The Body as Territory: An Interview with Yoalli Rodriguez Aguilera

Last week, Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera (Assistant Professor of Latin American & Latinx Studies and Anthropology at Lake Forest College) visited CLAIS to give a talk titled “Mestizo Geographies: Race, Gender, and Environment in Oaxaca.” In this interview with CLAIS, Rodríguez Aguilera talks to us about her research, which considers the body as a territory to critique power structures through decolonial and affect theories.

How would you describe your research interests to folks who are unfamiliar with it?

I explore the relationship between environment, gender, affect, and race in Latin America and, more specifically, Mexico. I mainly work with the emotion of grief. I analyze the myth of mestizaje: the supposed racial mixture of Spaniards and Indigenous peoples, which has at its center anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity while simultaneously denying the existence of racism. Second, the mestizaje center has a geographical, racial project of dispossession of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized territories. This occurs through pollution, toxicity, extraction, and tourism. In the case of the Chacahua Lagoons on the Oaxaca Coast and the surrounding Afro-Indigenous communities, the potential loss of the lagoons due to toxicity and environmental degradation due to State and transnational decisions, lead to emotions of grief. However, this grief is fuel for political mobilization to defend the land and water of their ancestral territory. 

How does the relation between environment, geography, and identity come up in your research?

It is as an entangled and mutually reciprocated dynamic. I am interested in exploring the intimate, sensorial, spiritual, and emotional effects of dispossession and racism on human and non-human beings in the context of Mexico. In other words, how environmental degradation in the Chacahua Lagoons in Oaxaca is the materialized effect of environmental racism and dispossession towards Black and Indigenous communities. The effects are not only territorial and physical but related to colonial legacies of extraction. 

What has been the relationship between decolonial theories and resistance against environmental racism, as viewed through your research?

The affect, emotion and the body understood as a territory are at the center of the research. In this sense, engaging with decolonial feminists and activists from Latin America, I approach the study of environmental racism not only through reason-rationality or the colonial binary division of body and mind or body and spirit. On the contrary, as Lorena Cabnal argues, I center the intimate connection between body-territory. Through an auto-ethnography of my experience with grief after a major loss in my life, I am writing about how we can think of grief as a method where emotions, sensations, and spirituality are also at the center of the research.

Grief does not make people stop but rather slow down in their life… But it also becomes the fuel for political mobilization. 

How do conceptual frameworks such as decoloniality, the coloniality of power, and the coloniality of gender help illuminate the everyday experiences of environmental racism of women of color from Latin America and understand how women resist such racism?

I think of how the colonial binaries’ impositions of gender, or human-nature, are at the center of neoliberal capitalism. From a decolonial perspective, gender, and the relationship between humans and non-humans beyond the binaries, are considered a fluid, non-linear relationship, but rather a simultaneous, complex, and intimate one. I think that also, by centering Black and Indigenous histories, activism, and embodied knowledge and theorization, we are decolonizing what we think of as knowledge production.

What does a focus on affect, and specifically grief, show us about racism and the environment?

The focus on grief allows us to think of affect not only as an emotion but also as a portal where we can explore the colonial legacies of racial capitalism. In this sense, there is an ancestral grief experienced by racialized communities through the dispossession of their ancestral territories. At the same time, grief is understood as an experience that does not make people stop but rather slow down in their life while they feel and process grief. But it also becomes the fuel for political mobilization. This grief is not personal but collective, and it is experienced through different emotions such as rage, sadness, and nostalgia, but also joy and love for the land and the water.

What projects are you working on right now?

I am working on my manuscript, Grieving Geographies, Mourning Waters: Race, Gender, and Environment, which will be published with the University of Illinois Press. I am also working on other creative writing pieces about my own path with grief and loss. 

By Alan Mendoza-Sosa, Graduate Communications Fellow