Territorialising Space in Latin America: Processes and Perceptions (The Latin American Studies Book Series) 3030822214, 9783030822217

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The Latin American Studies Book Series

Michael K. McCall Andrew Boni Noguez Brian Napoletano Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez   Editors

Territorialising Space in Latin America Processes and Perceptions

The Latin American Studies Book Series Series Editors Eustógio W. Correia Dantas, Departamento de Geografia, Centro de Ciências, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil Jorge Rabassa, Laboratorio de Geomorfología y Cuaternario, CADIC-CONICET, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina Andrew Sluyter, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

The Latin American Studies Book Series promotes quality scientific research focusing on Latin American countries. The series accepts disciplinary and interdisciplinary titles related to geographical, environmental, cultural, economic, political and urban research dedicated to Latin America. The series publishes comprehensive monographs, edited volumes and textbooks refereed by a region or country expert specialized in Latin American studies. The series aims to raise the profile of Latin American studies, showcasing important works developed focusing on the region. It is aimed at researchers, students, and everyone interested in Latin American topics. Submit a proposal: Proposals for the series will be considered by the Series Advisory Board. A book proposal form can be obtained from the Publisher, Juliana Pitanguy ([email protected]).

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15104

Michael K. McCall · Andrew Boni Noguez · Brian Napoletano · Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Editors

Territorialising Space in Latin America Processes and Perceptions

Editors Michael K. McCall Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Morelia, Mexico

Andrew Boni Noguez Universidad de Guanajuato Guanajuato, Mexico

Brian Napoletano Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Morelia, Mexico

Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Morelia, Mexico

ISSN 2366-3421 ISSN 2366-343X (electronic) The Latin American Studies Book Series ISBN 978-3-030-82221-7 ISBN 978-3-030-82222-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82222-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

All the book chapters, save Chap. 1, were externally reviewed. Therefore we wish to warmly acknowledge all the external referees whom we invited and who kindly agreed to review chapters. We are very grateful to them for the considerable time they contributed and for their many thoughtful and very constructive inputs: Alina Álvarez Larrain, América Nallely Lutz Ley, José Antonio Mora Calderón, José María León Villalobos, Jovanka Špiri´c, Margaret Skutsch, María del Carmen Ventura Patiño, María Fernanda Paz Salinas, and Susana Barrera Lobatón. At Springer Nature, we were encouraged right from the beginning at the CLAG Conference in San José, Costa Rica, by Juliana Pitanguy, Publishing Editor, Springer Latin American Studies, and she sympathetically supported us since, despite the continuing pandemic-driven delays of the project. Pranay Parsuram, Assistant Editor, ably stood in for Juliana Pitanguy during her maternity leave. For the later stages, we want to acknowledge Balaganesh Sukumar, Project Coordinator, Book Production Springer Nature, and Ritu Chandwani of Springer Nature Corrrections team, who have provided all kinds of necessary technical advice. We really appreciate the efforts of all our authors working through the pandemic lockdown, many of whom, as we ourselves, experienced a range of personally, socially, and administratively difficult situations in their various countries with sometimes bizarre COVID-19 policy approaches—in Mexico, Colombia, the USA, Costa Rica, Argentina, Spain, the UK, and Brazil. Thank you very much everyone, for sticking with us in this project; we have enjoyed working with you, and learning. Muchisimas gracias, muito obrigado! Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico May 2021

Michael K. McCall Andrew Boni Noguez Brian Napoletano Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez

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Contents

Introduction: Framing the Spaces of Territorialisation in Latin America—A Complex Labour of Herding Cats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew Boni Noguez, Michael K. McCall, Brian M. Napoletano, and Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Territory in Latin America—An Evasive and Deeply Embedded Construct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael K. McCall, Brian M. Napoletano, Andrew Boni Noguez, and Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Village-Scale Territorialities in Eastern Campeche State, Mexico . . . . . . . John Kelly Between Subsidies and Parks: The Impact of Agrarian and Conservation Policy on Smallholder Territories of Calakmul, Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carlos Dobler-Morales

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Territorial Changes and the Fisheries of La Encrucijada Biosphere Reserve, Chiapas, Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . José Manuel Mojica-Vélez and Sara Barrasa-García

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Contested Meanings of Territorial Production: Modern Territories of Coffee and Steel in Colombia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez and Rodrigo Chaparro Montaña

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Asymmetric Territories: Power as a Bag of Chisels Shaping Rural Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Adrián Ortega-Iturriaga and Tzitzi Sharhí Delgado Towards a Territorial Eco-Genesis. Land and Water Grabbing in the Oases of the Province of Mendoza (Argentina) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Robin Larsimont

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Historical Territorialization Process of the American Smelting and Refining Company in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Sol Pérez Jiménez Time and Territorial Variations of State Response and Local Action in Three Socio-Environmental Conflicts Over Mining in Chile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Tamara Ortega-Uribe The Communication of Territoriality in a Mining Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Andrew Boni Noguez and Michael K. McCall Participatory Mapping: Supporting Community Identity Through a Focus on Territory. An Indigenous Tupiniquim Community in Espírito Santo, Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Maria Elisa Tosi Roquette and Michael K. McCall Territorialization and Resignification of Residual Space. Experiences from Bogotá, Colombia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Nataly A. Díaz Cruz Building and ‘De-indianising’ a Nation. The Kuna and Guaymí People and the Formation of the Panamanian State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Ana Sofía Solano Acuña and David Díaz Baiges ‘They Destroy Everything:’ Racialising Discourses, Environmental Conservation Narratives, and Territorial Belonging in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Nora Sylvander

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Michael K. McCall Senior researcher, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico. Michael McCall studied at Bristol and Northwestern universities. He worked in ITC (University of Twente) for many years, in the University of Dar es Salaam, and in Sri Lanka. He is a social geographer engaged in Mexico and Latin America and previously in Eastern and Southern Africa. His primary research and teaching experiences are in participatory cartography of rural and urban local spatial knowledge with emphases on participatory spatial planning, territoriality, community initiatives, risks and vulnerability, and environmental management. e-mail: [email protected]. mx Andrew Boni Noguez Associate professor, División de Ingenierías, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. Andrew Boni Noguez is a geographer from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His research has mainly focused on the geography of conflicts between communities and extractive industries and other aspects of mining in Mexico, such as mineral extraction in natural protected areas and the social implications of open-pit mining. He teaches in the Geography and Geomatic Engineering programs. e-mail: [email protected] Brian Napoletano Assistant researcher, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico. Brian M. Napoletano studied biogeography at Michigan State University and Purdue University, but has since shifted his focus to the geographical dimensions of the metabolic rift, including alienation and territorial dispossession associated with capitalist urbanisation, conservation, resource extraction, and other major landchange processes in the Global South. He has recently become interested in the possibilities of autogestión and successful co-revolutionary mobilisation by the world

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and environmental proletariat to forge a hegemonic alternative to capital’s alienated mode of social-metabolic control. e-mail: [email protected] Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Ph.D. candidate in Geography, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Morelia, Mexico. Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez is a sociologist with Masters’ degrees in Social Sciences and Agrarian Studies. Her research interests are in territorial conflicts, place-based strategies for territorial development, and environmental governance. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography and her current project explores governance scenarios on local knowledge based on territorial relations of care among humans and non-humans in the coffee landscapes in Nariño, Colombia. e-mail: [email protected]

Contributors Sara Barrasa-García Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico Andrew Boni Noguez División de Ingenierías, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico Rodrigo Chaparro Montaña Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Ciudad de México, Mexico Tzitzi Sharhí Delgado Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores Unidad Morelia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Michoacán, México David Díaz Baiges Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica Nataly A. Díaz Cruz Departamento de Geografía, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia Carlos Dobler-Morales Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico John Kelly Department of Geography and Earth Science, University of WisconsinLa Crosse, La Crosse, USA Robin Larsimont Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Mendoza, Argentina Michael K. McCall Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico José Manuel Mojica-Vélez Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras (INVEMAR), Santa Marta, Colombia Brian M. Napoletano Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico

Editors and Contributors

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Adrián Ortega-Iturriaga Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Michoacán, México Tamara Ortega-Uribe Politics Department, University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA Sol Pérez Jiménez Instituto de Ecología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, Mexico Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico Ana Sofía Solano Acuña Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica Nora Sylvander Department of Geography and Environment, LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Maria Elisa Tosi Roquette Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil

Introduction: Framing the Spaces of Territorialisation in Latin America—A Complex Labour of Herding Cats Andrew Boni Noguez, Michael K. McCall, Brian M. Napoletano, and Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Abstract This chapter introduces a collection of original geographical research on territorial processes in diverse settings throughout Latin America. Most of the works were first brought together in a pair of sessions organised by two of the co-authors at the 35th Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers held in San José Costa Rica, the guiding purpose of which was to illustrate ‘how territory and territorialization are materialised in practice in Latin American contexts’. Rather than aiming to establish a unified theoretical vision, the collection seeks to integrate the rich complexity and wide ranging empirical applications of the increasingly important concepts of territory, territoriality and territorialisation. The book covers a broad geographical spread in terms of the authors, the institutions and the places they have elected to work in, which is reflected in a diverse range of thematic, theoretical and methodological perspectives behind each work. Keywords Territory · Territoriality · Latin America

1 Origins of the Book This book emerged from two sessions organised by Michael McCall and Brian Napoletano at the 35th Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers (CLAG) in San José, Costa Rica, 20–22 May 2018. The sessions were entitled ‘Territorializing Space in Latin America: Processes and Perceptions in Territorial Appropriation—Territorializar el espacio en América Latina: Procesos y percepciones en la apropiación A. Boni Noguez División de Ingenierías, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] M. K. McCall (B) · B. M. Napoletano · T. Rico-Rodríguez Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] B. M. Napoletano e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. K. McCall et al. (eds.), Territorialising Space in Latin America, The Latin American Studies Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82222-4_1

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territorial’, and they hosted presentations in both English and Spanish from scholars working on Latin America. We were pleased that Springer contacted us about assembling these presentations into a book for their Latin American Book Series, and we invited Andrew Boni Noguez and Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez to contribute their expertise and make a stronger team of four editors. Most of the chapters included in this book are based on the presentations made in San José, though some authors of studies were unfortunately unable to contribute, their plans being derailed by the pandemic. But then, we were fortunate to receive contributions from other authors who had not participated at CLAG, San José, but whose work is very much relevant to this topic. Ultimately, the decision was made to write all chapters in English, as the book is intended primarily to showcase work on territory in Latin America for scholars globally. As bilingual readers are already aware, excellent theoretical, conceptual and activist political work, as well as narratives directly from practitioners and communities, is found in many Latin American and Iberian sources. In CLAG’s own Journal of Latin American Geography, these include notable contributions by López Sandoval et al. (2017), Correia (2020) and Haesbaert and Mason-Deese (2020). Additionally, there is the recent collection of participatory mapping practices for reclamación y gestión de territorios, likewise in English translation (Sletto et al. 2020).

2 Vision and Setting The original invitation to contribute to the CLAG sessions, and by extension to this book, asked people to submit works that illustrated ‘how territory and territorialization are materialised in practice in Latin American contexts’ and encouraged them specifically to think along any of the following themes and discourses: • How power relations influence the configuration of material and symbolic landscapes. • Claims and contests over territory, considering internal conflicts as well as encounters with external actors and forces. • How people legitimise their claims in the face of external forces. • People’s need for territory extending the extant notions of belonging, ownership and responsibilities of landscape. • Territorial construction under the influence of pervasive entities including states, communities and enterprises. • Mapping as a mechanism towards either the appropriation or the reclamation of (indigenous) territories. An underpinning principle from the outset was that the essence of territory and territoriality conform to geographic spaces, where social entities shape, influence and control (to some degree) human activities and the access to what is in that space, in terms of both concrete items and culturally relevant imaginaries. Therefore, ‘territory’ must always be a locus of local (and often indigenous) social organisation and, ultimately, of struggles over power and effective control.

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Territory is thus a concept essentially linked to influence over and in a tangible spatial area which is essentially material, but whose control by necessity also entails symbolic and intangible dimensions of human life. The cultural, historical and sacred dimensions of territory, and the umbilical cord of identity with a people’s territory, are co-related aspects that support, constrain and modify the spaces of territories and the processes of territorialisation, as well as being interdependent complementarities. Feelings of identity, place, placefulness or home themselves, however, are not sufficient (and may not be necessary) to make a space into a territory. People’s need for territory extends beyond extant notions of belonging, ownership and responsibilities of a landscape. Our interrogative approach towards the territory, territoriality and territorialisation was therefore eclectic, inclusive, adaptive and critical. Though not committed to any specific theorisation of the many which in recent years have been produced (including Antonsich 2010; Delaney 2008; Elden 2013; Escobar 2016; Haesbaert 2011; Paasi 2006; Painter 2010; Raffestin 2012), the collection as a whole appreciates and shares the rich complexity these thinkers seek to convey, using these concepts as lenses to understand the confluence of the material and symbolic aspects of place with identity and power. Heretofore, we have spoken of territory and its related concepts as analytic concepts. But in the Latin American context, these concepts transcend the theoretical realm or rather they shuttle between it and the sphere of political and social action. In this sense, territory—or more aptly territorio—is a term that is becoming an increasingly broader bridge connecting the academic and the realised worlds of citizens and activists (López Sandoval et al. 2017; Haesbaert & Mason-Deese 2020). It is this double-sidedness of territory which lies beneath our motivation to highlight the notion’s empirical scope and, by extension, social relevance, in Latin America.

3 In the Book This collection aims to investigate and articulate space and place, power and control, of territory in concrete grounded cases. That is, interpreting how the trope of territory has been configured or reconfigured through practices exposed by the cases in this collection. Rather than proposing a priori, or even a posteriori, a definitive version of territory and territorialisation, which would restrict the research experiences in the chapters, we recognise the variety of explanations for the concrete manifestations of territory, territorialisation and conflict in Latin America. The vision behind this book is of grounded investigation and analysis of how territory and territorialisation are materialised in practice in the region. This collection, like the CLAG symposium that initiated it, recognises and showcases the richness and multiplicity that the concept of territory generates in the region’s context. We have aimed to allow full expression to a wide range of positions, and we try not to constrain the diversity of thoughts and interpretations of

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territory and territorialisation in the Latin American sphere. The book’s stories (chapters) seek out the complex connections between these oppositional notions in the strongly developed essentials of the Latin American context, both generic and local, from divergent political stances, without forcing a definitive modality to unite these different perspectives. We endeavour to find ontological and epistemological lines and red threads, warps and woofs, themes and memes in the concepts, so as to get a handle on territory and territorialisation, and not allow the term to elide into a vacuous synonym for just any social, cultural or political manifestations in space. Thus, our undertaking could be likened to the pleasing but challenging task of the herding of cats. The next chapter, ‘Territory in Latin America as an evasive and deeply embedded construct’, by the compilers of the book, addresses multiple contemporary conceptualisations of territory and territoriality. Framings of territory emerge as historical palimpsests, as instruments related to policy, and as powerful realisations of cultural identity. For understanding and analysis, ‘territory’ can be interrogated as ‘territory– space–control’ (as appropriation and exclusion), and as ‘territory–place–identity’ (sense of place, a shared landscape); related to both is the idea of ‘territory–knowledge–representation’ (experience and discourse). The linked processes of ‘territorialising space’ incorporate also deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, and this discussion introduces power dimensions of control, claims and conflicts, and agency. Although the following scan (which is reflected in the order of the chapters) highlights some key coinciding aspects of the thirteen case study chapters, we stress that this is not intended as a strict grouping, nor are the connections we identify the only ones to be found between them. Throughout, the reader may find links between the chapters in terms of themes, study areas, conceptual focuses and methodological approaches. The first three case study chapters focus, through different approaches, on the ways local territorialities are constructed and modified by a combination of local and external factors. John Kelly, in ‘Village-scale territorialities in eastern Campeche State’, uses participatory mapping to explore how local territorialities are historically constructed by farming communities in relation to internal and external factors and tensions. The effects of past ‘fortress conservation’ policies, external drivers of commercial agriculture and cultural differences within communities are part of what moulds the ever-shifting territorialities of these lands in Eastern Mexico. In the same region, Carlos Dobler analyses the effects of state intervention via environmental and farming policies on the organisation of the territory. He shows how state influence in the form of farm subsidies and conservationist restrictions has affected land use and organisation. José Manuel Mojica Vélez and Sara Barrasa García analyse the role played by modernising agricultural policies in the configuration of territory. They show how the construction of hydrological infrastructure aimed at extending the agricultural frontier, has negatively impacted wetland ecosystems and fishing communities, but also collided with later-established conservation measures. More central analyses of the role of modernisation, specifically represented by global markets, are present in the next three chapters. Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez and Rodrigo Chaparro Montaña, in their chapter ‘Contested meanings of territorial

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production: Modern territories of coffee and steel in Colombia’, analyse the social construction of territory as a local-historical process. Global demand for coffee and steel along with a nationalistic drive for ‘modernisation’ are the external drivers that influence the ways territory is locally constructed, with ever-present tensions regarding the uses and meaning of land. Adrián Ortega-Iturriaga and Tzitzi Sharhí Delgado also study how the collision of global market demand for a highly valued product (avocados) with local social-political realities results in the physical, political and cultural changes of a rural territory in central Mexico. In ‘Land and water grabbing in the oases of the province of Mendoza (Argentina): Towards a territorial eco-genesis’, Robin Larsimont examines how the market-driven enclosure of the countryside and the appropriation of water sources not only give rise to new territorial arrangements, but also trigger violent conflictual processes. Territorialisation driven directly by external corporate forces can also be a pervasive process, even though it is expressed locally, as shown by Sol Pérez Jiménez in ‘Historical territorialisation process of the American Smelting and Refining Company in Latin America’. There she describes the ways a global-scale mining company has wielded political, economic and technological power to control and reconfigure territories in four Latin American countries in the twentieth century. Territorialisation processes and the social construction of territory very commonly emerge within contexts of socio-political and spatial conflicts. Three chapters centre specifically on conflict-related cases. In her study on three mining conflicts in Chile, Tamara Ortega Uribe identifies the spatial strategies deployed by the state in different periods of recent Chilean history. This socio-historical study illustrates the ways in which different state strategies and local mobilisations in a conflict translate into specific territorialisation processes. In ‘The communication of territoriality in a mining conflict’, Andrew Boni and Michael McCall analyse the use of maps, or rather a single ‘official’ map, in a conflict in Northern Mexico spurred by a mining project in indigenous lands. Planned industrialisation in indigenous lands in Espírito Santo, Brazil, and an ensuing conflict is the locus of field research by María Elisa Tosi Roquette and Michael McCall. Through ethnography and participatory mapping, they find how the threat of a steel industrial complex and the prospect of land dispossession induced an indigenous community to redefine and reassert their identity and territoriality. The sole chapter that deals with an urban context shares many aspects with the preceding works. Nataly Díaz Cruz explores how transgressive uses of urban residual spaces constitute a deeply symbolic form of alternative territorialisation in Bogotá, Colombia. Colonisation and decolonisation are the themes of the final two chapters. In ‘Building and ‘de-Indianising’ a nation: The Kuna and Guaymí people and the formation of the Panamanian state’ Ana Sofía Solano Acuña and David Díaz Baiges analyse the territorial and political strategies involved in the colonisation of indigenous lands in nineteenth-century Panama. Geopolitical and economic interests, along with the establishment of a national identity, are shown to have been the main drivers of deep territorial reconfiguration and cultural change. National and indigenous identities, along with environmental discursive constructions, are the focus of Nora Sylvander’s

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chapter ‘ “They destroy everything”: Racialising discourses, environmental conservation narratives, and territorial belonging in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve’. The controversial policy of saneamiento territorial (‘territorial cleansing’), seemingly understood as a tool for indigenous rights, is shown to be ignoring the intragroup dynamics and can confuse the environmental aims. Just as these works represent a wide range of topics, themes and study areas, they also comprise a diverse set of methodological approaches that include ethnography, historical documentation, social surveys, interviews with key informants, participatory action research, discourse and image analysis, economic analysis, participatory mapping, geostatistics, GIS, satellite image analysis and more. This reflects not only the diverse backgrounds of the contributing authors, but also the range of applicability of territory as an analytical framework.

4 Geographies of the Institutions and the Authors Although the book was never planned to be a comprehensive survey of Latin American geography on the topic of territory, it covers a broad geographical spread in terms of the people, the institutions involved and the places they have elected to work in—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru. The majority are working in Mexico (from five different countries of origin). Overall though, the authors’ institutions represent a diverse range: Mexico (three centres within the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Universidad de Guanajuato); Argentina (CONICET—Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas); Brazil (Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo); Colombia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia—ESTEPA, and INVEMAR, Santa Marta); Costa Rica (Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica), Spain (Universidad Pablo de Olavide); USA (Clark University, the University of California-Santa Cruz, and the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse) and the UK (London School of Economics). The expertise and the experiences of the contributors are unsurprisingly mostly forged in the inclusive disciplines of Geography, History, Anthropology and Sociology. But reviewing also their supportive fields of expertise exemplifies why territory is a cross- and transdisciplinary challenge, well outside traditional silos. The authors’ competencies straddle also: Agrarian studies, Art, Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Creative writing, Cultural History, Ecology, Environmental Sciences, Forestry, Geomatics, Landscape Architecture, Media Studies and Political Science. We believe this diversity reflects the breadth of debate on notions and constructs of territory and the multiple processes that can be analysed through the approaches found in this book.

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References Antonsich M (2010) Rethinking territory. Prog Hum Geogr 35(3):422–425. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0309132510385619 Correia J (2020) Territories of Latin American geography. J Lat Am Geogr 19(1):132–140. https:// doi.org/10.1353/lag.2020.0018 Delaney D (2008) Territory: a short introduction, short introductions to geography. Wiley-Blackwell, Malden Elden S (2013) The birth of territory. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Escobar A (2016) Thinking-feeling with the Earth: territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the South. AIBR Rev Antropol Iberoam 11(1):11–32 Haesbaert R (2011) El mito de la desterritorialización. Siglo Veintiuno, Mexico Haesbaert R, Mason-Deese L (2020) Territory/ies from a Latin American perspective. J Lat Am Geogr 19(1):258–268. https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.2020.0005 López Sandoval MF, Robertsdotter A, Paredes M (2017) Space, power and locality: the contemporary use of territorio in Latin American geography. J Lat Am Geogr 16(1):43–67. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/lag.2017.0009 Paasi A (2006) Territory. In: Agnew J, Mitchell K, Toal G (eds) A companion to political geography. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 109–122 Painter J (2010) Rethinking territory. Antipode 42(5):1090–1118. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14678330.2010.00795.x Raffestin C (2012) Space, territory, and territoriality. Environ Plan D 30:121–141. https://doi.org/ 10.1068/d21311 Sletto B, Bryan J, Wagner A, Hale C (eds) (2020) Radical cartographies: participatory mapmaking from Latin America. University of Texas Press, Austin TX

Andrew Boni Noguez Associate professor, División de Ingenierías, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. Andrew Boni Noguez is a geographer from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His research has mainly focused on the geography of conflicts between communities and extractive industries and other aspects of mining in Mexico, such as mineral extraction in natural protected areas and the social implications of open pit mining. He teaches in the Geography and Geomatic Engineering programs. Michael K. McCall Senior researcher, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico. Michael McCall studied at Bristol and Northwestern universities. He worked in ITC (University of Twente) for many years, in the University of Dar es Salaam, and in Sri Lanka. He is a social geographer engaged in Mexico and Latin America and previously in Eastern & Southern Africa. His primary research and teaching experiences are in participatory cartography of rural and urban local spatial knowledge with emphases on participatory spatial planning, territoriality, community initiatives, risks and vulnerability, and environmental management. Brian M. Napoletano Assistant researcher, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico. Brian M. Napoletano studied biogeography at Michigan State University and Purdue University, but has since shifted his focus to the geographical dimensions of the metabolic rift, including alienation and territorial dispossession associated with capitalist urbanisation, conservation, resource extraction and other major land-change processes in the Global South. He has recently become interested in the possibilities of autogestión and successful co-revolutionary

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mobilisation by the world and environmental proletariat to forge a hegemonic alternative to capital’s alienated mode of social-metabolic control. Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Ph.D. candidate in Geography, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Morelia, Mexico. Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez is a sociologist with Masters’ degrees in Social Sciences and Agrarian Studies. Her research interests are in territorial conflicts, place-based strategies for territorial development and environmental governance. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography and her current project explores governance scenarios on local knowledge based on territorial relations of care among human and non-humans in the coffee landscapes in Nariño, Colombia.

Territory in Latin America—An Evasive and Deeply Embedded Construct Michael K. McCall, Brian M. Napoletano, Andrew Boni Noguez, and Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the concepts and constructs of territory and territoriality, with its special focus on their meanings in Latin America and to what extent these are considered as exceptional. The framings and material manifestations of the concepts are interrogated as historical palimpsests, as tools related to policy in neoliberal transformations and the territorial turn, and thirdly, as powerful realisations of cultural identity. In the section called, ‘territory as a geographical area of, and with, values’, the concept is dissected, for analytical clarification, as ‘territory– space–control’ (territory as appropriation and as exclusion), and as ‘territory–place– identity’ (sense of place, sense of attachment, the idea of community, landscape). Related to these is the idea of ‘territory–knowledge–representation’ (epistemological experience and discourse). Processes of territorialisation necessitate change, which must imply conflict, appropriation, alienation and resistance. This section considers the interpretations and realisations of both deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, which introduce discussions on power, control, claims and conflicts, as well as ethical issues of agency and legitimacy. Concrete manifestations of territory, as well as its conceptualisation, require a section on scale, limits and boundaries. The final discussion point is the actualities of signification and representation: ‘talking about “our territory”’, mapping methods and critical cartography in territorialisation. Keywords Territory · Territorialisation · Space · Place · Land · Localness · Identity · Conflicts · Representation · Latin America

M. K. McCall (B) · B. M. Napoletano · T. Rico-Rodríguez Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, México e-mail: [email protected] B. M. Napoletano e-mail: [email protected] A. Boni Noguez División de Ingenierías, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, México e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. K. McCall et al. (eds.), Territorialising Space in Latin America, The Latin American Studies Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82222-4_2

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1 Vision Territory, territoriality and territorialisation are primary themes in spatial epistemology with decades of contestation from divergent political stances over the frames, centres and limits of the concepts and of their operating processes and constructs. To find agreement on a common starting line or core is problematic, but we emphasise here the essence of territory and territoriality as geographic spaces, where social entities shape, influence and control (to some degree) human activities and access to resources in those spaces. In a traditional Anglo-Saxon discourse, the spaces of territory are typically understood to be associated with a specific or particular form of political authority. Thus, some of these discourses have argued its origins in the nation-state and assessed territory as a fairly recent invention, emerging in Europe under feudal landownership and elevated within the transition to the capitalist mode of production. However, with a broader vision, less historically and hierarchically focussed, territory is always a locus of local or indigenous social organisations and their struggles over power and effective control. At the larger scale in the neoliberal global system, territories and territorialisation also provide the frame appropriated by nation-states for hegemony, interventions and public policy in general. Beyond this, the essential interpretations of territorio and its specificities in Latin American contexts are recognised. The formulations of territory become more complex when the cultural synergy of identity and place are laid onto the political hegemony and economic power dimensions. This is especially pronounced in Latin American understandings, where the cultural, the historical and the sacred are agents that modify, constrain and guide the spaces of territories and the processes of territorialisation. When and where feelings of identity, place, placefulness and home (hogar) are identified with geographic spaces, new conceptualisations and manifestations of territory emerge.

2 Preamble to Territory in Latin America 2.1 Academic Musings on Territory The critical question of whether, and how, territory constitutes a sufficiently important topic to merit another book must be addressed at several levels. It is unarguable that academics find the subject fascinating; critical (re-)examinations of the trope emerge from across the academy, and there are thousands of grounded case studies. Concepts of territory, territoriality and boundaries have long been brought into political geography, highlighting as they do the geographical expression of social and political power (Antonsich 2009, 2011; Ardrey 1967; Delaney 2008, 2009; Elden 2011, 2013; Foucault 2007; Haesbaert 2007, 2011; Haesbaert & Mason-Deese 2020; Lovell 1998; Paasi 2003, 2006; Raffestin 1984, 2007, 2012; Sack 1986). The ambiguity and complexity become more apparent when territory and territoriality are

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‘understood as implicating and being implicated in ways of thinking, acting, and being in the world—ways of world-making informed by beliefs, desires, and culturally and historically contingent ways of knowing. It is as much a metaphysical phenomenon as a material one. Territory, in turn, informs key aspects of collective and individual identities’ (Delaney 2008, p.12). It is this special concatenation of issues, real-world problems and academic disciplines that make territory so compelling. As a research topic, it is significant in so many social science fields, undoubtedly geographical, with a growing presence in social anthropology, political theory, environmental and social psychology and of course in history. As a locus of praxis, it is related to individual and social identity, to feelings of place and Heimat, homefulness and attachment and to many aspects of the actual employment and operationalisation of power and control in territorial conflicts. It is the driver of so many conflicts and wars. The notions of territory and territorialisation have real-world human implications, making them more than just conceptual abstractions for academics. By contextualising the plastic concept of territory, we hope to avoid confusing contemporary uses, not only in Latin America, with the different meanings that the term has historically held following the emergence of the political state and associated systems of social relations (Elden 2011; Quaini 1982). Given the complexity of its readings within geography, that territory is transversal, cross-cutting, fluid, chimerical and an ambiguous boundary concept, all the conceptual understandings and methodologies and grounded evidence that we can build on are contributions not to a static definition, but as clues or signposts to making territory and territorialisation more usable concepts. We can consider Engels’s (1991, p.103) admonition in his preface to Marx’s Capital Vol. III, that ‘it should go without saying that where things and their mutual relations are conceived not as fixed but rather as changing, their mental images, too, i.e., concepts, are also subject to change and reformulation; … not to be encapsulated in rigid definitions, but developed in their process of historical or logical formation’. Theorisation and analytical dissection permit a more profound understanding and some cross-pollination, and help to identify anomalies and outliers vis-a-vis generalisations. These extend outside the conventional explorations of territory or landscape, into more critical, inventive, inclusive notions of space and place and power and identity, as in critical Marxist and feminist geography framings which foreground issues of equality, exclusion, difference and power into the interrogation of territory. This framing has radically critiqued limited understandings of territory. Critical feminist geography and critical GIS have called for non-positivist practices of knowledge production, more sensitive to patriarchal power hierarchies, including gender, that produce social, economic, cultural difference, all of which are relevant to understanding the territory (e.g., Pavlovskaya & St. Martin 2007; Wastl-Walter & Staeheli 2004). Continuing in the epistemological frame brings the question of who is included in the dominant ways of producing and communicating knowledge and whose perspectives are marginalised (regarding territory)?

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2.2 Meanings of Territory in Latin America In the various discourses on territory and territorialisation in Latin America, is the inquiry whether the concepts have significantly different meanings or concrete manifestations in the realities of the continent. Some accounts, e.g., López Sandoval et al. (2017), Haesbaert and Mason-Deese (2020), contend on several grounds that the terms hold special significance not shared everywhere. That is, there are exceptional cultural identity and historical political considerations for territory and territorialisation in Latin America. López Sandoval et al. (2017) developed an important review of alternative meanings, disputes and conceptualisations of territory and territorialisation in this context. An essential element of their argument is that the Latin American lens is exceptionalist in the sense that the intense social debates in Latin America over the concept of territory have resulted in highly fluid theorisations that ‘… question the original conceptual boundaries of these constructs’ (López Sandoval et al. 2017, p.2). Along these same lines, see also, e.g., Escobar (2008, 2016), Halvorsen (2018), Sletto et al. (2013). Haesbaert and Mason-Deese (2020) dissected territory into three ‘categories’ inserted into Latin American social space–time: a category of practice—‘a common sense conception of territory, as proposed in the everyday lives of most social groups’; a normative category—‘what a territory should be (as in territorial policies of the state)’; and a category of analysis, as in the academic sphere—‘territory becomes a theoretically and methodologically elaborated category through intellectual reflection’. The arguments behind this position centre on three elements: political and historical framing, policy impacts and cultural identity values. These elements are addressed here as we move towards debates about Latin American exceptionalism.

2.2.1

Historical Framings, Palimpsests

History is present in the (partially) shared journey of Latin American societies and cultures since the Conquista. Territorialisation is essential in land claims and entitlements of the indigenous peoples, in the spatial state formation of Latin American countries (e.g., Chile–Bolivia, Gran Chaco, Panama, Chiapas), and in the resistance of mestizo and indigenous peoples to the land alienations of megaprojects and globalisation. López Sandoval et al. (2017, p.45, 56) in their extensive review, argue conventionally that territory concerns power relationships in space, but they focus—with very specific reference to territory and territorialisation in Latin America—on conflicts ‘triggered by the confrontation between global forces … and local, place-based or territorially anchored groups …’. In their interpretation of territory and territorialisation in Latin America, collectivities, groups and peoples are central. To tie that to the essentiality of space and localness, ‘… we posit that space, power and locality are fundamental elements for understanding territorio, particularly when these are connected through actions, demands or claims of a collective’ (italics added).

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The configuration of territory based on the historical experience and current reality of Latin America renders it a profound de-colonialising exercise to use the trope to make visible the specific ways in which relations of capital have expressions and movements. Based on historical experience and current reality in Latin America, the configuration of territory and its constitutive moments have been at the centre of social mobiliation and struggles against oppression on numerous fronts, colonial and contemporary (Halvorsen 2018; López Sandoval et al. 2017). The dynamics of territorial formation have too much significance to be subsumed into just one type of process called territorialisation. Analysing the fluxes of territorial change has led geographers and political–cultural historians to recognise processes of both de-territorialisation and reterritorialisation, (revisited below in Sect. 5).

2.2.2

Policy—Neoliberal Transformations and the Territorial Turn

Territorial development and territory since the structural reforms of the 1990s in Latin America have become synonymous with decentralisation, local development, and rural neo-development. Decentralisation or devolution has meant in practice, the neoliberal development public policy directions of many Latin American countries, such as territorial growth zones, regional pôles de croissance and similar policies (Bebbington et al. 2008; López Sandoval et al. 2017; Radcliffe 2009). The rhetoric of decentralisation with which international financial institutions have justified and obscured the imposition of various rounds of privatisation (Bello 2000; Chomsky 1999; Miraftab 2004) has facilitated contra-hegemonic challenges to the territoriality of the state. Decentralisation frequently obfuscates the expropriation of land and land resources, in the form of deferring the actual hard decisions on neoliberal controls, and simply by transferring social costs (revenue from taxes, etc.) from the richer centre to the poorer periphery regions. A similar fundamental critique is made of the territorial turn in Latin America, that is the trend towards state recognition of (indigenous) community property rights. This is often presented as being a partial recognition of indigenous peoples’ demands for territory, but can be re-interpreted as the driving mechanism for expanding neoliberal approaches via the creation or extension of property rights regimes to community lands and entitlements (Bryan 2012; Offen 2011). But the process is never completed, the struggles continue (Correia 2019). The state in Latin America plays a major role in territory-making and in the naturalisation of links between territories and people (Paasi 2003, 2006; Sassen 2013). Without denying the major role of the state in enforcing ideas about territory and boundaries, it is not the sole institution through which social power is given a spatial expression.

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Cultural Identity

So often, special places and their related spaces associated with territory are linked to or derived from the cosmovisions and creation myths and dreaming practices of indigenous peoples in Latin America (and elsewhere) to support the construction of the sacred and spiritual dimensions of indigenous local territories. These always include physical landscape features—mountains, caves, rivers, and smaller scale nature—springs, sacred groves, trees, rocks or created artefacts, and frequently beyond that, the presence of real or mythological animals which can embody extrahuman identities (earth beings). (Barabas 2014; Basso 1996; de la Cadena 2015; Escobar 2016; Hirt 2012; Toledo et al. 2001; Wartmann 2016). The cultural, historical and sacred dimensions of place, and the umbilical cord of identity with a people’s territory, are co-related agents that modify, constrain and guide the spaces of territories and the processes of territorialisation. However, the feelings of identity, place, placefulness, home, are not sufficient (and may not be necessary) to make a space into a territory. People’s need for territory extends beyond extant notions of belonging, ownership and responsibilities of landscape. Many communities and activists seek the progressive and emancipatory opportunities opened up by conscious engagement in struggles to pursue alternative forms of territorialisation. Recognition of a shared agency to challenge the hegemonistic territoriality of the nation state is an antidote to a politics of despair, and a potent reminder that territory remains an indispensable category in activating resistance by showing the logic of the spatial divisions of their world (Escobar 2008; Sletto et al. 2013, 2020). However, the strength of cultural identity in so many Latin American territories does not make it globally exceptionalist—affinity to a place and the belief in defending our space seem to be a human universal (e.g., Ardrey 1967; Tuan 1974, 2001).

3 Territory as a Geographical Area of, and with, Values We begin with simpler statements recognising territories as partial and open to refinement or contradiction. Territory can be accepted as a ‘geographic space where multiple social entities shape, influence and control human activities and access to resources’ (Sack 1986), and therefore functions as a locus of local or indigenous social organisation with inevitable conflicts over power and control. Territory represents claims to some manifestation of ownership or entitlements over space, whether those entitlements are based in modern or customary legal ownership, political, cultural or moral power, or simply, blunt force and violence. Further, embedded in material spatialisations of territory are conceptual, symbolic, ‘virtual’ territories that are most often constructed upon cultural–historical landscapes. Territories exist because people believe in them (Haesbaert 2011). In essence however, there coexist essential dimensions of territory, which themselves have various nodes of interconnectivity.

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Territory 1: Territory as essentially linked to influence by some human group or their social–institutional manifestations over—or in—a geographically defined area (piece of land), and therefore space is the locus of control, power and appropriation. Territory 2: Place as the locus of (cultural) identity and attachment; a tangible area of land that is the focus of socio-cultural organisation (usually of a local community or indigenous group). These two conceptualisations can be summarised as territory–space–control, and territory–place–identity. These have complex connections in the Latin American context (e.g., Escobar 2008; Halvorsen 2018; Lovell 1998). Associated with both is Territory 3, which exists as an epistemological experience and discourse to articulate the historical processes of appropriation or disputes over space and specific places, which can be termed territory–knowledge–representation (e.g., Haesbaert & Mason-Deese 2020). This is in clear concordance with many of the numerous theorisations of territory and territoriality. Delaney (2009, p.16), for instance, says, ‘What bears emphasising here in our attempt to see around, through, and past territory is that territory cannot be considered apart from two fundamental aspects of human social being: meaning and power and the contingencies of their relationship.’ Paasi (2003, p.109) has framed it as: ‘Territory is simultaneously a piece of land, a seat of power and a functional space … several important dimensions of social life and social power come together in a territory: material elements such as land, functional elements like the control of space, and symbolic dimensions like social identity.’ (Italics added to both quotes). This may be interpreted as a distinct triple, but it can also be seen as Paasi using two components—the material and the symbolic. These are mirrored to a great extent in the simultaneous understandings of territory as space–control, and territory as place–identity.

3.1 Territory–Space–Control Territory is about space and spatial entities. This is such a sine que non that it does not need much theoretical construction. ‘Territory is no doubt a geographical notion, but it’s first of all a juridico-political one: the area controlled by a certain kind of power’ (Foucault 2007, p.176). Space is the theatre or the stage in which the actors function, though in some senses produced by the actors themselves (Lefebvre 1991). Territory is about the concrete physicality of land and space and the people who live it; territories are hard and real. But, territory as land needs to be constituted in a broad sense, not only in the superficial sense in which it may be translated into Spanish as suelo. Land is more than the soil per se, to include not just the surface, but what lies on it—the land cover, and what lies below it, and it can include what goes on well above it, for example, any restrictions on the use of drones or even satellite imaging over particular lands.

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Territory as Appropriation

The appropriation of land (and thus of nature) is not always explicitly discussed as an aspect of territory, but just try establishing a territory without it. The centrality of private property in most social economies, not only neoliberal, and the exploitation of nature as the basis of production, suggests how the appropriation of land, often treated as a passive backdrop to territorialisation, is better understood as a co-constitutive moment of territory-forming (e.g., Lefebvre 1991 also Halvorsen 2018). Appropriation of land (and nature) is something more than mere temporary possession, though not necessarily in the alienated form of private property. The spatial expression of this development runs through tribal territories to kin and clan systems, then to citystates, and eventually nation-states. It is obviously a far more complex process than this simplistic sketch, but the point is that the metabolic relation with nature, social production, and reproduction and territoriality co-evolved as mutually constituting moments (e.g., Quaini 1982) as forms of market exchange came to dominate.

3.1.2

Territory as Exclusion

A clamorous version of territoriality as exclusion with its expression in the nation state is currently employed to justify xenophobic voices against migration into many countries at a time when globalisation is supposed to render borders obsolete. Rather than (territorial) history ending with the levelling of the Berlin Wall, we are entering another spiral of physical barriers across varying political regimes. India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, USA, China, Botswana, Turkey, Israel, Ceuta and Melilla, etc. all enclose their territorial claims behind ever higher and more fortified ‘beautiful walls’ (Jones 2012; Wikipedia 2021). It is evident that we do not learn from the decline and fall of the territorial walls against the ‘barbarians’ by the imperial powers of Rome or China. In the early 2020s, compelled international migration and the legacies of colonialism are issues where territoriality is readily problematised in terms of expropriation and exclusion. Another concrete illustration is the spatial appropriation and control by narco and mafia gangs, i.e., the physical control of the transit spaces of landing strips and harbours, warehousing, etc. Besides the land needed for growing and processing drug crops are the protected, invisible ‘buffer zone’ spaces around fentanyl and heroin labs. Few researchers have been foolhardy enough to address this because of the obvious dangers of local (participatory) data collection, but there is an obfuscating result within the bubble world of academic literature. There is much research into the iniquities of territorial appropriations by mining companies, mega energy projects, palm oil plantations, etc., which indisputably are existential threats to local and indigenous communities. The deadly impacts of combinations of drug commerciants, drug labs, paramilitares, corrupt officials, large landholders or former ideological guerrillas are rarer issues in territory literature. These might therefore be considered relatively insignificant, but they are not—rural communities are deprived of access to their land, livelihoods, security and ultimately their lives, in many regions, as in Michoacán

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(Mexico), Bosawas (Nicaragua) or Urabá (Colombia). In Mexico, notwithstanding notable exceptions (Dulin & Patiño 2020; Salvador Maldonado 2010), this type of research has been left to investigative journalists who pay a heavy price—124 journalists murdered in Mexico in the last 20 years.

3.1.3

Territory and Alienation

Apart from myriad activities being organised on a territorial basis, a significant proportion of human behaviour is directed, explicitly and implicitly, towards partitioning space and towards maintaining the territories and boundaries formed (Gold 1982). Lévy describes this crisis in terms of a growing disjuncture between the nation and the territorial state, or the ‘perhaps temporary but nevertheless spectacular victory of networks over territories’ (Lévy 2011, p.278). Essentially, the coherence of the nation as a spatially bound entity has dramatically diminished with the mobility of capital and people, thereby rupturing society’s historical partnerships with the physical territory of the state. The nation-state functions as a sort of cosmopolitan-tribal hybrid, exacerbating the confusion experienced by local actors. From alienation as the separation from lived territory, and the interpolation of alienating mediators between humans and the means to meet their needs, and eventually the formation of capitalist mediators of territory—rent, private property, wage labour (Mészáros 2005), follows the fragmentation of territory and space into subterritories of living spaces of production and labour, and eventually into a multitude of spatial sectors designated by use, property designation, etc. (Lefebvre 1991). Key is the central position of private property and the nation-state in territoriality in our modern epoch. All of this utterly depends on control of land, whether this is control by physical force (guns and armies), laws and legislation (supported by myriad institutions), economic (market mechanisms and alienation of labour) or by cultural, moral forces, not excluding indigenous cultural norms and customary leadership.

3.2 Territory–Place–Identity 3.2.1

Sense of Place, Identity and Attachment

Place and placefulness and place–identity are fundamental to the localness of territory. People are attached and connected to specific places, not only through the obtaining of material resources and as a space to live, but through the historicity of individual or family life/spaces and especially through the specific historical creation of those spaces as a collectivity of people, whether as family, clan, community, neighbourhood, ethnic group (Tuan 1974, 2001). The deep place–identity connections—the placefulness—become operative conceptualisations of sacred places, the processes of symbolic appropriation and cosmovisions of place and landscape, and are eventually translated into claims to territory.

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The shared history that emerges from the place where people have been living, maybe for many generations or centuries, creates a sense of community, elements of place–identity and attachment regarding what belongs to us. These are the roots and axes of the disputes between the various actors (clans, communities, peoples) who may be claiming the same territories, actors who may utilise other modalities, other logics, and maybe other expressions of territoriality in those territorial spaces. The social construction of ethno-territories is the historical coexistence of indigenous or other long-settled local communities and their environments (Barabas 2014). This is the case not only for indigenous communities and it is not necessarily always successful coexistence.

3.2.2

Community and Gregariousness

To what extent does territory require community? There are strong parallels here with the socio-psycho re-inventions we need for the idea of community. Groups have a certain degree of homogeneity, in as much as self-distinctions can be made between inclusion (us–we) and exclusion (the other). However, it is misleading to assume too much social and political homogeneity or unity of interests and purpose within local communities or villages. The social groups may actually be very fuzzy, due to multiple social–cultural identities or nesting of smaller units within bigger ones. On the one hand, migrants who have exited a community may still belong to their ‘communities’ for many years, maybe generations. On the other hand, many people even inside geographic (place) communities may simultaneously have an affinity to other communities, such as social organisations, religious groups, political groupings, and increasingly with online communities, more likely prevalent with newer generations. Community needs dissecting as an easily facile umbrella term for a group of people who are comfortably currently coexisting with a common face to the outside world and with apparently agreed objectives, problems and consensus attitudes. Community is a contestable social construct and an ideal boundary object that is broadly acceptable in territory-building precisely because it is imprecise and fuzzy.

4 Nexus of Space and Place Some assert that the place-based (legitimate) interests of a local community (the ‘community territory’) are necessarily contradictory to the aggressive logic of territory and territoriality set by the state (‘state territory’), and thus, place may be a counter-pole to territory. But such a created dichotomy (humans’ explanations love binaries) is unrealistic and ungrounded in two senses. Local people may assertively defend or expand their territories against other local peoples—not just the state—in pursuit of their perceived entitlement to a piece of land (with its forest, minerals, water) for many objectives besides cultural affinity to a traditional landscape. And

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the state frequently uses the same ideals of visions of place, identity with the mother/fatherland, nostalgia, (chauvinism) in the service of its nation state vision. The state can equate local place identity of the community to the historico-cultural identity of the whole nation (or part of it). Both positions are myths. People occupy territory in the senses both of living in and of protecting (struggling for), and of appropriating or attempting to appropriate. People belong to territories, and territories belong to people who identify with them, have a sense of belonging, attachment and ownership. Territory is about struggle and contestations and therefore territory is about places (in space) and the localness of groups of people. When space gets a meaning for people and they form affinities for that space, then it becomes a place; as Cresswell (2004) put it, ‘space is for moving across/transiting, and place is for pausing’.

4.1 Space and Place: Territory and Landscapes There is an alternative conceptualisation, (or maybe just alternative nomenclature), of keeping the term territory just for the first meaning (Territory 1 above), and using landscape (or place) for the second meaning (Territory 2) (Rozo 2010). From land through landscape, to space, there are levels of abstraction in territory, from the less to the more abstract. What are the links between landscape elements and territory? What are the differences and overlaps? Landscapes are always cultural and social because they are formed and reformed by human society (with rare global exceptions), thus they might be symbolic or spiritual as well as physical, material and social economic. In global sustainability discourse, landscape is taken as a basic unit for biophysical, especially conservationist, analysis, whereas territory refers to the spatial units embedded in entitlements and thus in governance and use of the land. The concept of territory is essential to spatial justice, whereas landscape is not (McCall 2016). Territory is often related to very specific landscapes. A landscape can only be controlled by certain actors or groups, by means of political, legal, customary or simple force, if and where and when it is to some extent, even if not exclusively, their territory. The processes of territorialisation make use of or exploit the geographical landscapes that are perceived, identified, created by people (e.g., cosmovisions) in order to interweave them with the spatial territories to reinforce the cultural, social or economic forces. Thus, whilst landscapes and territories may sometimes coincide in space, landscapes are more organically formed through the action of human management on material natural factors, whereas territory refers to ‘a geographic space where a society or political entity, shapes, influences and controls social activities and access’ (Sack 1986). If a landscape is demarcated (by one who inhabits, claims or needs it), it may become a territory—be territorialised.

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4.2 Urban Territories Is there a need to distinguish urban territories? Is urban and peri-urban territory distinct from rural or regional? If so, what are the distinguishing features in terms of characteristics and concrete features, and in terms of processes of formation, appropriation, resistance or disintegration? There are rural–urban similarities in the neoliberal processes of capital formation and in social continuity or deformation or cultural resilience. There are also dissimilarities, however, because of obvious spatio-geographical differences in human population density, and in communication and interchange that positively affect the ability to mobilise. Further are the historic differences between many urban and rural situations—the length of shared experiences and the familiarity with the physical environment that affect the constructions of territorial identities and common purpose. There are fewer investigations of urban or peri-urban territory and territoriality than of rural in the geography literature of Latin America. This is despite the continent having the globally highest degree of urbanisation, at 80%. Most of the relevant work comes in urban sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies or identity studies. There are exceptional investigations—theoretical and also practical—in inclusive spatial planning, security, mobility and usability, for women in central cities and urban neighbourhoods (e.g., Valdivia Gutiérrez et al. 2017; and see: Crespo Oviedo 2006; Iconoclasistas 2014; Portela & Errandonea 2017). Looking at the case studies made by geography academics, it appears that the territorial disputes most often addressed are rural scenarios of identity and environmental conflicts where these tensions tend to be more visible and clear-cut. Urban examples are a lacuna in territoriality investigation in Latin America.

5 Territorialisation: Territoriality Processes Imply Conflict Territorialisation is about control, possession and authority, whether it is political, legal, customary, cultural or simple raw power, and the implications this has for the degree of autonomy or subordination, or shared governance. As Delaney (2008, p.10) says, ‘… any significant revision of the terms of territorialisation (such as with respect to public and private) entails an equally significant social transformation (and vice versa).’ Territory is a historical construct in the sense that its meaning depends on the historico-geographical circumstances in which it functions. A territory is not purely imaginary, and a territory must be designated by temporal as much as by spatial coordinates or markers. Territory is temporally bounded, even in human history, as it only exists in relation to specific historical forms. ‘Far from being a timeless, universal feature of human social existence, territory is deeply historical (and historically contingent) in a number of ways’ (Delaney 2008, p.13). Territory is inherently relational and dynamic–global issues from capital flow to climate change easily

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dispel any ideas of territory as fixed or externally related. Regarding the temporal aspect, we more readily recognise the relational and dynamic nature of territory when we talk about territorialisation. The timescale relates to the dynamics of the conflict. Conflicts are changeable and shifting; aspects like the arenas, the degree of contestation and the mechanisms of conflict will change over time, even though the structure of the underlying contest may remain.

5.1 Deterritorialisation and Reterritorialisation If territorialisation is the set of processes of identifying with, claiming, constructing, appropriating, defending (and more) of territories, then what about the un-making and re-making of territories? Recognising territorialisation as a process is fundamental in the service of creating or appropriating or destroying territories. ‘La territorialidad es vista aquí como el ejercicio de aprehensión y concreción del espacio’ (Crespo Oviedo 2006, p.14). Bryan (2012) argues for a reconsideration of the construct of territory as process, highlighting the ways in which governing works through territorialisation, and thus how territorialisation constrains social justice. Delaney (2009, p.13) takes this further: ‘… restricting attention to territory as a noun may have the effect of over-emphasising its apparent thingness and thereby neglecting its relationship to a range of other social phenomena, most especially the social activities, practices and processes that are implicated in its production and transformation’.

5.1.1

Deterritorialisation

The continuous cycles of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation constitute the basic rhythms of globalised capitalist society. The fundamental mechanisms of capital circulation accompany both processes. Globalisation transforms. Globalised capital liberates deterritorialised resources and appropriates the surplus from the reterritorialised spaces via new manifestations of institutions and governance frameworks. Deterritorialisation is the usually slow process of externally-powered transformation, in terms both of dislocation or alienation from material land, and in terms of cultural erosion and denigration. It degrades local cultural norms by generating relativisation and transforming local cultural experiences. Culture here should be interpreted inclusively, taking into account all kinds of social norms, belief systems, institutions, legitimisation frameworks. Deterritorialisation, however, is not simply an impoverishment of culture, but more of a transformation produced by the impact of the external cultural forces from colonialism and globalisation on the local social formation.

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Reterritorialisation

Reterritorialisation is the restructuring of a place or territory that has experienced deterritorialisation. Most conceptual literature sees reterritorialisation as the processes by which a hegemonic, oppressive power replaces the prior autochthonous cultural footprint with its own (Raffestin 2007, 2012). However it can be more than that: a more pronounced re-territorialisation with the radicalisation of territorially defined cultural identities. The social, institutional and political processes of community resistance and resilience are contained in the processes of reclamation by a people of their own territory. This we call more appositely, auto-reterritorialisation. The re-stimulation of community self-identity is a result of the renaissance of local, indigenous culture and local political strengths of resilience and processes of resistance against the seemingly inevitable history of deterritorialisation (Ruiz et al. 2020). Thus, auto-reterritorialisation is the awakened realisation of territory as a form of resistance by the community as they revalue and reactivate their indigenous identity. Mapping can be a vital and dynamic part of the resistance and reterritorialisation processes. (Sect. 6.1).

5.2 Power—Sovereignty, Control, Claims The position of power in territoriality is well established, and key to analysing and enriching explanations of territory. ‘Whatever else one might say about it, territory necessarily involves the workings of some form of social power’ (Delaney 2009, p.16) (cf. Elden 2011; Foucault 2007; Halvorsen 2018). This dimension foregrounds the relations of power, control and inequality occurring at all levels in all systems, and it is transversal, as with class, ethnicity and gender inequalities. What is central and dominant in Latin America are the hegemonic relations of globalised capital and neoliberal political systems that are attempting to appropriate land and resources in most Latin American regions, and which form the focus of resistance and struggle for many, many local peoples. Sassen (2013) amongst others has warned against a false alignment of territory only with constructs around the sovereign authority of the state. Territory is not reducible to national or state territory; indeed, the political construct of territory entails a measure of conceptual autonomy from the nation-state. Furthermore, the notion and existence of territory are not exclusive to modern capitalist modes of production. Territory as control or sovereignty of a space is not exclusive to global or national or regional scales, it exists at smaller spatial scales down to the level of local power players and individual households. Feminist geography has extended that further to the scale of individual people, in particular the cuerpos (bodies) of women, and brought that into the interrogation of territory. Territory is a technology of politics in the sense that there are techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain, and such technical measures and legal controls function alongside the economic and strategic (Bryan 2012; Elden 2011;

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Halvorsen 2018). The operationalisation of these technologies of power is expressed in the territories and by the actors. Therefore, a prerequisite for confidence in territory is security of tenure, a shorthand for multiple socio-cultural political factors and drivers that influence whether members of the community are, or feel, secure in their territory. Perceived and actual security can be independent of the actual tenure system, that is, the status of external or internal (il)legality, use and access entitlements, and durability, though clearly some tenure settings are more secure than others (Offen 2011; Vélez Torres et al. 2012). Claims to specific territories are usually framed as an element of the collective rights to (collective) management of natural resources on their lands, to cultural protection and enhancement and to autonomy in general. The idea of security of the claim (as ownership or tenure) continues to be problematic. In a neoliberal law situation, the rights of tenure will be contested in law courts or in government legislation, and will depend on effective and legal possession. But in many situations, the local understandings and therefore the disputes over territory are external to modern law, and are rather based in customary law, tradition and customs with very different mechanisms and modalities of legitimisation. There may be very little common ground or mutual understanding or acceptance of the competing recognitions and legtimisations of a territory, and there is nearly always a significant disparity of power and, thus, access to force as a final mechanism for appropriating territory. Property therefore is not necessarily a pre-condition for claims to, or projections of, territory by a group with collective interests (a community); nor is it necessary for evidence of such claims or beliefs. Bryan (2012), Mançano Fernandes (2012), Offen (2011) and others have critiqued the whole approach of the territorial turn in Latin America which is based on formal claims, noting the calculative techniques employed in the modern property rights regimes and the marginalising of indigenous understandings of space and identity.

5.3 Foci and Loci of Conflicts and Dispute In much activist and academic research in Latin America, conflicts are the central driver within territorialisation. The arenas of territorial contestations are the sites of the visible conflicts and competitive behaviour concerning struggles over endowments (resources), services and attributes, rights and entitlements to nature’s resources, space per se, control of people, access to capital and institutional or political power.

5.3.1

Legitimacy in Territorial Conflict

Territory embodies claims to ownership or entitlements, referencing the competing claims of actors based on power in its myriad forms: legal (official or customary),

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political, cultural, gendered or violent force. There are existential threats to people’s lands in Latin America, the most salient being indigenous and forest people’s fears that their land will be expropriated. Their demands for environmental and spatial justice are articulated in terms of claims and entitlements to land (territory) and access to land and resources (cf. McCall 2016; Offen 2011; Ulloa 2010; van Dam 2011). Such conflicts, however, concern not only communities vs. state (e.g., land expropriated for conservation or energy and infrastructure projects), and communities vs. large capital and megaprojects. The loci of conflicts also include inter-community and intra-community disputes. The idea that territory is the (exclusive) claim to a space by one community or social entity opens a moral inquiry into the validity of entitlements. The issue is whether that exclusive possession is emic, internal and self-validating (e.g., relating to principles of First Occupancy), or it derives from an external legalistic authority, that of the coloniser or a driver of globalisation. Conflicts are between the interests of different groups who have their internal logics, their recognition of rationality, and therefore feel a legitimate right to express and articulate their interests. A sustainable territorial future cannot close off the conflict by ruling that there is only one, or a few, overriding correct or acceptably legitimate claims to resources and their use. Indigenous peoples often seek legislative or ‘legal’ formalisation of their customary territories to ensure the external enforcement of their borders, and this process can generate conflict. The process of constituting collective territories is intimately related to the constitution of authority, as it involves the negotiation of physical boundaries and the recognition of the legitimacy of a particular entity to represent the collective (Larson et al. 2015).

5.3.2

Agency and Intensity of Territorial Conflict

Territory is about actual people—groups, communities, collectivities, affiliations, the noyau of people. Territory is not simply abstractable to theoretical social constructs. The groups, communities or collectivities are fluid and intersectional, and not classifiable by only one criterion. In the construction of territory, there is an obverse: the exclusion of some people and the creation of the outside other (Nevins 2010). Thus, local communities can be reactionary, xenophobic and tyrannical in place of being cooperative, welcoming and liberating, depending on the perspective of the observer and the situation. The need is to recognise the importance of peopling— centreing the people in the territory, and recognising the quality of their social agency. In Antonsich’s terms, we must avoid treating modern territory only as a terror(izing) tool, whereby people are treated as homines sacri, waiting to be controlled, oppressed or simply disposed of (Antonsich 2009, 2011). There is a long continuum in the intensity of conflict from (a) discussion, through (b) dissension, (c) quarrelling and rancour, (perhaps via shutting out the ‘other’), to (d) blustering, threats, (e) intermittent clashes and eventually to (f) violent confrontation (cf. escalation of conflicts, Yasmi et al. 2006). Though central to it, competing territorial claims per se do not necessarily lead to conflict. Conflict occurs with attempts

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to materialise the idea, i.e., to realise these competing claims (Nevins 2010). At this point, power becomes the determinate moment. Territorialisation can use military (including internal) force, economic, legal, social, cultural, moral or spiritual powers as mechanisms and tools.

5.4 Scale, Limits and Boundaries Territories are bounded geographical spaces (Antonsich 2011). But this boundedness does not necessarily mean that everyone agrees on the boundaries; there would be far fewer conflicts if that was so easy; nor do they easily agree on the elements or criteria or language of boundaries. But in the essence of territory and the processes of territorialisation, there are boundaries between the space of us and the space of them. They may be flexible, fluid, fuzzy, transparent, invisible, symbolic, imaginary, seasonal, peaceful, but there are limits. Boundaries are not necessarily sharp dividing lines, borders (frontiers), but exist as gradual transitions (Nevins 2010). Though there is ample evidence of indigenous recognition of territorial limits, we must re-emphasise that many local peoples, not only indigenous, do not hold to strict, permanent, fixed, delineated, (surveyed) geo-referenced boundaries (e.g., Barabas 2014; Sletto 2009; Thom 2014). A methodological–ontological question is: what are the spatial boundaries (if any) of a territory? There are physical spatial–geographical limits in which the actors operate. Where does a territory end? Territory is not exclusive to official political institutions, and so numerous territories can overlap, sometimes in conflict, sometimes complementary, and sometimes without much interaction at all. The same applies even within formal hierarchies of states (e.g., municipality, state, country). A felt territory of a small community might extend to the cities where members commute for work, to the markets where they sell, to other countries where they migrate seasonally or temporarily, but still, they feel belonging to the territory of home. Sloterdjik’s concept of spheres makes sense here—communities form bubbles (in here vs. out there) that then form a mass of foam rather than a coherent globe (Ernste 2018). In practical operational terms, some indigenous territories require security and management at a very big spatial scale. Population density in indigenous lands is frequently extremely low; for instance, 100,000 people in Bolivia supposedly have control over 7.5 million ha, 15,000 in Brazil own 2.3 million ha., and around 60% of the Amazonian lands of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador are indigenous territories (data from van Dam 2011). This presents enormous problems for effective control and spatial governance for forest peoples whose sustainable forest systems had developed at a much smaller scale. The actuality is that indigenous/local forest peoples also have national legal responsibilities over their extensive territories which are increasingly difficult for them to physically control. If the nation-state is generally regarded as the upper limit to the scale of a territory, the lower is less easily defined. There has always been some understanding of the

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territory of households or local groups, (e.g., street gangs or neighbourhood friends) and down to the household scale, and eventually to the scale of personal space at the psychological level (Hall 1966; Sommer 1969) which merges into the concepts of cuerpo. Feminist geography argues that most academic studies of territoriality and of boundaries have been so centred on macro issues of sovereignty and security that they make gender and localised quotidian behaviour appear irrelevant. Therefore, there is the need to disrupt traditional discussion of territory and boundaries to include other scales which demonstrate inclusion and exclusion. A radical alternative introduced by feminist geography to overcome limited understandings of territory is about re-seeing scale—space is lived and understood foundationally primarily from the physicality of humans’ bodily involvement in space. López Hernández and Rosas Chávez (2011) wrote of ‘understanding through subjectivisation’, where the idea of territory transits from the personal body to spatial conflicts in landscapes via human–social physical connectivity with nature. This conceptualisation is an expression of a complex dialectic of nature and society, as being mutually intertwined constructs that cannot be absolutely isolated from one another, but also cannot be collapsed into each other. This greatly expands the range and situatedness of territory and legitimises embodiment and affect. Feminist geography introduced the concept of cuerpo y territorio y tierra (d’Ignazio & Klein 2016; Sweet & Ortiz Escalante 2017); and the feminist collectives, Collectiu Punt (Valdivia Gutiérrez et al. 2017) and Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo (2017) ask: ‘¿Por qué las luchas desde el cuerpo?’.

6 Signification, Representation: Talking About ‘Our Territory’ Territory is about identity, cultural, ethnic, historical, social and personal. People are connected to their places. Territory in this dimension has a profound meaning as the connection to a place. But we reiterate that the territory is a (more or less) bounded piece of the earth that is subject to (territorial) claims by a bounded group of people (nations, tribes, communities, clans). Wolf (1990) drew attention to signification as a crucial aspect of power, and by extension, of territorialisation. This, in turn, calls attention to the vital role played by the representation of territory, so central that it is often regarded as part of territorialisation. Territorialisation utilises the representation of geographical landscapes (perceived, identified, created) to be interwoven with the territories to reinforce cultural, social, spiritual forces. Thus, as argued in Sect. 3.2, the connections between a localised people and their place, their landscape and locality, are not simply about ownership or property. There are intense and deep connections, and operative conceptualisations of space as memory-places and sacred places that are aspects of real physical or symbolic appropriation.

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Subversive or counter-maps present alternative meanings of territory from the various perspectives within the community (Sletto et al. 2020). There is much literature exploring traditional, vis-à-vis modern, representations of territory, usually via the medium of landscape features. This can be well-illustrated with a comprehensive study from Pearce and Louis (2008) from Hawai’i that demonstrates the range of characteristics and conditionalities that can live in the cultural reality of a specific territory—toponyms of course, seasonality, sun position, diurnality or tidal ranges— and thus in the territorialisation. Wartmann (2016) recognises especially language and ethnobotany/ethnoecology as elements of landscape and place in emic territorialisation in the Bolivian Amazon. Beyond the standard idea of cosmovisions as being only indigenous, there are endless representations of place connected with territory in popular modern culture which express relationships between locality and belonging. There are many forms and media for this: modern legal and customary rights, toponyms, legends and heroic stories, art, music, dance, poetry, imagination, mythologies of football and sports history and more (e.g., Kei Miller 2014; Lovell 1998; Sörlin 1999).

6.1 Maps and Mapping—Method There are many methods and presentation media used to explore and try to understand people’s uses of territory, e.g., ethnographic, political research, historiography, participatory mapping. Mapping is a rich language for the signification of territorialisation processes, because territory and space are mutually constitutive, and the standard representation of space is by the use—and misuse—of maps and cartography. This truism has been interrogated by many critical geographers and historians over many years, so there is no need to duplicate those works, e.g., Bryan and Wood (2015), Rundstrom (1995), Sletto et al. (2013). Mapping especially of indigenous territories is an essential tool in the defence of territory, see, e.g., Barroso Hoffman (2010) (indigenous peoples of Brazil); Escobar (2008) and Vélez Torres et al. (2012), (Afro-Colombians); Shinai (2004) (‘Aquí vivimos bien’ Peru); or Sletto et al. (2020) (Latin America). In ‘non-western’ mapping, there are numerous examples of the alternatives utilised for the media, the tools, formats, forms of representation, as well as the content, so different from conventional western maps. For instance, Pearce and Louis (2008) showed Hawaiians expressing the depth of place through performative mapping with proverbs, songs and hula dances and material artefacts including petroglyphs, carvings, lei garlands, kapa bark cloth and tattoos, Hirt (2012) explored representations of Mapuche territory in Chile, and Valiente (2009), the significance of folk music and songs in the identity of cultural territory in Argentina.

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6.2 Critical Cartography in Territory Kwan and others (Kwan 2002, 2007; Elwood & Leszczynski 2018) have argued the limitations of traditional GIS as a (mapping) instrument for the representation of human behaviour in terms of excluding or downplaying spirituality, emotion, ambiguity or intrinsic uncertainty, and for notably ignoring the essence of reflexivity and the realities of power and patriarchy. Kwan (2002) called GIS a masculinist technology, and Schuurman referenced Haraway’s cyborg (Leszczynski 2017) needing to be countered by a critical feminist geography. In mapping, feminist cartographies are developing new alternatives to mainstream cartographic and GIS representations, disrupting traditions of mapping towards critical interventions. Feminist geodata visualisation aims to examine power and empowerment, embrace pluralism, represent uncertainty, the excluded, the hidden missing data, and to consider context—i.e., to reference the material economy behind the data (d’Ignazio & Klein 2016). Approaches in feminist geography highlight the centrality of representation, signification and the recognition of identity, difference and power in territories. Territory and boundaries are used as expressions of enforcing ideas about who and what belongs in particular places and the kinds of activities and practices that belong to a place or are seen as being appropriate. Thus, questions of identity and difference are critical to the ways in which territory and boundaries are constructed. Racialised territories and territorialisation are elemental and essential, in that the majority of situations are indigenous claims for territory, or the struggles of indigenous and marginalised peoples against incursions into their spaces by the state, international capital (large corporations), mega-projects or by outsider settlers who hold explicit or tacit state support.

7 Summing Up The material, representational and epistemological aspects of territories need recognition as mutually constituting aspects rather than as separate categories. Notions of belonging or claims underlying territoriality, for instance, are not understandable if distanced from the material features of the land with which they are associated. Categories such as indigenous, campesino, rural, urban, natural, artificial, spatial and temporal are all imbricated in such relational understandings, but, as the case studies in the book demonstrate, they hold their own accents and emphases linked to the specific (grounded, local) questions being asked and the answers being sought. An essence of territory and territoriality is the focus on control, appropriation, conflict and power, which also provides analytical capacity. Territory embodies claims to ownership and entitlements, referencing the moral imperatives and competing authorities based on the many faces of power: legal/customary, cultural, gendered, political or moral power, or physical force. There are myriad manifestations of how control and appropriation may be sought and accomplished, how conflicts

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may be ignited, and power deployed over territory. There are internal conflicts as well as with external actors. Territory is thus also a clear lens to understand resistance. A territory’s boundaries are not only the limits of its material extent. The boundaries of a territory may be vague or distinct, open or restricted, fixed or fluid, but they always affect the power relations of the territory, the imaginaries built upon it, the practices that shape and change it and the ambitions and desires it inspires. Territorial spaces and places are not restricted to traditionally indigenous or rural community territories—they include spaces that are urban, rural, peri-urban, regional or virtual, and territorial constructs by interstitial entities between states and communities. The practice of territorialisation requires modalities for communicating the spatial elements of territory and their claims. Participatory mapping and spatial visualisations have proven very effective in the service of (indigenous) land claims and community ‘good land management’. The impermanence of territory is clear in the notion of territorialisation. Territories are not unchangeable, they are constructed, assembled, disassembled and rebuilt, they expand and retract, they are appropriated, contested, reclaimed and abandoned. Hence, the significance of re- and de-territorialisation as unfinished and open-ended processes. These processes operate both from tensions within a territory and in response to external forces. They too involve material and symbolic aspects of territories and are thus central as analytic tools to understand our shifting world. The framings themselves of territory are changing over time. However, a constant of territory lies in its transcending the analytical and academic. In Latin America specifically, territorio, is also action. In this sense, territory acts as a bridge linking academic observation and reflection with social and political movement. The special category of territory and the interconnections within the concept have provided an expressive approach to both insightful researches and to social improvement. We hope that the case studies in this book contribute further to these essential tasks.

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Raffestin C (2012) Space, territory, and territoriality. Environ Plan D 30(1):121–141 Rozo JDD (2010) Entre la materialidad y la representación: reflexiones sobre el concepto de paisaje en geografía histórica. Cuad Geogr Rev Colomb Geogr 19:77–86 Ruiz GAQ, Kotilainen J, Salo M (2020) Reterritorialization practices and strategies of campesinos in the urban frontier of Bogotá, Colombia. Land Use Policy 99:31 Rundstrom RA (1995) GIS, indigenous peoples and epistemological diversity. Cartogr GIS 22(1):45–57 Sack RD (1986) Human territoriality: its theory and history. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Salvador Maldonado A (2010) Globalización, territorios y drogas ilícitas en los estados-nación. Experiencias latinoamericanas sobre México. Estud Sociol 28(83):411–442 Sassen S (2013) When territory deborders territoriality. Territ Polit Gov 1(1):21–45 Shinai (2004) Aquí vivimos bien, Kameti notimaigzi aka: territorio y uso de recursos de los pueblos indígenas de la Reserva Kugapakori Nahua. Shinai, Lima Sletto BI (2009) Indigenous people don’t have boundaries: reborderings, fire management, and productions of authenticities in indigenous landscapes. Cult Geogr 16:253–277 Sletto BI, Bryan J, Torrado M, Hale C, Barry D (2013) Territorialidad, mapeo participativo y política sobre los recursos naturales: la experiencia de América Latina. Cuad Geogr Rev Colomb Geogr 22(2):193–209 Sletto BI, Bryan J, Wagner A, Hale C (eds) (2020) Radical cartographies: participatory mapmaking from Latin America. University of Texas Press, Austin TX Sommer R (1969) Personal space. The behavioral basis of design. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Sörlin S (1999) The articulation of territory: landscape and the constitution of regional and national identity. Nor Geogr Tidsskr 53(2–3):103–112 Sweet EL, Ortiz Escalante S (2017) Engaging territorio-cuerpo-tierra through body and community mapping: a methodology for making communities safer. Gend Place Cult 24(4):594–606 Thom B (2014) Reframing indigenous territories: private property, human rights and overlapping claims. Am Indian Cult Res J 38(4):3–28 Toledo VM, Alarcón-Chaires P, Moguel P, Olivo M, Cabrera A, Leyequien E, Rodríguez-Aldabe A (2001) El Atlas Etnoecológico de México y Centroamérica: Fundamentos, métodos y resultados. Etnoecológica 6(8):7–41 Tuan Y-F (1974) Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Tuan Y-F (2001) Space and place: the perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Ulloa A (2010) Geopolíticas del cambio climático. Anthropos Nr.227:133–146 Valdivia Gutiérrez B, Ciocoletto A, Ortiz Escalante S, Casanovas R, Fonseca Salinas M (2017) Entornos habitables. Auditoría de seguridad urbana con perspectiva de género en la vivienda y el entorno. Col·lectiu Punt 6, Barcelona Valiente S (2009) Discursos de identidad territorial según el cancionero folklórico. ACME Int E J Crit Geogr 8(1):46–68 van Dam C (2011) Indigenous territories and REDD in Latin America: opportunity or threat? Forests 2:394–414 Vélez Torres I, Rátiva Gaona S, Varela D (2012) Cartografía social como metodología participativa y colaborativa de investigación en el territorio afrodescendiente de la cuenca alta del río Cauca. Cuad Geogr Rev Colomb Geogr 21(2):59–73 Wartmann F (2016) From space to place in the Bolivian Amazon: exploring and representing folk landscape categories with ethnographic and GIS approaches. Claudia Wartmann Natürlich, Oberengstringen, CH Wastl-Walter D, Staeheli LA (2004) Territory, territoriality, and boundaries. In: Staeheli L, Kofman E, Peake L (eds) Mapping women, making politics: feminist perspectives on political geography. Routledge, London & New York, pp 143–153

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Michael K. McCall Senior researcher, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico. Michael McCall studied at Bristol and Northwestern universities. He worked in ITC (University of Twente) for many years, in the University of Dar es Salaam, and in Sri Lanka. He is a social geographer engaged in Mexico and Latin America and previously in Eastern & Southern Africa. His primary research and teaching experiences are in participatory cartography of rural and urban local spatial knowledge with emphases on participatory spatial planning, territoriality, community initiatives, risks and vulnerability, and environmental management. Brian M. Napoletano Assistant researcher, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico. Brian M. Napoletano studied biogeography at Michigan State University and Purdue University, but has since shifted his focus to the geographical dimensions of the metabolic rift, including alienation and territorial dispossession associated with capitalist urbanisation, conservation, resource extraction and other major land-change processes in the Global South. He has recently become interested in the possibilities of autogestión and successful co-revolutionary mobilisation by the world and environmental proletariat to forge a hegemonic alternative to capital’s alienated mode of social-metabolic control. Andrew Boni Noguez Associate professor, División de Ingenierías, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. Andrew Boni Noguez is a geographer from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His research has mainly focused on the geography of conflicts between communities and extractive industries and other aspects of mining in Mexico, such as mineral extraction in natural protected areas and the social implications of open pit mining. He teaches in the Geography and Geomatic Engineering programs. Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez Ph.D. candidate in Geography, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Morelia, Mexico. Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez is a sociologist with Masters’ degrees in Social Sciences and Agrarian Studies. Her research interests are in territorial conflicts, place-based strategies for territorial development and environmental governance. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography and her current project explores governance scenarios on local knowledge based on territorial relations of care among human and non-humans in the coffee landscapes in Nariño, Colombia.

Village-Scale Territorialities in Eastern Campeche State, Mexico John Kelly

Abstract The eastern half of Campeche State, in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, comprises a mosaic of forest and agriculture. The northern part, Chenes, is dominated by long-settled indigenous Maya, in social property villages (ejidos). Since about 2000, Mexican Mennonites have settled in private property villages there. The southern part, Calakmul, is a forest frontier where nearly all settlement has occurred since 1980, mainly as ejidos but including several private property villages. Sketch mapping and interviews were conducted in 23 villages. From these and other sources, GIS-based maps were developed for all or part of nine villages. The maps depict legal and customary land tenure, state-initiated conservation areas (including forest set-asides for payments for environmental services) and the pattern of forest and agriculture in 2019. Historical and current struggles to assemble territories in these regions are explored. While legal territorial rights were secured in the twentieth century, some communities struggle against the vestiges of ‘fortress conservation’ in Calakmul, while in Chenes the emerging patchwork of Mennonites and Maya engenders mutual accommodations along with struggles. In both regions, the underlying tension between commercial agriculture and traditional land uses contributes to the evolution of territorialities. In many villages, apiculture (bee honey production) is an important locus for this process. Keywords Mexico · Yucatan · Calakmul · Social Property · Mennonites · Payments for Environmental Services · Forest Frontier

1 Introduction In recent decades, preferred frameworks for understanding territory among academic human geographers have evolved roughly in parallel with the priorities and strategies of indigenous and marginalised rural communities. Related to these frameworks, bio-conservation strategies among states and other actors have likewise evolved. A J. Kelly (B) Department of Geography and Earth Science, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. K. McCall et al. (eds.), Territorialising Space in Latin America, The Latin American Studies Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82222-4_3

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key question is how closely territory is linked to land tenure (including de jure, statesanctioned title), and whether the struggles for economic justice, natural resource access and cultural distinctiveness are satisfied when tenure rights are ostensibly secured. Rogerio Haesbaert and Liz Mason-Deese (2020, p.259) note that this tension is fundamental to Latin America, a region whose very name carries a ‘colonial connotation,’ but also ‘subversive of … Eurocentric epistemic approaches and other sociocultural practices.’ One source of variation across Latin America is the scale of territorial expression: the individual (typically associated with de jure private property, and with commercially-focused land practices); the village (long the strongest locus of identity and land titling in Mexico, more than in other Latin American states); and the regional (e.g. an indigenous language community; or, a recently settled forest frontier zone) (Kelly et al. 2010). In an influential article, Karl Offen (2003, p.43) identified the territorial turn: indigenous and other marginalised rural communities were finally gaining title (often as regional-scale communal properties), after long struggles for state recognition of rights over lands hitherto legally regarded as ‘unoccupied national lands.’ In Mexico, this step had largely been achieved decades earlier, as village-scale social properties—ejidos and comunidades agrarias1 —were granted through post-revolutionary land reform, mainly between 1920 and 1940. In Territory: A Short Introduction (2005, p.12), David Delaney challenged scholars to see ‘through’ territory, to ‘reveal what is commonly obscured by focusing too much on sovereignty, jurisdiction, and property.’ A decade later, Latin Americanist social scientists and rural community activists were more directly critical of what Ramzi Tubbeh and Karl Zimmerer (2019, p.49) called the ‘ethnoterritorial fix.’ For an indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon, legal recognition of land rights through titling was a necessary step, but it could not resolve the tension ‘between the need to defend their territories and to enhance their market-based livelihoods’ (2019, p.48). In Limits to Decolonization (2018), Penelope Anthias (quoted in McEwan et al. 2019, p.35) examined the ‘limits of rights and state-led territorial titling processes’ in the Chaco region of Bolivia. Joel Correia (2019, p.16; see also Halvorsen, 2019, p.2) observed that, for the indigenous Ache of Paraguay and Brazil, territory is a ‘dynamic assemblage.’ The Ache struggles and accommodations with the state, with ‘traditional campesinos’ (Correia 2019, p.16), and with expanding commercial soybean farming, are reminiscent of the focus of this chapter: Campeche State, in Mexico. However, the ‘socioterritorial struggles’ (Haesbaert and Mason-Deese 2020, p.263) in Campeche are less obvious, less violent and less acute than in the Ache zone, or the Chaco, or the Amazon zone. In the Calakmul and Chenes regions in eastern Campeche, three key territorialising events have unfolded over longer stretches of time and space: property titling of indigenous communities; settlement of the forest frontier by campesinos (working-class rural residents), both non-indigenous settlers (in Mexico, 1

Ejidos were established for both indigenous and non-indigenous communities, mainly through the seizure of large haciendas (private properties). Comunidades agrarias comprise recognized historic indigenous lands, and usually function much like ejidos (Kelly et al., 2010).

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non-indigenous people are often called mestizo) and displaced indigenous ones; and the influx of non-indigenous, commercially oriented agriculturalists (Mennonites), interspersed among indigenous communities. In 2016 and 2017, to document the presence, origins, legal status and cultural purposes of village-managed forest reserves, I conducted semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and participatory sketch mapping exercises with residents in 23 villages: 16 in Calakmul and 7 in Chenes (including one Mennonite settlement). I found that village-scale forest reserves did exist, mainly in response to Mexican government programs of payments for environmental services (PES), but that there was little common ground between autochthonous (locally generated) and statedriven concepts of protected areas (Kelly 2020). In this chapter, I will use the same data set, and secondary sources, to explore broader historical and current struggles to assemble territories in these regions.

2 The Study Area The human-environmental geography of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula embodies classic core and periphery (see Fig. 1). From north to south, the city of Mérida is surrounded by the continuously settled ecumene of Yucatan State, where Maya is still spoken in dozens of villages. Starting 300 km south of Mérida and continuing another 300 km southward is the Selva Maya, a 200-km-wide tropical moist forest frontier zone bisected by the Mexico-Guatemala border. Its northern part, in southeastern Campeche State, contains the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve; its southern part is the Petén region of Guatemala. This forest frontier was (re)settled only since the late twentieth century, by mainly non-indigenous Mexicans carving new communities out of the forest, including some of the last village-scale social properties (ejidos). The Calakmul region’s ejidos were established during the last years of the agrarian reform program, initiated in the 1920s and covering about 50% of Mexico’s rural land base by the time of its 1993–2006 neoliberal dilution. About halfway along this ecumene-forest frontier gradient is the Chenes region of northeastern Campeche State, where long-settled Maya villages (social property ejidos, like the Calakmul villages) are more widely spaced than their Yucatan State counterparts further north, leaving unclaimed pockets of federal land between many of them—until Mexican Mennonites bought them and established their own private property communities to plant commercial soybeans, sorghum and maize, mostly since 2000.2 Both study areas are karstic, with thinner soils and more rugged topography than in the Yucatan State ecumene further north (Beach et al. 2006: 166). In the Chenes, small, arable dolines (‘flatlands’) tend to be sharply distinguished from the rocky 2

Pacheco et al. (2011) identified five actor groups transforming Latin American tropical forest landscapes: agribusiness farmers, modernizing cattle ranchers, campesino smallholders, colonizing loggers, and resurgent traditional/indigenous agro-extractors. As rather small-scale migrant colonists, yet with high access to global markets and to financial resources, the Chenes Mennonites depart from this template.

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Fig. 1 Location of study areas within the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

‘uplands,’ while in most of Calakmul, uplands and flatlands tend to be less distinct, except for seasonally saturated poljes (bajos). Small, perennial ponds (aguadas) are scattered across both areas.

3 De Jure and De Facto Individual Parcels and Common-Use Areas in Mexico De jure territories are state-sanctioned registered and surveyed properties. If they are private property, their titles and descriptions are stored in a county (municipio) cadastre. If social property, the entire ejido polygon is titled to the original group

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of households granted the land or to their heirs (ejidatarios), and its description is stored in the National Agrarian Registry (Registro Agrario Nacional, or RAN). Despite this legal common ownership, most ejidos internally recognise parcels as de facto belonging to individuals or households. In many ejidos, a significant portion of the villagers are pobladores or avecindados, i.e. those without legal land rights within the ejido system, though they may rent land (Kelly et al. 2010). Since the neoliberal counter-reforms of 1993–2006, in some regions of Mexico many of these former ejidos have been entirely converted to de jure private, individual properties. In other regions, a partial privatisation has occurred: the state-certified individual parcels (and often also the common use areas), but the fundamental title is still held jointly by all ejidatarios. In much of the Yucatan Peninsula, including the study area, most ejidos only had their village perimeters legally surveyed and registered. Internal divisions are only de facto: they are agreed to and recognised within the ejido assembly’s self-government processes, but not registered in the cadastral records, nor in the RAN. Torres-Mazuera (2018, p.163) argues that even this partial participation in neoliberal reform has contributed to a more individualised concept of land. When an ejido is first established—as a new legal description of a long-established territory (in Chenes), or as a new settlement (in Calakmul)—typically a few parcels near the village centre (where nearly all house lots are located in this part of Mexico) are set aside for community purposes (e.g. to support the school). In the Calakmul sample, territory far from the village centre and from any highway was often initially left unallocated to any individual. According to sketch mapping interviews I conducted in 1999, for example, the ejido Ley de Fomento (Fig. 2) contained unallocated strips comprising about 25% of its territory. Later, these lands have often been distributed to the next generation of ejidatarios. In Calakmul ejidos with long-term, intense, creative relationships with conservation NGOs and government agencies, some of these ‘reserves’ have been internally or externally codified as village-scale forest protected areas (AVDCs in the Mexican government’s parlance) (Kelly 2020, p.207). In other ejidos throughout Mexico, internal de facto divisions include sizeable areas that are locally considered as belonging to the ejido as a whole—potentially a significant expression of enduring village-scale territoriality. In parts of Mexico where neoliberal partial privatisation is more common, these are registered as de jure ‘common use areas.’ In this study, de facto common use areas are more typical among the Chenes Maya than among the Calakmul frontier settlements. Permitted activities in these common use areas typically include gathering firewood, hunting, and occasionally swidden (shifting) agriculture. Some are located around sacred sites or water features.

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Fig. 2 One Calakmul ejido (mixed mestizo/displaced indigenous), one private property settlement (displaced indigenous), and part of another ejido

4 Methods On a blank paper, the participants (four to nine individuals) were asked to draw sketch maps of their community, starting with its boundary and toponyms (place names). The aims of the participatory mapping and questionnaires (adapted from Herlihy and Knapp 2003) were to: (1) stimulate collective knowledge of de facto and de jure land tenure parcels, forest set-asides, productive landscapes and state interventions; (2) elicit unanticipated indications of individual or collective cognitive maps of a village territory, and the past or current struggles that shaped it and (3) create an opportunity for new research questions to arise (e.g. concerning renting agricultural parcels to

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Fig. 3 One Calakmul private property settlement (mestizo), plus part of an ejido

Mennonites in some Chenes communities). Typical participants were a comisariado ejidal (ejido leader) or equivalent, and two to five others, usually adult males. To illustrate the varied patterns of overlapping, evolving constructions of territory, and possibly the struggles that were (or are) a part of that assemblage, I combined data from the participatory maps and questionnaires, land tenure records and satellite imagery to prepare maps of all or parts of nine communities (Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6): Each map displays four layers of territorial expression: (1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

3

De jure tenure status of village-scale territories: social property ejidos in purple; and collections of private, individual parcels (plus, sometimes, a few titled common-use properties) in red. Within ejidos, de facto land rights: customary, unofficial areas recognised within the community, but not registered by the state. These comprise individual parcels; common use areas; and in Fig. 5, individual parcels rented to Mennonite farmers. Overlay of state-initiated conservation areas: the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve (divided according to the Mexican system into ‘core,’ ‘intensive use,’ and ‘multiple use’ zones, the latter two categories to include environmentally and economically sustainable human activities); and environmental services (PES) forest set-asides. Landscape patterns (satellite imagery), most prominently showing areas of agriculture and forest in 2019. This data layer is included: (1) as a material expression of key resource-based economic activities and (2) because the forest/non-forest patterns can be one manifestation of cultural distinctiveness, and the struggles to maintain or construct it.3

The neo-Marxist geographer Don Mitchell (2009: 129) focuses on ‘the ways that specific, often local struggles intersect with wider scale processes…to determine the transformation of landscape in a particular locale.’ In Latin America, Bernardo Mançano Fernandes and Cliff Welch (2019) are among those using this landscape-focused approach.

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Fig. 4 One Calakmul ejido (displaced indigenous)

The maps in this chapter show actual community (ejido or private property village) boundaries, but all internal parcels and PES reserve polygons are shown only approximately, to ensure confidentiality and because precise locations were only occasionally identified. These parcel polygons as mapped are broadly representative of each village’s patterns, based on participatory sketch maps and interviews and augmented with government records that lack exact coordinates (e.g. Comisión Nacional Forestal 2010), and by visual interpretation of the c. 2019 ArcGIS remote sensing imagery layer also displayed in the maps. Private parcels in some figures are based on the Campeche State cadastral records (e.g. Secretaria de Finanzas 2020). De facto parcel boundaries are especially sensitive since they are usually not in the public record. In the Calakmul region, additional historical data was drawn from participatory and personal GPS-based field mapping conducted from 1997 to 2002, during the author’s work with the Mexican conservation and rural development NGO Pronatura Península de Yucatán.

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Fig. 5 Two Chenes ejidos (in situ indigenous Maya)

5 Results: Territorial Assemblages and Struggles in Chenes and Calakmul The timing of a settlement’s establishment is a critical factor in the initial struggles for territory and subsequent transformations. In rural Mexico, wider-scale processes in various eras have included state-defined tenure regimes (social and private), and statedriven territorial conservation programs, including biosphere reserves with supposedly uninhabited core zones adjacent to sustainable development zones (most were established circa 1980–1995), and forest set-asides to justify payments for environmental services such as carbon storage (in Spanish, PSA—pagos por servicios ambientales, since 2003). Links to evolving commercial markets for land-based products are mediated through local, national and global consumer demands. These are filtered through state subsidies, the multinational accords that constrict these, and

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Fig. 6 One Chenes private property settlement (Mennonite)

village- and individual-scale access to capital and support services. Guided by these processes, each village collective (and each individual) adds unpredictable, creative practices, and decisions. I will consider five generalised processes that overlap in space and time. For each, I will briefly place the study area in context, and then observe how territorial struggles manifest in the maps of sample communities.

5.1 First Process: Village-Scale State Titling of Chenes Maya Territories Indigenous Maya have occupied the Chenes region for millennia. Since at least the early Colonial period, they have played a semi-peripheral role in the ecumene of what is now western Yucatan State. Between 1923 and 1940, the Mexican government issued village-scale titles to Chenes Maya communities (Cantún Caamal and Pat Fernández 2012, p.10). Besides scattered private holdings, lands left over after the formation of ejidos remained federal property. The struggle for state-recognised titling—the territorial ‘fix’—was essentially accomplished. Was it a victory? Not entirely: the Maya lost (or were not given) a chance to claim the spaces between their villages, nor to assert legal title over territories larger than ejidos. Scholars have long debated the inevitability of the ‘village’ as the primary scale of territorial identity in Mexico (Restall and Gabbert 2017). Does the postRevolutionary ejido (and its colonial and nineteenth-century antecedents) represent a continuation of autochthonous territorial practices; or, is it a state-imposed system to dilute indigenous (or campesino) identity and power, and to channel conflicts towards squabbles between villages (see Hodgson 2002 on the Tanzanian state’s

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1980s imposition of village-scale territories among the Maasai)? Many of Mexico’s indigenous language areas form coherent regions. During the colonial and national eras, some of these (and other regions) evolved into cognitive territories sometimes called patrias chicas (Warman 1988; Urquijo 2008, p.21; Kelly et al. 2010, p.173), but with indistinct boundaries and little sense of organised control. The local village as the fundamental unit of allegiance and administration has at least some pre-Hispanic roots in Mexico (Mundy 1996, p.214). For Campeche State during the contact/early colonial period, this is documented in the Calkini Codex, a series of manuscripts written between 1579 and 1821 (Cantún Caamal and Pat Fernández 2012, p.111). During the twentieth-century ejido titling process, Chenes Maya villagers’ potential claims to lands between the villages faced additional obstacles. Yucatan Maya considered inter-village forests as ‘open to anyone,’ typically for swidden agriculture (Torres-Mazuera 2018, p.157), thus these temporary usufruct rights blurred the perimeters of many village-scale claims. The last regional-scale autonomous territories on the peninsula had been extinguished during the Caste Wars (in Chenes, c. 1847–1855), and geographic disruptions during the same conflict made it difficult for some villagers to document their full territories to the state authorities (TorresMazuer 2018, p.154). Also, the state cited Chenes villages’ small populations as a reason to title small territories (Cantún Caamal and Pat Fernández 2012, p.111). Katab and Xcalot Akal (Fig. 5) are in situ Chenes Maya ejidos; adjacent federal land was sold to Mennonites c. 2000 as individual, private parcels (Fig. 6). De facto (internal) tenure patterns in these indigenous ejidos vary. Nearly all Katab is individual parcels; each parcel includes both arable flatland and upland. In Xcalot Akal, most upland is considered ‘common use’; flatland is divided into individual parcels, smaller than those in Katab. The maps illustrate how the struggle for state sanction of territory was essentially won in the 1920s and 1930s—but at the cost of extinguishing any vestiges of region-scale territoriality, including for legal claims over lands between ejidos. De facto (non-state-sanctioned) territorial practices vary between two otherwise similar villages, demonstrating the persistence of villagescale assemblages in Chenes.

5.2 Second Process: Settlement and Titling of the Calakmul Forest Frontier The Calakmul region was part of the Classic Maya (c. 200 BC–900 AD) core of urban and agricultural polities, but during most of the twentieth century, it was mainly nearly uninhabited forest. Apart from a few private holdings, it remained federal or state land, plus (from about 1930 to 2000) ‘forest extensions’ (ampliaciones forestales) titled to several distant Chenes ejidos, originally for tapping Manilkale spp. trees for chicle (chewing gum) (Cantún Caamal and Pat Fernández 2012, p.121),

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though without continuous settlement.4 From about 1975 to 1995, the Mexican state issued village-scale titles during (or just before) the initial settlement of campesinos from the Mexican states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Veracruz and elsewhere. The core of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve included leftover federal land and few settlements (including Bel Ha, in Fig. 3). Almost half of these late twentieth-century Calakmul villages are partly or entirely inhabited by displaced indigenous people—indigenous by self-identification and/or language. Most are Ch’ol Maya from the state of Chiapas, who fled intercommunity conflicts, violence between anti-government Zapatista and pro-government groups, and the 1982 eruption of the Chichón volcano (Haenn 2005, p.72). Ley de Fomento Agropecuario, Santo Domingo (Fig. 2) and Chichonal (Fig. 4) are mainly Ch’ol. Bel Ha (Fig. 3) is mestizo (non-indigenous). Two of the mapped villages comprise legally private, individual parcels: Santo Domingo (Fig. 2), where a group of the displaced Ch’oles carved out an agricultural settlement only 20 km north of the Guatemala border; and Bel Ha (Fig. 3), where 200– 300-ha private lots were distributed in contradiction to the subsequent establishment of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in 1989. Ley de Fomento (Fig. 2) and Chichonal (Fig. 4) are typical forest frontier ejidos. Their assemblies divided their polygons into de facto individual parcels (plus a few de facto common use areas). Most parcels were partly cleared for agriculture. Since 2000, permanent and mechanised farming has become more common, though swidden extensive farming is still practiced (see the analysis of this process in Calakmul in Dobler-Morales et al. 2020). This shift is visible as concentrations of cleared areas for mechanised agriculture are closer to the village or a highway. In Ley de Fomento, initially unassigned parcels (locally called a reserva) now belong to individual ejidatarios. Here as in Chichonal, some distant parcels are no longer farmed, reflecting a shift toward apiculture (honey production). Santo Domingo’s pattern of de jure (legally private) parcels (and a small common use area) is comparable, but here most parcels are entirely cleared for agriculture. Since the merely legal territorial ‘fix’ was achieved through settlement-era titling—part of their ‘continuous experience of the Mexican state’ (Haenn 2005, p.79)—Calakmul’s pioneers have struggled to assemble territory in other ways. An ongoing issue is how best to intersect with state-driven conservation initiatives (see Sect. 5.4, below), but only in Bel Ha is this an acute struggle. Calakmul’s ejidos participated in the nationally uneven resistance to the 1990s dilution of social property, but not due to anti-neoliberal communitarianism. On the contrary, the state insisted that forested land could not be converted to de jure individual parcels; Calakmul’s ejidatarios chose to avoid certifying parcels altogether, rather than allow the forest to be legally titled for common use (Haenn 2005, p.103).

4

In 1998, I accompanied the Calakmul Reserve director and representatives of Chenes ejidos in an exploratory trek of their distant ampliaciones forestales, which they had generally neglected since chicle declined around the 1960s. Other ampliaciones were revived in the 1970s and 1980s as the nuclei for new ejidos (Haenn 2005: 56).

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More subtly but significantly, territorial assemblage in Calakmul can be considered as a multifaceted effort to forge a new regional landscape mosaic of agriculture and forest into a culturally, economically and politically productive environment (see Sect. 5, below). Evolving spatial practices within communities over the past 25 to 40 years (e.g. the concentration of agriculture) parallel the larger struggles to create a coherent regional identity and purpose, in an economically and climatically marginal environment. Challenges to the region’s coherence include a dynamic population (frequent in- and out-migration) and divisions between displaced indigenous and mestizos. These divisions were noted by Haenn (2005, p.81), but are not reflected in this chapter’s maps, which display variation in Calakmul independent of ethnic identity. As in ejidos throughout Mexico, another struggle for territorial assemblage (though not reflected in these maps) that merits deeper study is the tension between ejidatarios and non-landowning residents, avecindados.

5.3 Third Process: Settlement of Chenes Mennonites Bilingual (Plautdietsch (Low German)/Spanish) Mennonites in the state of Chihuahua resettled in northeastern Campeche State (and in Belize and some back to Canada), mainly to flee narco-trafficking violence. About five small Mennonite settlements were established in Chenes between 1985 and 2000, with an additional 15, mainly larger villages founded since. Colonia Santa Rosa (Figs. 5 and 6) was settled in 2000 on state-owned land ‘in between’ the ejidos (see Sect. 5.1, above). Additional federal and private parcels were purchased later, nearly doubling the territory. For these Mennonites, as much as for the Calakmul settlers in the 1980s (Haenn 2005, p.76), the initial struggle was to escape insecurity, acquire land and carve out productive communities in a new physical environment—but, in this case, as scattered ‘mini-forest frontiers’ across a long-settled culture region.5 Mennonite and indigenous communities struggle to maintain their distinct cultures, while accommodating each other’s contributions to the evolving regional mosaic of landscapes and de facto tenure practices. Recent studies stress how Mennonite deforestation, agrochemical use and transgenic soybeans (the latter banned in 2012) (Echanov 2016, p.55) contribute to a decline in Maya land-based production, especially apiculture (Ellis et al. 2017; Gómez-González 2016). An aguada (Fig. 5) just outside of Xcalot ejido was used by that village’s residents as a water source until a Mennonite farmer purchased the parcel and filled it in. In the longer term, however, the two communities are sharing a struggle to forge a regional territorial assemblage (see Sect. 5.5, below).

5

Are these Mennonites practicing settler colonialism? They are changing the demographic makeup of the Chenes region, but with little or no “logic of elimination”; and arguably they are further from mainstream Mexican cultures. Settler colonialism, like territory, is a process and a structure, not a single program or event (Wolfe 2006).

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Colonia Santa Rosa is a collection of private 100–500-ha parcels and a semidispersed village centre, where productive house lots (e.g. to produce tomatoes) are larger than a typical Maya or mestizo solar (yard). Though not legally a social property, many decisions are made collectively among all landowners (Bravo Peña et al. 2015). Like in Santo Domingo and Bel Ha in Calakmul, territoriality tends to be practiced partly at the village scale. The mosaic pattern of agriculture and forest resembles that in neighbouring Maya ejidos (Fig. 5), but contrasts with the two-thirds of Chenes Mennonite settlements—e.g. Nuevo Durango, 30 km to the southeast— where forest cover loss has been more extensive (Ellis et al. 2017, p.475). The primary control in each case is the distribution of uplands and flatlands; Nuevo Durango’s flatland is a large polje, not a small doline.

5.4 Fourth Process: Conservation-Based, State-Driven Territorial Overlays in Both Study Areas State-driven conservation territorialities in the study areas comprise two phases6 (Thaler 2017, p.1427). First, from about 1985 to 2005, protected areas were established throughout Latin America, many of them intended to enhance state control over land use while affording local stakeholders (especially indigenous peoples) a role in territorial management (Kelly et al. 2017, p.6). Through the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve (CBR), the Mexican federal government introduced a blend of sporadically enforced ‘fortress conservation’ (White et al. 2016, p.178) and ‘sustainable development’ programs (embraced by some ejido settlers, and promoted by NGOs). Second, in the 2010s, payments for environmental services (PES) came to dominate the discourse and practice. Using the ‘reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation’ (REDD+) international guidelines, the Mexican government identified Chenes and Calakmul as top priorities for conserving carbon storage (Alix-García et al. 2018, p.7017). Calakmul’s ejidos intersect the state’s protected area territoriality in ways ranging from neglect or disappointment, through selective engagement, and, in a few cases, outright struggle. There is no concordance between the CBR zones (core, intensive use or multiple use) and the de facto and de jure tenure polygons (parcel and ejido perimeters) (Figs. 2 and 4). (Ley de Fomento and Chichonal were founded before the CBR, and Dos Naciones, an ejido partly visible in Fig. 2, after it.) Land use patterns appear to acknowledge the CBR’s location somewhat—e.g. in Chichonal (Fig. 4), most of the CBR multiple use zone is forested, but the distance from the village 6

While the literature on Chenes has emphasized forest cover loss (e.g. Ellis et al. 2017), the postNAFTA shift toward mechanized, commercial farming (e.g. Mennonite soy farms) could arguably be construed as indirectly promoting forest conservation through a third process: “land sparing,” the spatial concentration of economic value and rapid rural-to-urban migration (Elden, 2010; Oliveira and Hecht 2016: 269). In Calakmul, much initially cleared land was abandoned and returned to forest (Abel Vaca et al. 2012: 7), approximately balancing the modest expansion of cattle ranching there (Rodríguez-Solorzano 2014).

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centre is a stronger factor. Only in Bel Ha (Fig. 3), entirely within the CBR core zone, there is an ongoing struggle to carve out economically sustainable territory against the state’s ‘fortress conservation’ restrictions.7 Bel Ha’s private parcels are mainly still forest. Residents implored me to help spread the message that, while they recognise their role as caretakers of an important ecosystem, they feel unfairly constrained by the government’s restrictions on their land uses, which have not been balanced by significant assistance toward alternative economic activities. The Mexican federal government’s PES environmental services system was launched in 2003 to ‘offer annual payments of 20 to 80 dollars per hectare over 5-year periods to private and communal landowners, [who] must maintain existing forest or natural land cover and engage in land management activities such as building fences, controlling pests, or patrolling for illegal activity’ (Alix-García et al. 2018, p.7016). In most cases the beneficiary must submit ‘a map of the area to be included’ (Cortina and Porras 2018, p.4). These modest payments rarely engendered significant land use changes or decisions in this study’s ejidos, apart from some occasional disagreements.8 In Calakmul (Fig. 2) and Chenes (Fig. 5), ejidos typically declared about half their current forest area for PES. In Ley de Fomento (Fig. 2), Dos Lagunas del Norte (Fig. 3) and Katab (Fig. 5), many de facto individual parcels are partly or entirely within the PES forest set-aside; their owners do not farm them, but many own other parcels they have cleared for farming. In Xcalot Akal, the PES set-aside comprises most of the de facto common use area. Bel Ha also participates in the PES program (for de jure private landowners), but the other two private communities, Santo Domingo and the Chenes Mennonite village of Santa Rosa, chose to not participate.9 Santa Rosa (Fig. 6) has enough forest land to take part in the program, but its soybean and sorghum farmers told me the small payments were not worth restricting potential land uses of their upland parcels. Though their displaced indigenous ethnic identity and their peripheral forest frontier location differ from Santa Rosa’s Mennonites, Santo Domingo’s residents expressed a similar preference to avoid state-sanctioned land use restrictions. In sum, state conservation initiatives have not greatly impacted territorial assemblages in Chenes or Calakmul. Village-scale territorialities have endured. ‘Calakmul’s uniqueness arises from ejidal autonomy in natural resource management’ (Haenn 2005, p.1818). Here, and in Chenes, some ‘community management decisions effectively lead to conservation, even if this is not the main objective’ (Berkes 2009, p.19; Kelly 2020). 7

The confusion over land ownership in Mexico’s federally protected areas is rooted in shifting decrees during the 1930s Cardenista era of social property distribution. Parks, like ejidos, ‘embedded local property within the federal structure’ (Wakild 2011: 42). 8 ‘Evidence from carbon forestry projects operating on common property has shown that project developers ignore community politics and do not pay attention to the exclusion of particular social groups from carbon payments, such as women, landless people, and other vulnerable groups of the rural poor’ (Corbera et al. 2011: 331). 9 In Ecuador, private landowners wanted to engage in PES, but could not (Schloegel 2012: 95). PES may work better when commercial and traditional farming stakeholders participate (Wang et al. 2019).

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5.5 Fifth Process: Engagements with Commercial Markets in Both Study Areas, and Intercultural Territorialities in Chenes In twenty-first-century Latin America, ‘territorio’ encompasses the multi-scale connections between the rural and the urban, and amongst local spaces and often distant markets (Sandoval 2017, p.52). Territorial assemblages do not disappear; rather, they are increasingly embedded in political and economic networks (Haesbaert 2013). In rural Mexico, post-NAFTA trade liberalisation, especially of maize (corn), has been a key driver. In Calakmul during the 1990s, dependence on compensatory state aid increased, and subsistence poverty shifted toward market-dependent (e.g. chili pepper) poverty (Haenn 2005, p.125). ‘Campesino movements in Mexico were fighting not to have to move, to emigrate, if they could avoid it’ (Patel 2007, p.60); in 2001, the suicide rate in Campeche jumped (Patel 2007, p.50). By the early 2000s tariffs had ended, and Mexico had become a net importer of maize, sorghum and soybeans, mainly to feed livestock (Salin 2010). In 2008, the state began subsidising the establishment of soybean farming throughout northeast Campeche (Echanov 2016, p.53). By 2015, Mennonites produced 90% of the state’s soybeans (Echanove 2016, p.56). In both regions, a territorial challenge is to (re)assemble a mosaic of agricultural and forest landscapes that sustain culturally and economically productive environments. In Chenes, that struggle is most visible as indigenous Maya and newly settled Mennonites accommodate each other. In most Maya ejidos, conversion to mechanised, partly commercial agriculture was underway before the Mennonites came, but now it is more pronounced. While forest cover loss and threats to apiculture are serious issues, a hybrid territorial assemblage is emerging that accentuates the interdependence and common future of both Chenes communities. Maya villagers are employed as labourers on Mennonite farms (and on the modern chicken factory farm in Fig. 6). In many Maya ejidos, some agricultural parcels (or parts of them) are rented to Mennonite commercial farmers (Fig. 5). (Note that these maps display a representative pattern, not specific locations of actual rentals). In Campeche, Maya in low-population-density villages have rented land to other Maya since at least the early twentieth century (Cantún Caamal and Pat Fernández 2012, p.124). In some ejidos that lack machinery, over 80% of cultivated land is now rented to Mennonites for soybeans (Echanove 2016, p.60). The land use pattern in Mennonite Santa Rosa resembles that in the neighbouring Maya ejidos, and some Mennonites have been learning the Maya language (Spiric and Ramírez 2018). These rentals help forge territorial assemblages among clusters of proximate Maya ejidos and Mennonite villages. The land use patterns in Calakmul’s ejidos (Figs. 2 and 4) also show an increase in mechanised, more commercial agriculture, but here the less sharply delineated geomorphology, lower population density and persistence of swidden farming favour ‘distance from village or highway’ as the controlling factor for a tighter clustering

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of cleared areas. Santo Domingo’s residents (Fig. 2) practice nearly the same mix of commercial agriculture (here, chili peppers) and subsistence as their neighbours in Ley de Fomento, despite their private tenure regime and lower degree of mechanisation. Inter-village cooperation and seasonal labour sharing are common in Calakmul. A region-scale territorial assemblage has fitfully evolved, notably since the 1996 establishment of a county-level (municipio) government. Here, and in Chenes, the Mexican cultural focus on mestizaje downplays distinctions between indigenous peoples (displaced or in situ) and (other) settlers (Gentry 2019, p.69). ‘Campesino’ is a sort of unifying Calakmul identity (Haenn 2005, p.114). Village-scale territories are still where decisions are made to a remarkable degree– in Calakmul’s forty-year-old communities as well as in Chenes’ thousand-year-old and ten-year-old ones. It is the primary scale at which access for human activities— the contested balance between security (a closed boundary) and opportunity (an open boundary)—is most firmly regulated (Gottmann 1973, p.14). These practices are challenged by inter-village land rentals, migration to cities and to the USA, and by the individualising pressures of the market. The Mennonite settlers of Chenes engender concerns about natural resource commodification, but their village-scale struggles have much in common with the Maya and the Calakmul frontier campesinos. Indeed, the history of Mennonite territorial struggles, adaptations and cultural survival is astonishing. Before settling in Chihuahua in the 1920s, the Mennonite group in Campeche had lived in Canada, having moved there from Russia in the 1870s. Viewed diachronically, their territorial assemblage has been called not transnational, but rather trans-statal (Cañás Bottos 2008).

6 Concluding Remarks For the Chenes Maya indigenous communities and Calakmul frontier settlers, a mere ‘territorial fix’ was essentially achieved (though with compromises) during Mexico’s era of social property titling (c. 1925–1995). In the twenty-first century, settlers buy private properties, but some—e.g. Chenes Mennonites—also have some village-scale practices in common with their new neighbours.10 The villages sampled for display in this chapter’s maps are remarkably varied. They include surprising territorialities, e.g. Santo Domingo, a displaced-indigenous, private property forest frontier village partly in a biosphere reserve, almost entirely cleared for agriculture. In Calakmul, the primary territorial struggle has been to establish a village-scale and regional identity in an economically and environmentally marginal frontier with a high degree of in- and out-migration. For a few villages such as Bel Ha, the struggle has been against the lingering vestiges of late twentieth century ‘fortress conservation.’ Despite their dissimilar cultures, the Chenes Maya and Mennonites are both 10

Shawn Miller (2007: 69) observed that many indigenous tenure practices (e.g. forest commons) were more like certain European ones than is generally acknowledged–one reason for their persistence in parts of the (post)-colonial Americas.

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grappling with climate change and with rural-to-urban migration and the attendant loss of land-based cultural practices. They share a cultural space at the margins of the Mexican nation, yet are enmeshed in national and global economies. In both Chenes and Calakmul, apiculture proved to be a key activity at the nexus of the environment, cultural identity and economic survival for indigenous and mestizo communities. In Chichonal (Fig. 4) and other Calakmul ejidos, initial farming and ranching attempts have been abandoned in favour of managing dispersed beehives along forest paths. In Chenes, some Maya villagers blame Mennonite pesticides and herbicide use for declines in honey production. In rural Campeche State, Mexico, ‘territory’ is an assemblage of productive landscapes and cultural resources, evolving as its custodians interact with each other, the markets, and the state (including the state’s perhaps competing programmes to promote and commodify both forests and commercial farming). ‘Territory’ implicates social power, within a bounded space (Delaney 2005, p.17). If we pull back the lens to include the entire state of Campeche and its role within the Mexican economy, the relatively placid struggles among Chenes and Calakmul’s villagers are overshadowed by deeper inequalities. Campeche overall enjoys a high GDP (in some years, the highest in Mexico), mainly generated by its offshore oil production (The Economist 2018, p.1). Its inequality (e.g. as measured by the GINI coefficient) often is also the highest in the country (Courchene 2000, p.131). The efforts to assemble and maintain culturally, economically and environmentally sustainable village- and regional-scale territories must be appreciated against this backdrop of non-renewable resource extraction and its consequent imbalances.

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John Kelly Associate professor, Department of Geography and Earth Science, University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. After degrees in Geography (University of Chicago) and Landscape Architecture (University of California), John Kelly worked with conservation and rural development organizations in Mexico from 1997 to 2003 in Yucatán and Oaxaca. From 2005 to 2013, during doctoral studies at the University of Kansas, he collaborated with indigenous communities, students and agencies in Mexico and Honduras, to document land uses and fortify territorial rights, including the management of water sources. In Wisconsin he teaches human geography and GIS courses. He is an active board member of the Mississippi Valley Conservancy and collaborates in geography research with US and Mexican students.

Between Subsidies and Parks: The Impact of Agrarian and Conservation Policy on Smallholder Territories of Calakmul, Mexico Carlos Dobler-Morales

Abstract Abundant carbon stocks and high biodiversity levels make Calakmul’s forests, in southeastern Mexico, a valuable environmental resource. These forests also constitute the territory of a number of smallholder communities largely characterized by high poverty levels and a persistent dependence on swidden agriculture. Promoting economic development in the region while preserving its ecological integrity has been an historical challenge, which has increasingly captured the attention of the Mexican government in recent decades. In this chapter, I review how state intervention in the form of farm subsidies and land-use restrictions has evolved in Calakmul and how it affects the organization of the region’s territories. I argue that state-driven territorial processes in Calakmul cannot be interpreted as the result of an explicit conflict over space or land as often happens in other southern contexts. They are instead the product of a more subtle exercise of state power deployed through a blend of coercion and penalization aimed at aligning the attitudes of community residents with development and conservation goals. Crucially, this policy mix is not by design, as agrarian and conservation state instruments behind it continue to be implemented largely independently in the region. Nonetheless, their effects still display high complementarity, with significant implications for both Calakmul’s society and its environment. Keywords Swidden · PROAGRO · Payment for Ecosystem Services · Biosphere Reserve · Land-Sparing · Landscape Multi-Functionality

1 Introduction In the remote southeast corner of Mexico sits Calakmul, an area primarily known for its vast forest resources. Indeed, the region is said to hold the largest unbroken expanse of tropical forest in the country (Acopa & Boege 1998). Despite being frequently imagined as uninhabited, this forest actually constitutes the territory of C. Dobler-Morales (B) Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. K. McCall et al. (eds.), Territorialising Space in Latin America, The Latin American Studies Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82222-4_4

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a number of rural communities that arrived in the region in the 1960s, drawn by promises of land distribution by the government (Haenn 2002; Klepeis & Turner 2001). Ensuing decades would witness the materialization of these promises through the establishment of several ejidos—agrarian communities with a constitutionally underwritten tenurial system in which land is held collectively. Since its modern colonization, Calakmul’s development has been rather slow. Its persistent isolation together with its challenging environment in the form of poor soils and water scarcity continue to entrench most ejidos in conditions of economic marginalization, with local livelihood options largely limited to swidden—or slashand-burn—agriculture (Schmook et al. 2013). The coexistence of an abundant forest and a population dependent on what is often seen as a destructive land-use has made Calakmul a constant target of an apparently conflicting mix of external interventions—some focusing on the preservation of the region’s valuable ecology and others on pursuing higher levels of socio-economic development (Haenn 2005). Among the panoply of actors involved in this dual agenda, the state has gained considerable prominence in recent decades. Through a complex array of both agrarian and conservation instruments, its influence has increasingly interfered with the local institutional environment that governs ejido resources and the livelihood opportunities that can be derived from them in Calakmul. In this chapter, I review how such state intervention has evolved over the last decades and how it affects ejido land management. Drawing on Alcorn and Toledo (1998), I treat the ejido as the main interface between the state and local residents (smallholders), and thus, as an important locus of territorial processes. I frame these processes not as the explicit conflict over space or land that frequently characterize territorial tensions between ejidos and external forces in Mexico (e.g., Garibay et al. 2011; Rocheleau 2015), but rather as a more subtle exercise of power—one in which the aim is to align the attitudes of ejido residents with those of the state through a blend of coercion and restrictions. Crucially, the policy mix behind this blend is not by design, as the majority of agrarian and conservation state instruments in the region continue to be implemented independently. As I will show, nonetheless, their effects still display high complementarity, with significant implications for both Calakmul’s society and its environment.

2 Calakmul: Regional Context Calakmul is a municipality located in the southern Yucatán peninsula, on the Mexican side of the border with Guatemala (Fig. 1). The region was once the heartland of an important Lowland Maya civilization, but after its collapse circa CE 1000, the area remained virtually abandoned for almost a millennium, a condition that allowed significant forest regrowth and expansion (Klepeis & Turner 2001). Modern occupation of Calakmul commenced in the early twentieth century. Between the 1900s and 1930s, a first but modest wave of immigrants arrived to work in the commercial exploitation of chicle gum and logging of hardwood species,

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Fig. 1 The study area, highlighting the four ejidos studied: (1) Nueva Vida; (2) Nuevo Becal; (3) La Guadalupe; and (4) Narciso Mendoza

activities that were in the hands of large private concessions (Klepeis 2004). Eventually, workers for these industries gained access to land to farm, establishing the first ejidos of the region in the 1950s (Acopa & Boege 1998; Haenn 2002). The 1960s and 1970s witnessed far larger in-migration. Regarded back then as an empty quarter that could relieve a scarcity of land among smallholders from other states, Calakmul was opened to occupation by the federal government, which granted large tracts of land as ejidos (Haenn 2002; Klepeis & Turner 2001). Population in the region grew rapidly, and by the end of the 1980s, Calakmul had close to 60 ejidos.

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Notably, by the time this larger wave of immigration took place, the chicle market had collapsed and valuable timber species were close to depletion. Livelihood options for newcomers were thus essentially limited to subsistence agriculture (Acopa & Boege 1998). The conditions for farming in Calakmul, however, are quite challenging. Soils are shallow, sitting atop a karstic substrate (García Gil et al. 2002). Water is a chronic concern because rainfall—distinctly seasonal and highly variable—drains quickly through the porous limestone, leaving few natural surface water reservoirs (Foster & Turner 2004). High rates of evapotranspiration further exacerbate the scarcity of water in the region (Lawrence 2005). Under these environmental constraints, swidden cultivation of maize became the predominant form of agriculture due to its adaptability and low input requirements (Klepeis et al. 2004; Schmook et al. 2013). Swidden continues to be an important activity today in Calakmul, although the typical household economy has experienced some diversification (Radel et al. 2010). The cultivation of jalapeño chilli as a cash crop and the production of bee honey are responses to the increasing penetration of broader, although still thin and volatile markets for these commodities (Acopa & Boege 1998; Keys 2004). Rearing of livestock remains relatively rare, serving as a savings mechanism for those who participate in it in the absence of banks (Busch & Geoghegan 2010). Community-based forestry for timber persists as a legacy of former logging activities, although it is at a smaller scale and is restricted to the ejidos with the largest land endowments (Acopa & Boege 1998). Paid farm work is common, with peak demand in the months when fields need to be prepared and chilli harvested. A notable increase of labour out-migration has been reported, most of it looking for opportunities in the tourism corridor of the Caribbean coast and in the US (Carte et al. 2010; Schmook & Radel 2008). Notwithstanding this diversification of livelihoods and the growing connection of the region to the outside via incipient market exchange and labour flows, Calakmul preserves many aspects of its frontier past. The region remains relatively isolated. Population has grown slowly (16% in 10 years), and its density is low (only 1.9 people/km2 ), while poverty continues to be prevalent (86% of the municipality) (Araujo Monroy 2014).

3 The Architecture of State Institutions in Calakmul As with many other forest frontiers across the tropics, Calakmul remained largely invisible to the state for much of its early expansion. It was only in 1989 that the state intervened seriously for the first time through the establishment of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. The Reserve represented a response to the alarming deforestation rates associated with the settlement of the region and the attendant expansion of swidden agriculture (Acopa & Boege 1998; Roy Chowdhury & Turner 2006). Loss of forest cover was occurring at 2% per year at the time (Bray & Klepeis 2005;

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Turner et al. 2001), a figure that led the region to be designated as a global hotspot of deforestation (Achard et al. 1998). The Reserve introduced a significant territorial disruption in Calakmul as part of its area fell within lands already claimed by smallholders. The core zone of the Reserve, where farming is prohibited, overlapped with 21 ejidos (Bray & Klepeis 2005). In the face of a potential violent backlash by smallholders, the Reserve had to negotiate the terms of conservation in the area with an existing inter-ejido union (Haenn 2005; Klepeis & Roy Chowdhury 2004). Negotiations took the form of an ambitious conservation-development agenda based on a variety of programmes to, on one hand, promote the diversification of the overwhelmingly swidden-based livelihoods, and on the other, convince smallholders to set aside some ejido forest areas for voluntary conservation (Acopa & Boege 1998; Roy Chowdhury & Turner 2006). The late 1980s also witnessed the beginning of the general neoliberal turn in Mexican socio-economic policy. The state halted the process of land distribution across the country and, as a consequence of trade liberalization, maize prices plummeted (Appendini 2014; Cornelius & Myhre 1998; Gates 1996). Amid increasing economic challenges, the alliance between the Reserve and the ejido union struggled to deliver on development objectives, compromising its conservation-development agenda. In 1996, Calakmul became a municipality and replaced the alliance as the dominant governance structure in the region (Haenn 2005). Better connected with higher governmental bureaucracy, the creation of the municipality marked the start of an intensifying trend of state intervention in the area. As part of national-level efforts to help smallholders be more competitive in an opening market economy, from the beginning of the 1990s, farmers in Calakmul began to receive a number of subsidies from the Secretariat of Agriculture to—among other goals—‘modernize’ their agriculture (Klepeis & Vance 2003; Schmook & Vance 2009). Until recently, the main subsidies in the region came from programmes such as PROAGRO, formerly PROCAMPO (Spanish acronym for Program of Direct Supports for the Countryside), PIMAF (Program of Incentives for Producers of Maize and Beans) and PESA (Strategic Project for Food Security). The programme PROAGRO disburses an annual payment to smallholders proportional to the area farmed at a fixed location and extent, and conditioned on the continuous cultivation of the exact same field registered. PIMAF provides free agrochemicals and hybrid cultivar seeds to participating farmers. PESA provides free supplies of various inputs to improve household food security, including mechanized tillage. The municipal government has also played a part in these efforts towards agricultural modernization through its programme PRTP (Program for the Rehabilitation of Productive Lands), which is also focused on subsidizing mechanized tillage. On the other hand, the Secretariat of the Environment—by then already in charge of the management of Calakmul’s Biosphere Reserve—further expanded conservation efforts in the region with the introduction of a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programme in the early 2000s and the stricter enforcement of the 2005 Federal Forest Code (Porter-Bolland et al. 2015; Román-Dañobeytia et al. 2014).

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PES compensates smallholders through annual cash transfers for voluntarily maintaining forest patches within their ejidos. Meanwhile, the Forest Code bans cutting down any forest stand considered to be old-growth, even if it is located outside a protected zone (i.e. in the Reserve’s core area or a PES polygon).

4 On the Ground: The Influence of State Institutions on Household-Level Land-Use Patterns During Calakmul’s colonization and for some decades after, swidden agriculture in Calakmul was practiced in a ‘paleotechnic’ (Turner & Brush 1987) fashion. The typical practice entailed slashing and burning forest followed by the cultivation of maize, usually intercropped with squash and beans in a cropping system known here—as elsewhere in Mesoamerica—as milpa. Seeds were sown with a digging stick directly in the ashes, without tilling or any other land preparation. After a cultivation period of 1–3 years, land would be fallowed between 9 and 24 years before returning the field to cultivation (Klepeis et al. 2004). Secondary vegetation regenerates rapidly in these fallows largely due to the exceptional capacity of local species to sprout from stumps and roots left in the field (Negreros-Castillo & Hall 2000; Read & Lawrence 2003). Low input requirements and its capacity to thrive in the challenging environment of Calakmul established milpa cultivation as the most important livelihood option in the region (Schmook et al. 2013). Over time, milpa in Calakmul became more intensive. Although studies suggest cultivation periods remained relatively short (1–3 years), fallow periods shortened to 10 years or less (Abizaid & Coomes 2004; Schmook 2010). The incorporation of jalapeño chilli in the 1980s played a major role in changing local agriculture as the crop demands much higher amounts of labour and external inputs than maize (Klepeis et al. 2004). By the 1990s, chilli was the most important land-use in the region after maize in terms of producers and total cultivated area (Keys 2004). The use of agrochemicals increased substantially during that period, with up to 70% of farmers applying them to their chilli crops, but mechanical tillage remained rare, undertaken by only 11% of smallholders (Vance et al. 2004). Although chilli continues to be cultivated today, its production dropped drastically three decades after its introduction due to persistent market failure (i.e. volatile farm gate prices) and crop losses to pests. However, many of the external inputs used to farm it remained and were transferred to the cultivation of maize (Klepeis et al. 2004; Schmook et al. 2013). A study I conducted recently in the region (Dobler-Morales et al. 2020) demonstrates that the trend of agricultural intensification described above has continued. The study surveyed 84 smallholders from four ejidos (see Fig. 1) and their fields with the objective of characterizing individual agricultural practices and the internal and external drivers behind them. The study found that, in contrast to the previously common 1–3 years of continuous cultivation before fallow, fields now appear to be cultivated for 5.6 years consecutively on average. This figure hides a certain

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skewness: 19% of surveyed smallholders reported continuous use of their field for 1–2 years, 22% for 3–4 years, 17% for 5–6 years and 42% for 7 or more years. Use of agrochemicals is now even more widespread. 70% of the surveyed farmers use synthetic fertilizers (most commonly 17-17-17, 28-46-00 and 20-30-10 in N-PK concentrations), 85% use herbicides (glyphosate, 2, 4-D and paraquat) and 81% use pesticides (cypermethryn, parathion and cholorpyryfos). 92% use at least one agrochemical, a notable increase from the previous regional estimate (70% in 1997). Similarly, 54% of surveyed farmers use mechanical tillage, up from 11% in 1997. This pattern of agricultural change could be considered surprising given that typical conditions for intensification are largely absent. The region remains weakly integrated into crop markets, demand for food crops has changed little due to marginal population growth and land is in apparent surplus. Furthermore, intensification often entails major outlays of labour and capital (Boserup 1965)—resources in limited supply here. The aforementioned study sought therefore to test the influence of state institutions operating in Calakmul on farmers’ motivations to intensify their farm production. Results suggest that, on one hand, government farm subsidies appear to be working as incentives for intensification. Drawing on household survey data and statistical regressions, the study found that smallholders participating in PROAGRO were significantly more likely to prolong the number of years of cultivation of their field without fallowing, after controlling for other livelihood and household variables (Table 1; highlighted coefficients). The study ascribed this behaviour to PROAGRO’s transfers being conditioned on continuous cultivation of the field. Likewise, farmers enrolled in PESA were significantly more likely to mechanize their fields, as the programme subsidizes this practice. PROAGRO also appeared to be significantly correlated with field mechanization. The municipal programme PRTP was not included in the regressions because all farmers who reported being participants of it had mechanized their fields. This perfect correlation, however, speaks about the importance of the programme as a driver of intensification in the region. Notably, the study could not find a significant relation between any programme and the use of agrochemicals, most likely due to its widespread adoption (92% of surveyed farmers), and thus a strong bias in the sample. On the other hand, based on interviews with farmers and key-informants, the study found that state conservation instruments were also linked to agricultural intensification in Calakmul. Given the restrictions imposed collectively by the Reserve, the PES programme and the Forest Code, land access is currently limited to patches either already cleared, in early successional stages, or with no protection status. These restrictions appear to be inducing smallholders to reduce the rotation of their fields across the landscape and thus to extend the number of years the same field is cultivated continuously. Many informants noted that governmental efforts to monitor the forest and enforce its protection have grown in recent years, especially through the Federal Attorney’s Office for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA, an agency of the Secretariat of the Environment) and a Federal Police task force: the Gendarmería. Interviewed ejido leaders also noted how clearing forest areas designated for Payment for Ecosystem Services is punished internally by the ejido through

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Table 1 Smallholder intensification practices as a function of household livelihood variables and government farm subsidies (Dobler-Morales et al., 2020) Variable

Constant

Intensification practice: Fallow deferral (tobit model)a

Intensification practice: Use of agrochemicals (logistic model)b

0.54

Intensification practice: Mechanical tillage (logistic model)c −3.88 ***

4.80

Household characteristics and activities (2018) Family size

0.40 **

−1.22

Maize cultivation (ha.)

0.98 **

0.42

Chilli cultivation (ha.)

1.71 *

44.55

Livestock net worth ($) * 10−4

0.05

1.58

0.04

Honey production (kg.)

0.00

0.66

0.00

Remittances ($) * 10−4

0.16

49.32

0.00

Forestry (binary)

−1.70 *

Off-farm income ($) * −0.79 10−4

0.26 * 0.39 1.99 **

−21.20

−0.78

−0.52

−0.64

17.25

1.20 *

Participation in government programmes PROAGRO (binary)

2.79 ***

PIMAF (binary)

0.55

PESA (binary) *

2.12

−0.39

p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01, X-squared = 28.52 ***

0.73

3.44 a

Pearson’s r = 0.635 ***,

1.41 ** b

X-squared = 13.88 ***,

c

hefty fines, signalling an internalization of state-mandated conservation goals by the ejido (see Agrawal 2005). Farmers and key-informants attested that clearing oldgrowth and/or protected forest rarely happens today as residents tend to comply with environmental regulations.

5 Scaling Up: The Influence of State Institutions on Ejidal Landscapes Despite once being a deforestation hotspot, rates of forest cover loss in Calakmul began to decline in the 1980s due to multiple factors—among them, a deceleration of in-migration rates amid a nation-wide financial crisis (Bray & Klepeis 2005). In

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retrospect, that slowing of deforestation could be seen as the beginning of a trajectory that may eventually lead Calakmul to experience a ‘forest transition’—a process in which forest cover experiences a reversal in change rates, from losses to gains (see Mather & Needle 1998). A forest transition in Calakmul is likely given that multiple conditions for the expansion of forest cover have been present for some decades. One factor conducive to such a transition is the progressive decline in land availability after the establishment of ejidos in the region (Haenn 2006), which in turn reduced both inmigration and the expansion of swidden (Bray & Klepeis 2005). The termination of the state’s land distribution programme in the mid-1990s reinforced these dynamics, further stabilizing population growth and cropland expansion in the region (Schmook et al. 2013). Another factor is the progressive diversification of local livelihoods, especially through the incorporation of labour migration. Labour migration appears to be linked to a decline in swidden area at the household level (Schmook & Radel 2008), which should free up spaces for forest recovery at broader scales. One last factor involves the expansion of conservation instruments in the region (Bray & Klepeis 2005; Rueda 2010). The Reserve, the PES programme and the Forest Code, as mentioned, have been reported to effectively deter smallholders from felling forest, especially old-growth (García-Frapolli et al. 2009; Román-Dañobeytia et al. 2014). Some ejidos have also set aside areas for conservation voluntarily (Acopa & Boege 1998, see also Kelly 2020), representing an additional driver of reduced deforestation in Calakmul. The occurrence of a forest transition could be significant for a place like Calakmul. These processes have been linked to a number of social and environmental benefits such as increased carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and improved provision of other ecosystem services at local scales (Chazdon et al. 2016; Gardner et al. 2009; Pan et al. 2011). Nonetheless, while the slowdown of deforestation rates is relatively well characterized (Ramírez-Delgado et al. 2014; Rueda 2010), no study has conclusively detected a generalized trend of forest recovery in the region. Admittedly, accurate detection of forest transitions in swidden-dominated landscapes like Calakmul is challenging given the spatial complexity of the forestagricultural mosaic, and especially the quick and periodic replacement of landcovers: from forest to agriculture and back. It has been noted that common approaches based on the comparison of remotely sensed image pairs (before vs. after) are unable to fully capture such dynamism and might confound ephemeral forest cover changes with sustained recovery/loss trends (DeVries et al. 2015). In order to accurately detect where and when sustained forest expansion was occurring amid the ‘noisy’ background of land-cover change in the region, I conducted a change detection study based on the analysis of a 34-year dense stack of Landsat imagery (Dobler-Morales 2019). My approach consisted in analysing per-pixel time-series to detect abrupt changes in their reflectivity. Periods between these changes, or breakpoints, were assumed to correspond to different land-uses/land-covers (specifically, forest vs. non-forest). The duration of these periods was then quantified to estimate the age of their corresponding land-cover at any point in time. The entire procedure was performed for each one of the 30×30 m pixels within the boundaries of the four selected ejidos (see Fig. 1).

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My study found that forest dynamics differ across the four ejidos, yet some patterns seem to be shared (Fig. 2, Table 2). Theil–Sen slopes indicate that forest cover (all ages) is still declining in all four ejidos. When excluding secondary forest cover

Fig. 2 Forest and non-forest cover change in the four ejidos studied. Dashed line and dotted line represent all-ages and old-growth forest cover dynamics, respectively

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Table 2 Coefficients and significance of forest cover trends in the four ejidos All-ages forest

Old-growth forest

Ejido

Annual rate of Mann–Kendall’s Annual rate of cover change (per test of cover change (per Theil–Sen slopes) monotonicity (α Theil–Sen slopes) = 0.05)

Mann–Kendall’s test of monotonicity (α = 0.05)

Nueva Vida

−0.37 km2 (−0.23%)

Significantly decreasing

0.43 km2 (0.27%) Not significant

Nuevo Becal

in the official website of Edward Relph, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www.placeness.com/topophobia/.

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spatial planning, while retaining significant spatial segregation and ghettoization. Consequently, abstract space (mostly related to conceived space) becomes the dominant space ‘imposed by the State upon its ‘subjects’ (…) being, in fact, inherently violent’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.387). Within the production process of most residual spaces in Bogota, we may identify several expressions of violence brought on by the ‘organizers’ of urban space. These expressions include: displacing dwellers from the neighborhoods in which their families grew up, due to planned demolitions; destroying the social fabric of local communities built over generations; informing, instead of consulting, citizens about planning modifications in areas used for daily activities; diminishing the quality of the urban landscape in pedestrian areas; establishing the rules for whom, and for what purposes, the newly generated ‘public space’ can be used; and setting aside vacant lots for real estate developments, rather than for green space, in a city with an effective green area deficit of 70% (Bogotá cómo vamos 2017). Certainly, ‘abstract space is a tool of power’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.391) that intends to swallow the representational space, but its demands are not fixed. In fact, despite the global homogenizing trend of space, the social space is a scenario of contradictions3 that can ‘express’ conflicts between socio-political interests and forces (Lefebvre 1991, p.365), as well as reinforce inequality across various divides (Pierce and Martin 2015). Thus, dwellers can claim and appropriate them through their subjective experiences and daily practices. By doing that, people indeed highlight differences within space and create a new kind, a differential space (Lefebvre 1991, p.52). Accordingly, the appropriated residual space in Bogota embodies a differential space as a counter space that manifests externalities, and in many cases, houses both citizens and practices that are spatially excluded and peripheral to the dominant homogenized-fragmented-hierarchical space. The above-mentioned expressions of spatial violence in the production process of the residual space do not imply that all related urban developments are negative. However, they reveal the undeniable contradictions between dwellers’ interests and forces of capitalism, which, in turn, also establish a contradiction between dominant space and appropriated space. We can identify two phases in the production of residual spaces in Bogota: one concerns the process of making the dominant space by building the urban development infrastructure, and the other involves the appropriation process that turns homogenized4 space into differential space. In both phases, the differences and hence the exclusion take on pre-eminent roles. In the first, differences usually endure in the form of externalities focused on buying and demolishing properties along either side of the massive urban transport development routes, even against popular opposition. All this has the intention of making broader avenues for a transport system that generates a high private surplus from over-priced tickets (Ojeda 2020), and of 3

Contradictions in Lefebvrian terms that can be understood as ‘competing place frames’ from the relational place perspective of Pierce and Martin (2015). 4 Although I use only the word homogenised, hereafter I always refer to the complex homogenisedfragmented-hierarchical space.

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defragmenting space to create opportunities for gentrification through private urban renovation while displacing the traditional dwellers and merchants. In the second phase, the differences arise as conscious and non-conscious resistances against the abstract space. Thus, although the residual spaces look like voids and remain outside the urban dynamic and its productive structures, like ‘terrain vagues’ (Solà-Morales 1995, p.120), their eventual appropriation by citizens reincorporates these spaces into the urban system. Most of the appropriation practices have the characteristics of being informal, and even non-legal, practices of activities and expression. Occasionally public and private institutions organize and finance initiatives such as markets, fairs, and graffiti interventions in Bogotá’s residual spaces. Nevertheless, people who usually territorialize these spaces are outside of the institutional realm, at a low socioeconomic level, and do not have formal jobs. Therefore, residual spaces highlight class exclusion in the city’s built space and, consequently, a lack of spatial justice. The pathways of appropriation of residual space lead to a spatial multidimensionality that is ‘transposed onto the level of urban morphology’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.373). Appropriation does not just build space but also transforms the urban landscape, revealing political power conflicts visually expressed as layers that constitute a palimpsest on the territory. A single instant in a residual space can encompass multiple temporalities that demonstrate space as an unfinished social construction in permanent change (Massey 2005; Stokoe and Wallwork 2003). For example, by observing some inactive facade walls,5 it is possible to go back in time and identify the scope of the original building to which they had belonged. In Fig. 1, some structural samples are visible, probably belonging to a bedroom in the past. Also, there are traces of old advertising posters, and at the same time, some new ones, and several graffiti resulting from present-moment practices. Moreover, the façade of the adjoining property foreshadows a possible future condition as it has its windows and a door. In Fig. 2, kids play soccer on debris in a vacant area at the corner of a street intersection with considerable vehicular traffic. Debris talks about the past. They are the ruins of a demolished property, while the children’s game is in the present time of the instant in which the observer took the picture. During the time that the children were playing, that vacant lot became a soccer field. In both residual spaces (Figs. 1 and 2), the spatial practices attest to appropriation of space through action. Children owned the residual space when they were playing on it (Fig. 2). They exercised control over that area, and to that extent, they territorialized it, transforming its character from private to public. The same happens to the inactive façade wall that was conceived only as a barrier between inside and outside. The painted symbols on the wall are signatures of a determined graffiti writer who, by leaving his tag, territorialized that specific residual space. In sum, both of the described activities are counter practices that create a differential space by opposing the forms and power structures of the abstract and homogenized—fragmented—hierarchical space. Through these contested practices people claim and assert their ‘right 5

Díaz Cruz (2015) categorizes the residual spaces of Bogotá in four: inactive facade walls or culatas in Spanish, vacant or remnant lots, zones under bridges, and abandoned or unused properties.

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Fig. 2 Children playing soccer in a remnant area on 10th Avenue and 22nd South Street, Bogotá. Source Author

to the city’ (Lefebvre 1996), in opposition to the ‘disappearance of many characteristics of city life—such as—(…) security, social contact, the facility of child-rearing, diversity of relationships’ (Jane Jacobs, as cited by Lefebvre 1991, p.364), among others.

4 Territorialization Practices in the Residual Space The territorialization practices in residual space replace the vagueness with significances, transforming it into a landscape. However, most of these practices are ephemeral because they constantly compete for power with the dominant economic and political forces that operate in the homogenized space. The transitoriness is evident, for example, in the determination of the city government to erase territorial markers like graffiti in order to keep a ‘clean’ landscape. That illustrates the tensions over domination of space because, even when it supposedly had an aesthetic intention, the clean-up programe also had the aim of muting or silencing differential voices in space. Ultimately, there is both an economic force that defends private property from public practices that could diminish the value of the private goods, and a political power that ‘aspires to control space in its entirety’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.388). It is a similar situation regarding the apparent incorporation of residual spaces as new public spaces. Although the State refers to its continual efforts to revitalize these zones, most of them are not open to unrestricted use by citizens since they remain fenced, dirty, or without street furniture. Therefore, in opposition to the

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dominant institutional discourse, many citizens define these zones as grasslands, brownfields, pigsties, or shithouses (sic), among other expressions. Nevertheless, citizens also recognize that these spaces can develop into contestations of exclusion and marginalization. Thus, the contradictions between homogenized and differential spaces are manifested both visually and discursively. In fact, within the territorialization process, the residual space turns ‘into the space of speech, expressiveness, and power, and— already at this level—of latent violence and revolt (…) The space of speech envelops the space of bodies and develops by means of traces, of writings, of prescriptions and inscriptions (Lefebvre 1991, p.403).’ Therefore, the residual become a territorial space, a historically specific political form of (produced) space (Brenner and Elden 2009, p.363) in contestation with the statist and institutional abstract space. The practices that territorialize the residual spaces in Bogotá generate affective and dynamic experiences in those who actively take part in them. Similarly, they foster an emotional experience in those who participate only as observers of the process and the results. Among the multiple territorialization practices in the residual space, some of the most significant are described in what follows.

4.1 Graffiti Despite the historical opposition and even institutional persecution over graffiti practices (Alcaldía de Bogotá 2013), they constitute one of the most significant markers of space in Bogota’s urban landscape. Graffiti are easy to find in almost all residual space categories, thanks to their versatility. Street artists and writers claim that these zones grant a means of expression to those who do not have an officially sanctioned opportunity to be seen or heard publicly. Thus, graffitiing is ‘a practice that has given young people the possibility of using the wall to speak, communicate, and make themselves visible in the city’ (Díaz Cruz 2015, p.118). Traditionally, graffiti in Bogota have had a sociopolitical intent. Through graffiti, people have used appropriate spaces abandoned by the State or by private owners to demonstrate the disregard of many stakeholders toward the city. In recent decades, this appropriation has also taken the form of an appeal to local identities or values. Graffiti purposes in the city may depend on the sources of funding for the practice. Because the government has financed mural-making in some residual spaces, especially on the inactive facade walls that remain after the transport infrastructure, it is making the decisions—up to a point—over what kind of symbols are permissible. As graffiti have an irreverent component, many graffiti writers consider that the main political function of their initiatives is to be a critical commentary on statal errors. Furthermore, based on exclusion and the normalized function of serving capitalist economic interests, the most cost-effective option for the State is not to intervene in the facades along the transport system lines. Instead, the State places this function onto the property owners, because according to Articles 21, 239, 246 and 272 in the

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Bogotá Land Use Plan (Alcaldía de Bogotá. District Decree 619 of 2000 (2004)), the facades are private property, albeit they belong to the public space. That contradictory policy implies that the government is not directly responsible for the surfaces, although the owners depend on state entities for interventions. Amidst the legal confusion left by the law, the graffiti appropriate spaces that seem to have no importance for the city institutions, notwithstanding that the quality of a city landscape has a role the wellbeing of its citizens. Graffiti in Bogota have contributed to the design of the inactive facades in terms of their visual character, livening up the street, and creating an urban landscape that developers on many occasions, subsequently destroy. Therefore, even though some types of graffiti ‘writing’ generate displeasure and feelings of fear, the graphic interventions in Bogotá mostly have favored a topophilia toward residual spaces. Besides supplying an aesthetic function, graffiti gave rise to the territorialization of residual spaces in Bogotá ‘since the most appropriated spaces are those occupied by symbols’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.366). With graffiti, individuals and associations demarcate their spatial control and make residual spaces counter-spaces for communicating and denouncing, and keeping memories alive. Some graffiti in the city’s residual spaces have gained such significance that they become collective memory places functioning as landmarks for social movements for remembrance days and demonstrations.

4.2 Informal Vending The occupation of residual spaces as workplaces reflects the shocking economic disparities in Bogotá’s society. Informal work in the capital constitutes the only economic survival option of more than 40 percent of the working-age population (DANE 2020). Thus, non-formal sales of products and services occur throughout the city, including in residual spaces, especially in remnant lots and in the high pedestrian traffic zones under bridges (Fig. 3). Territorialization by street vendors occurs not without tensions between different social actors. Gaining the control of specific public areas and maintaining spatial market power creates a sense of ownership that leads some vendors to defend their appropriated space even by using violence. Therefore, these territorial spaces usually involve power conflicts, including fights between vendors who would like to occupy a space already taken, or between vendors and the State. While some citizens are grateful that the residual spaces revitalized by the vendors become safer to walk through, others relate the presence of informal vendors with the unregulated occupation of public space and favorable conditions for theft due to the obstruction of pedestrian mobility (Díaz Cruz 2015).

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Fig. 3 Informal vendors and graffiti in a mixed residual space on NQS Avenue, Bogotá. Source Author

4.3 Homelessness Related Activities Zones under bridges, in tunnels, and some other areas with little pedestrian flow are occupied by street dwellers for recycling activities, sleeping, or using drugs. Some people also use these residual spaces as toilets and for depositing rubble and littering. To many Bogota citizens, the presence of the homeless and their practices generates an aversion toward the spaces they occupy (topophobia). For this reason, people consider those areas to be just for ‘passing through and not for spending time in’. Territorialization by the homeless can obscure some violent practices of the police because they are socially legitimated by citizens expressing opinions like, ‘the Mayor should take the homeless out of here’ (Díaz Cruz 2015, p.161). Those opinions deny the right that street dwellers also have—as citizens—to inhabit the city, and they hide the legitimization of practices such as the so-called ‘social cleansing’.

4.4 Cultural and Leisure Activities Communities and institutions plan cultural activities, but leisure is more spontaneous. Usually, cultural activities in residual spaces have the character of family-oriented fairs with music, handicrafts, and marketing in open and more structured areas. There are also some initiatives to transform the landscape, such as planting urban gardens

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in vacant zones. Leisure activities are the only practice of territorialization performed by children. These include soccer encounters, skateboarding, and hanging out after lunch, and they occur in almost any vacant or remnant lot, even at the Bus Rapid Transit intersections. Cultural activities and the provision of street and leisure furniture are the initiatives best-received by citizens for activating residual spaces, but they are the least likely to be organized by State institutions because of their lack of financial resources (Díaz Cruz 2015, p.133).

4.5 Occupations of Space Occupancy or ‘occupying’ is one of the most vigorous counter practices of territorialization in residual spaces because it is often linked to citizens’ complaints against various public policies regarding the destruction of the built landscape. People also confront the State, both legally and non-legally, because of its financial abandonment of the social and cultural projects that were originally intended for many of the abandoned buildings in the city. Posters, graffiti, and legal actions like lawsuits are tools in several processes to demonstrate citizens’ disagreement with official determinations and their intention of stopping the development of projects that exclude collective interests. Occupations in residual spaces have many facets and they occur both in vacant lots and in abandoned buildings. On the one hand, citizens use most of the lots as temporary parking, as extensions of workshop areas for crafts or bike repair, or for temporary settlement of street dwellers. Some people occupy the abandoned buildings where they used to live or work, such as the hospital complex San Juan de Dios, which used to serve low-income people with government funding until its sudden closure due to state negligence. Because the closing left not only patients, but also employees, with no place to go, some families of medical personnel have occupied the hospital for two decades. Doctors and nurses living there have tried to keep providing assistance while taking care of the medical equipment and the facilities, despite a legal judgment against them.

5 Territorialization as a Synonym of Resignification Stating that a space is residual can lead to the assumption that it has a second-hand character that makes it irrelevant in the urban configuration. Consequently, residual spaces could be considered as urban infrastructure ruins with no possibility of being an active part of a city. Nevertheless, as Lefebvre states (2016, p.141), ‘each residual element contains something precious and essential’, and through territorialization practices, residual spaces can become landscapes full of symbolic value for those who produce them. Interaction gives significance to residual spaces, turning them into counter-spaces and resignifying the urban ‘ruins’ to be looked at a second time.

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Therefore, territorialization practices in residual spaces are counter-practices that constitute mechanisms for both the production of differential space and the social construction of the territory. Thereby they have the possibility of transforming what Lefebvre called the ‘phallic’ condition of the abstract space into a ‘uterine’ condition. That means, building a space less obliging to dominant economic interests, more conciliatory in terms of its collective uses and appropriation, and socially produced through inclusive practices, experiences, and symbols. In sum, a space more centered on subjects than on objects, where the participation of social minorities such as children, women, or elders is more viable because it (the uterus) may contain everyone. Practices of territorialization in residual spaces highlight a lack of rights to the city, understood as spatial justice (Soja 2010), while having the potential to transform the urban aesthetic by means of citizen interactions, into a safer, happier, and healthier way to live in the city. Such transformation requires more commitments from the stakeholders and developers to include people’s initiatives of public space appropriation. ‘The challenge is colossal since there is a tendency for ‘green areas’— trees or squares that are anything more than intersections, town parks, and similar to die out (…) because their consumption is non-productive because all they produce is a pleasure. So, they attract no investment’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.359). To improve the transition of residual space toward a more uterine and better lived space, it is crucial to resolve the contradiction ‘between a consumption of space which produces surplus value and one which produces only enjoyment—and is therefore seen as ‘unproductive’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.359–360). In other words, it is urgent to find a balance between capitalist space builders and community landscape producers, which would indeed allow territorialization by the city dwellers.

References Alcaldía de Bogotá (2004) District Decree 190. https://www.alcaldiabogota.gov.co/sisjur/normas/ Norma1.jsp?i=13935 Alcaldía de Bogotá (2013) Regulatory decree 75. “By which the artistic and responsible practice of graffiti in the city is promoted and other provisions are issued”. https://www.culturarecreaciony deporte.gov.co/sites/default/files/decreto_075_de_2013_0.pdf. Accessed 16 Feb 2020 Bogotá cómo vamos (2017) Informe de Calidad de Vida en Bogotá 2017—Así avanza la ciudad. https://bogotacomovamos.org/informe-de-calidad-de-vida-en-bogota-2017-asi-avanzala-ciudad/ Accessed 20 Feb 2020 Borja J (2005) La ciudad actual. El desafío del espacio público. Revista anual de pensamiento. Hacia la ciudadanía del siglo XXI. El valor de la palabra. Hitzaren balioa 5:25- 44. http://www. bideo.info/buesa/imagenes/valordelapalabra5.pdf Brenner N, Elden S (2009) Henri Lefebvre on state, space, territory. Int Political Sociol 3:353–377 Curzio C (2008) El origen y las características de los fragmentos urbano públicos residuales. Cuadernos Geográficos 42:53–82. http://www.ugr.es/~cuadgeo/docs/articulos/042/042-003.pdf DANE (2020) Boletín técnico. Medición de empleo informal y seguridad social. https://www.dane. gov.co/files/investigaciones/boletines/ech/ech_informalidad/bol_ech_informalidad_dic19_ feb20.pdf. Accessed 24 March 2020

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de Solà-Morales I (1995) Terrain vague. In: Davidson CC (ed) Anyplace. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p 118–123 Díaz Cruz NA (2015) Análisis del paisaje residual en Bogotá. Ejes de Transmilenio: Avenidas El Dorado, Fernando Mazuera, Caracas y Norte Quito Sur. Master’s Dissertation, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá García A, Fernández V, Zambrana L (2011) Luces y sombras de los espacios públicos del Aljarafe sevillano. Documentos de Arquitectura y Patrimonio 3(4):120–127. https://idus.us.es/handle/ 11441/12133 Lefebvre H (1991) The production of space. English translation by Nicholson-Smith, Donald. Blackwell, Oxford Lefebvre H (1996) Writing on cities. Blackwell, Oxford Lefebvre H (2002) Critique of everyday life, vol II. Foundations for a sociology of the everyday. Verso, London Lefebvre H (2016) Metaphilosophy. Verso, London Massey D (2005) La filosofía y la política de la espacialidad. Algunas consideraciones. In: Arfuch L (ed) Pensar este tiempo: espacios, afectos pertenencias, Paidós, Buenos Aires, pp 103–127 Nogué J (2011) Otros mundos, otras geografías. Los paisajes residuales. Revista da Anpege. 7(1):3– 10. http://anpege.org.br/revista/ojs-2.4.6/index.php/anpege08/article/view/174 Ojeda D (2020) La tarifa de Transmilenio se ubica entre las más altas de Latinoamérica. El Espectador Newspaper. https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/bogota/la-tarifa-de-transmileniose-ubica-entre-las-mas-altas-de-latinoamerica-articulo-907575. Accessed 28 March 2020 Pierce J, Martin D (2015) Placing Lefebvre. Antipode 47(5):1279–1299 Relph E (1976) The phenomenological foundations of geography. University of Toronto, Department of Geography, Discussion Paper 21. https://www.academia.edu/7183675/The_Phenomeno logical_Foundations_of_Geography Soja EW (2010) Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Stokoe E, Wallwork J (2003) Space invaders: the moral-spatial order in neighbor dispute discourse. Br J Soc Psychol 42:551–569 Tuan Y-F (1974) Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. PrenticeHall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

Nataly A. Díaz Cruz Independent researcher, Department of Geography, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia. Nataly Díaz Cruz has a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry and Master’s degree in geography. She is an educator and socio-environmental researcher specialising in cultural landscape and territorial environmental management. She is also a columnist and broadcaster in independent media. She is a member of the ESTEPA (Espacio, Tecnología y Participación) at UNAL, Bogotá. Her Master’s thesis on residual landscapes received attention from academia and citizen urban policy collectives in Bogotá.

Building and ‘De-indianising’ a Nation. The Kuna and Guaymí People and the Formation of the Panamanian State Ana Sofía Solano Acuña and David Díaz Baiges

Abstract In this chapter we survey the diverse political and ideological strategies put forth by the state and elites in order to take over areas of the ‘national territory’ thought of as ‘empty’ and ‘wild’, tear apart ethno-territories and cultural universes, and manage indigenous people and their resources under the veil of a consolidating a ‘national state’. We examine the experiences in the eastern and western frontiers of Panama during its transition from the Colombian period into republican life after 1903. Each case study illustrates the social construction of the indigenous societies (Kuna and Guaymí) targeted by these strategies. We consider that although the colonial enterprise was one, each territory strongly determined the specific modes of state encroachment, construction of the cultural other, and the discourses deployed to bring these social bodies within the national project. The documental corpus used in our study comprises press articles, official documents, and the writings of intellectuals and Catholic missionaries. In the eastern frontier the role of Catholic missions was key, as they were tasked with converting the indigenous population into ‘citizens’ useful to the homeland; to culturally ‘de-indianize’ (desindianizar) their ways of life and settlement; to wield political and economic power over the lands bordering Colombia; and to re-signify the ethnic territory. In the western frontier de-indianization must be understood differently, as it involved many central-western villages administratively losing the category of ‘indigenous’, giving way to the emergence and consolidation of a new socio-racial category, which not only reaffirmed the low-class status of the indigenous, but also obliterated any recognisable historical roots of prior categories. Keywords De-indianisation · Nation · Frontier · Cultural territory

A. S. Solano Acuña (B) Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica e-mail: [email protected] D. Díaz Baiges Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. K. McCall et al. (eds.), Territorialising Space in Latin America, The Latin American Studies Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82222-4_14

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1 Introduction This chapter examines the context in the eastern and western borderlands of presentday Panama, specifically in terms of the experiences of the Kuna and Guaymí peoples as they faced land and population management policies during the Colombian period and into the first years of Panama’s independence in 1903.1 This study seeks to understand the nation as a discursive construction, whose narrative process involves an ambivalent alternation between projects to homogenise and to differentiate (Díaz Baiges 2018). Colonisation policy in Colombia between 1820 and 1870 sought to attract foreign settlers by granting land to populate the borderlands and maintain the road network (Solano Acuña 2019). Incoming families were expected to settle in farming villages in the borderlands for them to establish and run mid-size homesteads (Le Grand 1988). An additional and determining aspect of the land policy in the Panamanian borderlands during this period was the interventionist policy wielded by the Unites States mainly aimed at controlling the canal lands, but also establishing monopolies on resources such as guano, tagua nut and rubber (Sandner 1984). Particularly, in 1850 the Kuna territory was subject to a string of surveying expeditions (González Escobar 2003,2011; Santa-Teresa 1956) aimed chiefly to assess the possibilities for building a canal through the Darién region. Similarly, the Guaymí, on the border with Costa Rica, were threatened by re-settlement attempts by the U.S. As Solano Acuña (2019) explains, this attempt involved the mobilisation of the black population south of Chiriquí to work the coal fields needed to fuel ships as establish colonies along the land route to Central America. This ideal would later be picked up during the first administration of Belisario Porras (1912–1918), by promoting European, mainly Spanish, migrants to settle in farming colonies in Chiriquí, after having worked in building the canal. These efforts did not materialise, but the idea yet again resumed as railway construction further advanced into Chiriquí and Los Santos. Such penetrations into indigenous territories came along with tax exempt grants of thousands of hectares of unused and ‘pardoned’2 land to foreign investors (Pizzurdo Gelós y Araúz 1996, p.32). By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Chorographic Commission was established. Its work was carried out in two phases. The first, under the leadership of general Codazzi, consisted in the exploration of the provinces presently corresponding to the departments of Boyacá, Santander, Norte de Santander, Antioquia, Chocó, Nariño and Panamá. One of the main objectives of exploring Panama was to determine the possibility of opening an interoceanic canal through the isthmus of Darién.

1

On November 28, 1821, Panama joined Greater Colombia in what turned out to be a strained relationship until it gained its independence on November 3, 1903. During that period this territory went by various names: Departamento del Istmo (1821–1840), Estado Libre del Istmo (1840– 1841), Departamento de Panamá (1842–1855), Estado de Panamá (1855–1862), Estado Soberano de Panamá (1863–1886), and Departamento de Panamá (1886–1903). 2 Tierras indultadas. This term refers to lands free of any restrictions to be granted.

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In 1870 the Kuna signed their first agreement with the government, by which they accepted the authority of the Unites States of Colombia over these lands. This pact hinged upon the government acknowledging the natives’ property rights of their dwellings and crop fields, hunting and fishing rights in areas in the public domain and offering protection against possible invasions (Zapata 1871). These agreements also gave birth to the comarca Tulenega, a new territorial entity comprising 36 small villages scattered between the bay of San Blas and the mouth of the Atrato River. However the comarca was short lived since both parties soon breached the terms of the agreement. As of August 8, 1885, Colombian politics shifted towards conservatism by the socalled Regeneración movement. This political swing gave way to the Concordat of 1887, in accordance with the new constitution. This resulted in new arrangements, such as the Missions Convention (Convenio de Misiones) and the arrival of new religious communities promoting missionary work (Solano Acuña 2019). From October 17, 1899, to November 21, 1902, the Thousand Day War broke out in Colombia. This conflict was won by the conservatives except in Panamá, where liberal resistance prevailed in numbers and tactics. Resulting from the conflict was nationwide economic devastation, hundreds of thousands of lives lost on both sides, and an unstable and volatile political climate, all of which gave rise to the isthmus seceding in November, 1903. During the conflict, liberalism adopted a populist and paternalistic discourse towards the indigenous peoples, reaffirming the notion of the natives as spiritually rich and industrious but in need of assistance from the state to control poverty and exploitation (Langebaek-Rueda 2014). Around the year 1912, the government led by Belisario Porras created legislation, following the same path as its predecessors, meant for ‘civilizing’ the indigenous peoples as a way of integrating them, secure the national space and the construction of a nationality in which the indigenous would only have a place as part of the past (Solano Acuña 2019). Hereafter both western and eastern lands would be subject to ravages by foreign and domestic forces, as a logical effect of the construction of the Interoceanic Canal.

2 Methodology Our approach to the eastern and western areas was based on primary archival sources and secondary sources, such as serial collections. More specifically, for the case of the western frontier official documents and texts by indigenous writers found in the Panama National Archive stand out as key sources. Regarding the latter, we located dispatches from members and authorities of indigenous communities to agents of the Catholic Church, the Panamanian or Colombian central governments, and to other indigenous leaders in distant regions. In regard to frequency, the most plentiful documents are letters, visit reports (from clergy, prefects and governors), dispute records, tax reports, technical-administrative reports and appointments/dismissals of public servants.

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The analysis of the eastern frontier depended mainly on documents by missionaries: mission reports and magazines and other mission propaganda. Additionally documents held in the archives of the Urabá Apostolic Prefecture (digitalised by the Fundación Sancho el Sabio), proved very useful for the study of the missionary project in this Colombian prefecture.

3 Indigenous Populations and Territories from the Colombian Period to Republican Life In the early nineteenth century a series of ‘protectionist’ laws and decrees were enacted in order to run different aspects of life within indigenous communities, especially in regard to land tenure. The deployment of such legal instruments evinced the failure to grant equal treatment to this population among the citizenship at large (Solano Acuña 2019). Pizzurdo Gelós (2011, p.78) explained that in 1824 with Law 30, called ‘Method to civilise the wild Indians’, land was offered to the natives who accepted forms of permanent settlement, became farmers and renounced their non-Christian customs. Eight years later, from 1828 to 1859, there was an increase in the parcelling of indigenous lands, the extinction of the indigenous councils and the consequent proletarianisation of a large part of the native population (Pineda Camacho 2004). In 1868 Law 19 of 12 October was enacted in Panama. Its main purpose was to guarantee common lands to the indigenous communities. Other rulings were issued alongside regarding this special administrative regime, while also recognising the Catholic Church as overseer of government matters within the indigenous communities (Guzmán 2004, p.160). Two years later the Law of 4 June, concerning resettled indigenous communities (reducciones de indios), gave rise to a formal Kuna territory. Laws 61 and 48, enacted in 1882, made possible for citizens to acquire land plots (‘globos de tierra’), on proving their use for farming, which in the long term promoted non-indigenous peasant immigration to indigenous lands (Le Grand 1988). The 1886 Political Constitution of Colombia portrayed indigenous communities as ‘savage’ or ‘half civilised’ and in need of guardianship by Catholic missions, as they were legally considered ‘minors’. The Concordat of 1887 signed between Colombia and the Vatican materialised these precepts through the establishment of religious institutes dedicated to charity, mission and education, among others. The resources provided by the State to the Church were also used in the dioceses, town councils and seminaries. Article 12 of the Concordat established that: In colleges and high schools, in schools and other educational institutions, public education and instruction shall be organised and directed in conformity with the dogmas and morals of the Catholic Religion. Religious education shall be obligatory in such centres, and the pious practices of the Catholic Religion shall be observed there (Concordat 1887, p.2).

In terms of the two territories that occupy us in this work (the western border and the eastern border of Panama) it will be possible to observe how the process of

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independence from Colombia in 1903 was overcome. This idea of the consolidation of the national border based on religious orders will be especially clear in the case of the Kunas, but not for the Guaymí, whose model of incorporation into the nascent national state was based on territorial rupture and the process of de-indianisation. The importance of the Catholic Church in the process of colonisation and acculturation was reaffirmed in Law 103 of 1890, by which it was formally appointed as the representative for the national government in the territories on the southern border, and tasked to ‘resettle and evangelise the savages’ (reducir a los salvajes) as well as establishing a first bastion of Colombianness facing possible invasions from neighbouring countries (Restrepo 2006; Bushnell 2007). Fourteen years later, this mechanism was recovered in the Political Constitution of Panama in 1904, whose article 26 stated that the first steps to ‘Panamanise’ the indigenous communities would hinge upon the establishment of Catholic missions. Similarly Law 59 of 1908 declared the need to develop a system of missions and schools as well as to regulate the relations between indigenous and ‘civilised’ peoples. Two years later, in Gaceta de Panamá (1906), Law 19 was published ‘Which determines how the indigenous people of Coclé province should be governed’. This law was especially important because it declared on the part of the state that there was no indigenous population in the province of Coclé. This law effectively abolished the indigenous cabildos and governorships, and initiated the creation of police stations (Toabré, Pajonal, Tolé, Penonomé, Piedras Gordas, La Pintada, Marica, Cabuya, El Valle de Antón, Tóza and Natá) and the foundation of schools (Toabré, Pajonal, Tolé, Cañaveral, Penonomé, La Pintada and El Valle de Antón). However, this idea of a ‘problem solved’ did not extend to all the territories with indigenous population, so it was necessary to reiterate its incorporation in Law 56 of 28 December 1912 ‘On the civilisation of indigenous peoples’. This law was directed mainly to those territories where state control was still deficient or unstable and promoted the development of settlements in strategically selected places in order to establish communication with these indigenous communities, organise political forces to maintain order, and grant lands to colonists in those areas required by the state (Solano Acuña 2019). The main call was to pacify, to attract to civilised life the barbarian, semi-civilised and wild tribes existing in the country. Another direct result of this law was the complete withdrawal of support for the Catholic Church in its role to ‘civilise’ the indigenous communities, leaving that task exclusive to the state. By 1913 Law 20 ‘On uncultivated and pardoned lands’ was enacted. Its purpose was to bring land tenure into order, apply taxes and stimulate foreign investment, a much needed measure for the public treasure. Article 38 called on citizens and companies devoted to the production of ‘useful items’ or services to file for grants of necessary land for their enterprises. Article 39 reaffirmed the commitment of the state to establish farming colonies making it possible to ‘set apart and demarcate land plots no larger than one thousand hectares’ (Solano Acuña 2019, p.388). These actions were further reiterated by the 25 March Decree 17, which laid down the ‘regulations for the allotment of land for the establishment of farming colonies in all the Republic’, anticipating no fewer than ten thousand colonists. These benefits were

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available to private citizens and colonist firms; lot management was to be undertaken by the municipalities (Solano Acuña 2019, p.390).

4 The Kuna, the Missions, and the ‘New Citizens’ As already noted, on 3 November, 1903, Panama declared its independence from the Colombian state. As that took place the Kuna, mostly concentrated in the San Blas region, saw their territory split asunder, itself becoming a new border. In both Bogotá and Panama City the vulnerabilities of the new frontier were recognised: vast, unprotected and with an indigenous population likely to give access and even assistance to enemy troops seeking to shift the borderline. This vulnerability, added to the fear on both sides that the Kuna might favour the other, led the two governments to implement policies seeking to bring them into ‘civilised’ life, to ‘nationalise’ them and turning them into constituents of use to the homeland. To achieve that, a well-known strategy was put in practice: Catholic missions (see Fig. 1). On the Colombian side the task of evangelising and ‘civilising’ the Kuna was at first entrusted to the Claretian Missionaries, then in charge of the Apostolic Prefecture of Chocó, established in 1908. In 1918, this responsibility was transferred to the order of the Discalced Carmelites, who administered the Apostolic Prefecture of Urabá (1918–1940). On the Panamanian side the first attempt to establish Catholic missions among the Kuna was carried out by Jesuit Leonardo Gassó, who started a mission on the island of Narganá (1907–1912). After the mission closed down and after more than ten years of aggressive colonisation policies in the Kuna territory, which culminated with the Tule Revolution of 1925, the Catholic Church was once again appealed to assist in the effort. This resulted in the creation of the Apostolic Vicariate of Darien in 1925, entrusted to the Claretian Missionaries (Misioneros Claretianos 1939). The practices implemented by the Discalced Carmelites in Gulf of Urabá region, Colombia, as those by the Claretian Missionaries in the area of San Blas, were rather similar in the sense that they focused on the education of children as an instrument for change. Neophytes would first be taught the national language, Spanish, while religious indoctrination of children was considered the first step towards ‘civilised’ life, followed by inculcation of an unconditional love to the homeland. Another fundamental element was the teaching of arithmetic as well as training in trades and ‘modern’ farming techniques, devices expected to ease their future insertion into capitalistic economy as wage earning workers. Thus instructed, neophytes were to return to their homes to preach both the gospel and their new ‘civilised’ ways to their relatives (Misioneros Claretianos 1939). The main function of these practices, besides converting the Kuna into citizens useful to the homeland, was to ‘de-indianise’ their cultural patterns of life and settlement. They were expected to dress as ‘westerners’, abandon their ways of sustenance by inserting themselves into a capitalistic economy under the terms defined by the state, and raise typically Christian families, all of which would entail a fundamental

Fig. 1 Kuna territory, first half of the twentieth century

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change in their social organisation and patterns of settlement. Thus, the first act performed upon those newly arrived to a school or boarding school was to remove their traditional garments, since clothing was considered the identifying mark of the natives’ ‘inferiority’ and ‘semi-savageness’. As these practices were performed, missionaries would also facilitate state encroachment in these remote regions. This would involve ‘taming’ the natives in order to ease access to natural resources that, according to the Claretians, were being seized by them. Thus the missionaries called for the colonisation of these lands, for without the presence of colonists the Kuna territory would remain ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’. To that end it was made necessary to establish towns and build chapels and churches in which the cross and the national flag were the only visible symbols in the land for its inhabitants to identify themselves with. The photographs published by the Claretians in the San Blas region are a good example of how this spatial re-arrangement was understood as a way to set ‘civilisation’ apart from ‘barbarity’. The implementation of the missionary project among communities on both sides of the border led to reduced mobility within these territories. In the long term this resulted in the disruption of the Kuna ethnic territories, perhaps best illustrated by the dissolution of the comarca Tulenega, which had been recognised in 1870. Despite the efforts of both state and religious orders to culturally eradicate them, the Kuna learned how to shift things to their advantage. Through diplomacy, carried out by their leaders and most literate members, educated in western institutions, the Kuna finally received the official territorial designation of comarca in 1953. This materialised as a semi-autonomous political organisation which formally acknowledged the unique aspects of the indigenous society. In the agreement, in exchange for autonomy in cultural, economic and political aspects, the Kuna accepted state involvement in matters regarding territorial sovereignty, security and natural resource use (Martínez Mauri 2011).

5 from Indians to Cholos. Rupture and Continuity in the Guaymí World In this analysis we consider the greater indigenous realm of western Panama, including Chiriquí, Bocas del Toro, Veraguas and the southwestern section of Coclé. In the late nineteenth century the region was made up by a sizable number of scattered kinship groups, interconnected by familial ties, culturally diverse and, in varying degrees, contact with their ‘cultural others’. Within this region Bocas del Toro remained the most remote area since the time of the Spaniards (see Fig. 2). These areas in the far north of the Panamanian territory were represented as dangerous places, lacking in civility and patriotism, rich in terms of exploitable natural resources, vast in quantity and quality of land and with much greater cultural relationship with Costa Rica than with the rest of Panama. It is because of this last

Fig. 2 Guaymí territory, late nineteenth century

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aspect that it was common during the period of union with Colombia, as well as after the independence process, for brigades to be deployed to undermine riots and possible rebellions (Cervera 1884), and for pages to be devoted to reflection on the need to incorporate these territories and their populations as an indispensable requirement for the consolidation of national unity. This is illustrated in a report of 1886 addressed to the Civil and Military Chief of State and the President of the Republic of Colombia, where the concern about the northern border is vehemently exposed, especially for the province of Bocas del Toro. The report states that […] the inhabitants of this very important island have no ties of any kind, nor by tradition, with the rest of Colombia; there our language is replaced by English and if they were ever asked to which nation they would like to belong I am sure they would choose, if not the United States of America, any other nation but Colombia (Secretario de Gobierno en el Despacho de Fomento 1886).

A few years before (1852), Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera (1798–1878), a Colombian military man, diplomat and statesman, described this geographical space as one of the ‘dirtiest and most unhealthy places in the New Granada’; he also indicated that the border with Costa Rica was a place of deep insecurity due to ‘the ambitious pretensions born from the rivalry of the bordering peoples’ (De Mosquera 1852). In stories and reflections similar to De Mosquera’s, the danger of establishing alliances between its inhabitants and indigenous sectors from other parts of Central America such as the Talamancan peoples and the inhabitants of the Miskito Coast, and also with the English, was highlighted. These concerns were much more constant in 1805 and 1806, when attacks and looting of villages were documented in a collaborative manner between Miskito and Guaymí Indians (Audiencia de Panamá 1805, 1806). The inhabitants of western Panama were also represented as ‘semi-civilised and barbarians’, with a population number that was scarce in relation to the immensity of the territories and the wealth of natural resources, resources that were also of great value (and urgency) for the construction of the Nation. In a report by the Prefect of Coclé in 1888, we read his request for the construction of a school in the village of Toabre, which would contribute to ‘improve the social condition of those inhabitants, who are thus deprived of the principles of civilization and progress’ (Prefect of Coclé 1888). Gradually, the representation of the Guaymí population was reaffirmed as scarce in number, which hardly reached two thousand people, possessed a not very complex social and military organisation, and was dedicated almost exclusively to agriculture (Perez 1862, Prefect of Coclé 1888). There were constant comparisons with the indigenous populations of eastern Panama, concluding at times that the Guaymí were less and less indigenous, that they were heirs to a glorious but distant past, that they were ‘mixed’ indigenous people, easy to integrate into the new productive systems, and also the necessary labour for the development and expansion of production and extraction projects in the region. The result of implementing this representation of an eroded indigenous condition was the emergence of a peripheral Indian ‘other’, even poorer, individualised, uprooted from the protection of his community and plundered from his past, thus the cholo was born.

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This representation, built from the spaces of power, was considered an effective tool to make accessible lands that were protected by indigenous legislation. These lands were frequently violated, but the traditional authorities (in the particular case of rey, rei, cacique, governor) had a margin of demand protected by their status as indigenous communities. For example, in 1881 King Juan Roble Montesuma presented a written request for protection to President Rafael Núñez, as he denounced the fact that the ‘white’ Candelarios Rosas, Fausto Coctre, Manuel María Camaños and ten other people were settling among the indigenous families in Tolé; and that they did not recognise his authority, so he requested the presence of twenty to forty soldiers to come and help them defend their farms (Roble Montesuma 1881). Six years later, Victor Espinoza (1887), Governor of the Indians of the province of Coclé, addressed a memorial to the civil governor of the Department of Panama, with the purpose of denouncing the treatment received by the Indians in his government. In his own words, he ‘raises his weak voice to demand protection for the civic life of these Indians, so that they would be allowed to have their own government, which they considered a social necessity. Espinoza defines the population under his administration as ‘semi-civilised Indians’ who had to live with strangers on their land, and who over time claimed more and more land and rights. Coexistence under these conditions became increasingly unsustainable for indigenous families, who were often violated by both civilians and the forces of law and order. Regarding this situation, the Indian governor Venancio Agraje (1897) indicated that ‘the men of the Army who seemed to come to our land charged with hatred against us’. This situation was compounded by a series of taxes on metal and labour, the provision of arms service, road maintenance, prohibition on the use of non-Christian names, the obligation to embrace the Catholic faith and speak Spanish, the duty to conform peoples and collaboration in the construction of public infrastructure. In this complex context, as they lost the possibility of claiming their former lands, part of this population became labourers on the nascent haciendas, poor peddlers of various products, while kinship groups were displaced to farther northern mountainous areas. Thus, the composition of the historical territory was impacted at the beginning of the last century, in part by an administrative definition that limited to a series of features who was indigenous and who had ceased to be; and on the other hand, by the territorial displacement that effectively occurred in a sustained manner throughout the twentieth century as a result of the forms of violence that both the state and the civilian population exerted upon these populations (see Fig. 3).

Fig. 3 Guaymí territory, first half of the twentieth century

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6 Conclusions The nation state that was conceptualised from the Panamanian independence of 1903 carried on with the debate that was widely developed during the period of union with Colombia regarding the integration of the lands adjacent to Costa Rica and those in the Darién. Independent life thus inherited a series of representations on the territory, natural resources, strategic location and populations, which promoted (and justified) administrative, legal and economic mechanisms for a greater presence of the state in these remote places. The revision of the attention given to each of the new national borders allows us to conclude that the civilising and integrating project adapted its intervention plan taking into account the cultural characteristics of the communities, that is, that there was no unitary project. In terms of the debate on the indigenous communities, independence also brought no major break with what had been promoted in Colombia for the attention of these sectors of the population. In other words, independent Panama continued not only to apply some of the mechanisms, such as the introduction of religious orders in the case of the Darién, but also to extend the imaginaries in the new laws aimed at addressing the indigenous problem. It is in the experience of the Guaymí people that there is a greater variety of mechanisms for the integration of the indigenous population and the incorporation of their territories. In this experience, the representation of the indigenous people by the political, economic and intellectual elites not only justified their integration by their ‘barbarism’ but also to create the conditions for the appearance of poor peasants to farm the land for the new owners (companies, Colombian families, Panamanian or European families).

References Bushnell D (2007) Colombia Una nación a pesar de sí misma. Nuestra historia desde los tiempos precolombinos hasta hoy. Planeta Colombiana, Bogota Claretianos M (1939) Memoria del Vicariato Apostólico del Darién (República de Panamá). Imprenta Acción Católica, Panama De Mosquera, TC (1852) Memoria sobre la geografía, física y política de la Nueva Granada, Imprenta SW. Benedict, New York Díaz-Baiges D (2018) Convertir para Dios y transformar para la Patria. Doctoral thesis. Universidad de Barcelona, Barcelona González-Escobar LF (2003) Nación cuna, secesión y reintegración de Panamá. Una historia olvidada. Paper presented at the “De país en país ‘polifonías caribeñas’ ” symposium. Universidad de los Andes, Medellín. Accessed 4 March 2003 González-Escobar LF (2011) El Darién. Ocupación, poblamiento y transformación ambiental. Una revisión histórica, parte I. Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano, Medellín Guzmán A (2004) Victoriano Lorenzo, epílogo de una confrontación político-social y proemio de un devenir diplomático vergonzoso. In: Bonilla H, Montañez G (eds) Colombia y Panamá. La metamorfosis de la nación en el siglo XX. Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota

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Langebaek-Rueda C, Robledo-Escobar N (2014) Utopías ajenas: evolucionismo, indios e indigenistas. Universidad de los Andes, Bogota Le Grand C (1988) Colonización y protesta campesina en Colombia. Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota Martínez-Mauri M (2011) La autonomía indígena en Panamá: la experiencia del pueblo kuna (siglos XVI-XXI). Abya-Yala, Quito Pérez F (1862) Jeografía física i politica del Estado de Panama, escrita de orden del gobierno jeneral, Imprenta de la Nación, Bogota Pineda Camacho R (2004) La política indigenista entre 1886 y 1991. Estados y Pueblos indígenas en el siglo XX. Revista Credencial Historia no. 146. http://www.banrepcultural.org (Consultado el 10/02/2011) Pizzurdo Gelós, Patricia y Arauz, Celestino, Estudios sobre el Panamá Republicano (1903–1989) (1996). Editorial Manfer, Bogota Pizzurdo-Gelós P (2011) Memorias e imaginarios de raza e identidad e Panamá en los siglos XIX y XX. Mariano Arosemana, Panamá Restrepo N (2006) La iglesia católica y el estado colombiano, construcción conjunta de una nacionalidad en el sur del país. Revista Tabula Rasa 5:151–165 Sandner G (1984) Estructuración espacio político-geográfica y la geopolítica en la Región Caribe. Revista geográfica de América Central, 13–14:41–66 Santa-Teresa S (1956) Historia documentada de la iglesia en Urabá y el Darién: desde el descubrimiento hasta nuestros días, vol 5. Empresa Nacional de Publicaciones, Bogota Solano-Acuña AS (2019) Imágenes de la memoria y el poder. Los Guaymí del occidente de Panamá en la conformación del Estado Nacional (1880–1925). Doctoral thesis, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla Zapata F (1871) Memoria del Secretario de lo Interior i Relaciones Esteriores al congreso de Colombia. Imprenta de Medardo Rivas, Bogota

Official Documentation AGI, Audiencia de Panamá (1805–1806) Invasión de indios guamíes y mosquitos, PANAMA, 294 ANP, Período Colombiano (1881) Juan Roble Montesuma, indígena libre presenta queja al Presidente de la República por el trato a los Guamí, Tomo 2700, Folio 74 ANP, Período Colombiano (1884) Carta de Dámaso Cervera a los Ciudadanos Diputados informando que en la Provincia de Chiriquí se han dado levantamientos de istmeños en asociación con colombianos y otros extranjeros, Tomo 2776 ANP, Período Colombiano (1886) Informe al Secretario de Gobierno en el Despacho de Fomento, para reconocimiento del señor Jefe Civil y Militar del Estado y de su excelencia el señor Presidente la de República de Colombia sobre la desvinculación que tienen Bocas del Toro de Colombia, Tomo 2805, Folio 132 ANP, Período Colombiano (1887) Panamá, Comunicación de Víctor Espinosa titulado Gobernador de la provincia de Coclé en el que se queja de los atropellos de que son víctimas los indios, por parte de algunas autoridades subalternas y por particulares, Documentación suelta ANP, Período Colombiano (1888) Informe del Señor Prefecto de la Provincia de Coclé al Gobernador del Departamento de Panamá sobre administración gubernativa, judicial e instrucción pública, Tomo 2666, Folio 43–49 ANP, Período Colombiano (1897) Carta del Gobernador de Indios de Penonomé Venancio Agraje, Tomo 2965, Folio 128–12 Concordato celebrado entre la Santa Sede y la República de Colombia 1887

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Gaceta de Panamá, Panamá-Panamá, Ley 19 por la cual se determina la manera como deben ser gobernados los indígenas de la provincia de Coclé, 6 de noviembre de 1906 Gaceta de Panamá, Panamá-Panamá, Ley 56 sobre civilización de indígenas, 28 de diciembre de 1912

Ana Sofía Solano Acuña Associate researcher, Colegio de América, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain. Ana Sofía Solano Acuña is a social anthropologist from Costa Rica. She has a Master’s degree in History of Latin America-Indigenous Worlds and a Ph.D. in History and Humanistic Studies. David Díaz Baiges Associate researcher, Instituto de Estudios Sociales en Población, Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica. David Díaz Baiges has a Ph.D. in Society and Culture: History, Anthropology, Arts and Patrimony with a specialisation in History of the Americas from the Universitat de Barcelona. He is currently an associate researcher in the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica and a collaborating professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

‘They Destroy Everything:’ Racialising Discourses, Environmental Conservation Narratives, and Territorial Belonging in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve Nora Sylvander Abstract This chapter analyses racializing and environmental discourses in producing belonging and displacement in Nicaragua’s indigenous territories from the perspective of non-indigenous peasants. I suggest that these discourses work to construct a seemingly homogeneous non-indigenous, or mestizo, category that conceals crucial intragroup differences in power, spatialities, and environmental behaviour. Hence, they authorize the removal of mestizo peasants through the saneamiento territorial (‘territorial cleansing’) policy, while ignoring broader political-economic drivers that territorialize space in indigenous territories. Although envisioned as an emancipatory mechanism to improve indigenous territorial security, saneamiento is unlikely to resolve territorial conflicts in the long term. Keywords Environmental Conservation · Racialized Discourses · Nicaragua · Saneamiento Territorial · Territorial Conflicts

1 Introduction This chapter focuses on the ways in which racializing and environmental conservation narratives intersect and shape territorial legitimacy in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. It suggests that these discourses play a crucial role in configuring and reconfiguring territories, as they produce and reproduce criteria of belonging that mask complex realities at the local level. It emphasizes particularly how non-indigenous peasants, labelled as mestizos (‘mixed race’), become envisioned as outsiders and as culprits for the increasing ‘inter-ethnic’ territorial conflicts in Nicaragua’s indigenous territories, despite the long and convoluted political-economic and historical factors that explain their presence in these territories. A lot of analytical work has focussed on how indigenous people become constructed as subjects through racializing and environmental conservation N. Sylvander (B) Department of Geography and Environment, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. K. McCall et al. (eds.), Territorialising Space in Latin America, The Latin American Studies Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82222-4_15

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discourses that affect indigenous territorial claims (e.g., Hale 2002; Mollett 2011; Sundberg 2004; Ybarra 2017). Yet, few analysts have looked at the impacts of these narratives on the ‘non-indigenous’ mestizo category that is still largely understood as ‘unmarked.’ In this chapter, drawing on literature in political ecology (conservation narratives and territorialization) and cultural politics (neoliberal multiculturalism and mestizaje), as well as my ethnographic fieldwork in Nicaragua, I suggest that mestizo peasants residing in indigenous territories are not untouched by environmental conservation and racializing discourses either. Instead, it is these discourses that render them as ‘not-belonging’ to Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, and lead to their political and physical displacement through Nicaragua’s ‘saneamiento territorial’ (‘territorial cleansing’) policy. Saneamiento has, in practice, come to mean the eviction of mestizo peasants from indigenous territories, and it is justified by the labelling of these peasants as (1) out of place, and (2) environmentally unsustainable, creating a mestizo-indigenous binary. The chapter suggests that environmental conservation and racializing discourses do not act only as a mechanism of differentiation between the seemingly irreconcilable categories of ‘indigenous’ and ‘mestizo.’ Perhaps more importantly, they also work as a tool of homogenization, establishing ‘mestizos’ as a black-boxed, seemingly coherent group of people, which conceals crucial intragroup differences in political-economic power, spatialities, and environmental behaviour. Consequently, these discourses simultaneously create and uncreate differences, in territorializing space. This division of people into separate, homogenous groups is a well-known mechanism to render them more legible and amenable for state control and territorialization (Hale 2002; Mollett 2014). The research finds that, although envisioned as an emancipatory mechanism to improve indigenous territorial security, saneamiento is based on problematic assumptions of ethnic and environmental identity and belonging. Thus, it is unlikely to resolve territorial conflicts in the long term; instead, it may further exacerbate these conflicts. The structure of this chapter is as follows. The following section provides background information that situates the analysis contextually. Thereafter, it highlights the ways in which the construction of mestizos as a homogenous group justifies the exclusion of mestizo peasants on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, while leaving more powerful mestizo actors relatively intact. Finally, it discusses the role of environmental conservation discourses in further reinforcing the indigenous-mestizo dichotomy, showing that the envisioning of all mestizos as ‘unsustainable’ further legitimizes the removal of mestizo peasants from indigenous territories, especially because they double as conservation areas.

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2 Background 2.1 Territorial Conflicts in Nicaragua Territorial conflicts between indigenous and non-indigenous people appear to be increasing in Nicaragua’s indigenous territories, as elsewhere in Latin America. In Nicaragua, these conflicts have taken a violent turn and have led to multiple deaths on both sides (e.g., Galanova 2017; Lopez 2020). These conflicts have received a reasonable amount of attention from academics and the media, as analysts are— rightfully—concerned about the right of indigenous people to maintain and control their territories. These accounts generally blame mestizo peasants for the conflicts—they are said to invade indigenous territories in search of land and ways to capitalize on the natural resources located in these territories (e.g., Galanova 2017; Parker 2016). Mestizo migrants are portrayed as relatively powerful actors, and they are said to invade land under the auspices of Sandinista government officials to practice cattle ranching and land speculation. Consequently, mestizo migration is effectively conceptualized as a new instance of colonization of indigenous territories (Downs 2015; Herlihy 2016). At the same time, mestizo migrants are also envisioned as destroyers of the environment. This is true particularly in the areas that are rich in natural resources, such as my research site, the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. There, deforestation and environmental degradation are to a large extent attributed to the ‘unsustainable’ practices of mestizos, particularly cattle ranching and shifting cultivation. These management practices are then discursively contrasted to the benign, sustainable methods of indigenous people (e.g., Parker 2016; Stocks et al. 2007). Consequently, the colonization of indigenous territories is framed both as a human right and an environmental conservation problem, and saneamiento is urgently called for. ‘They [mestizos] destroy everything,’ as a development worker based in Managua told me. I fully share the preoccupation related to the colonization of indigenous territories in Nicaragua. Yet, what I find problematic about the predominant narrative blaming mestizo migrants for the conflicts is how it renders these disputes apolitical—as local clashes between two incompatible groups of people. It pays no attention to the underlying political-economic drivers and histories of violent elite-led territorialization in indigenous territories in Nicaragua and beyond (e.g., Finley-Brook and Offen 2009). Nor does it critically scrutinize how racializing and environmental conservation discourses have played a role in territorial adjudication. In this chapter, then, the focus is on the often-flawed assumptions that these narratives make about the contemporary mestizo peasants residing at the agricultural frontier of Nicaragua.

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2.2 Indigenous Territories in Nicaragua The establishment and legalization of indigenous territories in Nicaragua have received much attention from scholars (e.g., Baracco and González 2016; FinleyBrook and Offen 2009). Thus, this chapter will only briefly outline the key stages of the process. Nicaragua was historically divided into the Caribbean and Pacific Coasts. While the Pacific Coast was colonized by the Spanish, on the Caribbean Coast, British and later North American influences were dominant. After the forceful incorporation of the Caribbean Coast into Nicaragua in 1894, the Nicaraguan state became increasingly interested in the area’s natural resources, many of which were located in areas traditionally inhabited by indigenous people (Vilas 1989). Despite the HarrisonAltamirano treaty, drafted in 1905, that gave indigenous communities basic rights to their territories, those rights were continuously violated by the Nicaraguan state as well as by foreign enclave industries (Mairena et al. 2014). In 1987, the Caribbean Coast was legally recognized as autonomous, and Northern and Southern Caribbean Autonomous Regions were established (Baracco and González 2016). Yet, the Autonomy Statute’s implementing regulations did not come into force until 2003, when the Communal Lands Law 445 was created (Mairena et al. 2014). Law 445 specifies five steps to demarcate indigenous territories: (1) presentation of the solicitation to demarcate and title communal territory; (2) conflict resolution; (3) measurement and marking of community boundaries; (4) titling; and (5) saneamiento. The implementation has been slow, however, and while almost all indigenous territories have been titled, most are awaiting the completion of the last stage of the process, saneamiento, or the removal of unlawful claimants (see Finley-Brook and Offen 2009; Sylvander 2018).

2.3 Study Area and Methods Bosawas was first established as a protected area in 1991 and further converted into a Biosphere Reserve in 1997 (Staver et al. 2007). It consists of a core area of 7,441 ha and a buffer zone of approximately 12,000 ha. There are altogether seven indigenous territories in the reserve, mainly located within the core area. Mestizo settlements are concentrated in the buffer zone, although there is evidence that core areas are also being colonized (pers. comm., 2018). This research focuses specifically on analysing the dynamics of territorial conflicts in an indigenous Mayangna territory in Bosawas—Mayangna Sauni Bas. There, territorial colonization is an urgent problem, and it is estimated that the number of mestizos already supersedes the number of Mayangna inhabitants (Kräuter et al., n.d.).

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The chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the area between 2014 and 2018. I conducted semi-structured, in-depth, and focus group interviews and participant observation with the Mayangna and mestizos residing in the area, as well as interviews with conservation and development practitioners, government officials, and academics familiar with the zone and territorial conflicts. Moreover, I had access to census data collected by the German Cooperation Agency GIZ on mestizo settlers in Mayangna Sauni Bas in 2007 and 2010. I also draw from my experiences as a development worker in the area between 2012 and 2014.

3 Racialized Logics of Territorial Exclusion 3.1 Mestizaje and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Constructing Mestizos as Not-Belonging This section draws on literature in mestizaje and neoliberal multiculturalism to analyse how mestizos, as a collective, become conceptualized as outsiders in Bosawas, based on their ethnicity as non-indigenous. It then contrasts these constructions and narratives with the actual lived experiences of mestizo peasants, showing (1) that many of them originate from the area where they are now labelled as migrants, and (2) many of the actual peasant migrants were resettled in the area as a result of the territorializing policies of the Nicaraguan state and thereafter abandoned. In particular, this section highlights the need to ‘unpack’ mestizo as a seemingly unracialized and unmarked category (see de la Cadena 2005; Field 1998). The dominant portrayal of mestizo settlers in Nicaragua’s indigenous territories suggests that the settlers, due to their mestizo ethnicity, automatically come to occupy positions of power and privilege—as mentioned above, they are envisioned as largescale cattle ranchers, or as having close ties to the government (Herlihy 2016; Parker 2016). While such actors are, of course, present in Nicaragua’s indigenous territories, this research shows that, at the same time, these indigenous territories also host a number of the very poorest peasants in Nicaragua. Literature on mestizaje has suggested that the idea of ‘racial mixing’ had an essential role in the nation-building projects in many countries of Latin America. The aim was to construct a strong, mixed national identity free of colonial labels that all citizens would adopt (Field 1998; Gould 1998). Obviously, this idea blatantly violated indigenous rights by aiming to erase indigenous identities. As Gould (1998) has suggested, mestizaje was never complete; it was faced with strong indigenous resistance, which has led him to call it merely a myth. Yet, less work has focussed on the impact of mestizaje on mestizo identities (but see de la Cadena 2005; Field 1998). Generally, mestizaje aimed at producing an unmarked, homogenous mestizo identity that became the dominant ethnicity in many countries, including Nicaragua (Gould 1998; Vilas 1989). This mestizo is discursively

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established as powerful (Gurdián 2004), something that can be observed in the narratives surrounding land conflicts in Nicaragua, which often draw parallels to the earlier histories of colonization of indigenous territories, as mentioned above. The dominant discourse on mestizaje and the historical separation of the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua furthermore frame the Pacific Coast as an area, where mestizaje was close to complete, and the Caribbean Coast as a space that was largely out of the reach of the project (Field 1998). Hence, in Nicaragua, there is a stark discursive division between the ‘mestizo’ Pacific Coast and the ‘indigenous’ Caribbean Coast. This framing has invisibilised indigenous identities on the Pacific Coast (Gould 1998). At the same time, it leaves little space to understand the identity of those mestizos who are incompatible with the powerful and privileged image of a mestizo belonging to the Pacific Coast—that is, the mestizo peasants on the Caribbean Coast. Paradoxically, the emergence of the so-called neoliberal multiculturalism did little to visibilise these ‘unfitting’ mestizo identities. As Hale (2002) has suggested, neoliberal multiculturalism recognizes indigenous rights and identities to the extent that they are compatible with the neoliberal goals of the state. At the same time, it works to further highlight the separation of ‘indigenous’ from ‘mestizo.’ There is a lot of literature analysing the adverse impacts of neoliberal multiculturalism on indigenous people, showing, e.g., that it works to further subsume them into the capitalist political-economic structures, exacerbating intra- and intercommunity inequalities (Hippert 2011; Mollett 2011). I suggest that the mestizo identity also has not been outside of the racializing effects of neoliberal multiculturalism. As ‘mestizo’ becomes ever more firmly separated from its ‘indigenous’ counterpart to which it is contrasted, ‘mestizo’ as a category becomes further consolidated. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to scrutinize the internal differences within this group. Again, as the colonization narrative rightfully highlights the violations against indigenous territorial rights by ‘mestizos,’ it further reinforces the imaginaries of disputes between ‘powerless, rooted’ indigenous and ‘powerful, migrant’ mestizos, which obscures the differentiated lived realities within the ‘mestizo’ category. These narratives then, potently justify the efforts to territorialize space in ways which exclude all non-indigenous claimants, e.g., through saneamiento. In doing so, they mask the complex power structures, identities, and overlapping claims to land. Again, this is not to deny the violence and injustice inherent to the colonization of indigenous territories. Rather, this is a call for more nuanced accounts of this colonization and territorialization in indigenous spaces.

3.2 Experiences of Mestizo Settlers 3.2.1

The Internal Heterogeneity of the Mestizo Category

The experiences and lived realities of the mestizo peasants I interviewed in the Bosawas area challenge the idea of an inherently powerful mestizo identity that

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is reproduced by the media and, to some extent, academic literature. Many of my interviewees were poor peasants, and they had been commonly subjected to the territorialization efforts of the state and elites: they had often been displaced from, or found it hard to make ends meet in, their area of origin, which is why they had acquired land in the indigenous territories of Bosawas. The dual status of these lands—as part of an indigenous territory and a reserve—means that all land sales are illegal, but they nevertheless take place (see Finley-Brook and Offen 2009). Due to the precarious status of land ownership and the inability to obtain official titles, land in the Bosawas area is among the cheapest in Nicaragua, as the people I interviewed repeatedly told me. This is an opportunity for unscrupulous land speculators to illegally capitalize on indigenous land: No, there are large investments here already… There are people with money inside. (A mestizo leader)

At the same time, this can also be the only possibility for marginalized peasants to acquire land. Many of them had heard about the availability of affordable land from their contacts that had previously moved to the area. As one of the mestizo settlers said: ‘My neighbour had come here before, and he told me about a [cheap] piece of land.’ A development officer added: So, the best way to buy cheap land is by going to Bosawas, because of the conditions... There is no road… no productive structures… no water, no electricity, there’s nothing, so those are the cheapest lands.

My fieldwork revealed these precarious conditions in which many peasants live. As the quote above suggests, they lack access to basic services and infrastructure. The living conditions stand in stark contrast to the idea of wealthy mestizo settlers— the vast majority have dirt floors and no electricity (although small solar panels are not rare). The settlements can only be reached by mule or foot, and the paths are muddy and steep. Functioning schools are uncommon, and the closest healthcare facilities are hours away. As the residents in one village told me, the children had not attended classes in more than three years, because they had not received any support from the Ministry of Education, and there were no teachers. While there were schools in a few communities, many stated that they could not afford to send their children to school. Therefore, feelings of resentment were commonplace: ‘The institutions have abandoned us’ (a mestizo peasant). In addition to actual evictions through saneamiento, mestizo peasants are thus subjected to territorialization in the form of what Mollett (2014) calls ‘displacement in place,’ i.e., they receive little support from the institutions of the government. At the same time, physical displacement is not uncommon either. Saneamiento has started in Bosawas, as the natural resources in the area are of interest to the state. Hence, many pointed to the fact that they were living in constant fear of being evicted. Saneamiento efforts are generally carried out by the ‘Ecological Battalion’ (Batallón Ecológico, or BECO), an army unit, the purpose of which is, e.g., to protect natural resources in Bosawas. A group of peasants who were currently waiting to see what measures were to be taken to resolve the situation told me that they had abandoned

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their village after BECO had come by and threatened them with evictions, burning some of the settlements down. The fear of eviction has also led to further property sales. As a mestizo leader told me: …The first ones who were [here] left, they sold. Why? Because they were afraid of the repression… that they will evict them…

At the same time, there are crucial differences in the ability of ‘mestizos’ to claim space in the indigenous territories in Bosawas. Obviously, in addition to small-scale peasants, there are actors with considerable political-economic power present in the reserve. Thus, the research highlights the importance to account for these differences when analysing how indigenous space becomes territorialized and claimed by mestizos. A concrete way to look at these differentiated territorializing impacts is to analyse the distribution of land holdings in the reserve, based on data collected by GIZ in 2010. While the amount of land occupied by mestizos has increased in recent years, the distribution still follows similar patterns: land ownership among mestizo claimants is highly unequal (pers. obs., 2018). The 10% of the settlers with the most land claimed almost 45% of all holdings of mestizos in Mayangna Sauni Bas in 2010, whereas the bottom 50% only claimed 8%. This observation clearly shows that there are crucial differences in how ‘mestizos’ come to possess the land, i.e., they are not a homogeneous group. At the same time, some peasants merely take care of a land plot for someone else (pers. obs., 2018). Hence, marginalized mestizo peasants are used as a vehicle for the territorialization efforts of the landowning class. What is important here is that, while arguably those with more land have a more significant role in the colonization of indigenous territories, it is nevertheless the poor peasants who are the most likely to become evicted through saneamiento (pers. obs., 2018). Those with more land generally have more bargaining power—many of them have connections to political and economic elites—and, thus, they are often able to negotiate and maintain their landholdings. The poorest peasants, on the other hand, are the easiest to evict. Similarly, while several mestizos have been brought to court and sentenced for land sales in the Bosawas area, they have generally sold relatively small pieces of land, whereas those possessing the most land are left intact.

3.2.2

Belonging on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua

The migrant-as-culprit discourse also masks the differentiated places of origin of the mestizo settlers in Mayangna Sauni Bas. The dominant narratives suggest that most settlers originate from the Pacific Coast and that they have arrived in the Bosawas area recently. Yet, the data from GIZ show that in 2010, most (75.5%) of the settlers reported that they were from the same North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, where Mayangna Sauni Bas is located—often from the closest municipality, Siuna (55.7%). Similarly, a professor at a local university said: ‘[T]hey are not outsiders, they’re people from here, and they know where the lands are.’ Yet, their ethnic identity as mestizo renders them as discursively out of place on the Caribbean Coast.

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It is important to consider that many settlers arrived in the area as a result of territorializing policies of the Nicaraguan state. It is well known that racist and colonial imaginaries have discursively rendered indigenous territories as national lands in many parts of Latin America (Hale 2011). Nicaragua is not an exception, and the state has a history of egregious violations of indigenous territorial rights (Finley-Brook and Offen 2009; Vilas 1989). Bosawas, particularly due to its status as a reserve, is still envisioned by the state and the settlers as national land, despite the fact that the indigenous territories in the area have official titles: ‘The zone where [my land] title is… patrimony of the state [because it is a reserve]’ (a mestizo peasant). This framing also explains why the state has resettled a large number of peasants and ex-combatants in the area through official resettlement projects (Vilas 1989). As a result of export-oriented agriculture and the consolidation of agricultural land on the Pacific Coast, many peasants became displaced from their lands during the dictator Somoza era, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The Nicaraguan state resettled them at the agricultural frontier, including the Bosawas area (Mendoza and Kuhnekath 2005). Many of the settlers that I interviewed suggested that they had arrived in the area after the 1980s civil war. At this point the state gave land to ex-troops as an effort to appease them, paying little attention to the fact that many of these lands were located within indigenous territories (Pineda 2006). As a Nicaraguan professor told me: ‘Everything was resolved by giving [people] land.’ Yet, after these resettlement projects, the combatants were largely left on their own, without access to basic services or infrastructure. As a result, many ended up selling their land plots, which some say started the land sales on the Caribbean Coast (pers. comm., 2018). Hence, mestizo peasants and troops have been used by both the state and land speculators to advance their territorializing efforts. Again, this is not to say that there are no new, powerful settlers arriving in the area—there certainly are, as the violent outbursts and the large land plots consolidated by certain actors show. Yet, what is problematic is that saneamiento, as a mechanism, is unable to differentiate between types of ‘mestizo’ actors. Thus, it may indirectly facilitate the territorialization efforts of the elites.

4 Environmental Logics of Territorial Exclusion 4.1 Environmental Conservation Narratives I suggest that the indigenous/mestizo binary and the internal consolidation of a ‘mestizo identity’ are further reinforced by environmental conservation narratives that pit ‘sustainable’ indigenous communities and ‘unsustainable’ non-indigenous populations against each other. As mentioned, this distinction is prevalent in the narratives written about territorial conflicts in Nicaragua; multiple accounts attest to the perceived destruction that mestizo migrants cause in Bosawas (e.g., Parker 2016; Stocks et al. 2007).

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Therefore, the colonization of indigenous territories has become a conservation issue. Environmental devastation is frequently cited as a justification to carry out saneamiento, i.e., to evict mestizo settlers. In fact, this is the main reason why several conservation organizations have incorporated saneamiento into their agenda, and the process has started in areas of high conservation value, including Bosawas (see FCPF 2013; Martínez and Ramírez 2013). Moreover, in the cases where settlers have been taken to court and sentenced, this has generally been done based on their alleged participation in land conversion and deforestation. The fact that they have violated indigenous territorial rights remains secondary (pers. obs., 2018; Sylvander 2021). Environmental conservation discourses blaming local people for environmental destruction have, for long, justified the territorializing efforts of the state in indigenous territories and in areas traditionally managed by local communities (Mollett and Kepe 2018). Yet, with the neoliberalisation of environmental governance, the framing of local people in these discourses has changed: now, local people are often incorporated in conservation efforts and their role in the sustainable management of natural resources is emphasized (Dove 2006). Specifically, certain indigenous groups that manage to perform an ‘authentic,’ sustainable indigenous identity become embraced by these narratives. Moreover, there is a large body of literature focussing on the exclusion of those indigenous groups that do not fit the ‘tribal slot’ from conservation schemes (Li 2000; Hippert 2011; Sundberg 2004; Ybarra 2017). I suggest that similarly, these discourses tend to exclude other, ‘unmarked’ peasant groups, i.e., in the context of Nicaragua, mestizos. In so doing, this further works to naturalize the indigenous-mestizo boundary through explaining the inherent (non-) sustainability of actors by their ethnic identity. This territorializes space by further rendering mestizo peasants as outsiders and notbelonging in areas that are rich in biodiversity, such as Bosawas. This framing acts as a further justification for their eviction, reproducing earlier conservation paradigms based on a human/environment dualism and the eviction of people from conservation spaces (see Mollett and Kepe 2018). In the next section, the aim is to complicate the straightforward correlation between ethnicity and environmental behaviour. While scholars have exhaustively done this in the context of indigenous identities, the differentiated environmental motivations and practices among the ‘non-indigenous’ remain largely unpacked.

4.2 Experiences of Mestizo Settlers Again, the experiences of the mestizo peasants interviewed in the research area challenge the naturalized correlation between ethnic identity and environmental behaviour prevalent in the narratives that frame the colonization of indigenous territories as a question of gaining access to natural resources and environmental destruction.

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These narratives ignore the differentiated environmental impact of the settlers, as well as the deeply rooted political-economic drivers of deforestation in the Bosawas area. The experts and mestizo and indigenous community members that I interviewed repeatedly pointed to how the extractivist practices of foreign enclave industries and different Nicaraguan governments have played a key role in the degradation of natural resources in the area (see, e.g., Finley-Brook and Offen 2009; Mendoza and Kuhnekath 2005). I was told how corrupt state officials continue to grant logging and mining concessions in the reserve and turn a blind eye to the timber trucks that leave the area almost daily. This is not to say that, e.g., cattle ranching practiced by some settlers is not an important driver of deforestation in the Bosawas area. Inexpensive land and the lack of presence of authorities make it relatively easy and affordable to establish and maintain large pastures. That said, there are striking differences in how settlers manage their land plots: As you know, the colonos, land-grabbers, we don’t all act in the same way… Some want to damage, others to contribute. Some of us are protecting the forest, others aren’t… (a mestizo leader).

The mestizo peasants that I interviewed asserted that they were aware of the importance of conserving forests, particularly along the rivers. Many of them had bought the land parcel where they were living and proclaimed that they had not converted further areas of forest into pasture: Ever since we bought [the land] here, we have not cleared even one manzana [0.7 ha]. Socolas [clearings], we have maintained what was already there. The first [owner], I think yes [cleared], because he bought all this here.

While some of them had many cows (e.g., one of the former political leaders who had settled in the reserve), many only had a few or none. This is in line with observations from the census data that show that in 2010, 58% of the settlers in Mayangna Sauni Bas had no cows. The 10% with the most cows, on the other hand, had in total 76% of all the cows. Unsurprisingly, cattle ownership was highly correlated with the amount of land that these settlers possessed. This contradicts the portrayal of all mestizo settlers as powerful cattle ranchers, as well as the idea of cattle ranching as an inherent, integral part of a so-called ‘mestizo’ culture, as is reproduced in academic literature and the media. Instead, cattle ownership is highly dependent on economic resources. Saneamiento has done little to target these large-scale cattle ranchers and landowners. As they maintain close ties with the government—and often with indigenous leaders—they practically enjoy impunity, despite their higher territorial and environmental impact in indigenous spaces. Hence, saneamiento, as it is currently implemented, is unlikely to resolve the issues that lead to the appropriation of indigenous territories and the conversion of forests into pasture.

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5 Conclusions This chapter has called for more nuanced understandings of ‘inter-ethnic’ conflicts and the role of narratives in shaping belonging and territorial inclusion/exclusion in the context of Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. This is important, as these narratives mask the broader drivers of the colonization of indigenous territories in the area. This colonization has taken a violent turn and is severely compromising not only indigenous rights but also indigenous lives (Galanova 2017; Lopez 2020). The chapter argues that the dominant understandings of ‘mestizo’ identity stem from both racializing and environmental conservation discourses: these establish an indigenous-mestizo binary, whereby mestizos, as a collective category, become rendered as inherently environmentally unsustainable and out of place in biodiverse areas. As shown, this discourse pays little attention to the differentiated power, origins, and environmental behaviours within the ‘mestizo’ category. Consequently, these narratives work to territorialize space and facilitate state and elite usurpation of indigenous territories and the natural resources located in them. They attribute territorial conflicts in indigenous territories to marginalized mestizo peasants—who have for long been used as a tool for territorialization by both the Nicaraguan state and political-economic elites—justifying yet another instance of their displacement through ‘saneamiento.’ By blaming a collective ‘mestizo’ subject, colonization narratives conveniently conceal crucial power and spatial differences within the assumed ‘mestizo’ category and divert attention from the state- and elite-led ‘mestizo’ extractivism and appropriation of space in indigenous territories. Mestizo peasants are the easiest to remove, and their eviction gives the impression that something is being done to resolve the situation—even as their removal leaves the actual territorializing drivers and actors intact. Therefore, saneamiento territorial, or the eviction of mestizo peasants, as it is currently envisioned, is unlikely to address the colonization of indigenous territories in the long term. This compromises its ability to improve indigenous territorial security. While the findings of this chapter are specific to the case of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve in Nicaragua, I suggest that they may have broader implications. I hope that this chapter serves to open a conversation on the ‘non-indigenous’ identity, which to date has remained largely black-boxed in the cultural politics/political ecology literature. Unpacking this category helps move away from blaming migrants for territorial conflicts and instead tease out the underlying dynamics of these disputes, as they are driven by the territorial ambitions of the state and elites.

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Nora Sylvander Fellow in Environment, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, London, UK. Nora Sylvander is a human-environment geographer interested in territorial conflicts, environmental conservation and governance, and racialization in Latin America. Her research focuses on territorial and natural resource disputes between indigenous communities and non-indigenous migrants in Nicaragua. She also studies the political ecology of migration and market-based conservation mechanisms in Ecuador.