‘Esta carretera nos atraviesa’: roadbuilding and mapping the cuerpo-territorio of Amazonian Indigenous girls in Bolivia

Abstract

Transnational economic dynamics in which China is increasingly a pacesetter have been widely analyzed as macro-structural processes, rather than in the territories, lives, and bodies of those who experience their effects in an intimate way. This article charts the experiences of Indigenous girls from the Multi-Ethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM) in the Bolivian Amazon undergoing the construction of a highway by a Chinese company. I analyze the collective feminist body-mapping of three cuerpo-territorio maps made by Indigenous girls about the transformations brought by ­infrastructural development in their territory. This community-centered approach employs body-maps to trace the girls’ feelings of joy, hope, fear, and sorrow as affective navigational coordinates of their community. Putting Indigenous feminist theory in conversation with scholarship on the affective turn and feminist political ecology, I argue for an understanding of cuerpo-territorio as an amalgamation in which Cartesian notions of internal/external, reason/emotion, and objective/subjective are destabilized. This case study centers sensible and extra-linguistic registers to attend to the affective circulations of embodied spatialities that are of interest to feminist and Indigenous geographies. Interrogating the embodied geographies interwoven in global dynamics of power from the girls’ partial perspectives, this article interrupts monolithic accounts of life in the Amazon during construction, and traces a spatial roadmap of living relationally with territory instead.

Keywords:

• Affective infrastructures
• Bolivian Amazon
• cuerpo-territorio
• embodied territorialities
• feminist body-mapping
• indigenous girls’ geographies

Acknowledgments

I am immensely grateful to the TIM’s Indigenous women and girls who, for eight years now, have opened the doors of their territory to me. None of my research would have been possible without their teachings, care, and wisdom. Thanks to my compañeras at Jasy Renyhê, to Julia Bordelon for helping me see this through at every stage of the process, and to Benjamin Weinger for their unconditional support and guidance in this journey and its weavings. Special thanks to Caroline Faria and Kelly Kay for their inexhaustible and caring mentorship. This article is dedicated to the vibrant Amazonian rainforest and to the territory and its peoples, for showing me life otherwise.

Disclosure statement

This research has no conflicts of interest associated with its publication and there has been no significant financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nohely Guzmán

Nohely Guzmán is a feminist and anti-colonial PhD student in the Geography Department at UCLA. Her work focuses on Indigenous understandings of embodiment, intimacy, territoriality, and life-politics in the Bolivian Amazon.