Disrupting the Patrón---Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco

CEJ would like to welcome Joel E. Correia to CSU and congratulate him on his first publication! Joel E. Correia is Assistant Professor in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Department at Colorado State University. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well‑being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correia’s ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America’s settler frontiers.

"Disrupting the Patrón tells a story of the underrepresented peoples of Paraguay, of their endurance under multiple cycles of dispossession that threaten their existence, and of the various forms that their resistance takes."—Gabriela Valdivia, coauthor of Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia

"By focusing on the racial and cultural implications of land and labor in Indigenous struggles in Paraguay, Joel E. Correia expands our focus on environmental concerns to include human rights, cultural rights, and the need for legal and political justice."—Nancy Postero, author of The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia

"In the Paraguayan Chaco, missionaries, settlers, and officials turned stolen Indigenous land into ranches where cattle is valued more than Indigenous people. Correia's vivid ethnography of the interstitial strategies and land reoccupations through which Enxet and Sanapaná people carry out a 'dialectics of disruption' makes a crucial and incisive contribution to our understanding of racialized geographies, settler capitalism, and environmental and Indigenous justice."—Gastón R. Gordillo, author of Rubble: The Afterlifeof Destruction