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California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider groundwater overdraft as a vertical frontier. Thinking with water as an analytic, we study the nexus of relationships that inscribe settler water infrastructures as normative, demonstrating their role as frontier processes within a settler colonial present. Our analysis shows the necessity of dismantling settler modes of sustainability and centering and supporting Indigenous sovereignty.
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Conceptualizing Settler Colonialism in Nicaragua
A growing body of literature has argued for the reconceptualization of Latin America as a settler colony. Contrary to the self-proclaimed decolonization of Latin American states upon their independence two centuries ago, the settlers who came to Latin America stayed and preserved the structure of settler colonialism to the present day. This article analyzes the case of Nicaragua through the conceptual frame of settler colonialism and examines an apt case study: the Indigenous and Afrodescendant communities of the Rama-Kriol Territory in southeastern Nicaragua, where I have conducted activist ethnographic research since 2014. The ongoing colonization of the Rama-Kriol Territory exhibits not only failures of the state to enforce legal protections of multicultural rights, but also the extension of a colonial logic of dispossession and elimination. The case of the Rama-Kriol Territory demonstrates the entanglements of Nicaraguan settler colonialism with international institutions, development banks, multinational corporations, and settler colonial projects around the world. I conclude that social science researchers should attend to continuing and emergent forms of Indigenous sovereignty in Nicaragua. Amid the fading backdrop of liberal multiculturalism in Latin America, these assertions of sovereignty pose a political horizon of decolonization and an end to settler violence, dispossession, and domination.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1918424
- PAR ID:
- 10249252
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Urban anthropology and studies of cultural systems and world economic development
- Volume:
- 49
- Issue:
- 3-4
- ISSN:
- 0894-6019
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 195 - 245
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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