Relational Conservation Territories: Racialized Property Regimes, Negotiated Rights and Environmental Management in the Selva Misionera

Abstract

This dissertation examines the intersection of the often-unrealized rights of Latin America’s ‘territorial turn’ and the shifting political economy of Misiones, Argentina, as the selva misionera subtropical forest is revalorized as an object of conservation. I analyze the making of conservation territories through an ethnography of ‘Lote 8’, a nearly 4000-hectare lot in the Yabotí Biosphere Reserve, purchased for conservation and titled to three Mbya Guarani communities following over a decade of struggle for their land. First, I explore how Lote 8 is produced and stabilized as a discursive object through a multi-scalar network of actors, institutions, and infrastructures, which extract political, social and material value through its representation. Then, I trace the relationship among property, indigeneity and the selva though the creation of the Yabotí Biosphere Reserve in the early 1990s, the dispute over Lote 8 between the Mbya Guarani and a logging company at the turn of the century, and the negotiated conservation land purchase and titling agreement. I show how claims to ‘conservation citizenship’ produce new spaces to contest histories of racialized dispossession and negotiate rights otherwise foreclosed through legal avenues, as conservation networks become an audience for the enunciation of rights claims and a non-state arbiter of the recognition of Indigenous communities. Problematically however, where rights claims made to the state require legibility of land as Indigenous territory, recognition by conservation actors requires that Indigenous communities demonstrate their legitimacy as conservation subjects, making ‘negotiated rights’ contingent, imbricated with the political economy of conservation and always susceptible to being undermined. Finally, I examine the effects of (re)producing the selva misionera as an object of environmental management in the Yabotí Biosphere Reserve and its area of influence. I show how provincial parks are socially produced through the embodied labor of park rangers, which extends through (b)ordering practices for managing the overlapping borderlands of the Yabotí Biosphere Reserve and the national border with Brazil. I argue that accessing land titles through conservation entangles Indigenous rights with environmental management as it operates as a mode of extending settler colonial territorial control through the everyday enactment of conservation territories.