Introductory description

How has water been understood by humans in Latin America? How has it been represented across different cultural contexts?

Latin America contains one-fifth of the world’s water resources, including some of the earth’s largest lakes and rivers. As the global climate emergency and increasing levels of pollution threaten their (and our) futures, this course looks predominantly to the past to consider the nature of human entanglements with water in Latin America. We will study examples of how Indigenous groups interact with and manage water, as well as how water systems and the creatures that inhabit them have been represented in European and Latin American sources. Students will explore representations of some of the region’s most emblematic aquatic locales across three thematic blocks: Lakes, Drainage and Dispossession in Mexico (Lake Texcoco and Lake Tláhuac-Xico, Mexico), Mining, Resistance and Aquatic Justice in Peru (Highland lakes in Cajamarca, Peru) and Patagonia, Pinnipeds, and Living Water (Cape Horn and the Strait of Magellan, Argentina/Chile). This course will further familiarise students with scholarship on water, aquatic life and the ‘blue humanities’ in Latin America. We will work across a variety of primary sources including maps, an art installation, film, and literature, with students being encouraged to think laterally across disciplinary, temporal, and national boundaries in the Latin American context. This module will be of interest to any students who would like to learn more about environmental history, ecology, Latin American literature and visual culture, map history, and Indigenous studies.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Weeks One and Two: Thinking and Representing Latin American Waters

Week One: Theories and Concepts

This session introduces students to the course structure, and gets them to start thinking about the key terms and concepts that underpin this module. We discuss and define the terms ‘blue humanities’, ‘liquid turn’, and ‘anthropocene’, use the set texts to start thinking about water’s capacity for meaning, and consider how different bodies of water have been understood historically, such as seas, shorelines, lakes, and rivers.

Readings:
Matt McGrath, ‘Pollution: "Forever chemicals" in rainwater exceed safe levels’, BBC News, 2nd August 2022.
John R. Gillis, ‘The Blue Humanities', HUMANITIES Volume 34, Number 3 (May/ June 2013), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-humanities
Veronica Strang, ‘Living Water’, in Water: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2015), 31-50.
Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez, ‘Beyond the Blue: Notes on the Liquid Turn’, in Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art, edited by Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), 1-9.

Week Two: Aquatic Latin America on the Map

In this session we will examine about how the waters surrounding South America were represented around the time Europeans first crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean in the early 16th century. We look specifically at how information coming back to Europe about aquatic spaces was depicted on the map, and why sea monsters were often shown to be lurking off the shores of the region. This session also helps students to think about the European discovery of the Americas and the subsequent cultural invention of the region, especially in early modern Europe.

Primary Sources:
Abraham Ortelius, Americae sive novi orbis, nova descriptio, in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp: 1570), Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3200m.gct00126/?sp=14
Joan Blaeu, Americae Nova Tabula in Atlas Maior, vol. 11, America, quae est Geographiae Blavianae (Amsterdam: 1662), Bibloteca Digital Hispánica, http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000001867

Secondary Sources:
Chet Van Duzer, ‘Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps’, Jan 31, 2014, John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUvMr86UZq4&ab_channel=LibraryofCongress
Martínez, Carolina. ‘“Salvajes desnudos, feroces y caníbales”: textos fundacionales e imágenes cartográficas en la construcción de América como Pars Quarta’, in Pensar América desde sus colonias: textos e imágenes de América colonial, edited by Silvia Tieffemberg (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2020), 32–56.

Weeks Three and Four: Lakes, Drainage and Dispossession in Mexico

Week Three: The City on the Lake: The Conquest of Mexico and the Mapping of Tenochtitlan

When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his troops arrived in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1519, they encountered a city in the middle of a vast lake, complete with elaborate drainage systems, fluvial transport, and unlike many cities in Europe at the time, potable water. This session examines how the lakes figured in visual representations of the culture around the time of the Spanish conquest. By studying the Nurermburg map of Tenochtitlan in particular, we consider how Mexica understandings of space meld with European understandings to create a hybrid vision.

Primary Sources:
Codex Mendoza, fol. 2.r, c.1541, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/68210492-1fd1-499e-acee-188fa1226ca1
Nuremburg Map of Tenochtitlan, Nuremberg, 1524, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/cartography/map-tenochtitlan-1524
Hernán Cortés, ‘Segunda Carta al Emperador Carlos V’, 30th October 1520, available at https://www.biblioteca.org.ar/libros/134.pdf (Spanish) and https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1520cortes.asp (English)

Secondary Sources:
Barbara Mundy, ‘Water and the Sacred City’, in The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 25-51.
Barbara Mundy, ‘Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and Meanings’, Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 11-33.

Week 4: The Return of a Lake

The installation 'The Return of a Lake/ El retorno de un lago' was debuted by Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, with a follow-up exhibition taking place in 2014 at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. This collaborative project tells the story of what is now known as Lake Tláhuac-Xico on the outskirts of the capital. After being dried by a Spanish immigrant in the early 20th century, the lake refilled in the early 21st century due to subsidence caused by poor water management in the capital. In this seminar we study how the project, in Alves' own words, 'is an investigation of how colonial practices remain in place as an everyday reality for Indigenous communities, and how they obstruct the possibility of a viable and ecologically sustainable future for all members of Mexican society' (Natura, p. 51). The students are introduced here to contemporary debates on water management, ecocide, and Indigenous rights in Mexico.

Primary Sources:
María Thereza Alves, ‘El retorno de un lago’, 2014, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, https://muac.unam.mx/exposicion/el-retorno-de-un-lago (exhibition catalogue in Spanish and English: https://muac.unam.mx/assets/docs/folio_int_maria_thereza_alves.pdf)
María Thereza Alves, ‘The Return of a Lake’, in Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape, edited by Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018), 51-60.

Secondary Sources:
María Thereza Alves, ‘The Return of a Lake: The Community Museum of Valle de Xico, social practice, and Indigenous hydro-agriculture’, Nov 6th, 2020, Kunstinstituut Melly, https://www.fkawdw.nl/en/our_program/events/keynote_by_maria_thereza_alves_the_return_of_a_lake (watch from 00:18:00-00:45:10)
Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Chronicle of a Visit to the Museo Comunitario Del Valle de Xico, Or: Cultural Solidarity in the Globalised Neoliberal Age’. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43 (1 March 2017): 46–57.

Week Five: Mining, Resistance and Aquatic Justice in Peru

In this session we study the documentary Hija de la Laguna (2015) which follows Nélida Ayay Chilón, a Quechua woman from Porcón, Cajamarca, and her community in their fight to protect their lands from the Conga mining project, which seeks access to a large gold deposit. The project is a cooperation between Newmont mining (US), the Compañía de Minas Buenaventura (Peru), and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation, supported by the Peruvian government. The mining would involve the draining and relocation of two lakes in the area, as well as dumping of toxic waste in a third specially-created reservoir. In particular, we consider how Nélida’s community understand water as more than just a resource, and how pollution and colonialism are connected.

Primary Source:
Ernesto Cabellos, Hija de la laguna (2015)

Secondary Sources:
Carolyn Fornoff, ‘Documenting Extraction in Hija de la laguna (Ernesto Cabellos, 2015)’, Mediático, 12th June 2017, https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/mediatico/2017/06/12/documenting-extraction-in-la-hija-de-la-laguna-ernesto-cabellos-2015/
Max Liboiron, ‘Introduction’, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 1-38.

Week Six: Reading Week

Week Seven: Guest Lecture

Guest Lecture from Dr Jessica Savage (Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick), ‘Broccoli, or, how the world works’. This lecture gives students an introduction to marine ecology and water management from a life sciences perspective.

Weeks Eight and Nine: Patagonia, Pinnipeds, and Living Water

Week Eight: Francisco Coloane and Fuegian Narratives of Water:

In this session we study two short stories by Chilean author Francisco Coloane, 'Cabo de Hornos/ Cape Horn' and 'Tierra del olvido/ Forgotten Land', alongside several Yahgan tales about sea lions and floods. The Yahgan are one of the groups indigenous to Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia, Southern Argentina and Chile, along with the Selk'nam, Haush, and Kawésqar. These stories account for the behaviours and forms of nonhuman life by detailing their agency and ability to seek revenge for human transgressions. Here students think about water and the nonhuman, and relationships with aquatic animals in Patagonia. We also read a secondary source about the sealing industry in the region around the turn of the 20th century, which provides context for Coloane’s tales.

Primary Sources:
Francisco Coloane, ‘Cabo de Hornos’, in Cabo de Hornos (Santiago: Editorial Orbe, 1973): 11-25.
Francisco Coloane, ‘Tierra de olvido’, in Tierra del Fuego (Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1968): 157-169.
Cristina Calderón, Úrsula Calderón, and Cristina Zárraga, Hai kur mamashu chis: I Want to Tell You a Story, translated by Jacqueline Windh (Ukika: Ediciones Pix, 2013).

Secondary Source:
John Soluri, ‘On Edge: Fur Seals and Hunters along the Patagonian Littoral, 1860-1930’, in Centering Animals in Latin American History, edited by Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013): 243–69.

Week Nine: El botón de nácar

Released in 2015, Chilean director Patricio Guzmán's film El botón de nácar/ The Pearl Button weaves together multiple narratives of water from the coasts of Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. In this session we examine how the film reflects on water's ability to both conceal and reveal the truth, hold memories, and give and take life, linking the dispossession and genocide of the Fuegian peoples to the role of the Pacific Ocean in the Pinochet Dictatorship (1973-1990), which was used as a mass grave for the bodies of the disappeared.

Primary Source:
Patricio Guzmán, El botón de nácar (Santiago: Atacama Productions, 2015)

Essential Reading:
Virginia Zuleta, ‘Una memoria obstinada. El mar como “medio” sensible en El botón de nácar de Patricio Guzmán’, Cuadernos Materialistas, no. 3 (2018): 10–24.
Brenda Hollweg, ‘A Questioning Situation: Patricio Guzmán’s Cine-Essayistic Explorations of Fragile Planetary Configurations’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 15, no. 1 (1 March 2017): 13-32.

Week Ten: Revision Week

In this session we go over any concerns/ queries relating to the course and assessments.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Critique, compare and contrast representations of water across a range of Latin American sources
• Understand the fundamentals of blue and environmental humanities scholarship
• Write about Latin American literature from an environmental and blue humanities perspective
• Construct clear arguments based on close reading of the texts

Indicative reading list

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Interdisciplinary

This module requires students to engage with literature, film, art, and historical texts, working with concepts from art history, anthropology, sustainable development, literary studies, and environmental history.

International

All modules delivered in SMLC are necessarily international. Students engage with themes and ideas from a culture other than that of the UK and employ their linguistic skills in the analysis of primary materials from a non-Anglophone context. Students will also be encouraged to draw on the experiences of visiting exchange students in the classroom and will frequently engage with theoretical and critical frameworks from across the world.

Subject specific skills

This module will develop students’ linguistic skills through engaging with primary materials in the target language. It will build students’ capacity to engage with aspects of Latin American culture through analysis of this primary material and through seminar discussion aimed at deeper critical thinking.

Transferable skills

All SMLC culture modules demand critical and analytical engagement with artefacts from target-language cultures. In the course of independent study, class work and assessment students will develop the following skills: written and oral communication, creative and critical thinking, problem solving and analysis, time management and organisation, independent research in both English and their target language(s), intercultural understanding and the ability to mediate between languages and cultures, ICT literacy in both English and the target language(s), personal responsibility and the exercise of initiative.