Gabriela Valdivia

Indigenous bodies, indigenous minds? Towards an understanding of indigeneity in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This article explores how perceptions about bodies and interpersonal exchanges contribute to the production of indigenous subjectivities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on feminist methodologies and experiences with Cofán, Quichua and Secoya peoples in the province of Sucumbíos, I reflect on how bodies and their ‘grammar’ can become analytical spaces through which to understand indigeneity. Specifically, I look at the body as object and subject of imaginaries of difference with the goal to examine how moments and interactions through which people commonly identify as ‘indigenous’ construct, contest and/or maintain indigenous subjectivities. I conclude with a discussion on the possibilities of thinking about and with bodies to further a post-colonial questioning of indigeneity.

Border Crossings: New Geographies of Protection and Production in the Galápagos Islands

The Galápagos Islands, Ecuador, have been managed as a fortress of conservation since the late 1950s. Well-maintained borders separate the Galápagos National Park (GNP) and inhabited areas as incommensurable spaces of natural (protected) and human (productive) life. In recent years, ecological, political, and economic crises have challenged this separation and stimulated shifts in the socioecological thought that underlies conservation management. In this article, we draw on the insights of border studies and of studies that recognize the hybrid and collective nature of conservation to trace the discursive and material exchanges that traffic the GNP border. The goal is to resituate the contribution of borders in nature conservation: from borders as technologies that fix space for protection to borders as sites of lively encounters with the potential to transform conservation theory and practice.

Oil frictions and the subterranean geopolitics of energy regionalisms

This paper contributes to analyses of energy integration strategies in Latin America. Focusing on the case of Ecuador’s participation in regional energy networks, the paper traces how oilfields, region, firms, and state are entangled in the making of energo-political assemblages. The paper develops an analytic of subterranean frictions in order to trace the coproduction of subterranean space and oil geopolitical events and, more generally, propose a more expansive geography of subterranean geopolitics that challenges spatial simplifications of resource extraction. The paper discusses how subterranean geopolitics, alongside surface politics, contributes to our understanding of the promises (and failures) of emerging energy projects in Latin America.

Borders, Border-Crossing, and Political Art in North Carolina

Since the 1990s the Southeast has experienced a continued and dramatic growth in Latino populations in both rural and urban areas throughout the region. This immigrant population is establishing and building communities, transforming the landscape, and producing diverse cultures in place that are not traditionally Latino. In this paper we focus on the work of the Mexican artist, Cornelio Campos, who lives in North Carolina and whose artwork represents journeys of Mexico-U.S. migration and imaginaries of political, cultural, and physical boundaries to examine how art engenders questions and reflection about these borders. We argue that Campos’ artwork brings the Mexico-U.S. border closer to non-Latina/o audiences in North Carolina and by doing so shapes their geographic imaginations of the Latinization of the South. The paper is based on interviews with the artist, observation, and projects conducted by undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina.

Environmental Crisis and the Production of Alternatives: Conservation Practice(s) in the Galapagos Islands

Recent discussions over conservation in the Galapagos Islands indicate a search for the right way to do conservation policy. When it is treated as a narrowly environmental issue, there are relatively clear dictates as to the organization of priorities and targets. As a social issue, however, conservation is not just “done”; it is experienced, negotiated, and contested such that policies intended to address the same issues inhabit and generate quite different spaces on the islands. In this chapter, we suggest that conservation in the Galapagos has changed considerably over the past three decades; this has happened less because of changing ecological conditions or scientific understandings and more because regular moments of crisis have led to ongoing efforts to reconcile different visions of human/environmental dynamics. As a result of attempts to reconcile conservation and society, conservation approaches have multiplied. There is now not just one approach to conservation on the islands but several, and together they constitute an uneven patchwork of overlapping and competing or conflicting approaches. Based upon data collection encompassing four field seasons and over 100 interviews with key informants of the archipelago, from governmental representatives and conservationists to farmers, fishermen, and other residents, we illustrate this multiplicity of conservation approaches and develop a framework for understanding environmental crises as generative spaces and moments in which new approaches, alliances, and attitudes are formed.

“Wagering Life” in the Petro-City: Embodied Ecologies of Oil Flow, Capitalism, and Justice in Esmeraldas, Ecuador

This article uses a political ecology approach to examine how urban residents of the refinery city of Esmeraldas “wager life” under conditions of social and chemical toxicity associated with oil capitalism. The article draws on the scholarship on affective economies and critical oil geographies to trace the knotting of social reproduction and oil capital in Esmeraldas and to illustrate how “cruel optimisms” (Berlant 2011) allow city-dwellers to make sense of everyday life amidst frontier-style petro-capitalism. Focusing on personal narratives of social reproduction, affect, and hope in the city, the article first argues that “justice” can be contradictory and politically ambivalent and, second, challenges fixed readings of resistance, refusal, or submission in resource extraction–dominated sites. Rather than presupposing resistance to petro-capitalism or submission to its workings, the article illustrates the liveliness of urban justice struggles and how attention to embodied ecologies and affective oil economies deepens scholarship on social justice. Key Words: cruel optimisms, environmental justice, petro-capital, social reproduction, urban political ecology.

Abandonment is us

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The End of “The Good Fight”? Organized Labor and the Petro-nation During the Neoliberalization of the Oil Industry in Ecuador

Early one morning in August 2003, in a residential area of Quito, hundreds of oil workers from Petroecuador , Ecuador’s state oil company, stood outside the headquarters of the Federation of Petroleum Workers of Ecuador (FETRAPEC ). The excitement was palpable. By mid-morning, a group brought out two giant papier mâche puppets, the first of Lucio Gutierrez, then President of Ecuador, dressed as a bride in a white dress, and the second of Horst Kohler, then President of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), dressed as a groom in a black tux. Hanging from Gutierrez’s dress was a plastic bottle labeled “oil patrimony .” In Kohler’s hand was a contract and in his breast pocket, dollars. The puppets were meant to bring attention to Gutierrez’s proposal to privatize the operations of Amazonian oilfields in order to secure loans from the IMF. Another group of workers carried a large sign that reads “just married,” and a nearby sign reads “la boda del ano” (“the wedding of the year”), both referring to how the privatization deal was a marriage of convenience that weakened state control over the national oil industry, the largest revenue-generating sector in Ecuador.

The Road to the Revolución Ciudadana

The spaces of oil extraction in Ecuador are dynamic sites of negotiation, contestation, acquiescence, and resistance. Since the election of Rafael Correa in 2006, the uneasy coexistence of state, firm, and indigenous peoples in these spaces has shifted to reflect an explicitly anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist platform. This chapter examines the conditions of this shift, and asks the question at the heart of this book: what is the possibility for a new political economy of oil in Ecuador? We use the concept of “entanglements” to frame this emerging direction, to move beyond a dualistic understanding of power relations, and to ask about the transformative promises that emerge out of the messy and intersecting relationships shaping life in Ecuador’s twenty-first-century oil frontier. In Ecuador’s Amazon region, crude entanglements take on a multiplicity of forms and have changed dramatically since the discovery of oil in 1967. A brief political economic history of oil boom, indebtedness, neoliberal policies, and tumult provides necessary context to understand the rise of President Correa and his party, Alianza Pais. Correa’s platform is encapsulated by the Revolucion Ciudadana, a developmentalist project of governance introduced by his administration in 2007. As we discuss, the term Revolucion Ciudadana can be interpreted in many ways, and these multiple meanings and valences possess a utility in describing and justifying the suite of policies and practices of the Correa administration. The project of the Revolucion Ciudadana is made possible via public spending using revenue generated by extractive activities disproportionally impacting socio-ecological communities in the Amazon region, an area of high biological and cultural diversity.

In and Out of the Shadows of Citizenship

Recent killings between contacted Waorani and Waorani in voluntary isolation raise questions about the meaning and consequences of citizenship for indigenous peoples, and, importantly, how to protect vulnerable groups for whom citizenship, belonging, and inclusion are yet undetermined. We trace the historical trajectory of the politics of citizenship and indigeneity in Ecuador, from top-down legal frameworks to indigenous mobilization and collective action. While contacted Waorani are seen and heard as citizens—they receive formal education and access to urban public works, for example—the Taromenane, a group of Waorani in voluntary isolation, are within the shadows of citizenship. They exist within geographic boundaries created by the state, but do not recognize its authority, and by definition cannot represent themselves in political processes. Despite the designation of an “intangible zone” and other constitutional protections, PVI are sometimes “erased” from the geopolitical map and are inadequately protected by the state’s precautionary measures. Issues of indigenous citizenship thus do not merely pertain to the politics of difference, participation, and recognition, but are matters of life or death.