermen. In the air drifts the hope
for a big school of fish for June.
Chaos and domestic trash float through the hours, spilling from
the cliffs and rugged coasts.
Hungry looks eat away at us in silence, and dawn shows us its
cavernous jaws.
How did Amazonia convert itself into the sewer of the planet? What had
happened to the lungs of the planet, the global commons, and the world’s
pharmacy that hides medicinal secrets that could save humankind? What
happened to the tales of paradise that Cristóbal de Acuña and Antonio
León Pinelo told in their chronicles? Today, the account of Jesuit mission-
ary João Daniel, who believed that the Brazilian Amazonia was the place
destined to carry out the plans of God, seems unbelievable. The many
different Amazonian imaginaries compiled by Jorge Marcone (El Dorado,
the Green Inferno, the Promised Land, Paradise Lost, and the Geography
of Danger) seemed impossible to reconcile with what we were seeing. 4
 Amazonia 261

Today, the representations of Amazonia as either an earthly paradise

or a green inferno are difficult to reconcile in situ; not because the Eden
that once existed and now must be recovered has been lost, but rather
because neither image ever existed in reality. They correspond more to
fantasies that conquistadors and explorers constructed, based primarily
on their own experiences and desires. Amazonia, just like the rest of the
planet, has faced transformations since the beginning of time not only by
humans, but also by plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi that adapt them-
selves and transform the landscape according to their own biological
needs. 5 However, it is necessary to distinguish between this type of trans-
formation and that which results from predation driven by the pressures
generated by global market demands. These transformative processes
have aggressively and systematically destroyed ecosystems and local
communities, as has been the case in the exploitation of rubber and other
hardwoods, mining, industrial monocultures, extraction of hydrocar-
bons, and illegal drug trafficking. The lack of governmental oversight
and protections has taken its toll in all these extractive practices, as have
unregulated hunting, fishing, and the extraction of specimens that are
exported to diverse parts of the world for the sole purpose of decoration.
Still, every problem is much more complex than the sum of its causes.
Population growth and a high unemployment rate—problems that are
far from exclusive to Amazonia—come together to create the perfect reci-
pe for predatory practices. Fishermen from the Iquitos area allege that
more and more, people feel forced to cast their fishing nets into the water,
due to the lack of available jobs and, at the end of the day, the obligation
to feed themselves and their families. In the dry season, the river fills
with fish that, deceptively, give the impression of an inexhaustible re-
source to many native inhabitants, although few paixes, gamitanas, and
pacus remain in the waters surrounding Iquitos.
Bellavista-Nanay is a fishing district in Iquitos. All day, fishermen go
out to cast their nets from the shores where the riverbed meets the rain-
forest. They also fish with hooks, in canoes that barely float above the
water, using one hand to grab the line and the other a shrub on the shore
to prevent the current from carrying them away. The hours pass like this,
at a standstill, as if the canoe rested on solid ground and not on the
current of a powerful river. “Ejercitan todos los músculos de su cuerpo”
(they exercise all of the body’s muscles), says Amílcar, a young fisherman
who navigates the peque-peque (a small-motor water vessel adapted for
travel throughout Amazonia) on which we travel. They hunt doncella, a
newly discovered type of catfish that has gained popularity after the
disappearance of the paixe, gamitana, and pacu from many Amazonian
rivers. The doncella now faces the consequences of having become the
replacement for the most coveted and rare fish in Amazonia. It has been a
long time since the paixes can be found in their native environment in
many rivers of Amazonia; in order to see the paixe, one must travel to
262 Prado, Galeano, and Abecasis

Pacaya Samiria, a nature reserve which is accessible by a one-day boat

journey up the river from Iquitos. The protection that the reserve pro-
vides and the self-regulation of the local fishing community still make
possible the presence of colossal paixes, gamitanas, and pacus, but in many
other places they are already a thing of the past.
As in most of the rivers and seas of the world, the popularization of
the use of plastic and disposable materials has left its mark on Amazonia.
One fisherman from the region affirms that, before, everything was
wrapped in paper rather than plastic, and glass beer and soda bottles
were returned to bottling facilities to be reused. Today, plastic bags re-
main entangled in trees on the riverbanks, and plastic bottles float in the
water as a symbol of the arrival of the modernity of the moment. The
disposal of garbage in the community of Padre Cocha, situated on the
Nanay River only a few kilometers from Iquitos, is a good example of
this. Due to the negligence of local authorities (with whom the commu-
nity has been pleading for means to facilitate the disposal of their gar-
bage), plastic containers, batteries, and other contaminants are thrown
directly into the local rivers and yards, affecting river life and soil quality,
and poisoning edible plants and medicinal gardens. Presently, efforts are
being initiated by local and international NGOs to resolve this issue.
The growing population and lack of employment also generate com-
plex situations, even in protected areas of Amazonia. One of the coau-
thors of this article, Herman Ruiz Abecasis, led a surprise operation di-
rected at finding and capturing people illegally harvesting hardwood in
Pacaya Samiria. Accompanied by twenty police units, they successfully
surprised three tractors that hauled hardwood from the protected area
and captured the boss of the illegal hardwood extracting operation. How-
ever, the local community surrounded police and pleaded that the wood
cutters not face criminal charges, arguing that this operation was one of
the few sources of income for the region. Similarly, it is suspected that
some riverside inhabitants drill holes into oil pipelines in order to receive
cleaning jobs after a spill.
These problems also affect indigenous communities. For example, in
Pacaya Samiria, there are several communities of Kukama, one indige-
nous group in the region. The Kukama have practiced fishing since an-
cient times, but the decline in fish populations has affected them directly.
Dramatic accounts can be heard at Formabiap, a university that works to
educate indigenous teachers, located 45 minutes from Iquitos via a dusty
highway in summer or, in the rainy season, an inundated semblance of a
highway. The students come from various regions of the Peruvian Ama-
zon. Education at Formabiap is bilingual, depending on the community
to which the students belong: teaching occurs both in Spanish and in
their local indigenous languages. Students, professors, and shamans from
four different communities live on the university campus: Kukama-kuka-
miria, Kichwa, Awajun, and Shawi. The campus prohibits plastic; in or-
 Amazonia 263

der to drink from public water fountains, glass containers are used and
the cafeteria serves food with metal utensils that are hand-washed by
students, professors, and visitors immediately after use.
Speaking with students, professors, and keepers of ancestral knowl-
edge at Formabiap, we were able to observe how the current state of
intervention in the local ecosystem is reflected in the accounts of those
who are very familiar with their surroundings. On the Formabiap cam-
pus, we met with Kik Morey Lancha, a Kukama-kukamiria student who
is writing his thesis on discourse and techniques of traditional fishing. On
a platform supported by stilts above the marshlands, we asked him what
he thought about fishing conditions in the regions of Amazonia that are
familiar to him. His vision, similar to all of those that we have seen so far,
is not very optimistic. Upon asking him what species one hunts nowa-
days in his region of study, he began to name those that one no longer
catches: “ya no se pesca tigre zúngaro, sábalo, gamitana, pacu ni mucho
menos paiche” (we no longer catch tigre zúngaro, sábalo, gamitana, pacu,
not even paiche). After asking him what he believed was the cause of this
loss of fish, he spoke to us about the exploitation for commercial pur-
poses, the use of techniques involving barbasco and dynamite, which kill
all fish, but he emphasized that the most serious cause was the loss of a
common vision and protocol with regards to fishing: “cuando un abuelo
se iba a pescar, le pedía a la madre de la cocha que le dejara tomar
algunos peces, se pedía con respeto y veneración, porque para los Kuka-
ma, todo tiene un espíritu, pero esa relación de respeto se ha acabado”
(when an elder went fishing, he prayed to the mother of the marshlands
that she would let him catch a few fish, and he asked with respect and
veneration because, for the Kukama, everything has a spirit, but this
relationship of respect no longer exists). Kik told us that the fishermen
and their equipment were blessed by the mother to better themselves,
become more agile, and, most of all, to help them respect the spirits of the
fish, the marshlands, and the river. Kik also told us that in some indige-
nous towns the people were working on spells and medicinal plants to
“close the cochas” through the growing of dense vegetation around
them, so that they become inaccessible to outsiders.
Kik told us about Ricardo Tamani, a Kukama wise man who lived on
the university campus: “él me dijo que fue fisga, es el que sabe pescar con
todo, el que sabe dónde agarrar los peces y que siempre va a agarrar los
peces grandes, fisga es una de las denominaciones más altas que puede
recibir una persona en el pueblo Kukama” (he told us that fisga is one
who knows how to fish with everything, who knows where to catch fish
and always catches the largest fish; fisga is one of the highest denomina-
tions that one can achieve in the Kukama culture). We followed Kik’s
suggestion, and we went to speak with don Ricardo, a Kukama wise man
and fishing specialist, who started by telling us the history of fish:
264 Prado, Galeano, and Abecasis

Antiguamente no había ríos, cochas ni agua en ninguna parte, la gente

carecía de agua para sustentar la vida, pero en una oportunidad, la
gente se empezó a admirar de que mientras la gente seguía muriendo
de sed, los pájaros carpinteros aumentaban. Un armadillo llevó la his-
toria a un médico indígena: “ustedes están muriendo de sed, pero los
carpinteros están sacando el agua de una lupuna, cada que pican el
tronco del árbol, salen chorros de agua.” El médico indígena fue a
avisarle a su pueblo que en la lupuna había agua, así que los pobla-
dores fueron a cortar el árbol para recoger agua en sus cántaros, pero a
medida que se fue secando el tronco de la lupuna derribada, el tronco
del árbol se convirtió en río, mientras las ramas se convirtieron en
quebradas y las hojas se convirtieron en peces.

(In the old days, there were no rivers, marshlands, or water anywhere;
people lacked water to support life, but one day, they marveled that,
while people were dying of thirst, the woodpecker population was
growing. Eventually, an armadillo told an indigenous doctor: “you
people are dying of thirst, but the woodpeckers are extracting water
from the lupuna tree; every time they peck a hole in the trunk of the
tree, out come streams of water.” The indigenous doctor informed his
people that the lupuna contained water, and the inhabitants cut down
the tree to collect water in their jugs, but as the fallen lupuna tree dried
out, the tree trunk became a river, while the branches transformed into
creeks, and the leaves became fish.)
Don Ricardo says that he has fished with bow and arrow, spear, and
hook since the age of 14, when he learned the secrets from his father, who
never went fishing without conversing with the mother of the marsh-
lands, the creeks, the rivers, and the rainforest. But now the fish have
disappeared because the population has increased, and one is not able to
depend on the fish because the new fishing techniques have depleted
everything. He told us that to recover our fish, we must care for our
environment and ourselves, and that net casters should stop hunting the
fish. There are more fishermen than fish, and it is important to recover
the traditional ways because the elders who know it are dying, and the
Kukama language, along with all indigenous knowledge, is disappear-
ing. At night, while transcribing these interviews, from our Formabiap
residence, we heard the detonations of dynamite used by fishermen in
Zúngarococha.
Near Zúngarococha is Moronacocha, and similar problems are shared
throughout this region. Poet Percy Vílchez Vela writes about Moronaco-
cha in his poem “Zozobra en el lago moribundo” (“Foundering on the
Dying Lake”):
 Amazonia 265

The boat stops suddenly among tall

Putuputales and the tangling gramalote grasses.
We are on Morona lake:
Water dying,
A cesspool of fossils of commerce.
Houses on the shore reveal their exposed rooms,
Their corn huskers, their animals scampering
Among wooden posts.
It’s the west side of Iquitos and the drain pipes spew their daily sewage.
It’s the dirty side, like a false door,
A turbid window of filth.
A trip to Manacamiri from here costs a sol.
A quarter of an hour trip and the scenery is free.
But we grew silent shortly after leaving.
The pequepeque boat doesn’t sing like a frog.
It leans to port as if it were leaving.
The bowman removes the obstacles and tries to move forward.
Women fix their hair and smile nervously.
And we float over these waters that are suitable for a plague,
Like over a gloomy ocean,
As if on the verge of an imminent catastrophe.
Being in the midst of submerged trash, of waste on the shore,
Makes you sick.
When did this lake start to die?
What stories of its owners would the waste tell?
A sudden storm would finish us all.
We would be shipwrecked in this mess.
They would find nothing of us in this bed of miasmas.
Adrift, close to ports and herons with their long necks
And lucuma beaks.
How do flowers grow here, the trash dump of this metropolis?
The ladies open their purses, look through their purchases
And help the boatman.
Given the incapacity shown by Western leaders and planners of econo-
mies and life in solving the environmental problems that greedy markets
create, the most convenient solution would be to consult the people who
suffer most from the direct consequences of market pressures. The dis-
course of different indigenous groups derives from a profound respect
and reciprocal care for the environment in which they live. Starting with
a foundation of respect for the environmental systems that nourish us
seems like more than just an option, but a necessity for our own well-
being. However, accounts of missing species, leveled rainforests, and pol-
luted waterways are a testimony of constant disrespect. Since the mo-
ment in which the indigenous made contact with the conquistadors, the
use of the Spanish language has been imposed upon them, along with the
use of Western medicine, and speaking with animal spirits is considered
satanic and to be avoided at all costs. As a result, many indigenous lan-
266 Prado, Galeano, and Abecasis

guages and knowledge bases have disappeared, and many others are at
risk of disappearing. Kukama, for example, considered to be a dying
language, is spoken by few young people and, in all of the Kukama
communities, Spanish is the first language. Don Ricardo, the Kukama
wise man from the indigenous university, tells us that he can easily rec-
ognize other Kukama people, and that as soon as he finds himself with
one of them, he speaks in their ancestral language, but the young people
do not respond in Kukama because they do not know the language or
because they are ashamed of their heritage.
For more than five centuries, in the civilizing projects of Western cul-
ture, indigenous cultures’ philosophy of life and cultural practices have
been seen as antagonistic to the progress and development of the region.
Despite being successfully practiced for thousands of years, indigenous
beliefs and skills are viewed as though they were inferior, as if they lack
any sort of validity in comparison with the knowledge generated by
modernity. Don Ricardo informs us that they have been led to believe
that the animals in the forest do not have spirits, that rivers are masses of
inert water, and that the plants and animals were created by God so that
man could benefit from them. Perhaps current criticism, in which indige-
nous knowledges and environmental problems have become increasingly
important, could coincide with indigenous discourse and propose new
alternatives. For this, it is necessary to reconsider our relationship with
nature and abandon the superiority complex that has dominated Western
discourse. Although it is neither possible nor desirable to go back in time,
it is necessary to establish the existence and recognition of a world that is
more than human. The transformations that we humans have made of
our environment are as natural as that of any other species, but the rate of
this transformation puts at risk our quality of life and our own subsis-
tence, negatively impacting other species, ecosystems, and groups of peo-
ple that, despite having little to do with market expansions, are most
vulnerable.
It is unfortunate that, in moments of crisis, one quickly loses cultural
heritage and knowledge that may be capable of solving many of the
problems generated by this crisis. In a 2015 article in Science, Andrew
Lawler affirms that it is increasingly less probable that indigenous com-
munities who have chosen to isolate themselves can remain untouched.
Given the pressures of mining, oil, and the hardwood industry, and tak-
ing into account the shortage of resources in general, the indigenous are
being contacted by explorers or obligated to establish contact with set-
tlers in order to obtain resources. According to the specialists consulted
by this journal, it is fundamental that this contact be done in a controlled
way, under strict medical vigilance in order to avoid the spread to the
indigenous community of any new illnesses for which their immune sys-
tem is not prepared and for which there is no medicine. Upon asking the
advanced students at Formabiap about this theory, they responded that
 Amazonia 267

the most important thing was to respect the voluntary isolation at all
costs, controlling access to their territory by miners and fishermen, but
that in cases where contact cannot be avoided, Western medicine is nec-
essary, “pero no como antes, no impuesta, debe aclararse que hay enfer-
medades que se tratan mejor con medicina occidental de la misma mane-
ra que hay otras enfermedades que se tratan con conocimiento tradicion-
al indígena” (but not like before, not imposed, it should be clear that
some diseases are better treated with Western medicine, in the same way
that there are other diseases that are better treated with indigenous
knowledge). This mind-set shows an opening to alternative solutions
coming from other systems of knowledge. Likewise, it is probable that
this mind-set could work to solve environmental problems; for some
problems it will be better to use Western knowledge while, for others,
traditional knowledge will work best and, sometimes, an innovative mix
of both. The paradoxical element is that the West has rarely felt that it has
anything to learn from indigenous wisdom, nor that learning the way in
which these communities interact with their territories could provide im-
portant alternatives to solutions for our environmental problems. Let’s
just hope that the indigenous can close off their cochas before it becomes
too late.

Translation: Jennifer E. Irish

NOTES

1. Throughout Entangled Edens, Candace Slater affirms that in various visions of

the Amazon, El Dorado, the Golden Dream, finds expression as an impulse toward
fragmentation and containment of the natural world: the Amazon as second Eden, as
Hostile Wilderness, as Vanishing World.
2. See Jorge Marcone’s “Nuevos descubrimientos del Río Amazonas” for an analy-
sis of the representation of different archetypes of the Amazon in the Spanish
American novela de la selva genre.
3. See Slater’s “Amazonia as Edenic Narrative” for a recounting of this Edenic
motif in representations of Amazonia.
4. Marcone affirms that all of these are “metáforas con las que la selva ha sido
representada y a través de las cuales ha sido y es percibida y entendida” (metaphors
with which the rainforest has been represented and through which it has been per-
ceived and understood) (“Nuevos descubrimientos” 131). However, despite the diver-
sity of textual representations of Amazonia, Marcone affirms that they reproduce
visions that respond more to personal interest than an actual demystification of the
rainforest, and that even the criticism is not exempt from the “tradición discursiva que
critica” (discursive tradition that it critiques; 135).
5. In Amazonia: A Natural History, Hugh Raffles writes that “place making in Igara-
pé Guariba still relies on the hard work of nature making. This is partly because
nature, in its biophysicality, is never in stasis, and forces a constant reinvestment and
reinvention of labor, debate, and knowledge” (68).
268 Prado, Galeano, and Abecasis

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 FIFTEEN
The Nicaragua Canal and
the Shifting Currents of
Sandinista Environmental Policy
Adrian Taylor Kane

The 1979 triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua was a pivot-

al moment in Central American history that presented great hope for
social progress on multiple fronts, not least of which was the country’s
environmentalist movement. One of the central objectives of the revolu-
tion was to enact agricultural reforms that would create economic oppor-
tunities for peasant farmers, who had long suffered from economic poli-
cies designed for the exclusive benefit of the Nicaraguan oligarchy. Given
the importance of healthy ecosystems for the success of subsistence farm-
ers, it was perhaps inevitable that, as one Nicaraguan scientist put it,
“revolutionary struggle and environmentalism became one” (qtd. in Fa-
ber, Environment 154). Thirty-six years later, with Sandinista President
Daniel Ortega having struck a deal with Chinese billionaire Wang Jing
for the construction of a $50 billion interoceanic canal, the ties between
Sandinismo and environmentalism appear to have been severed. Indeed,
for Axel Meyer, a German biologist and expert on Nicaragua’s ecological
systems, the true cost of the canal is “staggering environmental devasta-
tion” (qtd. in Zach 6).
Ernesto Cardenal, who served as the Sandinista government’s Minis-
ter of Culture from 1980 to 1988, recently dedicated a poetry reading at
the International Poetry Festival in Granada to “the great Lake Nicara-
gua, which is being threatened by the monstrosity of the canal” (Vílchez
n. pag.). 1 His poem “Nueva ecología” (“New Ecology”), written shortly
after the 1979 revolution, captures the environmentalist current of Sandi-
269
270 Kane

nista thought and portrays the state of Nicaraguan nature at this impor-
tant moment in Central American history. The poem paints a grim pic-
ture of Nicaragua’s ecosystems, which in many cases had been devastat-
ed by the economic and environmental policies of Anastasio Somoza
García and his son Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who ruled Nicaragua
from 1936 until 1979, leaving what Daniel Faber describes as “a national
environmental crisis of massive proportions” (Environment 152). The
poetic voice of “Nueva ecología” makes clear that as a result of the blood
shed during the Sandinista Revolution, under the revolutionary govern-
ment, Nicaraguans will reclaim and decontaminate their nation’s natural
resources.
Reading Cardenal’s poem in 2015 helps illuminate the historical junc-
ture at which Nicaragua currently finds itself by highlighting Ortega’s
canal project as a drastic departure from the environmental advocacy that
was fundamental to his party’s revolutionary platform during the 1970s
and 1980s. My brief reading of Cardenal’s poem in this chapter will serve
as a point of contrast between the utopian environmentalist vision of the
revolution and the apparent collapse of that vision in the decision to
build the canal. The inherent irony of the current situation in Nicaragua
has not been lost upon the masses. Indeed, the popular protest song “No
quiero el canal” (“I don’t want the canal”), which I will also briefly dis-
cuss in the latter half of this chapter, avails itself of this irony, wielding it
as a potent weapon of dissent. By juxtaposing these two cultural artifacts,
the present chapter offers the proposed Nicaraguan canal as yet another
example to support Sergio Ramírez’s assertion that Ortega’s revolution-
ary rhetoric no longer coincides with the Sandinista government’s actions
(xiv).
The aesthetics of “Nueva ecología” are derived from the concept of
exteriorism, which Cardenal defines as “objective poetry, narrative and
anecdotal, made with elements of real life and with concrete things, with
proper names, details, data, statistics, facts and quotations” (qtd. in
Beverley and Zimmerman 70). A narrative poem, “Nueva ecología” con-
sists of a single stanza of sixty-three verses that are primarily composed
of complete sentences. It tells the story of Somocista environmental de-
struction by enumerating a lengthy list of offenses, but it also offers new
hope for nature’s recovery.
Despite its bleak portrayal of the environmental scenario of 1979 as a
result of Nicaragua’s oppressive past, “Nueva ecología” presents an opti-
mistic view of the future. Indeed, in the opening verses, nature responds
favorably to the triumph of the revolution, with more coyotes appearing
near San Ubaldo, more rabbits and weasels along the highways, and
more alligators in the rivers (1–4). In these verses and throughout the
poem, Cardenal adheres to the aesthetics of exteriorism by avoiding com-
plex metaphors and by naming specific rivers, people, lakes, towns, and
animals. The list of animals mentioned throughout the poem is particu-
 The Nicaragua Canal and Sandinista Environmental Policy 271

larly extensive. As in the verses above, in many instances the various

species are inscribed in the text as a way of marking nature’s revival after
decades of destruction. In other verses, animals are named as victims,
among them, the jaguar, the puma, and the tapir, which are presented as
facing extinction (verses 34–36).
Nicaragua’s rivers are also a central component of the poem’s exteri-
orist imagery. The poetic voice denounces Somoza and his supporters,
“los somocistas también destruían los lagos, ríos, y montañas” (Somoza’s
people destroyed the lakes, rivers and mountains, too), and takes specific
exception to their alteration of the natural course of rivers for the irriga-
tion of large plantations (verse 9). 2 In the verse “El Sinecapa secado por el
despale de los latifundistas” (the Sinecapa dried up because the big land-
owners stripped the land), the river becomes a symbol of the destruction
wrought by the greed of the Nicaraguan oligarchy (verse 13). The Ocho-
mogo River, the poem continues, is polluted with “desechos químicos
capitalistas” (capitalist chemical wastes), and the Boaco is filled with
“aguas negras” (sewage water; verses 17 and 20). Indeed, the overall
effect of the rivers in “Ecología” is to portray a country sucked dry by
greed and contaminated by a corrupt form of capitalism.
Nevertheless, in the poem’s final verses, the poetic voice makes clear
that nature too has been liberated as a result of the revolution. Indeed, by
concluding with the oft-cited verses, “Toda la ecología gemía. La
revolución / es también de lagos, ríos, árboles, animales” (The whole
ecology had been moaning. The Revolution also belongs to lakes, rivers,
trees, animals), the poem renders environmentalism inseparable from the
Sandinista revolution (verses 62–63).
The utopian vision presented in “Nueva ecología” was created during
a moment of triumph for the revolutionary movement against the op-
pressive economic and environmental policies of the Somoza regime and
aligns with several of the actions taken by the Sandinistas following their
rise to power. For example, in response to a proposal made by a group of
environmentalists, one month after assuming control, on August 24,
1979, the Sandinistas created the Instituto Nicaragüense de Recursos Nat-
urales y del Ambiente (Nicaraguan Institute of Natural Resources and the
Environment, IRENA). According to Faber, “the tendency toward ‘revo-
lutionary ecology’ came to be reflected in IRENA’s environmental poli-
cies and policy battles, which included programs in reforestation, wa-
tershed management, pollution control, wildlife conservation, national
parks, environmental education, and the conservation of genetic diver-
sity” (Environment 154–155). The environmentalist vision presented in
“Nueva ecología” thus corresponds with the Sandinistas’ actions during
the early years of the FSLN’s rule.
Given that Daniel Ortega was one of the original members of the junta
that governed from 1979 to 1984 and approved the creation of IRENA,
one might understandably be confounded as to how the same man from
272 Kane

the same political party could possibly support the construction of a ca-
nal whose environmental impact has not been independently assessed,
and which scientists warn could wreak havoc on ecosystems across the
country. Sergio Ramírez, also one of the original five members of the
Sandinista junta and Ortega’s vice president from 1984 to 1990, offers a
political analysis that helps explain the current state of the FSLN:
The Sandinista Front that supported Daniel once again as a candidate
in the 2006 election differs both in spirit and in nature from the one that
took up arms and conquered power in 1979. . . . Despite the mistakes,
false conceptions, and many setbacks, it was originally inspired by a
kind of mysticism with deeply held ethics, now replaced with ambition
for personal power. . . . That messianic party, its collective leadership
with Daniel as a primus inter pares and a Leninist-inspired structure
and discipline, no longer exists. It has been entirely replaced by the
personal will of Daniel himself, and his wife, Rosario Murillo. (xiv,
xvii)
Ramírez argues that Ortega’s rhetoric has not changed, but his words no
longer correspond with his actions as they did during the early years of
the FSLN. Despite its impassioned rhetoric, he continues, the left finds
itself making fundamental concessions to the right to such an extent that
the difference between the two sides becomes imperceptible (xiii). An
important difference, Ramírez notes, is that in the early years “there were
no great capitalists among the Sandinistas” (xiv). For the former Vice
President, there is no longer any continuity between the ideals of the
revolutionary government of the 1980s and today’s FSLN (xiii).
Ramírez expressed his utter disillusionment with Ortega and the state
of the FSLN in the foreword to a 2007 reprint of his memoir Adiós Mucha-
chos: Una memoria de la revolución sandinista, six years before the Nicara-
guan government granted a concession to the Hong Kong Nicaragua
Canal Development Investment Company (HKND) for construction of
the interoceanic canal. Nevertheless, Ortega’s support for the canal
project only reinforces Ramírez’s analysis of twenty-first-century Sandi-
nismo as having abandoned its initial ideals; in this case, particularly
with regards to environmental stewardship. Although major infrastruc-
ture projects in Nicaragua are subject to a standard independent environ-
mental impact assessment, a law passed in 2013 exempts the canal from
such review (Laursen 7). Therefore, the only study that has been commis-
sioned is by the British consulting firm Environmental Resources Man-
agement (ERM), which was hired by HKND, presenting a clear conflict of
interest (Zach 6).
In the absence of an independent review, an ad hoc international sci-
entific panel convened in Nicaragua in November 2014 and identified
three broad areas of concern for the canal plan: water and sediments,
biodiversity and ecosystem integrity, and socio-economic impact (Huete-
 The Nicaragua Canal and Sandinista Environmental Policy 273

Pérez et al., “Scientists” 3990). The canal would cut across agricultural
land, forests, Lake Nicaragua, pasturelands, the Indio Maíz Biological
Reserve, the Cerro Silva Natural Reserve, wetlands, and indigenous com-
munal land (Huete-Pérez et al., “Rethink” 355; Zach 6). For Huete-Pérez,
Meyer, and Álvarez, a primary concern is “how the initial construction
and recurrent dredging of the lake channel might affect the trophic dy-
namics, water quality, and sedimentation of local rivers, along with im-
plications for domestic water supplies, crop irrigation, and fisheries”
(“Rethink” 355). Scientists have also noted that Lake Nicaragua’s “inter-
connected ecosystems are fragile and particularly susceptible to the ef-
fects of sediment resuspension” due to its shallow depth and constantly
mixing waters (Huete-Pérez et al., “Scientists” 3991). As well, they have
warned that forest area impacted by the canal on the Caribbean side of
the country is home to at least twenty-two threatened or endangered
species, some of which could be directly affected (Huete-Pérez et al.,
“Scientists” 3992).
The social impact of the proposed canal has also caused concern
among citizens and scientists alike. Despite the fact that more than 50
percent of the canal will run through communal indigenous and Afro-
descendant territories, and in spite of a national law that prohibits the
sale, lease, or seizure of such lands, the concession to HKND grants the
Chinese group the right to expropriate land along the canal route (Huete-
Pérez et al., “Scientists” 3993; Laursen n. pag.). Indeed, approximately
280 communities and more than one hundred thousand people are ex-
pected to be displaced by the canal’s construction (Huete-Pérez et al.,
“Scientists” 3993). According to Elizabeth Zach, indigenous groups
threatened by the plan include the Garifuna, Mayanga, Miskitu, Rama,
and Ulwa (6).
During the final months of 2014, citizens marched to demonstrate
opposition to the project in multiple municipalities along the canal route,
including Rivas, Nueva Guinea, and San Miguelito. At root of their oppo-
sition, they cited environmental concerns, fear of land expropriation, and
the loss of national sovereignty. Public opposition to the canal escalated
during December 2014, after the government and HKND announced that
the construction of an access road would commence just before Christ-
mas. On December 10, thousands of protesters flooded the streets of Ma-
nagua to denounce the canal project, many wielding banners and signs
characterizing President Ortega as a money-hungry vendepatrias or trai-
tor. According to Huete-Pérez, Meyer, and Álvarez, government and se-
curity forces responded “by harassing, repressing, and jailing opposition
protesters and leaders, increasing fear among the populace” (“Rethink”
355). When construction began, the protests devolved into violence be-
tween police and protestors as police dismantled roadblocks set by pro-
testors on the Pan-American Highway in Rivas and on the Managua-San
Carlos Highway (“Protests Erupt” n. pag.).
274 Kane

The anthem of the protest movement has become an anonymously

released song titled “No quiero el canal,” which is set to the music of the
1970s song “No basta rezar” (“Praying Is Not Enough”) by Venezuelan
group Los Guaraguao. Ironically, the Guaraguaos’ social protest music is
closely associated with the Latin American revolutionary movements of
the 1970s, including the rise to power of the anti-Somoza Sandinistas, but
it has now been converted into a weapon of dissent against some of the
same Sandinistas, particularly Ortega. The original refrain “No, no, no
basta rezar / hacen falta muchas cosas para conseguir la paz” (Praying is
not enough / much more is needed to achieve peace) have been trans-
formed into “No, no, no quiero el canal / hacen falta muchas cosas para
poderme engañar” (I don’t want the canal / much more is needed to
deceive me). The song declares that protecting the environment is the
priority of the people and acknowledges that the poor stand to lose the
most because it is their land that will be expropriated to make way for the
canal.
At least four different videos for the song have been published on
YouTube, the most popular of which (based on the number of views to
date) was uploaded by the user No Quiero el Canal in October 2014. The
video primarily presents a combination of photos from various protest
marches across the country and satirical caricatures that had previously
been published in the national newspaper La Prensa by Manuel Guillén.
One particularly poignant caricature features a sculpture of Sandino with
his quote “la soberanía de un pueblo no se discute, sino que se defiende
con las armas en la mano” (the people’s sovereignty is not discussed;
rather it is defended with weapons in hand) altered to read, “la soberanía
de un pueblo no se discute, se negocia por un buen billete en la mano”
(the people’s sovereignty cannot be disputed; rather it is negotiated for a
nice bill in hand). Another of Guillén’s images portrays Ortega intention-
ally contaminating Lake Nicaragua so that he can declare it already pol-
luted to put an end to environmentalists’ concerns about the canal’s im-
pact on the lake’s fragile ecosystems. The overall irony of a president
from a party founded on a platform of national sovereignty with strong
environmental policies during its early years in power is captured in a
photo from the video of a woman with a poster that reads, “¡Sandino les
llamaba vendepatrias!” (Sandino would call you traitors!). The sugges-
tion, of course, is that Sandino himself would not condone the Sandinista
government’s canal plan.
In “No quiero el canal,” Guillén’s caricatures, and protest banners and
posters, Ortega is portrayed in a similar fashion as Somoza in Cardenal’s
“Nueva ecología.” That is, he is characterized as an unscrupulous capital-
ist who is reckless with Nicaragua’s natural resources. By repurposing
protest music associated with the Sandinista revolution and satirically
reminding the FSLN leaders of their party’s anti-imperialist origins, the
opposition has made effective use of the unfortunate irony of the current
 The Nicaragua Canal and Sandinista Environmental Policy 275

situation to highlight Ortega’s abandonment of the ethics of Sandinismo.

Although Ramírez might not have predicted the current circumstances,
the Sandinista’s support for the canal seems to support his assertion that
“the old revolutionary project now clearly lies in the obscurity of the last
century, very distant from what it once was in terms of its ideals” (xvii).

NOTES

1. All translations are the author’s own, unless noted otherwise.

2. English translations from “Nueva ecología” are John Cohen’s. Cardenal’s poem
has been published as “Nueva ecología” and “Ecología” in different collections.

WORKS CITED

Beverley, John and Marc Zimmerman. Literature and Politics in the Central American
Revolutions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Print.
Cardenal, Ernesto. “Nueva ecología.” Antología. Buenos Aires: Nueva América, 1986.
Print.
———-. “New Ecology.” From Nicaragua with Love: Poems 1979–1986. Ed. and trans.
John Cohen. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986. 1–6. Print.
Faber, Daniel. Environment Under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Central
America. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993. Print.
Los Guaraguao. “No basta rezar.” Jesús caminante. Yare, 1973. LP.
Huete-Pérez, Jorge A., Pedro J. J. Álvarez, Jerald L. Schnoor, Bruce E. Rittmann, An-
thony Clayton, María L. Acosta, Carlos E. M. Bicudo, Mary T. K. Arroyo, Michael T.
Brett, Víctor M. Campos, Hernán Chalmovich, Blanca Jiménez Cisneros, Alan Co-
vich, Luiz D. Lacerda, Jean-Michel Maes, Julio C. Miranda, Salvador Montenegro-
Guillén, Manuel Ortega-Hegg, Gerald R. Urquhart, Katherine Vammen, and Luis
Zambrano. “Scientists Raise Alarms about Fast Tracking of Transoceanic Canal
Through Nicaragua.” Environmental Science and Technology 49.7 (2015): 3989–996.
Web.
Huete-Pérez, Jorge A., Axel Meyer, and Pedro J. Álvarez. “Rethink the Nicaragua
Canal.” Science 347.23 (2015): 355. Web.
Laursen, Lucas. “Nicaragua Defies Canal Protests.” Nature 517 (2015): 7–8. Web.
No Quiero el Canal. “No quiero el canal.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. October 26,
2014. Web.
“Protests Erupt in Nicaragua over Interoceanic Canal.” The Guardian. December 24,
2014. Web.
Ramírez, Sergio. Adiós Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution. Trans. Stacey
Alba D. Skar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Print.
Vílchez, Dánae. “Poesía comprometida con el Gran Lago.” Confidencial. February 15,
2015. Web.
Zach, Elizabeth. “Nicaragua’s Troubled Waters.” The New York Times. Travel 1, 6–7.
April 26, 2015. Print.
Zimmerman, Marc and Ellen Banbeger. “Poetry and Politics in Nicaragua: The Upris-
ing of 1978.” Literature and Contemporary Revolutionary Culture 1 (1984): 274–94.
Print.
 SIXTEEN
Tourism, Ecology, and
Changing US-Cuba Relations
Marcela Reales Visbal

A study conducted in 2011 by the World Resources Institute on the

world’s coral reefs indicates that more than 75 percent of reefs in Carib-
bean waters are affected by local threats such as coastal development,
marine-based pollution and damage, and overfishing. 1 More than 30 per-
cent of these reefs were reported to be at high or very high risk. However,
there are also 630 Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) established in the re-
gion, which cover about 30 percent of the reefs (Burke et al. 64). Among
them is Cuba’s Jardines de la Reina (Gardens of the Queen), the largest
fully protected MPA in the Caribbean. Established as a reserve in 1996,
Jardines de la Reina is an archipelago located 100 kilometers south of
Cuba that includes a variety of coral reef, sea grass, and mangrove sys-
tems (Siciliano n. pag.). Scientific studies show that the reserve has devel-
oped into a productive, healthy, and diverse ecosystem; in fact, it is one
of the most pristine marine ecosystems in the Caribbean due to the no-
fishing zone restrictions imposed by the Cuban government during envi-
ronmental reforms implemented in the 1990s. 2 The work being done at
the Jardines de la Reina has gained attention in the United States, and it
has been the subject of a number of articles, reports, and documentaries
intended for the general public by NPR, 60 Minutes, PBS, and The New
York Times, as well as a photo-documentary by Robert Wintner. 3 The
prolific coverage of the site’s ecological success is significant, particularly
when one considers the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between
US president Barack Obama and his Cuban counterpart, Raúl Castro, on
December 17, 2014. The international interest demonstrates not only the

277
278 Reales

sustained collaboration between the two countries in the realms of sci-

ence and environmental conservation policy, but also the ecological con-
cerns that the potential end of the trade embargo raises due to the ex-
pected expansion of the tourism industry on the island.
Cuba’s marine ecological richness is largely the result of its coastal
underdevelopment in comparison with the rest of the Caribbean, a situa-
tion that arose in large part from the trade embargo that the United States
imposed on the country on February 7, 1962, which limits the access of
tourism and industry from the United States. A prospective lifting of the
embargo will almost certainly benefit Cuba’s economy, since it will gen-
erate hard currency in the short term, but the expected flood of tourists
and foreign investment could potentially threaten the conservation of
Cuban environments such as Jardines de la Reina. Although censorship
has limited local public response to the reestablishment of relations be-
tween both nations, the Cuban art community has produced prolific
work on the subject. Likewise, social media has played a prime role in
circulating opinions, mainly outside of Cuba due to the limitations of
internet access within the country. Through hashtag campaigns and ani-
mated videos, Cuban-born artists currently residing abroad such as Tania
Bruguera, Ana Olema, Annelys Casanova, and Aristides Pumariega have
used Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube as platforms for raising
awareness and, in a sense, to educate prospective tourists and investors
about the political implications of the restoration of diplomatic relations,
as well as the effects for the Cuban landscape and culture of the expected
influx of tourism and global multinational corporations. In general, their
work reflects shared skepticism towards the possibility of immediate
democratic reform, highlighting the ongoing human rights violations that
Cuban citizens face daily. In addition, the artwork assumes an outcome
in which Cuba enters a market-driven economy that stimulates the fast-
paced development of infrastructure that could potentially harm the local
environment through air, land, and water pollution. However, it is diffi-
cult to predict the ecological effects that reestablishing diplomatic and
trade relations will bring, since Cuba has taken action in the past to
preserve its natural environments following a major turning point in the
country’s socioeconomic structure.
Prior to the 1990s economic crisis, Cuba underwent a period of indus-
trialization centered around the sugar agroindustry. Following the coun-
try’s accession to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA)—
the Soviet-centered trade bloc—in 1972, the sugar industry became the
key sector in Cuba’s economic development strategy. Cuba was assigned
the role of sole sugar supplier, which meant significant economic invest-
ments in the agricultural, manufacturing, and transportation segments of
the industry. The 1980s were characterized by the sizable expansion of
land cultivation, high levels of capital investment, and intensive use of
inputs such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides, machinery, and irriga-
 Tourism, Ecology, and Changing US-Cuba Relations 279

tion (Pérez-López and Álvarez 28–29). Even though sugar production

rose dramatically, improving the socio-economic well-being of the coun-
try, the industry did not follow a sustainable model. Sugar monoculture
caused major environmental impacts in Cuba similar to those in other
Caribbean nations that adopted large-scale monoculture practices such as
water-intensive banana cultivation in Jamaica (United Nations 34–35). It
permanently altered the country’s landscape through deforestation, the
widespread damming of rivers, soil erosion, and loss of biological diver-
sity (Scarpaci and Portela 33). Furthermore, the adopted model of agricul-
tural industrialization—the increased use of tractors, trucks, and agro-
chemicals—generated additional environmental stresses such as oil
spills, coastal erosion, algal blooms, and high levels of salinity (Dick
Nichols 51). During the 1980s, rather than complying with environmental
protection laws featured in the country’s developmental agenda, sugar
industry administrators chose to fulfill the production plan, even if it
meant breaking the law. Integration into CMEA meant that Cuba had to
follow Eastern Europe’s resource and energy-intensive technologies,
which had the effect of frustrating the growth of environmental aware-
ness on the island (Nichols 51–52).
Cuba’s economy crashed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union
in 1991 and the loss of CMEA financial support, and the country entered
into a crisis that the government called the “Special Period in Peacetime.”
During this period of scarcity in the 1990s, Cuba underwent significant
structural transformations to revitalize the economy and replenish the
country. The government was forced to rethink its economic future, turn-
ing away from the sugar agroindustry and towards a plan for attracting
foreign investment in mining, oil and gas production, manufacturing,
and, most importantly, tourism in order to earn hard currency (Whittle
and Lindeman 30). Domestic shortages of basic goods, especially food,
agrochemicals, and petroleum, led to the development of alternative
farming practices such as organic home and community gardens. 4 How-
ever, the progression towards a more self-sufficient and sustainable mod-
el was partly possible because of previous administrative action. During
the period of highly mechanized agriculture, the government developed
alternative modes of production and protective measures in an effort to
mitigate environmental and public health issues associated with sugar
monoculture, which included growing pesticide resistance, soil erosion,
loss of biological diversity, and fresh and salt water pollution (Nichols
52). The move towards a self-sufficient model was also driven by a doc-
trine proposed by the Ministry of Defense that assumed the possibility of
Cuba being partly occupied by a hostile power (Lewontin and Levins
361). By the end of the 1980s, the country had a widespread adoption of
urban organopónicos, a sustainable agricultural practice that resulted from
military experiments in low-input agriculture, where crops can be grown
in small areas with no dependence on outside resources (Lewontin and
280 Reales

Levins 361). When the country fell into economic crisis in the 1990s, these
investments in scientific education contributed greatly to the develop-
ment of strategies aimed at converting the industrialized agricultural
methods into more diverse, productive, and sustainable ones, particular-
ly when integrated with preexisting local knowledge and practices.
Fidel Castro’s speech at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Envi-
ronment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (known informally as the
“Rio Earth Summit”) set the stage for the upcoming reforms that made
environmental protection an official priority. Soon after the Rio Earth
Summit, the Cuban National Assembly amended the 1976 constitution
with a series of laws and policies designed to ensure that new develop-
ment be sustainable. Following the constitutional change, environmental
reforms continued with the establishment of the Ministry of Science,
Technology, and Environment (CITMA) in 1994; the adoption of a Na-
tional Environmental Strategy and the Law of the Environment in 1997;
and subsequent environmental laws and regulations, including the estab-
lishment of the Jardines de la Reina marine reserve south of the island
(Whittle and Rey Santos 77).
The Cuban government’s reaction to growing environmental concerns
and the subsequent successful implementation of reforms stand in
contrast to governmental inaction in neighboring Caribbean nations such
as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s population and environ-
ment have historically endured substantial neglect from its ruling parties,
who have privileged short-term profit over long-term economic and en-
vironmental sustainability. The country has suffered from political in-
stability, poverty, and violence, as a result of foreign occupation and
corrupt governments, particularly during the 1957–1986 regimes of
François and Jean Claude Duvalier. Haiti has one of the most polarized
distributions of wealth in the world, with masses of poor people living in
rural areas or the slums of Port-au-Prince and a tiny population of
wealthy elite residing in the mountain suburb of Petionville (Diamond
330). The Duvalier regimes focused more on consolidating their power
than modernizing the country or developing local industry. Rather, the
economy depended largely on transnational manufacturing chains, who
exploited Haiti’s cheap labor and natural resources (Sommers 121). Ac-
cording to Jared Diamond, only 1 percent of Haiti’s forests remain due to
the unfettered extraction of resources for profit and poor land manage-
ment practices, which have led to severe erosion and frequent flooding
(329). There are currently only seven patches of forest, and of those, only
two are protected as national parks, both of which are subject to illegal
logging (Diamond 329). The continued erosion and lack of watershed
management threaten food and water sources for the population, thus
leading to dependence on imported food. In the post-Duvalier era, insti-
tutions and policies have been developed to protect the environment, but
there has not been an effective enforcement of environmental protection
 Tourism, Ecology, and Changing US-Cuba Relations 281

laws due to the lack of coordination and the prevalence of corruption

within institutions (Noël 1). In short, the push for economic development
in Haiti has led to a predatory, extractive economy that has negatively
impacted the nation’s people and its environment, and the government’s
poor environmental management raises concerns about the country’s fu-
ture.
On the other end of the island, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo focused on
modernizing and industrializing the Dominican Republic during his dic-
tatorship (1930–1961). Trujillo inserted the Dominican Republic into the
global capitalist system by creating an export economy dependent on
sugar, mining, and other agricultural exports, all of which were monopo-
lized by Trujillo, his relatives, and close allies (Diamond 336–38). This
industry-based economy led to an increase in rates of deforestation due
to the expansion of sugar plantations and other crops, the contamination
of streams by agricultural activities, and greater urbanization (Diamond
341). Trujillo’s regime did implement some basic environmental protec-
tion measures, but he was likely motivated by his own economic advan-
tage, since commercial logging of the pine forest he protected yielded
significant revenue, and he happened to be the joint owner of the coun-
try’s main sawmills (Diamond 342).
In addition to agricultural exports, a key component to the Dominican
Republic’s economic growth and development is tourism. According to
the World Economic Forum, tourism represented an estimated 14.7 per-
cent of the country’s GDP in 2013 (Ripton 35). However, tourism’s impact
on resident communities and the natural environment is often over-
looked by public officials and private investors, and similarly to Haiti,
there is not a regulated implementation of environmental protection
laws, which endangers the country’s natural resources and the local com-
munity’s well-being (Ripton 36). Foreign private investment in tourism
has led to the development of multiple mega-resorts in areas such as Las
Terrenas, located on the northeast coast of the island. The establishment
of tourism facilities has caused erosion, water pollution, and the deteri-
oration of coral reefs. In addition, due to the economic power of foreign
investors, local residents have been excluded from any significant deci-
sion-making role during the development of their community. As a result
of the fast-paced, internationally oriented industry, poverty levels have
been exacerbated, health and welfare has been compromised, and local
residents of Las Terrenas have been pushed into low-wage service jobs
and illicit activities in order to make ends meet (Ripton 49).
A decade before Las Terrenas was established as a prime tourist at-
traction in the Dominican Republic, during the Special Period of the
1990s Cuba also developed mainland and coastline tourism as part of an
economic program meant to stabilize the country’s economy through
foreign capital flows. In 1993, the government legalized the already wide-
spread holding and use of foreign currencies, and, in 1995, it passed a law
282 Reales

that favored foreign investors by allowing direct investment in the form

of joint ventures with domestic state-owned enterprises (Díaz-Briquets
and Pérez-López 268). Foreign investment from Spain, Italy, Canada,
Britain, and France generated the development of tourism infrastructure
on the main island and the pristine northern keys, but being a joint ven-
ture, the state participated directly in the process, a stark difference from
other Caribbean nations (González et al. 215). Starting in 1989 and
through the first half of the 1990s, the government began the construction
of causeways that connect the keys to the mainland. Cuban websites,
such as the collaborative encyclopedia EcuRed, praise the construction of
the causeways, arguing that the implementation of bridges along the way
facilitate the free movement of waters, causing little impact on the sur-
rounding marine environment. However, a 2006 study on the “Pedraplén
de Cayo Coco,” a causeway that cuts Bahía de los Perros in half and
connects the north coast of Cuba with Cayo Coco, the largest offshore cay
in the Jardines del Rey sub-archipelago, found a rise in salinity between
50 and 80 percent, which in turn caused a reduction in fish stock and a
high mortality of black mangrove (Cepero and Lawrence 213). The con-
struction of the causeway clearly altered the movement of ocean currents,
impacting the mangrove ecosystem.
Access to the keys allowed fast-paced commercial and residential de-
velopment in the area, from all-inclusive mega resorts financed by
foreign investment to wastewater treatment plants, the Jardines del Rey
Airport inaugurated in Cayo Coco in 2002, and other supporting infra-
structure. Although tourism increased only slightly in the early 1990s due
to poor infrastructure and limited ancillary services, by 1996 the number
of tourists visiting Cuba surpassed the one million mark (Scarpaci and
Portela 131). The numbers have continued to increase and in 2011, Cuban
newspaper Juventud Rebelde announced a record of 2.7 million interna-
tional visitors (“Más de 2.7 millones” n. pag.). These statistics reflect the
influx of tourism to the keys as well as other touristic centers such as the
coastal cities of Havana and Santiago; the Varadero peninsula, a histori-
cally popular beach resort town located in the province of Matanzas; and
inland eco-friendly areas such as the Las Terrazas community in Pinar del
Río and the Topes de Collantes reserve park in the Escambray Mountains.
The development of the tourism industry incentivized economic
growth and opened Cuba to the world, suggesting an alternative to Cold
War portrayals of Cuba by highlighting the island’s rich and diverse
environments. In 1996, in addition to the Jardines de la Reina marine
reserve, the government established the Parque Nacional Alejandro de
Humboldt, a national park in the northeast region of the island that pro-
tects most of Cuba’s endemic plant species. These two sites are popular
among international scientists and allow very limited tourism. The major
ecotourism attraction is Las Terrazas, a community project that began
during the 1990s in the midst of the economic crisis. Due to the lack of
 Tourism, Ecology, and Changing US-Cuba Relations 283

basic needs such as water, electricity, and medicine, Las Terrazas was
built with the purpose of improving the local population’s well-being.
The preservation of local flora and fauna, successful reforestation, and
the development of organic herbal medicine gardens led to the construc-
tion of Hotel Moka, an eco-friendly complex composed of bungalows,
restaurants, and cafés. Las Terrazas combines ecological conservation
and local social and cultural enhancement, an example of a successful
outcome of the country’s sustainable development reforms.
On the north side of the island, urban tourism developed in coastal
cities near Havana. Before the Revolution, Varadero was a popular elite
tourist region that attracted wealthy visitors from all over the world.
After the Revolution, tourist facilities were nationalized and free access
was established indiscriminately, so for a few decades, Varadero became
a tourist resort for Cubans (González et al. 220). In the 1990s, the current
urban structure and type of tourist destination was consolidated; the
number of facilities increased dramatically and, in 2011, Varadero be-
came the leading international tourist destination in Cuba (González et
al. 220). The government developed a model for urban growth around
the area, designating towns 15–30 kilometers from the main tourist zone
of Varadero for Cubans working in construction and service jobs. This
urban plan avoided the consolidation of shanty towns within the tourist
oriented territory, but marginalized local citizens.
One of the most controversial parts of this development has been the
Varadero/Matanzas tollbooth, which leads from the mainland to Varade-
ro Beach. The tollbooth functions as both entryway and barrier: it earns
revenue from international tourists and keeps out unauthorized Cubans,
who want to work with the tourist crowds. It has been highly criticized
by locals, as it underscores what is likely the most tourist-apartheid set-
ting on the island (Scarpaci and Portela 128). Following the tourism boom
of the 1990s, the Cuban government recognized the potential threat that
foreign investment posed to revolutionary ideals and it placed restric-
tions on the population to limit their interaction with foreigners, includ-
ing banning unauthorized Cubans from entering hotels catered for
foreigners. The ban was lifted in 2008 by Raúl Castro, a largely symbolic
measure since lodging fees are unaffordable for most Cubans. The issue
continues to be controversial among locals because it highlights one of
the island’s many contradictions: the revolutionary idea of a shared space
and equality among its citizens, but the reality of segregation and in-
equality.
Cuban abstract painter Enrique Báster has represented this contradic-
tion in a series of works. His oil paintings depict imaginary Cuban cities
that from afar appear as structured and encompassing landscapes. A
closer look, however, reveals that the “cities” are composed of an array of
irregular and fragmented cubes. The cubes capture the geometric imagi-
nary that characterizes urban planning as well as the effects on individual
284 Reales

bodies of autocratic redistribution, as in the case of the towns surround-

ing Varadero. Regarding one painting that portrays the ban on Cubans
from entering hotels, the artist stated that “the forest is difficult to go
through and the traffic lights are saying you can go; no you can’t go . . .
up to the Hotel Nacional” (qtd. in Boobbyer n. pag.). In this way, his
paintings capture the claustrophobic sense of enclosure and restriction
that Cubans experience on a daily basis.
Practices of exclusion are also prevalent in the “all-inclusive” mega-
resorts located in the keys, which follow a standard, globalized structure:
“color-coded plastic wrist bands and constant surveillance control who
wanders about freely and who is turned away at the front door” (Carter
245). The complexes occupy vast tracts of land composed of multiple
buildings containing guest rooms, restaurants, gymnasiums, spas, bars,
shops, and administrative offices. Connected by pathways and artificial
gardens, resorts generate structured, homogeneous, and pristine land-
scapes, very different from the local ones. In addition, the all-inclusive-
ness of the beach resorts stands in contradiction with the realities of the
Cuban people, who are still struggling with scarcity and underdevelop-
ment.
The expansion of the tourism industry in coastal zones has taken a toll
on the Cuban environment. Aside from the adverse effects of the cause-
ways, the large tracts of land needed for the development of facilities
have led to deforestation and loss of biodiversity in the area due to lost
habitat as well as other factors such as reduced water quality and noise
and light pollution, which affect many species’ breeding habits. Addi-
tionally, the accommodations are resource intensive and produce sub-
stantial amounts of water, land, and air pollution caused by chemical
runoff, construction and tourism activities, waste of various kinds, and
emissions from land and air travel (Whittle, Lindeman, and Tripp
539–43). These environmental issues related to tourism stand in contrast
to the thriving reefs located south of the island. For instance, Jardines de
la Reina strictly limits visitors to one thousand divers per year and fifty
sport fishermen, regulations that have allowed the ecosystem to flourish.
Even though such restrictions would not be profitable in the short term if
implemented throughout the island’s coastal zone, the marine reserve is
an example of long-term economic and cultural value as the result of a
successful implementation of environmental protection measures; the
marine reserve is economically feasible as it generates income from tour-
ism and local and international research projects. 5
Cuban and international environmentalists are concerned about the
effects that recent changes in the United States–Cuban relationship may
bring to the country. Cuba is rich in minerals, petroleum, and marine
reserves. The prospective investment opportunities to extract the coun-
try’s natural resources have the potential to cause massive ecological
degradation. Offshore oil and gas excavation is likely to increase the
 Tourism, Ecology, and Changing US-Cuba Relations 285

possibility of oil spills, which would in turn destroy surrounding ecosys-

tems, not to mention the large amount of air pollutants and residual
materials that the industry generates. Even though such developments
will promote the economic growth of the island, particularly at a time
when falling oil prices threaten Venezuelan subsidies, the prospective
environmental marine degradation could also threaten the coastal tour-
ism industry, one of the country’s main sources of revenue. 6 While US
tourism to Cuba is still technically prohibited as of December 2015, the
reestablishment of diplomatic ties in 2014 has already led to an influx of
tourists from the United States to Cuba: there has been a 36 percent
increase in visits between January and May of 2015 in comparison with
the same period in 2014 (Harpaz n. pag.). More tourists lead to an in-
creased need for infrastructure, which if not developed sustainably,
could potentially generate habitat loss and large amounts of waste and
pollution.
The potential privatization of tourism and natural resource extraction
in Cuba may result in practices that would not only affect the environ-
ment but also local residents’ health and welfare, as happened in Haiti
and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, the destruction of local landscapes
and cultures is an ongoing concern throughout Caribbean nations. As
Lizbeth Paravisini-Gebert argues in “Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias,”
environmental destruction and cultural displacement have occurred at
such a vast scale in the Caribbean that the majority of Caribbean art and
literature that is not designed for tourists deals explicitly with these is-
sues. Indeed, writing specifically about Haitian literature, she notes that
“the Haitian novel has been, above all, a chronicle of the nation’s unimag-
inable ecological catastrophe. . . . The post-Duvalier period has been
marked in the region by the emergence of the Caribbean artist and writer
as a committed environmentalist” (115–16). Confronted with a lack of
attention to these problems in national political discourse, writers
throughout the Caribbean engage in environmental activism through
their work as a means to protest and raise awareness about environmen-
tal and human rights issues.
Within Cuba, however, government and social censorship often pre-
vents writers and artists from expressing apprehensions and disagree-
ment with government policies. Coco Fusco summarizes this reality in
exemplary fashion: “[i]ntellectuals’ words have been a prized symbolic
currency throughout the course of the Cuban Revolution. The state’s le-
gitimacy has been inextricably tied to the promotion of mass literacy and
its role as a cultural laboratory,” leading to a situation in which any
artistic dissent is viewed as a betrayal of revolutionary ideals (n. pag.).
Artists with an activist agenda living on the island thus risk not only
being silenced, reprimanded, and/or jailed by the government, but also
ostracism by their peers.
286 Reales

Cuban environmental concerns have been primarily discussed in doc-

umentaries and articles produced by and catering to foreign countries.
Public news outlets use internet streaming to raise awareness of the po-
tential threats of uncontrolled tourism-related development to the physi-
cal landscape and conservation and management policies. Similarly, op-
positional views from Cuban-born artists who currently reside outside of
the island have used the internet and social media platforms to educate
future visitors about their role and impact in the country’s future. The
focus has been to highlight the uncertainty around the possibility of dem-
ocratic reforms, concerns about the relegation of Cuban citizens currently
living on the island to service providers rather than business owners, and
the potential effects of the development of tourist-centered infrastructure.
Many Cubans argue that the opening of trade and travel will not
necessarily lead to short-term democratic and human rights reforms. In
fact, since December 2014, dozens of artists, activists, and dissidents have
been detained or arrested, among them Tania Bruguera (“Cuba Opening”
n. pag.). In the aftermath of the reestablishment of relations, in a public
letter to the Pope and the presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro,
Bruguera proposed to relocate her 2009 performance, Tatlin’s Whisper #6,
to the Plaza of the Revolution. As an act of defying the repression of
freedom of expression, the artist intended to appropriate a public space
and offer Cuban citizens the chance to voice their views about the coun-
try’s future in the face of change. The performer used the hashtag
#YoTambienExijo to promote her project through internet platforms from
outside of the country, and in spite of the limited access to internet in
Cuba, the word did spread to local oppositional groups. The piece was
censored by the Cuban government and Bruguera was detained and later
ordered to remain on the island for the upcoming months. The artist did
succeed, however, in opening up discussion among intellectual circles
and art communities inside and outside of Cuba about prospective
changes, or the lack thereof, in policies regarding human rights.
Several Cuban-born artists have shown support for Bruguera’s proj-
ect, including Ana Olema and Annelys Casanova. Since February 2015,
the artists have used #VisitCubaProject to circulate on platforms like
Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram a series of re-purposed vintage travel
posters that display the physical repression that local citizens undergo.
While the fonts and some of the slogans from the original posters were
kept, the stereotypical images of tropical women were replaced by im-
ages of citizens being captured and tortured by local authorities. In one of
the posters, the message “So Near and Yet So Foreign, 90 Miles from Key
West” appears above an image of Sara Martha Fonseca, a member of an
opposition movement, being violently apprehended by a government
agent. The altered posters highlight the links between tourism and re-
pression, and they stand in contrast to the romanticized vision that was
promoted in the 1940s and 1950s—images of a beach paradise, luscious
 Tourism, Ecology, and Changing US-Cuba Relations 287

women, and cigars. According to the artists, the purpose of the campaign
is not to limit tourism, but to raise awareness of local opposition and
educate potential tourists from the United States by showing the realities
that Cuban citizens face (Guerrero Vall n. pag.).
Arístides Pumariega is another Cuban-born artist that has created
work dealing with the expected growth of tourism in the country. Puma-
riega used YouTube to promote a series of four animated videos called La
Política Cartoon that deal with circumstances and possible outcomes of the
normalization of relations. One of the videos called “Traidores” (“Trai-
tors”) focuses on the reaction of Cuban citizens to the potential return of
exiles and emigrants. The video shows a crowd of Cubans yelling “trai-
dores!” at people leaving the island on boats and rafts. The scene changes
and now the same group of Cubans yell “¡traen dólares!” (They bring
dollars!)—a play on words in Spanish since both expressions sound near-
ly the same—to returning citizens, now sources of revenue. The anima-
tion stresses the contradictions and lack of consistency within the re-
gime’s ideology, as well as the economic interests and necessities of the
population.
In “El Caimán” (“The Alligator”), another video in the series, Puma-
riega juxtaposes the current local landscape with a prospective one. The
video begins with the shot of a man writing “¡Abajo Fidel!” (Down with
Fidel!) on a wall. The camera then follows the man while he is running
away from a police officer. The background is a torn down Havana, with
trash piled on the streets, rats running from building to building, and
houses falling into pieces. In addition, in the midst of the persecution
there is a scene of a man being beaten down by another police officer for
an unknown reason. The next scene depicts a group of men sailing away
from Cuba, among them, Raúl Castro crouching over the coffin of his
brother, Fidel. After what could possibly symbolize the end of the social-
ist regime, the video ends with a shot of the National Palace, now sur-
rounded by global food chain restaurants. In front of the landmark, a
group of tourists appear in a bicycle carriage decorated with flags from
the United States and Cuba and driven by a dark skinned local man.
Through the videos, Pumariega exposes not only the prevalent realities of
repression and censorship on the island, but also the possible outcomes
for the Cuban citizens and landscape. From the artist’s perspective, after
the potential lift of the embargo, Cuba will adopt a market-driven econo-
my in which the involvement of multinational corporations is expected, a
view shared by many. The lack of means will prevent most Cubans from
making incursions in private businesses, relegating them to service jobs.
In addition, as it has been discussed earlier, the potential foreign invest-
ment and development of infrastructure threatens the country’s ecologi-
cal systems and current environmental laws and policies.
Lifting the trade embargo will almost certainly generate positive eco-
nomic outcomes for the island: the Cuban government will be connected
288 Reales

to the global market economy and hard currency will circulate in the
country. The hope, however, is that economic progress will be accompa-
nied by democratic reforms that grant Cuban citizens freedom of speech,
physical and economic mobility, among other human rights, and sustain-
able development, including restrictions that promote the conservation of
the environment and prevent the degradation and exploitation of the
island’s natural resources.

NOTES

1. See Burke et al., Reefs at Risk.

2. See, for example, Fabián Pina-Amargós et al., “Evidence for Protection of Tar-
geted Reef Fish on the Largest Marine Reserve in the Caribbean” and the Ocean
Doctor’s Cuba Conservancy Program’s website.
3. See Robert Wintner’s Reef Libre: Cuba-The Last Best Reefs in the World; the NPR
segment “U.S. Biologists Keen to Explore, Help Protect Cuba’s Wild Places”; Erica
Goode’s article in the New York Times “Crown Jewel of Cuba’s Coral Reefs”; the 60
Minutes segment on “The Gardens of the Queen”; and “Cuba: The Accidental Eden”
on PBS.
4. Regarding the rise of sustainable organic farming in Cuba, see Christine Buch-
mann’s “Cuban Home Gardens and Their Role in Social-Ecological Resilience” and
Charles Thompson and Alexander M. Stephens’ “Visions for Sustainable Agriculture
in Cuba and the United States.”
5. Regarding this point, see Figueredo Martín, Pina Amargós, and Angulo Valdés’
study on the “Economical Feasibility of the Implementation of the Jardines de la Reina
National Marine Park.”
6. Regarding the effects of oil prices on Cuba’s international relations, see Jorge
Castañeda, “Behind Cuba’s Opening to the U.S.: Dropping Oil Prices Are Forcing an
End to Venezuela’s Subsidy of the Cuban Economy.”

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 Afterword
The Self as Nonhuman Other

Zélia M. Bora

This book is the result of a collective effort to make visible the effects of
contemporary technologies on Latin American environments and the be-
ings that inhabit them. Underpinning each chapter lies the general critical
notion that traditional ethics do not teach contemporary humans how to
control their “destructive impulses” toward nonhuman beings and the
environment. Over the last thirty years, critical discussions in academic
circles on the role of ethics in environmental destruction have consolidat-
ed in several key lines of thought, ranging from the reevaluation of non-
Western modes of knowledge to new materialist approaches and posthu-
manist theory. These perspectives have emerged in response to the
anthropocentric currents underpinning Western ethics as well as the nat-
ural sciences.
Understanding organic life in our times entails immersing oneself in
the earth’s interiority as a pulsing organism within which our own iden-
tities reside. Understanding the others with whom we share life annuls
Descartes’ divisive distinction between the “animate” and “inanimate”
worlds (Jonas 7). This distinction harmed life by transforming nature and
its nonhuman beings into objects in a history whose violence and anxie-
ties are inscribed within language itself. 1
In this book, the various ways of narrating the diverse aspects of
environmental crisis in Latin America are structured around the goal of
influencing in the consolidation of new academic studies dedicated to
calling attention to and inspiring new strategies of activism related to the
protection of nature and its beings, especially the nonhuman ones. The
texts included in this volume examine diverse ways in which people are
alienated from nature, prominent among them corporate capitalism,
whose agents, in the end, remain impassive before the immense ecologi-
cal degradation that victimizes the natural environment and, particularly,
nonhuman beings. In this sense, this book is also aimed at a new genera-
tion of thinkers, educational workers, and professionals in a variety of
fields, as a minimal collective effort to lessen, symbolically, the lack of

291
292 Bora

knowledge about ecological matters and contribute to the expansion of

awareness about environmental crisis in Latin America.
We know that the concept of crisis had its origins in the triumph of
technology over nature, whose tragic unfolding in the Americas deter-
mined the conquest of animal, vegetal, and mineral life, whether or not
human eyes perceived it. Incomprehensibly, modern humans are unable
to understand that the gradual death of the Earth also foretells the death
of the human species. Taking these considerations into account, the role
of writing, in the texts included here, is to recover the inherent value of
these organic beings, ignored or destroyed by human experience. There-
fore, all of the arguments present in our texts converge in the symbolic
intervention in traditional philosophical language, both with regards to
the ideological prevalence of anthropocentrism as well as the simple and
pure conscience demonstrated through facts. In other words, in the name
of unifying the symbolic and the material, our efforts take the form of a
symbolic act that recovers aspects of life that have been suppressed by
theory. Therefore, symbolically, we look to abolish theories that presup-
pose a separation between the mental and the material, between human
culture and nonhuman nature, and that inspired, during centuries,
anthropocentric philosophical systems, from idealism to existentialism,
as well the materialist natural and human sciences.
The different perspectives represented here are intended to suggest
new critical directions for new, autonomous disciplines that may emerge
in different centers of knowledge throughout the continent, particularly
in undergraduate and graduate university programs. The encounter with
environmental realities challenges academic paradigms and may be pro-
moted through redesigning programs at every educational scale, from
elementary schools to the university, with the object of critiquing and
resisting, at the discursive level, both the agents of environmental de-
struction and technocratic environmental discourses that wrest ecological
agency from the hands of local populaces, subordinating them to national
and global economic interests.
Historically, people and groups linked to these tendencies disregard
the notion of crisis, especially in its most explicit meanings, even when
this crisis continues to affect the different geographies of popular and
nonhuman communities emplaced within particular environments. Aca-
demic engagement should be initiated through intellectual and juridical
interventions, with the goal of preserving the physical and psychological
integrity of nonhuman beings, including animals. These actions play a
crucial role in the struggle to preserve nature in Latin America, especially
when universities and other advocacy groups serve these beings in altru-
istic ways, protecting them when individuals and official institutions en-
gage in maneuvers of criminal cooptation that harm the environment.
Power plays, through which global capitalism’s coercive force over re-
 Afterword 293

gional and national spaces becomes apparent, emerge in the alliances

between individual and institutional interests.
It is clear that both the return to nature and the expansion of pro-
nature movements are inserted within the dynamics of the capitalist sys-
tem itself. What is not so clear is the degree to which “environmental
elites” are capable of fulfilling their promise to protect the environment
and care for its subjects. Furthermore, the urgency of these questions
proscribes the imagination of future utopian spaces. It is important to
emphasize that neither neoliberal maneuvers nor utopian socialism can
provide a substantial valuation of the human and nonhuman agents that
compose environments; in them, anthropocentrism and speciesism have
prevailed as ideologies and violent practices over “minor beings.” At the
same time that we advocate for an ecocentric order, we must look for new
forms of activism, whose urgent implementation is an ever more pressing
necessity.

THE PRINCIPLE OF RESPONSIBILITY

AS A PRECEPT FOR EXPERIENCE

At the end of the nineteenth century, the theoretical vulnerability and

ethical possibilities of the fragmentation of the subject were demonstrat-
ed through the solitary demythification undertaken by Nietzsche, who,
fortunately, did not live to see what we are experiencing today, that is,
the definitive triumph of technology over nature and the systematic and
conscious exploitation of nonhuman forms of life. Beyond internal hu-
man subaltern categories like race, gender, and social class, the “human
essence” dominates over other living beings. In silence, throughout the
Americas, individual and institutional actors continue to devastate the
environment, to exploit and enslave nonhuman beings. Suffocated by
ideological premises that have prevailed over at least five hundred years,
since the “modernization” of the continent began, nonhuman lives were
ignored by the human will.
While in postwar Europe, philosophers of ethics have called timidly
for an ecocentric approach to the nonhuman beings of the environment,
Latin America is like a field ready to receive the seeds of this project, to
put theory into practice. In other words, academic knowledge about the
degradation of flora and fauna is not sufficient in Latin America, because
an immense cohort of nonhuman beings, who have been exploited and
whose security and right to live have been violated, demand immediate
action. As Will Goya writes in his summary of German environmental
ethicist Hans Jonas’ thought:
We must avoid risking future human life, which is to say that when we
engage with new technologies, we must ask ourselves if we have the
right to risk the future life of humanity and of the planet. Jonas con-
294 Bora

cludes that we must not, even if we have the technological power and
political arrogance, because we do not have the right to establish the
end of human and planetary life as a valid, justifiable ethical principle.
(n. pag.) 2
Jonas’ thesis takes into consideration an entire critical process, inasmuch
as it refers back to the fallibility of the subject outlined by Nietzsche as
well as the crisis in modernity brought about by the hegemony of tech-
nology diagnosed in the Frankfort School’s critical theory. Taking these
concepts as his point of departure, Jonas arrived at the conclusion that
both humans and nature find themselves in danger. In other words, the
potential for destruction created by human beings has placed us in dan-
ger, along with the rest of the biosphere (Jonas 229). For Jonas, these facts
immediately place us into the following dilemma: either we exercise re-
sponsibility in our relations with nature or we will destroy our own
future as well as the biosphere. Conscious of the danger of the reappear-
ance of a kind of neoanthropocentrism, Jonas states that: “from a truly
human perspective, nature conserves its dignity, which counters our will
to power. In the sense that it generated us, we owe total faithfulness to all
of nature’s creations. Faithfulness to our being is only the apex. Under-
stood correctly, this apex covers all else” (229). The contemporaneity of
Jonas’ thought reinterprets the subject as a being that has both destruc-
tive and restorative capabilities. When we take this precept as a query put
to the future of humanity, we view it as an open appeal and, possibly, a
solution, if not the only one available to us. Jonas believes, however, that
we can’t afford to view this paradigm shift as utopian; rather, it is a
practical decision that must be made immediately or we risk creating an
unlivable future. The challenge Jonas proposes is expressed as both the
premise and objective of this book, a collective challenge invoked
through language. In the end, it implies a form of solidarity that is in-
vested in the recovery and preservation of this living, pulsating body we
call the Earth.
We hope our minor effort converges with other texts that share the
notion that the human being is not metaphysically isolated. From this
acknowledgement, we hope to comprehend the existence of the Other as
a subject beyond the human face. This presupposes taking a form of
responsibility over our actions, which no longer present themselves as
the simple, frivolous intuition that there is still much to be explored in
nature, in the air and the water, but rather as a progressive unfolding of
actions that lead us to practice responsibility for this Other. When we
form an identitary relation between the self and the Other, otherness
becomes part of our own subjectivity (selfhood). As Paul Ricoeur postu-
lates, we must think of the Other as part of ourselves in such a way, with
such intimacy, it is not possible to think of one’s self without the Other
 Afterword 295

(3). Ricoeur’s formulation does not refer specifically to nonhuman other-

ness, but neither does it exclude it.
The widespread destruction of nature and its actants has come about
due to economic policies and dynamics related to the implementation of
modern technologies and the commercial exploitation of natural re-
sources. This process is evident in Latin America in the operations of
large, multinational corporations, who have obtained concessions from
national states that allow them the right to extract primary materials at an
uncountable biological price, affecting plant, animal, and human lives,
and causing damage to rural and urban populations ranging from physi-
cal illnesses to the scarcity of water.
In addition to the problems that human industry has caused to the
natural environment, we must also consider other crises provoked by
natural causes such as the El Niño climatic phenomenon, which, as an
oceanic-atmospheric phenomenon, has highly disruptive effects for envi-
ronments on a global scale. These effects include intensifying drought in
some regions, such as already drought-prone northeastern Brazil; inten-
sified rainfall on the Western coast of the Americas; more frequent tropi-
cal storms in the Pacific; and droughts in the Asian Pacific nations. Some
scientists believe that El Niño may be related to warmer-than-usual win-
ters in the Central United States, as well as droughts and heat waves as
far away as Africa and Europe. Furthermore, there is evidence that
anthropogenic global warming is exacerbating El Niño’s effects.
Although it is difficult to know for certain what other meteorological
factors may be involved in this phenomenon, some individuals and cul-
tures view the profound climatic changes devastating the planet as not
only the product of human destructiveness, but also perhaps the planet’s
own reaction as an organic body. In this perspective, the earth itself is
showing visible signs of exhaustion. Within this paradigm, humans must
show responsibility and care for the vulnerable Other: the planet itself.
Meanwhile, what seems clear and essential takes on almost unthink-
able proportions when we consider the cracks caused by the political
postures taken by those countries who distance themselves from the is-
sues that affect us all, especially common survival, but also a host of
environmental problems that do not affect only humans. Nations like
Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, for example, still find themselves mired in
the crossroads of reductionist policies that minimize the urgency of ad-
dressing environmental crisis to privilege short-term solutions that guar-
antee the continuity of egocentric, corrupt political regimes, who focus
only on maintaining their power in the present. As conscientious onlook-
ers, we cannot remain silent before an issue that is becoming more and
more pressing for millions of people, as well as the flora and fauna of the
continent. And the displacement of populations degrades and produces
trash in urban centers, which further disfigures the invisible lives of flora
296 Bora

and fauna. These factors will become more grave in the coming years due
to the flow of new migrants to urban centers.
In these final words, we cannot fail to alert the reader to the fact that
we must exercise an ethics that allows us to understand the environment
as our self. We return to this notion through the words of philosophers
like Hans Jonas, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida. We are aware that
over our perspective prevail the political and economic interests of pow-
erful national and international groups of speculators moved by the vo-
racity of profit, which aggravates the problem of corruption in Latin
American societies.
We don’t know for certain how many future generations will be able
to face this situation, as thousands of us do today. We position ourselves
alongside nature, vestige of our primordial origins, against the discourse
of these large economic conglomerates, allied with the endemic immoral-
ity of corruption that emanates from the centralized powers of the conti-
nent. As participants in this process, we no longer feel satisfied with
Utopian promises nor do we find solace in metaphorical models lacking
respect for the sacred pact with nature, in the sense of preserving it and
protecting it.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once used the metaphors of the hunter
and the gardener to describe the behavior of pre-modern and modern
humans, respectively. According to Bauman,
the hunter’s main work consists in defending his territory from any
and all human interference, with the goal of preserving the “natural
equilibrium.” The hunter’s behavior follows the belief that things are in
their best state when they are not interfered with; [he believes that] the
world is a divine system in which each creature has its legitimate and
functional place and that humans’ mental abilities are too limited to
understand God’s wisdom and harmonious worldview. (n. pag.)
In contrast,
in the modern world, the metaphor for humanity is the gardener, who
assumes that there is no order in the world without the sustained effort
of each individual. The gardener knows which kinds of plants should
grow or not grow and that everything depends on his care. He works,
primarily, from a plan thought out beforehand that he then puts into
practice. He forces his a priori idea on his surroundings, promoting the
growth of certain kinds of plants and destroying those that are not
desirable, the harmful “weeds.” The most fervent producers of Utopias
usually emerge from the group of gardeners. (n. pag.)
But what kind of gardeners have we really been? Both the gardener and
the hunter find themselves prisoners of a single reality, that of the contin-
uous destruction of the planet. What I think is that, in the last fifteen
years, the prehistoric hunter-gatherer has predominated in the relations
between humans and their environment. Perhaps, in reality, he never
 Afterword 297

disappeared entirely from our society, but now goes by another name:
the extractor of “natural resources.” His weapons are more sophisticated
than those of the gardeners, many of whom have become frustrated by
the iniquities the hunter has perpetrated against nature. Not that the
gardeners are innocent; uncountable nonhuman beings have disappeared
through the connivance between hunters and gardeners. Few notice the
spilling of nature’s blood in the twisted, dilacerated branches of brutally
murdered forests. The animals have been left in silence.
It is time, as Derrida reminds us, to invert the terms. For nature, all
that remains is the melancholy of seeing its nonhuman beings called
forth, named by us in the impossibility of reappropriating their own
names, since “to be called, to hear oneself named, to receive the name for
the first time is, perhaps, to know one’s own mortality and, in fact, to feel
one’s own death” (Derrida, O Animal 43).
What is left us as hunters and gardeners, then, is shame. A shame that
is expressed through the language of rationality, manifested in different
languages that ignore the absolute alterity of the neighbor, that nonhu-
man Other, who observes me in silence.

NOTES

1. I refer to the sense in which Derrida uses this notion in Writing and Difference.
2. All translations are the author’s own.

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 Index

accumulation by dispossession, xvi, Barrios, Valentín: and El mensú que

9–11, 17n2, 89, 194, 199, 204–205 triunfó en la selva, 236
actants, 186, 193, 221–222, 223, 295 Báster, Enrique, 283–284
activism: environmental, 12–13, 139, Bauman, Zygmunt, 296
142–143, 147, 160–161, 167, 207, 271, Bello, Andrés: and the “Silva a la
285; indigenous, 12–13, 179–181, agricultura de la zona tórrida,”
185–188, 190, 200; popular, 12–13, 47–51
160–161, 162, 273–274; social media, Berry, Thomas, 206–207
186, 274, 278, 286–287 bioregionalism, xxi, 119, 123, 149
advertising, 113, 165–166, 245–246 biotechnology. See genetically
agency: cultural, 16, 179–181, 273–274, modified organisms
285; ecological, ix, 58, 64, 71, 73, 179, bodies: bare, xv; and biopower,
203–204, 238–240, 291, 295; 191–192; toxic, xi
distributed, xix, xxi, xxii; subaltern, Botero Restrepo, Jesús: and Andágueda,
12, 79, 86, 151, 179–181, 185–188, 28–31
238–240, 273–274 Bridi, Sônia: and Diário do clima, 128
agrochemicals, xi, 162, 165, 167–168, Bruguera, Tania, 286
170, 172, 279 buen vivir, xxi, 13, 174n13
a-growthism. See degrowth
animality and critical animal studies, Candido, Antonio, 14
xx, 58–59, 74, 125–126, 128, 135, capital fictions, xxii, 15
206–208, 222–226, 238–240, 245–252, capitalist world-ecology, xiv, xvi–xvii,
297 xxixn18, 4–6, 80, 81–82, 83
animistic perspectives, 49–52, 64–65, Capitalocene, xvi–xvii, 4–6
73, 187, 195n7, 206–207, 263–264. See Cardenal, Ernesto, 269–271
also Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo; cartography, 101–109
Descola, Philippe Ceibo tree (Ceiba petandra), cultural
Anthropocene, ix, xv–xvi, xvii–xviii, 7, meanings of, 49–51
101, 104 Chico Mendes: Eu quero viver
anthropocentrism, 58, 74, 125–126, 132, (documentary film), 141–144, 146
134–135, 181–182, 188, 224, 239, Chihuailaf, Elicura, 209
250–251, 292–293 chinampas, 93–94
anthropomorphism, 47, 49, 52–58, 239, Chocó (film), 37
245–248. See also animistic Chullachaqui, 45–46
perspectives Club of Rome, 157
apocalypse, xxvii, 103–104, 120n4, climate change, ix, xv, xviii, 5–6, 11,
144–146 137, 139, 159, 295
Aridjis, Homero, 117 coloniality, x–xii, 4–6, 65, 81–82, 86, 93,
assemblages, ecological, xix, xxii–xxiii, 104, 150, 190–193, 199–201, 210, 219
xxviin2, 112 Commodities Consensus, 9, 103

321
322 Index

commodity determinism, 15 eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición

commodity fetishism, 23–24 (performance), 161–173
commodity frontiers, xvi, 4–5, 7–11, 14, Escobar, Arturo: and the “age of the
22, 81–83 Pacific,” 23, 29–30; and the concept
complexity, ecological, xxii–xxiii, 102 of ecological “redes,” xxiii
Corona Aguilar, Elisa, 110 ethics and crisis, xix–xx
Crutzen, Paul and Eugene Stoermer, ix, exteriorism, 270–271
xxixn23 externalities, 157, 159
Cunha, Euclides da, 126–128 extinction, species, x, xvii, 16, 137, 155,
Curupira, 51 217, 219, 225, 241–243, 271
extractivism, x, 3–13, 22, 81–83,
Derrida, Jacques, 101, 103, 141, 143, 297 149–151, 165, 173, 259
Descola, Philippe, 58
decolonial practices, 190–193, 210, flows, 106, 118–119
230–231 Franzen, Jonathan: and Freedom,
deep time, 109, 111, 121n16 153–161, 164–167, 169–173
deforestation, x, xvii, 48–50, 127, 137, Friedmann, Nina de and Alfredo
199, 202, 213n9, 241–244, 262 Vanín: and Chocó: Magia y leyenda,
degrowth, 152, 171 25–28
dictatorship: in Argentina, 248–249; in Fuentes, Carlos: and Aura, 79–83,
Brazil, 138; in the Dominican 90–95; and The Death of Artemio
Republic, 281; and neoliberalism, xi Cruz, 94
documentary film, 142–143 Furtado, Celso: and dependency
theory, 140–141
ecocriticism, 16, 150, 153–154, 218, 242
ecodevelopment, 157 Galeano, Eduardo, 3, 9, 75n5
ecofeminist perspectives, ix, 38, 218, Galeano, Juan Carlos, 45–46, 58, 63,
224, 230, 246–247 73–74, 257
ecogothic aesthetics, 16, 79–83, 89, 92, García Gárate, Iván, 113–114
95, 95n2 García Márquez, Gabriel, xvii, 11,
ecolanguages, 153–155, 174n7 21–22
ecological crisis: definitions of, xiv–xv, gender and ecological crisis, 88–90. See
80, 138, 292 also ecofeminist perspectives
ecological footprint, 106–108, 154 genetically modified organisms
ecological unconscious, 79, 81 (GMOs), 7, 161–169, 217–218
ecophobic imaginary, 81, 128, 132, 242 Giardinelli, Mempo, 236–237; and Final
ecosocialism, 159, 269–271 de novela en Patagonia, 237; and
ecozones, 152, 155, 169–173 Imposible equilibrio, 237, 240–252
ejido, 83 globality, x–xxiii, 4–16, 83, 102–105,
encanto, 208 107–109, 140, 169–172, 191, 212, 247,
enclave economies, 22 284
environmental ethics, 293–294 “Global Pacific,” 23
environmental imaginary, 42 Globo Reporter (television show), 135
environmental journalism, 134–135 GMOs. See genetically modified
environmental rationality, xxiii, 160 organisms
environmentalism and geopolitics, gothic aesthetics. See ecogothic
172–173 aesthetics
environmentalism of the poor, 159 “Great Frontier,” 3–7. See also
epic, 142–144 commodity frontiers
 Index 323

Green Revolution, x, 82 land grabbing. See accumulation by

greenwashing, 156, 166–167 dispossession
Guha, Ramachandra, Latour, Bruno: and actants. See actants:
xxviiin11–xxixn13, 159 and nature-culture hybrid
Guillén, Manuel, 274 problems, xix, xxixn27
Güiraldes, Ricardo: and Don Segundo Leff, Enrique, xiii–xiv, xxii–xxiii, 12–13,
Sombra, 236 102, 157, 159–160
Levinas, Emmanuel: and first ethics, xx
H2Omx (documentary film), 116–119 Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A. Maslin, 6
habitat loss, x, 242, 285 Lima Barreto, Afonso Enriques de,
haunting, 83–86, 95, 111 127–128
Hernández, José: and Martín Fierro, 235 Loyola Brandão, Ignácio de: and
heterogeneity, 227–228. See also Manifesto verde, 138; and Não verás
complexity, ecological país nenhum, 144–146
historical imagination, xiii–xv, Lynch, Benito: and El inglés de los
xvii–xviii güesos, 236
“hollow frontier” agriculture, xi
Hoyos, Juan José: El oro y la sangre, Mapuche-Huilliche, 199–201, 212n5
34–37 Mendes, Chico, 127, 138–139, 141–144,
Huenún, Jaime, 200–201; and 147
Reducciones, 202–212 mestizaje, 113, 188–190, 203
Huichol. See Wixaritári metabolic rift, xiv, xxixn17, 81, 85–86,
humanism: and conceptualization of 88, 95n5–96n6
nature, xii–xiii; and species Mexican Miracle, 79–83
exceptionalism, xiii, xiv–xv, Mexican Royal Botanical Garden, 93
108–109, 218, 238–240 Mexico (toponym), 106, 121n11
human rights, xv, 114, 165, 180–181, migration, xvi, 83, 199, 203, 229–230
183, 190, 249, 278, 285–288 modernity: and oil. See
hydrology, 11, 15, 105–106, 116 petromodernity: and planning,
101–104
indigenismo, 37, 75n3, 189, 211–212 monocultures, x, xxviiin6, 5, 9–12,
indigenous cosmopolitics, 181–182, 87–88, 162, 167, 169–170, 205, 261,
186, 194 279
indigenous cultural production, 17n5, Monsanto, 161, 163–167, 173
201–202 Monsiváis, Carlos, 101, 112
indigenous knowledges, 181, 187, monstrosity: and the eco-gynophobic
189–191, 199–201, 212, 262–264, imaginary, 90–92, 96n22
265–267 Monteiro Lobato, José Bento Renato,
indigenous rights, 183, 187–190 127–128
irony, 156, 162–163, 168, 169, 218, 247, Morales, Alejandro: and The Rag Doll
261, 270, 274 Plagues, 16
Morton, Timothy: and hyperobjects,
jabuticaba, 130–132, 136n6 xix, 6; and the “mesh,” xxiii
Jardines de la Reina Marine Preserve mountaintop removal mining, 156
(Cuba), 277–278 multiculturalism, xx–xxi, 23, 113,
journalistic mediation, 129–130, 180–181, 188–190, 194–195
134–135 multinaturalism. See Viveiros de
Castro, Eduardo
land cover change, x, 137 multiverses, 64
324 Index

mythical narrative, xiii, xxviiin11, 24, Quijano, Aníbal, 191–193

45–46, 47, 49, 58, 65–67, 75n1, 86,
143, 179, 208 Ramírez, Cynthia, 113
Ramírez, Sergio, 272
nature: cheap, 5–7, 80, 150–151; and regionalism, xxi, 43n7, 135n2
Edenic myth, 65–67, 85–86, 258–259, remediation, 173, 180
261, 267n1; second, xxixn20 Reyes Ramírez, Carlos, 70–71, 260
neoliberal capitalism, xi, xvi, xxi, revolutionary ecology, 271
xxviiin7, xxixn14, 7–12, 103, 121n12, Ricardo, Jorge, 112
157–159, 204–205 rights of nature legislation, xx–xxi,
new materialisms, 116–119, 181–182, 187–188
193, 220–225; and the historical Rivera, José Eustasio: and La vorágine,
agency of commodities, 14–15 29, 47, 52–58, 66
novela de la selva genre, 60n26, 66, 75n2, Romero, George: and The Night of the
258–259, 267n4 Living Dead, 95
Roundup Ready (RR), 161–164
object-oriented ontologies. See new ma- Rulfo, Juan, 84; and Pedro Páramo,
terialisms 79–90
oikeois, 4, 17 Ruvalcaba, Alonso, 114
Olema, Ana, 286–287
orality, 17n5, 25–27, 43n5, 202 sacred perspectives of the
outsourcing of waste, xix, xxixn26, 9 environment. See animistic perspec-
overpopulation discourse, 156–157 tives
Sandinismo, 269–270
Palacios, Arnaldo: and Las estrellas son Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 235
negras, 32; and La selva y la lluvia, scale, xviii–xxiii
31–34 Sebey, Georgina, 113–114
Paz, Octavio, 79 Serje, Margarita, 22, 24–25, 29
Peak Appropriation, 7–13 Slater, Candace: and Entangled Edens,
personification. See 66–67, 258–259, 267n1
anthropomorphism slow violence, 14, 172, 174n11
perspectivism. See Viveiros de Castro, spiritual ecologies, 45–46, 64, 179–181,
Eduardo 187, 200, 205–206
petromodernity, 82, 84, 92 stratification, xxii, 104, 111–113, 120n10
Petry, André, 130–134 sublime, Romantic, 53
phytomorphism, 55–56, 58 subsidence, 115–116
planetary perspective, xiv, xviii–xix, sumak kawsay. See buen vivir
xxi–xxiii, 6, 105, 108–109, 224, 295 sustainability: discourse, xiii, xiv, xvii,
Plascencia, Salvador: and The People of xxi, xxiii, 103–105, 237; practices, 74,
Paper, 16 82–83, 87–88, 93–94, 119, 142,
pluriverses, 179, 193, 194–195 172–173, 184, 279–280
political ecology, 125–126
popular movements. See activism terraforming, ix, xxviin2, xxviiin5, 119,
postdevelopmentalism. See degrowth 202–203
posthuman(ism), xx, 15–16, 58–59, 64, territoriality: indigenous forms of,
181, 188, 217–220, 237–240 185–187, 203, 208–209; in neoliberal
proyectos de muerte, 11 capitalism, 21–22, 104, 107–110, 165
Pumariega, Arístides, 287 tourism, ecological effects of, 281–285
 Index 325

toxicity, x–xi, xix, xxiii, 46, 69, 119, 144, volumetric perspectives, 105, 116
168–169, 172. See also bodies, toxic vulnerability, xx, 16, 293
Trans-Amazonian Highway, 139
transhumanism, 238–239 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 13
waste, xiii, xxviiin12, 9, 21, 84–87, 110,
underground, 109–116 118–119; in Amazonia, 65, 260–262;
urban ecologies, 106–109 industrial, 244, 271
urbanization, 80–83, 94, 100, 117, 119n1 wilderness, xii–xiii, xxviiin11, 10, 258
Urcututu, 65 Wixaritári, 179–181, 183–188, 194,
195n3
Varela Tafur, Ana, 65–69 world cities, 109
Ventura, Zeunir, 128; and Chico world literature, 94–95
Mendes: Crime e castigo, 127 world-ecology. See capitalist world-
“vertederos”. See waste ecology
Vílchez Vela, Percy, 71–73, 264–265
Villoro, Juan, 99, 104, 111, 113, 114, Yacumama, 71
121n17 Yacurunas, 71, 72, 73
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, xxi, 58,
60n29, 75n1, 207–208 Zalis, Pieter, 130–134
 About the Contributors

Mark Anderson is associate professor of Latin American literatures and

cultures at the University of Georgia. He has published numerous articles
and book chapters on ecocritical topics as well as a book on Disaster
Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America (2011).

Juanita C. Aristizábal is assistant professor in the Modern Languages

Literatures and Cultures field group at Pitzer College. Her book, Fernando
Vallejo a contracorriente, was published by Beatriz Viterbo in Argentina in
2015, and she has published several articles on Colombian literature in
peer-reviewed journals.

Ana Avalos is a PhD candidate at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba,

Argentina. Her research centers on ecocriticism and the new material-
isms. She teaches English at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and
she is also a Cambridge examiner, teaching history and literature for the
IB Programme.

Zélia M. Bora is professor of Brazilian and comparative literature at the

Universidade Federal de Paraiba, Brazil. She is author of Naciones (re)
construidas: política cultural e imaginación (2002) and more than fifty arti-
cles and book chapters on ecocriticism and cultural politics in Latin
America.

Mirian Carballo is professor of American Literature and Anglophone

Postwar Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina.
She currently supervises a research group working on the impacts of
neomaterialism in ecocritical studies and she is coeditor of Ecocrítica,
“crítica verde”: La naturaleza y el medioambiente en el discurso cultural
anglófono (with M. Elena Aguirre, 2010).

Ida Day is assistant professor of Spanish at Marshall University. She has

published several articles on Latin American indigenous writers and in-
digenous perspectives of the environment.

Sharae Deckard is lecturer of world literature at the University College

Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and
Globalization (2010) and coauthor of Combined and Uneven Development:

327
328 About the Contributors

Towards a New Theory of World Literature (2015). She has edited special
issues of Green Letters and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and she has
published more than a dozen articles and book chapters on ecocritical
topics from a postcolonial perspective.

Diana Dodson Lee is visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Pepper-

dine University. Her doctoral dissertation deals with representations of
nature and violence in Latin American literature.

Simão Farias Almeida is professor of journalism at the Universidade

Federal de Roraima in the Amazonian region of Brazil. He is author of
Jornalismo ambiental em formato livro: Alegorias e subjetividades (2014) and he
is a researcher in the Media, Knowledge, and Environment: Amazonian
Perspectives research group.

Juan Carlos Galeano is a poet, translator, and essayist born in the Ama-
zonian region of Colombia. He has written several books of poetry in-
spired by Amazonian cosmologies, and he also made a documentary film
on the topic. His poems have been anthologized, translated into English,
and published in a wide variety of international journals including Casa
de las Américas (Cuba), The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, BOMB Maga-
zine, Drunken Boat, and Poesía. He is currently professor of Latin
American poetry and Amazonian cultures at Florida State University.

Adrian Kane is professor of Spanish at Boise State University. He is

author of Central American Avant-Garde Narrative: Literary Innovation and
Cultural Change (2015) and editor of The Natural World in Latin American
Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writings (2010).

Jeremy Larochelle is associate professor of Spanish at the University of

Mary Washington. He recently published ¡Más aplausos para la lluvia!:
Antología de poesía amazónica reciente (2014), an anthology of contemporary
poetry from throughout the Amazon basin. His work on literature and
the environment has been published in Hispania, Review, and The Dirty
Goat.

Diego Mejia Prado is a biologist from the Universidad Javeriana of Co-

lombia, where he combined laboratory and field research on plants from
various regions of Colombia and the United States. He is currently com-
pleting his doctorate at Florida State University, where he focuses on
environmental issues and science as it relates to the dynamics between
conservation and natural resource extraction in Amazonia.

Kerstin Oloff is lecturer in Hispanic studies at Durham University. She

has coedited a volume on Perspectives on the “Other” America: Comparative
 About the Contributors 329

Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture (2009), and she is the
author of a dozen articles and book chapters on Caribbean, Latin
American, and ecocritical topics.

Abigail Pérez Aguilera is a doctoral candidate in justice studies and

social inquiry at Arizona State University. Her dissertation is entitled
“Nature, Gender, and Indigeneity: Three Case Studies of Environmental
Movements in Mexico.” Her research deals with contemporary indige-
nous movements, literature written by women of color, and their connec-
tions to environmental social movements, forced displacement, gender
violence, and global politics.

Marcela Reales Visbal is a doctoral candidate at the University of Geor-

gia. She is coauthor with Mark Anderson of a chapter on “Extracting
Nature: Toward an Ecology of Colombian Narrative” in the Cambridge
History of Colombian Literature. Her dissertation focuses on cultural repre-
sentations of migration and ecological and geopolitical borders within
Amazonia.

Herman Vladimir Ruíz Abecasis is a Peruvian biologist and conserva-

tionist who specializes in fishery management in the Pacaya Samiria Na-
tional Reserve of the Peruvian Amazon. He has also served as an advisor
for fishing communities in the region. Currently, he is a consultant for the
Peruvian government regarding the effects of oil drilling on water eco-
systems in the Amazon basin.

María Victoria Sánchez is a graduate student in Comparative Literatures

and Cultures at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, where
she participates on the ecocriticism research team directed by Mirian Car-
ballo. She is currently completing her master’s thesis on new material-
isms.

Lesley Wylie is senior lecturer in Latin American studies at the Univer-

sity of Leicester, UK. She is author of Colonial Tropes, Postcolonial Tricks:
Rewriting the Tropics in the novela de la selva (2009) and Colombia’s Forgotten
Frontier (2013) as well as coeditor of Surveying the American Tropics: Liter-
ary Geographies from New York to Rio (2013).