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Pérez Gámez, Daniel

University of British Columbia

This dissertation examines and explores how Nahua activists, intellectuals and politicians in the wetlands of Xochimilco have fought for self-determination against racialized environmental violence since the construction of colonial Mexico City. Through a deep engagement of autonomous political organizations in the town of Atlapulco over three centuries, this dissertation underscores the dynamic engagements with working landscapes of biodiversity that shape Nahua forms of self-government. Utilizing an anticolonial, collaborative methodology that includes critical archival analysis, participatory-action research, and counter-storytelling, this dissertation asks: 1) What are the main local strategies that colonial and nationalist state projects employ to impose extractivist and corporate forms of rule? 2) What lessons can we learn from imperial urbanistic projects founded on the disruption of vast, complex ecologies? 3) What insights do Nahua activists in Atlapulco offer to contemporary understandings of sovereignty, territorial defense, and Indigenous ways of life? Chapter one historicizes the intricate role Nahua intellectuals and politicians played in shaping the politics of self-government and land tenure in Atlapulco, Xochimilco, and the Anahuac during the colonial period. Chapter two documents the political, social, spiritual, and environmental transformations faced by Nahua peoples in the wetlands of Xochimilco from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The chapter highlights the multiple imperial urban forms that autocratic political regimes imposed on the region. Chapter three makes sense of embodied experiences of state violence and political domination. It centers the strategies introduced by political parties and state institutions in Atlapulco to co-opt or incorporate community-based leaders into their mechanisms of rule. Chapter four traces the entanglement of racial capitalism, land dispossession, and state-sponsored corporate rule through an analysis of the political and psycho-affective scars left by the internalization of colonial ways of life in Abya Yala (Latin America).

Text

2024-08-14

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88938

Geography

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/