In this talk, Daniel Gámez weaves extended conversations, collaborative archival analysis, and political advocacy with elders, traditional authorities, and agricultural workers of Atlapulco, a Nahua pueblo in Xochimilco, southern Mexico City. He focuses on the everyday intimate, spiritual, and embodied encounters with earthen materials and waterscapes, tracing environmental transformations experienced by chinampa ecologies—characterized by abundance and life—with the expansion of the colonial city. The talk will consider how the latter is on the brink of environmental catastrophe, prompted by centuries of imperial urbanization.

 

Daniel P. Gámez, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, American Indian Studies & History—University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a postdoctoral scholar for the project “Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses,” supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He received his PhD in Geography from The University of British Columbia, and is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist specializing in the study of anticolonial thought, racialization, Indigenous sovereignty, and imperial urbanism in Abya Yala (Latin America & the Caribbean).