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In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well‑being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correia’s ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America’s settler frontiers.

About the Author

Joel E. Correia is Assistant Professor in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Department at Colorado State University.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Environmental Justice Otherwise
Rupture 1: Open/Closed
Chapter 1: “A Land in the Making”
Rupture 2: Boundaries
Chapter 2: Not-Quite-Neoliberal Multiculturalism
Rupture 3: In/Visible
Chapter 3: Biopolitics of Neglect
Rupture 4: Prison
Chapter 4: Restitution as Development?
Rupture 5: Heart
Chapter 5: Five Years of Life
Rupture 6: Spectacle
Conclusion: In Pursuit of Environmental Justice
Postcript

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Reviews

"Disrupting the Patrón is a superb ethnography of Indigenous environmental justice as well as a nuanced account of the possibilities and challenges of land back. It deserves to be widely read by scholars and practitioners of all stripes."
— Antipode

"Correia constructs a provocative ethnography which centers on the land struggles of the Enxet and Sanapaná people and offers a timely reminder of the racialized regimes and unequal geographies that mark the landscape of a rapidly changing economic frontier in Latin America."
— NACLA

"Joel Correia’s timely Disrupting the Patrón has arrived at a moment of unprecedented national investment in environmental justice within the United States, and as Indigenous-led calls for the return of stolen land across North America continue to grow. Correia’s in-depth ethnographic study of the Indigenous Paraguayan communities of Enxet and Sanapaná’s decades-long fight for return of their ancestral lands adds critical insight to this movement, pushing the limits of how environmental justice is often defined and pursued within the states while still honoring its origin."
— Sierra

"Disrupting the Patrón tells a story of the underrepresented peoples of Paraguay, of their endurance under multiple cycles of dispossession that threaten their existence, and of the various forms that their resistance takes."—Gabriela Valdivia, coauthor of Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia

"By focusing on the racial and cultural implications of land and labor in Indigenous struggles in Paraguay, Joel E. Correia expands our focus on environmental concerns to include human rights, cultural rights, and the need for legal and political justice."—Nancy Postero, author of The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia

"In the Paraguayan Chaco, missionaries, settlers, and officials turned stolen Indigenous land into ranches where cattle is valued more than Indigenous people. Correia's vivid ethnography of the interstitial strategies and land reoccupations through which Enxet and Sanapaná people carry out a 'dialectics of disruption' makes a crucial and incisive contribution to our understanding of racialized geographies, settler capitalism, and environmental and Indigenous justice."—Gastón R. Gordillo, author of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews