Latin American Geography Research Articles

Territories as Practice for economic transformations. Insights from Latin American geography

Based on the contributions of critical Latin American geography, this paper proposes an alternative understanding of territories to explore the transformation of regional and local economies towards environmentally friendly and conscious modes of production while tackling uneven development. We argue that economic geography is well-suited to study these transformations due to its emphasis on understanding the spatial distribution and organization of economic activities. However, most of its theorisations are based on the Global North, leaving out discussions in the Global South. A decolonial approach to territories can help understand economic change towards sustainability and inclusiveness, considering alternative institutional and social arrangements that mediate socio-economic relations. The concept of ‘territories as practice’ emerges from critical Latin American geography and challenges monolithic and colonial conceptions of development and modernity. As proposed here, territories as practice allows explaining and planning for regional transformations in non-core regions, while paying attention to how global networks and extra-territorial factors influence economic change. We advocate for a practice-based spatial approach that acknowledges the practices shaping territories, helping us comprehend how localities and communities resist and adopt economic transformations. Territories as practice capture the multiplicity of visions, contradictions, and constructions defining a territory, leading to more inclusive and context-specific approaches to economic transformations.

Decolonising pedagogy in practice: cuerpo-territorio to consolidate students´ learning

ABSTRACT Cuerpo-territorio is a method stemming from Latin American geography, which recognizes the centrality of situated and embodied experiences as a form of knowing. We engaged with this method in the classroom to understand how students through their embodied and situated experiences had absorbed a post-development geographic course content and how these notions had remained with them. Given that emotions, particularly when elicited by images play a major role in consolidating knowledge, we asked students to explore their embodied feelings related to the course content by reflecting and representing them in a visual form on a poster. Through this paper, we aim to contribute to the debate on the importance of applying decolonial strategies in the classroom by widening the methodological toolbox of our geography colleagues. We find that, given the diversity of the students’ population, working with a boundary object such as the posters helped students to relate to each other via the course content. Finally, reflecting and assimilating the course content through cuerpo -territorio, we argue, was conducive to consolidating learning outcomes, while students experienced knowledge co-creation with their peers.

Following the Water Uphill? The Spread of Blueberry Cultivation to the Mountains of Áncash, Peru / ¿Siguiendo el agua cuesta arriba? La expansión del cultivo del arándano en la sierra de Áncash, Perú

jlag Perspectives Landscape observers in Peru’s Áncash region have been concerned for over a decade about the impact of climate change on the shrinking glaciers of the Cordillera Blanca and the Santa River watershed (Bury et al., 2013). However, the Santa River valley, which is known locally as Callejón de Huaylas and is one of Peru’s most important Inter-Andean valleys, has been experiencing a second dramatic landscape change that has gone mostly unnoticed by outsiders. It has rapidly become covered by huge swathes of whiteplasticusedintheconstructionofhigh tunnels for blueberry production (Figure 1).1 Primarily for export, this production is transformingresourceuseaswellasvalleyaesthet ics ,withimpactsfordiversesectorsofsociety inÁncash.Furthermore,itsuggestspotential new trends in global agro-exports. CommercialblueberryproductioninPeru began in 2007 and has expanded rapidly throughanationalcampaignsince2012:from 50 hectares (ha) cultivated in 2012 to more than 18,000 ha in 2022 (Cordano, 2016; León Following the Water Uphill? The Spread of Blueberry Cultivation to the Mountains of Áncash, Peru¿Siguiendo el agua cuesta arriba? La expansión del cultivo del arándano en la sierra de Áncash, Perú Martha G. Bell Pontifical Catholic University of Peru Karl S. Zimmerer Pennsylvania State University and CEFE-University of Montpellier Odolin Saturnino Rodríguez Tinoco Institución Educativa 86648, Santo Domingo de Guazman - Yungay JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY 22(1), 1–11 Carrasco,2023).Blueberriesarecurrentlythe agro-export crop that generates the highest sales. In 2022, sales totaled US$ 1,435 million, approximately 14 percent of Peru’s total agro-export sales (Agraria.pe, 2023). Peru has also become the world’s leading exporter of the fruit (freshfruitportal.com, 2023), producing more than 276,000 metric tons in 2022 (Agraria.pe, 2023). This has corresponded to the larger expansion of “non-traditional agricultural exports” (NTAEs) across Latin America, which, beginning in the 1990s, saw production booms of grapes, avocados, mangos, asparagus, and other crops along Peru’s desert coast. This growth has depended on large-scale agribusiness and government investments in irrigation projects and “technified” agriculture as well as inexpensive labor and new trade and legal arrangements (Williams & Murray, 2019; Lombana, 2020; Crespi, 2022). Peru’s blueberry boom depends on distinctive varietal management and new geographic strategies for production. In 2023, the most prevalent blueberry varieties included Emerald and Biloxi, which are extra-large, firm, sweet, crunchy varieties that can survive cold storage and shipping (Ilyas, 2023). These are so-called zero or low chill varieties, which require reduced hours at cool temperatures (below 7 oC) compared to other varieties, and are thus suitable for Peru’s warmer temperatures (especially on the coast but also in the CalleFigure 1. Blueberries cultivated in high tunnels near Caraz, Áncash, Peru (Photograph by Marcia Castromonte, February 17, 2023). 2 Journal of Latin American Geography jón de Huaylas). In addition to these properties , which are common to agro-exports, blueberry expansion has required transforming new geographic spaces by subsuming previously “underutilized” lands into the agro-export model. While in previous agro-export growth these spaces have typicallybeenlocatedonPeru ’sdesertcoast,now itishigheraltitudezones,andspecificallythe inter-Andean valleys of Áncash, La Libertad, Cajamarca, and Piura—which are characterized by more abundant surface water, gentle rainfall, absence of frosts, and available land and labor—that are targeted for blueberry production (Cordano, 2016; Servicio Nacional de Sanidad Agraria del Perú, 2019). We focusourdescriptiononalltheseproduction factors, with special attention to the role of water availability in the upslope spaces. The cultivation of blueberries in Inter-Andean valleys has mainly occurred near the city of Caraz, which is located in the relatively wide, flat-bottomed Santa River valley known as Callejón de Huaylas. The Santa River is fed by glacier meltwater flowing down from the Cordillera Blanca, which contains some of the most important tropical glaciers in the world. During the twentieth century, agriculturalists in the Caraz area, including indigenous peasant communities (Comunidades Campesinas) as well as smallholders and medium-size farms, used irrigation to grow products for national markets. These included purple-kernel maize (maíz morado) used for the chicha morada beverage , Andean amaranth (kiwicha), artichokes, green beans, snow peas, and flowers. The surge of blueberry producFigure 2. High tunnels for blueberry growing in the valley bottom of Callejón de Huaylas, Áncash...

Research collaboration networks in Latin American geography education

The current development of science is characterized by a global trend of scientific collaboration (SC). However, this growth has been mostly linked to intra-national cooperation. Several factors including geographic, institutional, and social proximities have been identified as key for promoting or hinder collaboration among scholars. Based on these premises, the present study analyses the co-authorship and affiliation relationships among geography education researchers in Latin America, exploring through a general trend and social network analysis, the characteristics of SC in geography education. For this purpose, 1774 articles (922 co-authored) published within the region were included as part of the data used for understanding the structure of SC. The results showed an increasing and dominant pattern of co-authoring in the region, but mostly developed at the local and national scale, with scarce intra-regional research. Moreover, the network analysis showed that there are some institutions with a dominant role in the production of research, and a loose network structure of research that could foster diverse perspectives on the field. These findings offer opportunities for thinking about how to enhance future SC processes in the region to strengthen the development of geography education research based on a regional collaborative approach.

The Pastoral City-State: A Metaphor for the Geography of Uruguay

Metaphors are a powerful heuristic to help interpret the particularities of places. In order to familiarize readers with Uruguay and advance the value of metaphors in geography, in this article I coin the term pastoral city-state. As a historical-geographical construct, the pastoral city-state is a metaphor for the extreme primacy of Uruguay’s capital Montevideo in a territory dominated by extensive livestock raising. In the opening sections, I call on geographers to interrogate pre-existing metaphors of places for their explanatory power and, when insufficient, to create new ones. I explore the reasons that academic geography’s engagement with Uruguay has been limited, and why, despite this, a richer historical-geographical understanding of Uruguay leads to a richer understanding of Latin America that expands beyond stereotypical notions focused on Mesoamerica and the Andes. Following these contributions towards geographical inquiry and pedagogy, I analyze six features and six caveats of the pastoral city-state that I have chosen for their salience in explaining Uruguay’s most important historical-geographical patterns as I have observed them in my reading and fieldwork. The pastoral city-state metaphor can serve as a guide or reference for a variety of needs, including as a starting point for researchers conducting projects in Uruguay, a point of comparison with other countries, and a teaching tool for survey courses in Latin American geography.

Infrastructure & Latin American Environmental Geographies: An Introduction to our Special Issue

Infrastructure & Latin American Environmental Geographies: An Introduction to our Special Issue Jessica Hope University of St. Andrews Murat Arsel International Institute of Social Studies Erasmus University Rotterdam Latin America’s contested environmental geographies remain globally significant , in particular for the negotiation and analysis of predatory extractive frontiers and for fertile decolonising agendas that include claims for territory, plurality, and ontological multiplicity. Yet contemporary commitments to new infrastructure connect and complicate both extractive and decolonising agendas, with implications for Latin American environmental geographies and their analysis. Plans for new infrastructure include new highways, waterways, railways, ports,dams,andpowerstations,includingin the Amazon basin (Bebbington et al., 2020). These plans support the region’s extractive imperative(Arseletal.,2016)butalsoextend a wider turn to infrastructure-led development (Dodson 2017; Alami et al., 2021) and, somewhat surprisingly, are entangled with global agendas for sustainable development (Hope 2022, this issue). In this special issue, we bring together fertilegeographicaldebatesoninfrastructure with debates on Latin American environmental geographies. Specifically, researchers are examining how new energy, transport, and water infrastructures (including incomplete projects) co-constitute environmental geographies and trajectories. In so doing, the papers pay close attention to several interrelated dynamics. First, juxtaposing the renewed emphasis on infrastructural development with previous waves of similar investments, they interrogate the function contemporary infrastructural projects serve for nation-states and policy makers. Second, the papers tease out societal responses to infrastructural projects at and around the sites where they are implemented, paying particular attention to dynamics of conflict (with outside actors as well as within communities), co-operation (with projects and/or implementors), and co-optation (of stakeholders as well as infrastructural projects ). Finally, they theorise the environmental geographies of Latin America by tracing thelocal,national,regional,andglobalspaces (re)created and connected by infrastructural developments. In this introductory paper, we set out the rationale for the special issue, its collective JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY xx(x), 1–14 contributions, and our core arguments—that although infrastructure can be important for inclusion, citizenship, and participatory development (Bayer, this issue; Bauman & Zimmerer, this issue), much new hard infrastructure is proving top-down and hard to negotiate. It is tied to wider economic and political agendas and constitutes yet another environmental injustice for many communities .Thesepapersshowtheimportanceofwho drives decision-making about infrastructure and what this might mean for more emancipatoryenvironmentalgeographies (Werner& PimenteldeOliveira,thisissue;Guarnos-Meza & Torres Wong, this issue; Post, this issue). We further argue that hard, built infrastructure is not simply a connecting device. It constitutes a new object and political agent in particular environmental geographies—one that has consequencesforhowenvironmentsareexperienced and known (Hope, this issue). This is crucial for assessing what ambitious plans for new infrastructure mean for the regions’ environmental geographies and for wider trajectories of sustainability. This introduction is structured as follows: first, we summarise key debates on infrastructure and how they extend contemporary work on environmental geographies. Second, we argue for the continuing importance of Latin American environmental geographies, focusing on demands to settle Indigenous land claims, recognise plural natures, and implement non-extractive and non-growth-focused trajectories of development as well as on the ways such demands have been appropriated by an extractive imperative (Arsel et al., 2016) and commodities consensus (Svampa, 2015). Third, we introduce the papers in this issue and how they individually extend current work on infrastructure and environmental geography, focusing on overlaps, continuities, power, choice, and reassembly. Finally, we set out our conclusions. Turns to Infrastructure In urban geography, infrastructure has become a central lens for understanding how state-society relations and infrastructures are being analysed as co-constitutive of social worlds (Graham & Marvin, 2002). Going beyond treatments of hard infrastructure (electricity, roads) as purely physical objects, urban geographers have drawn from anthropology (see Larkin, 2013) to argue that physical infrastructure is implicated in the making of social worlds. This includes research on the ways that infrastructures co-constitute citizenship (Lemanski, 2020), act as a political intermediary (Amin, 2014), and determine rights to the city, amongst other dynamics. However, despite many hard infrastructures reaching into rural and conservation areas (such as roads or energy infrastructure), there is less attention to how infrastructures co-constitute socio-environmental worlds. Emerging work in geography and political ecology is arguing for an...

The Nature of Space By Milton Santos, translated by Brenda Baletti Duke University Press (2021)

Introduction If asked to name the most influential Latin American geographer of the past century, most would probably reply “Milton Santos” without hesitation. Born in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia in 1926, Santos has long been a key thinker on space and place in the region. It is only more recently, however, that his work has gained the attention of broader publics in North America and Europe. That Santos’s oeuvre is finally receiving the international recognition it undoubtedlydeservesisowedinlargepartto the recent translation into English of several of his most important works, including the latest, Brenda Baletti’s translation of The Nature of Space, following editions of the book in French and Spanish (Santos, 1997, 2000). In this JLAG Book Review Forum we haveinvitedgeographersfromLatinAmerica, North America, Europe, and Africa whose own work is influenced by Santos or who have engaged with this writtings to reflect on this new translation. And we’ve invited Baletti, who spent more than a decade immersed in the project of this translation, to offer her rejoinder to these reviews. This book review forum advances two of JLAG’s editorial priorities: 1) to facilitate better South-North geographical dialogues, especially highlighting Latin American perspectives; and 2) to facilitate communicationandcirculationofdiversescholarlyideas through translation (see Finn et al., 2020). As for the first point, Milton Santos has hitherto not received nearly the prominence that he deserves in academic geography outside Latin America. Though some of his texts have been translated into English, French, Spanish, and Italian (Santos 1979, 1986, 1990a, 1990b, 2016), Santos’s extensive body of work has not had considerable impact within North American and European geography. How well is Santos known in the Northern Hemisphere? How can his work speak to pressing epistemic and theoretical issues in contemporary geography? How can non–Latin American geographers find relevance and meaning in his writings? Howcangeographicalandsocialtheoryfrom The Nature of Space By Milton Santos, translated by Brenda Baletti Duke University Press (2021) jlag Book Review Forum JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY xx(x), 1–30 the global South inspire and animate geographers in the North? And how can Milton Santos’s thoughts on space and place from a Latin American point of view serve as an inspiration to current debates on decoloniality and Southern epistemologies? We hope this JLAG Book Review Forum begins to answersomeofthesequestions,and inspires geographers from across the discipline and around the world to engage more deeply with Santos’s extensive contributions, and specifically with Baletti’s new translation of The Nature of Space. As for our second point, while theories and concepts from Europe and North America frequently gain swift acceptance across Latin America, Latin American contributions to social and geographical theory do not find traction nearly as quickly or easily in the global North. Language barriers remain one of the key reasons for this paucity of Latin American influence. As Maria Dolores Garcia-Ramon (2003) wrote nearly twenty years ago, the monolingualism of Anglophone geography means that the ideas, contributions, research, and writings of anyone writing in any language other than English are largely neglected and left outside of dominant geographical conversations. As a result, she argues, “[T]here is the undisputed hegemony of one single geography, Anglo-American geography, which sets the guidelines for intellectual debate in many parts of the world” (Garcia-Ramon, 2003, p. 1). Not only does this give short shrift to the outstanding and diverse work of scholars from all over Latin America, but it also narrows the intellectual field in unfortunate and counterproductive ways. Each one of thecontributionstothisJLAGBookReview Forum highlights creative ways this newly translated text has the potential to counter this narrowing of the field, to jettison a singularAnglophonegeography ,andtobuildupon Santos’s body of work to create inclusive and authentic transnational scholarly dialogues. Finally, Baletti’s rejoinder to the five reviews in this forum provides vital insights into the complexity of academic translation . Some may think that a simple online translation through Google would render obsolete the need for professional translation of books and articles. But as Baletti clearly shows, translation is not a simple word-by-word exchange of vocabulary, but is itself a scholarly undertaking that must capture meanings, be situated in the historical , geographical, and...

Os vínculos entre a geografia brasileira e a geografia cubana: instituições, redes e círculos de afinidades

This article presents part of the results of an investigation that aimed to understand the relationships and bonds established between Brazilian and Cuban geography. The research problem started from the assumption that geography, since the second half of the 19th century, served the interests of colonialist and imperialist countries, given that both Brazilian and Cuban geography were influenced by European theories. In this sense, we seek to identify interchange relations between the two of them, emphasizing the importance of geography between geographers in Latin America. The methodological procedures for collecting relevant information and data were sustained both in bibliographic references and in interviews with geographers from both countries. History and the oral source were essential in the search for primary information. In it we address the following subjects: the periods in which the bonds were established, the institutions that participated in the exchange, the networks and circles of affinities that were built through the ties established between the researchers. Considering that to integrate is to learn from both sides, it is to consolidate, this work joins the list of those who intend to contribute to the construction of a shared Latin American geography.

Latin American geography education research trends in open access journals from the twenty-first century

Recent projects, declarations, and articles around the globe addressed the status and development of geography education, where the discipline is standing, and what should be done to enhance the quality and quantity of research. Nevertheless, the paucity of research and limited approaches in Latin America about the type of studies published has made difficult the promotion and development of research lines, or even more an international comparative perspective. Therefore, the aim of the study is to show the spatiotemporal trends and existing research lines in geography education, extracted from 1880 articles published in 140 open access journals within the region from 2000 to 2019. The findings showed a consistent growth of research especially after 2010, just a few journals gathering most publications, and the intraregional disparity among countries on the evolution of the number and type of studies. Although Latin American researchers increased the number of publications in all research lines, the scientific production has been more prolific in five topics: theories, philosophy and debates, teacher education, teaching methodologies, instructional materials and resources, and student’s learning. In contrast, studies on assessment, technologies, fieldwork, research practices, history and educational policies have received less attention from scholars.

Asylum and Mass Detention at the U.S.–Mexico Border during COVID-19

The study (URL1) is the work of two scholars living and researching in the United States. Jeremy Slack is a lecturer of geography at the University of Texas (UTEP) in El Paso. He got his doctoral degree at the University of Arizona, his main research area is crimes in connection with state border (human and drug trafficking, violation of rights of other persons) and the problems in connection with procedures of the state power (deportation, brake of family contacts). Josiah Heyman is professor of anthropology at UTEP. The main direction ofhis work is the examination of the perpetrator side of illegal border crossing (mainly between the USA and Mexico) and of the acts of the state power handling these actions and further a confrontation of both sides. In his studies is presented the value order of his master, Eric C. Wolf (URL2), who criticised violence connected to authorities. The publication appeared in the „Journal of Latin American Geography”, which has been published by the Latin American Geographic Conference (CLAG) and has been distributed by the University of Texas Press since its founding in 1970 (URL3). H-index: 20. Actuality of the topic is indisputable, as controlled and uncontrolled global migration and the global human pandemic of Covid-19 affect the population of the whole world.

Editorial: Expanding Access to the Journal of Latin American Geography

Editorial: Expanding Access to the Journal of Latin American Geography

Remnants Revisited: Guatemala's Landscapes of Fear

Remnants Revisited:Guatemala's Landscapes of Fear Rebecca Clouser introduction I was first approached in January 2020 about writing a retrospective essay reflecting on my article Remnants of terror: Landscapes of fear in post-conflict Guatemala (Clouser, 2009). It was during a coffee break at the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG) conference in Antigua, Guatemala. At the time, I began to ponder the shifts that had (and had not) occurred since 2009 in post-conflict Guatemala. These included the historic genocide trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt, the 2015 anti-corruption protests—which led to the resignation and subsequent jailing of then-president Otto Perez Molina—and the more recent disheartening closure of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) in 2019. Of course, since January 2020, the world has shifted not once, but several times. Not only would the CLAG 2020 conference be the last in-person conference I would attend that year, but the coronavirus pandemic has since gone on to infect over 120 million people, killing nearly 2.7 million of them. And in Guatemala specifically, at the time of this writing, there are more than 184,000 confirmed cases, with 6,619 deaths (WHO, 2021). The pandemic has produced landscapes of fear characterized by the eerily empty streets of lockdowns throughout the world, including in Guatemala. Barren images of normally congested zones, like the infamously busy El Trébol intersection in Guatemala City, circulated online (Hernández, 2020). And, as restrictions decimated livelihoods built on the informal economy, white flags denoting hunger and starvation began to dot the landscape of Guatemala as early as April 2020 (Abbott, 2020a). Then, as I settled in to write this essay in late November of 2020, international news headlines prominently featured Guatemala. Two deadly back-to-back hurricanes and massive national protests (one of which resulted in burning part of the National Congress building) captured the world's attention. It is not [End Page 259] new for Guatemala to be framed in a such a way. Popular media's simplistic narratives form broader geographic imaginaries of the country as endemically prone to disaster, corruption, violence, and general bad luck. Yet, as scholars have long argued, the realities of Guatemala are extremely complex, deeply tied to historical legacies, contemporary injustice, U.S. interventions, and enduring sociopolitical structures that enable and perpetuate marginalization, racism, and violence. Beyond headline-inducing moments of cataclysm, in Guatemala the post-conflict daily reality is rife with continued pain, struggle, and fear for millions. In an effort to highlight this quotidian persistence, in my original article I used landscape theory to examine the multiple ways in which fear and insecurity are interwoven into the country's landscape. Analyzing the examples of model villages, scorched earth blank spaces, clandestine graves and exhumations, and landmarks and memorials, I sought to emphasize how both presence and absence in the landscape can serve to reflect and reinforce a culture of fear throughout the country. In this retrospective essay, I revisit these examples to contemplate how things have evolved in the decade since my original article. a landscape of fear framework In 2009, I argued that using the lens of landscape theory, with an explicit focus on landscapes of fear, was a particularly productive point of entry for examining the profound legacies of Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, as well as the longer-term legacies of colonization and modernization that various actors have imposed upon Indigenous populations in the region now known as Central America for centuries. Drawing on Tuan's (1979) insistence that landscapes of fear are equally psychological as they are tangible, I unpacked layers of meaning in the post-conflict landscape of Guatemala, highlighting the presence of fear. I sketched out the implications of these deeper connotations, which manifest in inhabitants being "ever on the alert in the spaces of everyday life" (Pred, 2007, p. 363). Finally, noting the works of Crump (1999) and Till (1999), I described the importance of attending to absences in the landscape. Because power imbalances, particularly in post-conflict situations, lead to skewed control in forming the landscape, absences can be critical for understanding the threads of fear...

Bodies, Borders, and Resistance: Women Conjuring Geography through Experiences from the Other Side of the Wall

Introduction This text that we present as Geobrujas-Comunidad de Geógrafas2 arose from the invitation that we received in 2019 to participate in the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers. As a result of that initiative, we began generating an internaldialoguetodeterminewhatwewantedto address and how to present it in a workshop form. Above all, however, we questioned the conditions and chances for physically participating in the encounter, which, as mostly Mexican women geographers living in Mexico, meant thinking about the idea andfeasibilityofcrossing(ornot)theborder with the U.S. to be able to attend the event, whether due to migratory or economic reasons. At the beginning of 2020, the uncertainty generated by the increasing number of Covid-19 infections added another layer to our debates, since we did not know whether or not the event would take place. Finally, when the pandemic was declared, our participation was postponed until 2021 and shifted to the virtual mode, which resolved our possible impediments to physically attending the event but did not lead us to abandon our previous reflections. Thus, for our broadcast in 2021, we decided to stick with the issue of borders, adding to it the context of the pandemic. Building on our situated, critical, and collective knowledges, we have elaborated in this text on our participation in that event, which we organized through a combination ofexposition,miniworkshop,andbriefquestionnaire that attendees responded to voluntarily . With these, we sought to generate a space of exchange to reach a joint reflection, thus overcoming the physical and virtual distance. In this way, each of our presentations started by problematizing the issue of borders in our respective “bio-geographies.”3 Each of us responded to the following quesBodies , Borders, and Resistance: Women Conjuring Geography through Experiences from the Other Side of the Wall Geobrujas-Comunidad de Geógrafas1 Translated by Liz Mason-Deese 2021 JLAG Lecture JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY xx(x), 1–11 1 tions: What borders have crossed you? What borders have you embodied or reproduced? What borders have you challenged? As we introduced ourselves, we marked ourbodieswithcolors,symbols,orkeywords as a way of representing how these experiences of crossing form a part of our bodies and stay there as embodied experiences. With this action, we also sought to show ourselves in a self-critical and intimate way, to thus generate the necessary trust to later have an exchange and dialogue with participants . As we cannot abstract ourselves from the context of violence against women in which welive,wedecidedtostartwithapronouncementthatwouldposition us politicallywhile also demonstrating our indignation through public denunciation. Precisely at that time we were shaken by an escalation of femicides .OneofthemhappenedintheMexican state of Quintana Roo, where the murder of Victoria Salazar of El Salvador revealed the abuse of police power, and another across thebordertotheNorthwhereAishaXimena Mireles Nava, a young Mexican woman, was murdered in Los Angeles. We wrote this document based on that presentation. First, we introduce the topic through guiding questions. Second, we discuss the methodology and results of the mini workshop, then dedicate a section to a briefanalysisofthequestionnaire.Finally,we conclude with a few reflections. Whydid we decide to talk about borders? Where are we speaking from? We are all women who live in Mexico but have had very different life experiences, giving rise to different positionalities. If this meeting had been in person, we would have had to cross several political-administrative borders to get there. Due to our diversity , it would have been easy for some of us, but others would not have been able to come. Among the borders we would have had to cross is one of the ten longest borders in the world, one of those along which a wall has been built to contain the migration organized as “legal” and “clandestine,” one of the borders with the most surveillance and violence, where human beings of different nationalities and conditions die in the attempttocross.Facedwiththissituation,we critically position ourselves against the hegemonic organization of people. That is why, to participate in the AAG meeting, we immediately thought of speaking of borders: we chose the topic as a duty, as an urgent personal, political, and collective need. We address it starting from our bodies, through...

Diálogos entre Geografia e Ciências Sociais: Região, Regionalidade e América Latina e Caribe

O presente artigo propõe desenvolver uma reflexão crítica a partir da Geografia e das Ciências Sociais Latino-Americanas, acerca da relação entre dinâmicas regionais e as categorias de análise geográfica e regional América Latina e Caribe. O objetivo é analisar a possível insuficiência do universalismo europeu sobre as nomenclaturas América Latina e Caribe frente a particularidades culturais, territoriais e processos sociais contra-hegemônicos. O método qualitativo norteará a metodologia baseada na interpretação de materiais bibliográficos clássicos e contemporâneos para analisar outras alternativas de regionalização deslocadas do essencialismo econômico, colonial e imperialista da cartografia tradicional. Acreditamos em outras linguagens possíveis de distintas cartografias conforme diferentes regionalizações do continente, baseados em aspectos históricos, críticas teóricas, fluxos migratórios, populações étnico-raciais, distribuição sócioespacial de grupos econômicos e aspectos político-ideológicos.
 Palavras-chave: Geografia, Ciências Sociais, Região, América Latina.

Feminist Futures in Latin American Geography

Feminist Futures in Latin American Geography

Editorial: Mobility, Connectivity, and the Implications of Covid-19 for Latin American Geography

Editorial: Mobility, Connectivity, and the Implications of Covid-19 for Latin American Geography

Emerging Geographies: Academic Communities, Research Agendas, and International Conferences in Ecuador and Bolivia

Emerging Geographies:Academic Communities, Research Agendas, and International Conferences in Ecuador and Bolivia Andrea Carrión and María F. López Sandoval introduction Geographical knowledge relies on area or regional studies and the production of disciplinary knowledge (Jazeel, 2015). Latin Americanist geographers around the world are mainly concerned with the first form of knowledge; however, given the politics of area studies (Powell et al., 2016), we acknowledge that the context and location of Latin Americanists affects the shape of knowledge produced about Latin America. Understanding the foregoing, this paper has two main aims. First, we approach the trajectories of geography (e.g. the evolution of their academic communities and disciplinary contributions) in two countries, Ecuador and Bolivia, over the past two decades. We emphasize these countries because most geographical studies published about and generalized for Latin America have focused on Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and somewhat more recently Colombia. Second, we review the linkages of these emerging geographies with two regional events and networks: the Encuentro de Geógrafos de América Latina (EGAL) and the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG). We base our analysis on a literature review, journal bibliometrics, two discussion sessions conducted with EGAL participants in 2019, and expert interviews. In the first section, below, we present how geographical academic communities emerged in the two countries. We then turn our attention to how national research agendas have been molded by the influence of international research agendas and local demands. The following two sections review the connections of these emerging geographical communities with the above-mentioned international conferences and the Journal of Latin American Geography (JLAG). We conclude by discussing the constraints that challenge knowledge production in the context of North-South dialogues between Latin American and Latin Americanist geographers. geographical academic communities in ecuador and bolivia In Ecuador and Bolivia, geography has long [End Page 61] been more of an applied science than an epistemic approach to concerns of space, place, or territories. Hence, eclecticism and diversity characterize most interactions among entities and groups doing geography and producing disciplinary knowledge. In both countries, geographic thought incorporates elements of French, American/English, and Brazilian paradigms. However, in contrast to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia, where geography has an older and stronger background both as a discipline and a career, in Bolivia and Ecuador it has remained negligible in national academic and political debates and is regarded as a somewhat marginal profession. As in several other countries in Latin America, geography in Ecuador and Bolivia has been commonly associated with the production of national and official cartographic material. For instance, through the mid-1990s, the Military Geographic Institute (IGM) of Ecuador was the official geographic and cartographic agency, and also employed the few professional geographers who were educated as engineers in the University of the Armed Forces (ESPE). However, IGM has hosted international organizations such as the Pan-American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH) and the Pan-American Center for Geographical Studies and Research (CEPEIGE). The interaction of these centers with international research and development agencies, such as the French Research Institute for Development (ORSTOM/IRD), resulted in a series of thematic maps and publications such as Geografía Básica del Ecuador (Gómez, 2018). In the mid-1990s, two events largely influenced the expansion of geographical production. First, an undergraduate degree in human geography was created at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE); and second, technology-based innovation was introduced via geographic information systems (GIS), which reinforced the curricula of the existing geographical engineering programs in Bolivia and Ecuador. Both the professionalization of geographers and the popularization of digital spatial data enabled a more open and critical approach to mapmaking than in the past, achieving a certain independence from state-produced analog cartography. Even so, there is still no graduate degree program in geography in any university in Ecuador or Bolivia. By the turn of the twenty-first century, geography as a discipline and as a profession had become more popular in Ecuadorian higher education. Both ESPE and PUCE strengthened and updated their bachelor's degrees on geodesy, geographical science, spatial planning, and environmental science. At the same time, universities in Cuenca, Guayaquil...

CLAGistas: The Rise of Women in Latin American Geography

CLAGistas:The Rise of Women in Latin American Geography T. Shawn Mitchell the conference of latin american Geographers (CLAG) and I are both fifty this year, making it an apt time for celebration and introspection. When I finished my doctorate in 1997, pregnant with my second child, I didn't know how to balance fieldwork in Central America with motherhood, so I continued to teach as an adjunct but put my career on hold. Now that I am re-entering the academic world, I feel like Rip Van Winkle waking up after a twenty-year maternity leave to find an explosion in the number of women engaged in Latin American geography. In honor of our semi-centennial, I'd like to use this essay to outline the growth of women in CLAG ("CLAGistas") over the past five decades and then provide my perspective as an academic late bloomer. Statistically, men still dominate geography, making up 65 percent of faculty in colleges and universities and 70 percent of employees in non-academic geographical professions (AAG, 2018). Those numbers belie the gains made by women on many fronts, from leadership to publications and employment. Publications serve as a valuable metric for assessing women's progress because they reflect not only the ability to conduct research, but also access to resources and institutional support. In most universities, peer-reviewed articles remain the "corner-stone of professional advancement" (Fredrich & Salazar, 1990, p. 361). To put CLAG's numbers in perspective, female contributors to the Annals of the American Association of Geography rose from zero in 1956 to 35 percent in 2016, with a similar trend in The Professional Geographer (AAG, 2015). According to Fredrich and Salazar (1990), women authored only 10 percent of articles in the first decade of CLAG's Publication Series. To provide a more complete picture of female authorship over time, I used the online archives of CLAG publications (Publication Series, Proceedings, Yearbook, and Journal of Latin American Geography) to tally articles with female authors and co-authors in fiveyear intervals between 1980 and 2019. There was little growth over the first three decades, but female contributions rose significantly after 2000, and in 2019 women (as authors and co-authors) contributed an impressive 65 percent of articles and 43 percent of reviews (Figure 1). CLAGista research is diverse and leans more toward applied than theoretical topics. Agricultural and historical themes dominated the early decades, but migration, globalization, and environmental issues are now ascendant. Feminist geography "[a]lthough not solely a subject of interest to women … is perhaps the only subfield in geography [End Page 20] that is clearly dominated by women" (Schroeder, 2002, p. 149). Of the thirty-two articles and reviews with gender-related titles published between 1990 and 2019, 82 percent were authored or co-authored by women. The word "women" appeared in eighteen titles, "gender(ed)" in eight, and "mujer(es)," "feminist/feminism," "feminista," and "latina" each showed up twice. Since this count is based solely on titles, it overlooks articles in which the content might be gender related. It also neglects work CLAGistas do outside of academic publication to promote women in geography, like the "Let Girls Map" program started by Patricia Solis. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Female authorship as a percent of total journal content for select years, 1980–2019. (Articles include introductory essays, research articles, JLAG Perspectives, and "From the Field" notes. Those written by female co-authors may also have male authors. Reviews include reviews of films, websites and books). Conferences provide another gauge of women's participation in Latin American geography. There were no female presenters at the first CLAG meeting in Muncie, IN, in 1970 (Davidson, personal communication, 18 May 2018). In the subsequent decade, women presented only 9 percent of papers, inching up to 17 percent in the 1980s (Fredrich & Salazar, 1990). At the 2018 conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, women presented nearly half of the papers, and received all eight of that year's student travel awards. While host universities are disproportionately represented at any given conference, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, and the University...

Benchmarking and Beyond: CLAG's Role in Evaluating Research Agendas, 1970–2020

Benchmarking and Beyond:CLAG's Role in Evaluating Research Agendas, 1970–2020 Gregory Knapp introduction The Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG; originally, Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers) began as an actual conference in 1970, convened to assess the current state of research themes on the region. The resulting proceedings were published as a Benchmark volume in 1971 (see Carmin, Martinson, & Lentnek, 1971). Many organizations have produced benchmark or inventory and prospect volumes to stimulate future research (James & Jones, 1954), but CLAG went further than most by starting with one and producing them on a regular basis. After the end of that conference it was decided to create an organization by the same name, which went on to organize many additional meetings and publications that have continued through the present. The idea of benchmarking continued in decadal meetings in 1980 and 1990, resulting in special publications. A final effort took place in a publication in 2002 (Knapp, 2002), but after that interest in systematic evaluations waned, as the new Journal of Latin American Geography (JLAG) was published more frequently, covering diverse topics, sometimes in themed issues such as this one. What was accomplished by the Benchmark meetings and volumes? What were their strengths and weaknesses? Critical research of academic and scientific organizations is important for evaluating organizational effectiveness and best practices, and also issues of inclusion and diversity. Organizations often do a good job of celebrating their successes but may not do so well at diagnosing problems (Lutz & Collins, 1993). CLAG has recently changed its name from Latin Americanist Geographers to Latin American Geography as one gesture to enhance inclusion. How does the trajectory of benchmarking relate to issues of diversity? the first benchmark: challenges of diversity As is well known, the idea for a conference on Latin America was discussed at a private meeting of fifteen geographers during the 1969 meeting of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History in Washington, D.C. The meeting was held at the Cosmos Club at the invitation of Preston James; participants were all from the United States, and included mostly U.S. faculty (including John Augelli, president of the Latin American Studies Association), but also geographers from the Organization of American States (Wolfram Drewes) and the State Department (Arthur Burt) (Martinson, 1996). Founded by John Wesley Powell [End Page 38] in 1878, the Cosmos Club was also where the National Geographic Society was founded. This members-only club became racially integrated in 1962 and open to women in 1988, due to public pressure. While CLAG itself never formally refused participation to women and minorities, or Latin Americans, their participation was similarly limited in its early years. This is something the organization needs to continue to recognize as it broadens its commitment to diversity. The preface to the 1970 Benchmark volume (Carmin et al., 1971) provides a discussion of the context of the first conference. Originally the conference was to be small and restricted to a few North American participants, due to funding and timing concerns, as well as to the vision that the conference would be national and primarily for North American geographers. However, as funding was obtained (from the National Science Foundation [NSF] and the Social Science Research Council [SSRC]), interest expanded until it grew to 150 total participants, including fiftyone invited presenters and eight discussants. Planning meetings were held at Michigan State University (chaired by Barry Lentnek) in October 1969, and at Ohio State University in January 1970, and the first conference was held in Muncie, Indiana, funded by the NSF and SSRC with cochairmen Tom Martinson and Robert Carmin of Ball State University, from April 30 to May 3, 1970 (Martinson, 1996). At this point Martinson was not a board member, but would later join the board and become executive secretary from 1978 to 1992. Invited, funded observers from Latin America at the 1970 meeting included Pedro Pinchas Geiger (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica, Brazil), Silvana Levi de López (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico), and Carlos Merida (Guatemala) (Carmin et al., 1971). The final published volume—Volume 1 of the CLAG Publication Series—included forty articles, among them twelve on urban, spatial, and...

Racialized and Identity-Based Inequalities as (New?) Frontiers for Academic Discussion: Future Agendas around Land Issues

Racialized and Identity-Based Inequalities as (New?) Frontiers for Academic Discussion:Future Agendas around Land Issues Diego Andrés Lugo-Vivas latin America and the Caribbean have long carried a heavy colonial weight. The region's history of inequality and development reflects years of conflicts, struggles, exclusion, and visions of progress that have had a particular imprint on our social landscapes. On the one hand, the construction of a highly unequal rurality centered on the hacienda, mining enclaves, and expulsion of peasant, indigenous, Afro-descendant, LGBTIQ+, and other racial, ethnic, and gender minorities due to spatially extensive activities based on cattle, monocrop, conservation, and, later, energy and hydrocarbon projects, is present in almost every Latin American and Caribbean country. On the other hand, the ongoing construction of the city and the urban frontier, with segmented settlement in which wealthier groups populate less risky areas while enormous misery belts are erected as a form of exclusion against migrant and displaced groups, summarizes the history of the urban frontier. In the academy, both of these processes have prioritized a particular stream of voices, topics, and research mechanisms that might be taken as a consequence of the very colonial history. The Conference of Latin American Geographers (henceforth CLAG) and the Journal of Latin American Geography (henceforth JLAG) are simultaneously a reflection of that, a source of inspiration and critique, and a vehicle to propose new debates. This essay will emphasize the history of CLAG and JLAG discussions of land issues, and it will propose a set of theoretical and methodological approaches to uncover new realities and old processes related to the dispossession and displacement of a set of minorities, namely, LGBTIQ+ groups. White, male, and north-based scholars have dominated CLAG publications and presentations for decades. A brief overview of "who has published what" illustrates the perhaps unconscious emphasis that CLAG publications have developed over time. Since the creation of CLAG's Publication Series (1972-1980), Proceedings (1981-1983), and Yearbook (1984-2002), authors devoted to the study of land issues had a particular profile. Between 1972 and 2002, just over 100 articles on land issues were published.1 Of those, eighty-six were authored or co-authored by 100 white, male, north-based scholars under single or shared authorship, compared to only sixteen articles authored by women (with no co-authored contributions, much less publications in which men [End Page 233] were led by a woman). Since 2002, with the advent of JLAG, new frontiers have been established, though male predominance is still distinctive.2 Of the 245 land-related articles published during this time, 293 men and 117 women appear as authors and just eleven manuscripts have been coauthored by teams in which two or more men have followed the lead of a female voice. These and other trends, such as the lack of a Caribbean emphasis and the historical prevalence of bilingual authors with few involvements of indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant Latin American and Caribbean-born scholars, might be seen as a consequence of the very colonial history and the exclusionary past and present of the region. These, on countless occasions, have been the subject of study in articles in CLAG publications. In that context, one of the most salient historical emphases in Latin American geography has been the analysis of land use and land cover change (LULC change), and the distribution of property regimes based on homogeneous notions around land and soil as scientifically observable research objects. In my experience as a researcher in Colombia, the academic tradition has revolved around highly unequal property regimes, processes of colonization, and settlement in the agricultural frontier that have reinforced patterns of exclusion and violence associated with the accumulation of land, which in the Colombian case have been exacerbated by the longest and bloodiest armed conflict in the hemisphere. In recent decades, and coincident with the arrival of JLAG, political ecology has played an important role in the diffusion of new voices regarding cyclical and renewed paths of land grabbing (Reyes, 2009; CNMH, 2010; Ballvé, 2012; Grajales, 2011, 2013; Oliveira, 2013; Oxfam, 2013; Ybarra, 2013; CICIG, 2016). This eclectic stream of voices has brought attention to different colonial and exclusionary dynamics...