Presentation short abstract

Using critical agrarian studies and intersectional political ecology, this presentation examines land conflicts and rural migration in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve, critiquing “interethnic” framings and showing how extractivist dispossession and classed racial-spatial hierarchies shape violence.

Presentation long abstract

I draw from critical agrarian studies and intersectional political ecology to criticize narratives that frame conflicts in indigenous territories as “interethnic.” Focusing on the colonization of indigenous territories in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how territorial disputes are reduced to clashes between “culturally incompatible” indigenous communities and “non-indigenous” mestizo migrants. I argue that this framing obscures how indigenous territorial insecurity is rooted in the nexus of extractivist accumulation by dispossession, rural migration, and territorial violence, enabled by state policies that prioritize extractivism and large-scale agriculture, marginalizing and uprooting both “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” rural lives. Moreover, it invisibilizes how intersecting axes of class, race, and space shape the lived realities and subjectivities of mestizo campesinos, often left essentialized in agrarian studies literature.

In state imaginaries, the Caribbean Coast and its indigenous territories—racialized as an indigenous space—are conceptualized simultaneously as a resource bank and as a spatial fix for campesinos dispossessed by extractivism on the Pacific Coast. Although migrants hold racial privilege over indigenous communities, their class-based marginalization results in precarity. Moreover, the Caribbean Coast’s spatial–racial framing renders mestizos as migrants and “settler-colonos,” even when they are Caribbean Coast–born. This status facilitates their exclusion, while the broader structural privilege of mestizo elites—the true agents of large-scale extractivist land accumulation—remains unchallenged. By unsettling the notion of a homogeneous “mestizo” identity, I demonstrate that violence and migration are inextricably linked to intersectional racial–class-spatial hierarchies and extractivist regimes of dispossession.