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This dissertation examines the cultural politics of conservation efforts in Mexico City, where in 2000, the city legislated a soil and water conservation plan in its rural areas. During 12-months of field work in the village of San Luis Tlaxialternalco 1 focused on how the conservation plan was to be established in the wetlands with chinampa agriculture, directly above one of the city's fresh water reservoirs. Political ecology research of conservation suggests that ecosystemic processes are intricately linked to economic and social processes on many scales. Post-structuralist analysis has complicated homogeneous and generalizing descriptions of social categories, politics of power, and the causality between socio-economic, political, cultural, and ecological factors. Research in political ecology emphasizes the diversity of actors and their subject positions and seeks to locate and understand the dynamics of power and agency within and outside formal institutions. I examined the negotiations of the conservation plan on three social scales and I looked at the intersecting axes of power and the knowledge of various actors, and how they inform conservation. On the scale of the state, a discursive analysis of the 'coloniality of power' of the conservation plan uncovers the city government's underlying assumptions about how the fanners' land use practices and social organization contribute to the conservation effort. I ask how do those assumptions define and condition chinampa farmers as 'Indian'? I conclude that in the conservation plan, colonially-based discourses constitute rural communities and agriculturalists in ways that subject them to the city's needs and interests, and exclude them from equal livelihood opportunities. In San Luis Tlaxialternalco I examined ideas of 'community' by documenting how the conservation plan affected local power relations. Analyzing the dynamics among chinampero farmers in their meetings, I exarnined the alliances in and the 'voice' of the village. I conclude that 'community' is a fluid and contested entity shaped by class, knowledge, and cultural values in unpredictable constellations. The tjaird scale of analysis concerns women's knowledge and voice, and examines ideas of silence as agency. In semi-structured interviews and participant observation in farmer women's everyday lives in San Luis I explored how they make decisions that affect the environment. The research shows that multiple constraints and opportunities, such as economic responsibilities, class, prestige, and patriarchy shape women's daily lives and direct their decisions to advance goals consistent with their values even when their decisions may undermine the long-term health of the environment they depend on. By looking at the micropolitics of conservation, my research provides cultural understanding of how at different scales decisions that affect ecology are made and how they are articulated through cultural idioms in the charged context of the conservation plan. The dissertation de-mystifies predominant representations of chinampas and chinamperos. It also complicates ideas of 'cornmirnity' and suggests that the analysis has to go beyond class and include values and knowledge. Further, I show that relevant ecological knowledge does not automatically lead to 'appropriate' action, and that silence can be a powerful tool that resists impositions and firrthers individual and community interests. Finally, the thesis suggests that political ecologists need to move away from equating power with action and activism within "progressive movements", and that conservation efforts need to have multiple goals and follow diverse strategies. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Grounded in the geographies of Chiapas, Mexico, the dissertation maps a cartography of Zapatista indigenous resistance practices and charts the production of decolonial political subjectivities in an era of neoliberal governance and low intensity conflict. It analyzes the relationship between local cultural political expressions of indigenous autonomy, global capitalist interests and neoliberal rationalities of government after more than decade of Zapatista struggle. Since 1996, Zapatista indigenous Mayan communities have engaged in the creation of alternative education, health, agricultural production, justice, and governing bodies as part of the daily practices of autonomy. The dissertation demonstrates that the practices of Zapatista indigenous autonomy reflect current shifts in neoliberal state governing logics, yet it is in this very terrain where key ruptures and destabilizing practices emerge. The dissertation focuses on the recolonization aspects of neoliberal rationalities of government in their particular Latin American post Cold War, post populist manifestations. I argue that in Mexico's indigenous regions, the shift towards the privatization of state social services, the decentralization of state governing techniques and the transformation of state social programs towards an emphasis on greater self-management occurs in a complex relationship to mechanisms of low intensity conflict. Their multiple articulations effect the reproduction of social and biological life in sites, which are themselves terrains of bio-political contention: racialized women's bodies and feminized domestic reproductive and care taking roles; the relationship between governing bodies and that governed; land reform as linked to governability and democracy; and the production of the indigenous subject in a multicultural era. In each of these arenas, the dissertation charts a decolonial cartography drawn by the following cultural political practices: the construction of genealogies of social memories of struggle, a governing relationship established through mandar obedeciendo, land redistribution through zapatista agrarian reform, pedagogical collective selfreflection in women’s collective work, and the formation of political identities of transformation. Finally, the dissertation discusses the possibilities and challenges for engaging in feminist decolonizing dialogic research, specifically by analyzing how Zapatista members critiqued the politics of fieldwork and adopted the genres of the testimony and the popular education inspired workshop as potential decolonizing methodologies. / text