Toxic tropics Gender, nature and capitalist transformations in the southern coast of Ecuador

This dissertation focuses on the coastal plains and manglar islands of southern Ecuador that are home to some of the country’s largest banana and shrimp plantations. Since the 1950s, the spread of export-oriented monoculture has reconfigured society-nature relations in this region and radically transformed the lives of those living in these spaces. While many chose to leave and join the growing flow of rural out-migrations, those who remained have contributed to the proliferation of different ways of life in the many interstices of large-scale capitalist developments. This dissertation aims to understand how those who remained learned to live in places made toxic and unsafe by the expansion of capitalist relations of production. It specifically focuses on the gendered dimensions of people’s everyday living strategies and their diverse responses to the changes undergone in their surroundings. Using historical and ethnographic research methods, it traces the stories and lives of rural families in their self-constructed homes and barrios, workers in the fields and in fruit processing plants, small farmers in the foothills of the cordillera and artisanal fisher gatherers in the manglares and seas. By placing their experiences at the heart of this study, I explore the transformative potential of rural people living in toxic landscapes and how gender and social differences, produced and reinforced by capitalist dispossessions, are shaping important changes from below.