The promise of interspecies desegregation: Allying with capybaras against gated communities in Buenos Aires’ wetlands

Abstract

Nordelta is an exclusive gated community in Buenos Aires built over the wetlands of the Paraná Delta that has encroached on more-than-human bodies and lands through racialized discourses and infrastructures. In this article, I analyze a controversy that arose in 2021 when crowds of capybaras started roaming freely in the community. The event triggered a robust social media response that, I argue, generated popular epistemic tools to enlist capybaras into categories of multispecies endangerment and dispossession. In addition, I delve into the emergence of the communitarian territory of Punta Querandí, which, at the borders of Nordelta, seeks to repair segregation and encroachment for humans and other-than-humans. Drawing on scholarship on animals, race, and the built environment, I employ an ethnographically informed analysis of social media, archival documents, and interviews to explore the two cases as responses to racial capitalism and real extractivism in contemporary Argentina, shedding light into what I term “the promise of interspecies desegregation.”