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Recently completed doctorates in social and cultural geography

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of conservation efforts in Mexico City, where in 2000, the city legislated a soil and water conservation plan in its rural areas. During 12 months of field work in the village of San Luis Tlaxialtemalco I focused on how the conservation plan was to be established in the wetlands with chinampa agriculture, directly above one of the city’s freshwater reservoirs. I examined the negotiations of the conservation plan on three social scales and I looked at the intersecting axes of power and the knowledge of various actors, and how they inform conservation. On the scale of the state, a discursive analysis of the ‘coloniality of power’ of the conservation plan uncovers the city government’s underlying assumptions about how the farmers’ land use practices and social organization contribute to the conservation effort. Secondly, in San Luis Tlaxialtemalco I examine ideas of ‘community’ by documenting how the conservation plan affected local power relations. Analysing the dynamics among chinampero farmers in their meetings, I examined the alliances in and the ‘voice’ of the village. The third scale of analysis concerns women’s knowledge and voice, via semi-structured interviews and participant observation in farmer women’s everyday lives in San Luis. By looking at the micropolitics of conservation, my research provides cultural understanding of how at different scales decisions that affect ecology are made and how they are articulated through cultural idioms in the charged context of the conservation plan.