Andrea Elizabeth Sempertegui

Over the last decades, Latin America has witnessed the rise of women’s collectives resisting the expansion of extractivism. This book project centers on the organizing of the Mujeres Amazónicas, “Amazonian Women,” a network of Indigenous women leaders who resists the implementation of oil and mining projects in the Ecuadorian Amazon. These leaders confronted the government with their Living Forest Declaration at their 2013 “March for Life” and have since emerged as influential environmental actors in the region. While much Latin American feminist literature interpret the protagonist role of Indigenous women in anti-extractive struggles as related to their cultural and gendered roles in their communities, this book creates openings within these debates and offers a bodily and place-based reading of Mujeres Amazónicas’ politics. I call their organizing “forest politics,” characterized by the co-constitution between these leaders’ political bodies and the forest as a source of power against extractive capital. Based on my co-labor ethnography with members of this coalition and combining Indigenous and anthropological literature on Amazonian relationality, the body and more-than human politics, I follow the transformation and deployment of practices like “dreaming,” “chanting” and producing chicha to trace how Mujeres Amazónicas produce their politics in continuum with the forest.