Poetics of human and non-human displacements on the soil of Lake Texcoco. An approach to the notion of agency

Abstract

The idea behind this essay is to be able to think of Lake Texcoco -a large shallow wetland located northeast of Mexico City -as a non-human agent that overflows beyond the epistemological and cultural categories that define and designate it as a “lake.” I will use my own experience walking on its soil and also the reflections and provocations launched by various authors, such as Bruno Latour, Elizabeth Povinelli and María Puig de la Bellacasa, among others, to understand how this agent resisted the silencing implied by the construction of an airport in its bed that threatened the interspecies communities that still exist there, those who resisted due to Lake Texcoco’s changing and elusive nature along with the people of the Atenco region who organized themselves to defend it from government imposition, which had insisted (and failed) for twenty years on the construction of an airport on the Lake.