Through lively, engaging narrative, Understories demonstrates how the volatile and violent politics of race, class and nation animate contemporary forest struggles in the U.S. Southwest. Author Jake Kosek argues that Chicano activists, white environmentalists, and state officials, as well as nuclear scientists, heroin addicts, and health workers have all shaped the material and symbolic "natures" of New Mexico's forests. Drawing on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, he demonstrates how these fractious natures are integral not only to environmental politics but also the formation of racialized subjects, labored landscapes and modern regimes of rule.

Kosek traces these political formations by examining histories of forest extraction and labor exploitation that have forged Hispanos' passionate attachments to place. He describes how their feelings of dispossession emerged through land tenure systems and Federal Management programs that mapped 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 Smokey the Bear became a symbol of white racist colonialism for many Hispanos, while Los Alamos National Laboratory remade the social ecologies and political economies of northern New Mexico. Understories thus offers an innovative vision of environmental politics, one that challenges scholars as well as activists to radically rework their understandings of relations among nature, justice, and difference.

REVIEWS

"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 Espanola 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, 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, In Amazonia: A Natural History

"This theoretically and methodologically innovative study of how environmental politics shape and are shaped by race, class, and nationalism in the Southwest will make an important contribution to environmental anthropology and history as well as to border studies for years to come. An exciting book, it is also highly readable and can be used in advanced undergraduate as well as graduate level courses.' Ana Maria Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier

more reviews: La Jicarita News