Teresa Velasquez

As a socio-cultural anthropologist trained in activist research methods, I have spent more than two decades accompanying Indigenous and environmental social movements in Ecuador. My book, Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador (University of Arizona Press, 2022) examines the political significance of new protest movements that rally human and non-human entities into the defense of community watersheds. Based on more than two years of continuous ethnographic research, the book traces how campesino anti-mining activists came to reclaim Kichwa-Kañari ancestry to consolidate a plurinational, water defense movement that simultaneously challenged the extractive model of national development and hegemonic racial and spatial ideologies rooted in mestizaje. The book exposes the limits of progressive governance under neoliberal and socialist governments, and argues that political change requires sustained, broad-based coalition movements that go beyond the election of left governments in Latin America.

My current research project continues to engage a critical perspective on extractive capitalism by examining the intersection of identity politics, judicial activism, territorial defense, and food sovereignty. My forthcoming publication follows how Indigenous and campesina women reimagine and defend territorial sovereignty through agroecology, an everyday practice where the kitchen table, household garden, and dairy patch are turned into critical sites for resisting settler dispossession. It will appear as a co-authored chapter in The End of Extraction as We Know It? Learning from Extractive Resistance for Sustainable Futures, edited by Chelsea Fairbank and Amy Janzwood (2025).

My research has also appeared in NACLA, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Latin American Perspectives, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Resources Policy, among others. My contributions to edited volumes on extractivism include The Anthropology of Resource Extraction (Routledge, 2022), Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism, and Resistance in Broad Perspective (Rowman and Littlefied, 2021), Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Oil, Mining, and Gas in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2013), and Social Conflict, Economic Development and Extractive Industry: Evidence from South America (Routledge, 2012).