| This dissertation demonstrates how the practices and conflicts surrounding the forest and its management in Northern New Mexico are inseparable from articulations of race, class and nation. Though these articulations of nature and difference are central to the formation of subjects, populations, and landscapes, the complex means by which this takes place are rarely explored. The following dissertation intends to demonstrate this dynamic through an exploration of three forms of assemblage that shape the contentious forest politics of the region. First, I explore the forest's role in the formation of passionate attachments to place, community and land. I look at how these ‘structures of feeling’ have been built through histories of extraction and exploitation, through intense, shifting political struggles, and through deep sentiments of loss and longing—all of which develop in relation to the forest. Second, I explore how the forest has functioned as a site upon which debates around purity and protection are struggled over, and as a means by which hierarchical and exclusionary forms of nationalism and race are constituted. Finally, I examine the discursive practices through which formations of difference and nature travel between Hispano bodies and forest landscapes, and examine how the care and management of both have led to a particularly ‘green’ form of state formation and governance. I conclude by showing that by placing the cultural politics of difference in the same analytical frame as the politics of nature, new understandings and radical political possibilities are enabled—both in New Mexico specifically, and within environmental politics more generally. |
