Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork conducted at the Monarch Butterfly Reserve in Mexico, the paper documents the various animal and plant rhythms of this forest and explains how a lens on more-than-human temporality can help us comprehend the forms in which technoracialization occurs and how it can be undone.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a decade-long fieldwork conducted at the Monarch Butterfly Reserve in Mexico. It documents the various animal and plant rhythms of this forest and explains how a lens on more-than-human temporality can help us comprehend the forms in which technoracialization occurs and how it can be undone. The paper delves into the relationship between agrarian capitalism and conservation, mainly how the expansion of the avocado industry as an agrarian capitalist commodity is influenced by conservation capitalism. It highlights how agribusiness and conservation have used similar techniques to maintain racialization and induce rapid socio-environmental change. Both have reinforced the utilitarian use of nature to achieve a different use of time and space. By tracking the fast rhythms of avocado plantations, the paper also documents other ancestral more-than-human rhythms, such as those of the monarch butterfly and native corn. It ponders the power and struggles that both humans and more-than-humans face in this clash of temporalities and agencies. It also explores recent eco-political transformations that open space for the re-emergence of more-than-human worldmaking projects that lean to relations of life, care, and slow cultivation of time-place making.