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This is not the usual story on how the Mar Menor coastal lagoon in South East Spain became the first ecosystem invested with legal personhood in Europe (Vicente Giménez, 2023), or on how the lagoon became the epicentre of land-water disputes around the impacts of the extensive development of intensive irrigation along its drainage basin (El Campo de Cartagena) (Zuluaga-Guerra et al., 2023). Neither is this a reworking of the familiar story of a unique coastal ecosystem overfed with nutrients to the point that two mass wildlife death events (López-Ballesteros et al., 2023) followed an algal bloom (Martínez-Fernández & Esteve-Selma, 2020). This is a story, or maybe consciously not it, perhaps a constellation, of the stories of persons hardly heard, and of how their stories intertwined with mine. The self-reflective character of this piece, however, does not make it a confessional text on an anecdotal, unacademic effort.
In a challenge to linear storytelling, maybe to storytelling itself, i would like to begin where the story ends (if it ever does). i would like to share with you how a thread of decolonial feminism thinking-feeling of Abya Yala (or Latin America in the colonial register) can speak of a different Mar Menor, that of the “subaltern others”. Let us note that this research was not originally framed within the epistemological and praxical lessons of decolonial feminisms, but has instead segued into them throughout the last leg of the process, as a response to my experience of the Mar Menor crisis.
For the past 25 years feminist scholars and activists from different ambits of Abya Yala have questioned the various configurations of race and gender. They have denounced structurally patriarchal and Eurocentric mechanisms of domination and stratification that are sublimated into the social institutions of capitalist contemporaneity (Espinosa-Miñoso et al., 2021; Gómez Montes, 2018). Resistance to these mechanisms of social structuration have eventuated into dissident embodiments of notions of territory (Zaragocin & Caretta, 2021), of identity, and of the self (Lugones, 2003). Their message is not a point to be made, but an invitation to recognise that gender and race problematics run deeper than it seems, and that this is not trivially so.
The consciousness of the oppressions and resistances that i embody took on vivid colours ever since i arrived in Murcia. The intensity and profundity of my experience of alienation was rendered incomparable to the sufferings and vicissitudes of many migrant workers of the Mar Menor and the Campo de Cartagena. Yet i invoke the multivocality and poli-rhythmic contestations of the multiple selves that the oppressed inhabit (Lugones, 2003), to disrupt dominant narratives of ecological crisis and economic collapse built around the Mar Menor (Cabello & Brugnach, 2023).
With the socio-ecological crisis framing the scope of the research, and under the umbrella of the knowledge co-production canon (Chambers et al., 2021, 2022; Norström et al., 2020), the researcher Violeta Cabello and i met up with 11 locals to dialogue and reflect about the Mar Menor. For over a year we held interviews and workshops thematising some of the controversial issues around the socio-ecological crisis. Here you can find our timeline and connected results: https://www.shareddialogues.org/.
However unprecedented in the context of the positivist, and postpositivist, academic production around the lagoon, these spaces (unintentionally) reproduced the idea that migrant workers’ sufferings are peripheral to the crisis. No migrants other than myself participated, and discussions about race and gender were not forthcoming. By the end of these sessions of collective construction of knowledge, this realisation pointed to a dissident path for me to revisit the crisis.
From November 2022 to March 2023, i encountered persons hailing from radically distinct geographies, with respect to the Mar Menor and/or the Campo de Cartagena waterscapes, working various jobs and navigating distinct migrant statuses. These encounters elicited a portrayal of oppressions⇔resistances in a series of visual stories co-created within an interdisciplinary research team, which would later demarcate entry points into decolonial feminist understandings of the crisis. These border-dwelling stories not only present an account of personal experiences, but make apparent the contradictions and tensions inherent in the capitalist contemporaneity. As human bodies remain illegal, nonhuman ontologies are invested with legal personhood, as though both were comparable actants materially shaping land and lagoon. The stories denounce oppression, domination, and colonial encodings of nature and otherness, which are rarely thematised when speaking of the crisis. We are their outlet.
Cabello, V., & Brugnach, M. (2023). Whose waters, whose nutrients? Knowledge, uncertainty, and controversy over eutrophication in the Mar Menor. Ambio. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01846-z
Chambers, J. M., Wyborn, C., Klenk, N. L., Ryan, M., Serban, A., Bennett, N. J., Brennan, R., Charli-Joseph, L., Fernández-Giménez, M. E., Galvin, K. A., Goldstein, B. E., Haller, T., Hill, R., Munera, C., Nel, J. L., Österblom, H., Reid, R. S., Riechers, M., Spierenburg, M., … Rondeau, R. (2022). Co-productive agility and four collaborative pathways to sustainability transformations. Global Environmental Change, 72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102422
Chambers, J. M., Wyborn, C., Ryan, M. E., Reid, R. S., Riechers, M., Serban, A., Bennett, N. J., Cvitanovic, C., Fernández-Giménez, M. E., Galvin, K. A., Goldstein, B. E., Klenk, N. L., Tengö, M., Brennan, R., Cockburn, J. J., Hill, R., Munera, C., Nel, J. L., Österblom, H., … Pickering, T. (2021). Six modes of co-production for sustainability. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00755-x
Espinosa-Miñoso, Y., Lugones, M., & Maldonado-Torres, N. (Eds.). (2021). Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala. Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges. Rowman & Littlefield.
Gómez Montes, L. M. (2018). Más allá del feminismo: caminos para andar, México, Red de Feminismos Descoloniales. HistoriAgenda, 33(3), 180–184.
López-Ballesteros, A., Trolle, D., Srinivasan, R., & Senent-Aparicio, J. (2023). Assessing the effectiveness of potential best management practices for science-informed decision support at the watershed scale: The case of the Mar Menor coastal lagoon, Spain. Science of the Total Environment, 859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.160144
Lugones, M. (2003). Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker/Estrategias Tácticas de la Callejera. In Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use
Martínez-Fernández, J., & Esteve-Selma, M. A. (2020). El colapso ecológico de la Laguna del Mar Menor. In F. La Roca & J. Martínez-Fernández (Eds.), Retos de la planificación y gestión del agua en España. iNFORME 2019 (pp. 61–75). Fundación Nueva Cultura del agua.
Norström, A. V., Cvitanovic, C., Löf, M. F., West, S., Wyborn, C., Balvanera, P., Bednarek, A. T., Bennett, E. M., Biggs, R., de Bremond, A., Campbell, B. M., Canadell, J. G., Carpenter, S. R., Folke, C., Fulton, E. A., Gaffney, O., Gelcich, S., Jouffray, J. B., Leach, M., … Österblom, H. (2020). Principles for knowledge co-production in sustainability research. Nature Sustainability, 3(3), 182–190. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2
Vicente Giménez, T. (2023). The Mar Menor: an ecosystem with its own rights. In Y. Vega Cárdenas & D. Turp (Eds.), A Legal Personality for the St. Lawrence River and other Rivers of the World (pp. 437–446). Éditions JFD.
Zaragocin, S., & Caretta, M. A. (2021). Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(5), 1503–1518. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1812370
Zuluaga-Guerra, P. A., Martinez-Fernandez, J., Esteve-Selma, M. A., & Dell’Angelo, J. (2023). A socio-ecological model of the Segura River basin, Spain. Ecological Modelling, 478. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2023.110284
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