{"product_id":"pachamama-politics-teresa-a-velzasquez-9780816556557","title":"Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador","description":"Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, constitutional rights in 2008. This landmark achievement represented a shift to incorporate Indigenous philosophies of Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir (to live well) as a framework for social and political change. The extraordinary move coincided with the rise of neoextractivism, where the self-described socialist President Rafael Correa contended that Buen Vivir could be achieved through controversial mining projects on Indigenous and campesino territories, including their watersheds. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003ePachamama Politics\u003c\/i\u003e provides a rich ethnographic account of the tensions that follow from neoextractivism in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, where campesinos mobilized to defend their community-managed watershed from a proposed gold mine. Positioned as an activist-scholar, Teresa A. Velásquez takes the reader inside the movement--alongside marches, road blockades, and river and high-altitude wetlands--to expose the rifts between social movements and the \"pink tide\" government. When the promise of social change turns to state criminalization of water defenders, Velásquez argues that the contradictions of neoextractivism created the political conditions for campesinos to reconsider their relationship to indigeneity. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e The book takes an intersectional approach to the study of anti-mining struggles and explains how campesino communities and their allies identified with and redeployed Indigenous cosmologies to defend their water as a life-sustaining entity. \u003ci\u003ePachamama Politics\u003c\/i\u003e shows why progressive change requires a shift away from the extractive model of national development to a plurinational defense of community water systems and Indigenous peoples and their autonomy. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Teresa A. Velásquez\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0816556555\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780816556557\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Arizona Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/16\/2025\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 288\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback","brand":"Teresa A. Velásquez","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47305650340095,"sku":"9780816556557","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_dee1aa99-252c-45d0-a49c-dcd9eca22ca8.jpg?v=1758831466","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/pachamama-politics-teresa-a-velzasquez-9780816556557","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}