Geographies of Tension in Mexico’s Black Pacific: The production of Citizenship in Environmental Practices

• In Event: Identity, Ecology and citizenship

Description for Program

I focus on how the connections made by waterways play a significant role in understanding the different subject positions among Indigenous, Mestizo, and Black Mexicans in the coastal region of Oaxaca, Mexico. I map the communities connected by waterways and water use and how the social relations tethered to local economies exemplify ongoing legacies of colonization and logics of anti-blackness. I explore how the broader discourses of development exclude counter-state narratives and how this exclusion process sets up the possibility for what I discuss as “geographies of tensions.” My work focuses explicitly on the competing agendas of development and how structural and social hierarchies differentially position Black and Indigenous communities to exploit the limited opportunities to enact and participate in local development projects. I argue that because Black communities are not legible within the multicultural recognition framework utilized by the Mexican state for allocating economic resources, Black relationships to land are not legible through an environmentalist lens by local, state, or federal agencies. This then sets up the potential for the Costa Chica to become a geography of tension. Within this work, I utilize my geographies of tension framework to consider how issues of race, nation, state, class, and gender impact local, state, and federal approaches to sustainability, conservation, climate change, and environmental justice. This work ethnographically investigates the Costa Chica region as a geography of tension to understand the possibilities for Black Mexican inclusion and how Black Mexican environmental practices may become legible in conservation, sustainability, and justice frameworks. This work reconciles Black Mexicans' historical role in land and water relations. This paper leans into the stories of land and water relations in the Costa Chica region. It positions an analysis of these narratives as essential for moving conversations on sustainability development toward including Black Mexican voices.

Author

• Grecia Perez, University of California, Riverside