Wind Futures:
Indigeneity, Aerial Worlds, and the Making of Renewable Energy in Colombia
My first book project offers an anatomy of wind energy capitalism in the Global South. It ethnographically traces how indigenous Wayúu communities, energy experts, and state bureaucrats experience, negotiate, and shape the rising renewable energy economy in La Guajira– one of the windiest places in South America. Most of this peninsula is part of the territory of the Wayúu, the largest indigenous people in Colombia and Venezuela, who claim sovereignty on both sides of the border. Following a long and ecologically damaging history of resource extraction, most notably of coal mining, La Guajira has gradually become the center of a wind energy rush, with over 57 projects currently being designed, licensed, and built. Based on over 16 months of multi-sited fieldwork in Riohacha, Uribia, and the Wayúu community of Kasiwoulin, the manuscript examines how wind energy has become a site of contestation where discourses about climate change and decarbonization exist in uneasy tension with indigenous cultural, political, and ontological worlds. It shows how Colombia’s green energy economy is predicated upon a fragile calibration between corporate and Wayúu modes of accountability, authority, and futurity.
Wilfredor, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Vanishing Oil:
Infrastructural Ruins, Decarbonization, and Indigenous Life beyond the Petro-State
I am developing a second research project, tentatively titled Vanishing Oil: Infrastructural Ruins, Decarbonization, and Indigenous Life beyond the Petro-State. It explores the material, sociocultural, and energy shifts brought about by Venezuela’s declining oil industry for indigenous peoples living near once-iconic refineries that have fallen into disrepair. While discussions of global warming have stressed the unsustainability of fossil fuels, Vanishing Oil investigates what kinds of embodied experiences, ecological relations, and political horizons arise in a petro-state when oil disappears. This second project advances my scholarly work in energy transitions, resource extraction, and indigeneity, while engaging debates on ruination, materiality, toxicity, and the afterlives of industrial infrastructure. As a Venezuelan, this project directs my ethnographic attention to the rapid decline of the nation’s iconic oil industry and its impact on indigenous life worlds, which have become ever-present during the past six years of dramatic political and economic upheaval.