Party Politics and Environmental Contention in Palpalá, Argentina

• In Event: 474 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 17. Party Politics and Social Movements

Abstract

Much of the scholarship on “contaminated communities” – spaces in which people live in areas affected by widespread pollution – assumes that residents will either publicly protest the existence of contamination once they are aware of its health effects or will remain “acquiescent” on the issue, and it will fail to become a salient political priority. This scholarship hinges on recognizing public contention according to familiar tropes – protests, marches, roadblocks, and the like, which in turn are motivated by people’s level of awareness and understanding of health risks they face.

In this paper, I analyze how what might look like “acquiescence” on contamination is a result of the embeddedness of environmental contention in everyday routines and political power struggles. Based on two years of ethnographic observations and interviews, this paper shows how local political party networks frame people’s discourse and action on widespread pollution in Palpalá, Argentina, a hub for mineral processing in the country’s Northwest. I show how people’s aversions, frustrations, alienation from or loyalty to local party politics mediate organization and discourse on environmental contamination, despite a general awareness of health risks incurred by exposure to toxic industrial pollution. Understanding how local politics and political networks are bound to residents’ relationship to “action” on contamination complicates existing literature that links people’s understandings of the gravity of environmental risks to their likelihood to act collectively on them, and also complicates scholarly definitions of what “action” looks like among residents of contaminated spaces.

Author

• Emily Jane Spangenberg, University of Texas at Austin