Tag Archives: epistemic disobedience

Of necropolitics and “writing as a geologist”

The 12th Conference of the Nordic Latin American Research Network (NOLAN) took place last week at the beautiful South Campus of the University of Copenhagen in cooperation with FIEALC (Federación Internacional de Estudios sobre América Latina y el Caribe). Chaired by Georg Wink, Director of Iberian and Latin American Studies Forum, the conference was superbly organized and packed with an impressive number of thought-provoking keynotes, panels, and round tables. Two interventions made a big impression on me.

The first one was a presentation by Isidro Morales (Universidad Autónoma de Puebla), who analyzed Mexico’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixing statistics and discourse analysis, Morales showed how Mexico had one of the highest per capita numbers of fatalities in the world because of a lack of infrastructure (i.e., enough hospital beds and health staff), political decisions, and an irresponsible communication strategy. Despite the existence of a competent health expert in charge of the crisis management efforts led by the federal administration and promises that Mexico’s response would be as “good as Denmark’s,” the populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known colloquially as AMLO, continued with austerity policies and constantly undermined science-based recommendations aimed at the general population. AMLO, for example, refused to wear face masks in public events and acknowledge the severity of the virus for risk groups and marginalized populations. In Morales’ view, to avoid mass panic, AMLO tapped into Mexican religious culture and its relationship to death by for example wearing escapularios, an amulet worn by devout Roman Catholics, and stating that was all he needed to fight the virus. Encapsulated in the common saying “You need to die in order to let live” and epitomized in the country’s Day of the Dead, the acceptance of death has deep roots in precolonial Mexico. All these factors, according to Morales, created a context where the government’s necropolitic strategies fused with Mexican culture creating a context where marginalized populations, those working in the informal economy, for example, were left with little room to maneuver. Having to choose between the virus and not having food on the table, people stoically developed the saying “elige tu riesgo,” choose the risk you want to take. Morelos’ work on necropolitics makes me think of racial capitalism and Nancy Fraser’s (2019) emphasis that we need to understand the specific “landscapes of racialization,” to, among other things, untangle the relationship between racial capitalism and the state.  

A second intervention that I found inspiring, was the keynote by Cristina Rivera Garza (University of Houston), recent Pulitzer winner for Liliana’s Invincible Summer. In her talk – based on her book Autobiografía del algodón – Rivera Garza presented the story of migrant agricultural workers along the US-Mexico border at the beginning of the 20th century. Escaping drought in central Mexico, the workers were part of an agrarian experiment to expand the ecological boundaries of the desert to plant cotton. Looking at the “land as archive,” “forces embedded in ruins,” and personal family history, Rivera Garza uncovers how cotton became a life-giving resource, providing the foundations for an autonomous way of life. (In contrast to the stories of cotton in the United States). I found fascinating how Rivera Garza described her intervention as a piece of fiction/nonfiction. She encouraged us to practice “writing as a geologist,” uncovering layers and contradictions, and using our personal stories mediated by research. The approach reminded me of the “global intimate” (Fonseca Alfaro, 2021; Pratt & Rosner, 2006) and the call to write bodies and embodiments into academic texts advocated by, for example, Donna Haraway (1988) and Juanita Sundberg (2005). Rivera Garza’s call is central to present the geographies of Latin America in more nuanced ways and practice what Walter Mignolo (2009) refers as “epistemic disobedience.”

References

Featured image: Photo by Nicholas_Demetriades on Pixabay