This month we're getting to know the newest member of our department, Assistant Professor Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, who uses social mapping and videography to highlight the multiple geographies and ways of knowing that can inform epistemic and social justice efforts.
Could you say a little bit generally about your research interests, writing, and scholarship. What has inspired the work you’re doing now?
My research interests are political and historical geographies, political ecologies, and critical cartographies. My scholarship explores different topics, and I enjoy and consider it much more beneficial to write collaboratively. Also, I draw on community-engaged methods, such as social mapping and videography. For example, I have explored the contemporary consequences of forest conservation for communities as new resource frontiers in their territories, the ideas about forest conservation in the colonial period in Mexico, and the ways of understanding, naming, and narrating landscapes from the Chatino perspective as ‘other’ geographies that are erased.
I have been inspired by the work of colleagues and mentors who have shared with me their passion and interest in social cartography, ethnography, and community-engaged research, as well as their political commitment to marginalized communities. My inspiration also comes from the collaborative work with community members with whom I have worked over the years to develop materials for the community.
When you visited last Spring, you gave a talk called, 'They do not understand what communal is:' Assembling Yu Ska T'lyu (communal land) in the Chatino Forest Conservation Frontier. I'd love to hear more about the role Indigenous/Latinx Geospatial Analysis, Representation, GIS plays in your work?
I have been interested in ‘other’ ways of mapping and counter-mapping as a critical approach in my research. I also use GIS in my work or with communities, as it is standard representation for state-led environmental programs, to give one example. However, I consider mapping to be a process. I focus on cartography's possibilities to reflect on understandings of landscapes, narratives, or ethics of places. The ideas around social mapping in the Americas bring together different epistemic approaches to mapping that question the hegemonic representations of space. In my work, mapping represents a device to share ideas, pose questions, and re-think how landscapes are being transformed, but also what people want for their neighborhood, community, and territory. I see mapping also as a political tool that allows communities or groups not just to visualize, but to convey particular ways of knowing and being. Sometimes, these representations are nothing related to the conventional Cartesian map; other times, they do, and they always respond to the circumstances that make necessary the use of such tools.
Congrats on your new book, Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order, which you co-wrote with Anthony Ince. Why is the book important and how does it relate to the abiding problems of the modern world?
Thank you! This book project is part of a collaboration between Anthony and me that has been ongoing for over 10 years. We have been exploring what we consider an absence, a silence regarding the “state” in our discipline. We point to the series of myths and uncritical engagements that permeate Geography when inquiring about the state and its social mechanisms. Our project also points to understanding the logic underpinning the vast diversity of state forms and mechanisms: statism. We focus on how statism defines particular geographical imaginaries of order, nature, and people's relationships and their material consequences. We argue that attention to such logics requires the same attention and critical engagement that other forms of oppression, considering it as one of the many possible (as well as historically contingent and recent) ways of organizing. We think such absences are critical to understanding current problems of the modern world, and the book explores such issues considering the vast diversity of ways of being and organizing that societies have had despite the state.
What do you have planned for this semester, academically? Are there any projects you’re working on that you’d like to share with the UC Berkeley community?
This semester, I am working on a feature documentary that I am co-directing: Xa Lyu K’yaq, a world of mountains. This has been a long-term project, but we are now in the post-production phase and will finish it the following fall. This film explores the consequences of environmental programs and climate change mitigation measures, particularly carbon offsetting, for Chatino and peasant communities in Mexico. We follow a community leader and other community members as they reflect, negotiate, critique, and navigate the contradiction these programs entail regarding their ways of using and understanding the forest. I am also preparing a paper on the carbon offsetting market between the California and forest communities in Mexico. I am examining the commodity chain of this new “resource” from its production in the communal forest to its final users.
You recently moved from Providence, RI. Are there things outside of the academic world of UC Berkeley that you’ve been enjoying in the bay area (or that you’re looking forward to exploring)?
I have been enjoying food lately. There is an incredible diversity of culinary options in the Bay Area, especially from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I love trying different types of cuisine, as it allows me to learn more about various cultures. I have been practicing Japanese archery, known as Kyudo, for over a decade. In the Bay Area, there is a beautiful location surrounded by redwoods where I can train. I thoroughly enjoy practicing Kyudo and sharing my experiences with the community that has developed, including the teachers who guide us. Finally, I enjoy wandering in the city and visiting different neighborhoods, art spaces, and markets.
Last question: what three books would you recommend to our Geography community?
I would like to recommend three books that are not about Geography or by geographers, but I consider they speak to what our community is interested in. The first book is Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo People by Lucas Bessire. It is an anthropological approach, but I consider it one of the books that challenged me the most and helped me re-think issues of representation and identity. His video project was also an inspiration for my own film. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow presents a detailed account and an engaging argument to re-think order and hierarchy throughout human history. Finally, El Capitaloceno. Una historia radical de la crisis climática by Francisco Serratos is an excellent account of the rise of capitalism and the transformation of human- nonhuman relations in the long term.
Check out Barrera's new book, Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order, and learn more about his work here!