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Paper short abstract

Drawing on a multispecies ethnography of a Mexican national park, this paper proposes disruptive hybridity as a tool for examining how lagoon inhabitants negotiate conservation authority, racialised belonging, and multispecies care under conditions of ecological change.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on an audiovisual multispecies ethnography of the Chacahua-Pastoría lagoons, one of Mexico’s oldest national parks. It proposes disruptive hybridity as an analytic tool for examining how a history of forced movement and belonging are negotiated across species divisions. The lagoon is inhabited by a variety of species and by an Afromexican human community, all affected by ecological degradation and increasing tourism. As a national park, Chacahua is the site of community-led conservation projects. While participating in crocodile-monitoring patrols, I learned about the lagoon’s hybrid crocodiles: members of a species from the Gulf of Mexico escaped from the local cocodrilario and reproduced with the lagoon’s native crocodiles. The hybrid crocodiles now populating the lagoon reveal ontological claims about species purity and what nature worthy of protection is within a conservation framework, sites of creation of knowledge about the lagoon as a protected environment. At the same time, the hybrid crocodiles prompt comparisons among Afromexican inhabitants, who relate the crocodiles’ in-between status and histories of forced movement to Afrodescendant experiences of slavery, resettlement, and mestizaje. This self-attributed hybridity challenges racialised imaginaries that frame Afromexicans as either foreign and less capable of environmental care or as ‘close to nature,’ instead foregrounding Afromexican environmental knowledge based in sensory perception, embodied knowledge and multispecies communication. Being tonal, sharing life with an animal – a bond humans have to a particular animal in the lagoon – is one expression of this knowledge and offers a counterpoint to the national park's conservation practices.