Seminars

Estuaries are interstitial spaces where salt and freshwater engage one another in a delicate dance. They serve as nurseries for the reproduction of marine life, and house many of the world’s mangrove forests. In Puerto Rico, economic development along the coast has disrupted this balance, accelerating beach erosion and increasing the vulnerability of coastal ecosystems to sea level rise. These processes are threatening the livelihoods of the human and more than human ecologies that have thrived here for centuries. I understand the estuary as a geographic space and a source of conceptual inspiration to think about climate change anew—not as a sudden and unprecedented crisis, but as a process of continuous change that requires “staying with the trouble,” to quote Donna Haraway. The persistence of Black communities in Loíza is rooted in small scale and seemingly mundane acts of permaneciendo, being present. Presence here—in the form of a community led mangrove reforestation project and in the reclaiming of a historic Afro-Puerto Rican site along the banks of Rio Grande de Loíza for a fishing school, art gallery, and casa-museo—produces a different story about the climate crisis, one that calls forth political possibilities and futures in the face of a foretold death.

I went to the Gulf of Kutch in Western India to explore what India’s largest port project does to coastal lands, lives, and livelihoods. The region’s rich ecology overwhelmed me. Tidal mangroves and fishers seemed to coexist awkwardly with cattle and camels in the desert. Seafaring urban merchants lived alongside goats and snakes. How was I to make sense of this frenzied mosaic? And the frenzied mosaic inside of me amid rapidly changing personal and academic circumstances? This prelude to my book explores what it means to reckon with an individual past, what it means to know, and how these might help address a central ethnographic question: how do I study the coast-as-landscape? I then ask how the past is imagined in memory, how cognitive frameworks define what it means to imagine, and how the coast is carved out as an object of inquiry through such ways of knowing. The embodied lexicon offers answers to these questions. It takes you to the region through local idioms that coalesce to present the coast as a meshwork of freshwater, seawater, sediment, and emotion. They frame the region not just as a site for mega-port building, but as a space from which to think about what it means to survive and thrive amid ecological and economic uncertainty.