The promise of interspecies desegregation: Allying with capybaras against gated communities in Buenos Aires’ wetlands

Dicenta, M. (2024). The promise of interspecies desegregation: Allying with capybaras against gated communities in Buenos Aires’ wetlands. Environment and Planning F, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825241255688

Here is a summary of key points:

• Nordelta’s gated community in Buenos Aires’ wetlands has encroached on more-than-human communities through racialized discourses and infrastructures.
• A controversy arose in 2021 when crowds of capybaras started roaming freely in the neighborhood. The event sparked a social media response, creating popular epistemic tools to assess multispecies dispossession.
• Also, the Indigenous territory of Punta Querandí, at the borders of Nordelta, aims to repair multispecies segregation, confronting not only encroachment but also biologized/archaeologized notions of time, kinship, and Indigeneity.
• I find a symbiosis between Real Estate & Conservation frontiers in sustaining the accumulation of property, capital, and moral privileges by redefining/revaluing boundaries between the wild and the civilized.
• Yet in the face of extractivist reorderings, “interspecies desegregation” promises not border erasure but “amphibious subjectivities” & reemergence of relations wounded by racialized/commodified partitions. Central is the cultivation of moralities beyond consumption & distinction.
• The term “interspecies desegregation” puts racial capitalism & extractivism into dialogue, challenging Argentina’s strategy of invoking US segregation history to deny internal racism through comparison while disavowing US anti-racist history.