Swiss human geographies lecture 2019 tourism troubles: feminist political ecologies of land and body in Panama

Abstract

On the Panamanian Caribbean coast and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, foreign direct investment via residential tourism development drives land displacement. As land insecurities grow, particularly for local Indigenous and Afro-Panamanian peoples, ongoing dispossession is not simply about land, but rather simultaneously about land, people and their bodies. In Bocas, foreign land enclosures are infused with imaginaries, which take for granted Black female servitude and Black landlessness. Such imaginaries seemingly lock economically “poor” Afro-Panamanian women into particular kinds of work. To illustrate, I entangle feminist political ecological assertions that struggles over nature are embodied struggles, with intersectional and relational understandings of land and body. To do so, I draw insights from postcolonial, decolonial and Black feminist critiques of coloniality and settler colonialism. Building from this literature, I seek to show how a logic of elimination operates within the legal geographies of residential tourism development. In doing so, I highlight the historical and contemporary ways in which Afro-Panamanian women are naturalized as criadas (maids), a process that accompanies land enclosure. Blending ethnographic and historical data collection, I seek to illuminate how Afro-Panamanian women's livelihood struggles reflect both their acquiescence to residential tourism development, and their resilience in the face of Bocas' anti-black patriarchal coloniality. Thus, I argue that Afro-Panamanian women's desires for inclusion and belonging in Bocas' tourism enclave – a project that seeks to eliminate Indigenous and Black relations to coastal lands and foster their embodied subjection to foreign nationals – simultaneously reflects their struggles for the right to remain on the coast.