Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador by Teresa A. Velásquez (review)

Reviewed by: Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador by Teresa A. Velásquez Nicholas L. Padilla Teresa A. Velásquez Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2022. xx + 264 pp. Illustrations, color map, index. $55 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-816-54473-8); $55 e-book (ISBN 978-0-816-54531-5). Teresa velásquez examines the complex imbrications of rural peasant and Indigenous identities, contentious claims to and over nature, and the unlikely [End Page 224] political alliances that emerged in defense of water in the Ecuadorian Andes. Velásquez's project emphasizes the awkward and partial ways that disparate groups coalesce around water to contest mining development outside of Cuenca, Ecuador. She relies on ethnographic and activist methods to make sense of the intensification of neoextractivist politics within Ecuador during the early years of Rafael Correa's administration, indigenous and campesino (peasant) social movement responses, and the role of Andean cosmovisions in shaping these relations. To guide this work, Velásquez asks: How and why do campesinos weave Indigeneity into their anti-mining politics and with what outcomes? What role does gender play in this reweaving of identities? How do diverse coalitions draw upon and engage Andean cosmopolitics, and what new meanings, values, and rights do they produce in relationality to water? To what extent can Andean cosmopolitics unsettle prevailing forms of mestizaje in the region when adopted by Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, and how might it transform the identity politics of the broader anti-mining movement? (p. 6). Velásquez employs an activist research methodology to frame her project, and explicitly calls to the fore the myriad challenges of working with—and within—social movements. She is forthright about her relationship to this project and her desire to effect change as a scholar-activist. The difficult-to-navigate imbrications of scholar-activism are held in tension with the demands for rigorous analysis across the book, and this approach creates a nuanced analysis that dwells in the difficulties of identity politics. The scholar-activist approach creates an opening to examine the Correa administration's efforts to criminalize dissent in pursuit of constructing a national Ecuadorian identity (see Chapters 1 and 2). Velásquez integrates vibrant ethnographic detail connected to larger theoretical discussions around anti-extractivist social movements. She centers water as a protagonist in these struggles and emphasizes water's unique materiality as well as its cultural significance in these settings. For Indigenous and campesino peoples, water is more than a natural resource. Water assumes cultural significance as a living substance within Andean cosmovisions that enables the book's defensoras to fight on behalf of their kin—yaku (water). Water is also a life-giving force that flows from within Pachamama (Mother Earth) to support more-than-human webs of life. The Ecuadorian state and transnational mining companies both enact what Max Liboiron calls "bad relations" in his book Pollution Is Colonialism (Liboiron, 2021, p. 5), in their environmental assessments to determine whether large-scale mining would degrade local water quality. Velásquez demonstrates how initial water quality testing was done by the Canadian Iamgold Corporation to demonstrate that local communities' livestock grazing made water unsafe to drink, while effluent from Iamgold's treatment facilities met state standards for clean water. Velásquez points out that treated effluent from Iamgold mining sites meets all [End Page 225] requirements from the Ecuadorian state, yet the same water does not taste or smell the same to the people who have consumed it for their entire lives. Indeed, taste and smell are too subjective to convince the Ecuadorian government of the damage done by mining operations. More importantly, the distinctions between water as a natural resource and water as a life-giving substance demonstrate the complexities of water quality studies. Activists astutely point out that water contaminated with pathogens from livestock feces is materially different from water contaminated with lead, for example. These substances are not equivalent toxins. Velásquez centers colonial hierarchies of race as she examines the ways that racialized bodies assume new identities. Mestizos (mixed European and...

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