Duke University Press Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (A John Hope Franklin Center Book)

Through lively, engaging narrative, Understories demonstrates how volatile politics of race, class, and nation animate the notoriously violent struggles over forests in the southwestern United States. Rather than reproduce traditional understandings of nature and environment, Jake Kosek shifts the focus toward material and symbolic "natures," seemingly unchangeable essences central to formations of race, class, and nation that are being remade not just through conflicts over resources but also through everyday practices by Chicano activists, white environmentalists, and state officials as well as nuclear scientists, heroin addicts, and health workers. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, he shows how these contentious natures are integral both to environmental politics and the formation of racialized citizens, politicized landscapes, and modern regimes of rule.Kosek traces the histories of forest extraction and labor exploitation in northern New Mexico, where Hispano residents have forged passionate attachments to place. He describes how their sentiments of dispossession emerged through land tenure systems and federal management programs that remade forest landscapes as exclusionary sites of national and racial purity. Fusing fine-grained ethnography with insights gleaned from cultural studies and science studies, Kosek shows how the nationally beloved Smokey the Bear became a symbol of white racist colonialism for many Hispanos in the region, while Los Alamos National Laboratory, at once revered and reviled, remade regional ecologies and economies. Understories offers an innovative vision of environmental politics, one that challenges scholars as well as activists to radically rework their understandings of relations between nature, justice, and identity. Review "[Kosek] probes the roots of forest management in the United States as well as the roots of the politics of race and difference in environmental conflicts in contemporary northern New Mexico. In so doing he presents many important insights and artful performances. . . . Kosek makes an important contribution in putting the mutual constitution of race, nation, and nature front and center in the dialogue on forging a more just and sustainable society."--Carl Wilmsen "Society & Natural Resources " "In this stunning account of the forest wars of New Mexico, Jake Kosek forces us to reconsider the underlying racial politics of the environmental movement's self-righteous claims to 'stewardship' over the natural resources that sustain indigenous communities. If you want to understand the deep roots of the rising anger, not just of the Hispanos in the Española Valley, but of marginalized blue-collar people everywhere in the West, this powerful and honest book, with its unique synthesis of theory and passion, is the place to begin."--Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Buda's Wagon " Understories is a critically important book. Jake Kosek's arguments are original, necessary, and rarely heard; his deep tying together of race and nature is almost entirely absent from the current scholarly literature."--Hugh Raffles, author of In Amazonia: A Natural History "Kosek offers an important cultural reading of environmental politics, showing how differing constructions of nature and identity have produced northern New Mexico's forest disputes. His analysis of Forest Service governance, the power at the center of the disputes, is unusually perceptive and deserves a wide audience."--Ruth M. Alexander "American Quarterly " "Kosek's writing is engaging and draws skillfully on conversations, ethnographic observations, and archival research. His approach bridges disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, history, American culture studies, and political ecology. His work on cultural politics and memory will be of interest to the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. Practicing environmentalists and social just