PROGRAM – Conference of Latin American Geography 2026
Puerto Vallarta
January 6-9, 2026
This preliminary program is subject to change, please check back before the conference begins.
Tuesday January 6th
where: Rooftop Bar at the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf – map
Come by to see old friends and make new ones.
Come by to see old friends and make new ones.
Wednesday January 7th
where: Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf – map
Two shuttles will leave from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf to CUCOSTA in the morning. The first will leave at 8:00 am and the second at 8:15 am. (*these are the only free shuttles to the conference site for the day. If you can, please take the early shuttle to ensure there is enough space for everyone.)
Two shuttles will leave from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf to CUCOSTA in the morning. The first will leave at 8:00 am and the second at 8:15 am. (*these are the only free shuttles to the conference site for the day. If you can, please take the early shuttle to ensure there is enough space for everyone.)
Register for the conference, get your name tag and meal tickets.
where: Auditorium Dr. Juan Luis Cifuentes Lemus – CUCOSTA
TBD – CUCOSTADra. M. Isabel Ramírez, Directora Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de MéxicoSarah Blue, Texas State University, CLAG Chair
TBD – CUCOSTADra. M. Isabel Ramírez, Directora Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de MéxicoSarah Blue, Texas State University, CLAG Chair
where: Auditorium Dr. Juan Luis Cifuentes Lemus – CUCOSTA
Coffee and snacks 🙂
Organizer(s): Eloisa Del Mar Berman Arévalo – Universidad del Norte
Discussant: Eloisa Berman-Arevalo – Universidad del NorteDate and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session A: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 1
En su Cocina Criolla de 1955, la escritora y cocinera dominicana Amanda Ornes vda. de Perelló vincula comida, espacio y sabor de maneras que moldean la imaginación culinaria caribeña. Ornes distingue las prácticas culinarias según el nivel económico, ubicando el burén y las estufas de leña dentro de la pobreza rural, aunque señala que “la comida cocinada con leña es tan sabrosa” que incluso familias urbanas adineradas las conservan para ciertos platos criollos. El adjetivo que utiliza Ornes es “sabrosa”, sugiriendo un gusto tan potente que atraviesa las fronteras de clase, aunque lo sitúa en una geografía fija: lo rural y lo pobre. A través del burén, Ornes vincula el sabor con las tradiciones alimentarias indígenas taínas y afrocaribeñas, incorporando la ruralidad, la pobreza, la manteca de cerdo y el humo de leña en una narrativa cultural sobre los orígenes del sabor.
Este marco no solo señala que el sabor es producido materialmente a través de herramientas y combustibles específicos, sino también que está históricamente y socialmente arraigado en geografías racializadas. Esta ponencia examina herramientas culinarias como el burén, frecuentemente etiquetadas como “tradicionales” o “auténticas”, para interrogar cómo las relaciones contemporáneas con la comida en Cuba, La Española y Puerto Rico están moldeadas por tales narrativas. A través de un análisis multimodal—que combina medios visuales con lecturas literarias de libros de cocina de mediados del siglo XX—exploro cómo las nociones de sabor se producen, circulan y disputan mediante historias entrecruzadas de tiempo, espacio, raza y género.
Este marco no solo señala que el sabor es producido materialmente a través de herramientas y combustibles específicos, sino también que está históricamente y socialmente arraigado en geografías racializadas. Esta ponencia examina herramientas culinarias como el burén, frecuentemente etiquetadas como “tradicionales” o “auténticas”, para interrogar cómo las relaciones contemporáneas con la comida en Cuba, La Española y Puerto Rico están moldeadas por tales narrativas. A través de un análisis multimodal—que combina medios visuales con lecturas literarias de libros de cocina de mediados del siglo XX—exploro cómo las nociones de sabor se producen, circulan y disputan mediante historias entrecruzadas de tiempo, espacio, raza y género.
This presentation details how historians and geographers can explore Black and Indigenous histories in the Americas through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analyses of what we might call material witness scholarship. Scholars from paleoclimatology to archaeology, plant sciences and landscape architecture, are investigating how “archives of nature” can serve as material witnesses and “storage mediums” of lesser-known or hard-to-research histories. These cases of material-witness research, such as Case Watkins’s Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia’s Dendê Coast (2021) and Beronda Montgomery’s When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History and America’s Black Botanical Legacy (forthcoming 2026), help scholars research against the silences, gaps, and erasure in “archives of societies,” which we know are shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. After making the case for material-witness research in the environmental history of race and diaspora in the Americas, this presentation offers three materials witnesses of diaspora in Mexico: sesame (Sesamum indicum), mules (Equus), and arsenic (Periodic Table No. 33). Through these three plant, animal, and chemical witnesses, this presentation argues that material-witness research deepens our understanding of how the African Diaspora and environmental injustice took place–geographically, ecologically, and historically–in Mexico. Furthermore, this material-witness methodology of storytelling can offer historical renderings that are accessible to interdisciplinary, bilingual, and non-academic (or public) audiences.
La reforma agraria de 1961 y la construcción del Distrito de Riego de María La Baja transformaron radicalmente las dinámicas agrarias y territoriales de los Montes de María, un territorio de poblamiento histórico afrodescendiente en el Caribe colombiano. Bajo el discurso de la modernización agrícola, las agriculturas negras fueron fragmentadas y subordinadas a la agroindustria. En este escenario, el guandú (Cajanus cajan)—un cultivo con profundas dimensiones alimentarias, espirituales y simbólicas—experimentó tensiones, reapropiaciones y resistencias.
Este trabajo articula los estudios agroalimentarios y las geografías negras para responder a la pregunta: ¿cuál fue el papel del cultivo y consumo del guandú en la persistencia y transformación de las geografías negras tras la creación del Distrito de Riego? A partir de un enfoque histórico-etnográfico que combina archivos, entrevistas y trabajo de campo en Palo Altico, San José del Playón y comunidades cercanas, se analizan tanto los impactos estructurales de la reforma agraria como las memorias, prácticas culinarias y espirituales que sostienen la vida negra rural.
Los hallazgos muestran que, aunque los monocultivos buscaron desplazarlo, el guandú persistió en patios, huertos y festividades, reafirmando su centralidad en la cocina, la economía estacional y la reciprocidad comunitaria. Así, el guandú funciona como archivo vivo de memorias y luchas afrodescendientes, revelando cómo los pueblos negros reconfiguran su territorio mediante prácticas alimentarias que se convierten en políticas de resistencia frente al despojo racializado. La investigación contribuye a situar el Caribe rural en debates transnacionales sobre raza, alimento y justicia territorial, ampliando las geografías negras más allá de marcos anglocéntricos.
Este trabajo articula los estudios agroalimentarios y las geografías negras para responder a la pregunta: ¿cuál fue el papel del cultivo y consumo del guandú en la persistencia y transformación de las geografías negras tras la creación del Distrito de Riego? A partir de un enfoque histórico-etnográfico que combina archivos, entrevistas y trabajo de campo en Palo Altico, San José del Playón y comunidades cercanas, se analizan tanto los impactos estructurales de la reforma agraria como las memorias, prácticas culinarias y espirituales que sostienen la vida negra rural.
Los hallazgos muestran que, aunque los monocultivos buscaron desplazarlo, el guandú persistió en patios, huertos y festividades, reafirmando su centralidad en la cocina, la economía estacional y la reciprocidad comunitaria. Así, el guandú funciona como archivo vivo de memorias y luchas afrodescendientes, revelando cómo los pueblos negros reconfiguran su territorio mediante prácticas alimentarias que se convierten en políticas de resistencia frente al despojo racializado. La investigación contribuye a situar el Caribe rural en debates transnacionales sobre raza, alimento y justicia territorial, ampliando las geografías negras más allá de marcos anglocéntricos.
In this research, I examine the ways in which the community of Coquí, Chocó, Colombia, negotiate their identity. I argue that local forms of representation are re-created in forms of daily life activities such as farming, fishing and cooking. At the same time, those negotiations are connected to structures such as the black and indigenous territorial autonomy, the national economic system, and the presence of structural violence and narco-trafficking. I focus on the use of local discourses as a mechanism to explain the territorial tensions with modernity, race, food, political agency and autonomy. I conclude by suggesting that the local territorial autonomy has permitted the consolidation of local food activism, unique ontological relations with nature, perspectives of black political activism, race and sustainable economies that dialogue in particular ways with the current global capitalist model.
Las geografías negras se centran en la relación entre la raza, los imaginarios, las representaciones, el pensamiento y las prácticas espaciales de los negros . Cuando se toman en conjunto, estos temas dejan en evidencia cómo las epistemologías negras de la espacialidad están vinculadas a poéticas -imaginarios, representaciones- y prácticas radicales de la vida negra. Al llamar la atención sobre los compromisos de las geografías negras con la interacción de los procesos materiales y poéticos de la negritud , coloco en primer plano las tramas y comprensiones del espacio en los terrenos negros . El objetivo de este artículo consiste en analizar la construcción del sentido negro del lugar . Con esto en mente, examino, por una parte, a las rozas, vegas e islas, en tantas formas y tramas socioespaciales y el modo en que estas intersectan raza, espacio y naturaleza, configurando un sentido negro del lugar. Por otra parte, argumento que la hacienda ganadera es una expresión geográfica de la plantación que construye/elimina el sentido negro del lugar. La metodología que guía al artículo es de carácter etnográfico, con técnicas de producción de información, a saber: entrevistas, notas de campo, contracartografía y representación espacial. Basándome en la conceptualización del sentido negro del lugar y estableciendo puentes teóricos con campos como la ecocrítica negra y otras disciplinas de las ciencias sociales, recurro a ejemplos empíricos de la espacialidad negra del suroccidente de Colombia, para forjar otras conversaciones geográficas, socioespaciales y antropológicas sobre las formas en que se construye el sentido negro del lugar. En este artículo tomo en serio las categorías espaciales, pongo en diálogo narrativas, textos, autores y profundo en la comprensión de la producción negra del espacio.
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session A: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 2
Existen beneficios que brinda la naturaleza a los seres humanos, sin los cuales nuestra calidad de vida se reduciría significativamente. Los animales polinizadores son primordiales para la reproducción de la mayoría de los cultivos en el mundo. Sin embargo, en los últimos años han sufrido debido a la degradación del paisaje donde habitan. Desde el crecimiento urbano de las ciudades, los paisajes han cambiado la mayor parte de su estructura natural, y los polinizadores han presenciado esos cambios que han afectado su hábitat. El uso de pesticidas y el manejo de insectos para la reproducción de cultivos en la agricultura extensiva han causado el desplazamiento de polinizadores. No existe información al respecto y se está impulsando la implementación de huertos como una forma de mejorar la calidad de vida de la población urbana y periurbana, adicionalmente, varios trabajos consideran la conversión de las ciudades en santuarios de vida silvestre y no contar con información sobre polinizadores nos limita al momento de implementar acciones específicas de conservación. El objetivo comprender la relación entre los factores del paisaje urbano-periurbano y la cantidad de polinizadores en los huertos de la ciudad de Morelia. Se llevaron a cabo censos en 7 huertos de Morelia para obtener la tasa de visitas de polinizadores mediante censos de flores y se caracterizó el paisaje urbano-periurbano a través de SIG y validación de campo. Se encontró que la cantidad de insectos está correlacionada negativamente con el nivel de transformación del paisaje circundante a los huertos estudiados.
The identity of place in relation to its plants remains fluid, often connected to an introduced species. In some instances, the place from which the plant originates becomes blurred with the passage of time as communities adopt these species as their own. Additionally, economic gain and marketing can further solidify the role of a plant. People and plants have historically travelled between Latin America and Spain, most notably with the Columbian Exchange. While for the Spanish archipelago, the Canary Islands, human migration took a unique turn in terms of the fact that residents from the islands “Isleños” looked for work to gain economics status in Cuba and Venezuela, certain Latin American plants were making an economic impact in the Canary Islands. This paper looks at the historic and current role of Opuntia, often called “prickly pear”, on the islands. We explore how this cactus became dominant in the commercial identity of Canary Islands residents, and then how external markets, ecological factors, and the adoption of even newer arrivals influence the changing role of this species in the landscape.
One of the largest trees of the tropics, the ceiba tree (Ceiba pentandra) is native to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and northern South America. In Middle America, it is widely known as the sacred tree of the Maya, and is also a distinctive feature of the cultural landscape throughout its natural range. In the insular Caribbean, the ceiba is commonly known as the silk-cotton tree or kapok, both referring to the cotton-like fiber that is harvested from its seed pods. Though not holding the same deep cultural significance as elsewhere in the region, ceiba trees are nevertheless prominent features of the cultural landscape on many Caribbean islands, both in natural settings and intentionally planted in private and public locations. This paper surveys recent research on the historical and cultural importance of ceibas throughout various parts of Middle America and the Caribbean, with emphasis on preliminary field investigations in the Leeward Islands.
There has long been a focus on deforestation in forest change research, and rightfully so, but there is also an increasing interest in reforestation. A forest transition model gained traction in the 1990s with increasing studies about a reversal in forest-cover trends. The forest transition model posits that as a society advances to later stages of demographic and economic transitions, reforestation begins to outpace deforestation. Here will be a review of forest transition model’s two main explanations, the scarcity hypothesis and the economic development hypothesis, using studies from across Latin America and the Caribbean. Specific research in Peru and Jamaica will be used as prime examples of each. In Peru the scarcity hypothesis comes from government-initiated, and later NGOs’, programs to reforest Andean landscapes with eucalyptus and pine. In Jamaica, the economic development hypothesis is applied to abandonment of marginal lands that result in reforestation. The goal of this paper is to compare and contrast these two explanations and look to future research on the forest transition model.
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session A: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 3
Durante mucho tiempo estigmatizada como el “patio trasero” de la Ciudad de México, Iztapalapa es ahora conocida como la cuna de las UTOPIAS, un programa social que ha atraído atención nacional e internacional. Las Unidades de Transformación y Organización para la Inclusión y la Armonía Social (UTOPIAS) son centros polivalentes que ofrecen acceso a servicios, actividades e instalaciones sociales, culturales y recreativas en una zona marginada de la ciudad. Entre 2022 y 2024, más de ocho millones de personas accedieron a uno de estos 13 centros municipales, y ahora hay planes para expandirlos por toda la ciudad. En marcado contraste con la tendencia privatizadora de la austeridad neoliberal, las UTOPIAS revalorizan el espacio y los programas públicos, la justicia socio-territorial y la colaboración entre comunidad y gobierno local. Además, estos centros municipales conectan las condiciones urbanas, la infraestructura social y las tensiones temporales y espaciales que se entrecruzan en el cuidado cotidiano, que en la mayoría de los casos recae sobre las mujeres. En base a visitas y entrevistas realizadas en 2023 y 2024, nuestra investigación aborda dos preguntas principales: (1) ¿por qué las UTOPIAS en Iztapalapa? O, en otras palabras, ¿qué condiciones ayudan a explicar su concepción y características?; y (2) ¿cómo se diferencian las UTOPIAS de los programas sociales urbanos previos? Entendemos las UTOPIAS como una intervención urbana que lleva mucho tiempo gestándose, a la vez que resulta innovadora. Nuestra argumentación sostiene que este programa materializa un enfoque socio-territorial sobre el derecho a la ciudad junto con un enfoque emergente sobre la organización socio-espacial del cuidado, avanzando las condiciones para el derecho a las ciudades cuidadoras.
En América Latina los asentamientos autoconstruidos reclaman los espacios urbanos en la búsqueda de su identidad, el derecho a la ciudad y otros derechos. El espacio público, como uno de los derechos fundamentales de las ciudades, es especialmente reclamado por las juventudes, quienes establecen relaciones importantes en estos espacios y expresan su vida pública. A través de las prácticas, relaciones, conocimiento espacial y subjetividad en el cotidiano las juventudes construyen socialmente los espacios públicos. A partir del caso de estudio de Ampliación Leandro Valle, asentamiento autoconstruido del periurbano de Morelia, Michoacán se indaga en el proceso de construcción social de los espacios públicos por las juventudes. La metodología constó de una revisión bibliográfica, recorridos en campo, caracterización de los espacios públicos y mapeos participativos con juventudes de 12 a 24 años. Los hallazgos muestran un total de 14 espacios públicos reconocidos y utilizados por las juventudes que conforman su conocimiento espacial. A través de las prácticas cotidianas de encuentro entre amigos, pareja; de relajación, recreación, juego; prácticas culturales como expresiones a través de dibujos, grafitis y modificaciones; y funcionales como el pastoreo, el paso, el descanso, comerciales, las juventudes construyen socialmente estos espacios. Las distintas prácticas, los orígenes y materialidades, constituyen particularmente los espacios públicos de este asentamiento utilizados por las juventudes. Acercarse desde esta visión permite reconocer a las juventudes de asentamientos autoconstruidos como un grupo importante en la construcción de la ciudad, que reivindican sus derechos desde la cotidianidad.
Las comunidades indígenas dentro del Área de Conservación (Ciudad de México), de origen rural prehispánico, han sido absorbidas por la dinámica urbana, convirtiéndose en espacios periurbanos contra su voluntad. Esto ha intensificado las actividades legales e ilegales que rodean el territorio, mientras que las actividades económicas tradicionales se han perdido debido a las imposiciones de la creciente ciudad. Este es el caso de San Miguel y Santo Tomás Ajusco, en lo alto de las montañas y entre las comunidades geográficamente más distantes de la ciudad. El objetivo fue identificar la relación entre los conflictos socioambientales (bosque-agua) y el declive de la agricultura como actividad principal en las últimas décadas. La metodología fue una narrativa construida mediante triangulación de datos. Los resultados muestran que la falta de rentabilidad, el empleo urbano y la migración han llevado al declive de la agricultura; mientras tanto, los recursos bosque-agua se están perdiendo hoy en día debido a las actividades ilegales y la urbanización.
Se presentan los resultados del proyecto que fue apoyado por el Instituto Interamericano para la investigación del Cambio Global (IAI). Contempló el marco de ciencia abierta que incorporó la consulta ciudadana de las alcaldías. Una herramienta útil para evaluar la eficiencia de las áreas verdes, en las alcaldías Benito Juárez e Iztapalapa, fue la cartografía participativa o mapeo comunitario. Los mapas ayudaron a complementar el conocimiento técnico, con los conocimientos de la vida real de las personas. Se trató de un proceso abierto que plasmó las ideas sobre cómo se entiende el territorio, su medio ambiente, la cultura, los problemas, sus necesidades y sus posibles soluciones. Con la participación activa de la academia, el gobierno local y los programas actuales de áreas verdes fue posible realizar un diagnóstico comunitario que permitió ubicar áreas con problemas de mantenimiento, seguridad, falta de áreas verdes y otras necesidades. Los resultados permitieron identificar focos rojos de vulnerabilidad y una línea base para la planeación de servicios de salud y la construcción de puentes de comunicación entre las dependencias y la comunidad. De esta manera, se puede promover la conservación de áreas verdes y mejorar la toma de decisiones de las instancias públicas, considerando la opinión de la población con base en los mapas participativos y afrontar de mejor manera las olas de calor que son cada vez más frecuentes en la Ciudad de México.
Organizer(s): José Mária Léon – UNAM – CIGA Michael Keith McCall – UNAM – CIGA
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session A: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 4
Este trabajo presenta una propuesta metodológica de mapeo participativo (Mapeo P) aplicada al fenómeno de la pesca ilegal en San Felipe, Baja California Sur, en el marco de la criminología azul. La propuesta se sustenta en revisión documental, análisis de datos abiertos y entrevistas realizadas con pescadores locales, para diseñar un protocolo escalable cuando existan condiciones de seguridad. El diseño contempla cuatro momentos: (1) Cartografiado preliminar: compilación de normativas, vedas, infraestructura, accesos, meteorología y ambientes de pesca; integración de trazas y capas abiertas (imágenes satelitales de libre acceso, reportes periodísticos y comunitarios), sin georreferenciar actividades sensibles. (2) Modelado de escenarios y riesgos: identificación de eventualidades, actores y cadenas de valor; mapeo de “zonas de vulnerabilidad”. (3) Estrategias de acercamiento: pautas para talleres de co-diseño de bajo riesgo, consentimiento informado continuo, protocolos de anonimización, enfoque de género y cuidados; líneas rojas (no registrar coordenadas, no exponer rutas, no vincular identidades). (4) Uso público y evaluación: criterios de efectividad basados en utilidad comunitaria (protocolos de monitoreo, acuerdos locales), y rutas de incidencia con autoridades sin entrega de datos sensibles. La contribución radica en operacionalizar el Mapeo P en contextos de alta conflictividad, mostrando cómo producir cartografías útiles y éticas que visibilicen presiones estructurales y saberes locales sin poner en riesgo a personas ni territorios. Se discutirán limitaciones, sesgos y salvaguardas para escalar la propuesta cuando existan condiciones para colaboración presencial. Se hace especial énfasis en el diseño y aplicación de protocolos de seguridad tanto para quienes realizan la investigación, como para personas de la comunidad.
En esta presentación abordaremos el uso de maquetas en 3D y a escala como herramientas cartográficas utilizadas, para la gestión del territorio, la enseñanza y la didáctica de la geografía local. Aquí seleccionamos la experiencia llevada a cabo en dos comunidades p’urhépecha, de Michoacán, México. Estas comunidades son Cheran y Cheranastico. La comunidad de Cheran padeció un importante proceso de deforestación por talamontes vinculados al crimen organizado en la primera década del siglo XX, en el año 2011 se dio un importante movimiento social que tuvo entre sus repercusiones la creación de un sistema político sin la presencia de partidos políticos, y la restructuración de sus sistemas de representación en torno al territorio comunal. En el año 2023 se elaboró en conjunto con las autoridades agrarias una maqueta de su territorio comunal, que sirvió para hacer talleres con autoridades y con infancias. Por su parte la comunidad de Cheranastico, ha tenido una serie de conflictos agrarios por el reconocimiento de sus limites del territorio comunal, y actualmente tiene varios litigios aun en proceso por el reconocimiento de sus bienes comunales. Uno de sus principales necesidades cartográficas, era contar con un mapa que pudiera expresar la espacialidad de estos problemas, para esto se elaboró maqueta. Una vez elaborada la maqueta se llevaron a cabo diversos talleres con autoridades, mujeres e infancias. Así en esta ponencia se exploran la utilidad de las maquetas como herramienta de gestión del territorio, pero también como herramienta para la enseñanza de la geografía local.
En Bogotá, Colombia, hay comunidades autoconstruidas que existen en áreas designadas como «alto riesgo no mitigable» por la alcaldía, lo cual significa que los residentes se tienen que reasentar por ley. Algunos miembros de estas comunidades sienten que el proceso de designar y gestionar el riesgo ambiental es injusto porque no se aplica de manera consistente, no factoriza la resiliencia comunitaria, y tampoco considera alternativas al reasentamiento. Basando el trabajo en el marco de investigación participativa basada en la comunidad, esta investigación explora cómo comunidades autoconstruidas en el sur de Bogotá perciben el riesgo ambiental de sus territorios y cómo esta percepción está en conflicto con la narrativa oficial del riesgo. A través de un ejercicio de contramapeo participativo y entrevistas, logramos obtener una mejor idea de cómo la comunidad percibe los riesgos ambientales que los rodean y su propia resiliencia ante estos riesgos. Descubrimos que las comunidades perciben que acciones e intervenciones humanas aumentan el riesgo ambiental y que ellos no son tan vulnerables como son denominados. Los mapas producidos fueron interpretados y visualizados por nuestro equipo usando ArcGIS para presentarlos a la alcaldía con el fin de explicar el desajuste entre los entendimientos, lo cual no dio mucho éxito. Postulamos que el contramapeo participativo es una herramienta que puede iniciar el diálogo entre entidades públicas y comunidades pero la efectividad de estos ejercicios depende de el seguimiento y la receptividad de los agentes públicos en considerar formas alternativas de conocimiento.
Esta ponencia analiza dos años de experiencias docentes sobre uso comunitario de drones en Chiapas (2023-2025), proponiendo una metodología etnográfica de tres fases —antes del despegue, durante el vuelo, tras el aterrizaje— como aproximación pedagógica esencial en contextos de creciente criminalización del espacio aéreo. A través del curso-taller “Introducción al uso comunitario de drones para la gestión, conservación y defensa del territorio”, cuatro prácticas escolares universitarias y registros aéreos solicitados por movimientos sociales, se documentan las tensiones entre apropiación comunitaria y criminal de tecnologías aéreas no tripuladas. Los resultados revelan una paradoja: aunque se logra crear productos concretos —cartografía detallada, modelos 3D digitales e impresos y fotografías aéreas 360° (alojados en OpenAerialMap, Sketchfab y Mapillary), y movimientos feministas, LGBTIQ+ y católicos obtuvieron registros audiovisuales de sus movilizaciones (alojados en YouTube)— la apropiación colectiva permanece fragmentada. Esta limitación responde a factores estructurales-técnicos (ausencia de espacios de socialización tecnológica, brechas digitales generacionales) y político-simbólicos (transformación del dron de herramienta de curiosidad a símbolo de vigilancia y control criminal-militar). La ponencia argumenta que el uso comunitario de drones en territorios disputados requiere reconfigurar aproximaciones pedagógicas mediante: (1) metodologías etnográficas que capturen dimensiones simbólicas del control aéreo; (2) protocolos de seguridad adaptados incluyendo validación de identidades y modalidades presenciales; (3) pedagogías preventivas contra reclutamiento tecnológico criminal; y (4) fortalecimiento de capacidades geoespaciales locales en un contexto académico chiapaneco dominado por enfoques socio-antropológicos. Se propone transitar de la capacitación técnica hacia pedagogías territoriales que reconozcan la disputa por el espacio aéreo latinoamericano.
Box lunch provided (pickup between 12:30 – 1:00 pm).
Poster session I.
Investigación que tiene como tema central el Ordenamiento Territorial en México, abordando la problemática dada por un marco regulatorio general que carece de especificaciones metodológicas para captar las particularidades biofísicas y socioculturales a nivel local en territorios originarios. El estudio se centra en la cuenca Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, zona de gran valor hidrológico, biótico y cultural como territorio de la cultura Purépecha. El objetivo principal fue proponer un Modelo de Aptitud Territorial mediante la creación de índices, cuyos resultados se expresen en unidades de paisaje y se validen con casos de estudio concretos. La metodología integra el análisis de cambios de cobertura y el cálculo de índices biofísicos (Singularidad Paisajística, Geosistemas Funcionales y Hábitat geoecológico) y culturales inéditos (Dinámicas Espacio-Temporales y Tipología de Paisajes geoculturales). La principal contribución es la generación de un modelo espacialmente delimitado que ofrece una alternativa a las metodologías tradicionales, incorporando la influencia de la organización social y la tenencia de la tierra de comunidades originarias en la evolución del paisaje. Los resultados buscan ser una herramienta para los gobiernos municipales y consejos comunales, proponiendo además aportes teórico-metodológicos para guías de Ordenamiento Territorial en México, con un enfoque sostenible e inclusivo que trasciende los paradigmas antropocéntricos convencionales.
Climate change is not neutral to gender or other intersecting identities -such as age, income, marital status, health conditions, disabilities, or geography- and its impacts are unevenly distributed. Structural barriers exacerbate the vulnerability of some groups while privileging others. Intersectionality highlights how interconnected systems of inequity produce both advantages and disadvantages, offering a lens to understand the complex socio-environmental dynamics of climate change. This research examines how climate change affects livelihoods in two rural Andean communities -Tanta and Yauyos- in the Cañete River basin, Lima, Peru. It explores how gender and other intersecting identities shape people’s differentiated experiences with climate impacts, both positive and negative, and analyzes the limitations of public policies in addressing these local realities. The study is guided by three central questions: (i) How does climate change affect local livelihoods? (ii) How do gender and intersecting identities influence these effects? (iii) To what extent do climate policies incorporate these differences at the local level? Grounded in political ecology, the research employs participatory ethnographic methods to co-produce knowledge from a bottom-up perspective. This approach rethinks the nexus of climate change, local power dynamics, and intersecting identities while valuing community knowledge and voices. By generating findings collaboratively with local actors, the project not only unpacks the lived realities of climate change but also contributes evidence that can inform more inclusive and equitable climate policies. Ultimately, integrating communities, scholars, and policymakers is essential to strengthen responses that are both context-specific and socially inclusive.
Nature-based solutions (NbS) offer new pathways and opportunities for cities worldwide. NbS deliver multiple benefits and can help reduce climate risks while enhancing the well-being of urban residents (Frantzeskaki et al., 2019). However, despite global attention, key challenges remain when considering NbS as an adaptation strategy to increase urban resilience. For example, reports claim that women are critical stakeholders in the NbS decision-making process; however, they are frequently omitted from design and implementation processes, limiting the understanding of how gender shapes urban resilience and adaptation pathways to climate change (Caswell & Jang, 2024). Gender-responsive approaches are methods that examine and actively address gender norms, roles, and inequalities to promote gender equality (2024). When applied to NbS for adaptation, the goal is to enhance the ability of vulnerable groups to manage climate risks while protecting and enhancing biodiversity, considering how gender norms, roles, and behaviors may facilitate this process (2024). Differences in needs and access to resources, capacities for participation, and opportunities are therefore meaningfully incorporated into the NbS design and implementation process in urban systems. This research employs a mixed-methods approach to better capture the complexity of women’s lived experiences in Mérida, Yucatán, México by combining qualitative and geospatial mapping methods. Mérida can serve as a case study highlighting the interplay between everyday and planned adaptations to pluvial flooding. This research can also serve as a framework for bridging the high-level and policy-driven framing of NbS with smaller-scale, everyday adaptations, utilizing a gender-responsive approach for adaptation to pluvial flooding.
In the remote Peruvian Amazon near the Brazilian border, ecosystems support an extraordinary diversity of flora and fauna. The Amazon Rainforest serves vital roles in carbon, water, and nutrient cycling, yet continues to experience unsustainable resource extraction, accelerating deforestation, and expanding development. Over the past two decades, illegal logging along with limited regulatory oversight of forest concessions have turned hundreds of thousands of hectares into sites of corruption and ecological degradation. Neighboring rural, traditional, and Indigenous communities experience downstream effects of forest, fauna, and water loss from forestry concessions, illegal logging, and forestry roads. This research analyzes the complex history of a Peruvian forestry concession near the Brazilian border. This concession has passed through the ownership and management of three logging companies since Peru’s 2000 forestry law created the modern forestry concession system. Results demonstrate how illegal logging, informal roads, land speculation, and in-migration of illicit agriculturalists can transform a site selected for sustainable forestry into another type of landscape entirely.
The Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon is one of Earth’s most biodiverse regions, yet it faces unprecedented challenges from off-the-grid oil extraction that directly threatens Indigenous Kichwa communities. This study examines contamination in Blocks 43 and 12, which have experienced 7 and 25 years of extraction, respectively. While communities have repeatedly reported health and environmental concerns, conventional testing has historically failed to detect elevated pollution. This research combines environmental monitoring with Indigenous epistemology through participatory mapping workshops to identify contamination sites based on traditional knowledge systems. Systematic soil sampling revealed alarming contamination levels directly impacting communities that depend entirely on local resources. EPA method 1633 detected seven PFAS compounds in Block 12, with concentrations ranging from 1,000-8,000 ng/kg, while method 1664 identified eleven TPH compounds across both blocks. Critically, contamination was found in areas surrounding community housing and agricultural zones where residents rely on their land for 90% of their needs. This creates direct exposure pathways through food, water, and soil contact, which is particularly concerning given these off-grid communities’ complete reliance on local resources for subsistence. This study represents the first systematic environmental assessment within Yasuní that bridges scientific methodology with Indigenous knowledge. By providing communities with empirical evidence, if interested, they are able to hold corporations accountable for the destruction of Kichwa livelihoods and establish a framework for protecting the Amazon while respecting Indigenous epistemologies.
The Amazon Rainforest plays a vital role in regional water cycles through evapotranspiration (ET), a process strongly influenced by deforestation, forest degradation, and land cover change. Protected areas function to conserve land cover and maintain a forest’s associated hydrological functions; however, these areas’ effectiveness on a regional scale is largely unexplored. This study investigates the relationship between forest disturbances, ET, and land conservation status in the borderlands of Ucayali (Peru) and Acre (Brazil), which encompasses over 3.5 million hectares of tropical forest including 31 Indigenous Territories and eight Protected Natural Areas. Using MODIS ET data from 2001–2024 and forest disturbance records from 2003–2024, we compared protected (conservation and Indigenous) areas versus areas without official protection. Results show that while forest disturbances are spatially correlated with declining ET, overall evapotranspiration trends do not differ significantly between protected and unprotected areas at the regional scale. However, protected areas exhibit higher average ET per hectare, which suggests a more localized effect within Indigenous Territories and Protected Natural Areas. These findings highlight the impact that protected areas can have on a local scale; therefore, further research on, and investment in, protected territories is recommended to support, and improve our understanding of, Amazonian hydrological functions under increasing deforestation pressures.
Road-building is one of the primary drivers of deforestation and regional climate change in the Brazilian Amazon, where first-cut roads are precursors to expanding networks of secondary roads. These secondary roads are often built by non-state actors for the extraction of natural resources and are prone to under-regulation. This study examines three secondary road networks in the state of Amazonas that are connected to the official highway BR-364 in Acre, Brazil. Using Landsat imagery and MODIS data (500m and 1 km), we measure the impacts of these roads on deforestation, degradation, land surface temperature, and evapotranspiration in the period of 2003-2024. In all but one case study, we find that the environmental impacts of secondary roads are most clearly detected within 1 km of the roads, where we observe large areas deforested and degraded, higher temperature, and reduced evapotranspiration. Where forest regrowth has occurred, however, there is no significant impact from a remote sensing perspective, suggesting that natural regrowth can to some extent mitigate the impacts of road-building.
The Amazon rainforest is the largest rainforest on the planet, and thus of critical importance to the absorption and storage of carbon dioxide. The Amazon also serves as the terrestrial biome in South America that supports the largest amount of biodiversity of flora and fauna with over 12,000 species of trees and 430 species of mammals. The Indigenous residents of the Amazon have lived in homelands alongside the fauna and flora for millenia. However, developmental forces are increasingly extending into the most remote portions of the Amazon, including the borderlands shared by Peru and Brazil. In the Southwestern Amazon borderlands, 14 Indigenous ethnicities and other traditional residents who live at the headwaters of the Jurua, or Yurua River, have banded together to form the Jurua-Yurua-Tamaya Transboundary Commission in order to protect the rivers, forests, and fauna they depend on. The headwaters of these rivers are in Peru where multiple forestry concessions controlled by logging companies seek to harvest the forests and the fauna. Here we analyze the geography, history, and impact of one remote forestry concession that has been pivotal in the timber extraction, access, and in-migration into the headwaters for over 20 years. Document research and GIS analysis shows a complex history of environmental, social, and cultural impacts that extend well beyond the bounds of the forestry concession itself. This research has been integrated not only into maps and this poster, but also into the efforts of the transboundary commission to forge a different future for their headwaters rather than a state and industry controlled forestry concession.
En el litoral de la Riviera Nayarit en la costa del Pacífico mexicano, se empezó a edificar zonas de alto impacto turístico a partir de los años ochenta del siglo pasado; lo anterior, debido tanto a factores históricos, geopolíticos y de economía internacional, como a los atractivos paisajísticos locales para la recreación y ocio en playa. Con el tiempo, se observa que, al igual que muchos destinos similares en México, se produce una convivencia espacial inestable entre las condiciones naturales del lugar (vista como mercancía) y la presencia de una industria turística-inmobiliaria agresiva, con una paradoja espacial: los impactos provocados por el capital a efecto de incrementar el patrimonio dinerario provoca una desaparición del activo natural que a su vez es el producto espacial que busca el turismo. Los distintos sectores económicos locales abordan esta paradoja mediante la discusión de la “densidad” adecuada del territorio en el Modelo de Ordenamiento del Programa de Ordenamiento Ecológico Local Participativo de Bahía de Banderas (POELP) realizada desde el 2023 al 2025. Esta discusión se analiza en esta ponencia tomando como base insumos cartográficos presentados por agentes locales, en el marco de la desposesión de la Segunda contradicción de Harvey.
Este poster presenta el lanzamiento del Catálogo de Imágenes Satelitales Planet desarrollado por la Unidad de Información de la Frontera Sur (UIFS) (https://uifs.cimsur.unam.mx/) del Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur (CIMSUR) de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), iniciativa que facilita el acceso a imágenes satelitales de alta resolución. A través de la licencia Campus de Planet contratada por la Universidad, proporciona acceso a imágenes de observación terrestre que cubren Chiapas, Centroamérica y El Caribe bajo tres modalidades: miembros de la comunidad universitaria, estudiantes externos con tutores institucionales, y colaboradores con coautores institucionales. El catálogo ofrece cuatro tipos de imágenes: PlanetScope (3m), SkySat Collect y Scene (50cm), y basemaps (mosaicos libres de nubes). Tableros interactivos permiten navegarlo sin experiencia en SIG, agilizando solicitudes mediante formulario en línea. Paralelamente, la UIFS desarrolló servicios de acceso abierto mediante visualizaciones publicadas en Planet Stories bajo Creative Commons, incluyendo análisis de transformaciones del entorno agrícola, urbano y forestal de Zinacantán (2016-2025), desarrollo urbano de San Cristóbal de Las Casas (2016-2024), construcción de la autopista Palenque-Ocosingo, y cambios ambientales en el Parque Nacional Laguna Lachuá (Guatemala) y Cayo Cochino Mayor (Honduras). Estas herramientas de líneas de tiempo y comparación temporal permiten analizar dinámicas territoriales sin restricciones. Esta infraestructura híbrida equilibra compromisos institucionales con difusión científica abierta, estableciendo capacidades para investigación sobre Chiapas, la frontera sur de México, Centroamérica y El Caribe.
Organizer(s): Eugenio Arima – University of Texas at Austin
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session B: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmPlace: Room 1
Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) have diversified their operations beyond the illicit drug trade and now extend their power and influence into licit sectors like agriculture and mining. To profit from these industries, DTOs establish ‘criminal governance’—the regulation of social and economic spaces through violence, threats, and bribery. This allows them to integrate their operations into legal markets, turning high-value agricultural products into critical assets for expanding their criminal empires. This pattern is not isolated to avocados; it is replicated across Latin America in sectors like cattle ranching, sugar production, and gold mining. Our research examines the environmental sustainability dimension of criminal governance, using the Mexican avocado case as an illustration. It moves beyond traditional security analyses to investigate how DTOs leverage territorial control to systematically undermine environmental protection, drive deforestation, and silence environmental defenders. The presentation also explores instances of successful community-led resistance and analyzes the potential of market-based policy responses to mitigate these troubling dynamics.
Central America has been drug trafficking transit zone for more than 60 years, which has created large scale environmental harm. Drug trafficking is just one illicit economy that is detrimentally impacting the environment in the region. Organized crime is causing harm through diverse illicit economies including cattle ranching, logging, mining, fishing, and flora and fauna trafficking. The environmental harm caused by these illicit activities include forest fires, deforestation, forest degradation, water contamination, depletion of marine fishing and shellfish stocks, biodiversity loss, mangrove destruction, land grabbing, and illegal road construction, among others. Environmental harm caused by organized crime is diverse and uneven across Central America. This research analyses more than twenty years of media publications and government reports detailing organized crime’s environmental harm to describe how geographic differences in two case studies – Guatemala and Panama – reflect the ways criminal organizations embed in the economy and state institutions, as well as differences in natural resources. For example, money laundering and territorial control through illegal cattle ranching in Guatemala’s protected areas results in large scale deforestation, while Panama’s dollarized economy and role in global trade have resulted in illegal logging of rosewood, alongside land grabbing and money laundering in the tourism and real estate. This analysis details how legal and illegal economies are intertwined, as are state institutions and criminal actors, which creates immense challenges in both understanding and addressing the environmental harm caused by organized crime.
Rapid loss of forests has occurred in recent decades in the state of Michoacán, México, because of the expansion of areas dedicated to the cultivation of several crops, with avocado being one of the main ones. Concerns about the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services provided by these forests make it extremely urgent to take conservation measures, for which information allowing the prioritization of areas based on objective criteria is fundamental. We present a prioritization exercise based on the diversity patterns of the woody flora of the remaining temperate forest patches within the socio-environmental avocado mosaic (SEAM). For this, we compiled a list of 112 woody species and 3220 occurrence records of these species within the SEAM. Based on these records, we depicted the patterns of species richness, irreplaceability, and vulnerability using a grid with cells of ~20 km2. Given that occurrence records were strongly aggregated near urban areas and that large expanses of the SEAM had a low number of records, we also used ecological niche modeling to produce potential distribution maps (PDM) for each species, and then estimated the same diversity metrics (richness, irreplaceability, and vulnerability) based on the PDMs of all species. Results indicated that several areas within the SEAM harbor a considerable diversity of woody flora, some of which are already protected but others lack any formal protection at this time. The inclusion of other criteria such as the probability of persistence of priority areas under future land-use models and climate change models will be discussed.
Organizer(s): María Cecilia Roa Garcia – Universidad de los Andes
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session B: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmPlace: Room 2
La acuicultura a nivel mundial ha ganado protagonismo en cuanto a la cruzada contra la inseguridad alimentaria de personas alrededor del mundo. En 2022, se tuvo una producción total de 130.9 millones de toneladas de marisco. A pesar de esta apuesta a nivel mundial, la instalación de granjas dedicadas a la producción marisquera ha mostrado un claro desplazamiento de pescadores artesanales en diversas partes de América Latina. Esta investigación buscó evaluar los niveles de dependencia de recursos marinos orientados a la pesca realizada dentro de áreas de manglar protegidas en Honduras y El Salvador, enfocada en la alimentación de sus familias con una dieta basada en mariscos, así como las amenazas para la obtención del producto. Se realizaron visitas en la zona del manglar de La Unión (El Salvador), Valle y Choluteca (Honduras), realizando 102 encuestas a pescadores y extractores para establecer la dependencia de recursos marinos. Se encontró que más de la mitad de las familias reservan parte de su producción pesquera para el consumo del hogar, manteniendo un consumo de productos del mar de dos a tres veces a la semana. Las comunidades mostraron una reducción de la captura de especies, así como la reducción de áreas de pesca. Determinar las capacidades de pesca, inversión y hábitos alimentarios en la zona costera latinoamericana permite establecer estrategias para garantizar la soberanía y seguridad alimentaria basadas en el respeto de las tradiciones y conocimientos de poblaciones que están siendo excluidas de las actuales tendencias de la acuicultura de cultivo masivo.
Lxs pescadores artesanales en todo el mundo enfrentan una profunda crisis socioecológica que pone en peligro la seguridad alimentaria global, los medios de vida y la continuidad cultural. Esta crisis tiene sus raíces en relaciones de poder asimétricas, exclusión económica y una degradación ambiental gradual, a menudo agravada por una “brecha de atribución” que dificulta vincular los factores complejos con los daños específicos. Este artículo explora el potencial de movilizar el concepto de la pérdida de la pesca artesanal como desastre de evolución lenta, entendido como un marco capaz de orientar las respuestas judiciales hacia una justicia relacional. Los desastres de evolución lenta se definen como fenómenos que evolucionan de manera gradual, resultantes de cambios progresivos que ocurren durante muchos años o del aumento en la frecuencia o intensidad de fenómenos recurrentes. Se contrastan con los eventos de inicio súbito, pero plantean desafíos igualmente serios para abordar las pérdidas y los daños asociados con los efectos adversos del cambio climático. Entre estos se incluyen fenómenos climáticos como el aumento de las temperaturas, la elevación del nivel del mar, la salinización, la acidificación oceánica y la pérdida de biodiversidad, por mencionar algunos. Estos procesos pueden afectar de manera decisiva los medios de vida, conduciendo potencialmente al desplazamiento de poblaciones.
Para las comunidades de pesca artesanal, este marco va más allá de los impactos climáticos e incorpora la crisis impulsada por décadas de factores interrelacionados, incluyendo la persistencia de proyectos de desarrollo industrial, las infraestructuras de exclusión (como el dragado y los cercamientos), el desplazamiento causado por la sedimentación (aterramiento) y los patrones de violencia y criminalización. De manera crucial, esta categoría tiene el potencial de superar las limitaciones de los enfoques tradicionales basados en derechos individuales, que a menudo no logran abordar los sistemas y estructuras que corroen la dignidad y deterioran la red de relaciones. Movilizar la categoría de desastre de evolución lenta ofrece un mecanismo jurídico riguroso para traducir la degradación crónica y sistémica en reclamos que resalten la agencia y obliguen a los jueces a enfrentar las profundas y históricas relaciones de poder asimétricas que ponen en riesgo los modos de vida de los territorios pesqueros.
Para las comunidades de pesca artesanal, este marco va más allá de los impactos climáticos e incorpora la crisis impulsada por décadas de factores interrelacionados, incluyendo la persistencia de proyectos de desarrollo industrial, las infraestructuras de exclusión (como el dragado y los cercamientos), el desplazamiento causado por la sedimentación (aterramiento) y los patrones de violencia y criminalización. De manera crucial, esta categoría tiene el potencial de superar las limitaciones de los enfoques tradicionales basados en derechos individuales, que a menudo no logran abordar los sistemas y estructuras que corroen la dignidad y deterioran la red de relaciones. Movilizar la categoría de desastre de evolución lenta ofrece un mecanismo jurídico riguroso para traducir la degradación crónica y sistémica en reclamos que resalten la agencia y obliguen a los jueces a enfrentar las profundas y históricas relaciones de poder asimétricas que ponen en riesgo los modos de vida de los territorios pesqueros.
Buena parte de mi investigación durante los últimos años ha girado en torno a los cuerpos de agua de La Mojana en Colombia, los cuales pude conocer en medio de mi trabajo de campo etnográfico, gracias al conocimiento experto-local de los pescadores tradicionales, quienes me adentraron en ellos. En mi doble calidad de abogada asesora de estos pescadores y antropóloga, identifiqué como características de las ciénagas y ríos estudiados la conectividad y el movimiento; de la misma manera que pude verlos como cuerpos asediados cuya vida está en vilo, en virtud de las transformaciones dadas por las infraestructuras del agua y el acaparamiento de tierras. Llevo las dos características antes mencionadas al ámbito de los estudios acerca de un derecho para el antropoceno, para indagar por la pregunta ¿qué tienen los cuerpos de agua por enseñarle al derecho?, y en diálogo con autoras y autores como Grear, Davis y Wheeler, que han considerado que el contexto ambiental y social en el que nos encontramos amerita la emergencia de un Derecho Salvaje post-humanista y post-antropocéntrico, propongo que un giro conceptual supone considerar que los principios del derecho surjan de los no humanos y más que humanos, para regular el mundo humano, y no al revés. Con ello mi ponencia nos invitaría a pensar qué sería un derecho salvaje para el antropoceno a partir de los cuerpos de agua y qué implicaría una justicia de esa naturaleza.
La historia ambiental y climática de la cuenca baja del río Magdalena en Colombia ha estado marcada por grandes procesos de transformación de las relaciones materiales, sociales y epistémicas. La complejidad de del territorio hizo que por miles de años sus pobladores desarrollaran formas de vida adaptables a condiciones de alta variabilidad y ciclicidad. La mirada modernizadora del desarrollo sobre la ecorregión, materializada en obras de infraestructura como la ampliación del canal del Dique en el siglo XX, el fallido proyecto de control de las aguas para la producción agrícola en el sur del departamento del Atlántico, y otras obras más locales sobre el río, caños y ciénagas, han interactuado con procesos a mayor escala produciendo eventos catastróficos para las poblaciones locales, y potenciando procesos de evolución lenta con serias consecuencias para los ciclos vitales de los cuerpos de agua. Proponemos un análisis de la transformación de la región a partir de la relacionalidad radical propuesta por Alfred North Whitehead, para proponer nuevas formas de abordar la justicia climática y ambiental que está en mora de discusión con las poblaciones locales y las entidades del Estado. Dando prioridad a los flujos y procesos como constitutivos y ontológicamente anteriores a las cosas y entidades, proponemos analizar las transformaciones de la región del Guájaro y de las ciénagas de Malambo a partir de la interrupción violenta de un sistema de relaciones vitales.
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session B: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmPlace: Room 3
In the Guatemalan Highlands, food insecurity remains a burden disproportionately felt by Maya women, who remain responsible for provisioning food. Previously, women grew their household’s food in gardens and milpa terrains. Recent field work demonstrates how a combination of industrial agriculture, population growth, and climate change have undermined women’s land access (Carte et al, 2019) and eroded their ability to access food, let alone nutritionally sufficient food. Today, Maya women face the highest rates of food insecurity in the country (Care, 2022), often skipping meals to feed their households. Building on the work of Farhana Sultana (2011), who underscores everyday forms of violence women experience accessing resources, and communitarian feminism’s notion of cuerpo-territorio (Cabnal, 2010), I argue that meaningful solutions to food insecurity must interrupt the colonial-gendered paradigm that requires women and land to constantly sacrifice their health. Drawing on recent fieldwork in the Highlands, this paper explores how Maya women’s efforts to recuperate household gardens and ancestral agricultural practices interrupts the colonial-gendered paradigm by offering women consistent access to organic and culturally significant food and medicine without compromising their health. Recognizing their physical and emotional wellbeing as part of the solution to food insecurity in their communities, Maya women leverage their agricultural practices to nurture their cuerpo-territorio, which has important implications for the social reproduction of their territories. My research affirms how questions of food insecurity remain necessarily gendered issues that must take women’s wellbeing and social reproductive capacity just as seriously, if not more, as agrarian productivity.
This presentation addresses how women’s livelihoods were altered by the COVID crisis and continue to be shaped by current economic duress. Cuba is facing environmental hazards, social changes, and a lack of resources which has challenged how Cuban women provide for themselves and their families. The results of a semi-structured survey conducted in Havana and Matanzas will be presented. Results show that some women were reassigned new jobs when COVID hit while some had to leave the workforce entirely. In all cases, women felt they were more hard-pressed financially starting with COVID and continuing through the time of the interviews. The presentation also highlights the importance of mentoring and establishing long-term relationships with local research assistants.
This research examines how compounded risks shape urban vulnerability through the everyday experiences of women in an under resourced neighborhood in Merida, Yucatan. During the COVID-19 pandemic residents simultaneously faced extreme heat, flooding, and economic uncertainty- highlighting how multiple, overlapping crisis exacerbate preexisting inequities. Drawing from feminist geography and vulnerability theory, I focus on a women-led community kitchen (comedor) that emerged in 2020 in response to food insecurity, economic uncertainty, and state neglect. Based on 25 semi structured interviews, participant activities, and participant observations, I demonstrate how the comedor fulfills the basic and immediate needs of the women involved. Women’s strategies like pooling resources, organizing food production, and dealing with limited infrastructure, reveal how vulnerability can be produced through both environmental hazards and socio-political neglect. I conceptualize the kitchenspace as a site where the social, environmental, and political dimensions of compounded risk converge. Additionally, I analyze the kitchenspace through vulnerability theory- highlighting how even food preparation can be impacted by a changing climate and environmental hazards. Their work highlights how vulnerability is an accumulation of state inefficiency, gendered labor burdens, and environmental hazards. Through the comedor women have been the de facto safety net- addressing the needs of local families, that other institutions are not. This research demonstrates how compounded disasters exacerbate vulnerability.
The objective of this research is to estimate inequality in the living conditions of older adults in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area. This is achieved through a quantitative methodology that estimates and maps a Social Development Index, in conjunction with areas of high concentration of older adults. The aim is to identify spaces of socio-territorial isolation that exacerbate physical and emotional fragilities during this critical stage of life. The estimation method is based on Mexican legislation relevant to the study area and on socioeconomic variables, which allows for the study’s replicability.
Climate change represents a growing challenge for land management and public policy in Mexico, with uneven impacts that most severely affect vulnerable populations, especially those living in risk areas with less access to infrastructure and basic services. This paper analyzes how land use policies and strategies in Mexico address the challenges of climate change, particularly for vulnerable populations. A study is conducted based on an applied approach, combining a regulatory review of public policy instruments, an analysis of land use plans, and representative case studies from different Mexican regions facing risks from hydrometeorological events to identify gaps in policy implementation and opportunities for improvement.
Preliminary results suggest that the effectiveness of land use policy depends not only on regulatory planning, but also on coordination between levels of government, citizen participation, and the incorporation of socio-environmental vulnerability criteria into decision-making. Recommendations are also presented aimed at strengthening land management in the face of climate change, prioritizing risk reduction for vulnerable populations and promoting a comprehensive territorial resilience approach that can be replicated in other cities and regions of Latin America.
Preliminary results suggest that the effectiveness of land use policy depends not only on regulatory planning, but also on coordination between levels of government, citizen participation, and the incorporation of socio-environmental vulnerability criteria into decision-making. Recommendations are also presented aimed at strengthening land management in the face of climate change, prioritizing risk reduction for vulnerable populations and promoting a comprehensive territorial resilience approach that can be replicated in other cities and regions of Latin America.
Organizer(s): Michael Keith McCall – UNAM – CIGA José Mária Léon – UNAM – CIGA
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session B: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmPlace: Room 4
FLUJOS (Flood Justice Utilizing Satellite Observation) is a collaborative research project and methodological framework that blends machine learning, satellite imagery, and participatory mapping with flood-vulnerable residents. Situated at the southern tip of the Texas-Tamaulipas border, the Rio Grande Valley contains thousands of predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American colonia communities with high levels of flood vulnerability. These informal settlements face infrastructural violence, including exclusion from basic drainage infrastructure and flooding due to development in nearby municipalities (Wutich et al., 2022). Developed with a coalition of community-based organizations starting in 2023, participatory maps with colonia residents and local activists compose the backbone of the FLUJOS project. The result is a co-produced, publicly available and bilingual (English/Spanish) flood mapping database designed to support this coalition of community-based organizations and residents as they experience ongoing flood risk (https://assets.rgvflood.arizona.edu/). Drawing from critical quantitative methods in artificial intelligence, GIS, and remote sensing (Haraway, 1988; Amoore, 2020; Elwood, 2022; Bennett et al., 2022) this paper presents the core participatory methods of the FLUJOS project including: co-production with community-based organizations, participatory mapping with colonia residents, and the ongoing co-design of the FLUJOS flood mapping tool. Furthermore, this paper interrogates tensions between quantitative expertise and community knowledge, addressing questions of representation, truth, and accuracy, within a broader technocratic landscape of flood mitigation infrastructure. Finally, through climate coloniality frameworks (Bonilla, 2020; Rivera, 2022), this research explores how knowledge arising from the borderlands (Mignolo, 2012; Anzaldúa, 1987) might challenge infrastructural violence in Global South communities.
In recent years, various individuals and civil society organizations in Guatemala have worked to map the civil war-era violence. These mnemonic cartographies highlight the complex ways in which place, memory, and mapping coalesce, and play a unique role in the memorialization process of post-conflict Guatemala. Drawing from an initial analysis of interviews with key stakeholders who have been involved in these map-making initiatives, this paper explores the motivations and challenges of remembrance mapping. While distinct organizations and individuals have varied missions, and the maps produced take on different forms, common themes emerged in relation to the motivations for such projects, including memory, education, and justice. Additionally, stakeholders identified common challenges: access to resources, community involvement, and representativity. By highlighting these themes, this paper seeks to underscore the complexities and productive possibilities of historical mapping initiatives.
Las escuelas son espacios donde accedemos a múltiples conocimientos, amistades, actividades culturales, deportivas, empero nuestra educación como sujetos políticos es casi nula, así como los impactos que pueden tener nuestras acciones, en nuestros espacios más inmediatos de vida. Desde la geografía ponemos una pedagógica del cuerpo-territorio como puente analítico que permita a cualquier estudiante, de diferentes niveles educativos, reflexionar sobre la importancia del cuidado de La Vida. El espacio prístino mencionado por Milton Santos (2000), es nuestro cuerpo, a través del cual conocemos, experimentados el mundo, defendemos o resistimos volviéndose una espacialidad política. Cuerpo-territorio es una categoría que pone en el centro de discusión La Vida como vector político, defender el cuerpo es defender territorio y Vida. Cuidar de sí, cuidar territorio contempla las interconexiones que tenemos con otros seres vivientes, donde cada uno es parte un complejo sistema. Cuidar nuestro cuerpo-territorio tiene una dimensión política que permite una visión integral de esferas ambientales-culturales, sociopolíticas en diferentes escalas desde el sujeto político. Una de las dimensiones políticas más cotidianas que podemos experimentar es nuestra alimentación, qué comemos, cómo lo preparamos, dónde lo comemos, el efecto que tiene en nuestros cuerpos-territorios. A través de la cartografía corporal, dibujo, juego de roles y grupos de discusión proponemos de manera lúdica reflexionar sobre la importancia del cuerpo-territorio-alimentación-política, destacando la importancia de nuestra capacidad agentiva, de nuestro potencial político cotidiano.
Coffee and snacks 🙂
Organizer(s): Eugenio Arima – University of Texas at Austin
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session C: 3:45 pm – 5:15 pmPlace: Room 1
In Guerrero’s highland poppy zones, a transnational export commodity chain enables criminal groups to appropriate territory, labor, and the bodies of adolescents—especially boys—turning youth into an extractive resource for territorial control. Grounded in a binational, multi-sited, child-centered qualitative study with children and mothers in shelters along the U.S.–Mexico border (Nogales, Ciudad Juárez) and with young people and key informants in Guerrero’s Sierra, we analyze how recruitment pressures, cartel–state entanglements, and community militias (auto-defensas) organize everyday life and flight. Bridging feminist political ecology with decolonial frameworks of cuerpo-territorio and re-existencia, the paper advances three arguments. First, boys and young men are disproportionately targeted for forced and pressured recruitment into cartel operations and auto-defensa ranks, their marginalized masculinities exploited and rendered disposable. Second, vertical integration of the poppy economy—alongside extortion, curfews, and coerced collaboration—deepens precarity and escalates displacement as families refuse inscription into armed orders. Third, mothers and children assemble clandestine protection circuits, translocal care, and cross-border asylum strategies; we read these mobilities as re-existencia—embodied refusals that re-territorialize safety and claim life against narco-extractive rule. In centering community impacts and displacement within an export-commodity frontier, the paper shows how criminal governance rests on the appropriation of youth bodies alongside land and livelihoods.
Michoacán’s agro‑export boom—anchored in avocados, berries, and limes—is often cast as a development success, yet it has expanded a commodity frontier marked by illegal deforestation, intensified water capture, and mounting community insecurity. Drawing on interviews conducted in 2024–2025 with displaced families, growers, producer‑activists, and regional experts, this paper examines how criminal governance is embedded within export agriculture and reshapes landscapes and livelihoods. We develop the concept of criminal water governance to describe how criminal groups control wells, irrigation, and watershed access as mechanisms of rent extraction and territorial rule. We then trace socio‑ecological consequences: local water crises, ecosystem degradation, internal displacement, flight toward the northern border and U.S. asylum, militarized responses, and coerced collaboration where state protection is absent or complicit. Finally, we analyze producer‑activist practices that challenge resource capture and assemble infrastructures of care that assert a right to remain amid criminal rule. Bridging feminist political ecologies of extraction with scholarship on criminal governance, the paper shows how the gains of export agriculture rest on socio‑ecological dispossession while community organizing reopens possibilities for protection and permanence.
The production of avocados uses natural resources such as land and water, in addition to involving important human dimensions such as labor, land tenure, and equity, among others. Based on our research experiences in the Avocado Belt of Mexico, we recognize three principal ways that the negative impacts of demand could be mitigated. Because the original land cover in production areas of Michoacán and Jalisco was forest, the first axis of concern involves deforestation, which has resulted not only in forest loss but habitat degradation. Forest fragmentation could be addressed through monitoring and intervening along the deforestation frontier, predicting future land use/land cover change, and programs for endemic and other species of conservation concern. Globally, indicators of sustainability could include degree of alteration of original land cover, effects on watersheds, and type of biodiversity affected. In utilized landscapes, an orchard-centric approach might be more effective by emphasizing management of pollinators, pests, and water use, and by considering agroforestry approaches for producing additional products. Indicators of sustainable production could include certifications related to pesticide, fertilizer, and water usage, and pledges to not expand production areas through land cover change. Finally, the human dimensions of sustainability need to recognize the positive economic aspects while preventing or reducing criminality or injustices. These indicators of sustainability need to be relevant to the needs of growers and farmers, the packing houses and shippers, and wholesalers and retailers. It may be consumer demand for certification of both social and environmental axes that shapes future export outcomes.
Moderator: Jorn Seemann – Ball State University
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session C: 3:45 pm – 5:15 pmPlace: Room 2
Panel Description: North-South and South-South collaborations in and on Latin America have increased considerably in the last few decades, resulting in international, sometimes multilingual publications. Whereas much is written about research, little is said about the production process, interactions between authors, language barriers, and different conceptions of research that can hamper any kind of initiative. Based on two recent edited books (Sam Halvorsen’s Latin American Geographies and the forthcoming trilingual anthology Lutas Territoriais e suas Geografias na América Latina by Rego, Seemann & Pires), the aim of this panel is to discuss the challenges stemming from organizing multivocal or multilingual publications and collaboration on an international and intercultural level. How does communication with and between authors from different backgrounds, academic cultures, and languages work? What challenges must be tackled? How can we overcome language hegemonies in publishing? How can these collaborations be improved? The panel invites book editors, authors, critics, researchers, and others interested in the topic to share their experience, think and rethink research on Latin American geographies, and reflect on how to strengthen North-South and South-South dialogues and collaborations.
Panelists: Jorn Seemann – Ball State University Tim Norris – University of Miami Nicholas Crane – University of Wyoming Martha Bell – Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session C: 3:45 pm – 5:15 pmPlace: Room 3
Se realizó un estudio geográfico-espacial y cartográfico sobre el desplazamiento forzado interno (DFI) y desaparición forzada de personas, en Chiapas, México. Metodológicamente, se recurrió a datos públicos de la Fiscalía General del Estado de Chiapas alojados en su portal ¿Has Visto a? (https://www.fge.chiapas.gob.mx/servicios/hasvistoa/), a informes de la Guardia Nacional y a resultados de investigaciones anteriores recientes sobre el DFI. En conjunto, la información fue analizada y organizada, para la construcción de bases de datos estadísticas que fueron georreferenciadas y proyectadas en el SIG, derivando en mapas temáticos que fueron analizados espacialmente. Desde la investigación se aportan insumos cartográficos buscando evidenciar los territorios en los que se deben extremar medidas de prevención y contención a este tipo de violencias. Algo importante es que las bases de datos georreferenciadas que se lograron construir actualmente no existen o no son públicas en México, y que pueden ser de utilidad pensando en posibles esquemas preventivos de gestión pública. Con esta investigación, se aporta al conocimiento científico del sur de México desde una perspectiva que busca llegar a un amplio sector de la población no necesariamente especializado en el tema.
Bulk cocaine loads have been shuttled north out of South America via small boats for decades. Throughout that period, U.S. law enforcement ‘interdiction’ activities have targeted these boats and have picked up hundreds of mariner-traffickers annually for prosecution and incarceration in the U.S. criminal justice system. As long-standing and quotidian as it has been, this maritime policing has been hard to see, in part because it plays out over a massive 7 million square mile area including the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean. As a result, little is known about the men who are picked up by this legal regime and their fates in the U.S. Starting in September, 2025, the Trump administration has weaponized this ignorance to argue that the men on boats are narco-terrorists and therefore deserve summary execution via drone-based ‘boat strikes.’ This paper uses court records and other secondary sources to accurately describe the men who crew these ‘drug boats,’ how they are typically treated by law enforcement, and what the implications of their extrajudicial execution means diplomatic and military cooperation between the U.S. and so-called ‘partner nations’ in Latin America.
This paper explores the intersections of climate degradation, forced migration, and extractive colonial power in Guapinol, a rural, campesino community in the Bajo Aguán watershed of northern Honduras. The expansion of illegal, privatized mining concessions entangled with organized networks of crime, has contaminated a major potable water source and targeted land defenders who resist the state through criminalization, displacement and lethal violence. Drawing on fieldwork conducted through interfaith accompaniment delegations and a discourse analysis of grassroots media produced by Radio Progreso, this paper examines how resistance is voiced and mobilized. As one of the most influential community radio stations in Honduras, Radio Progreso serves as a national platform for political dissent, amplifying testimonios of land defenders and broadcasting counter-narratives against the state regime. Grounded in Critical Environmental Justice and informed by political ecology, this study positions media discourse and accompaniment as methodologies that disrupt colonial epistemologies by centering lived experiences. These practices reclaim land, memory, and voice in the face of repression and erasure. The paper responds to calls within Latinx geographies by exploring the connection between grassroots media activism and memory work in Honduras, where storytelling becomes a mode of survival and a site for liberation.
The growing role of the private sector in international development has reshaped territorial struggles in Latin America. Since 2015, donor governments and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) have increasingly deployed blended finance—using public resources to subsidize and “de-risk” private investments—in pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While framed as a mechanism to “crowd in” private capital, this approach often deepens neo-extractivist policies that drive socio-environmental conflicts and territorial dispossession. In Honduras, the Aguan Valley illustrates these dynamics. Since 2008, campesino movements have resisted the expansion of a major African palm company financed by International Finance Corporation (IFC) loans and subsequent IFC equity stakes in Honduran commercial banks. Violence surrounding this conflict has been severe: between 2010 and 2013 alone, over 88 campesinos were killed, while attacks, threats, and forced evictions have persisted into 2025. Despite investigations by the IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) that found violations of IFC performance standards, Dinant exited accountability processes by repaying its loan, leaving campesinos to pursue legal action in U.S. courts that culminated in an unprecedented $5 million settlement. Drawing on discourse analysis of legal and CAO documents, alongside interviews with campesino leaders and international financial institutions representatives, this study examines how DFI funding structures—particularly the use of financial intermediaries and SME-focused projects—create accountability gaps and weaken collective campesino land claims. The research contributes to limited scholarship on Honduras, while offering broader insights into how blended finance and DFIs shape struggles over land, development, and accountability in Latin America.
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Wednesday January 7th – Session C: 3:45 pm – 5:15 pmPlace: Room 4
En julio del año 2025 el lago de San Pablo, cantón Otavalo en Ecuador, fue declarado sujeto de derecho por la Corte Constitucional. La sentencia declara culpable al municipio y la empresa pública de manejo de agua potable, EMAPAO, de haber violado los derechos de la naturaleza del lago. La primera fuente de contaminación son las aguas residuales, cuya gestión se da en un contexto plurinacional que requiere integrar diversos sistemas de saberes para una gestión equitativa y sostenible de los recursos hídricos. En el lago de San Pablo se reúnen diferentes actores con intereses en la gestión del agua para mejorar la situación de contaminación del lago debajo del lema “tejiendo agua en el territorio”. Para darle inicio al trabajo en comín, se realizaron un ritual en la orilla del lago San Pablo, cantón Otavalo, comunidad de Pucará de Velázquez. Fue liderado por una mama kichwa, con flores y frutas como ofrenda, colocadas en forma de caracol porque este símbolo representa el ciclo de la vida. El ritual marcó el inicio de una investigación sobre la calidad y la gestión del agua a nivel comunitario. De esta forma se solicitaron permiso al lago desde una cosmovisión que concibe al agua como un ser vivo. La ponencia muestra diferentes significados de este ritual en cuanto a la gobernanza del agua comunitaria en el lago de San Pablo en Ecuador, en su contexto plurinacional y la co-creación de conocimientos múltiples.
La toponimia, como nombramiento de los lugares, refleja procesos socioespaciales y es una forma simbólica de apropiación y control territorial. Esta investigación aborda la hidropolítica como un proceso de producción espacial desigual (Lefebvre, 2013) en una microcuenca del Valle del Mezquital, analizando como el control hídrico centralizado y la desigualdad socioétnica se inscriben y se disputan. Se sostiene que el agua es un híbrido socio-natural cuyo flujo es inherentemente político (Swyngedouw, 2004). El estudio se centra en la herencia del pacto colonial y la influencia de la metrópolis como área hegemónica. Se destaca el proyecto del Desagüe del Valle de México como un cambio estructural del poder hídrico que prioriza intereses urbanos a costa de la periferia. Esta forma de gestión provoca daños ambientales y genera desigualdad hídrica (Ávila-García, 2016) bajo un modelo de neoextractivismo (Svampa, 2019), el cual se legitima mediante: 1) Toponimias oficiales y mitos fundacionales que actúan como representaciones del poder. 2) Contracartografías que son prácticas de conocimiento situado y resistencia mediante toponimias y narrativas locales. El análisis demuestra que la toponimia es un campo de disputa narrativa donde las comunidades éticas desafían las estructuras de poder. Se concluye que las contracartografías revelan la historia del paisaje, las hidro-desigualdades y el conocimiento territorial local, esenciales para comprender las acciones de poder, coloniales y modernas, que han transformado el carácter de este territorio.
Chagres National Park in Central Panama is a cornerstone of the Panama Canal’s ability to funnel thousands of ships across the isthmus each year. The Río Chagres and its tributaries, which flow through the park’s neotropical rainforest, deliver as much as forty percent of the Canal’s water. Yet agricultural colonization, industrial chicken coops, and luxury gated communities have crept into the park from different angles, chipping away at its forests which are vital for maintaining the flow of the rivers feeding the Canal. One might chalk up these developments to state ambivalence or faulty enforcement, but the Panamanian Ministry of Environment maintains a field office amidst the industrial chicken coops—inside Chagres National Park! This apparent paradox is not lost on the indigenous Emberá members of La Bonga, an isolated community of about 50 families living along the Río Pequení, a principal affluent of the watershed inside Chagres National Park. Here community members maintain a low ecological footprint through small-scale agriculture and fishing. La Bonga’s establishment in the mid-1950s predates the creation of the park in 1984, allowing the community to remain in place. Yet without fee simple land tenure rights, La Bonga’s existence is tenuous, while community members have little recourse to confront the slow colonization of their lands. Drawing on preliminary field research, this paper examines how La Bonga’s effort to use Panama’s Law 72 of 2008 to secure collective land rights exposes the contradictions and consequences of state environmental mismanagement in the Panama Canal watershed.
The Panama Canal, which handles about 5% of global trade, revolutionized shipping between the Atlantic and Pacific but depends on abundant freshwater for its locks. Climate change and recurring El Niño events have reduced water levels in Lakes Gatún and Alajuela, prompting the Panama Canal Authority to propose a new dam and reservoir on the Río Indio. This project will be linked to Lake Gatún by a five-mile tunnel. The project faces resistance due to displacement and ecological disruption, echoing a historic cycle of “Ironic Resource Management,” where attempts to solve water shortages create new environmental and social problems. Earlier dams, such as the Gatún dam in 1914 and Alajuela in 1935, were built to sustain the Canal but caused similar harms. Each “solution” has intensified the depletion of Panama’s watersheds. The proposed Río Indio dam continues this unsustainable pattern, illustrating how over a century of canal expansion has prioritized trade over local communities and ecosystems, with global relevance for dam development.
where: CUCOSTA – map
Two shuttles will run from CUCOSTA to the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf. They will leave at 5:30 pm.
Two shuttles will run from CUCOSTA to the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf. They will leave at 5:30 pm.
Thursday January 8th
where: Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf – map
Two shuttles will leave from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf to CUCOSTA in the morning. The first will leave at 8:00 am and the second at 8:15 am. (*these are the only free shuttles to the conference site for the day. If you can, please take the early shuttle to ensure there is enough space for everyone.)
Two shuttles will leave from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf to CUCOSTA in the morning. The first will leave at 8:00 am and the second at 8:15 am. (*these are the only free shuttles to the conference site for the day. If you can, please take the early shuttle to ensure there is enough space for everyone.)
Register for the conference, get your name tag and meal tickets.
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session D: 9:00 am – 10:30 amPlace: Room 1
We begin from the position that a crisis is not rupture but a governing device that normalizes precarity. We make the case that terms like ‘Adaptation’ and other technical language in Latin America has come to mean learning to survive perpetual dispossession, including those in development and climate change language while leaving power structures intact. We also believe that the global South is not only a site of exploitation and dispossession, but also a fertile ground for political imagination, collective practice, offering worlds that transcend western imaginaries. In this paper, we highlight both the strategies of power and the strategies of resistance and refusal. We seek to center voices and analyses from Latin America while recognizing that climate injustice is a global structure requiring solidarity across contexts. We open a conversation where we examine how climate change discourse, with its seemingly neutral language of adaptation, resilience, mitigation, and crisis, operates in Latin America. The questions that animate our work are: When does “crisis” begin? For whom is climate change a rupture, and for whom is it an intensification of centuries-old conditions? What does it look like in Latin America when the narrative of crisis is normalized, and adaptation is seemingly the only alternative out?
Approximately one-quarter of Latin America’s population lacks access to safe water resources, particularly in Mexico. Water scarcity in Mexico results from inadequate infrastructure, socio-political factors, and neoliberal policies that exacerbate and exploit both urban and rural regions. This conceptual paper draws from early-stage fieldwork and relationship-building in Canoas Altas and Cholula, Mexico, to explore how communities resist extractive pressures and environmental degradation in Canoas Altas and Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. These are two communities contending with privatization, ecological degradation, and state neglect, shaped by broader neoliberal and capitalist development agendas. Based on early-stage fieldwork focused on building relationships and understanding community dynamics, I examine how residents mobilize against extractive industries and urban expansion that threaten local water systems and livelihoods. In Canoas Altas, community members maintain an autonomous water system amid shortages, resisting external control while navigating internal tensions around state intervention. In Cholula, organizations like Cholutecas Unidxs en Resistencia and La Asamblea de Agua Social challenge corporate and governmental actors through direct action and legal advocacy. Their actions reveal how water extraction intersects with other environmental injustices, such as private landfills, pollution, and gentrification. These movements and communities demonstrate distinct yet complementary strategies of autonomy versus reform, which reflect broader efforts for environmental justice. These findings contribute to environmental justice scholarship by showing how resilience emerges in response to neoliberal neglect not just as a form of survival, but as strategic, community-driven efforts to reclaim water and territory.
Oral traditions have widely been recognized as a crucial vehicle in processes of re-construction and transmission of collective memory. The latter in turn has been argued to often be at the center of the construction of a subaltern politics of resistance by marginalized and exploited social groups. This paper argues for oral traditions to be studied as a privileged site for examining the ways in which collective memories are mobilized and turned into political action. I revisit in my argument the ideas of James Scott and his conceptual framework regarding public and hidden transcripts of interaction between dominant and subordinate groups. However, I propose to extend the restricted way in which Scott sees the hidden transcript as always dialectically related to contexts of domination. Instead, I argue for a need to focus on the transition from hidden to public transcript as the moment when resilience turns into resistance, when offstage discourses and practices ‘storm the stage’ and become part of the wider public discourse. Empirically I scrutinize these claims by examining the ways in which Colombia’s social movement of Black communities has drawn on their collective memories (of slavery, exploitation, but also resilience) in the changing dynamics of political mobilization since the early 1990s, triggered by far-reaching national constitutional changes, to the current moment of unprecedented access to political power following the electoral victory of the Pacto Histórico political alliance in 2022.
Ñuu Savi, or people of the rain, describe Indigenous Mixteco people and their geographies as shaped through highland weather patterns in the southern mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Yet, in the past five years, pueblos Mixtecos have lamented increasing drought, scarcity of potable water, and environmental degradation as variables to their impending forced displacement. In this article I examine a case study in San Mateo Etlatongo, Oaxaca of Indigenous Mixteco Commission of Natural Resource Management (Bienes comunales) establishment of water retention ponds, a dam, and reforestation efforts as insurgent planning strategies amidst environmental crises. I specifically analyze these insurgent planning tactics as rooted in a Mixteco politic of ‘el derecho de no migrar,’ or ‘the right to stay home,’ as a refusal to succumb to forced displacement caused by climate change. In January 2025, I joined San Mateo Etlatongos’ Commission of Natural Resource Management’s delegation to Bogota, Colombia for an Indigenous Encounter on climate risk and adaptation planning to present the insurgent planning projects developed in the Mixteca. I use these experiences to explain how insurgent planning from below, most specifically, molded by Indigenous actors, develop new relations of insurgent planning practices that refute induced displacement and promote Indigenous right to territory.
Moderator: Azucena Pérez Vega
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session D: 9:00 am – 10:30 amPlace: Room 2
La creciente importancia de las geotecnologías plantea la necesidad de evaluar su utilidad desde un enfoque cualitativo, centrado en las personas. Utilizamos las percepciones sociales para analizar la utilidad del geovisualizador “Serie Cartográfica Monarca Digital” (SCMD) como herramienta en los procesos de toma de decisiones territoriales (PTDT) en núcleos agrarios de la Reserva de la Biosfera Mariposa Monarca (RBMM). Aplicamos entrevistas semiestructuradas (9) y el Análisis de Stakeholders para caracterizar los actores en la RBMM e identificar las geotecnologías que emplean. Asimismo, exploramos las percepciones de los actores clave sobre el contenido y la usabilidad del SCMD mediante el enfoque de Diseño Centrado en el Usuario, complementado con una metodología basada en tareas, implementada de manera individual (8) y en un grupo focal (3). De los diez actores identificados, cinco -pertenecientes a los sectores gubernamental, civil y núcleos agrarios- resultaron clave por sus altos niveles de la relevancia, influencia e interés en los PTDT. Las plataformas web y los SIG fueron las geotecnologías más utilizadas. La mayoría de los actores clave percibieron el contenido del SCMD como muy útil, siendo los mapas de uso de suelo y vegetación y de expansión del aguacate de mayor interés para los núcleos agrarios. En cuanto a la usabilidad, se observó una diferencia notable entre personas con y sin habilidades de cómputo. Esta capacidad resultó ser la principal limitante para un uso adecuado del geovisualizador, pues los actores clave percibieron la herramienta fácil de usar.
El presente trabajo se enmarca en el contexto de una propuesta de investigación posdoctoral (2024-2026) y muestra los avances para la generación de una cartografía dinámica participativa. El objetivo principal es el monitoreo permanente de algunos recursos, considerados como principales en el ejido: áreas forestales productivas, vegetación secundaria de acahuales y fauna silvestre. Hay una relación directa con la estructura de caminos ya que las actividades productivas están estrechamente ligadas a sus recursos. Para una adecuada gestión de sus recursos se inició con la percepción directa de la población y sentar las bases para un protocolo adecuado de monitoreo de los recursos. Se utilizó una encuesta digital para documentar la percepción, así como talleres de mapeo comunitario. Los métodos y técnicas de cartografía participativa comunitaria, apoyadas con el uso de geotecnologías y recorridos directos en campo permitieron obtener información geoespacial y retroalimentar de manera importante la elaboración de mapas en un tiempo y lugar determinado. La relación entre la infraestructura de accesos y el desarrollo socioeconómico de una comunidad fue un componente clave que impacta directamente en la conectividad, la accesibilidad y en la calidad de vida de sus habitantes. Aplicar la propuesta en el ejido Nuevo Becal, Campeche conformará una línea base de monitoreo que se podría replicar con más comunidades forestales de la región para un mejor aprovechamiento de los recursos locales.
En México, la inadecuada gestión del agua y el déficit hídrico constituyen una grave amenaza al derecho humano al agua. Una gestión fragmentada, desarticulada y con nulo compromiso por el cuidado del medio ambiente, con infraestructura obsoleta, alta contaminación por descargas industriales y agrícolas, y marcos regulatorios prácticamente sin aplicación. El presente trabajo está basado en fuentes de datos oficiales del año 2020: 1. superficies de riego a nivel municipal; 2. condición de abatimiento de los acuíferos y 3. servicios de agua potable en los hogares a nivel localidad para México con un estudio de caso en el estado de Guanajuato. Los resultados muestran las mayores superficies de riego para los municipios de los estados de Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, Sonora, Guanajuato y Michoacán. Mientras la mayor sobrexplotación de las aguas subterráneas corresponden por orden de importancia: Guanajuato, Sonora, Baja California, Chihuahua y Zacatecas ubicados todos ellos en regiones semiáridas y áridas. Los municipios con más altos porcentajes de viviendas sin agua son: Chiapas, Veracruz, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosí, Chihuahua, Guerrero y Guanajuato condición prevaleciente principalmente en comunidades rurales y periurbanas. Guanajuato, enfrenta una profunda crisis por sobreexplotación masiva de sus acuíferos para satisfacer la demanda agrícola de exportación, con abatimiento máximo de hasta 4 m anuales. Los municipios con mayores superficies agrícolas pertenecen a corredor agroindustrial, coincidiendo principalmente con los municipios de mayor precariedad al derecho humano al agua y algunos municipios de la parte norte del estado. El modelo de gestión hídrica en Guanajuato es insostenible, basado únicamente en la productividad económica, lo que ha generar un altísimo déficit hídrico y dejado a un importante número de ciudades y comunidades sin el derecho humano al agua, es urgente una reconversión hacia una gestión equitativa y sostenible.
This study analyzes the territorial distribution of depression in the State of Jalisco, Mexico, during the period 2014-2024, with the aim of identifying the evolution of the disease through spatial patterns. Based on data from the Epidemiological Bulletins of the Ministry of Health, a series of maps and figures were created to show the incidence of depression across the territory. The results reveal an increase in cases throughout nearly all states of the Mexican Republic, including Jalisco, which has remained among the top states for this disease since 2014. The municipalities of Guadalajara, Zapopan, San Pedro Tlaquepaque, and Tonala account for more than 50% of registered cases, it is worth noting that all these municipalities belong to the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area; suggesting a correlation between urbanization levels and the incidence of the disease. Due to demographic and epidemiological transitions, as well as various environmental and socioeconomic factors, the incidence of neurological disorders is expected to increase. Therefore, it is necessary to implement public policies with a territorial perspective that recognize and address the affected population. Mapping shows priority areas for psychological or psychiatric care, which in turn can guide health planning. Finally, it is important to understand depression not only as a medical challenge, but also as a spatial, sociodemographic, and economic process.
Moderator: Timothy Norris – University of Miami
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session D: 9:00 am – 10:30 amPlace: Room 3
Marine turtles, particularly the Northwest Atlantic (NWA) leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), face population declines partially attributed to egg and nesting female exploitation, and bycatch in artisanal and industrial fisheries. Traditional conservation strategies, often externally led and centered on nesting beach protection, have shown mixed long-term success, likely due to threats occurring across the turtles’ transboundary life cycle and the socio-economic realities of coastal communities. In recent decades, conservation has increasingly shifted toward community-based conservation (CBC), which integrates local stewardship, traditional ecological knowledge, and shared governance. However, the extent and effectiveness of CBC integration into leatherback turtle conservation across the NWA region remain poorly understood. This presentation introduces a doctoral research proposal that examines how CBC strategies are being implemented to reduce exploitation and bycatch of the NWA leatherback turtle population. Using a mixed-methods approach, the proposed research will conduct: (1) a gap analysis of CBC integration into conservation projects from 2005–2024, (2) case studies in Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Costa Rica, and (3) analysis of value-belief-norm pathways and Ostrom’s design principles within local governance structures. The study aims to identify enabling conditions and barriers that shape CBC adoption across different socio-ecological contexts. While results are forthcoming, this proposal outlines a framework to evaluate how community values, governance systems, and conservation initiatives intersect to support long-term leatherback turtle recovery.
Protected areas are one of the most effective tools for conserving functional ecosystems, which in turn are essential for human well-being. They can also be vital spaces for the cultural (re)production of indigenous peoples and local communities. Bolivia has been one of the pioneering countries in including local populations in the management of protected areas. However, Bolivia’s National System of Protected Areas (NSPA) is today deeply weakened and threatened by the pressures of a hegemonic development model based on extractivism and by more than a decade of weakening of the institutional framework for conservation. This paper presentation aims to take stock of the current situation of the NSPA to issue recommendations for its (re)consolidation. The arguments presented in this paper are based on an analysis of secondary sources of information and first-hand experience of some of the authors with protected area management. First, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding the relationships between conservation, well-being, and development, as well as the role of protected areas in preserving environmental benefit flows. Next, we address Bolivia’s biocultural wealth, the characteristics of its protected areas, and the history of the NSPA with its innovative experiences in shared management. We then present evidence of the multiple pressures currently threatening the NSPA. Finally, we emphasize the value of Bolivia’s protected areas and their people as the country’s greatest potential for sustainable development and issue recommendations for restoring the NSPA’s institutional framework in the context of the current political transition.
In 2002 the Peruvian Congress designated the Cordilleras Huayhuash and Raura of the central Andes as a 67,000 hectare provisional protected area called the Zona Reservada Cordillera Huayhuash (ZRCH). Since this initial step to protect these mountain ranges, there has been a remarkable shift in conservation efforts in the region. Local communities leveraged novel private conservation frameworks to have their communally titled lands recognized as private conservation areas (PCAs). Four communities achieved this recognition and continue to build their conservation efforts, and those communities that did not gain recognition continue to develop informal conservation activities. This hybrid public/private conservation strategy with the co-existence the ZRCH and the four PCAs is remarkably successful to date. This paper outlines the evolution of the national and community led conservation activities in the ZRCH and identifies opportunities and challenges as the hybrid framework matures. I argue that the benefits of the PCAs remain hidden to the National Service for Natural Protected Areas and that the benefits of the ZRCH remain hidden to the local communities. This hidden hybrid presents challenges for future conservation efforts in the area.
Recent GPS studies suggest that most, if not all, of the gray whales in the Pacific Ocean come to the Baja Peninsula of Mexico to give birth. (Since the gray whales of the Atlantic Ocean were hunted to extinction in the early 1700s, it may be that all gray whales are Mexican citizens by birth.) After a few weeks of recovery, the moms and their new calves usually migrate to cooler, more productive arctic waters to feed. Last summer, however, about 30 whales deviated from this centuries-old pattern and stayed in Magdalena Bay. This abrupt change in migration behavior is likely caused by climate warming, but the exact forcing is not understood. To assess recent changes to ocean primary productivity around the Baja Peninsula, 24 years of daily satellite estimates of chlorophyll-a concentrations were characterized using Harmonic Wave Analysis (HWA). The results show significant decreases in total primary productivity and in seasonal variation in the north of the Sea of Cortes. They also show that peak productivity is happening earlier in the northern and central portions of the Sea of Cortes. This analysis confirms that primary productivity in the waters around the Baja Peninsula are affected by climate warming and are consistently becoming less productive. This is surely at least one of the causes of whales’ new behavior. The analysis also demonstrates that HWA is a useful tool for systematically monitoring oceanic productivity in the area.
Cenotes (water-filled sinkholes, known as ‘ts’ono’ot’ in Maya) are common features across the Yucatán Peninsula, which is home to an estimated 5,000–10,000 of them. Thousands remain unregistered and unexplored. Presently, most known cenotes are Mayan-owned, continuing their traditional uses for water, agriculture, and religious purposes. A small yet growing number of visitor-accessible sinkholes have created a unique sector for cenote tourism in southeast Mexico. Tourist-facing cenotes offer consistent beauty, similar recreational opportunities, modest admissions, and many (not all) cases of local or indigenous stewardship. However, there are starkly uneven distributions of tourist amenities and digital visibility among individual cenotes, and these factors influence visitation. The increasing density of public-facing cenotes in Yucatán state risks oversaturating the market, thereby crowding out those with minimal name recognition. This study examines 57 visitor-accessible cenotes located near the tourist hub of Valladolid, Yucatán. For each one, a visitor infrastructure score and digital footprint statistics are used to classify it within three categories: mass-touristic, mid-tier, and adventure/minimalist. The analysis finds that varying levels of cenote visibility reflect diversity in the geologic structure, social relations, and perceived authenticity of a given cenote, all of which shape their appeal to distinct tourist demographics.
Organizer(s): Anika Rice – University of Wisconsin-Madison
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session D: 9:00 am – 10:30 amPlace: Room 4
Border enforcement in southern Mexico immobilizes migrants in transit to the US and racialized local communities. Scholars in fields like border and migration studies and political geography observe that border restrictions implemented in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America constitute an externalization of the US border. While valid, this explanation tends to ignore the economic interests of Latin American states motivating border enforcement in the region. To pay attention to the latter, in this paper, I draw from ethnographic data, archival documents, and secondary sources about the consolidation of Mexico’s southern border in the Maya-Lacandon Forest, a region largely inhabited by agrarian and Mayan communities. I show the colonial and racial roots of the national security discourse that Mexican officials use to advance policies that simultaneously open and close the border. On the one hand, such policies promote the expansion of agro-industrial plantations producing global commodities free to move across borders. On the other, policies take a carceral turn to secure a precarious migrant labor force for the plantation. I discuss the worrisome impacts that this racial national security discourse, enacted through border enforcement, has for Mayan land relationalities and the Maya forest.
From January 2021 to December 2024, more than 8.6 million migrants arrived at the US-Mexico border. In contrast to Trump I’s unilateral and draconian enforcement measures, the Biden administration promised a new humanitarian approach to unsolicited border arrivals that adopted principles from the UN Global Compact on Migration. In January 2025, Trump again closed the US’ southern border to asylum seekers, pausing this wave of arrivals. It is in this pause that we reflect on the effectiveness and consequences of the poorly understood and widely criticized US attempt under the Biden administration’s (2021-2024) re-working of the US’ asylum system. This paper uses interviews conducted during the peak years of migrant arrivals at the US’ southern border, in 2023-2024, to illustrate how implementation of Biden’s ‘humane border enforcement’ policy resulted in the hemispheric-wide illegalization of transit, leading to unintended consequences such as increased migrant vulnerability and the enrichment of criminal actors.
Despite the growing body of literature on agrarian extractivism as a land change driver in Latin America and a potential source of rural displacement, we know little about the linkages between this phenomenon and the other important driver of rural change in the region—international labor migration. This paper contributes to a more comprehensive knowledge of the interconnections between migration and extractivism through a case study of six rural communities in Guatemala directly affected by both the rapid expansion of sugarcane plantations, as well as ongoing out-migration of community members to the United States. Based on a household survey, in-depth interviews, and focus groups, we find that both processes of migration and extractive sugarcane production have a negative impact on the availability and accessibility of land for smallholders. The analysis challenges unidirectional depictions of displacement that are commonly observed in studies on extractivism and human mobility. Rather than operating separately, the results show that migration and extractivism intertwine to jointly shape rural landscapes—sometimes sustaining local livelihoods and settlement, while at other times driving displacement. In this process, remittances and migrants’ savings may limit the territorial spread of extractive industries.
Population flows from the Northern Triangle (NT) of Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) to the United States increased substantially during the last decade. Notably, a historically high portion of these migrants traveled as family units, not as individuals. This paper presents rate of outmigration at the Department and Municipio scales from a dataset recording origin locations of all family unit migrants from NT countries who were apprehended at the U.S. Southern border (2012-2018). A trend toward increased migration of families from rural areas may signal challenges to agricultural livelihood strategies in the NT. Such challenges may result from adverse impacts to growing conditions due to multidecadal climate change as measured by metrics such as total annual precipitation, average ambient temperature, and the duration, start, and end date of the rainy season. These climate metrics are observed to be significantly correlated with the rate of outmigration in the NT at the Department scale, although the strength of these relationships and the set of most salient factors are not uniform across the region. At finer spatial scales, measures of land cover change can indicate conditions associated with higher rates of outmigration. We focus on the case of eastern El Salvador, where measures of land change associated with smallholder agricultural producers’ competition with extractive agriculture over resources correlate with rate of outmigration at the Municipio scale. This relationship is interpreted in the context of the region’s history of civil conflict and agricultural development.
Coffee and snacks 🙂
Organizer(s): Yolanda Valencia – University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC)
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session E: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 1
This paper examines children and youth migrant workers’ care activism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent migrant children and youth are regularly invisibilized in activist spaces, often said to be merely accompanying their parents to protests, rallies, and community organizing events. However, as this paper demonstrates, despite the presence of immigration and customs enforcement in the public, children’s work is indispensable for migrant justice movements seeking to mobilize the community. I engage with Tungohan’s concept of “care activism” to understand how everyday care work can expand conceptualizations of children and youth migrant activism in diverse spaces of protest. The children’s initial involvement was somewhat tepid, emerging from the inability to protect their own families and a desire to fulfill their own aspirations. This paper considers 1) how the youth transitioned from everyday care work to care activism, 2) manifestations of care activism in the overlapping practices of service, advocacy, and mobilization 3) how care activism practices eroded the children’s fear and containment. The findings advance conversations on the political geographies of children and youth, migration, and social movements.
In recent years, academics have increasingly focused on care, enriching debates about everyday survival and livelihood strategies. There has also been some recognition, albeit limited, of the role that girls themselves play as caregivers, rather than just the recipients of care. Yet, policies themselves continue to categorize young migrants in static ways. This paper examines the experiences of Venezuelan girls who have migrated to Peru. As young people engaging in both migration and care, the girls in this study defy easy categorization; the systems meant to care for and support them can actively hinder their own efforts to care. Their testimonies and participatory activities reveal experiences fraught with violence—but where girls perceive the most violence does not always mirror dominant assumptions about conflict and violence. As women and migrants, they must navigate additional challenges as they attempt to care for themselves and others. Their accounts raise important questions about how to support practices and politics of care in the context of violence.
This paper addresses the methodological challenge of quantifying human exposure to environmental health risks in dynamic urban environments, using the case of urban water runoff sites (UWRS) in eastern Tijuana, Mexico. As part of a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project in collaboration with the Colectivo Salud y Justicia Ambiental (CSJA), we sought to address resource constraints to assess exposure risk of residents to urban runoff. To do so we combined qualitative and quantitative data to shed light on how residents navigate their exposure to contaminated runoff. Collaborating with residents as citizen scientists, we collected and analyzed GPS data to (1) identify and quantify spatial- temporal patterns of individual proximity to these streams as crossings and (2) evaluate duration of exposure within 50-meter buffer zones. Our findings demonstrate a high variability of exposure risk and the variety of approaches residents take to reduce those risk which are often shaped by situational and contextual factors on how they share those risk.
Capitalism and colonialism are structured through distorting and preying upon our relations. These distortions attempt to make life static, to confine, divide, exclude, and extract through law and custom. But what does it mean to be rooted in resilience? How do such resilient roots inform where we know from, who we are, and the type of scholarship we produce? How might such knowledge travel across borders in the co-creation of livable worlds in places not made for us – minoritized people of color? Inspired by my transborder Mexican community’s wisdom and practices of resilience amidst state-sponsored violence in the US and reflecting upon my experiences in academia, in this conversation, I engage these questions. This community has taught me that practices rooted in logics of communality, solidarity, and reciprocity are essential in protecting and expanding our relations and in making livable worlds.
Organizer(s): Christian Abizaid – University of Toronto
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session E: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 2
Over the past half-century, more than 500 new municipalities have been carved into Brazil’s Amazon region—an unprecedented wave of administrative fragmentation that has redefined both the map and the meaning of Amazonia. This paper argues that such municipal proliferation is not merely bureaucratic—it is profoundly urban, territorial, and environmental. Through an integrated analysis of census data (IBGE) and land-use change (MapBiomas), the study reveals how this explosion of cities has actively reshaped the forest, acting as a key driver of deforestation and land conversion. While over 70% of Amazonian residents now live in urban areas, the urban turn remains understudied in regional frameworks. This research reframes the “Urban Amazon” not as an exception, but as a dominant and accelerating reality. Patterns of municipal creation—especially during the 1980s and 1990s—correlate sharply with forest loss, particularly in the “arc of deforestation” states such as Mato Grosso, Pará, and Rondônia. In contrast, states like Amazonas and Amapá, with fewer new municipalities, maintain higher levels of forest cover. The findings challenge the artificial separation between deforestation and urbanization, revealing how state-led administrative decisions serve as spatial mechanisms of occupation, infrastructure expansion, and environmental degradation. By tracing how 500 cities in 50 years have transformed a forested frontier into a fragmented urban-agricultural mosaic, this paper calls for a radical rethinking of Amazonian geographies—and the governance frameworks that shape them. The Urban Amazon is no longer emerging. It is here, and it is key to the region’s future.
Floods are key to life in the Amazon floodplain. They facilitate transportation, replenish soil fertility, and are key to the life cycle of thousands of fish species. For riverine populations, flooding is a given, a season that they are generally well adjusted to, but at times, floods can severely disrupt the lives and livelihoods of local populations, this is especially so during extreme floods. With climate change models predicting longer and higher floods in western Amazonia, concern about the fate of local riverine populations is increasing. Studies to date have focused on the implications of floods for food security, on local exposure, impacts and responses and everyday experiences. Although they have helped to advance our understanding of flood vulnerability, such studies tend to treat the flood as a discrete event and thus fail to capture important nuance about how people experience floods and respond to them. Some of that ambiguity stems from the fact that research on flood vulnerability is typically conducted during the low water season, and at times, years after the flood. This study seeks to contribute to that gap by reporting on insights gained from reconnaissance work conducted in a floodplain community along the Ucayali River during and after the 2025 flood-the worst flood in more than 40 years. Attention is paid to how the flood event evolved and the changing experience, impacts and responses during and after the flood. Implications are discussed.
We explore the opportunities and limitations that collaborative in situ assessments to account for loss and damage in Amazon Indigenous territories can provide to Indigenous communities and their allies in the context of extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change. The work presented here stems from a collaborative initiative carried out in 2023 – 2025 between Tacana Indigenous communities and organizations, and climate justice, development, and conservation NGOs and funders.
The recognition of Indigenous rights has become a central element in global debates on environmental governance. Fundamental to such rights is the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), which grants Indigenous Peoples the authority to give or withhold consent to projects or measures impacting their lands, territories, or resources. However, given the recent surge of irregular mining economies in Venezuelan Amazonia, FPIC as a legal mechanism remains an unclear avenue for Indigenous communities to contest the social and environmental impacts of mining. Such communities face significant barriers to securing constitutional rights, including limited access to legal systems, political co-optation, security risks, and economic vulnerability driving many into mining activities. Drawing on a case study and participant observation of grassroots organizational initiatives, I evaluate how FPIC complicates Indigenous efforts to resist mining encroachment. I argue that, in the context of an expanding resource frontier where state forces and organized armed groups vie for control of mining rents, a strictly rights-based approach to environmental justice risks reproducing structural forms of violence against Indigenous Peoples. My findings underscore how a decolonial approach to environmental justice can advance more meaningful outcomes within Indigenous struggles against resource extraction.
The Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s most vital ecosystems for global climate health and biodiversity; however, continued development and resource extraction are increasingly threatening the rainforest and pushing it toward a tipping point. This study examines 40 years (1985-2025) of growth in the active road network in eastern Ucayali, Peru, an area along the Peru-Brazil border characterized by old-growth forests, Indigenous communities, and endangered species. We used a manual road digitization method, leveraging Landsat (1985-2015) and Planet (2016-2025) satellite imagery, to track road expansion and contraction and evaluate their environmental impacts. The road network in eastern Ucayali grew by 250% over the 40 years, with most roads built after 2011. Environmental degradation was linked to proximity to roads, with results showing increased deforestation, higher land surface temperatures, and reduced evapotranspiration within 5 kilometers of a road. While Indigenous territories and natural protected areas are crucial for defending the Amazon from deforestation and biodiversity loss, these areas are increasingly threatened by road construction, especially from neighboring privately owned forestry concessions with limited oversight. The findings of this regional infrastructure study highlight the need for ongoing monitoring of road development and its environmental effects. The combination of comprehensive data collection and remote sensing offers a new framework for understanding human-driven regional changes in the critically important southwestern Amazon.
Organizer(s): Jaime Paneque-Gálvez – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session E: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 3
En el estudio de los proyectos neoliberales que han provocado la urbanización del México rural, se ha visto cómo las comunidades son excluidas y, en consecuencia, carecen de información sobre los proyectos que se establecen en sus territorios. Esto se debe a la opacidad con la que las autoridades gestionan dichos espacios y la ausencia de instrumentos legales que les obligue a comunicar y consultar a la población. Esto sucede en el municipio de Colón, en Querétaro que, desde inicios del siglo XXI, comenzó a urbanizarse debido a la construcción del Aeropuerto Internacional de Querétaro, el subsecuente desarrollo del clúster aeronáutico y recientemente el establecimiento de centros de datos. Dichos proyectos provocaron fuertes cambios de uso de suelo, lo que obligó a los ejidatarios a vender sus tierras y esto a su vez provoca la degradación del ambiente. Ante la injusticia ambiental, se considera fundamental que disciplinas como la geografía se involucren de manera activa y contribuyan a brindar argumentos que ayuden a luchar por los territorios más justos en el que no queden pueblos olvidados, ni personas desplazadas por los proyectos neoliberales. En este sentido, el presente trabajo tiene por objetivo, por un lado, plantear la importancia de difundir la información producto de investigaciones y compartirla con las comunidades que han sido víctimas de los proyectos neoliberales impuestos en sus territorios, y por el otro, acercar las herramientas del mapeo y los SIG Participativo como otra manera de conocer y defender su territorio.
La Zona Metropolitana de Querétaro ha experimentado un crecimiento disperso y desigual en las décadas recientes, sobre todo ligado al desarrollo de condominios residenciales. La construcción de estos desarrollos y la mercantilización de la vivienda –sobre todo a partir del neoliberalismo– tiene implicaciones sociales y ambientales, que van desde cómo se apropian de las tierras, hasta cuestiones de privatización del agua por las mismas desarrolladoras inmobiliarias. Para ejemplificar lo anterior, podemos dar cuenta de dos casos: Zibatá y El Campanario. Ambos son desarrollos residenciales de lujo de construcción reciente, que se instauraron sobre suelo ejidal mediante despojos, fraudes y el uso de violencia. El suministro de agua de estos condominios es a través de concesiones privadas que se les otorgó a las mismas desarrolladoras, lo cual ha dejado a habitantes de colonias aledañas con un suministro intermitente y de mala calidad o, incluso, la llegada de descargas de agua residual hacia sus colonias. La geografía comprometida permite dar cuenta de esta producción desigual del espacio, las relaciones de poder imperantes y las implicaciones que ello tiene en la vida cotidiana de las personas, sobre todo de aquellas poblaciones segregadas y despojadas. Además, una geografía crítica, comprometida y comunitaria permitiría no solo visibilizar estas problemáticas en el sector académico (y quizás en la esfera política y pública), sino contribuir a la lucha y la acción desde abajo, desde las propias comunidades, que ayuden a transformar las relaciones sociales desiguales hacia unas más igualitarias.
Las universidades del Sur Global tienden a perpetuar la colonialidad del conocimiento académico proveniente de las universidades del Norte Global. Esto genera una profunda desconexión espacial y epistémica con los territorios en los que inciden sus modelos educativos. Frente a esa realidad, realizamos un proyecto de innovación educativa en Morelia, México, cuyo objetivo fue crear un espacio de aprendizaje colectivo horizontal y desescolarizado donde operacionalizar un diálogo de saberes intercultural entre académicos, estudiantes, una comunidad de práctica sustentable (Comunidad Ecológica Jardines de la Mintsïta – CEJM), y personas de la sociedad civil. El proyecto fue codiseñado junto con la CEJM y se articuló en torno a tres ejes que consideramos claves para su defensa del territorio: ecotecnologías, herramientas de comunicación audiovisual, y reflexión teórica para nutrir la acción colectiva. Partiendo de un diseño que podemos denominar “geografía comunitaria” (Shannon et al., 2021), argumentamos que nuestra praxis generó una pedagogía descolonial que propició la coproducción de conocimientos situados y aprendizajes socialmente útiles, desafiando así el “epistemicidio” occidental; además, contribuyó a disminuir las relaciones de poder entre academia y sociedad, a estrechar las relaciones entre los participantes, y a fortalecer la territorialidad de la CEJM. Concluimos que la geografía comunitaria orientada hacia la educación descolonial, entendida como una praxis situada y comprometida con los grupos sociales subalternos, ofrece un camino viable para que la academia posicione su quehacer al servicio de las luchas socioambientales populares, contribuyendo a la construcción de geografías más justas y sustentables.
En varios países latinoamericanos predominan los modelos de desarrollo norteamericanos y/o europeos, resultado de 500 años de colonización y colonialismo, que reproducen la dependencia económica, militar, geopolítica e incluso cultural, lo cual influye en las teorías y métodos que utilizamos en Geografía. Al mismo tiempo, en América Latina identificamos experiencias de subversión político-cultural y teórico-metodológica, como las que se dan a través de una ciencia territorial comprometida con la sostenibilidad, practicada y teorizada desde la investigación-acción participativa. En esta ciencia, integramos las ciencias académicas, el saber y las prácticas populares y ancestrales, la teoría y la práctica, la universidad y el territorio, con una significativa inmersión territorial y un firme compromiso político con los sujetos de cada proyecto de investigación-acción. Trabajamos con el método de las convivencias, es decir, investigamos, enseñamos, aprendemos y cooperamos simultáneamente con sujetos del campo y de la ciudad, buscando superar los modelos y las fases tradicionales de la investigación científica hegemónica. De esta manera, nos involucramos con las personas de cada proyecto: la implicación territorial es teórica y práctica, abarcando tradición e innovación, confianza e identidad, redes de cooperación y solidaridad, sinergias y conflictos. Significa simultáneamente participación social, horizontalidad, diálogo, humildad y, en última instancia, una praxis para lograr la autonomía decisional desde una perspectiva decolonial y contrahegemónica (Saquet, 2024a, 2024b).
Organizer(s): Anika Rice – University of Wisconsin-Madison
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session E: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 4
For decades, coyotes, or smugglers, have been a central figure that represents the irregular crossing of migrants towards the US. However, as borders are increasingly enforced and externalized, new corridors emerge, and the practices evolving the facilitation of the irregular transit of migrants have become more complex and diverse. This paper is part of a project that gathered data over a 18-month period, from January 2023 – June 2024 and is drawn from a survey of 154 migrants surveyed and interviewed in the Rio Grande valley (RGV) sister cities of Matamoros (Tamaulipas, Mexico) – Brownsville (Texas, USA) and Reynosa (MX) -McAllen (USA). Comparing broader trends from other empirical studies with our study’s findings, this paper points to the complexities of the practices constituting the facilitation of unauthorized border crossings involving transit migration to the USA. Instead of framing facilitation solely as a criminal enterprise bound to a single region, this paper reveals the interplay among local facilitators, transnational enforcement, and regional migration dynamics, showing that some relationships involve reciprocal favors beyond monetary exchange. It also examines border controls, changing smuggling fees, and shifting migrant strategies, arguing that reliance on facilitators results from structural, regional, and transnational factors that transcend individual criminality.
The rapid acceleration of climate change has made it increasingly clear that it is now a compounding driver of human migration, interacting with other factors tied to economics, politics, and conflict. Unprecedented in scale, frequency, and devastation, human-induced climate disasters have destabilized entire communities with droughts in Central America, fires in the Amazons, and flooding in Jamaica. This study offers preliminary insights into how the acceleration of climate change is reshaping historical migration patterns in the Americas and the Caribbean by observing the demographic changes of migrants in Mexico. The methodology focuses on a historical analysis of past migration patterns of migrants from the Americas and the Caribbean in Mexico, tracking how these patterns have changed over the past three decades, and identifying climate change induced events that could be linked as compounding causes. By mapping out the connections between various climate disasters and patterns in human movements, the research underscores the importance in centering climate change when addressing the “migration crisis” that world leaders often decry. Mexico serves as a promising case study due to its status as simultaneously a transit, receiving, and sending country and its physical proximity to the United States, a long-standing destination country for many in the Americas and the Caribbean. The research argues that climate change should be a forefront consideration for policymakers when key decisions regarding immigration and migrants are made in order to craft policies that encourage sustainability and safeguard vulnerable communities.
With increasingly difficult conditions for smallholder agricultural production, labor migration is an essential component of livelihoods for many rural families in the Global South. This migration is gendered and is often normalized as part of households’ livelihood portfolios. Yet it also can reproduce livelihood precarity and help maintain underlying structural inequalities. The role of labor migration as a livelihood strategy therefore requires continued research attention. Livelihood processes, including those connected to gendered labor migration, are infused with and shaped by a variety of emotions, including stress, longing, suffering, or contrastingly, aspiration, exhilaration, wellbeing, or happiness, that are experienced intersectionally. We contend that excluding analysis of emotional experience imperils comprehension of the drivers, motivations, and impacts of growing livelihood migration and other gendered livelihoods shifts. Emotions are core to migration decision-making, impact, and experience and therefore are central to any holistic understanding of the migration-livelihoods nexus. Paying attention to the role of emotion at the livelihood-migration nexus, where emotions often take center stage, is also a helpful entrée for taking both affect and intersectionality more seriously in the broader context of gendered livelihoods in general. These contentions result from past research fieldwork on labor migration and environmental change in Guatemala’s Pacific lowlands and Nicaragua’s northwest.
This project interrogates how land access, land use and debt tied to property are related to various migration trajectories, and how Maya K’iche’ women in Guatemala respond to and shape their conditions. Across rural Guatemala unequal land tenure, structural poverty, and high migration rates are prevalent (Land Links, n.d.; OIM, 2021). Many families thus rely on livelihood migration, which at once sustains families but also reproduces structural inequalities that condition migration (Radel et. al 2018). The prevalence of debt as both a cause and consequence of migration reflects this livelihood precarity (Heidbrink 2019). Migrants bound for the US commonly mortgage land as collateral for migration loans, with varied outcomes (Johnson 2021). Women who live with the uncertainty of prolonged family separation may take on added labor, experience changes in their access to resources, and contend with local and transnational gossip that impacts their labor and their mobility. Fieldwork was conducted in the municipality of Santa María Chiquimula, Totonicapán, where transnational migration took off recently, in 2019-2020, allowing me to study the role of land tenure, mortgages and debt at the onset of a migration trend. Data was collected in collaboration with Indigenous mayors, community development councils and the Jesuit Migration Network (Red Jesuita con Migrantes). This paper draws from a combination of 113 quantitative household surveys across three village communities, as well as qualitative interview and parcel mapping exercises. This work makes visible the financial, livelihood, cultural and gendered struggles that are embedded in the smallholder landscape, and how they interface with out-migration. Just as important are the K’iche land ethics and 21st century Indigenous worldviews that motivate families to persist on their ancestral lands.
Box lunch provided (pickup between 12:30 – 1:00 pm).
Poster session II
The Amazon rainforest is the largest rainforest on the planet, and thus of critical importance to carbon storage and the safeguarding of biodiversity. Indigenous residents of the Amazon have lived in forested homelands alongside diverse fauna and flora for millenia. However, selective logging is expanding into the most remote portions of the Amazon. In the Southwestern Amazon borderlands of Peru and Brazil, 14 Indigenous ethnicities and other traditional residents of the headwaters of the Juruá, or Yurúa River, have banded together to form the Juruá-Yurúa-Tamaya Transboundary Commission to protect the rivers, forests, and fauna they depend on. Logging companies use Peru’s forestry concession system to harvest the timber while fauna feeds their loggers and rivers transport their logs. Our research analyzes the geography, history, and impact of four remote forestry concessions activated by the expansion of logging roads. Analysis of forestry management plans and inspection reports, along with GIS analysis of roads, timber, and trails shows a complex and dynamic history of ownership with the amalgamation of multiple concessions into one of Peru’s largest. This research provides the Transboundary Commission with an analysis of how the state has envisioned, impacted, and inspected their forested headwaters over the past 20 years.
This proposed research seeks to problematize how Black Americans in Mérida, Mexico navigate privilege, race, and belonging within a society shaped by mestizaje and global mobility. Scholarship on lifestyle migration often centers white, middle-class expatriates, framing mobility as a pursuit of freedom and self-realization. Yet, this framing obscures how racial hierarchies travel across borders and how privilege itself becomes unstable when embodied by racialized subjects. Grounded in theories of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1991), liminality (Turner 1969), and global racism (Christian 2021), this project interrogates how racialized privilege in motion emerges through social and digital practices of recognition. Using qualitative digital ethnography—including interviews, participant observation, and analysis of online migrant communities—this study will explore how Black Americans negotiate visibility, belonging, and moral legitimacy in both local and virtual spaces. Rather than assuming mobility equates to empowerment, the research aims to problematize the tensions between privilege and marginalization experienced by Black Americans abroad. Preliminary digital observations suggest that racial hierarchies are not dissolved through transnational movement but reconfigured through encounters with mestizaje and mediated networks of recognition. By linking race, mobility, and digital geography, this project contributes to emerging dialogues in Black geographies and critical migration studies. It highlights the need to theorize privilege not as possession, but as a contingent social relationship that reveals the enduring spatial and moral boundaries of racialized belonging in the Americas.
The development of the Amazon borderlands Acre (Brazil) and Ucayali (Peru) has been framed by a variety of actors with different perspectives, motivations, and levels of power. The UC-105 highway has increasingly become a center of development discourse. Politicians from both countries have participated in press tours promoting the highway with the promise of economic development, while local residents and environmental and Indigenista organizations warn of impacts (deforestation, intrusion on indigenous lands). The aim of this project is to site the debate geographically across the Amazon borderlands and the countries of Peru and Brazil. We have compiled Brazilian and Peruvian news articles and social media posts on Facebook (Meta), Instagram, and YouTube during the driest portion of the 2025 dry season (August to October) in the Southwestern Amazon. By simultaneously locating sources of the debate and their geographic imaginaries we are able to better understand how these debates may shape the landscape and vice versa.
El estado de Michoacán presenta una notable diversidad ecológica, abiótica y cultural que se refleja en la presencia de geomorfositios, entendidos como formas del relieve con valor científico, patrimonial y paisajístico. En las últimas décadas, estos elementos han adquirido importancia creciente debido a su potencial para la investigación, la conservación y el aprovechamiento social (Mucivuna et al., 2019; Panizza & Piacente, 2008). La región de Mil Cumbres constituye un espacio donde la configuración biofísica favorece una elevada diversidad geológica y ecológica. Desde una perspectiva geográfica, el relieve emerge como un componente central en la construcción del paisaje, permitiendo identificar geomorfositios de relevancia como el Cerro de San Andrés, la Peña de San Miguel, la Barranca de Tumbisca y los saltos de Tzitzio e Ichaqueo. En todos estos casos, las formas de relieve se vinculan estrechamente con prácticas culturales, dinámicas económicas e incluso procesos históricos locales (Ruiz-Pedrosa et al., 2024; Serrano & González-Trueba, 2005). Además de su singularidad geomorfológica, estos sitios mantienen una relación directa con el ámbito antrópico, ya sea mediante usos tradicionales, valores simbólicos o actividades económicas. Esta convergencia evidencia la necesidad de integrar enfoques de gestión territorial que reconozcan el valor geográfico y sociocultural del relieve (Gray, 2004; Palacio Prieto, 2016). El presente trabajo propone el diseño y aplicación de un sistema de caracterización e inventario de geomorfositios para Mil Cumbres, con miras a su posterior replicabilidad en distintas subprovincias fisiográficas de México (Bravo Cuevas et al., 2021; Solís García, 2015; Zwoliński et al., 2018).
As the largest rainforest on the planet, the Amazon rainforest is closely connected to the global climate; regional-scale changes in the Amazon rainforest can disturb regional and global climate patterns. However, changes in global climate systems also disturb Amazonia. In particular, precipitation patterns in Amazonia are strongly influenced by systems of ocean and air temperature in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Historically, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has been the main driver of Amazonian drought, and, until recently, the majority of significant drought events were closely correlated with extreme ENSO events. However, as climate change has elevated sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and disrupted weather patterns, Amazonian droughts have become increasingly unpredictable and erratic, both in their intensity and their distribution. The increasingly important influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and other such ocean systems have changed the spatial distribution of drought at a basin-wide scale, increasing rainfall in previously dry areas and vice versa. Through the analysis of remotely sensed climate data using R and ArcGIS, this poster examines the impacts of rising SSTs on the spatial distribution of extreme drought events on a regional scale, focusing on the biologically and culturally diverse states of Acre, Brazil and Ucayali, Peru in Southwestern Amazonia.
With the growing need for both climate change mitigation and adaptation, Indigenous activism provides both an alarm and an alternative to business as usual. In the Amazon region, Indigenous activists face growing levels of deforestation and forest degradation as the rainforest approaches a tipping point to a tropical savannah. Indeed, recent research underscores the critical role of the Amazon forest for regulating earth systems (carbon cycle, water cycle etc.) and social systems (agricultural supply chains and reliance on ecosystem services) in South America and beyond. Given they cover 28.5% of the Amazon while being proximate to protected natural areas (25.5%), Indigenous territories provide effective barriers to deforestation and forest degradation. Defending these territories are cohesive local Indigenous communities with strong cultural and environmental knowledge who depend on their homelands’ forests, rivers, fauna, and local climates. COP30 provides a unique opportunity to analyze the overlap of global processes and local activism, at the first COP conference held in the planet’s largest tropical rainforest. An estimated 1,000 Indigenous leaders will be attending COP’s Blue Zone – almost three times more than previous conferences. Despite this, Indigenous leaders face challenges to have their voice heard in an event designed for state, corporate, and NGO actors. As COPs grow in attendance, if not action, so has frustration at participation inequities. This poster shares the story of an Indigenous-led Transboundary Commission and their efforts to travel across the Amazon to share their story and create change at the largest stage on the planet.
Key words: Tipping point, COP30, Indigenous engagement, Amazonia, Climate Change, Transboundary Commission
Key words: Tipping point, COP30, Indigenous engagement, Amazonia, Climate Change, Transboundary Commission
El proyecto de divulgación científica en Geografía y Geohistoria del que forma parte estos materiales tiene como propósito llevar el conocimiento histórico y geográfico de Michoacán a las comunidades locales, haciéndolo accesible a públicos de todas las edades. A través del uso de mapas 3D interactivos se busca fomentar el interés en la Geohistoria, combatir el centralismo educativo, y conectar a los participantes con su entorno histórico y geográfico. El enfoque interdisciplinario e inclusivo garantiza que el aprendizaje sea significativo y adaptado a las realidades particulares de cada localidad. Con esto en mente se generaron modelos tridimensionales geográficos que se pueden visualizar con tecnología de realidad aumentada (AR). Aplicado a la divulgación de la Geografía, se proyectan modelos virtuales anclados a una imagen real usando dispositivos móviles con acceso a internet. Accediendo a los códigos QRs correspondientes a cada experiencia AR, cualquier persona, en cualquier momento, mientras tenga la imagen correspondiente, puede acceder a estos modelos. Entre los modelos generados hasta el momento, se cuenta con la proyección de Werner, el volcán Paricutín, la Luna, la cuenca del lago de Pátzcuaro en 1522, entre otros modelos que se hacen llegar a la gente en la forma de separadores que damos de manera gratuita.
The proposed Trocha UC-105 forestry road stretches from Nueva Italia to Puerto Breu in the Peruvian Amazon through areas of old growth rainforest and Indigenous homelands. Due to fluctuating legislation and enforcement, the UC-105 and its secondary trails have undergone moments of expansion and contraction, creating a unique path that alternates between an actively used route and an abandoned linear strip of secondary forest – a legacy road. In this study, we seek to understand the timeline of this morphology and the associated forest resiliency. Using imagery from Landsat (2003-2015) and Planet Imagery (2016-2024), we mapped the annual extent of the UC-105 for over 20 years (2003-2024) and created a 1 km, 2 km, and 5 km buffer of each year’s road network. We use these buffers to compare two legacy road cases. These cases are analyzed in Google Earth Engine across our timeline (2003-2024) and buffers using remotely sensed data of regional evapotranspiration and land surface temperature. The results were then analyzed using t-tests in RStudio, where pre-road averages were compared to each post-road year. Our results indicate whether these legacy roads demonstrate forest resiliency or fragility in the face of road morphology in the Amazon rainforest. Results inform the potential costs and benefits of road investment in tropical rainforests.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30×30 target calls for the protection of 30% of Earth’s lands and waters by 2030 and emphasizes that these efforts must respect the rights, knowledge, and governance of Indigenous peoples and local communities. As efforts accelerate to achieve this target, research increasingly highlights that equitable and effective Marine Protected Area (MPA) management relies on integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and community participation, which can be facilitated through decentralized, shared governance between local communities and government—commonly known as co-management. Despite this evidence, adoption of co-management schemes has been slow, and there is limited guidance on context-specific frameworks that can serve as models. In response, this study aims to examine how TEK and cultural heritage among Indigenous and Afro-descendant residents in Cahuita, Costa Rica, shape MPA governance and socio-ecological outcomes in Cahuita National Park—an area with over three decades of co-management history. The research employs qualitative and participatory methods, including document analysis and semi-structured interviews with key actors and community members. Purposive and snowball sampling will be used to ensure robust representation of perspectives across diverse stakeholder groups. Thematic analysis will identify trends in governance practices, TEK integration, and community-defined measures of conservation success. Anticipated outcomes include a clearer understanding of how culturally grounded governance can foster ecological resilience, equity, and long-term conservation success. These insights can inform the development of a context-responsive framework for strengthening existing MPA management, guiding the establishment of new sites, and supporting more sustainable outcomes for both communities and marine ecosystems.
Corruption remains a persistent challenge in Latin America, shaping political stagnation, social inequality, and the erosion of democratic institutions. Guatemala is one of the most corrupt countries in the region, with corruption taking many forms, including bribery, vote-buying, extortion, illicit financing, and manipulation of the judicial system. This study critiques traditional approaches, such as Principal–Agent Theory and Collective Action Theory, as insufficient for explaining corruption’s persistence and adaptability. Using Competitive Disadvantage Theory and the Fraud Triangle Theory, corruption is conceptualized as both systematic and situational, rooted in social disadvantage but reinforced by personal and institutional incentives. The analysis traces corruption from the colonial era through foreign corporate influence, Cold War authoritarianism, and the weakening of accountability institutions following the expulsion of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Contemporary scandals and the 2023 elections, including the unexpected victory of Bernardo Arévalo, are examined as potential turning points, highlighting the role of civil society and institutional oversight in challenging entrenched impunity.Finally, the study proposes practical strategies grounded in theoretical frameworks to guide policy interventions and civil society action, offering insights for addressing corruption and strengthening democratic governance in Guatemala.
This poster introduces narcoloniality as a critical analytical lens to examine how psychoactive substances become knowable, governable, and meaningful through colonial legacies and contemporary state practices. It conceptualizes substance effects as relational, shaped by historical geographies of violence, structural inequality, and dominant ontologies that uphold racial hierarchies and human exceptionalism. Rather than approaching substances as inherently harmful or healing, narcoloniality centers the dynamic relations among substances, bodies, environments, and histories that co-produce effects and risks. The framework critiques pharmacological determinism and the epistemological-ontological divide that underpins modern drug governance. It traces how colonial worldviews have rendered certain substances—and those who use them—objects of regulation, fear, and commodification. In doing so, it situates contemporary approaches to psychedelics and harm reduction within longer histories of criminalization, dispossession, and ontological violence. Empirically, the paper draws on doctoral research with two Colombian civil society organizations: Acción Técnica Social (ATS), the country’s leading harm reduction group, and Fundación Consciencia VIBA, which pioneers psychedelic palliative care. These organizations work within and against prohibitionist regimes to reframe drug policy through community-based, trauma-informed practices. Their efforts exemplify how ontological struggles over harm, risk, and healing are reshaping the governance of psychoactive substances. This research contributes to Latin American geography by highlighting how relational approaches to health, legality, and subjectivity emerge through grassroots resistance and epistemic reworlding. It invites participants to consider healing as a multispecies, collective process grounded in historical, political, and environmental context.
Organizer(s): Zoe Pearson – University of Wyoming
Discussant: Zoe Pearson – University of WyomingDate and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session F: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmPlace: Room 1
Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs are promoted for their dual goals of biodiversity conservation and livelihood support, yet their implementation and outcomes vary across socio-ecological contexts. This study examines Ecuador’s Socio Bosque (PSB) conservation program by comparing the motivations, experiences, and co-benefits of individual landowners and communities in north-central coastal Ecuador. It draws on survey data from 2010, a 2016 focus group, and insights from a long-term conservation NGO. Both groups were motivated by conservation to join the PSB, but communities emphasized tenure security and reported more co-benefits, including collaboration and external support. In contrast, individual landowners—operating in fragmented, high-opportunity-cost landscapes—reported fewer benefits and greater administrative barriers. Focus group findings revealed that individual landowners preferred tree-covered land uses (e.g., cocoa; excluding plantations) when considering financial returns alongside biodiversity and water protection—suggesting these options were viewed as productive and desirable. Drawing from these results and over a decade of practitioner engagement, we argue that conservation programs in fragmented regions would benefit from simplified institutional procedures and broader approaches that include diverse, tree-based land uses. This study highlights the importance of tailoring PES program design to the specific social, ecological, and institutional contexts in which they are implemented.
Smallholders worldwide intentionally farm to promote pollination, water conservation, and soil fertility. Agroecosystems are thus vital for food sovereignty and biodiversity conservation. Within agroecosystems, edible insects are a compelling object of analysis. Ninety-two percent of edible insects are harvested directly from “the environment,” including farms. Insects provide important nutrients to human diets, including protein and fiber. Mexico — as a chef explained in 2024 — is the “epicenter of insect eating.” In Veracruz, Mexico, edible insects are co-constituted with coffee agroecosystems, and farmer management practices. And while research exists on insect nutrition and preparation, there is a surprising dearth of scholarship on the relationships between humans, edible insects, and agroecosystems. Escamilla-Prado et al. (2012: 12) explained, “…future research should explore the techniques and methods that allow insects to be ‘cultivated,’” within coffee systems. And Piña-Domínguez et al. (2022) urged scholars to “rescue” Indigenous knowledge about edible insects. Based on preliminary data from twenty semi-structured interviews in Veracruz, this paper fills this gap by examining how farmers – of different genders, ethnicity and location – understand and manage edible insects. I demonstrate that for Nahuatl farmers, insects are carefully managed based on ecological and biological knowledge. For these farmers, edible insects also constitute everyday resistance to corporate food systems. Other farmers, by contrast, see insects as pests, enacting chemical treatments to control insects that are later harvested for consumption. This paper details diverse understandings of edible insects in Veracruz, and links farmers’ agroecological practices to potential implications for human and ecosystem health.
Introduction: This project assesses the post‑displacement impacts of the Zimapán Dam in central Mexico through posthumanist and plant turns lenses. It examines how human‑plant relations (HPR) shape the adaptation of two Hñahñu descendant communities to new socioeconomic realities and influence their sense of place thirty years after relocation. Research Questions: The project is structured along the following questions: 1) How do community members conceptualize plants and their relationships with them? 2) Which plant traits (plantiness) mediate HPR, and how have these relationships changed due to displacement? 3) Do HPR affect sense of place and post‑displacement adaptation, and if so, which dimensions of place are most impacted? Methods: Semi‑structured interviews explored the relevance of HPR in participants’ daily lives before and after displacement, mapping the conceptual network surrounding these relations. A home‑garden survey inventoried cultivated trees and shrubs; diameters at breast height (or base) and heights were recorded using a hypsometer and field tape. Participatory photography captured participants’ perceptions of their communities and the role of plants in place-making. Results: HPR emerge as intertwined ecological and political interactions characterized by care dynamics. In both communities, these relations have historically organized productive and leisure activities. Following displacement, the plantiness of species has shifted: plants once valued primarily for food now also serve as sources of emotional support and as anchors for place‑making that connects people with past livelihoods and destroyed communities.
Southern Colombia is littered with overlapping and intersecting traumas. Between armed groups, military incursions, forced displacements, social dislocation, and failed promises of economic development, among many, Indigenous peoples are constantly confronted with traumas. In this paper, I examine how historical traumas of capitalism have impacted Indigenous socionatures in southern Colombia. I center how Indigenous communities frame their historical separation from territories within their political discourse as colonial dispossessions that enabled the imposition of capitalism as the organizing socionatural relationship across the region. Indigenous communities across southern Colombia today live among the ruins of these colonized landscapes and they are subjected to the memories of these historical traumas daily. I argue that colonization marks an ongoing traumatic series of events that continuously rupture socionatural relationships between indigenous communities and their territories. I examine the digital presence of Indigenous social movements and organizations in southern Colombia to characterize these historic traumas and evaluate Indigenous responses. I focus my analysis on how my research partners frame their collective sociospatial positionalities as “enduring” in response to these intersecting phenomena. Enduring in this place means to avoid erasure and disappearing, and acts of enduring seek to avoid erasure. Drawing upon their framing of enduring, I examine how these communities enact ‘enduring’ socionatures through their praxis of liberating, cleansing, and revivifying Indigenous territory across the region.
How do we cope, breathe, react, and resist in this age of cascading socioecological crises? In this presentation I take a deep breath to consider, feel, and relate theoretical frameworks by three underappreciated Brazilian thinkers. I combine reflections on fieldwork from the Costa do Dendê in Bahia, Brazil, with ancestral theorizations by Antônio Nêgo Bispo, Ailton Krenak, and Beatriz Nascimento to reimagine the transatlantic diaspora of the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq). Building on and weaving Bispo’s integrative theories of “biointeraction” and “confluence” with Krenak’s expansive concept of “the river” and Nascimento’s generative framework of “transatlanticity,” I explore a range of diasporic, yet still deeply intimate, ecologies, landscapes, and foodways stitched together across generations and vast oceans. In lieu of conclusive determinations, the essay culminates by offering up new coalitions for thinking, working, writing, and being at the confluences of people, plants, and planet.
Organizer(s): Tom Perreault – Syracuse University
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session F: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmPlace: Room 2
This paper explores the shifting relationship between water, infrastructure, and territory in Catacaos, a town in the Piura region of northern Peru that has been particularly affected by El Niño floods. Historically, residents celebrated the seasonal rhythms of the Piura River, which sustained social, cultural, and agricultural life in this arid environment. They danced, played music and launched fireworks to celebrate the annual arrival of the water. However, since the construction of irrigation and flood control infrastructure in the 1970s, this relationship has been reconfigured, at both a local and regional scale. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews conducted in the aftermath of the 2017 Coastal El Niño floods, we analyze how hydraulic infrastructure has reshaped not only the physical landscape but also local knowledge systems, perceptions of risk, and citizen-state relations, focusing on major developments from the late 19th – early 21st centuries. Our findings highlight three interrelated dynamics: (1) the historical evolution of infrastructural interventions on the Piura River and its relation to the construction of risk, (2) the socio-spatial inequalities embedded in infrastructure planning and implementation, and (3) how communities adapt to and reinterpret infrastructure over time. Engaging with recent scholarship on infrastructure, more-than-human geographies, and citizenship, this study analyzes how water management projects actively produce territory in both material and symbolic terms, while contributing to differentiated experiences of vulnerability and risk.
En las planicies del caribe colombiano, los distritos de riego de gran escala materializaron sueños de modernidad y desarrollo desde las primeras décadas del siglo XX. A finales de los años 1960s, fueron centrales en la implementación de la Ley de Reforma Agraria, sirviendo de base para la democratización del agua de riego en el marco de un modelo de desarrollo agrícola marcado por los preceptos de la Revolución Verde. Hoy, trágicamente, los distritos de riego del Caribe son lugares emblemáticos de la violenta historia de contrarreforma agraria colombiana de décadas recientes. El conflicto armado, sumado a la crisis de las economías campesinas fruto de reformas estructurales desde finales de los 1980s, condujeron al despojo y el acaparamiento de tierras y agua en los distritos de gran escala, de la mano con el establecimiento de plantaciones agroindustriales de palma aceitera. Este trabajo propone ampliar la comprensión del fenómeno de acaparamiento de tierras y agua en distritos de riego a partir, por un lado, de una mirada histórica de las trayectorias localizadas de cambio agrario entendidas desde las particularidades en los órdenes raciales y espaciales ; por otro lado, explora la operación actual de las políticas de riego de corte neoliberal, señalando no solo su impacto en el acaparamiento de tierra y agua sino la manera cómo las lógicas y prácticas cotidianas del neoliberalismo agrario están profundamente moldeadas por las manifestaciones concretas del capitalismo racial.
The hydrosocial cycle conceptualizes “water” as produced by, and productive of, social relations. While studies of water governance often treat water as a material resource that is the object of social actions, a hydrosocial relations perspective encourages us to focus on how water-society relations have become configured in specific contexts, and how they can be transformed. Means of transforming hydrosocial relations – as opposed to water institutions and policies – have to date been rather elusive, but they broadly comprise (1) democratic participation and emancipation, (2) autonomy and capabilities, and (3) embodied (cultural) practices. The key challenge is to identify pathways that may rework the power relations that underpin particular hydrosocial arrangements, rather than those arrangements themselves. Drawing on the emblematic case of Chile, where since the 1980s a market-oriented Water Code has transformed the use and identity of water to serve dominant political and economic groups, I reflect on ways in which hydrosocial relations might be transformed. To do so, I discuss the limitations of the main existing proposals to reform the Water Code, and consider the potential of forms of water sharing to rework the hydrosocial relations of commodification.
Chile’s water code governs water according to private property rights buyable and sellable on markets (Bauer 1998, Prieto 2015). But privatization of water in the country also entailed the entrance, in the 1990s, of for-profit multinationals into the management of Chile’s urban water systems. In rural areas, the situation is distinct: communities rely on water institutions called sistemas de aguas potables y rurales (APRs), which formalize self-governance by water users themselves, who manage the infrastructural networks from which they draw water—all outside of the profit motive (Blanco & Donoso 2016). This latter aspect makes APRs bulwarks of rural autonomy and resistance. In the agricultural province of Petorca, an epicenter of Chile’s epochal megadrought, APRs have become protagonists in efforts to manage water scarcity and maintain access for households. As drought began in 2010, water directors organized toward unions of APRs along the dwindling rivers in the province, enabling collaborations among these water communities and eventually the construction of aqueducts connecting the APRs in both of the province’s major basins. More recently, the federal passage of Ley 20.998 has aimed to regularize the functioning of APRs, centrally determining tariffs to ensure their solvency and requiring benchmark operational capacities. APRistas worry that the law erodes their autonomy and threatens encroachment by for-profit nexuses of provision into the campo. This paper examines how APRs are mobilizing territorial claims about the distinction of the campo from urban Chile to maintain local control and domestic access in the face of drought and legal uncertainty.
Mi presentación examina el agua y el territorio desde la priorización de los usos del agua para el desarrollo agrícola en Haití a mediados del siglo XX. Mediante la investigación de archivos, revisión bibliográfica y novelas contemporáneas a la época de estudio, examino los efectos que los planes de desarrollo del valle del Artibonite, la zona más fértil del país, tuvieron en el reordenamiento territorial por parte del estado y en la codicia de los especuladores, dentro y fuera del gobierno. Desde la ocupación estadounidense (1915-1934), el valle del Artibonite fue identificado como el territorio clave para el desarrollo de la agricultura en el país, lo que posibilitó la paulatina especulación y la expropiación de pequeños agricultores. La promesa de agua de riego para los campesinos haitianos fue así instrumentalizada por el poder, dando lugar a procesos de “acumulación por desposesión” (Harvey, 2003).
Organizer(s): Christian Abizaid – University of Toronto
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session F: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmPlace: Room 3
For decades, observers have argued whether state-led (command and control) or market-led (moratoria) policies are best suited to allow for agricultural development while protecting forests. The two have not been mutually exclusive when considering all the information that is needed to enforce rules, from delimitation of biomes and definition of “sacrifice zones” to tracking land use and land cover change at the property level to certify the “legality” of soybeans. With new trade wars brought on by the Trump administration, and considering existing and new trading blocs with their own rules about “good” and “bad” soybeans, it is an open question where soy and other “clean” supply chain initiatives fit as effective strategies going forward. This paper details the complex placemaking behind soybean production in the Brazilian Amazon and points out the most likely levers that governmental, NGOs, and industry could pull to meet stated 2030 zero deforestation goals.
In 2018, a Calgary-based petroleum company, PetroTal, began drilling for oil on the edge of a small riverine community called Bretaña in the Peruvian Amazon. The introduction of oil drilling to the region, highly dependent on environment-based economic activity and river-based transportation, has transformed local villages and fomented identity-based conflict. Some local residents have begun to assert an Indigenous identity in their dealings with the state and corporation, while others have rejected claims of Indigeneity. I suggest that local residents’ interactions with PetroTal’s corporate social responsibility programs are a crucial factor in their willingness to associate with Indigeneity. Those who perceive the development and ongoing economic transformation of the district as beneficial are typically less inclined to associate with Indigenous identity or organizations. These perceptions are reinforced by company and state discourses surrounding Indigeneity, which interface with the underlying historical geography of ethnic acculturation in the Peruvian Amazon. Geographers have previously explored the mobilization of Indigenous communities in response to resource extraction, including the role that CSR programs play in constructing relations between the state, company, and local communities. I suggest that an underexplored aspect of this dynamic is the way corporations interface with notions of ethnic identity through their CSR programs, particularly as it relates to a reluctance to associate with Indigeneity. Overall, my research calls for greater nuance in scholarship on community responses to resource extraction in Amazonia, acknowledging that while extractivism can result in identity-based community mobilization, it can also reinforce residents’ rejection of Indigenous identity.
For the past two decades, the literature on REDD+ has raised concerns about climate justice for Indigenous peoples. Concerns entail perpetuation of historic inequalities, restriction of rights, and silent participation in forest governance. A few authors, however, have been optimistic and hopeful that the pioneering experiences of Brazil with state-centered REDD+ could advance calls for climate justice in REDD+ schemes. This paper aims at understanding to what extent state-centered REDD+ has helped advance Indigenous land rights and calls for climate justice in Brazilian Amazonia, and explicitly documenting issues of recognitional and transformative justice in state-centered REDD+, beyond more common academic concerns of distributive and procedural justice. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Studies approach, and using the 12 principles for a climate justice approach to climate change mitigation in the Amazon (Osborne et al. 2024) as an analysis framework, my study focuses on three state-centered REDD+ in Brazilian Amazonia: the Amazon Fund, REM Acre, and REM Mato Grosso. These programs are internationally praised for their commitment with social environmental standards, and have inspired other REDD+ formats around the world. My findings, however, show that language and discourse of Indigenous rights, let alone climate justice, has been poorly present in the analyzed reports, documents, and interviews.
In the last twenty years, the Amazon rainforest has experienced a re-primarization of its economy, driven by increased demand for agriculture, cattle ranching, and mining, particularly of fossil fuels. Oil is key to energy production and many manufacturing conglomerates; hydrocarbons are found everywhere from computers to pharmaceuticals. This presentation exposes the nature of neo-extractivism in an era of technological advancement and empire. I will provide evidence of how international corporations utilize so-called “clean technologies” to conduct fracking operations and drilling in some of the most biodiverse and sensitive places on Earth, while arguing for the use of updated technology and following legal frameworks that protect Indigenous peoples and the environment. In collaboration with Penn State co-researchers, I utilize multidisciplinary research methods that combine environmental engineering and body-forest (cuerpo-bosque) Kichwa epistemology to understand the nature of contamination not only by hydrocarbons but also by PFAS, or forever chemicals. High levels of these ubiquitous chemicals raise serious concerns, given their high concentrations and the fact that they do not degrade in the environment. Such contamination is spreading in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, raising concerns for ecocide and the threats to the last uncontacted tribes in the Yasuni National Park, the Tagaeri and Taromenane.
¡COP30! The Amazon hurtles toward simultaneous ecological and socio-economic tipping points as Indigenous peoples invade the United Nation’s Restricted Blue Zone due to frustrations with corporate-driven development in the forest. The protesters demanded that their Indigenous homelands be freed from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners, drug traffickers and illegal loggers. This is the arena that the Transboundary Commission of the Juruá-Yurúa-Alto Tamaya (TC), a coalition of 14 Indigenous peoples fighting for their forests, rivers, and cultures in the borderlands shared by Brazil and Peru, arrived at. Belém’s Climate Change conference witnessed the TC leveraging their cultural power, traditional ecological knowledge, and host of allies to act for positive change, inform climate science, and dynamize sustainable policies for the forests and rivers they call home. The stakes have never been higher nor the global stage closer to home. Here we share strategies, challenges, and successes of a uniquely gifted group of Indigenous leaders crossing borders and scales to create change for their homelands, Amazonia, and our planet.
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session F: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pmPlace: Room 4
The global expansion of soybeans is a defining feature of contemporary agrarian change, often analyzed at the national level. This study argues that a subnational perspective is critical for understanding the heterogeneous and contested dynamics of this expansion. It develops a methodological framework for analyzing commodity frontier shifts by using long-term, logarithmic-scaled data to distinguish between “broadening” (the extensive incorporation of new land) and “deepening” (the intensification of yields on existing land). This method is applied to a time series (1961-2024) across Argentina’s 17 distinct agronomic zones. The research makes two central contributions. First, it systematizes a replicable approach for identifying and classifying patterns of commodity frontier expansion at a subnational scale, moving beyond national-level generalizations. Second, it reveals the complex spatial articulation of these frontiers within Argentina, demonstrating how regions have followed distinct pathways—from persistent land-use expansion to rapid technological intensification, and often a flexible combination of both. By mapping these trajectories, the study provides a nuanced geographical analysis of Argentina’s agro-export model, offering critical insights into the regional ecologies, histories, and political economies that shape Latin America’s transforming countryside.
The Brazilian Cerrado, recognized as the world’s most biodiverse savanna, spans approximately 1.98 million square kilometers across central Brazil. While the region’s agricultural practices remained rudimentary until the 1970s, subsequent modernization catalyzed the expansion of major crops, most notably soybeans, maize, and sugarcane. Despite the Cerrado’s considerable importance as a repository of biodiversity the expansion of new crops continue with wheat cultivation gaining prominence, particularly within the states of Goiás and Bahia. This study seeks to understand the determinants of wheat cultivation adoption at the municipal level within the Cerrado biome, with a specific focus on the states of Goiás and Bahia. The findings reveal that wheat production frequently competes for productive resources with other established crops, such as cotton, maize, and beans. Furthermore, the presence of infrastructure—most notably proximity to highways, rivers, and milling facilities—emerges as a pivotal enabler of wheat expansion, even as broader logistical constraints continue to impede agricultural expansion. While soil characteristics do influence the likelihood of wheat cultivation, factors including average farm size and land tenure exhibit limited impact in this context. Importantly, the availability of irrigation infrastructure presents a significant opportunity for the further expansion of wheat production in the Cerrado. These insights highlight the imperative to deepen our understanding of the multifaceted drivers of agricultural expansion, thereby informing targeted interventions that balance productivity, sustainability, and socio-economic development.
Avocado production in eastern Michoacán has reshaped the landscape by replacing maize fields with avocado plantations. This transition has increased the use of pesticides and raised concerns about the risks to humans and the environment. The proposed study examines the local perspective on these risks and explores community-supported strategies for mitigation among avocado farmers, agricultural workers, and other individuals involved in pesticide handling. The research uses face-to-face semi-structured interviews and workshops designed to gather firsthand experiences, decision-making processes, and contextual constraints that influence pesticide management. Previous interviews revealed gaps in formal training, highly variable perceptions of risk, and limited access to protective equipment among farmers. These initial findings also demonstrate that community knowledge, informal norms, and local support networks play an important role in shaping daily practices. The upcoming workshops will build on this foundation to document diverse perspectives and identify feasible, culturally grounded mitigation strategies that align with local realities. This work aims to establish a robust empirical basis for an integrated risk mitigation strategy that considers local exposure realities and informs more effective regulatory and community level interventions.
Rural livelihoods in Mexico are increasingly shaped by global conservation agendas aiming to reconcile biodiversity conservation, resource sustainability, and local development. Sembrando Vida (SV), launched in 2019 as Mexico’s flagship rural development program, represents one of the most ambitious national efforts to address rural poverty, curb deforestation, and promote agroforestry-based livelihoods. This paper examines how power dynamics emerge within and from SV’s governance structure to influence the program’s capacity to meet its multifaceted goals. The research builds on a collaborative workshop held in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2024. The workshop brought together researchers from institutions in Mexico, the United States, and Canada and aimed to develop a shared understanding of SV implementation throughout its duration to date. Drawing on interdisciplinary case studies conducted between 2019 and 2024 and across diverse ecological and sociocultural contexts, we analyze SV through the lens of interactive governance. Initially characterized by a top-down and standardized implementation, SV’s governance has gradually evolved as participants and local facilitators negotiated and adapted program rules to local realities. These interactions highlight the central role of campesinos and field staff in shaping program outcomes through everyday practices and collective action. Power relations within SV both enable and constrain improvements to rural livelihoods: centralized control and ambiguous guidelines often limit participation, whereas recognition of local ecological knowledge and participant diversity fosters more inclusive and adaptive strategies. Ultimately, the long-term success of SV in achieving its intertwined goals of conservation and rural development will depend on its capacity to redistribute power, strengthen local agency, and institutionalize interactive governance principles in policy design and implementation.
Coffee and snacks 🙂
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session G: 3:45 pm – 5:15 pmPlace: Room 1
Organizer(s): Christian Abizaid – University of Toronto
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session G: 3:45 pm – 5:15 pmPlace: Room 2
Rural development policies in Amazonia have focused principally on three pathways – those related to extractive resources (e.g., rubber, timber, oil, gold), road building and colonization (cattle and soy), and large-scale plantation development (oil palm, cacao). A fourth and less-promoted pathway follows the development of the bioeconomy in the forests and along the rivers of the region. The bioeconomy integrates a myriad of economic activities undertaken by Indigenous /folk peoples (IPLCs) that provide food to the cities, products for export, and foster forest protection and biodiversity conservation. A growing number of studies provide one-time snapshots of forest livelihoods, but few as yet examine how livelihoods have changed over time and whether or not the bioeconomy has made people better off. In this paper, I present the results of long-term observations among forest peasant communities along a tributary of the Amazon River, near the city of Iquitos, Peru. Drawing on repeated household surveys, focus group discussions and field observations since 1987, I seek to answer three questions: (1) are people better-off today than 40 years ago?; (2) how have livelihoods and local environments changed?; and, (3) to what degree can changes in community development and household welfare be ascribed to the bioeconomy? Answers to these questions inform a broader understanding of the degree to which the bioeconomy can provide a viable and sustainable pathway for rural development in Amazonia.
In 2023, images of diminished Amazonian river channels, small ribbons of bluish-brown surrounded by massive sand banks, captivated Brazilian and international audiences. Eco-social activists, concerned government officials, and the international environmental movement called attention to these apocalyptic landscapes: the seemingly infinite water resources of the expansive Amazon Basin reduced to a trickle. This paper calls for a local territorialization of rivers, specifically in eastern Pará state where the pressures of development arrived with the opening of the Belém-Brasília Highway (1960), Trans-Amazônica Highway (1972), and Tucuruí Dam (1984). We write from a region accustomed to devastation under the mantra of economic growth and development (Ioris, 2024). We offer three principal interventions within the framework of the river as territory. First, we emphasize the importance of the small igarapés which nourish these rivers. Next, in order to arrive at the affective power of rivers in Quilombola societies, we must consider the historical role of rivers as landscapes of flight, fear, and expert knowledge–factors in the formation of hydro-survivance (Vizenor, 2000) which connects the layers of the past to the present moment in the Quilombola politics. Finally, rivers create the possibility of movement, and in this case eco-social movements which network dispersed Quilombola communities with each other, but often go further, resulting in coalitions between Quilombolas, Indigenous groups, traditional populations (such as ribeirinhos), and environmentalists.
In Latin America, neoliberal ideas of development have long gone hand in hand with dispossession and extractivism. Ecuador shows this clearly, especially in the Amazonian province of Zamora-Chinchipe where transnational large-scale mining has reshaped local territories and livelihoods. I examine how extractivism, mediated by Ecuadorian State policies and local racialized dynamics, is lived through gendered bodies and places, reconfiguring hierarchies of care, labor, and authority. Drawing from the Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) framework and ethnographic methods including participant observations and interviews during my 2025 summer fieldwork with Indigenous Shuar communities and government officials, I present layered accounts of gendered and collective adaptation under extractivism in this global-local encounter, showcasing the endurance of patriarchal norms, the State’s instrumentalization of Shuar culture along with the neglect of their well-being in practice, and internalized racism and sexism. My findings challenge the framing of Indigenous women being major resistant actors and reveal how “conformity” signifies relational and situated survival strategies within unequal, extractive, and racist systems. Interrogating this ambiguity, I complicate FPE by showing how extractivism is simultaneously imposed, normalized, embodied, and internalized in Shuar people’s everyday life. By highlighting how livelihoods are sustained through care and adaptation rather than overt resistance, this study rethinks the everyday politics of living with extraction and expands current understandings of Indigenous livelihoods in Amazonia. It further speaks to broader debates on the shifting geographies of development in the Global South.
Southwestern Amazonia’s biodiverse landscapes are critical for climatic stability, with Indigenous territories playing an integral role in mitigating deforestation and forest degradation (Reygadas et al., 2023; Walker et al., 2020). Recent studies identify Indigenous governance and land stewardship as key factors protecting intact tropical forest against increasing pressures (Virtanen et al., 2025). Building on scholarship examining participatory mapping as activist research (Herlihy & Knapp, 2003; Sletto, 2020), this research examines how environmental knowledges are co-produced and mobilized through community mapping and advocacy in southwestern Amazonia. Responding to deforestation pressures from informal road networks and extractive industries, the Yurúa-Juruá-Alto Tamaya Transboundary Commission emerged as a grassroots coalition coordinating cross-border resistance between Peru and Brazil. This study investigates how maps support environmental advocacy across institutional and geographic scales, and whether integrating boundary-work theory, political ecology, and epistemic pluralism can reconfigure our understanding of how participatory mapping mobilizes environmental knowledge to influence forest governance. Through participatory mapping workshops in four Ucayali communities and multi-sited participation in transboundary advocacy meetings, this research reveals environmental knowledge mobilization as an inherently dynamic and political process. Maps function as infrastructures for advocacy, operating differently across three scales: translating between remote sensing data and lived experiences at the community level, scaffolding collective resistance regionally, and asserting territorial occupation nationally.
Organizer(s): Tom Perreault – Syracuse University
Date and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session G: 3:45 pm – 5:15 pmPlace: Room 3
In May 2024, a local court in the Peruvian Amazon heard the testimony of a dozen Kukama Indigenous women, pleading for the rights of the Marañón river. The Marañón is an important tributary of the Amazon river that has been contractually granted to Chinese state-owned enterprise Sinohydro for the construction of a waterway. This “riparian highway” would dredge the river bottoms, destroying Kukama fisheries and submerged spiritual worlds. In their declarations, Kukama women upheld the rights of the river by describing the damage that pollution has caused to their ancestral territories, their bodies, and those of their newborn and unborn children. When the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, it not only recognized the interdependence between the integrity of the river, the autonomy of ancestral territory and women’s bodies, it also upheld it against geopolitical plans by halting the waterway infrastructure project. As the trade between South America and China increases, so do geopolitical tensions with the United States and efforts to build alternative trade routes through the Amazon rainforest. In the Peruvian Amazon, Indigenous women and youth are fighting against geopolitical competition by redefining the autonomy of their territories in terms of river protection and of their bodily experiences. This project theorizes the cuerpo-territorio paradigm to analyze how embodied experiences of the Marañón are performed as litigation strategies in the context of multipolar globalization.
This paper examines overlapping forms of territory and territorialization among Aymara communities in Sajama National Park, Bolivia. These include traditional Andean Indigenous/originario forms of territory (ayllus, sayañas, marka), state administrative territorial forms (department, municipio, national park), and newer forms of collective lands, established in the 1990s (Tierras Comunitarias de Origen). Historically, Indigenous and state forms of territory have been mutually produced, through processes of social struggle and accommodation between Aymara communities and the Bolivian state. At the heart of these struggles is the ayllu: a form of socio-territorial organization based on extended kinship and the control of land and water. Though greatly transformed, the ayllu – as both a material place and a cultural ideal – has persisted in many parts of the central Andes, in spite of multiple attempts to dissolve. Among Aymara pastoralists communities in Sajama National Park, on the Bolivian Altiplano, ayllus are organized around access to Andean peatlands, known locally as bofedales. Bofedales are crucial pasture for llamas and especially alpacas and are therefore essential for pastoralist livelihoods. As high altitude wetlands, bofedales must be continually watered by springs, streams, glacial runoff, and/or irrigation. Bofedal ecology, and therefore pastoralist livelihoods, require careful water management, a reality that is magnified by climate change. This paper examines the relationship between livelihood practices, bofedal management, and the production of territory among Aymara communities in Sajama National Park, Bolivia.
The soaring over-extraction of groundwater for agriculture in arid regions transforms deserts into productive farmland for agroindustry. In doing so, nation-owned land and water become appropriated by the private sector and incorporated in circuits of capital. The lush layer of crops conquering the sand of the Atacama desert in Ica, Peru, brings forward questions about the continued expansion of the agroindustrial frontier on the desert, and the mechanisms that enable and facility the transformation of the territory. We answer these questions with data from interviews, focus groups, primary and secondary quantitative data, and document analysis of Peruvian water and land policies. We find that the deplition of the Ica-Villacuri Aquifer—recharge of 266 Mm3/year is almost doubled by an over-extraction at a rate of 219 full-size Olympic swimming pools/ day, is accompanied by the proletarization of Andean peasants as farm workers, who live in informal settlements in the desert. Workers in waterless settlements implement strategies to access water. Conversely, favorable neoliberal resource governance, infrastructure, global trade services, and investment configure a constellation of enabling and facilitating factors for agroindustrial production of fresh produce for export to global markets. Findings from Ica illuminate global processes for incorporating arid lands in the capitalist nature-society metabolism. We propose a suite of institutional reforms ranging from robust groundwater governance organization and institutions, international finance and trade that supports human rights, systematic and rigorous data for supporting salient and legitimate information about water resources more attuned to environmental conditions and natural cycles.
This is a methods-centered presentation that introduces the concept of intimate cartographies, a framework that we propose for an “otherwise cartography” (Oslender 2024) of Amazonian Indigenous self-determination. It is well known that maps can be weaponized to lie, suppress, and distort (Bryan and Wood 2015). Yet maps also offer glimpses of worlds beyond this world—maps are world-making, too. Aware of the trouble with mapping for Indigenous self-determination and aligned with calls for deeper empirical engagement and dialog with knowledges otherwise (Oslender 2024; Halvorsen 2019; Daigle and Ramirez 2019), we focus on cartographic playfulness, imagination, and creativity as the starting point for generating mappable accounts of Amazonian thought-place as self-determination. We focus on a series of cartographic workshops (2022-2025) with Napo runa from the Ecuadorian Amazon that sought to map relations with the Hollín River. We look closely at these mapping experiences, to explore the concepts, decisions, and encounters that led to the production of various maps representing yakui yachana (“learning from and with the water”), and to reflect on the potential of counter-cartographic processes for communicating the connections between land, ancestral lifeways, and Indigenous futures.
Moderator: Anthony Dest – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Discussant: Gabriela Valdivia – University of North Carolina at Chapel HillDate and Time: Thursday January 8th – Session G: 3:45 pm – 5:15 pmPlace: Room 4
Panel Description: During this roundtable, participants will discuss Dissident Peace: Autonomous Struggles and the State in Colombia (Stanford University Press, 2025). In 2016, the peace accords between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC–EP) and the Colombian government promised to bring an end to over fifty years of armed conflict. Yet, despite widespread international acclaim and heavy investments in the peace process, war continued. Dissident Peace provides a rigorous reassessment of the terms of peacebuilding through an ethnography of ongoing struggles for autonomy, based on over fifteen years of research and activism in Colombia.
Panelists: Eloisa Berman Arevalo – Universidad del Norte Anthony Dest – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kendra McSweeney – The Ohio State University Nicholas Padilla – Western Michigan University
where: CUCOSTA
Two shuttles will leave from CUCOSTA to the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf. They will leave at 5:30 pm.
Two shuttles will leave from CUCOSTA to the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf. They will leave at 5:30 pm.
Presentations:CLAG Honors and AwardsMusic and Dancing
Friday January 9th
where: Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf – map
Two shuttles will leave from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf to CUCOSTA in the morning. The first will leave at 8:00 am and the second at 8:15 am. (*these are the only free shuttles to the conference site for the day. If you can, please take the early shuttle to ensure there is enough space for everyone.)
Two shuttles will leave from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf to CUCOSTA in the morning. The first will leave at 8:00 am and the second at 8:15 am. (*these are the only free shuttles to the conference site for the day. If you can, please take the early shuttle to ensure there is enough space for everyone.)
Organizer(s): Fiona Gladstone – Fairleigh Dickinson University
Discussant: Diana Liverman – University of ArizonaDate and Time: Friday January 9th – Session H: 9:00 am – 10:30 amPlace: Room 1
With a focus on community-led urban reconstruction, we examine the role of commoning in supporting urban change in four cases from Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. The cases concern strategies of urban mobility, social equity, space reclamation, and infrastructure. In each case, community leaders used a variety of commoning strategies to build alliances, protect the vulnerable, and achieve transformative change that improved the quality of life for some of the more marginalized neighborhoods in the cities we consider. The analysis highlights the role of communities and commoning in advancing transformative change in urban settings.
Transforming the views, structures, practices that undermine socio-natural flourishing on Earth (IPBES 2024) requires political engagement of multiple kinds. Contemporary social movements often realize or build power as they “scale up” – convincing ever-larger swathes of the population to unite in actions and demands for change from policymakers. This outward-facing model contrasts with another form of social movement activity: recuperating, building, and strengthening territorially defined governance institutions for autonomy and self-determination. We call this work commoning. Commoning is particularly relevant for structurally marginalized communities in a neo-colonial world. Using ethnographic and autoethnographic methods, we analyze the actions and aims of activists engaged in stewardship and accompaniment of self-governance processes in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico against the enclosure and privatization of Mayan lands, waters and cultural heritage. Comunidades por la Autonomia (Communities for Autonomy) is an informal organization founded in 2023 by activists from a mix of Mayan and other Indigenous Mexican backgrounds. On the basis of voluntary labor and reflexive use of philanthropic connections, the activists work to empower local communities in developing robust local institutions and link their struggles through a regional, representative council. We examine the actions and perspectives of key activists in Communities for Autonomy as a proof of concept for the role of intermediate level organizations– “stewards of the stewards”– in transformative change. We analyze how views, structures, and practices come under transformation through the case of Telchaquillo, Yucatán, where local organizing accompanied by Communities for Autonomy has contributed to transformations in local subjectivities, democratic processes, and horizons for community-governed cultural resources.
To what extent are there emergent collective processes and strategies shaping coupled livelihood and environmental sustainability? What individual, household, and community level responses are resilient and sustainable for both humans and nature? A large literature examines drivers of vulnerability and land degradation. But what about drivers of synergistic livelihood vitality associated with environmental sustainability? To address these questions, this project, in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, integrates household surveys and community-level interviews with satellite and drone-derived imagery nested within “bright spots” and “hot spots” modeled from globally available data. To our knowledge, this project is the first to identify emerging land regeneration “bright spots” adjacent to land degradation “hot spots” in a forest frontier. It is also the first to examine how ”bright spot” household and community responses of ecological resilience and reforestation compare with responses of “hot spot” neighbors with similar ecological and socio-economic conditions. To the extent research findings suggest instances of commoning associated with ‘’bright spots’’ qualitative interviews and household surveys may suggest potential pathways to coupled household and environmental resilience with potential implications for challenging frontier land transition theories and to identifying behaviors and practices that can be potentially replicated to improve household and ecological resilience in tropical forest frontiers globally. Findings may also help improve understanding of interactions among social and biophysical system components that can help inform UN member nation monitoring and evaluation towards achieving UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UNCCD Strategic Objectives for desertification, land degradation, and drought.
Moderator: Martha Bell – Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Date and Time: Friday January 9th – Session H: 9:00 am – 10:30 amPlace: Room 2
Panel Description: The aim of this panel is to create space for dialogue with the editorial team of the CLAG-published Journal of Latin American Geography (JLAG) around the nature and role of the journal as a key publication in the field. The editors will outline how JLAG has engaged with recent theoretical, topical, and methodological advances in geographical scholarship on/in/from Latin America as part of their vision for the journal and will invite open discussion with the audience. The discussion also includes scope for additional themes, such as the journal’s publishing model, its peer review and publication process, as well as opportunities to get involved with the journal and the team. The panel will be conducted in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. All conference attendees are warmly invited to participate in the conversation.
Panelists: Jessica Budds – Universität Bonn Gabriela Valdivia – University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Eugenio Arima – University of Texas at Austin Jörn Seemann – Ball State University Martha Bell – Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Moderator: Manuel Bollo
Date and Time: Friday January 9th – Session H: 9:00 am – 10:30 amPlace: Room 3
Las inundaciones repentinas representan uno de los mayores peligros naturales en México, especialmente en zonas montañosas como el Pico de Tancítaro, donde la topografía abrupta y las lluvias intensas han provocado eventos catastróficos, -por ejemplo, la inundación de septiembre de 2018 en Peribán que causó ocho fallecimientos. Este estudio desarrolló modelos hidráulicos de alta resolución para cinco afluentes intermitentes susceptibles a inundaciones repentinas en tres municipios michoacanos. La metodología integró tecnología de vehículos aéreos no tripulados (VANT) durante el estiaje, generando ortomosaicos y modelos digitales de superficie con resolución de 5 cm. Se procesaron 1,754 fotografías cubriendo 29.73 km², permitiendo la extracción detallada de geometría fluvial, secciones transversales, cobertura del suelo y coeficientes de rugosidad (Manning). Las simulaciones en HEC-RAS consideraron dos escenarios: la tormenta de 2018 (precipitación acumulada de 123 mm/m³) y un escenario de diseño con periodo de retorno de 25 años (caudal de diseño de 220 m³/s). Los resultados revelan que incluso tormentas moderadas pueden generar inundaciones devastadoras en las cinco localidades analizadas (dos cauces en Peribán, dos en Santa Ana Zirosto y uno en Tancítaro), amenazando población, infraestructura y los extensos cultivos de aguacate de la región. El estudio demuestra que la fotogrametría con VANT aporta datos topográficos precisos y accesibles para el modelado hidráulico en cuencas con escasez de información, contribuyendo a estrategias de gestión del riesgo frente al aumento de eventos extremos por cambio climático.
El trabajo es producto de una tesis de doctorado en Geografía Ambiental titulada Aptitudes Geoecológicas de Beneficio Mutuo en la cuenca Zirahuén, Michoacán México. Se propuso establecer un procedimiento teórico-metodológico que permitiese evaluar la vocación de los geosistemas para ofertar beneficios a la sociedad y simultáneamente, que estos reciban las compensaciones que mantengan el equilibrio ambiental y el aprovechamiento sostenible. Para ello se desarrolló el sistema de conceptos de Aptitudes Geoecológicas de Beneficio Mutuo, que permite acometer las evaluaciones en unidades espaciales concretas, con un enfoque sistémico y holístico, y que contempla el beneficio no solo de la naturaleza hacia la sociedad, sino también una retribución en sentido opuesto. Para ello se tomaron referentes del Pradigma Ambiental, las Cosmovisiones de culturas originarias, la agenda político-ambiental Buen Vivir, el modelo económico-político Doughnut, el marco teórico Nature Contributions to People y los fundamentos teórico-metodológicos de la Geoecología. Los objetivos específicos estuvieron relacionados con la Cartografía de los geosistemas con una técnica geomorfométrica novedosa, la Identificación de las coberturas y la Estimación de la vegetación original, el Cálculo de índices geoecológicos, y la Propuesta de un set muestra de Recomendaciones de Aptitudes Geoecológicas de Beneficio Mutuo para una cuenca específica. Esta tesis ofrece una alternativa teórico-metodológica para reformular la manera en que se evalúan los territorios en los ejercicios de Ordenamiento Territorial y Planeación con un enfoque más cercano al Paradigma Ambiental y menos al Paradigma Antropocéntrico, causante de la crisis contemporánea que hoy enfrenta nuestro Planeta.
El aguacate es uno de los productos agrícolas mexicanos de mayor demanda internacional. Esto ha propiciado una gran expansión del cultivo que se ha agudizado en las últimas dos décadas y con ello la preocupación por sus impactos socioambientales, que han alcanzado incluso en áreas naturales protegidas. En este trabajo analizamos la expansión (1994-2020) y la aptitud climática del cultivo de aguacate en los municipios que conforman la Reserva de la Biosfera Mariposa Monarca (RBMM). Por medio de interpretación visual de fotografías aéreas e imágenes de satélite de alta resolución, registramos las plantaciones de aguacate a escala 1:10,000. Mediante bibliografía especializada y entrevistas a productores identificamos los requerimientos climáticos del cultivo y con datos de 24 estaciones meteorológicas calculamos las variables climáticas críticas. Generamos modelos de distribución de la aptitud climática en dos periodos: 1960-1989 y 1990-2019. Encontramos que en 1994 las plantaciones de aguacate ocupaban 1,328 hectáreas en cuatro municipios, concentradas en Zitácuaro, que en 2020 se extendieron a 10,737 hectáreas de 13 municipios. En los modelos se observa que ha habido un desplazamiento de condiciones climáticas óptimas hacia altitudes mayores y que hasta el 2020, los límites de la RBMM parecen haber sido efectivos para contener esa expansión.
Evaluamos la dinámica espacio-temporal de la oferta y la demanda de biomasa utilizada en el horneado del agave para la elaboración de mezcal artesanal, e identificamos las zonas con mayor presión potencial sobre los recursos forestales en el municipio de Madero. Se desarrollaron dos módulos: 1) demanda: a través de entrevistas y mapeo participativo con productores, se caracterizó, espacializó y cuantificó la biomasa utilizada en el horneado y 2) oferta: mediante un modelo de regresión aleatoria se calculó la densidad de biomasa aérea. Ambos módulos se integraron con un modelo que permitió evaluar la dinámica entre las variables involucradas. Se identificaron 71 vinatas y 210 productores y se encontró que la cantidad de biomasa utilizada en el horneado está definida por la cantidad de agave horneado (de 1-3 Mg de agave ~ 1 Mg de leña y de 4-7 Mg de agave ~ 2 Mg de leña), llegándose a triplicar en un mismo sitio por la renta de vinatas. Las especies forestales más utilizadas son el encino y el tepehuaje, debido a su lenta combustión y a las propiedades organolépticas que transfieren al mezcal. En la integración, se establecieron escenarios a 10 años con los consumos de biomasa anual y se identificó que en la zona de estudio la demanda puede llegar a ser de 68160 Mg, representada en el aprovechamiento de 750 ha de bosque, ubicadas en las zonas más cercanas a las vinatas y a los caminos o veredas. Estos resultados aportan información base para la implementación de planes de manejo forestal, enfocados a mitigar los impactos ambientales generados por el crecimiento acelerado de la industria del mezcal.
Organizer(s): Nikolai Alvarado – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Discussant: Neville, Laura, L; Alvarado, Nikolai, A – University College London; University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignDate and Time: Friday January 9th – Session H: 9:00 am – 10:30 amPlace: Room 4
In the expansion of “migration crises” throughout the region, migrant struggles do not unfold exclusively at national borders or within national citizenship regimes but also in cities and through distinctly urban processes. Not surprisingly, cities have become key sites for anti-migrant spectacles, deportation raids, and the performance of sovereign–authoritarian power, as border struggles increasingly turn into urban struggles (De Genova 2015). The city is thus a critical site in shaping the limits and possibilities of migration projects in the current conjuncture. Yet, to fully grasp the potentialities and political possibilities—the liminal spaces of operation, inhabitation, and care that cities enable—we must move beyond a political ontology that “sees like a state” and which structures migration research largely around accounts of sovereign power. Instead, we need one attuned to the processes, conditions and forms of governance that render migration an urban manifestation. Thinking through this migration–urbanization nexus and the migrant urbanisms that piece together living territories in cities across the hemisphere, I reflect on what Latin American experiences can teach us about migration as an urban manifestation, and on the conceptual tools that emerge when we shift analytical lenses from sovereign power as a totalizing condition of migration toward the radical possibilities of urban life. This shift requires that we move away from seeing “like a state” towards a political ontology that sees migration “like a (global south) city.”
In sharp contrast to the rest of Costa Rica’s international image as an eco-friendly paradise, San José has often been described—with the sensibilities of tourism in mind—as dirty, lacking vegetation, ungovernable, and in ruins. Amid an intense urban renewal campaign reshaping the capital over the past twenty years, accelerating in the last decade, real estate developers rapidly building luxury apartment towers have latched onto the city’s sparse public green spaces, touting their internal gardens, sustainable construction certifications, and ecological amenities as exclusive offerings. This research charts a cartography of almost sixty luxury vertical condominiums in San José to understand the socioenvironmental dynamics of luxury real estate expansion in the capital of the “Green Republic.” Through an analysis of municipal policies since 2004, hybrid spatial-ethnographic documentation—combining national registry data, field observation, and developer discourse—and interviews with key stakeholders and activists, I analyze how green urbanism serves as a tool for real estate speculation. Core to this project is a critical examination of how state institutions and private developers use ecological aesthetics and environmental certification regimes to legitimize elite development, while exacerbating socio-spatial inequalities and producing new forms of exclusion. As Costa Rica’s green exceptionalist narrative scaffolds the moral and technical language through which the state legitimizes private territorial expansion, I position this rapid accumulation of capital, land, and nature in the city as a case of urban extractivism, in dialogue with a growing body of literature from Latin America.
Medellín’s image has undergone a dramatic shift since the turbulent decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when it stood out as a city of violence and organized crime. In the early 2000s, violence plummeted as external investment grew; the city began to invest in a series of inclusive infrastructure projects under the banner of social urbanism. Newspapers and magazines the world over lauded the ‘Medellín Miracle’ with glossy spreads of its new public buildings, located in its most marginalized neighbourhoods. What got less attention was how this transformation was financed. The surprising answer is through the annual dividends paid to the city by its aggressively expansionist state-owned enterprise (SOE), the multi-utility corporation Empresas Públicas de Medellín (Medellín Public Enterprises, EPM), which accounts for at least 20% of the city’s budget. Medellín’s growth depends on that of its SOE, and EPM’s growth is financed by debt. That debt is mainly acquired for infrastructure projects, whether regional, national, or international. Honing in on infrastructure financing across six decades, I show that wealth and debt are deeply imbricated, and that infrastructure and its attendant services are key mechanisms and artifacts through which wealth and debt, miracle and crisis, are mutually formed and reformed. Building on that finding, I argue that, just as debt is central to the generation of wealth, remaining latent only to be spotlighted in justification of wealth’s eventual erasure and the onset of “eventful” crisis, everyday crises and their proliferation are ever-present within the economic miracle.
This paper examines how the dynamics of digitalisation and datafication become embedded in the intimacies of everyday life in Santiago de Chile’s new migrant spaces of inhabitation by focusing on their entanglements with the gendered geographies of homemaking. Through entanglements with experiences of migration and displacement, the making of home out of new dwellings spaces is sustained by gendered labour that underpin fragile, and temporary geographies of home. The paper asks how new reconfigurations of everyday processes of digitalisation and datafication – from digital platforms to everyday forms of surveillance – are further shaping the spatial politics of domesticities. The paper draws on ethnographic research in Santiago de Chile’s vertical large scale urban developments – 25 to 40-story buildings, pejoratively referred to as “vertical ghettoes”, that emerged as legally contested spaces through unauthorized zoning approvals – primarily housing a Venezuelan and Colombian migrant population experiencing precarious living conditions and stigma shaped by racialized urban discourses. By highlighting the ways in which domesticities intersect with everyday dynamics of datafication and digitalisation, the paper invites to rethink the digital dimensions of homemaking shaping the struggles of marginalised migrant women that embody the everyday realities of displacement and migration in the city.
Coffee and snacks 🙂
Organizer(s): Fiona Gladstone – Fairleigh Dickinson University
Discussant: Diana Liverman – University of ArizonaDate and Time: Friday January 9th – Session I: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 1
While Latin American social movements are renowned for resisting enclosures, their transformative power lies in how this engaged praxis is linked to the construction of viable socio-ecological alternatives. Our presentation builds on political ecology, social movements theory, and ecofeminism to show, through empirical evidence, that commons movements in the region create a reinforcing loop between mobilization and commoning. We use geospatial and ethnographic data to analyze established cases in Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico where the reinforcing loops have institutionalized natural resource governance, improving water access and forest cover. We use original ethnographic research and turn to Colombia, where subsequent paros nacionales in 2019 and 2021 saw the emergence of a ‘primera linea’. Interviews with activists in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali illustrate ephemeral commoning infrastructures, similar to those that emerged in Chile during its ‘estallido social’ around the same time. Protest barricades evolved into community kitchens, street medic networks, political teach-ins, and popular assemblies. Putting collective care at the center fostered new forms of social solidarity and political subjectivity. Juxtaposing emergent urban struggles with enduring rural commons, our comparative framework shows that Latin American movements prefigure and construct the very socio-ecological futures they demand.
Community-based electricity infrastructures are being envisioned as an alternative for rural communities experiencing energy vulnerabilities. This narrative has been adopted by a wide range of actors, from technocrats who frame decentralized renewable infrastructures as technological fixes, to radical scholars and advocates who see them as a means to decommodify and democratize energy. However, these debates rarely acknowledge that communities have long been constituted as responsible subjects of their energy realities by rural electrification policies and programs operating under evolving governmental rationalities. As such, this work traces two related processes: First, how rural communities have been historically incorporated as key agents for governing the use and maintenance of local energy systems throughout Colombia’s shifting governmental rationalities (pre-neoliberal, neoliberal, and post-neoliberal); and second, how communities have engaged with these rationalities and how commoning practices have allowed them to negotiate, resist, or rework these modes of governance. In my work, I discuss how these processes have historically produced institutions, social relations, practices, and narratives around electricity, its infrastructures, modernity, and the state, and how these configurations enable and/or constrain the emergence of the envisioned community-based energy futures. In doing so, this study contributes to understanding the dynamic interplay between governmental rationalities and community agency in shaping heterogeneous energy and development geographies in Latin America. And by adopting a historical perspective on this matter, this research will provide elements to understand potential pathways and/or obstacles to materialize more democratic energy futures in rural Colombia.
The pulque agave is a plant endemic to Mexico, whose care and preservation have driven the development of a vast peasant culture. Due to its socioecological interactions, it serves as a source of sustenance for both humans and nonhumans coexisting in the nearby biophysical environments. This article investigates three cases in which collective organization, through multispecies commoning, has preserved socioecological environments. Commoning, considered an organizational, knowledge-based, productive, and social practice, is based on the care of the pulquero agave through peasant knowledge—from the Hña-Hñu and mestizo cultures—located in two cooperatives and a civil association. These cooperatives have undertaken actions to recover knowledge, systematically reforest pulque agave, considering the biodiversity of their environments, and have promoted economic and legal strategies to curb monoculture. Using a case study approach, this paper analyzes the experiences of the Alegría del Maguey and Néctar de los Dioses cooperatives, as well as the Ometoxtoctli Civil Association. The three organizational experiences, distinct in their origins and strategies, illustrate the diverse ways to build commons, commoning, and coproduce territories through multispecies care. This approach is observable in traditional peasant agriculture, productive diversification, and ecological preservation, encompassing aspects of multispecies care and community economies.
Moderator: Kate Swanson – Dalhousie University
Date and Time: Friday January 9th – Session I: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 2
Panel Description: This bilingual panel will discuss a research-informed, creative non-fiction book for young adults titled, ‘La tierra que nos sueña: Historias de niñas, niños y jóvenes que migran’ [The land that dreams of us: Stories of girls, boys and young people who migrate] (2024). This innovative book is a product of NSF-funded research on the intertwined geographies of violence, poverty, and impunity that have given rise to forced displacement, marking the lives and landscapes of countless children and adolescents in Latin America. Driven by the territorial control of organized crime and the absence of safety and justice, families migrate in search of re-existence and freedom from violence. The work presented here emerges from a collective project that brings together qualitative research and literary creation to explore the spatial and emotional textures of child and youth displacement, migration, and asylum-seeking.
The resulting book is grounded in four intertwined sources: a binational study conducted in shelters in Nogales and Ciudad Juárez (2019–2024); the human rights and advocacy work of IMUMI (Mexican Institute for Women in Migration); field research in Tapachula and Mexico City; and the accompaniment of young asylum seekers along the US/Mexico border. From these encounters, thirteen fictionalized narratives were collectively woven by award-winning children’s writers, researchers, and human rights defenders.
This project asks how one might honor the experience of displacement without appropriating it; how to write the unspeakable without erasing its humanity; and how storytelling itself can map territories of dispossession and, at the same time, territories of hope. It proposes a geography of testimony—one that recognizes migrant children not only as victims, but as creators of meaning, resilience, and re-existence within landscapes shaped by violence.
Panelists: Rebecca M Torres – University of Texas, Austin Verónica Macías Andere – University of Texas, Austin Olimpia Montserrat Valdivia-Ramírez – University of Texas, Austin
Moderator: TBD
Date and Time: Friday January 9th – Session I: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 3
Esta ponencia sobre la Desmitificación de falacias en la enseñanza de términos geográficos, surge de la investigación académica, materializada en la publicación Diccionario ilustrado de términos geográficos elementales, bajo mi autoría. Dicha obra nace como una herramienta académica que porta los términos y conceptos principales o claves de la geografía. Es una obra lingüísticamente rica, ya que combinan distintas marcas que hacen posible una mejor descripción y compresión de los términos. Además, se apoya e incluye conceptos de áreas relacionadas, como la astronomía, la biología, la física, entre otras. Su forma no difiere de la mayoría de los diccionarios convencionales de metalenguaje. Consiste una lista de términos ordenados de manera alfabética. Cada entrada incluye una palabra base, acompañada de marcas lingüísticas, una definición precisa y una imagen ilustrativa. Las principales marcas lingüísticas señalan la categoría, el género y la disciplina a la que pertenece cada término; por ejemplo: sust. (sustantivo), f. (femenino) y Meter. (meteorología). Esta investigación comprende unos 1,000 términos geográficos, mismos que se describen, explican, ejemplifican, ilustran y aplican al contexto el territorio de Honduras y otros contextos regionales e internacionales de acuerdo a su uso. En este contexto, para la ponencia se harán ejemplos de términos de usos común mal conceptualización desde la perspectiva geográfica, entre ellos, citamos: geografía, barlovento, sotavento, golfo, bahía, rada, punta, cabo, barra, península, cascada, catarata, salto de agua, geosinclinal, geoanticlinal, clima, estado del tiempo, canícula, brisa, montaña, sierra, cordillera meseta colina, dolina.
This presentation shares preliminary findings from a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning study of a First-Year Experience (FYE) cultural geography course at a predominantly white institution in the U.S. Midwest. Designed for first-year non-majors fulfilling a general education requirement, the course integrates global learning and FYE goals through creative, reflective, and collaborative activities that connect disciplinary concepts to students’ personal experiences and to global cases from Latin America and other regions. Unlike many FYE models that separate disciplinary content from FYE components, this course weaves them together. Within a low-stakes, human-centered environment, students are encouraged to analyze interconnections among place, identity, and power; build relationships with each other and the university; and develop curiosity about people and places beyond campus. Learning activities include arts-based projects, embodied activities, and an online collaboration with peers in Brazil and Türkiye. Analysis of pre- and post-semester surveys and student reflections examines the course’s impact on students’ sense of belonging on campus, their sense of connection to people and places beyond the university, and their interest in further global learning and engagement while in college and beyond.
This paper explores the concept of “geosophy” and its theoretical and practical implications for new directions in the geohumanities. Geosophy, the subjective, philosophical, and creative understanding and practice of geography, was introduced by John Kirtland Wright in his 1946 presidential address to the American Association of Geographers to develop a humanistic counterpoint to the predominantly empirical discipline. Wright stressed the importance of perception, visualization, narrative, metaphor, cognition, and other non-scientific factors in constructing geographical knowledge. These subjective processes of narrative orientation and mind-mapping, claims the cultural geographer Yi Fu Tuan, integrate physical and human geography into a meaningful symbiotic whole and transform space into place. Years of teaching World Geography at the undergraduate level have convinced me of what Jared Diamond calls, the “Power of Place.” I have seen students inspired and empowered by their growing understanding and field experience of the earth and its systems. Basic geographic concepts – materiality; flux; geologic “deep” time; scale and perspective; landscape; the human-physical nexus; cartography and wayfinding; regionalism; geopolitics; and interconnection, etc. – are explored and mined for insights to both ground and liberate a new geographic literacy and imagination in the classroom and everyday life. Conversely, geographic illiteracy, abetted by the removal of geography from most school curricula and the prevalence of GPS and other conveniences, has impoverished our understanding of and interaction with the world. Through a practical exploration of multicultural approaches to geography, this paper considers the literary, artistic, civic, and pedagogical possibilities of geosophy and the geohumanities.
Organizer(s): Nikolai Alvarado – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Date and Time: Friday January 9th – Session I: 10:45 am – 12:15 pmPlace: Room 4
A diferencia de la organización del riego en las zonas altoandinas, cuya gobernanza se funda en costumbres de raigambre precolonial y su cercanía a las fuentes de agua (v.gr., por precipitación o deshielo glaciar), la irrigación costera en el valle del río Lurín tiene como piedra angular la “administración de la escasez”, dado que padece temporadas secas que pueden durar hasta ocho meses al año. En este desafiante escenario, la expansión urbana, legal e ilegal (v.gr. por tráfico de tierras), hace sentir su presencia en el valle de Lurín por su cercanía al núcleo capitalino de Lima. Y es que aun cuando esta región se encuentra dentro de la capital peruana, la presencia estatal lejos de proteger las actividades de riego pone en peligro los escasos recursos hídricos del valle, sobreexplotándolos. A estas presiones se suma la ocurrencia de eventos inesperados como consecuencia del cambio climático que han provocado deslizamientos e inundaciones en la costa central peruana en los últimos años, afectando los cultivos e infraestructura de riego de la Junta de Usuarios del Sector Hidráulico Lurín. A través del modelamiento SIG del terreno en un sector del valle bajo, este estudio busca poner en evidencia cómo el desarrollo urbano ha agudizado las desigualdades que los usuarios de riego experimentan actualmente. Asimismo, esta investigación busca iluminar las vulnerabilidades de esta organización costera de riego frente a potenciales eventos climáticos futuros para dilucidar hasta qué punto las nuevas presiones urbanas sobre los recursos hídricos locales exacerbarían tales vulnerabilidades.
Esta ponencia analiza las fachadas del centro histórico de San Cristóbal de las Casas como territorios fronterizos donde convergen tensamente normatividad patrimonial, prácticas creativas transgresoras y dinámicas de gentrificación turistificada. Mediante metodología que combina fotogrametría tridimensional, etnografía digital y trabajo de campo presencial, documento cómo los muros operan como superficies en disputa donde múltiples territorialidades se materializan cromáticamente. Los modelos 3D georreferenciados conforman un catálogo de acceso abierto bajo licencia Creative Commons disponible en Sketchfab (https://skfb.ly/pahqb) con su respectivo geovisualizador (https://tinyurl.com/5n7k2m7a), democratizando acceso a espacios públicos digitalizados. Empleando el marco teórico de Lefebvre sobre la producción del espacio y el concepto de prácticas intersticiales de Mubi Brighenti, demuestro que estas dinámicas no operan mediante confrontación binaria entre resistencia y dominación, sino a través de “colaboraciones contradictorias” que reconfiguran constantemente los límites de lo permitido. Los hallazgos revelan tres procesos centrales: primero, aplicación diferencial de la normatividad patrimonial según nacionalidad, posición económica y conexiones turísticas; segundo, barreras económicas que determinan quién puede materializar territorialidades transgresivas; tercero, la normatividad patrimonial funcionando como mecanismo de exclusión que facilita gentrificación selectiva. Las secuencias temporales documentan la persistencia de territorialidades transgresoras pese a estrategias de control escaladas que incluyen videovigilancia y conversión de espacios en infraestructura turística. Aporta metodológicamente al capturar la verticalidad y temporalidad de las intervenciones murales, superando limitaciones de abordajes tradicionales. Teóricamente, contribuye a comprender cómo las fronteras urbanas latinoamericanas operan como zonas de traducción donde patrimonio, creatividad y capital turístico se articulan contradictoriamente, generando nuevas formas de extractivismo urbano.
Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) refers to agricultural production within cities (intra-urban areas) and their surrounding regions (peri-urban areas). As a localized food production strategy, UPA contributes to reducing hunger and food insecurity while promoting more sustainable and resilient food systems. It encompasses a wide range of practices, from small-scale household production for self-consumption to capital-intensive operations on urban lots. The benefits of UPA are diverse, including income generation, employment and skill development, and increased access to fresh, nutritious food. My research offers a comparative case study of UPA in two municipalities of similar size and agricultural traditions: the Township of Centre Wellington, Ontario, Canada, and Regente Feijó, São Paulo, Brazil. Through interviews with urban and peri-urban farmers, I explored the role of UPA in local food supply chains, its contribution to community food security, and the socio-demographic profiles of farmers, with particular attention to the leadership of women in crop management. I also identified the main crop types cultivated and the agricultural inputs used in each context. The comparative analysis revealed how distinct social, economic, and environmental conditions shape UPA practices and outcomes in the two municipalities. Through the examination of these similarities and differences, the study contributes to a broader understanding of how UPA strengthens local food systems and enhances food security in diverse geographical settings.
This research examines the intersection of place, memory, and neoliberal transformation in São Paulo, focusing on how the city’s spatial fabric reflects both the authoritarian legacy of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985) and the subsequent restructuring under neoliberal urbanism. Using a grid of spatial practices, the analysis situates São Paulo as a contested site where the production of space during the dictatorship—through securitized campuses, repressive policing of public squares, and infrastructural megaprojects—both constrained and enabled new urban imaginaries. The study then considers how neoliberal reforms, privatization, and entrepreneurial urban governance have reshaped the landscape, often erasing or commodifying spaces of memory tied to student resistance, labor organizing, and state violence. By juxtaposing sites of repression—such as university precincts, detention centers, and protest squares—with contemporary spaces of capital accumulation and memorialization, the research highlights the uneven ways memory is inscribed onto the urban environment. Methodologically, this project combines archival work, field observation, and critical spatial analysis to interrogate how historical geographies of authoritarian control persist within, and are transformed by, neoliberal spatial logics. The paper argues that attending to place and memory within São Paulo’s neoliberal present not only illuminates the city’s fractured histories but also reveals the enduring power of spatial practices in shaping collective remembrance and forgetting.
Box lunch provided (pickup between 12:30 – 1:00 pm).
where: Meet at: Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf – map
2.5-hour, 3.5-kilometer walking tour led by Alfonso Baños de CUSCOTA to explore the Zona Romántica in Puerto Vallarta. The objective is to observe the relationship between geographical and territorial elements in the urban and architectural development of a city whose main activity is tourism, a key aspect of its daily life. Among the attractions included are the Malecón (boardwalk), the Plaza de Armas (main square), the Templo de la Virgen de Guadalupe, the Teatro Saucedo (now a Parisian store), and some Vallarta-style properties designed by Fernando Romero Escalante. Additionally, the tour includes a visit to the Cuale River, with buildings such as the municipal market and the Parián del Puente.We will leave from the Holiday Inn and Suites at 4:00 pm pm on Friday January 9th.In some areas, the topography is hilly, so comfortable clothing and footwear are recommended, as well as a generally good state of health. Although mild weather is expected since it is winter, it is advisable to bring water. The excursion ends in the Romantic Zone; return transportation to the Holiday Inn hotels is not provided.
2.5-hour, 3.5-kilometer walking tour led by Alfonso Baños de CUSCOTA to explore the Zona Romántica in Puerto Vallarta. The objective is to observe the relationship between geographical and territorial elements in the urban and architectural development of a city whose main activity is tourism, a key aspect of its daily life. Among the attractions included are the Malecón (boardwalk), the Plaza de Armas (main square), the Templo de la Virgen de Guadalupe, the Teatro Saucedo (now a Parisian store), and some Vallarta-style properties designed by Fernando Romero Escalante. Additionally, the tour includes a visit to the Cuale River, with buildings such as the municipal market and the Parián del Puente.We will leave from the Holiday Inn and Suites at 4:00 pm pm on Friday January 9th.In some areas, the topography is hilly, so comfortable clothing and footwear are recommended, as well as a generally good state of health. Although mild weather is expected since it is winter, it is advisable to bring water. The excursion ends in the Romantic Zone; return transportation to the Holiday Inn hotels is not provided.
Saturday January 10th
where: Meet at: Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf – map
8-hour bus tour to the municipality of Bahía de Banderas led by Jesús Rodriguez of CUCOSTA to meet with local stakeholders actively involved in environmental protection. The objective is to have direct contact with local people working on jaguar protection projects in the Sierra de Vallejo and to promote the first Ecological Land Use Planning Program in the municipality. The route is Hotel-Rancho mi Chula-Bucerías-Hotel. There will be three specific activities:– A tour of the area showcasing aspects of the Local Ecological Land Use Planning Program. San Pancho: topics related to the Protected Natural Area.– A session at the Sayulita Ejido Community Center for an interview with a civil association.– A session at the Bucerías Ejido Community Center with ejido presidents. The tour concludes with a community meal at the location.We will leave from the Holiday Inn and Suites at 9:00 am on Saturday January 10th. Lunch will be included as a part of the field trip. The trip is expected to last 8 hours and will be conducted by bus. Participants should have already had breakfast, bring water, and wear comfortable shoes.
8-hour bus tour to the municipality of Bahía de Banderas led by Jesús Rodriguez of CUCOSTA to meet with local stakeholders actively involved in environmental protection. The objective is to have direct contact with local people working on jaguar protection projects in the Sierra de Vallejo and to promote the first Ecological Land Use Planning Program in the municipality. The route is Hotel-Rancho mi Chula-Bucerías-Hotel. There will be three specific activities:– A tour of the area showcasing aspects of the Local Ecological Land Use Planning Program. San Pancho: topics related to the Protected Natural Area.– A session at the Sayulita Ejido Community Center for an interview with a civil association.– A session at the Bucerías Ejido Community Center with ejido presidents. The tour concludes with a community meal at the location.We will leave from the Holiday Inn and Suites at 9:00 am on Saturday January 10th. Lunch will be included as a part of the field trip. The trip is expected to last 8 hours and will be conducted by bus. Participants should have already had breakfast, bring water, and wear comfortable shoes.
where: Meet at: Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf – map
3.5-hour, 4-kilometer round trip walking tour led by local tour guides with the Mirador Conchas Chinas as the principal destination. You will walk a moderate ascent along urban slopes and remnants of deciduous tropical forest, to a viewpoint that allows for an understanding of the relationship between the steep terrain and high-density residential development. You will experience the transition between the urban environment and the tropical coastal ecosystem. The tour addresses urban growth, land-use planning, the geography of tourism, and landscape transformation. Key points of the tour:– Initial ascent through tropical vegetation.– Observation of cliffs and granite rock formations.– Panoramic view of Banderas Bay.– Discussion on coastal geomorphology, erosion, and land use.– Analysis of hillside urban planning and adaptation to the mountainous terrain.– Observation of terraces, hillside cuts, and exposed geological structures.– Excellent view for interpreting the bay and coastal morphology.We will leave from the Holiday Inn and Suites at 9:00 am on Saturday January 10th. The tour includes: Round-trip transportation from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf hotel to the starting point, specialized guide, water, light snack, field journal, assistance, and brief educational materials.
3.5-hour, 4-kilometer round trip walking tour led by local tour guides with the Mirador Conchas Chinas as the principal destination. You will walk a moderate ascent along urban slopes and remnants of deciduous tropical forest, to a viewpoint that allows for an understanding of the relationship between the steep terrain and high-density residential development. You will experience the transition between the urban environment and the tropical coastal ecosystem. The tour addresses urban growth, land-use planning, the geography of tourism, and landscape transformation. Key points of the tour:– Initial ascent through tropical vegetation.– Observation of cliffs and granite rock formations.– Panoramic view of Banderas Bay.– Discussion on coastal geomorphology, erosion, and land use.– Analysis of hillside urban planning and adaptation to the mountainous terrain.– Observation of terraces, hillside cuts, and exposed geological structures.– Excellent view for interpreting the bay and coastal morphology.We will leave from the Holiday Inn and Suites at 9:00 am on Saturday January 10th. The tour includes: Round-trip transportation from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf hotel to the starting point, specialized guide, water, light snack, field journal, assistance, and brief educational materials.
where: Meet at: Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf – map
4.5-hour, 7-kilometer round trip walking tour of the Río Pitillal (Playa Grande) led by local tour guides. You will walk a moderate ascent through urban slopes and remnants of deciduous tropical forest, with a viewpoint that allows for an understanding of the relationship between the steep topography and high-density residential development. The tour allows the study of the river as a key element of ecological connectivity and its function in water and urban regulation, and the nalysis of land use, riparian vegetation, and associated biodiversity. It combines human and physical geography in a short and easily accessible route. Key points of the route:– Middle section of the Pitillal River.– Identification of riparian flora and fauna.– Talk on environmental geography and water management.– Analysis of ecosystem services and hydrological functions of the river.– Direct observation of riparian vegetation, ecological connectivity, and urban pressures.– Flat, very accessible, and educational route.We will leave from the Holiday Inn and Suites at 8:00 am on Saturday January 10th. The tour includes: Round-trip transportation from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf to the starting point, specialized guide, water, light snack, field notebook, assistance, and brief educational materials.
4.5-hour, 7-kilometer round trip walking tour of the Río Pitillal (Playa Grande) led by local tour guides. You will walk a moderate ascent through urban slopes and remnants of deciduous tropical forest, with a viewpoint that allows for an understanding of the relationship between the steep topography and high-density residential development. The tour allows the study of the river as a key element of ecological connectivity and its function in water and urban regulation, and the nalysis of land use, riparian vegetation, and associated biodiversity. It combines human and physical geography in a short and easily accessible route. Key points of the route:– Middle section of the Pitillal River.– Identification of riparian flora and fauna.– Talk on environmental geography and water management.– Analysis of ecosystem services and hydrological functions of the river.– Direct observation of riparian vegetation, ecological connectivity, and urban pressures.– Flat, very accessible, and educational route.We will leave from the Holiday Inn and Suites at 8:00 am on Saturday January 10th. The tour includes: Round-trip transportation from the Holiday Inn & Suites Marina and Golf to the starting point, specialized guide, water, light snack, field notebook, assistance, and brief educational materials.
