UCLA

This dissertation, based on 20 months of activist fieldwork, is an ethnographic examination of Afro-Indigenous peoples’ struggle to conjure territory—that is, to convert the legal recognition of territorial rights into a social reality. In 2009, the Indigenous Rama and Afrodescendant Kriol peoples in southeastern Nicaragua received a joint title to roughly 4,000 km2 of land and 4,000 km2 of sea. Since then, they have faced dispossession and displacement at the hands of land speculators, cattle ranchers, gold miners, and state-supported megaprojects. As community members grapple with the failure of the law itself to generate freedom from dispossession, the dissertation demonstrates that they are confronting fractally recursive colonialism: a form of colonialism at one scale that reproduces another form of domination at a different scale. Specifically, the violent, extractive relation of United States imperialism toward Nicaragua is reproduced within Nicaragua as mestizo settler colonialism toward Afro-Indigenous peoples. Over the past century, Global North actors have forcibly indebted the Nicaraguan state, resulting in current debts to multilateral and private lenders. Paying these debts requires constant growth in exports to bring in U.S. dollars. The state meets these obligations by promoting mining, cattle ranching, and infrastructure projects that depend on the settler colonization of Afro-Indigenous lands.

After conceptualizing fractally recursive colonialism, the dissertation moves on to an ethnographic account of Rama-Kriol political thought and action. Starting from oral histories in two Rama and Kriol communities, the dissertation examines the historical roots of Rama-Kriol political thought on territory and freedom, attending especially to concepts of territorial care. The dissertation then narrates Rama and Kriol communities’ efforts to contest dispossession through an array of strategies, including lawsuits, vigilance, outright refusal of state and settler authority, cooperation with government officials and settlers, and appeals to international authorities. Through political and economic entanglements with state and international institutions, the communities are generating jurisdiction within their territory—a key building block for sovereignty. The conclusion reflects on the enormous stakes of the Rama and Kriol communities’ work to get free and—alongside similar communities around the world—to create a livable future on this planet.