More-than-Human Witnessing? The Politics and Aesthetics of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) in Transnational Agrarian Movements

Since the mid-1990s, appeals to “Madre Tierra” [Mother Earth] have united activists and campesino [peasant] networks globally as part of political claims of food sovereignty and agrarian rights. Positioning this paper as a contribution to feminist theory, here I explore what Madre Tierra does in political-aesthetic terms, specifically within situated struggles in Central America. Seen from (white) eco-feminist perspectives, the rise of Madre Tierra could be seen to perform new kinds of exclusions: in this resonant figure diverse indigenous cosmologies seem to collapse; agrarian struggles are rendered “feminine,” and both women and land-workers are placed in the realm of nature—which is to say, far from meaning-making. However, when the everyday practices of agrarian activism are thought through Latinx and Chicanx theories of queer kinship and black womanism, a more radical, and specifically decolonial, vision emerges. Through ethnographic vignettes I illustrate the ways that masculinity/femininity, nature/culture, and the relationships between them are being reworked.