The terms “Climate Change,” “Anthropocene,” “Environmental Crisis,” and “Climate Migrations” refer in a universal way to various phenomena that people experience and understand very differently according to their sociocultural context.1 In this sense, some of these terms do not reflect the full range of meanings of what is being addressed, even to those who are more exposed to the environmental issues that are gaining attention on global agendas.
That these terms mean different things to different groups of people became very tangible in a research project I carried out in an urban watershed in Greater Buenos Aires (Argentina), known as the Reconquista Area (RA). This space encompasses 15 neighborhoods located in environmentally degraded areas. Moreover, it is home to migrant populations from other geographical locations that are environmentally degraded in other ways. In this context, I conducted an anthropological and ethnographic study within the framework of Migrantas en Reconquista,2 a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project. This initiative integrated contributions from various disciplines and social organizations at every stage of the process and was guided by a feminist and collaborative perspective on knowledge construction.3 Among the rural women living in the RA, the terms elucidated above did not resonate with their experiences. Rather, the most extensive conversations about the environmental issues they faced came after we discussed the care work they were responsible for in their homes and neighborhoods, both in their homelands and current residences, or the challenges they faced in finding work in their places of origin.
That it is so difficult to make the terms used to address environmental issues in the global agenda resonate with those most affected by them suggests that these categories are not malleable enough to reflect their lived experience. From my research, I discovered that this gap is not purely a matter of terminology. Rather, the terms do not do justice to their experience because they do not recognize the local knowledge these women hold that is also essential for addressing environmental issues but leave it largely invisible and undervalued. This invisibility echoes the feminist criticism that care labor is undervalued; many women in these communities are also caregivers for their families and neighbors.
The experiences and knowledge of rural migrants must not be overlooked when we think about how to deal with current climate and environmental challenges. How do they contribute to the construction of knowledge around these concepts from an environmental justice perspective? What knowledge about these issues migrates with people, and how do they incorporate it into their practices?
Migration and Climate Crisis Beyond the Global Narrative
Climate change, a central term for identifying the issue on the global agenda, affects different populations unevenly, with unequal resources to cope with its unprecedented environmental impacts. Furthermore, different international organizations consider these environmental conditions, whether caused by sudden or “gradual” changes, to be a driving force for migration.4 This distinction in the timing of impacts is important for understanding the various reasons people choose to migrate. In the case of Latin America, one of the most environmentally affected regions, various inequalities intersect, and the environmental variable tends to lose weight among the reasons given in migrants’ narratives (socioeconomic, political, gender, etc.).5 All of this is in addition to what other approaches classify as “immobility” in the case of populations that, for various reasons, remain in place despite facing environmental problems.6
That is why, from a Latin-American perspective, the concept of environmental justice has grown in Latin American literature. Environmental justice goes beyond legal frontiers and considers socio-environmental inequalities from a colonial and extractivist perspective, including the historical exploitation of the territories and natural resources of the most marginalized populations, aggravated by a neo-extractivist dynamic: the intensive exploitation of natural resources and territories driven by global demands often leads to environmental degradation, displacement of local populations, and the concentration of wealth and landownership. It also contributes to climate change through deforestation, biodiversity loss, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. When this dynamic is brought into discussions of environmental justice, it exacerbates the difficulties of socioeconomic development both in migrants’ lands of origin and in the metropolitan conglomerations to which they may migrate.7
Rural migrant women in the RA have suffered from environmental problems in both their areas of origin and destination, occupying disadvantaged positions in the environmental justice framework throughout their migratory trajectories. This includes both the rural/peasant settings where they were born and those of their current residences in socio-environmentally disadvantaged and degraded urban neighborhoods. The RA is a residential area built by its inhabitants on a wetland of the contaminated Reconquista River8 and is located near one of the largest open-air landfills in Latin America, the CEAMSE Norte III, which receives 18,000 tons of waste per day from different areas of the Greater Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA).9
As part of the abovementioned participatory action research project Migrantas en Reconquista, I became involved in community spaces and met many rural migrant women living there who came from different parts of the South America. Most of them came from the neighboring countries of Paraguay and Bolivia, or from rural localities or smaller urban agglomerations in the northern provinces of Argentina, which are also shaped by rural labor dynamics. In all of these cases, the most common reason they gave for migrating was the search for work, influenced by the deterioration of living and working conditions that were themselves linked to both environmental degradation and the extractivist dynamics.
But, when I mapped the ways they faced and understood these issues in the RA, it was difficult to connect concepts like climate change or the environmental crisis to their narratives as they did not address them explicitly. They integrated environmental issues into their narratives but in a blurred way, framing them particularly in relation to their care practices. They did not mention concerns about water quality, air pollution, and the proximity of streams as “environmental problems” per se, but these became visible as they began to perceive—or associate—their children’s health problems with their surrounding environment. Thus, they perceived environmental issues in terms of the concrete effects they experienced: restricted access to drinking water, exposure to pollutants, or risk of disease. They identified these situations from the dynamics of daily care, which is mainly accessed and provided for in a communal way in the marginalized socioeconomic and socio-environmental contexts in which they find themselves.
Environmental Knowledge on the Banks of the RA
Doña María’s activist trajectory illustrates how women in the RA engage with environmental stewardship through lived experiences. A Paraguayan migrant woman living in the RA, she has been working on programs to clean up ditches and watersheds for twenty years. She began by working independently to improve the environment in her neighborhood, and this activity led her to pioneer the creation of cleaning service cooperatives, which are essential for maintaining the environment and preventing flooding. She attributes her initiative to the fact that she was born and raised in rural Paraguay and has worked “with her hands” since childhood. Thus, she knew where to start, how to do it and why, and used her experience to get involved in the environmental improvements of her neighborhood and later to lead the first crews that took on the task of weeding public spaces and cleaning the streams. That such projects are essential was reflected in the creation of the Arroyo Program, a joint project of the Province of Buenos Aires, the Municipality of General San Martín, and the organization CTEP/Movimiento Evita, for the cleaning and maintenance of the streams. The work––a situation of precarious employment with wages below the minimum wage despite the high risks involved and few adequate tools––was carried out by a team of 25 local workers.
Knowledge such as that Doña María made use of emerges in different everyday scenes through the community networks in which rural migrant women circulate. In the RA, some participate in urban forests, community gardens, and orchards––where their involvement is eagerly welcomed as a valuable contribution due to their extensive knowledge of working the land.10 In this way, many actively contribute to environmental community spaces, promoting food sovereignty and sharing traditional practices such as composting and sustainable planting methods.
As with many other rural and Indigenous populations in the region, knowledge of traditional practices has been passed down from generation to generation, providing immediate solutions for the work in community orchards and local environmental reserves, as well as other spaces where the rural and the urban come into dialogue. The creation of the Pohã Ñana book was paradigmatic of this dialogue. This book project was initiated by Teresa, a biology teacher I worked with in the Migrantas en Reconquista PAR. She recognized her migrant students’ vast knowledge of medicinal plants, encouraged them to write about it, and invited me to assist them with their writing. This collaborative process involved choosing a plant that represented their personal stories and writing about its uses, intertwining traditional knowledge with lived experiences in Paraguay and Argentina. The initiative expanded beyond the classroom, engaging local artists for illustrations and serigraphy, which helped bring the project to life. It gained visibility through exhibitions and events that highlighted the connection between these women’s expertise and broader environmental and cultural narratives. It involved rural migrant women interweaving their personal stories and traditional knowledge of medicinal plants in a collective process of writing and sharing memories of their upbringing in rural areas in Paraguay.11 The revaluation of medicinal plants and their inclusion in the local cultural and the environmental education agenda positioned several of these women within the local arc of environmental actors. These migrant women’s expertise contributed to a broader understanding of and greater action around environmental justice, fostering the construction of hybrid local community knowledge and solutions to the environmental problems around them.
Redefining Knowledge “Donde pisan los pies” (where your feet tread)
A hegemonic discourse does, indeed, marginalize the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous and local communities that are more exposed to current environmental problems in their lives.12 But there are diverse ways of knowing about and acting on current environmental and climatic adversities. Even though some international organizations or scientific programs recognize the need to work with this knowledge and attempt to incorporate it in their planning, these initiatives are poorly resourced and marginalized.13
The RA community has a strong link with the university in the San Martín district and plays its role in the institutional framework that classifies it as an “Educational Territory” due to the different lines of action and articulation between its educational system and local organizations. In this context, local actors, that is, migrant women residing in the RA, have thought about proposals for the coproduction of knowledge. Among them, there is a strong demand to involve the university in the neighborhoods, to work collaboratively, to promote the recognition of local knowledge—especially that which comes from the daily experience of living and working in the environmentally degraded RA—to weave networks that transcend the local and connect communities with global actors to share experiences and solutions, and to strengthen the autonomy of neighborhood organizations as genuine consultants of local forms of action.
Challenges Ahead
The problem of recognizing this knowledge is doubly challenging. On the one hand, it clashes with the hegemonic logics through which knowledge is recognized. The most obvious example is the university degree, to which these rural migrant women have difficulty gaining access for a variety of reasons. Another example is the distance between the technical categories that warn of an environmental risk and the experience of those exposed to it. Various scholarly and activist approaches, such as the field of agroecology, often point to the ways in which lifestyles and consumption patterns in urban centers disconnect people from the degradation they cause to the ecosystems from which and in which they live. Yet, cases like that of the RA are examples of how the dynamics of mobility they are involved bring to the shores of the metropolis a living knowledge of this connection, albeit marginalized, made invisible, and framed in categories quite different from the more technical vocabulary to refer to them. In this sense, it would not be in vain to try to reinscribe these factors into categories that are more translatable and meaningful for the concrete experiences of exposure to environmental risks.
On the other hand, the recognition of knowledge has to take into account that responses to environmental problems already rely on the contribution of this local knowledge, although it is made invisible and poorly or not at all remunerated. This observation aligns with feminist demands regarding care work, which, like the environmental contributions of these women, is often undervalued and undercompensated. In essence, what is needed is a double recognition, both at the epistemological level and in terms of remuneration, in order to value, ensure justice and strengthen this participation that we find in the areas most exposed to environmental injustice: in the budgeting of actions for environmental improvement, in the planning of projects of this type, or even in the thinking about training or educational policies.
María Belén López is an Argentinian PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM). Combining Fals Borda’s participatory action research methods with feminist approaches, she conducted her fieldwork as part of the “Migrantas en Reconquista” project, focusing on rural migrant women’s risk perceptions, care practices and collective responses to environmental issues. She currently co-coordinates the Migration, Gender, and Environment Program (UNSAM) and the Epistemology and Pedagogy Working Group within The Global DeCentre network.
- See Astrid Ulloa, “Construcciones culturales sobre el clima,” in Perspectivas Culturales del Clima, ed. idem (Bogotá: ILSA-UNC, 2011); and Allen Cordero Ulate, Materia Transformada: Notas teóricas y estudios de caso sobre paisajes en Costa Rica (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2022), for more on this topic. ↩︎
- This reads “Migrant Women in the Reconquista” in English. ↩︎
- See Orlando Fals Borda, The Origins and Challenges of Participatory Action Research (Amherst: Center for International Education, University of Massachusetts, 1999); and Lorena Pajares Sánchez, “Fundamentación feminista de la investigación participativa: Conocimiento, género y participación, o del diálogo necesario para la transformación,” Investigaciones Feministas 11, no. 2 (2020): 297–306. ↩︎
- Mentioned in “Report of the Conference of the Parties on its sixteenth session, held in Cancun from 29 November to 10 December 2010,” United Nations for Climate Change, archived March 15, 2011; and in Frank Laczko and Christine Aghazarm Migration, Environment and Climate Change: Assessing the Evidence (Geneva: IOM, 2009). IPCC reports also mentioned the topic until the last one “AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023,” archived in 2023. ↩︎
- Dalila Polak, “Movilidad ambiental y climática, una agenda de desarrollo que demanda de alianzas innovadoras” (IOM Argentina, 2023). ↩︎
- Hanne Wiegel, Ingrid Boas, and Jeroen Warner, “A Mobilities Perspective on Migration in the Context of Environmental Change,” WIREs Wiley Interdisciplinary Review 10, no. 6 (2019): 1–9. ↩︎
- For more details on environmental (in)justice in Latin America, see Hector Alimonda, Los tormentos de la materia: Aportes para una ecología política latinoamericana (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2006); Martha Moncada Paredes and Tania Mancheno, “El regreso de El Dorado,” in Amazonía y expansión mercantil capitalista: Nueva frontera de recursos en el siglo XXI, ed. Neyer Nogales (La Paz: CEDLA, 2021); Roberta Amaral de Andrade, “Criação de reservas extrativistas como mecanismo de resolução de conflitos: um estudo de caso no município de Lábrea, Amazonas (Brasil),” in Los conflictos ambientales en América Latina I: Casos y reflexiones, ed. Francisco Suárez and Carlos Ruggerio (Buenos Aires: UNGS, 2018); Veronica Gago and Sandro Mezzadra, “Para una crítica de las operaciones extractivas del capital: Patrón de acumulación y luchas sociales en el tiempo de la financiarización,” Nueva Sociedad, no. 255 (2015): 38–52. ↩︎
- Roberto Busnelli, Atlas de Residuos Sólidos Industriales del Partido de San Martín (Buenos Aires: UNSAM Edita, 2019). ↩︎
- For more information, see the report Informe especial cuenca del río reconquista primera parte (Buenos Aires: Defensor del Pueblo de la Nación, 2007). ↩︎
- For more information on these practices documented during the research project, see María Belén Lopez, “‘Despabilarse’ del hogar: La dimensión ambiental en la trama de cuidados provistos por mujeres migrantes del Área Reconquista,” PERIPLOS: Revista de Investigación sobre Migraciones 6, no. 2 (2022): 211–41. ↩︎
- For more information on the process of writing the book, see Debora Gerbaudo Suarez and María Belén López, “Writing the Roots: A Reflection on Migration, Gender and Environment through Arts,” Migration Studies (2024). ↩︎
- Hector Alimonda, Prologue of Cartografías del conflicto ambiental en Argentina (Buenos Aires: CICCUS, 2013). ↩︎
- See, for example, the case of the new agri-biotech production model in agricultura and the way in which these positions are polarized within academia in Florencia Arancibia, Ignacio Bocles, Alicia Massarini and Damián Verzeñassi, “Tensiones entre los saberes académicos y los movimientos sociales en las problemáticas ambientales,” Methateoria 8, no. 2 (2016): 105–23. ↩︎
