Gabriela Valdivia

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

resumen: Este artículo que conecta dos décadas de observaciones etnográficas (2001-2023), describe cómo el flujo y la fuga de bienes entre compañías petroleras y comunidades causan quiebres en la reorganización de la reproducción social comunitaria del Centro Shuar de Tiguano, en la Amazonía ecuatoriana. El artículo se centra en las luchas de las m...

Indigenous stewardship is essential to the conservation of biocultural diversity, yet conventional conservation models often treat Indigenous territories (ITs) as homogeneous or isolated units. We propose that archipelagos of Indigenous territories (AITs), clusters of ITs that span geographies but are connected through shared cultural or political...

This paper examines how the spatial distribution, size, connectivity, and governance of Indigenous lands can impact conservation planning and practice in the Amazon. Indigenous Territories (IT) are frequently treated as homogeneous spatial and cultural units, considered, explicitly or implicitly, as discrete, singular patches of land belonging to a...

In Colombia’s Caribbean region, where Black Diaspora agrarian spaces have been overtaken by oil palm plantations, access to safe drinking water has become increasingly difficult. Leticia is a water spring located in this historical afro descendant territory. Leticia’s near exhaustion in 2015 as a consequence of oil palm encroachment caused little p...

This essay reviews the following works: A Future History of Water. By Andrea Ballestero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Pp. 248. $25.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478003892. Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Edited by Jacob Blanc and Frederico Freitas. Foreword by Zephyr Frank. Tucson: University...

Resource use and management are central concerns to environmental geography scholars, who have mobilized diverse approaches to examine the making, circulation, and socioecological effects of resources and resource systems. Informed by our reading of the resource geography literature and our experiences editing The Routledge Handbook of Critical Res...

en Environmental justice scholarship recognises and denounces the uneven spatio-temporal patterns of toxic exposures. In doing so, it often prioritises oppositional acts and standardised metrics of evidence of harm. In this essay, I explore the concept of jugarse la vida (wagering life) as a philosophy of vitality in toxic spaces to argue that desi...

This Handbook provides an essential guide to the study of resources and their role in socioenvironmental change. With original contributions from more than 60 authors with expertise in a wide range of resource types and world regions, it offers a toolkit of conceptual and methodological approaches for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resourc...

To say that Covid-19 has changed everything about how we do geography is by now cliche. Multiple academic journals, including this one, have published special issues on Covid-19, and countless editorials signal how the on-going pandemic deepens existing inequalities, not only in the worlds we study as scholars but also in the ways in which we produ...

The Journal of Latin American Geography is happy to announce a newly expanded editorial team, including the addition of three new Associate Editors and a new Book Review Editor.

This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or ‘choke’ the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints – ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more – recasts longstanding anthropological concerns...

Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s theorising of transversality, this paper offers an ethnography of life-with-oil in the city of Esmeraldas, home to Ecuador’s largest oil refinery complex and a chokepoint of the country’s oil export logistics. The paper elaborates how desires, struggles, and wagers that shape everyday life in the city, which appea...

This multi-authored collection of papers examines the complex realities of research on natural resource industries, including the messy entanglements of extraction, materiality, and everyday social life this research entails. Of central importance to the contributors is how scholars confront fieldwork challenges ethically, methodologically, and cor...

This volume explores the many and deep connections between the widespread rise of authoritarian leaders and populist politics in recent years, and the domain of environmental politics and governance – how environments are known, valued, and managed; for whose benefit; and with what outcomes. The volume is explicitly international in scope and comp...

Oil extraction is a useful optic for thinking and writing about the future of sustainable resource use. While concerns over the burdens of oil extraction tend to be of a planetary scale (e.g. discussions around fossil-fuel addiction, energy security, and climate change), in this chapter we zoom in to the case of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where indigen...

In petro-states, the governance of flows of oil and oil money is vital to state legitimacy (e.g., regulations, contracts with companies, social compensation in sites of oil extraction). This article explores how contemporary oil price volatility shapes oil governance and the terms of petro-state legitimacy in Ecuador. In recent years, a technocrati...

Latin America is the second largest oil-producing region in the world, following the Middle East. Major producers, such as Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, export to other Latin American countries, in addition to the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and, increasingly, Asia. The US, the world’s largest oil consumer, is the largest purchaser of Latin...

Early one morning in August 2003, in a residential area of Quito, hundreds of oil workers from Petroecuador , Ecuador’s state oil company, stood outside the headquarters of the Federation of Petroleum Workers of Ecuador (FETRAPEC ). The excitement was palpable. By mid-morning, a group brought out two giant papier mâché puppets, the first of Lucio G...

In its earlier years, the Correa administration enjoyed a “green” image, thanks to the Yasuní–ITT (Ishpingo, Tambococha, Tiputini) Initiative, a government-sanctioned proposition to leave more than 900 million barrels of crude oil underground, protecting a highly biodiverse forest, mitigating against climate change, and protecting peoples in volunt...

In a visit to the Amazonian city of Coca in 2014, President Correa told local residents that petroleum brings Buen Vivir, that oil is a blessing not a curse, and that through infrastructure and services, people there can achieve a life of dignity. Traditional ecological knowledge, subsistence practices, and cultural lifeways were equated with ignor...

One of the key slated goals of the Revolución Ciudadana is combating poverty in Ecuador, where the Correa administration portrays itself as the vanguard of a twenty-first-century socialism that claims to prioritize people over capital through the expanded accumulation of the latter and its redistribution through public investments. Using a Gramscia...

In Chap. 2, we discussed the concept of indigenous citizenship in Ecuador, and its importance in protecting groups like the Tagaeri and Taromenane, Waorani clans in voluntary isolation. In this chapter, we discuss two high-profile killings (in 2003 and 2013) by contacted Waorani of small groups who continue to resist pacification and assimilation,...

The spaces of oil extraction in Ecuador are dynamic sites of negotiation, contestation, acquiescence, and resistance. Since the election of Rafael Correa in 2006, the uneasy coexistence of state, firm, and indigenous peoples in these spaces has shifted to reflect an explicitly anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist platform. This chapter examines the...

Ecuador’s northern Amazon was indelibly changed starting from 1967, when a large discovery by a Texaco–Gulf consortium led to the exploitation of the first commercial oil fields in the nation. While a standard narrative asserts that international processes and actors—namely, multinational energy companies like Texaco, now Chevron—powerfully determi...

In this chapter, we summarize the book and our argument that the spaces in which oil extraction continues expanding are sites upon which ideologies of the state and citizenship have been projected. These are spaces in which sensitive ecologies and the people who depend upon them are being compelled via state action or lack thereof down one of two p...

Recent killings between contacted Waorani and Waorani in voluntary isolation raise questions about the meaning and consequences of citizenship for indigenous peoples, and, importantly, how to protect vulnerable groups for whom citizenship, belonging, and inclusion are yet undetermined. We trace the historical trajectory of the politics of citizensh...

This article uses a political ecology approach to examine how urban residents of the refinery city of Esmeraldas “wager life” under conditions of social and chemical toxicity associated with oil capitalism. The article draws on the scholarship on affective economies and critical oil geographies to trace the knotting of social reproduction and oil c...

Harnessing the power of wind is commonly understood as a “green”—cleaner and more sustainable—alternative to conventional extractive practices. An examination of the unfolding of wind energy projects and their contestation in southern Mexico shows that, despite the seeming immateriality of wind farming, wind energy requires epistemological and mate...

This chapter examines one of the best-known collective action responses against oil pollution in Esmeraldas, Ecuador. La Propicia Uno, a neighborhood within Esmeraldas, suffered tremendous environmental pollution from a refinery operated by the state-owned oil company, Petroecuador. On February 26, 1998, a gasoline leak from the refinery resulted i...

Sleep Dealer is a feature-length, science fiction film by Alex Rivera that explores relations between Latin America and the U.S. from an unusual location: impoverished southern Mexico, sometime in the near future. We argue that the film’s multi-sited, polyvocal views on migration, labor exploitation and violent, proliferation of borders deliberatel...

This paper contributes to analyses of energy integration strategies in Latin America. Focusing on the case of Ecuador’s participation in regional energy networks, the paper traces how oilfields, region, firms, and state are entangled in the making of energo-political assemblages. The paper develops an analytic of subterranean frictions in order to...

The Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change held in Lima, Peru, during the first two weeks of December 2014 constituted a powerful statement on the dynamics of contemporary resource extraction in Latin America. Convened by a coalition of Latin American workers’, women’s, peasant, and indigenous movements and organizations, it was meant to take place simu...

The extractive sector in Latin America is changing rapidly. From Venezuela assisting Ecuador in constructing a refinery to process heavy oil, to the development of a liquid natural gas project connecting Peruvian natural gas reserves with the Mexican market, to the conversion of Bolivia into a natural gas hub supplying Brazilian and Argentinean mar...

The Galápagos Islands, Ecuador, have been managed as a fortress of conservation since the late 1950s. Well-maintained borders separate the Galápagos National Park (GNP) and inhabited areas as incommensurable spaces of natural (protected) and human (productive) life. In recent years, ecological, political, and economic crises have challenged this se...

Recent discussions over conservation in the Galapagos Islands indicate a search for the right way to do conservation policy. When it is treated as a narrowly environmental issue, there are relatively clear dictates as to the organization of priorities and targets. As a social issue, however, conservation is not just “done”; it is experienced, negot...

The Galápagos National Park is an iconic site of environmental conservation; hundreds of thousands of tourists, students, and scientists have visited the islands since the national park was founded in 1959. What a casual visitor to the region might fail to see, however, is the history of conflict that has accompanied the formation and maintenance o...

This article analyzes the struggles of the petroleum labor movement against the neo-liberalization of the petroleum industry in Ecuador. Though originally focused on defending collective bargaining rights, since the 1990s the movement has put forward a populist, nationalist critique of the state's governance of petroleum. The article traces the roo...

This essay explores the role of the coca economy in the politics of basic foodstuff production in the lowlands department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Efforts throughout the 1980s and 1990s to diminish the coca economy in Santa Cruz have led to a significant decrease in the physical presence of coca in the region. This paper argues that while coca has b...

At Johnny’s Café on West Main Street in Carrboro, North Carolina, customers savor gourmet coffee with fresh pastries. Known for more than two decades as Johnny’s Sporting Goods, the small corner market stocked fishing tackle in a “down home” atmosphere until 2008 when Johnny sold the store. The new owners cultivate a well-heeled clientele who play...

Since the 1990s the Southeast has experienced a continued and dramatic growth in Latino populations in both rural and urban areas throughout the region. This immigrant population is establishing and building communities, transforming the landscape, and producing diverse cultures in place that are not traditionally Latino. In this paper we focus on...

This paper examines contemporary struggles over hydrocarbon governance in Ecuador and Bolivia. Our comparative analysis illustrates the ways that petro-capitalism, nationalist ideologies, popular movements and place conjoin in the governance of oil and natural gas. In the case of Ecuador, state employees drew on their labor relations and political...

In 2006, President Morales announced that his administration would end land inequality in Bolivia. Agrarian elites in the lowlands department of Santa Cruz, known as the economic engine of Bolivian agriculture, strongly oppose this position and have vowed to counter it to safeguard the agrarian order. From visions of a capitalist moral compass of p...

This article explores how perceptions about bodies and interpersonal exchanges contribute to the production of indigenous subjectivities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on feminist methodologies and experiences with Cofán, Quichua and Secoya peoples in the province of Sucumbíos, I reflect on how bodies and their ‘grammar’ can become analytical sp...

Ecuador is the fifth largest producer of petroleum in Latin America. Petroleum has brought prosperity to many Ecuadorians, effectively becoming the nation's most important natural resource. It also has inspired intense political mobilizations. While the best known of these are led by Amazonian indigenous peoples, petroleum has also generated other...

This examination of the work of three organizations in the northeastern Ecuadoran Amazon, FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE, explores how they engage and produce representations of indigeneity in relation to an on-going lawsuit against Chevron Texaco. Each of these organizations has used distinct network associations and performances based on their particula...

Neoliberal reforms throughout Latin America are intended to promote development by opening up economies and encouraging market-oriented practices. These reforms have deeply affected the lives of indigenous peoples and their relationship with extralocal actors. Today, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, some indigenous peoples participate in oil-extraction ne...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999. Bibliography: leaves 112-117.