Speaker: Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo, University of Pennsylvania 

In this fourth installment of the spring 205 Proseminar Speaker Series, hosted by the Department of Anthropology, Aguilera Del Castillo will discuss their research in the souther state of Yucatán in Mexico, a site of rapidly growing agroindustrialism and large-scale national infrastructure projects, to interrogate the elusive problem of aquifer pollution.

Through a close analysis of the intimate socialities and everyday practices between Yucatecans and different subterranean sites (sinkholes, wells, caves, etc.), this talk seeks to complicate traditional accounts of aquifer pollution, contributing towards the conceptualization of emergent forms of subterranean sovereignty in places like Yucatán. By examining specific encounters of Yucatec people with the aquifer and its transformation, this talk considers what it means to privilege an analysis of the unexpected, contradictory, intimate attachments of people with a shifting ground.

Beyond traditional understandings of pollution, how might this new ethnographic attention to transforming the limits between the underground and the aboveground provide a different sense of territorial sovereignty, Indigenous autonomy, and emerging political horizons amid the ongoing coloniality of racial capitalism and agroindustrialism?