Placing Race in Environmental Justice Research in Latin America

Abstract

This article argues that human-environment relations are important, yet neglected sites in which racial hierarchies are constituted in Latin America. Unmapping how race articulates with environmental formations to constitute subjects, determine their social and geographical place, and organize space will enable better understandings of how environmental injustices in Latin America are organized, justified, but also reconfigured.

Keywords:

• environmental formations
• environmental justice
• Latin America
• natural resource management
• race
• racialization

Notes

By environmental imaginaries, I mean ideas about nature and appropriate human-land relations, as in resource management practices and property regimes.

The body has long been used as a metaphor for a polity, politically organized population or territory, and nation-state (Chilton 2004). In line with feminist scholars, I use the terms “body politic” and “national body” interchangeably to literally embody the nation—to remind readers of the ways in which nations are imagined in reference to raced, gendered, classed, and sexed bodies.

Ladino is the term used for a person of mixed European and indigenous descent; it can also refer to an indigenous person who no longer identifies him- or herself as such. The term, however, is not synonymous with mestizo, used in other contexts like Mexico where nation-building projects in the early 20th century celebrated the notion of mixed heritage.

The term Creole is used here to refer to American-born individuals of Spanish or European descent. In some parts of the Americas, the term is given other meanings. For instance, in Nicaragua, Creole refers to Afro-descendent people of the Atlantic coast.

My research in Guatemala draws on qualitative methods, including interviews with key players and participant observation over extended periods of time between 1993 and 2003.