As eco-criticism matures within Latin American Studies, discussions often still center around texts that make obvious commentaries on environment, nature, and humanity’s place in it. This includes a range of genres that often blend sci-fi and speculative post-apocalyptic disaster fiction. While Mexico does have such a tradition, prominent Mexican cultural production seems to feature ecological themes less explicitly than in other parts of Latin America (as in, say, the Argentine Samantha Schweblin’s much lauded 2014 ecological suspense Distancia de rescate despite the fact that revolutionary struggles over land and water are so central to its history.1 What is to be done, then, with a wave of award-winning and highly visible Mexican cultural production that either does not treat the topic of ecological crisis—present in multiple forms across Mexico today—or where it appears to operate in the background or as secondary to the main plot? And what can be made of what might be called a lack of political, speculative, or theoretical vision in Mexican works? To answer these questions and reconcile these absences, I focus on two contemporary products, Roma (2018),a film by director Alfonso Cuáron and Temporada de huracanes(2017),a novel by Fernanda Melchor, and I ask how world-ecological approaches can illuminate what they have to offer on the intersections of culture and its greater import for theoretical and political approaches to environment and Latin America today.2

Ecologies of Reproductive Labor and Family

In both works, nuclear family structures and gendered spheres of social reproduction and labor breakdown or shift, which I contend is inherently also a portrayal of ecological crisis, despite neither’s explicit engagement with the environment.Alfonso Cuarón’s magnum opus, Roma,is a fictionalized introspection of his childhood in the eponymous 1970s upper middle-class neighborhood in Mexico City. Instead of a traditional biopic, it is told through the eyes of his beloved nanny Libo, here named “Cleo,” an indigenous woman from Oaxaca. Over the course of about a year, Cleo gets pregnant and suffers her own tragedies of state violence and stillbirth, as she also ushers the family through a divorce. Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracaneslikewise details families in crisis, but it is more epochal in nature covering the decades before and after a particularly bad hurricane and landslide in 1978 that frame the events. The plot swirls around a set of characters either responsible for or loosely connected to the murder of “The Witch” in the small fictitious town of La Matosa in Veracruz, Mexico. Since the formation of the modern family often orders the reproductive labor necessary to sustain capitalism, it is also directly related to capitalism’s environment-making. Given the meteoric rise of Jason Moore’s approach in Latin American cultural studies, where reproductive labor (often of racialized and marginalized women or queer workers) is theorized as being intimately tied and akin to the “unpaid work” of nature that contributes value under capitalism, I take world-ecology as a point of departure for my analyses of these texts.3

While Moore’s expansive notion of value and work is productive, an insertion of the political is necessary into his breakdown theory of capitalism.4 Moore predicts that given the rise of “negative value” (e.g. everything from superweeds that threaten Cheap Food models of the Green Revolution to social movements) and the exhaustion of extraction frontiers for “Cheap Nature,” including energy, capitalism is facing a terminal crisis that will necessarily give way to something else (either better or worse). Moore is right to argue that capitalism’s way of abstracting nature from humanity has been key to its voracious accumulation cycle, but both works show how this may be more visible as social reproduction and real historical rifts between the country and the city, rather than as a conceptual Cartesian dualism between Nature and Society.5

Despite the fact that representations of social reproduction constitute and are constituted by their ecologies, these cultural works primarily depict rifts driven by anthropogenic social conflict, often mediated by state and racialized gendered violence. Furthermore, nature does not appear as laborer (or oppressor), and its expropriation is spectral. That it is being made to work “harder and harder for free” runs in the background, if at all. Instead, human need, such as hunger or physical safety, intersects with desire and personal trauma to ultimately home in on the way that current reproductive regimes have failed to fulfill basic material and social needs within a larger ecological framework. In his recent effort to define the relationship between commodity frontiers and world literature, Michael Niblett writes, “Far better, therefore, to grasp the term [commodity frontier] as a narrative category by way of which the logistics of frontier-making can be illuminated through the description of their movements as these manifest in specific historical situations.”6 Both works, I argue, are narrativizing the relative exhaustion of commodity frontiers in an epochal crisis of the social relations of reproduction that are both the cause and result of metabolic rift between town and country. Having established this, I then consider historical world-ecological regimes of “stocks” and “flows” (i.e. movements) in the novels and their dependence on gendered reproductive labor, to help further politicize Moore’s crisis theory. Misery seems in greater supply than revolution in both texts and negative value is not enough to rally new futures, but reproductive labor mediates both the interactions and autonomies of human and non-human natures in such a way that possible openings to heal metabolic rift may be imagined beyond those contained in the novels.

The concepts of metabolic rift between town and country and stocks and flows of energy are central to a number of world-ecologists and eco-Marxists, but in this essay, I put them into conversation with how culture is working through gendered labor as a way of attempting to fix, or simply survive amid — not always successfully — the world-ecological imbalance (or rift) between stocks/flows under capitalism. In dialogue with Andreas Malm and Jasper Bernes, I take flow to refer to forms of nature/energy that literally “flow” (like water and wind).7 Capitalism began to see these forms of energy as a disadvantage because they could not be held as easily in stocks,like coal, which allowed nature to be controlled at will for the sake of capitalist accumulation and expansion. Bernes thus privileges flow as the more revolutionary of the options, but mostly because this means that people will organize a kind of communist society that does not depend so much on capitalist stocks. Of course, some stocks are less inimical to the web of life’s flows, and flows can be captured as in wind or solar energy, but the idea is that there is an exchange that respects a “three-fold metabolism (human-society-nature) that prioritizes life.8 Conversely, 21st century capitalism is all about a different kind of flow that is far from revolutionary: the rise of logistics and the subjection of people to a highly precarious flow of migratory movement and disposability. Workers are increasingly excluded from the benefits that modern capitalist “stocks” provide (food security, healthcare, transportation, and even life itself). Many of the flows represented in Romaand Temporada de huracanesare excessive, thrown out of joint in the pursuit of stocks, from plantation agriculture and oil to logging and hydro-electric energy. In reading how town and country are traversed and in tension in both, particularly through analyses of Mexican history as they appear (spectral as they sometimes may be in the texts), it becomes evident that repairing the real metabolic rift between town and country must not only be done but accomplished by also concurrently restructuring gendered reproductive labor.

Historical and Literary Natures

In Mexico, just how to achieve equitable distribution of land, labor, and water, along with successful food and energy systems, has also been long debated. For example, colonial and contemporary campesinos and elites alike have argued, albeit with different motivations, for the importance of the small agrarian community. Colonial paternalism gave way to 19th and 20th century developmentalism in the countryside, with reformers — who were often politicians and writers alike ¾ looking back to colonial structures, likecongregación,to modernize the countryside through the concentrated (more urban) agrarian community.9 In the 19th century national romance novels, even if not always as archetypal or formulaic as sometimes assumed, romantic unions were engaged to envision possible responses to 19th century agrarian crises. This was especially true of utopic socialist novels, which tended to essay gendered labor regimes as part of reform. Despite an ideological range — from conservatives to utopic socialists — elites routinely had agriculture of scale as the end game, which created its own kind of path dependency toward private property and what would become post-revolutionary capitalist agri-business.10/p>

There has thus been a growing tendency throughout Mexican history toward dispossession and land consolidation, even if it has experienced meaningful interruptions and resistance, through the drive to ever-expand “frontiers” of cheap nature. This darker side of romance and world-ecology is chronicled and exposed in mid twentieth century novels of Rosario Castellanos, José Revueltas, and Juan Rulfo. During the post-revolutionary period, there was a brief, yet genuine attempt under President Lázaro Cárdenas, to create a nation based on small landholdings in what would be the largest land reform in the history of the Americas ofejidal common lands.11 As part of colonial-turned-developmentalist schemes, land reform was accompanied by a cultural and social project to educate and modernize racialized peasants who were often perceived to be ignorant stewards of the land. As Mexico approached mid-century, a techno-scientific capitalist thought (that had been cultivated since the early modern period), with private-property always as its end goal, triumphed in the form of the Green Revolution, essentially abandoning the earlier commitment to develop a robust and productive small land holding agrarian system that would feed the entire nation. This disappointment, as previously mentioned, is captured in much mid-century literature. The Green revolution’s implementation set Mexico on a decisive path toward technologically intensive practices that affected everything from the introduction of and reliance on petroleum-based agrochemicals to massive dams for irrigation and energy production. Even though outputs grew at an unprecedented rate for a time, the system soon met ecological havoc, a dynamic painstakingly laid out by Moore’s oeuvre. Tore C. Olsson is quick to remind us, however, that it was not the technology itself that set Mexico on a path dependency toward big agribusiness, but a series of political choices (as had been the case in the previous century), particularly at elite levels.12

Romaand Temporadaboth hinge on the 1970s, when the Mexican Miracle — a time of unprecedented economic growth indebted in large part to oil extractivism and the Green Revolution — began a clear terminal descent. As such, both works are anti-romances, wherein the absence, breakdown, or impossibility of traditional heteronormative relationships, particularly of marital property relations, is everywhere and indicative of a post-1968 nation —construed through its countryside and city dynamic — in world-ecological crisis. In Roma,there is divorce, a child conceived out of wedlock, and abandonment. In Temporada,the Witch is trans, a young girl is raped and impregnated by her stepfather and forced to run away, two queer adolescent boys cannot accept their own desires, and a nameless grandfather figure digs the graves of the young. Through these personal stories, both detail a kind of narrative aftermath to state abandonment of the revolution’s most radical promises that in turn provoked deeper metabolic rifts of reproduction since the 1970s. This is not to suggest that if the traditional social order of heteropatriarchal marriage could be restored, crisis would be solved, but rather that the relations of social reproduction have been entirely upended, and in this chaos, a new, less patriarchal and propertied system must emerge between humans and beyond the state and capital, particularly where they exist as nature, concurrently with any technological or agrarian fixes.

Roma

Debuting in theaters and on Netflixin 2018,the high-grossing Romareceived accolades in the form of reviews and viewership, particularly for a foreign language film. Starring the first-time actor Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo, the Mixtec speaking nanny and domestic worker from Oaxaca, its acting, plot, and cinematography generated both acclaim and debate over how to reckon with race, family, and gender in Mexican history on multiple fronts. To continue these important discussions, the role of environment must also be brought into an analysis of the groundbreaking film, where fairly early on, the father abandons the family and leaves his wife, Sofía (and of course, Cleo), to pick up the pieces. Meanwhile, Cleo, gets pregnant from her boyfriend, who abandons her and turns out to be a member of a CIA trained paramilitary group that uses martial arts techniques to terrorize student protesters. She more or less continues about her daily life, doing care work Sofía and the family, until the PRI government under then-President Luis Echeverría Alvarez unleashes the death squad on protesters during the movie’s portrayal of the 1971 Corpus Christi Massacre. Although not explicitly linked as a town-country relation in the film, the student protests were in part a reaction to the state’s gradual abandonment of more radical Cardenista education projects and ecological autonomy forged in the 1930s and 40s. This highly urban movement, though, also had radical agrarian counterparts in the rural normal schools that served as hotbeds of guerrilla resistance for land rights and autonomy in the 1950s-1970s.13 The terror of the attack on student protesters induces labor in Cleo after she melodramatically faces her baby’s father as a killing machine in the crib section of a department store. Cleo struggles to make it to the hospital in a taxi stuck in traffic exacerbated by state violence, in a scene that dovetails with what actually happened that day, as the halconesstrategically blocked the metro and terrorized victims seeking help in the hospitals.14

As a natural condition of Cuaron’s lifestory, the film is set in the 1970s, but he also embeds historical context into the film to at times operate as political critique of the Mexican state’s paramilitarism and society and at others to address the question of nostalgia. All of the politics of the time, though, are woven into the personal life and domestic spaces of Cleo and the family she works for, as in the example above, and I contend that nature and environment operate as more than just a landscape or a setting meant to provoke nostalgia in the viewer. More specifically, the film portrays the way that the environmental question of stocks and flows that uphold Mexican world-ecology are contingent on Cleo’s ability to solve, even if temporarily, contradiction generating rifts, especially for her employer’s family to continue a lifestyle of upper middle-class abundance. Her body also physically endures the prolonged pain and terror of the blockage of flows caused by the halcones(and President Echeverría), who are ultimately quelling dissent to an era of ever-closing revolutionary political possibility in education and ejidal land reform. This is particularly evident in the domestic space of the home and hacienda, when Cleo accompanies Sofía and the kids on a short trip for New Year’s (before the birth), and on another trip to the beach (after her baby is stillborn). In larger structural terms only alluded to in the film, when the state-capitalist nexus fails to grant nature its autonomy by insisting on corralling and controlling both the stock and flow of water for capitalist agriculture and hydro-energy, it simultaneously restricts Cleo’s autonomy of labor. Water leaks, floods, and evaporates. It does not necessarily obey infrastructure, such as the vast system of water pumps installed by the Mexican state and its Green Revolution over the course of the 20th century that provided only the chimera of disciplining water. Now, the land/water relation is left either drought ridden, sinking, contaminated, or flooding.

Take for example the much-acclaimed opening motif, where artful closeups of soapy puddles of water reflect airplanes as modern wonders and the top of the house (where Cleo will also do the very traditional reproductive labor of laundry in the azotea’s stock of the pila). As the shot opens up, the water goes down a drain in the garage patio floor, and we hear Cleo declare her first lines, directed to the dog, “te vamos a bañar, Borras.” She turns off the spigot and winds up the hose, walks into the servant’s kitchen area, and closes the door on the camera whose gaze rests on two birdcages and potted plants, suggesting immediately the restricted and domesticated nature of the space. In this sense, the grand botanical gardens that were so central to empire and the domination of nature have been incorporated into the humble private 20th century home. Cleo is often restraining the dog from entering certain spaces or escaping into the street, while she and her best friend, also a domestic worker in the house, have to continuously clean dog shit off of the tiled garage floor lest they subject themselves to the father’s ire. These are not just mere plot points, but ways that Cleo opens or restricts movement to sustain the family structure. As Cleo struggles to keep the path clear of excrement, the dog’s natural need to defecate is presented as an excess for the refined (and confined) home that demands a wasteful daily mopping of the floor. It is Cleo who opens and closes the spigot to make the water flow and stop, who conveniently makes all of it — the poop and the dirty water — go away out of sight and out of mind. Sofía and her husband need not think about Mexico City’s ground slowly sinking under their home, as Cleo operates infrastructures that—despite their often-hidden appearance (i.e. sewage pipes) and near instant magical function—actually require human labor to make nature work in an equally subjugated state.

Not long after the opening scene, Cleo washes the dishes and another closeup settles on the water running down the kitchen sink drain, followed by another masterful sequence in which Cleo methodically walks around the first floor of the house turning off the lights one by one. The shot clues the audience into her routine before she goes to her candle lit room, but the contrast also puts into relief the historical moment of fossil fuel energy, where the grid can be controlled at will. Even so, Cleo’s status as a racialized laborer regulates and restricts the grid’s reach, as Sofía prevents her from using electricity in her own room after a certain hour. Such scenes can be read as microcosms of the energy grid that marries the heteronormative nuclear family home to the capitalist regime of social reproduction. The methodical routine of turning off the lights and the consistent scenes of water and its drainage speaks to the stability of having a standing reserve of electricity, water, and oil that requires a parallel system of capitalist reproductive labor and the home. It requires the reproduction of yet another system of bourgeois labor, which in the 1970s would increasingly need to absorb white upper middleclass women like Sofía and leave indigenous women like Cleo, to do the precarious reproductive work without anyone to reproduce them in turn. The death of her baby at the end makes this rather obvious, and whether she wanted her or not is beside the point, since the film does not really allow an exploration of those emotions that would be nearly impossible to parse out.15

The inclusion of the Halcones and the Corpus Christi massacre in 1971 is the most visible historical political reference in the film, but there are other examples that contribute to the politics of the time that are inseparable from environmental questions of aquatic flows. This history of state repression has little weight unless connected to what the state was trying to repress: agrarian and anti-capitalist movements demanding different rhythms of life and labor. One notable set of scenes when the family visits a friend’s hacienda for New Year’s Eve offers vague context to this history. As they arrive, the viewer sees signs demanding land rights posted on the surrounding stone wall. In another sequence, the white upper-class adult guests play-act being guerrillas or joke in English about murdering them as they engage in target practice and the kids run around chaotically behind them in the woods and through large stagnant puddles or ponds. The parents fire their guns over a small stagnant pond, and while the camera zooms out, it never does a full 180 pan to the landscape to show where their bullets land. Its field of vision simply rests over the pond, the stagnancy of which perhaps symbolizes the continuity of colonial history of domination and violent primitive accumulation of land (and water). The workers who are present minutes earlier are made invisible, just like the guerrillas the elite imagine murdering, rendering the relation with those who have been dispossessed equally invisible, as capitalist environment-making regimes are wont to do.16 Other indigenous servants, at different moments, however, remind the viewer that the elite violence is real and on-going, such as when one woman shows Cleo the master’s taxidermy dog murdered over a land dispute, and when another explains that a campesino activist they know has been assassinated. On one hand, both brief anecdotes show the imbalance of the stakes, where the hacienda owner continues to live and can catalogue his power in trophied form, but the human campesino is dead. On the other hand, it also speaks to the hacendado’s propensity to catalogue, curate, and display nature in an act of power, not unrelated to the colonial projects of museums, botanical gardens, and taxonomy.

Later that night, there is a fire on the hacienda that the elite accuse local campesinos of setting, again highlighting the colonial tensions of the Mexican dirty war simmering beneath the surface. The children and racialized workers do most of the work carrying buckets of water out to the field and dousing the fire, as the drunken adult elite watch on, barking orders, including one who is dressed as the Krampus and starts singing a song in Norwegian amidst the flames. The scene is one of the most surreal of the film, with the song itself about missing one’s homeland left unexplained.<17 More importantly, Cleo mirrors his nostalgia by mentioning her own longing for Oaxaca to another servant the following morning while on a walk through the hacienda fields to the “falda” of the mountains. The landscape is an entirely colonial ecology, with the valleys farmed in their orderly rows and with square plots, with the wooded mountains surrounding them. The elite kids have never heard of “la falda de un cerro,” [the “skirt” or foothills of the mountain] perhaps because mountain landscapes are frequently indexed as “Indian” in the Mexican imagination. One little elite boy in training even quips about assault, “Alex, el cerro tiene falda. Si nos agachamos, podemos verle los calzones” [Alex, the mountain has a skirt. If we crouch down, we can see [its/her] panties]. Cleo, as an indigenous woman, then occupies this falda space as she climbs a ridge and recounts, “Sabes, se parece a mi pueblo. Claro, allá está seco, pero se parece. Y así, igual, hacen los animales. Y así suena. Y así huele.” [You know, it seems like my town. Clearly, it’s dry there, but it’s similar. And like that, the animals do just the same. And it sounds like this. And it smells like this].

No matter where she is—town or country—colonial socio-ecological relations are present, and the scenery doesn’t change except that here the elite have more water. Notably, massive dam projects of the time, like that of the Miguel Alemán Dam in Oaxaca, would privilege lower basin large landholders in Veracruz and displace thousands of indigenous Oaxacans.18 At the same time, this particular hacienda scene shows a decadent elite that have no apparent need for urban infrastructures of on-demand water, sewage, and irrigation lines, for their peons manage the stocks and flows not via spigots, but with buckets and shear strength, displaying the “unevenness” of the world-system that is nevertheless deeply “modern.” These elites fantasize about violent dominance in jest and live out real violence through land theft and labor exploitation that the peons still carry out for them (i.e. Cleo’s indigenous ex-boyfriend massacres his own people). The nostalgia pulsing throughRoma, which is of course Cuarón’s nostalgia for his childhood, is also present in the nostalgia of the characters, and it has an incommensurable and violent note to it insofar as Cleo is nostalgic for another kind of possibly colonial and violent ecology. For while she may have been the product of displacement or state abandonment of agrarian resources to communal lands, she also may have come from an hacienda system of peonage in Oaxaca (we have no way of knowing in the film). In order to truly heal the longing Cleo has for her homeland of Oaxaca and the wounds in the land, the town/country division must be dissolved, and its infrastructures and labor regimes reconceived. This new world would depend on entirely different relations of social reproduction (and therefore, between humans and nature) that must upend colonial-capitalist private property, and its flows of land, labor, and water. This would likely depend on a new security politics, as well, which the movie leaves open ended through these passing references to armed agrarian and student struggle.

In this same sequence of hacienda scenes, tension between the country and the city are further represented through fluids, water, and puddles. At a celebration in the servant’s quarters of the hacienda, for example, Cleo drops a shot glass of pulque on the stone floor and shatters it. The camera zooms in again on this puddle like all the others before, symbolically presaging the traumatic birth of her stillborn baby, after another indigenous woman with whom she’s sitting teases her for having acclimated too much to city life. Cleo is herself caught between both the city and country, as indicative from the teasing, but also in that the elder indigenous woman offers her mezcal and pulque, both indexed as indigenous drinks. Cleo expresses doubt about whether or not she should for the health of her baby, but the woman counters that just a bit is actually good for the baby (echoing a more indigenous sentiment over the medicinal nature of a little mezcal), and that it is equally important to celebrate life and the New Year. The woman stresses this when she points out that a man’s son has just been murdered in a land dispute, connecting agrarian crises of the 1970s to death in both the country (the assassinated son) and the city (Cleo’s baby). That Cleo opts for pulque over mezcal could also be read as her choosing the more capitalino option, as working class pulquerías cropped up across Mexico City in its 20th-century population boom and mezcal, until recently, remained a more peripheral phenomenon. Nevertheless, she maintains an ambivalence over her town/country subjectivity throughout.

Puddles factor in again when she visits the father of her baby in a slum, carefully stepping over pools of stagnant water. Here hardly any infrastructure provides the stocks and flows of clean running water (even as PRI government propaganda promises to bring it over the loudspeaker in the background). When she finds the father of her baby, he is training in a field for what will arguably be one of several climaxes of the film, the halconazo,that induces her tragic labor. The puddles are always indicative of infrastructures and labor out of joint with life itself; puddles represent that which should be flowing is stagnant and that which should be in reserve is flowing. The urban Mexico City home, the outer slums, and the rural hacienda are all pocked with non-potable puddles in one way or another. The film thus connects capitalist energy regimes with the violence of the state, since it was during the mid-century “Mexican Miracle” that the state invested in massive dams for energy, irrigation, and development, dispossessing many in the process. If neglected “backwater” areas, like the shanty town in the movie, had more state infrastructure, it wouldn’t necessarily change the political dynamics for the poor, just as it doesn’t for Cleo because such spaces must be devalued in capitalism’s ecological regime. Capitalism and its environment making create tragic puddles in both the city and the country, there is never a flow between them. The regime depends on Cleo’s ability to tragically move between both to soothe the contradiction generating rift, all for the sake of a capitalist value that does not value her life or its reproduction.

Finally, when read generously, the iconic ocean scene of the movie might allow for a meditation on a world where nature’s autonomy exists alongside that of labor to more fully value reproductive labor. Cleo joins the family on a short trip to the beach shortly after her baby is stillborn, even though she can barely manage to speak (the children tease that she has gone “mute”). Sofía uses the vacation to finally break the news to her children that their father will be moving out, and she will be returning to work (again made possible by Cleo’s domestic labor). Despite their mother’s warning to stay close to the shore, the children predictably go too far and are overcome in the waves. Cleo, who cannot swim, heroically wades out to save them, and as they all catch their breath in a melodramatic embrace, Cleo cathartically cries “no la quería!,” [I didn’t want her!]referring to her baby.In the car ride home, they all express love for each other and seem to mean it. While the trip and the ocean’s riptide symbolically mark the upending of the prior male breadwinner family relation, in the end, Sofia restores internal social relations to their hierarchical order, this time with her as the head of house, in an act of (post)colonial continuity. In this instance, a nature apart from humans (an undercurrent) acts on humans and has social consequences and creates, for a time, a shifted metabolic social arrangement with the family. Nevertheless, the ocean scene reminds us that water’s ungovernable characteristics cannot always be disciplined by humans. The scene asks us more than ever to consider what might happen if Cleo refused the reproductive activities, processes, and rhythms of all kinds that were not lifegiving to her. The film suggests otherwise, of course, but its tragic nature allows for us to consider what doesn’t happen and what could.

Temporada de huracanes

Set amidst cane and oil fields not far from the Atlantic coast, Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes has been hailed for its gritty portrayal of contemporary violence in Mexico, which for the most part is rendered as interpersonal and domestic violence. That such violence is clearly ingrained in structural issues isn’t exactly lost on the novel, but references to historical or systemic violence and suffering are resigned to more vague notions of police and corporate corruption. Some, such as Marcos Eduardo Ávalos Reyes and Jafte Dilean Robles Lomelí suggest that this is a purposeful feature of the novel, and that through rumor, which I’ll return to in a moment, Melchor is recreating the fragmented ability to register violence into words, subjectivity, and truth.19 However, I am interested in more fully excavating the novel’s presentation of historical socio-ecological processes of reproduction for their political implications. By exploring how gendered reproductive labor is central to metabolic rift and its rebalance, the more material limitations and possibilities of solidarity presented in the novel may be unearthed and put into relation with language, rather than readings that seek a vague solidarity or hope through language or narrative alone.

If Cleo’s labor in Romacould still partially resolve the eco-social crises of a post-1970s Mexico, and where brief moments of Cleo’s urban independence as a young woman and indigenous transplant to Mexico City are shown as a kind of nostalgic joy in doing things like going to the movies (a state backed cultural initiative of the era), then Temporada’sgothic tone is indicative of a more fully neoliberal regime of gendered reproductive labor that is ultimately unable to suture contradictory rifts. Considering the novel as gothic, a resurgent genre in Latin American culture in recent years, helps to more clearly identify how colonialism continues to operate in the novel, and how it signals a present season of excessive flows where everyone is awash in an even deeper despair and precarity than in Roma’s nostalgic, but no less violent, register.20 Through capitalism’s creation of stocks gone fully awry in the present moment, Temporadabecomes a nightmarish scene of pure violent flows. In this way, hurricane season names not just ‘normal’ cyclical disaster, but an epochal and particularly violent moment of late capitalism where excessive flows spill out of the historical attempts to prioritize capitalist stocks that have been 500 years in the making. In a more cyclically balanced ecosystem, stocks and flows would not be at odds with one another, but complimentary ways of sustaining human and non-human life that also attended to less oppressive rhythms of reproductive labor. The opening of the book, for example, explains the recent history of the town through the Witches’ gothic manor by grounding it in a foundational colonial violence that takes the reader from gendered primitive accumulation all the way to a groundless neoliberal dispossession and precarity. In what follows, I read the novel through three characters and how they can be mapped onto historical flows of Mexican history: 1) the witches who are dispossessed by eco-social disaster and enclose themselves, 2) in the story of a young runaway Norma that gives way to the aftermath of rumor, murder, and death; and 3) a nameless grandfather figure who expands the narrative beyond the personal to mass graves.

What are no doubt world-ecological regimes also appear in the novel as classic economic modes of production: sugarcane fields (worked by slaves and then peons, migrant, or seasonal labor), oil fields (employing mainly only skilled workers to the chagrin of the townspeople), and informal markets (from roadside stands to sex work) and organized crime (low level laborers and recruits to police and higher level corrupt government officials). These latter two are arguably provoked by the other first two regimes of sugar and water. Between the mountains to the west and the “eternally raging waters” of the Atlantic, the landscape is described as weedy and unruly [“vines that grew with rapacious speed during the rainy season and threatened to overwhelm homes and crops alike”], which the young migrant and virile cane cutters must constantly keep at bay with their machetes. This tracks with many colonial and neocolonial descriptions of the tropical environment as saturated with life but unruly. But it also could be interpreted as the “negative value” mentioned by Moore where superweeds have become a dominate force in a post Green Revolution ecology.

If interpretation is left open to both possibilities, we can see how the creation of capitalist organizations of nature that destabilize ecosystems become codified in colonial and environmentally racist terms. The Witch enjoys spying on the cane workers as they work and bathe in a nearby river for her sexual pleasure, and at least some of the men know it and maybe even enjoy the voyeurism. Here the sexual desire by the river mirrors the unrestrained virility of the lush landscape during the rainy season in ways that echo gothic environmental determinism and consequential downfall of the landed estate provoked by haunting Caribbean women (as in Jane Eyre). But in reality, the Witch and the townspeople have very little power to act, and even though desire is everywhere in the novel, the characters are often impotent sexually and politically. They are very much subject to the flows of the river, the weather currents that bring hurricanes, the shifting land beneath their feet, and the circuit of capital, so much so, in fact, that the Witch’s body will be disposed of in the cane mill’s irrigation canal.

More than metaphor, this deathly story is not without real environmental history. In this way, the townspeople’s precarity is a function, or better yet a contradictory externality, of elite capitalist attempts to make stocks (reserves) of cane and oil that narratively fall on the body as a final site of exploitation. More specific to Veracruz’s history is the massive mid-century Papaloapan dam project undertaken to provide hydroelectricity and control the routine flooding of agricultural lands. Like many other mid-century projects, it had more revolutionary roots, and while it did improve flooding for a time, it ultimately failed to prevent serious floods and landslides in the 60s and 70s, leading to the construction of yet another dam — the Miguel Alemán — to ecologically destructive ends (such as the drying of Oaxacan waterways previously mentioned that may have dispossessed someone like Cleo in Roma). Despite Veracruz having had some of the most radical peasant movements, according to Olsson, in the end, the Papaloapan irrigation project almost entirely benefitted larger sugar growers in the lower basin. Over the 1970s, the state shifted fully into techno-scientific irrigation projects from Central Mexico into the North to fully pursue large corporate agribusiness.21

In the novel, this history is personalized as it explains how the original Witch came to be in possession of the gothic estate when her husband and stepsons suddenly and mysteriously die. The circumstances immediately cast doubt on her as deserving of the land, echoing the way that social relations really did work to dispossess women of land and power, as Silvia Federici has famously argued of early modern witch hunts.22 The hacienda mansion is described as gothic and incomplete, and to survive, the witch collects rent but is not really involved in the means of production, nor, despite rumor of a great treasure hidden in the house, does she accumulate capital or personal wealth.23 It is revealed that some years later she had a daughter, known simply to the reader as “The Young Witch,” who is the likely product of rape by local men. Together the two manage the estate and an informal apothecary business for local women to acquire tinctures, particularly for abortions. Their medicinal abilities and strange demeanor are the primary source of continued rumor for any supernatural powers they might possess, which are linked to their supposedly mad wandering over geographies indexed as indigenous or marooned, as the narrative voice explains that the abortifacient herb is found at the top of a mountain, home to pre-Columbian temples and where “los antiguos, los pocos que quedaban, tuvieron que agarrar pa’ la sierra” [the ancients, the last few who were left, had run for the hills.”]24 At the same time, the Witches’ freedom of movement is contrasted all the same with their confinement to their ominous manor (not unlike so many other gothic women characters).

Instead of overtly violent processes of enclosure by elites, the old witch begins to enclose herself in the house as protection against the omnipresent threats of assault and plunder by her own townsfolk, who have an ambivalent stance toward the Witches and envision them as sexually deviant from the beginning. In Melchor’s novel, the town crassly imagines The Witch to have aberrant sex with a horned devil, particularly after she swears off men and marriage, but for a time, she lives off the townswomen supporting her with food in exchange for herbs, supported by the reproductive labor of her strong and capable daughter and the garden they both tend. According to So Mayer, as part of enclosure, witches were accused along with European Jews of having horns, a parallel made more striking “considering the forced position of European Jews as money-lenders,” which happens when the Young Witch takes up the role of moneylender to make a living for her and her mother, since there is no other means of survival.25 Similar distrust of non-Christian and racialized traditions is briefly mentioned when one of the novel’s characters also makes reference to the local Church’s disdain for the Afro-indigenous superstitions that pervade daily life, making a connection between primitive accumulation, witch hunts, and racialized labor regimes of colonialism. Furthermore, the young Witch is trans, and homophobia and transphobia will prove to be main drivers of the narrative arc. In the beginning, the men fear them, and while the women begrudge having to pay for The Witch’s services, and eventually the predatory moneylending practices instituted by the astute Young Witch, they are also indebted both literally and emotionally to not just the Witches’ herbs, but to the protected domestic space of the dilapidated mansion where the townswomen can air their many woes of hardship.

After the old Witch dies in the 1978 hurricane and landslide on the very same mountain that once provided relative ecological and reproductive autonomy, the Young Witch (who from this moment on in the novel is referred to as The Witch) carries on with the business and her mother’s garden but becomes increasingly commodified and loses autonomy as shetransitions from moneylender to sex worker and then paying for sex herself. This mimics Federici’s argument that women’s dominion over reproductive process became criminalized and contributed to the “accumulation of differences” of gendered, raced, and classed hierarchies.26 Such persecution came at a time of European enclosure when elites wanted to build a population of surplus labor, and so women who attempted to control their reproduction, partnerships, and relationships to nature became particularly heretical. As women and racialized peoples, alongside the reproductive labor they perform, are rendered closer to nature under capitalist exploitation, as Moore and many other Marxist-feminists have argued, so too are they internally divided “within a single household” and devalued along with a nature constructed as external. Both indigenous peoples and then the witches are not only dispossessed from the herb hill by social othering that makes this connection to nature seem deviant, but through the ecological disaster that will make way for the oil company to further monopolize the town economy. In other words, despite their “witchcraft,” they are unable to protect themselves, and as I’ll show in a moment, others, from the violent flows of capitalist ecologies.

The townspeople in all their misery do not practice any kind of collective political solidarity with The Witch, or with each other, in that they do not organize to occupy the cane fields, for example, and likely environmental destruction from nearby oil fields is left unchronicled. Most of the men are motivated by the fabled treasure hidden somewhere in the Witches’ house, that in part drives waves of attempted and achieved violence against them. Early on, the novel mentions that the men at the sugar mill from whom they collect a modest rent [were]:

…aguardaban un descuido de las Brujas para despojarlas con argucias legales, aprovechando que no había papeles, que no había hombre alguno que las defendiera, aunque ni falta que les hacía por la Chica quién sabe cómo había aprendido a negociar los dineros, y era tan cabrona que incluso un día se apareció por la cocina a ponerle precio a las consultas…

[…just waiting for the day the witches slipped up so they could be legally evicted, taking advantage of the fact there was no paperwork and not a man alive would come to their defense, but in fact they didn’t need anyone because the Girl, God knows how, had taught herself to manage their finances, and so tight was her hold on the purse strings that she even showed up one day in the kitchen to put a price on the townswomen’s consultations…]27

It is striking, however, that no one in the town who isn’t a landowner is after the Witches’ landand can only imagine petty plunder.In other words, the men and the women in the novel, mostly reduced to laborers in the cane fields or in the informal economy, cannot imagine occupying land for themselves (even if ill-begotten), much less redistributing it for the community as a whole. Instead, they can only imagine further primitive accumulation and theft of what can be easily sold for cash or selling their own bodies (commodity exchange and no production). What little autonomy the townswomen had left over, natural rhythms (recourse to the Witch’s herbs and the space of her home), is short circuited by her murder. For her part, The Witch is far from a manipulative sorceress and is instead subsumed as someone who both receives payment and pays for sex after the boys and men at the bar convert her pleasure into a commodity by suggesting that “she’d likely pay for it.” She is literally a commodified conduit as both buyer, seller, product, and laborer. Worse still, her lands are not really her own anymore, and in the end, while the townspeople and religious folk do not burn her at the stake, she is more intimately murdered by two young queer men and secret lovers, Brando and Luismi. For Brando, engaging in queer sex with the Witch is ultimately less about her deviance or his desire and more about his self-hating machismo. For Luismi, he mourns a possible connection he could have had with Norma, a young runaway impregnated by her stepfather, by helping her raise the baby.

The case of Norma, for example, and the Witch’s attempts to help her have an abortion, further illustrate flows out of balance and the limitations of reproductive labor to solve eco-social contradiction. When the Witch gives her a tincture to abort the fetus, Luismi seeks revenge for his own aborted possibility of a heteronormative family that he is conditioned to see as the only escape from his suffering as a queer man. A more imaginative possibility, in contrast, might allow Luismi and Norma to form family together without the expectation of sex, where Norma’s freedom of choice is honored, and where Luismi could be with another such as Brando, The Witch, or both. Instead, after The Witch’s murder, her assassins Luismi and Brando are in jail together, and Norma is thrust into the abusive hands of the state medical apparatus and government oversight after her abortion leads to serious infection. Although The Witch begged Norma to stay under her care and expertise to carry out the procedure, Luismi’s mother refuses and leaves her to suffer alone and away from the care of a knowledgeable Witch figure in yet another case of solidarity and reproductive labor’s life-giving potential short circuited.

Although it remains at the level of metaphor, it is worth mentioning that before Norma sees a way to get her basic needs met via Luismi and his family and pursues abortion, she considers killing herself on the seaside cliffs, subjecting her body and life to the violent will of the waves. This symbolism mirrors her actual insertion into the logistical flow of capital’s disposable populations, seeing no exit out of a working-class patriarchal order in Tabasco to Mexico’s south and no entrance into the stable middle-class upheld by stocks of the capitalist oil regimes and extraction that surround her in Veracruz. While Luismi and Norma’s relationship is arguably the most tender of the novel, it is characterized by tenuous understanding and communication, and similarly Brando’s sexual experience with Luismi is not exactly consensual. They all fail to use language to articulate their needs, and when the novel does more fully shift to Norma’s perspective, her immediate hunger and thirst frame her ability to gloss her entire sordid backstory to form an uneasy connection with Luismi.28 In the end, this is all Luismi ever knows of her previous life and her present needs. As Bernes’ notes, socioecological change may well be motivated first by the anthropocentric requirement to feed oneself, and it rings true here in that this material need for sustenance is the only one that creates a relation even approaching solidarity.

The second to last chapter, rather than one of linguistic blocks where characters fail to communicate or find more precise language, revolves around the feminized device of flowing rumor as it lays out a laundry list of heinous acts and reflections recounted through a stream of consciousness narrative prefaced with “They say…” As another out of control free-flow, in its content and literary form, the women’s rumors and folk-horror tales similarly struggle to patch over crises of reproduction with both the social relations of language and material practices, even if rumor and warning offer a temporary stay to protect their children. For example, consider the final page of the chapter recounting the state of the town:

Dicen que por eso las mujeres andan nerviosas, sobre todo las de La Matosa. Dicen que por las tardes se reúnen en los zaguanes de sus casas a fumar cigarros sin filtro y a mecer a los críos más pequeños entre sus brazos, soplando el humo picante sobre sus tiernas coronillas para espantarles a los moscos bravos, y disfrutar el poco fresco que alcanza a subir del río, cuando el pueblo al fin se queda callado y apenas se escucha a lo lejos la música de los congales al borde de la carretera y el rugido de los camiones que se dirigen a los pozos petroleros y el aullido de los perros llamándose como lobos de un extremo a otro de la llanura; la hora en que las mujeres se sientan a contar historias mientras vigilan con más atención el cielo, en busca de aquel extraño animal blanco que se posa sobre los árboles más altos y lo contempla todo con cara de querer advertirles algo. …Que les cuenten a sus hijos por qué no deben entrar a buscar el tesoro, y mucho menos acudir en bola con los amigos a recorrer las habitaciones ruinosas... Que respeten el silencio muerto de aquella casa, el dolor de las desgracias que ahí se vivieron. Eso es lo que dicen las mujeres del pueblo: que no hay tesoro ahí dentro, que no hay oro ni plata ni diamantes ni nada más que un dolor punzante que se niega a disolverse.

[They say that’s why the women are on edge, especially in La Matosa. They say that, come evening, they gather on their porches to smoke filterless cigarettes and cradle their youngest babes in their arms, blowing their peppery breath over those tender crowns to shoo away the mosquitos, basking in what little breeze reaches them from the river, when at last the town settles into silence and you can just about make out the music coming from the highway brothels in the distance, the rumble of the trucks as they make their way to the oilfields, the baying of dogs calling each other like wolves from one side of the plain to the other; the time of evening when the women sit around telling stories with one eye on the sky, looking out for that strange white bird that perches on the tallest trees and watches them with a look that seems to want to tell them something…That they mustn’t go inside the Witch’s house, probably…A look warning them not to let their children go looking for that treasure, not to dream of going down there with their friends to rummage through those tumble-down rooms, or to see who’s got the balls to enter the room upstairs at the back and touch the stain left by the Old Witch’s corpse on the filthy mattress…To respect the dead silence of that house, the pain of the miserable souls who once lived there. That’s what the women in town say: there is no treasure in there, no gold or silver or diamonds or anything more than a searing pain that refuses to go away.]29

Contrasts of stocks and flows abound, from the unabated toxicity of filterless cigarettes to the near stagnant breeze from the river, from drifting noise of an oil economy and its brothels to the silence of a gothic house and its women. The barking dogs and “the hour when women sit to tell stories” is quite possibly a subtle homage to Rulfo’s barking dogs of No oyes ladrar los perros that indicate life and civilization after a long trek through the desert, and to Pedro Páramo’s “it was the hour of the day when children come out to play…” Comala, the town in Pedro Páramo, has no children or future, it is full of only the dead and their murmurs of the past. Although the barking dogs in No oyesprovide signs hope that a father will be able to get his wounded son help in time, he dies just before reaching the town. While the women continue to tell stories amidst the bustle of capitalist activity, Melchor is also recounting fatal violence whose story is hidden by silence. The women want to protect their children, but in many ways the town’s lifecycle has already stalled, too, not just because of violence, but also because the oil fields will be in direct conflict with life indicated by the barking dogs. For the women, the only action left is to leave the house and its history in dead silence. Its walls and its cadavers do not speak, unlike the dead in Comala. The strange white bird is presumably the Witch, and it would like to speak, but the townswomen refuse to listen to its warnings given over the sound of trucks headed to and from the oil fields. Instead, they presume (“probably”) that it means they must avoid the history of the house and its possibilities, and they refuse to grapple with its pain. Robles Lomelí suggests that this fragmented style of gossip allows for the townspeople to form a kind of solidarity by narrativizing that which exceeds the official Mexican historical account and the ability to put into words such excessive violence and abjection. While the women may issue their own kind of warning to protect their children from the pursuit of treasure and the violence it will most certainly bring, only confrontation with the history of the house, its lands, the mountainside, and the gendered and racialized people who have worked and inhabited those spaces will ultimately achieve social protection.

Solidarity is thus still highly limited and within the rumor, deterministic ideas about environment preface the state of the town, as if to condition possibility:

Dicen que la plaza anda caliente, que ya no tardan en mandar a los marinos a poner orden en la comarca. Dicen que el calor está volviendo loca a la gente, que cómo es posible que a estas alturas de mayo no haya llovido una sola gota. Que la temporada de huracanes se viene fuerte. Que las malas vibras son las culpables de tanta desgracia: decapitados, descuartizados, encobijados, embolsados que aparecen en los recodos de los caminos o en fosas cavadas con prisa en los terrenos que rodean las comunidades.

[They say the place is hot, that it won’t be long before they send in the marines to restore order in the region. They say the heat’s driven the locals crazy, that it’s not normal – May and not a single drop of rain – and that the hurricane season’s coming hard, that it must be bad vibes, jinxes, causing all the bleakness: decapitated bodies, maimed bodies, rolled-up, bagged-up bodies dumped on the roadside or in hastily dug graves on the outskirts of town.]30

This is the only reference in the whole novel to possible climate change, that weather patterns are amiss, and that hurricane season — which increasingly stands in for the heightened flows of capitalist violence—has intensified. It recalls an old racializing trope that environment, particularly in hot tropical climes, drives impulsive and violent behavior in Latin America, modernized with the Gen Z speak of “bad vibes.” The marines will be a top-down corrupt force that imposes violence on top of violence, but then the hurricane will also come, and wreak havoc with consequences that no one can yet foresee. In Melchor, the hurricane approaches as an ominous threat from which the people lack protection (i.e. infrastructure), but it is capitalist social relations that allowed nature to become human-made disasters that devastate them. In other words, bad vibes, just like miasma of yore, did not cause all the suffering and violence, rather all the violence caused bad vibes and deathscapes.

In an expansion from the personal narratives of the Witches, Norma, and their lovers and families, the novel concludes with an unknown grandfather character acting like a subcontractor for the state to help it dispose of an overwhelming number of bodies, the common casualties of everyday violence in Mexico. He ruminates on the importance of talking to them and covering them up just in time before the rains come, so that they can find their way “to the light.” Rain and water are cast as purifying and hopeful storm breaks, but to what end is never speculated. Collectivity, it seems, can only be conjured in death from a mass grave, and the light at the end of the tunnel is dim. There are no stocks, no stability, not even the mass grave is a reserve or resting place, rather it is only a temporary place for passage into some light filled beyond. Everything and everyone is a flow, a conduit, a passing storm, a landslide, from migrant laborers to pumping oil wells, from sex workers to the dead still not at rest, to the memory and its language of gossip—the ultimate linguistic flow. The grandfather tries to protect the bodies from the rain and give them a peaceful burial precisely so they cannot haunt the living, as if to say their histories should be buried and gone forever, but their histories are ones of Mexican capitalism’s insistence on violent circulation that evades the ecological and social necessity of finding more lifegiving balances between stocks and flows.31 Unlike the murmurs of Comala, the dead do not speak, and the living struggle to form narrative, for both are even further removed from life in reciprocity with the land. Their seamless passage requires protection from the earthly and chaotic flow of hurricane rain as if there were no way for the living to learn from the dead and their past ecologies. But one wonders what would happen if the dead could encounter the hurricane of the living, and instead, if new balances between stocks and flows, humans and nature, town and country, could be forged by new relations of production, rather than ephemeral rumor, that do acknowledge history and memory.

While Melchor’s novel is bleak, the focus on interpersonal and familial breakdown set against the backdrop of colonial plunder, sugar plantations, the Mexican Petro-state, and the imperial Green Revolution’s highly engineered regimes, provides a prescient analysis of the need to upend reproductive labor regimes in the establishment of anti-capitalist eco-communist possibilities. Speculative, perhaps even utopic, narratives modes would be welcome counters to rumor since rumor is notorious for distortions as it loses or gains content and intent in the act of transference. It doesn’t just accompany a dysfunctional eco-social metabolism, but it also contributes to unstable flows where community members cannot forge new systems of care and reproduction with more direct intention and language until the real violence stops. What could be a revolutionary site (the Witches’ house, their lands), becomes one of gossip and gothic horror. None of the tension and destruction would have come to a head if queer desire, love, and labor had been recognized, rather than shamed and made a site of capitalist division and control, hearsay and warning; if women had autonomy over their bodies, lives, lovers, and reproduction; and if a land ethic existed, it might function to support all of the above. At the same time, a greater connection between the epoch making and autonomous waters of hurricanes, rivers, and other flows, and an attempt to actually face world-ecological history of La Matosa,seems like the only option to forge a new, more collective epoch beyond the tragic time of the narrative.

Conclusion

Mexican elites have for centuries drawn up plans for Mexico’s gendered and racialized town and country dynamic, often responding to earlier metabolic rifts caused by colonization that persist today. Despite a thread throughout Mexican history of movements vying for communal lands and lifegiving institutions of social reproduction, ideologies and practices have consistently given way to exploitative arrangements of private property and large landholdings that are in turn environment making world-ecological regimes. This can be seen in debates over early colonial congregación and large encomienda and hacienda ownership, to revolutionary and developmentalist land distribution, water rights, and education. The Mexican state-capitalist nexus seems increasingly unable and unwilling to solve socio-ecological contradictions, leaving this task largely to gendered and racialized laborers, adrift in extreme capitalist flows, to solve mounting contradictions.

Path dependency of colonial infrastructures that drain the countryside of people and nutrients and destabilize the city through contamination and precarity, and attempts to forge new metabolic paths in response, has is in many ways been at the heart of Mexican history and cultural production. In both Romaand Temporada,Mexico is on the precipice or has fully transitioned into a late capitalist model of state abandonment, and a nostalgic return to the rural community is not possible. In response to land consolidation, displacement, and grand infrastructural schemes, personal stories of human suffering have consistently also been eco-social ones. Even though Romaand Temporada are not stand alone works of eco-fiction, their shared focus on the gendered, laboring body as the site of world-ecological exploitation that mediates, often unsuccessfully or to tragic ends, are products of Mexico’s historic metabolic rifts.

For example, both texts feature reproduction in its most obvious form, childbirth, as they juxtapose more community-based care practices with state-based hospital systems that are portrayed as alien, threatening, and directly tied to racialized state power in the city and the country. This contrast is evident in Romathrough Cleo’s multiple interactions with other indigenous women in the sequence of hacienda scenes, who lovingly tease more than once about her pregnancy and working too hard in the same breath as they question whether or not she speaks English yet. Meanwhile, her traumatic hospital experience in Mexico City and patronizing treatment by Sofía and her mother do not prove lifegiving, suggesting that the movement from Oaxaca to Mexico City itself is deadly. Temporada’sNorma — herself in a liminal adolescent child/adult worker status — is abused, neglected, or misunderstood by everyone, including the state when nurses shame her for the sins of her father, representing the contradiction of the post-developmentalist state’s impulse to both reproduce the gendered capitalist laborer as in earlier capitalist epochs and also leave them for dead in a politics of disposability. Norma’s body registers the hunger and thirst that are the product of alienation from subsistence. Neither Cleo or Norma can return home to traditional midwives and care networks because these have been broken, and violence awaits them everywhere, it seems. No longer of either an entirely rural or urban ecology, Cleo expresses an ambivalence about her home in Oaxaca and her life in Mexico City. More eco-stable Mexican futures might not ask people to choose between both or seek to make the countryside in the image of the city, but rather, would aim to solve the divide between town and country and stocks and flows instead.

In more directly political terms, Jasper Bernes’ essay In the Belly of the Revolution,outlines the way that much contemporary green thought falls prey to path dependency or has not considered how access to food and energy will continue to be mechanisms of death and domination, survival and freedom in what will likely be a messy, rather than spontaneously clean, break with capitalism. In sum, agricultural and energy technology is path bound to capitalism and not capable of political transformation in and of itself — only “the reorganization of human society prompts a reorganization of nature.” Similarly, the rising cost and negative value described in Moore may not be enough to precipitate or prepare for kinds of community or infrastructure required to meet social need.32 To break with path dependency, Bernes’ point is that people will construct an emergent eco-communism that turns more toward the flow, not out of an ecological sensibility per se, but a self-interested pursuit of basic needs, like hunger, thirst, and possibly, security. In order to make flows like wind and solar power capable of holding a stock of energy for the grid, the political will and socio-ecological impact of mining and procuring such technologies may be anything but revolutionary. Andreas Malm’s vision, for example, requires massive state and international cooperation. “One must imagine, then,” writes Bernes, “either an international political elite willing and able to act in the interest of human life in general, or a social movement capable of exerting massive pressure on the state. The first scenario is absurd, and the second returns us to the question of motives and the belatedness of action.”33Bernes therefore questions to what degree capitalist technology or statist solutions will ever be able to confront climate and capitalist catastrophe, since most are tied up with capitalism by infrastructural and social design (path dependency), such that they would either no longer be possible at all or have little revolutionary possibility.

If any of the communities in both works did band together, certainly it would be belated, since what they portray is a general lack of class solidarity and a neoliberal individualism that causes absolute misery. Nevertheless, where struggle does seem like it could emerge is in the rhythms of reproductive regimes needed to feed, cloth, and shelter themselves, therein reclaiming time and nature (space, land and resources) in accordance with energy flows: “Though certain systems will require continuous energy, communism will prove itself much better able to adapt to the rhythms of flow energy, turning machines off and encouraging afternoon naps, perhaps, when the clouds cover the sun or the wind dies.” (359). Cleo is never afforded afternoon naps, made apparent as she does the laundry on the rooftop and quips to the boy, who is presumably portraying young Cuarón, that she, too, might like to play dead with him just to have a rest. Whether we call it eco-communism as Bernes, or eco-socialism as Fraser, matters less than the need and possibility for social planning that would be more life giving, in particular recognition of capitalism’s insurmountable internal contradictions of eco-social crisis, to which gendered and racialized social reproduction is inextricably linked. Other social relations and political economies are likewise capable of ecological imbalance, but they do not necessarily carry such internal contradictions as a pre-condition.34 In excavating all of the world-ecological histories in each text and their respective locales, past struggles — so many of which had social plans to more sustainably and equitably exist with the whole of nature (including other humans) — gesture toward what must be remembered and what must be done, even if present narratives struggle to articulate such plans themselves.

In Mexico, this would entail continued collective efforts to reclaim land that provides sustenance with a commitment to small landholding, agro-ecological methods of water and land management, and the affirmation of non-patriarchal work toward more expansive spheres of gendered labor (perhaps making them more flexible or abolishing them all together). Culture and social movements that help excavate prior movements’ struggles can play a crucial role in questioning renewed discourses of a Green Revolution 2.0, advocated for by powerful elites in the likes of the Gates Foundation. As Brian Whitener’s essay in this issue argues, looking to other past and present movements to develop a politics of security that helps sustain communal life more attuned to and in defense of ecological reciprocity will also be necessary. All of this means finding ways that urban/rural divides might be overcome through careful planning of what kinds of services and forms of decision-making, through communal self-determination, rural communities might like to have, and ways for urban sites to become more productive of immediate needs (urban farming and planned water usage). Transformations in communal education will need to be reoriented to serve social need, from healthcare to agriculture. Such structures may mean that people move more freely between settlements and lands, perhaps even borders, and are welcome to do so, rather than being cast into one spatialized (and often racialized) realm or another. Much of this work is already being done, and has been done for centuries, by Mexico’s indigenous communities, despite constant state violence. Solidarity with their many struggles to maintain ecological autonomy will only further strengthen political possibilities for others who find themselves either forced out of, into, or trapped within capitalism’s violent stocks and flows. Above all, such systems will need to place social need at the fore, but also recognize that so long as they depend on racialized hierarchies of gendered reproductive labor, they will continue to produce, rather than solve, metabolic rift.

1. Mexico does have a tradition of some environmental speculative fiction, in the works of authors like Homero Aridjis, but much of it tends not to focus on environment so much as institutional corruption (see Alberto Chimal in Latin American Literature Today for an overview of science and speculative fiction in Mexico). See also Jeremy G. Larochelle “A City on the Brink of Apocalypse: Mexico City’s Urban Ecology in Works by Vicente Leñero and Homero Aridjis,” Hispania 96.4 (2013): 640–56. It also bears noting that Latinx, especially Chicanx, culture and criticism has a long legacy of engaging ecological and agrarian themes.
2. Cuarón, Alfonso, Roma (Netflix. 2018), and Melchor, Fernanda. Temporada de huracanes (Ciudad de Mexico: Literatura Random House, 2017).
3. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015).
4. For a critique of Moore on this point, see Out of the Woods, “Human Nature,” The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com/human-nature/
5. The texts also remind us of nature’s relative autonomy alongside that of labor that cannot be fully subsumed by capitalism, and additionally, in a departure from Moore, of how multiple understandings of nature are valid and co-exist, as Fraser helpfully frames as Nature I (a kind of scientific objective nature), II (historical capitalist natures), and III (a socio-ecological conception of nature that includes humans). See Nancy Fraser,“Climates of Capital: For a Trans-Environmental Eco-Socialism,” New Left Review 127. Jan/Feb (2021) 108.
6. Niblett, Michael, World Literature and Ecology: the aesthetics of commodity frontiers, 1890-1950. (Palgrave: Macmillan, 2020) 52.
7. Bernes, Jasper “The Belly of the Revolution” Eds. Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti. (Materialism and the Critique of Energy. M-C-M, Chicago, 2018); And, Malm, Andreas, The Progress of this Storm (New York: Verso Books, 2020).
8. In terms of Mexican environmental history, cajas de agua and aniego irrigation techniques of the kind John Tutino credits for early agricultural productivity in the bajío region might serve as an example of more sustainable and effective stocks and flows. John Tutino, Making a New World(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
9. Congregación, also referred to as reducción or misiones, was the Spanish colonial practice — both civil and religious—of spatially concentrating indigenous peoples into planned towns to harness their labor in mines and fields and convert them to Christianity. Many towns and cities across Latin America today began as congregaciones, which were constructed and governed by strict edicts from the crown.
10. R. Andersson, Paige, “Grounding Progress and Mexican Potential: Nineteenth Century Representations of Congregación and National Unity,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies ٢٨:٢ (2019): ٢٣٥-٢٥١.DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2019.1620710
11. The ejido refers to communally held lands distributed to campesinos by the post-revolutionary Mexican state, with the greatest number granted during the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas. In the turn to neoliberalism since the 1970s, but most especially since the 1994 passage of NAFTA, there has been a concerted effort to re-privatize lands. For a history of the term and concept, see Emilio Kourí, “La invención del ejido,” Nexos 37.445 (2015): 54-61.
12. Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). See also Mikael Wolfe, Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico(Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), where Wolfe argues that campesinos often also advocated for access to these technologies, too, despite the fact that they were environmentally devastating and socially unsustainable.
13. For detailed histories on guerrilla resistance movements in Mexico during this period, see Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), and Alexander Aviña, Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
14. For more on the massacre, see https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/mexico/2021-06-10/corpus-christi-massacre-fifty-years.
15. In other words, it is impossible to know whether Cleo is asserting feminist choice to reject motherhood regardless of her relationship, economic status, or personal desire. Alternatively, to what extent is not wanting the child a direct consequence of her precarity?
16. There is not space here, but the scene is ripe for further analysis on the commentary and role of elite women (the wives), the English/Spanish dynamic, and the workers and children in the background.
17. For an in-depth analysis of the Norwegian song’s meaning, see Erick Tovar, “Nostalgia y misticismo vikingo en Roma de Cuarón.” https://cineoculto.com/2018/12/nostalgia-y-misticismo-vikingo-en-roma-de-cuaron/
18. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings 180-181.
19. See Marcos Eduardo Ávalos Reyes. “Temporada de huracanes de Fernanda Melchor: una lectura del cuerpo desde el terreno del chisme y la abyección,” Connotas. Revista de crítica y teoría literarias 19 (2020): 53-70 and, Jafte Dilean Robles Lomelí, “El Chisme Como Representación Histórica de La Ausencia En Temporada de Huracanes de Fernanda Melchor,” Revista de Historia de América 161 (2021): 435-58.
20. Mat Youkee, “Gothic becomes Latin America’s go-to genre as writers turn to the dark side,” The Guardian October 31 (2021). Youkee notes a surge in the gothic, particularly in South American literature, but it is worth noting that from the 1950s through the 1970s, several Mexican films and narratives were written that could be interpreted for their gothic tones, including but not limited to the stories of Juan Rulfo, the novels of Rosario Castellanos, Amparo Dávila’s short story “El huesped,” and several films from the 1970s such as Gleyzer’s La revolución congelada (1971), Arturo Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites (1978), and possibly even Felipe Cazal’s La Canoa and El año de la peste. Additionally, Kersten Oloff’s reading of Pedro Páramo and Aura in “The “Monstrous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell”: The Gothic Ecologies of the “Mexican Miracle,” Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America,ed. Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016) offers a fantastic exploration of the relationship between ecology and the gothic in Mexico.
21. Olsson, 178, 181, 188, 194.
22. This is not to say that men are not alienated from the land, as well, just that, as Federici explains, this process occurred on gendered terms, ultimately leading to further divisions. For another reading of Melchor via Federici, see Victoria Baena’s 2020 review of the novel, “The Murder of a Witch,” Dissent Magazine Fall (2020).
23. Melchor, Temporada15. The mountainside is also where the Witch is rumored to have found herbs to make the poison that she allegedly used to kill her husband and take his land.
24. Temporada 15. Fernanda Melchor, Trans. Sophie Hughes, Hurricane Season, (New York: New Directions, 2020) 7.
25. In a celebration of Federici’s work, So Mayer writes of the connections between colonialism, othering, and accumulation: “Similarly scattered mentions of the parallels between beliefs about witches and Jews (including the idea, linked to devil worship, that both had horns) suggest that there is generative thinking to be done with a broader map of Europe in terms of beliefs, social structures and economics (considering the forced position of European Jews as money-lenders), particularly with the interconnections between the Crusades, Reconquista and the conquest of the Americas, to understand the configuration of Othering that continues to arise so dangerously in European populism.” See Mayer, So, “House Plants and Huacas” Caliban and the Witch: A Verso Roundtable (2019). https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4463-house-plants-and-huacas
26. Silvia Federici, The Caliban and the Witch (New York: AK Press, 2004) 64.
27. Temporada 19; Trans. Hughes, Hurricane Season 10.
28. Temporada 107-8.
29. Temporada 218; Hurricane 205-206.
30. Temporada 216; Hurricane 204.
31. Whitener’s reading of the cadaver replacing the calavera as emblematic of culture’s exchange with late capitalist circulation in Mexico is prescient here, where the Witch is described as a rotting cadaver, as well as the bodies the grandfather is burying. See Brian S. Whitener, Crisis Cultures: The rise of finance in Mexico and Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) 132-134.
32. Bernes, “The Belly” 364.“But thinking the unity of humanity and nature does not overcome the practical rifts in this flow of flows; it does not overcome the division between town and country, which is a real break within matter, not merely a theoretical one…This is not an epistemological division so much as a real one, and dealing with its effects requires practical reorganization of the relationship between humans and nature, not a mere rethinking of the problematic.”
33. “The Belly” 367.
34. Fraser, Climates of Capital 97.