Invasive Life: Illegal Immigrants and Invasive Species on the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

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  • March 21, 2019
Creator
  • Bocci, Paolo
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology
Abstract
  • This dissertation is an ethnography of out-of-place human and more-than-human presences. Focusing on the highlands of the archipelago’s four inhabited islands, it examines how illegal farmers and invasive species have encroached on both the Galapagos National Park, where no one can officially reside, and the areas outside of the park, which are designated for contained human settlement. As a result of concerns about island conservation, the Ecuadorian state has required a permit to reside on the Galapagos since 1998. Yet, due to tourism’s exponential growth, mainland Ecuadorians have continued to migrate to the islands, though largely lacking official residency. Illegal residents concentrate in the highlands to work as farmers, while invasive plants coming from the continent have covered large swaths of farmland and park areas alike. Excluded from the protections of Ecuadorian citizenship, these migrant farmers cope with new plants and insects that invade the crops. Yet they also find ways to procure a livelihood in these changed landscapes. Accounting for the unexpected thriving of illegal farmers and invasive species, I treat them as both a symptom of a conservation paradigm in crisis and actors that enact new forms of nature-culture. I move past a critique of conservation and contends that the emerging multispecies entanglements in the highlands are suggestive of ways to live in today’s world of ecological ruins, beyond modern promises of recuperation and betterment.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Middleton, Townsend
  • Redfield, Peter
  • Escobar, Arturo
  • Ahuja, Neel
  • Wiener, Margaret
  • Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2017
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