Get life ahead: collective construction experiences, Patagonia Argentina

Abstract

In recent decades in Latin America we have witnessed a process of deepening the development model with an extractive character from nature. This dispossession regime has generated transformations in the territories and in the (re)existence strategies of those who inhabit these spaces. This analytical work is geo-politically located in dissident experiences of women's groups in dialogue with the (re)production and care of a dignified life. Likewise, we show how, at the extensive level of secondary data, the future of territorialities is configured, which disrupts life and impacts community plots; where the hegemonic devices for the construction of subjectivity imposed by the dispossession regimes of the last two decades trace narrow margins of habitability.

We work with the identification and analysis of two experiences of groups of women who live in the north of Argentine Patagonia: one is located in a fruit-growing region, rearranged by the grid of the unconventional hydrocarbon model in the town of Allen, and the other, on the Somuncurá plateau, also rearranged by the development of large-scale metal mining and extractive projects.

We seek to characterize how extractive activity impacts our bodies and territories; how it specifically affects women and their community plots and in what sense these are two experiences of (re)existence of commodification. For this, it is necessary to explore the territorialities in the sense of construction and recovery of knowledge to visualize the ways in which these groups propose to "get life ahead" from their complex and diverse community frameworks that develop in spaces and times not necessarily monetized with a productive-territorial-symbolic-material scope.

Through an ethnographic approach of feminist epistemology, we recover self-narratives that focus their approach on practices and their organizational processes, in the area of ​​Allen and the Somuncurá plateau, and from there problematize these experiences of (re)existence in terms of antagonism, resistance and recreation of community forms of production of dignified life. This proposed analysis allows us to record living conditions imposed by extractive dispossession regimes centered on the privatization of common goods of nature (land, water, vegetation), lack of work, violation of rights, health conditions; as well as the collective experiences of women who know the territories they inhabit and that make life possible in the face of the expulsive logic of the development model with an extractive character from nature.