Researchers first observed Mardi Gras Pass in 2011. Aided by the Mississippi River’s herculean push, one of the river’s channels began carving through landscape in its path. Then, on Mardi Gras in February 2012, the channel breached, creating a new river distributary—a branch of the river veering from its cross-continental course. Immediately, Mardi Gras Pass revived the transportation of sediment into withered marshlands. Within two years of the breach, a 2017 Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation report found that the distributary had restored marshland;¹ in fact, the distributary had succeeded in recreating it. The shifts brought on by Mardi Gras Pass mirrored nature’s method of sediment delivery that had, over thousands of years, gradually formed the “boot” shape seen at the bottom of South Louisiana maps today.²

But more than the landscape was breached that day.

For researchers, observation of Mardi Gras Pass provided breakthroughs in combating Louisiana’s land-loss crisis. In particular, they honed in on the ability of natural processes to rebuild wetlands; projects planned by the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) intended to mimic the natural unfolding of Mardi Gras Pass through human-made diversions. The result of their planning is the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, which nonprofits like the National Wildlife Federation describe as the largest ecosystem restoration project in US history.³ About a mile from Mardi Gras Pass, the $3 billion plan calls for carving a hole in a levee near Plaquemines Parish’s rural and Indigenous communities; there, about thirty-five miles south of New Orleans, artificial diversions will theoretically accelerate the rebuilding of wetlands, which buffer coastal storm surge risks, like those experienced in 2005 during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The CPRA estimates that the diversion will direct 75,000 cubic feet of Mississippi River water and mud per second, which will build roughly twenty-one square miles of new Barataria Basin land by 2075. Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, a fifty-year, $50 billion coastal restoration agenda funded by state lawmakers every five years, will afford the diversion project’s costs.

Meanwhile, for the region’s locals, it was a signal of a potential unmaking of communities and their resources, including local Indigenous people’s foodways and heritage economies, like the locally passed-down tradition of working in commercial fishing. Residents’ concerns mirror environmental researcher Rob Nixon’s characterization of environmental racism as a form of “slow violence”;⁴ as we witness the complexity of efforts to adapt vulnerable places to withstand the future catastrophic effects of climate change, a colorblind approach seriously risks perpetuating harms already felt by a region’s racially subjugated communities, including Indigenous groups. 

The ongoing debate over the diversion project’s long-term repercussions raises questions of environmental inequality that have, historically, gone unanswered: Who and what will climate adaptation projects protect, and who will be left out? These questions require answers in an era in which humankind is, again, attempting to radically modify nature—this time, to undo over a century of environmental mismanagement. Coastal Louisiana presents an early case study.

“This Has Nothing to Do with Fish”

In 2011, researchers Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and her peers published an article describing the long-term accrual of Indigenous trauma.⁵ “There is increasing evidence of emotional responses to collective trauma and losses among Indigenous Peoples,” they wrote at the time. In a more recent paper published in the American Journal of Community Psychology,⁶ researchers Emma Elliot and Megan Bang delve into how the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ land and food systems promotes their livelihoods. It notes the physical, mental, and intellectual risks of colonial trauma posed to Indigenous communities in its examination of how settler encroachment—a parallel to the case unfolding in Louisiana—upon Indigenous land and foodways is related to suicide.

But the Louisiana government’s pursuit centers upon future economies—sidestepping the question, for some coastal areas, of whether they will have a future at all. 

State planners unveiled their plan for the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project nearly a decade ago, and construction broke ground in August 2023. Throughout the heralded project’s journey through planning and public discourse, there have been disagreements among coastal researchers—some of whom claim that human-made levees do not restrict sediment’s flow and are not to blame for coastal erosion.

The Louisiana government’s pursuit centers upon future economies—sidestepping the question, for some coastal areas, of whether they will have a future at all. 

Meanwhile, locals among the 23,000 residents of Plaquemines Parish—about one-third of whom are Indigenous or people of color⁷—fear the state’s artificial-diversion construction runs a heightened risk of increasing local flooding. Or, perhaps worse, it may decrease the salinity in the Mississippi Sound’s brackish waters, which feed local Indigenous groups and where commercial fisherfolk harvest from the sea.

“The decision here is not a local one,” explains Mark Davis, the founding director at Tulane University’s Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, in reference to Louisiana’s white-knuckled push to implement artificial diversions (including a second diversion feature near the same vicinity) against locals’ will. Indeed, in recent years, Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes’ local representatives voted unanimously to halt the project’s construction. A 2022 Plaquemines Parish suit alleged irreversible harm to a Louisiana fishing industry worth $2.4 billion each year. To this day, they remain steadfast in opposing it. Davis adds that projects of such historic scale are designed with urban rather than rural communities in mind. “There’s a whole lot more at stake.”

At public meetings, CPRA and Louisiana lawmakers have acknowledged threats raised by residents of Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes. Throughout the diversion project’s planning, the state has performed a balancing act between meeting the needs of locals fearing damage to their livelihoods, as well as the inevitable fact that at the current pace of land loss in the area, tax bases will also begin to disappear; someday, there may be no land left beneath locals’ feet.

“That has nothing to do with fish,” Davis tells me.

“Big Oil”—and Bigger Adaptation

Of the largest oil and gas refineries in the US, nearly all are located along a roughly 300-mile stretch of shoreline between New Orleans and Houston—a distance equivalent to that covered during a five-hour drive. More than half of US crude oil is produced in Texas and Louisiana.⁸ In these industry-heavy areas, we see a race to protect global energy stability.

In southwestern Louisiana, near the Texas border, that includes the US Army Corps of Engineers and CPRA’s $6.8 billion Southwest Coastal Project.⁹ The partnership will invest most of its funding (about $5 billion) in rebuilding shorelines and marshland in Cameron, Vermilion, and Calcasieu Parishes—vulnerable neighborhoods that Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan anticipates will erode away by mid-century. The region is also home to an estimated one-fifth of the state’s oil and gas refineries.¹⁰ Unlike the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, federal funds will help cover its cost. The remainder will come from the Coastal Master Plan budget, raised through fines and settlements from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which in 2010 dumped 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf over eighty-seven days. Beyond Louisiana’s adaptation measures, federal and neighboring state governments will together look to spend, in the coming decades, up to $100 billion to fortify the roughly 80-mile stretch of Gulf shoreline that already plays host to the world’s largest petrochemical refining corridor.¹¹

In Texas’s Galveston Bay, the Army Corps and state partners will break ground later this year on a historic adaptation effort that, once completed, is expected to cost $55 billion. Locally, it’s known as the “Ike Dike”—a nod to 2008 Hurricane Ike’s toll on southeastern Texas, as well as centuries of Dutch flood control theory that inspired its design. It would be the largest infrastructure project in US history, with towering features such as some forty-three miles of sand dunes standing up to fourteen feet high, an artificial spine barrier encircling Galveston Island, a flood-defense system of thirty-six gates (designed to shut in sequences ahead of major storms’ landfall),  along with several even larger, more futuristic gates intended to guard against powerful storm-surge threats at the mouth of the fifty-two-mile Houston Ship Channel, where more than $900 billion in goods pass each year—much of which are oil and gas related. Texas’s adaptation project melds human engineering (so-called gray infrastructure) with nature (green infrastructure): 6,600 acres of marshland will be restored across the state’s southeastern coast, which, like Louisiana’s, will buffer severe storm threats. While modest, Texas’s coastal project recently received its first $500,000 allocation in May 2024.

“Intangible Connection to Place”

The Barataria Basin has seen some of Louisiana’s highest rates of coastal erosion;¹² altogether, the square mileage of Louisiana land lost to coastal erosion over the past century is equal to roughly twice that of Rhode Island. Simultaneously, Louisiana must account for additional coastal threats, like some of the nation’s highest future sea-level-rise projections. Without intervention, Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan estimates that some areas near Plaquemines Parish’s most southern borders could see as much as six feet in future sea-level rise by 2100.¹³ Meanwhile, due to last century’s local oil exploration, parts of Louisiana are sinking. The state once permitted some 50,000 former oil wells near coastal zones. To blame, as well, are approximately 8,000 miles of canals dredged by the oil and gas industry throughout the Mississippi River Delta. Over the past century, these canals have introduced saltwater into coastal Louisiana’s freshwater marshes, killing them. Subsequently, spoil banks—dirt piles leftover from the dredging of canals and their continued maintenance—also impede the distribution of dirt that nature laid down, intervening in the flow of water that was etched studiously across eons.

Eugene Turner, an oceanographer and coastal sciences researcher at Louisiana State University, suggests the state’s placement of blame on levee construction is misguided.¹⁴ Instead of pointing the finger at human-made levees, as the state has, the coastal erosion contributors most at fault for Barataria Basin and other areas’ land loss crisis, he argues, are dredged canals and spoil banks. A 2018 study that Turner coauthored with ecologist Giovanna McClenachan supports this conclusion, proposing an alternative, a “proven long-term strategy” in Louisiana’s fight against coastal erosion: backfilling canals with abandoned spoil bank piles’ sediment. Such a solution would cost a fraction of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project’s price tag, which has ballooned from the proposed $275 million since its announcement back in 2012; by comparison, Turner and McClenachan’s canal-backfilling proposal was priced at about $335 million.¹⁵

In a 2002 review of scholar-activist Winona LaDuke’s acclaimed 1999 work All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life,¹⁶ Native studies scholar Kimberly Tallbear articulates how each Indigenous tribe or community’s relationship to, or with, land is based on local history and necessity⎯a nuance that LaDuke’s analysis, according to Tallbear, fails to capture. Tallbear also argues that for land management conversations to reach their nuanced potential, it is crucial for all parties to partake in talks on environmental issues.

In Louisiana’s case, it represents an expansion of how we should think about how the Plaquemines Parish region’s Indigenous peoples relate to this land, even as it disappears. Louisiana-based researcher Jessica R. Simms and peers’ 2021 article underscores the gravity of such relationships in the context of relocation efforts taking place in Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles:

The intangible connection to place—feelings of belonging, lifestyle, family connections, and culture—plays a central role in many families’ decision to stay or go. The choice to relocate is rooted in this complex entanglement of identity, familial ties, land loss, historical and current marginalization, and a way of life passed on by multiple generations. ¹⁷

See No Evil

Indigenous peoples’ calls for the state to halt its diversion plan for their part of South Louisiana  have gone mostly ignored. Turner suggests that the state lacks research on alternative methods: “There’s background pressure to find another explanation for the loss [of land],” he tells me. But the favored excuse is that “the US government did this by building us flood-protection levees” and not the companies themselves. 

Diversion projects might also carry more short-term risks than long-term rewards.  

Dennis Lambert, a civil and environmental engineer specializing in coastal, marine, and environmental engineering projects, has long been one of the diversion project’s critics. In 2015, Lambert helped conduct an independent technical review of the Mid-Breton Diversion—a separate diversion project in the same area as Mid-Barataria, with the same purpose, but much further behind in its implementation—for a contracted Danish firm named COWI.

Then as much as now, Lambert’s findings helped shape opinion on the project; he also says he has suffered retaliation for voicing his concerns, which center on the diversion’s impact on sea life that calls Gulf waters home. Lambert tells me, “You don’t need to be a PhD in marine biology to know it’s going to kill dolphins,” which are among the species that depend on the marsh for shelter or to acquire food. If too much freshwater is introduced into those same brackish waters at once, as CPRA’s diversion project may entail, marine life will be in jeopardy.

Noting the potential loss of coastline to sea-level rise, Lambert laments, “We could lose our fisheries anyway. But the answer is not to unleash the river into the heart of it.”

Onward, Forward, without Indigenous Input

Legally, Louisiana wasn’t required to include Indigenous communities’ input during planning phases of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Project. Following the ethnic cleansing known to history as the Trail of Tears, members of Indigenous tribes banded together in an area today described as the southern tip of Plaquemines Parish. Without official tribal recognition from federal and state entities, local Indigenous leaders have no legal prerogative to take part in these types of civil works projects. As a means of tribal cultural resistance, in 2012 Grand Bayou residents joined Indigenous leaders across the nation to form the First People’s Conservation Council. Grand Bayou and FPCC leaders are among those to file suit against the project.

When I reached out to Chief Devon of the Grand Caillou Dulac Band, he declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Tribal leaders like Grand Bayou local Rosina Philippe, the FPCC’s president and a member of the Atakapa-Ishak / Chawasha, did not return requests for comment.

Still, Louisiana set aside $378 million for future aid to commercial fisherfolk and others who will be impacted by the project’s construction. Among those that qualify for funds are Indigenous community members in the village of Grand Bayou; it sits on Plaquemines Parish’s southernmost tip, only feet from the Gulf waters that have for centuries given their people life. Despite their village’s location on land that has almost completely eroded away in recent decades—with much of what’s left today only reachable by boat—the tribal village’s leaders have previously voiced their lack of a role throughout the project’s earliest and perhaps most communally vital planning.

In February 2024, a parish court enforced a stop-work order on the Mid-Barataria project, citing concerns for the commercial fishing industry among other issues. It was part of a flurry of legal moves filed months after the project’s groundbreaking.

Advocacy groups who have long backed the diversion projects remain steadfast in their support. In May 2024, a Louisiana Senate Transportation Committee meeting revealed that the state had already spent $422 million on project planning and construction. The committee noted that cancellation at this stage of the construction process could leave Louisiana responsible for paying out $1 billion in outstanding costs associated with the project.

Such hand-wringing is merely one example of the diversion project’s ongoing stress points. Many of these came to a head in January following the departure of Democratic governor John Bel Edwards due to term limits. The Republican administration of his replacement, Jeff Landry, has since expressed to federal officials what it describes as serious concerns about the project. In November before a State Senate committee, Landry echoed concerns of the diversion project’s opponents, saying its potential harm to commercial fishing and Indigenous foodways could “break [the] culture” of South Louisiana.¹⁸ 

Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungusser, Landry’s second-in-command and the former president of Plaquemines Parish, has publicly opposed the project outright.

Not long after taking office in early 2024, Landry also proposed a potential merger of state agencies—most notably the state’s natural resources department and the CPRA. Experts claim potential losses in funding could hinder the diversion projects’ broader goals.

The CPRA, for its part, remains adamant that the diversion must be constructed.

However, resolution is possible between the state and parish government. In a joint statement by the CPRA, the state, and Plaquemines Parish, the three entities professed their intention to work collaboratively in resolving residents’ “concerns related to the project.” The parish has since modified its stop-work order to allow minimal early work, such as prepping the construction site and building any necessary temporary structures. The statement added, “The goal of both parties is to protect and restore our invaluable coast.”¹⁹

It’s unclear what changes might come out of negotiations, or if a new environmental assessment from the Army Corps will be required for changes that might be agreed in the plan. That alone could set the project back years, perhaps longer, according to Davis and other experts.

Both proponents and opponents of diversion agree: Louisiana has no time to spare.

Commenting on the public balancing act required of coastal officials tasked with the project, Mark Davis tells me: “You cannot do this kind of work without making changes, particularly changes that are going to hurt somebody. The real issue is, how do you deal with that?”

Better yet, how can compromise be found before it’s too late to save a region?

Proponents and opponents of diversion agree: Louisiana has no time to spare.

I’ve grappled with this question often. Whose beliefs and analyses of the land are prioritized in the name of climate adaptation?

*

As we concluded our seaplane tour that spring afternoon, with Mardi Gras Pass now behind us, we banked sharply, splitting from the shoreline’s path and back toward the shallow bayou from which we had embarked.

The view ahead of our cockpit shifts from green and brown to the gray of the New Orleans skyline, rising above the coastal barriers that guard against the potential for lashings by the Gulf sea.

Whose beliefs and analyses of the land are prioritized in the name of climate adaptation?

The contrast between the deteriorating Louisiana coast and city skyline is stark. From our vantage point, I can’t decide which looks more delicate. But among those living below, like the Indigenous communities holding on to their way of life as Plaquemines Parish’s southernmost tip gradually disappears, their history seems at risk of breaking altogether.

In the words of Winona LaDuke, “The paradigm that got us into the problems we are facing today is not the paradigm that is going to get us out. And it would be important to have the courage to figure out some of these solutions together, and to recognize that indigenous people’s knowledge is pretty significant knowledge—thousands of years in the same place without messing stuff up.”²⁰ 

Historically, displacement of Indigenous people lies at the root of our most urgent ecological problems—a reality whose consequences continue to be illustrated clearly in coastal Louisiana today.

1. US Army Corps of Engineers, “Joint Public Notice,” March 5, 2018, mvn.usace.army.mil.

2.   Louisiana Geological Survey, “Generalized Geological Map of Louisiana,” December 2007, lsu.edu.

3.  Emily Schatzel, “Largest Single Restoration Project in U.S. History Breaks Ground,” National Wildlife Federation, August 10, 2023, nwf.org.

4.  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

5.  Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart et al., “Historical Trauma among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: Concepts, Research, and Clinical Considerations,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 43, no. 4 (December 2011): 282–90.

6.  Emma Elliott and Megan Bang, “Reducing Indigenous Suicide: Recognizing Vital Land and Food Systems for Livelihoods,” American Journal of Community Psychology 73, nos. 1–2 (March 2024): 267–79.

7.  US Census Results, 2020, US Census Bureau, census.gov. 

8.  “Profile Overview: U.S Energy Atlas with Total Energy Layers,” US Energy Information Administration,2022, eia.gov.

9.  Xander Peters, “How to Stop a State from Sinking,” MIT Technology Review, April 15, 2024, technologyreview.com.

10.  “Louisiana: Other Oil and Gas Infrastructure” (map), Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, n.d., dnr.louisiana.gov.

11.  Xander Peters, “Galveston’s Texas-Size Plan to Stop the Next Big Storm,” Smithsonian Magazine, July/August 2024, smithsonianmag.com.

12.  “A Changing Landscape,” Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, n.d., coastal.la.gov.

13.  “Parish Fact Sheet: Cameron Parish,”  2017 Master Plan, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, coastal.la.gov.

14. Robert Eugene Turner and Erick M. Swenson, “The Life and Death and Consequences of Canals and Spoil Banks in Salt Marshes,” Wetlands 40, no. 6 (December 2020): 1957–65.

15. Robert Eugene Turner and Erick M. Swenson, “The Life and Death and Consequences of Canals and Spoil Banks in Salt Marshes,” Wetlands 40, no. 6 (December 2020): 1957–65.

16.  Kimberly Tallbear, “Review [Untitled],” Wicazo Sa Review 17, no. 1 (2002): 234–42.  17.  Jessica R. Z. Simms et al., “The Long Goodbye on a Disappearing, Ancestral Island: A Just Retreat from Isle de Jean Charles,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 11 (2021): 316–28.

18.  Kevin Mcgill, “Louisiana’s Governor Raises Major Doubts about a Stalled $3 Billion Coastal Restoration Project,” AP News, November 21, 2024, apnews.com

19.  Erin Lowrey, “Major Coastal Restoration Project Resumes Some Work after Plaquemines Parish Works Towards Agreement,” WDSU 6, June 13, 2024, wdsu.com.

20. Taylor Jade Powell, “Winona LaDuke: ‘Time to Move On’ from Exploiting, Ignoring Nature,” The Hub, November 9, 2017, hub.jhu.edu.

Alejandro Villalpando: Paula, tell me a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up? Where’s your family from? And what would you consider your roots or your history?

Paula Ayala: My story begins in Southern California. My family was displaced in the ’80s from El Salvador during the civil war.¹ My father was forcibly displaced by the Salvadoran military, and that landed him here in Southern California around 1980. My mother left around 1983, leaving behind her two children, my eldest sister and brother. My eldest brother passed away in El Salvador due to a really contagious fever that was going around at the time because of poor health conditions and malnutrition.² It was during this time that dengue fever became an epidemic in the country.

My mother was going through the trauma of displacement and family separation via the death of her father and youngest son. This all was compounded by the intensity of the violence and what I imagine was the terror they were witnessing daily because of the war. 

We then left for the Central Valley of California in hopes of finding more suitable economic conditions for raising three girls. What they saw in the Central Valley was something very close to what they remembered in El Salvador: a countryside featuring natural rivers and mountains. As one of the few Salvadoran and Central American families in the area, we also experienced a lot of cultural and community isolation. So, my roots are very dispersed across territories and land, but we’re never forgetting our Salvadoran beginnings.

Alejandro: For folks who don’t know, the US has been involved in Central America for a long period, and this leads to a lot of displacement, as you talked about. How does/did military technologies or technologies of war seep into and show up in everyday discussions of the political situation back in El Salvador?

Paula: As a Central American kid,³ there’s a certain understanding that many of our families have about what weaponry, warfare, and military-grade artillery means. I understood what those technologies were at such a young age because the circumstances of war made this a norm in our community. Being forced as a young girl to know what a military tank is, what a grenade looks like, and what it does is something that later made me understand that these things were introduced by US empire and wouldn’t have existed in El Salvador before the suppression of—particularly socialist and communist—dissident movements against state power intended to serve capitalist interests. In the 1970s and early ’80s, the movements for communism and a socialist bloc were already developed. The US was interested in squashing these movements to introduce neoliberal capitalism, which was implemented after the wars. The political economies that were imposed on the region have been enabled and expanded by military technologies.⁴ 

We can think of this point in El Salvador’s history, along with those of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, as a moment where the globalization of technology and access to visualizing war—whether through DVDs, photography, VHSs, or telephone communication—revealed the actual horrors of death and displacement facilitated by some of the same technologies, appropriated by the US military and its subsidiaries. The parallels are not lost on me that this is the case with the global genocides currently underway and streaming on social media platforms. 

Alejandro: I’m curious, in your experiences traveling back and forth to different parts of Central America, whether you’ve had epiphanies like, “Oh, this happened here, and it was bigger than one can imagine.” Have there been any manifestations of that history while revisiting El Salvador, Guatemala, or Nicaragua where you see the history of US technological contributions to large-scale violence?

Paula: I want to give the credit to the people who have kept these archives through their memory, particularly through the reproduction of VHSs and DVDs of the war.⁵

Alejandro: Oh, bootlegs?

Paula: Bootlegs! We knew about warfare through VHS tapes and eventually DVDs produced in El Salvador and later brought to the US. There’s been people who showed them at our family parties openly, without censoring for the kids. We knew as young teenagers that this is what war looks like from DVDs brought from El Salvador. My curiosity would have me asking, “What am I seeing through the screen?” I’m seeing it. Partygoers made the connections to a place mentioned in the DVD and added who else was involved in this kind of warfare, who had been disappeared and never showed up, or got lost in one of those mountain ranges. I heard all of this growing up. So I wanted to look for that and go there myself to find it. I found out, in 2010, that the only way I could do that was by leaving the hellhole that is the US and going back to the town that my family is from. 

I visited a very important site in Perquín, Morazán. It was one of the guerilla strongholds of the eastern region of El Salvador during most of the 1980s. It’s where I first saw the crater of a bomb left by the Salvadoran military, a US-made bomb. I saw this hole, and I saw this crater. I was told by locals that this was made by a bomb. Next to the crater, I also saw the helicopter that dropped the bomb. 

The people of Perquín are strong and brave people who have held onto that helicopter with pride; they took down that technology, the technology of terror, in an effort to defend themselves. And that helicopter is there as a reminder to all the people of El Salvador that we can resist, and that resistance isn’t symbolic or abstract;⁶ resistance is something that you do, and your life will always depend on it.

Alejandro: Wow. Some of us choose to engage in the study of our past in places like Central American studies, anthropology, sociology, and so on. We work with our communities and our people through organizing, collaborations, cultural productions, and other forms of solidarity and activism. Some of us don’t even know what questions we’re about to meet as we take on this study, and it becomes kind of jarring because you’re having to relive it.

So, tell me: How do these memories shape your work, your position in academia, or just knowledge production in general?

Paula: The memories that I have are essentially passed down to me. They’re also very real and visceral memories for me because I tremble when I revisit them with the experiences of my family members. I tremble with them. And they shape my academic work by allowing me to hold on to the rage that I have, allowing me to use that rage to ask questions rooted in the aspiration for truth. A truth that explains why this has happened, who continues to be impacted, and who has benefited from our pasts. Sometimes, the last part gets sticky and complex for people in academia. 

My work as an academic is to ensure that I never obfuscate the truth, no matter how messy, no matter how discomforting it may be for my community or for me! This is important because there’s an actual reality of trying to wipe out those memories, to establish a collective amnesia. So, part of my work is to work against that amnesia as well as the continual and active problematization of settler-colonialism, American exceptionalism, multicultural neoliberalism, and brazen mestizo and white nationalisms in the Central American context.

Thinking back to my life as a kid, I recall parties being a place that showed me so much. Get-togethers were spaces of joy and, in many ways, sites of recuperation of the joy of nostalgia. They were also a container where the family would gather to cry for the people they were losing in real time in the ’80s and the early ’90s—people they couldn’t get a hold of because the phone lines were down, with whom they lost communication because there were shootings that week in the small towns we were from. People couldn’t get to phones in war zones. We had to sit with the irony of parties being both joyous and sorrowful. Parties were places where I learned our general history and that it was never lost in our family. 

Alejandro: How has coming into academia impacted the way you look back at those parties and memories?

Paula: With new lenses; because I’m lucky that I’ve been able to read and look at Central American scholars before me who have been able to put their experiences into a language that I understand. I’ve read these testimonies and academic works and have had the space to make sense of what that all has meant in my own life and my family’s lives. Reading works that explain the economic conditions, that understand the militaristic and political impositions of the US, has enabled me to theorize Central America as an abyss.

Central America, in my lifetime, has been thought of by those around me as an unknown place. If people did know something about the place, it was typically things like maras,⁷ pupusas, or pyramids. But there’s more to it than that. Questions have emerged for me through my studies, travels, and reflections that invite me to ask: What is it that I don’t know about this place? Why don’t I know this about this place? Why don’t more people know about this place like other parts of the world? And ultimately, what won’t we know, what can’t be known, and why can’t we know about this place? 

Alejandro: What else is there in your conception of Central America as an abyss? Because when I think of an abyss, I think about vastness. So, what else is in that vastness of the unknown?

Paula: It’s tied with the 500 years of colonization that has happened in Central America and what we’re now confronting as a larger systemic project of massive expulsion through ecological displacement, or what many would call “climate change.” Really, it’s capitalist ecological displacement, as is the case in Honduras with hydroelectricity and African palm;⁸ the burning of an ecological reserve, Indio Maíz, in Nicaragua that propelled a national uprising against Ortega in 2018;⁹ and the depletion and contamination of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.¹⁰ These are just some examples of the root causes of forced displacement managed by militarized corporations in tandem with the nation-states enforcing the repression of silence and, often, death. The intention is to eliminate whole populations and peoples, and that requires the elimination of their memory and a rewriting of Central American history. The questions then continue: Can we live in the abyss? Can we be in the abyss and not let those memories be lost? Can we also be in the abyss and live in the abyss and confront these realities in dignified ways?

So, the abyss is everywhere and manifests as the chaos that is settler colonialism and the multiplicity of ways that whole communities respond in defense—often by utilizing chaos itself. Central America is, for us, a place that is also everywhere. And in that “everywhere” that is Central America, I am rooted. The abyss is not a black hole that disappears the past. It is not abysmal. It’s infinite. And in that vastness, I come back to other diasporic-specific questions like: How do we survive? And I return to our people and their resistance; because they have always fought and have been fighting to survive. It didn’t start with the civil wars. The resistance, the struggle, the protests, and the dissidence are rooted in anti-colonial histories that the very guerillas of El Salvador, who dared to struggle, knew about and tapped into for their own strategies of guerilla warfare. Learning from our insurgent pasts and how our freedom fighters’ relationship to our ancestral links to anti-colonial resistance melded with practices of modern warfare and technologies, those things are an abyss that we can’t fully understand from afar and without guides. This is why I return to our people and the specific cosmological and geographical understandings of the depths of an abyss, much in the way that poet Ruben Dario describes as “the hope in the midst of doubt and obscurity”¹¹—because in their hope and vastness, they do and can understand and offer these stories as our inheritance. 

The abyss is everywhere and manifests as the chaos that is settler colonialism and the multiplicity of ways that whole communities respond in defense.

Alejandro: I’ve heard people talk about structural amnesia, especially among the Central American diaspora you talked about. These things that you saw in our families, like the crying—often the histories that animate the tears are unbeknownst to us, but they appear in those moments, in the community, in the convening, especially in the ’80s.

And back then, there weren’t a lot of lines of communication. I know everybody knows WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, and people are connected through these things, but that wasn’t the case back then. There might have been one phone line in a canton, which is like a small community, village, pueblo, or town. If it was down, it was down. You didn’t know what was happening. You knew your family was in the middle of a war. And you just didn’t know. That was super scary.

As we have talked about, some of us in the US are fighting against the forgetting, the collective amnesia. Is this also happening in countries like El Salvador, this kind of collective amnesia, or this structural forgetting? Is there a form of that happening right now that’s being instituted in El Salvador or wherever in Central America?

Paula: The institutional forgetting has become a tool of the fascist regime in El Salvador. One of its weapons is to create a condition of “unthought.”¹² So we see things or places where major battles were fought, people resisted, or massacres occurred, and we do not think about any of that. New movements and actions that push forward and call for egalitarianism are simultaneously criminalized, delegitimized, and undermined at the behest of the neoliberal state. Then the lineages these movements belong to are disappeared in our collective psyche.¹³ 

It is a project of the Bukele regime to propagate discourse that justifies the sell-off of the country to outside investors and paints it as an economic opportunity for locals. I was just in El Salvador, and we visited a lake in the region my family is from—Laguna de Alegría. And that lake has a really incredible history and is very meaningful. The waters contain sulfur. It’s not a freshwater lake. And as we were going to the lake, my family members happened to recognize a site of clandestine graves used by the military during the 1980s. Now, it’s an industrial zone with large CAT construction vehicles that dig up the earth, and it’s being mined for cryptocurrency.¹⁴

It’s places like these that the state wants you to see through an “unthought” frame. The current regime does not want us to remember that some people’s relatives are buried there, and the survivors may not ever know where their loved ones are because they were disappeared during the war. To advance the desires of crypto bros and the national ruling class, lakes like Alegría are renewed places of displacement like they were during the war. The displacement happening now is a result of the privatization and destruction of water sources for local populations because mining for global capital is placed in front of the needs of the locals. People cannot have the water of that lake for their use; they have little to no electricity or energy produced by the megaprojects there.¹⁵ I am not able to understand this without the people and their memories and stories that become unofficial records. These are the people’s archives that you’ll only truly know through the people themselves and those relations. 

Institutional forgetting has become a tool of the fascist regime in El Salvador. 

Alejandro: What are some of those unofficial archives that you would talk about in people’s memories? 

Paula: The lake in particular is a really important archive for my family because it tells us what’s happening now with the displacement because of the megaprojects. In 1932, La Matanza took place, which is an Indigenous genocide of El Salvador, during which Indigenous people from the west, places like Santa Ana and Ahuachapán, fled and made their way east toward the areas surrounding the lake.¹⁶ That unofficial record (memories and stories) explains part of my family’s history of internal migration. 

Alejandro: When did you learn these things? How does one learn these things when one goes back, given the push to forget?

Paula: The military wanted control of that region because of the organizational power that the guerilla encampments had in the mountain regions surrounding the lake. I would have never known that history if I hadn’t gone back with my family. Even if my family had talked about it in passing, with me around, while in the Central Valley, I would have never known what questions to ask, because I could not visualize that place. The structures of forgetting depend on displacing us from those places so that we don’t remember.

So we are left with more questions: How do we even ask? When we learn more about what has happened, we hesitate because the stories are so harrowing. We have to be sensitive and mindful and—

Alejandro: Trust.

Paula: Yes. To ask questions about traumatic pasts to survivors means one has to have a deep level of care and mutuality in the relationship to people and places. Fascist regimes that don’t want us to remember dissident histories want us to not ask these things. So, when we do know, and we hear of a place, of a town, a town name, someone is opening up—that’s where the abyss opens up. You open an abyss that is unending and anything is possible there, the most horrible things and the most beautiful things; because resistance is also expansive. The lengths people will go to defend their families can be something unimaginable and beautiful and also harrowing. That’s the abyss. 

Alejandro: Do you think that we always have to ask? What would you say to people about learning beyond a classroom? Are there other ways you’ve learned about these things without necessarily asking?

Paula: I’m a very sensitive person, and that always made me very quiet. This led me to be a good listener and very observant. I heard stories growing up that were so heavy and thick with detail that there was no longer a need to ask. A story that would be five minutes long would be so deep and heavy that I just sat with it. The intricacies would leave me trying to decipher a story for a decade. How is this possible? How can that happen to one person? 

Alejandro: How do we learn to remember again? 

Paula: I really want to honor the spirit of my late cousin. He was born to Salvadoran parents in Southern California and raised in the Central Valley. He always taught me through his words and actions, “No, I’m Salvi.” He wasn’t afraid to be himself. I loved that about him because he showed me I shouldn’t be ashamed of who I am. He was one of the youths who did not let the stigma and the shame that we’re supposed to have for being kids of exiles, refugees, and displaced people silence or erase us and our roots. Those are the people that society likes to throw away. Yet, those are the people that fight through whatever and with whatever is available, like dance or art, and I always knew that his movements and art were tied to something that I could not explain but had never forgotten. 

People like my cousin, and so many others, have historically been criminalized and deported as deemed “gang members” from the late 1990s to the present day in the US, and they are the same people who Bukele is currently persecuting and targeting under the national “state of exception.” This authoritarian law grants state officials all rights for unwarranted arrests of anyone deemed suspicious, with the nullification of any sort of constitutional rights and extended periods of provisional arrests.¹⁷ So again, given the long history of catastrophe, survival, displacement, and autocracy in the country—and, by and large, the region of Central America—how does one live and feel identity/ies as diaspora and within the fight of survival? It is also imperative to note Bukele’s own identity as a member of the Palestinian diaspora in El Salvador, and what that means for these specific histories of displacement and outright betrayals of justice for oppressed people in favor of dictatorships across the Americas.¹⁸ Are they merely paradoxes of power? Do they continue to signal this notion of an abyss—especially and specifically given the country’s recent history with revolutionary dissidence?

Alejandro: The abyss.

Paula: The abyss!

Alejandro: With the new regime in El Salvador, has there been a kind of effort at forgetting the past officially—or to silence the past—to borrow from Michel Rolph-Trouillot’s famous work?

Paula: One can go through the eastern region of El Salvador and never know what happened there. You can just go through it. That region can be read as a desolate and abandoned place, and that’s that. The state has abandoned that place. But for us that remember—because we grew up listening—we know that when you cross the newest bridge across the Río Lempa, we know that remnants of the old bridge (Puente de Oro) were strategically bombed by the guerillas so that the military would have no access to the eastern region.¹⁹ 

For one that knows, you understand that when you go to small towns like El Mozote, San Francisco Gotera, Intipucá, Perquín, you know that this is where Black, Indigenous, and poor mestizo people have lived. They are also the places that were the most rebellious against repression. So when the state ignores and abandons these regions, it is also an attempt to silence the reality that these were beacons of dissidence and rebellion. 

El Mozote is a place where over 900 people were massacred in less than two days. The Salvadoran military went in and gathered the community into buildings and fired at them from the outside until everybody inside died: women, babies, pregnant women, children, men. And very few survivors have lived to tell the story, Rufina Amaya being one of them. El Mozote is a place the state is trying to sanitize.²⁰

Alejandro: In many ways, we see that stories of survivors tend to be more palatable, whereas stories of militant resistance become more complex and, therefore, difficult for people to affirm. We are here because people dared to resist. So how do we help people not forget or dismiss that? 

Paula: We can all be more discerning with what we choose to accept as symbols for our communities. There are efforts to sanitize our pasts in the US through neoliberal schemes for inclusion and representation that fall flat and ultimately serve capitalist purposes. The desire for inclusion into the multicultural mainstream US obscures and, if we’re not careful, may erase our more radical histories of dissidence and dissidents. 

To see what’s happening in Palestine and how people continue to resist within the occupied territories and in that diaspora, we as Central Americans have another example of how powerful never forgetting really is. And to see the reactions and attempted suppression of people in solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians reminds me of how we were also categorized as threats upon our mass arrivals in the 1970s and ’80s. 

To call oneself a Sandinista was a dirty thing. When my family came here, you couldn’t say you were Salvadoran, because you were a communist. To soften and to play upon the tragedy of our past without acknowledging the militant and righteous resistance of the people of El Salvador is also why we are still here. It was never just the benevolence of an empire through peace accords that helped us survive.

Desire for inclusion into the multicultural mainstream US obscures and, if we’re not careful, may erase our more radical histories of dissidence and dissidents.

1.  For more on the history of the Salvadoran Civil War and the involvement of the United States see “Civil War, Descent into Violence,” California Migration Museum, August 2, 2024, calmigration.org.

2.  Before 1980 there were no reported cases of dengue fever in El Salvador. The epidemic advanced and took hold in the most abandoned parts of the country. See “Dengue in the Americas: The Epidemics of 2000,” Epidemiological Bulletin 21, no. 4 (December 2000). 

3.  “Central American” is used as a political identity in Central America—it refers to a once-unified nation, and to an identity that reemerged in Southern California during the 1980s anti-war and early immigrant rights movements. For more detailed arguments, see Maritza Cardenas, Constituting Central American-Americans: Transnational Identities and the Politics of Dislocation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 

4.  William J. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (New York: Penguin Random House, 2003).

5.  Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador: A Memoir of Guerilla Radio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

6.  “U.S. Copters Entered Salvadoran War Zone,” Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1985, chicagotribune.com.

7.  Steven Osuna, “Transnational Moral Panic: Neoliberalism and the Spectre of MS-13,” Race and Class 61, no. 4 (2020).

8.  “Take Action: Garifuna Land Defenders Forcibly Disappeared,” School of the Americas Watch, July 31, 2020, soaw.org.

9.  Josh Mayer, “Behind the Fire that Propelled Nicaragua’s Uprising,” North American Congress on Latin America, December 12, 2018, ​​nacla.org.

10.  Arwa Aburawa, “The Grandmother Lake: Conservation and Colonialism in Guatemala,” Al Jazeera, 2021, interactive.aljazeera.com.

11.  Ruben Dario, “La Fe,” available at Ciudad Seva, ciudadseva.com.

12.  Saidiyah V. Hartman, interview by Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2005): 183–201.

13.  Pedro Cabezas and Giada Ferucci, “Solidarity with El Salvador’s Santa Marta 5 Grows across Borders,” North American Congress on Latin America, April 19, 2024, nacla.org.

14.  For more on water, labor, electricity, cryptocurrency, and El Salvador, see Abigail Paz, “Bitcoin Mining’s Toll on El Salvador Leaves Communities without Water,” Global Voices, May 31, 2024, globalvoices.org; Claudia Diaz Combs, “In El Salvador, Workers Fight to Protect Public Services,” North American Congress on Latin America, August 15, 2023, nacla.org.

15.  Jorge Cuellar, “The Value of a Volcano,” North American Congress on Latin America, November 1, 2021, nacla.org.

16.  See “Jan. 22, 1932: La Matanza (‘The Massacre’) Begins in El Salvador,” Zinn Education Project, n.d., zinnedproject.org.

17.  “Salvadoran Resistance Bloc Denounces Recent Homicides, Repressive State of Exception, Failed ‘Territorial Control Plan,” Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, March 1, 2022, cispes.org.

18.  Sophia Azeb, “Who Will We Be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity,” Funambulist 24, June 28, 2019, thefunambulist.net.

19. Lydia Chavez, “Salvador Rebels Blow Up Bridge, Nation’s Biggest,” New York Times, January 2, 1984;John Newhagen, “Leftist Guerillas Bombed El Salvador’s Most Important Bridge Thursday,” United Press International, October 15, 1981.

20.  See “El Mozote Massacre,” Centro por la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional, n.d., cejil.org.

Over the last five years, a number of research projects have begun to engage with historic archival documentation to explore this phenomenon, which has taken place in most American cities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though no longer enforceable by law, the covenants provide evidence and a through line along which to trace the ways race has been routinely weaponized in order to construct and enforce white supremacy. The digitization of these formerly analog records provide a kind of witnessing—an evidence to their use as instruments of social control.

Like other forms of infrastructure, race becomes visible when the systems in which it is embedded break down. Locating the operational role that covenants played within local and regional systems of power is one means of prompting regenerative paths forward. Each set of restrictive covenants introduces us to how specific neighborhoods, parks, cemeteries, and other landmarks have been used as proxies to achieve exclusionary goals in community life. They also provide opportunities to reflect on how the visibility of race has, in many ways, been used opportunistically within these systems. 

For example, the quaint university town of Chapel Hill, nine miles from Durham, is a significantly smaller, whiter, and wealthier town. Chapel Hill experienced population growth later than Durham, and volunteers who have studied the town’s deeds argue that despite a relatively higher percentage of deeds with less explicitly racist language, Chapel Hill’s housing restrictions—by way of minimum required lot sizes, house sizes, and housing costs—were designed to block Black families from residing in certain of its neighborhoods. They also demonstrate how race can become an activating force when convenient. This is part of what scholar Wendy Chun has called “the how of racism” and what we hope our project, in conjunction with others across the United States that comprise a National Covenants Research Coalition, can illuminate through discussion and comparison. The impact of covenants and redlining are still very visible in Durham today—in the selection of areas for development and of which neighborhoods continue to be protected; in the fact of whose children grow up near garbage incinerators, and continue to play in contaminated parks. These are legacies of racism with a paper trail. HiH uses these records to provide evidence of and to instigate discussion around the long history of exclusionary restrictions—to problematize and counter the effects and impact of gentrification in the city as an economic development strategy. 

Finally, in making covenants available for public examination through communities of practice meetings and workshops over the last four years, HiH holds space for intentional public witnessing, reckoning, and discussion. Grounding conversations about the deeds in ways that explicitly avoid white comfort at the expense of further Black trauma, the project encourages people to begin to process their initial discomfort through somatic approaches. HiH challenges the removal of covenants from property deeds—a move currently pursued by multiple states and legal intermediaries. When covenants are removed, so is the evidence of an underlying story to be told. As archival studies tells us, this absence makes it possible to wrongly ascribe our social and economic differences to concepts like meritocracy rather than to the impacts of structural racism. Documentation can be used to make sense of the world and to be able to imagine otherwise while also understanding how systems of power function through cultural legitimization structures such as “history” and “archives.” This project asks: What might it mean to resist these clean narratives and to use the work of community building as a way to regenerate towards new possibilities?

In the following conversation, Logic(s)’ Puck Lo unpacks the impacts of racial covenants with HiH’s Alexandra  and James “JT” Tabron, assistant register of deeds at Durham County.

Puck Lo: Alex, you’ve worked as a digital archivist, and currently you’re a professor teaching archival studies. JT, you are an assistant register of deeds. Could you both talk about how you got involved with Hacking into History?¹

Alexandra Chassanoff: In 2010, I worked as a graduate research assistant on a project aimed at creating a digital collection for the redlining of neighborhood surveys and maps housed at the National Archives.² That experience was really eye opening to me about the kinds of documents that aren’t part of the national story. Fast-forward several years later: John Killeen—my former neighbor and the executive director of DataWorks NC—and I were discussing covenants after hearing about similar work happening at the University of Minnesota Library.³ So we talked with JT at the Durham County Register of Deeds office.

James “JT” Tabron: I manage the real estate division at the Register of Deeds office. My office is seventy feet away from the room where we keep these records in heavy-duty, plastic-bound books, and they’re right there in black-and-white print. For a while, I never really stopped to think that those were there. But you wonder why some communities look the way they do as compared to other ones, why governments seem to invest more in some places than others, why police may harass certain locations more than others. 

Puck: I’m curious about the materiality of the plastic-bound books, these documents. Could you talk about that?

JT: This is a government office. These things were all facilitated by the government. You look at the realtors who showed the houses. You have lawyers who write, rewrite, and copy these covenants and the legal documents, and then you’ve got the police that enforce them and the courts that enforce them. You don’t have to make great leaps to see how all these things are connected, and it’s right here in print in these books. No one with Negro blood can live here unless they’re a domestic servant.

Alexandra: Many American cities have these deeds. But to locate the specific covenants is really intense. When they’re in this physical paper form, it’s not like, I know where the racial covenants are, I just have to find the book.

JT: Real estate records are not generally filed by address. There are other organizing categories, like a legal description or a parcel ID or PIN number. Deed documents show ownership; a restrictive covenant is a clause that can either be tucked into a deed or stand alone. Restrictive covenants are clauses that say what somebody can or can’t do with a property. Racially restrictive covenants are going to be tied in among other covenants. You might see a deed with ten clauses—one might say, “You can’t have farm animals in your yard,” and another one might say, “You can’t build a building this high.” You’ll have six or seven of those, but then clause eight will be, “If you’re Black, you can’t live here.” It’s almost flippant how they just toss that in with everything else. Durham has digitized all of its land records back to 1881, so you’ve got thousands of records to trawl through. Alex, you can talk about how long you think this would have taken if we didn’t have access to machine learning. But basically, it enabled us to pull those documents and sift through them by looking for key terms. 

Alexandra:  Initially, the county scanned deed books to make electronic copies, but didn’t use optical character recognition, which makes text searchable. Our colleague Tim was like, “Let’s load all these up on an Amazon Web Services server, and I can run a machine learning tool on them.” We picked out a couple of keywords, like “Negro blood,” that were clear identifiers. But like with all machine learning stuff, you had to differentiate between references to white people versus white oak trees in the descriptions. That’s where the human validation part of our project came in. We wanted to crowdsource that part—we had over 150,000 records with the potential to contain racially restrictive covenants. And we loaded those into a crowdsourcing platform called Zooniverse and held community workshops for the better part of four years.⁴

JT: What we’re describing is a title search. You do this legwork of reverse-engineering the ownership chain, and it’s tedious. When people buy houses now, they get title insurance, and they get a lawyer to do it. It’s such an arduous but important task that there’s insurance involved—in the event that somebody messes up or misses something, because it can be so problematic. That just speaks to the amount of work involved.

Puck: Some people fixate on the deed itself—the paragraph—and it’s like, You’re missing the point. This is an index of generations of ongoing violence that is systemic and purposefully hidden from view. What gives value to land and property in the United States is racial violence. It’s the forcible removal of peoples of color and their replacement by white people.⁵ There’s even a calculation that was made: the government decided that the western frontier would be closed when there was one white body per two square miles.⁶ It was that specific—no pigs in the yard, no nonwhite people in the house, you know? 

JT: One of the things that we found looking through the documents is that a lot of them contain a clause that says: “It runs with the land.” Restrictive covenants can go into perpetuity. If there’s an addition that states “running with the land,” that means that the covenant terms continue on even after a property is sold. Our colleague, Tia Hall—who facilitates a lot of the somatic work in our sessions—makes the point that you can acquiesce with something even if you’re not actively participating in it. If you have communities around Durham where people are like, “I don’t have any restrictive covenants on my property; I don’t have anything to do with that.” But all of your neighbors do; that is going to assign some level of value—to your point, Puck—to your land. And if the prevailing sentiment of the time—coming from the federal government and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation—is that a property without certain types of people is more valuable than this other land where those people are; it just feeds into the point that you’re making, right? This valuation of land based on who’s there.

What gives value to land and property in the United States is racial violence. 

Puck: Can you talk about the crowdsourcing aspect of the project? 

Alexandra:  We launched in spring 2020. The original project was supposed to be in-person workshops where we use the covenants to engage people and teach them about the history of covenants. And then suddenly, we were all in this Zoom world, so the crowdsourcing platform made sense for carrying the project forward. It took us four years to get through all of the transcriptions. We had hundreds of thousands of deeds that had to be reviewed and validated by multiple volunteers.⁷

At our workshops we would give an introduction, then we’d spend thirty minutes doing transcription and validation, and then we’d ask people, “What is your reaction?” There have been a range of reactions, but I would say there is often a physical one, which is one of the reasons why having a community facilitator who uses somatic approaches has been groundbreaking. Tia asks people, “When you see the covenant itself and you see these words, ‘No one of Negro blood is allowed to live here,’ where do you feel that?” 

A lot of white people come to our workshops that want to “solve” the problem by removing the covenant. So as a project team, we’ve actually changed our focus. We’ve come to realize that seeing the language is a very powerful and important experience that is terrible, but also not something that we can just wipe away. We stand with it as a kind of witnessing.

JT: I think that when people’s worldviews are expanded with this type of information, it makes them uncomfortable. Some people talk about a tightness in their chest or their head starts to hurt or they feel sick to their stomach. So the response may be, “Well, how do we get rid of this?” But there are light bulb moments. I remember an older white lady. She told a story about how when she was younger, her parents, when they would drive around town, would take the long way home. And her parents would tell her, “We don’t want to go through that part of town, because these people live here.” She wasn’t able to conceptualize the inhumanity that her parents had been conditioned with that made them think that way—that we need to avoid these people, that there’s nothing we can learn from them, that they don’t have anything to offer; that their area doesn’t have any value, so we need to just circumnavigate that. 

We’ve come to realize that seeing the language is a very powerful and important experience that is terrible, but also not something that we can just wipe away. 

Puck: That’s a spatial story. That’s a story about people moving themselves in accordance with the world they built, right? And what determined value? If we’re looking at property law, it’s based on a worldview that said: we’re going to pull from the discovery doctrine, which gave European white countries the right to fight over supposed new territories and colonize them.⁸ I feel like that a-ha moment for that person, it’s like the body moving through time, having this realization that’s bigger than the moment itself. This is historical trauma, and it’s ongoing. We can’t move forward, because of trauma; we keep playing out the sources of our pain. We have to literally reenact this, and then we have to deconstruct it, start from scratch. There’s something in this process that you all put together that does that. You have current inhabitants bearing the weight of this history by sorting and recategorizing and witnessing, like you’ve said, the lineage of this violence. 

Alexandra: Not a lot of people that I know of are using somatic responses to do this kind of historical reckoning. It’s one of the most unique things about our project in Durham, because there are other projects examining covenants in cities all over the country.⁹ Some are focused on getting laws passed to get these covenants removed. Whereas our project is like, we want you to feel.

We have the archival receipts, and we want you to engage with the receipts and sit with them. They’re very uncomfortable, but we can only grow if we acknowledge those receipts.

We have the archival receipts, and we want you to engage with the receipts and sit with them. 

1.  “Hacking into History,” 2024, hackingintohistory.com.

2.  Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board,, October 11, 2024. archives.gov.

3. “Mapping Prejudice,” n.d., mappingprejudice.umn.edu. 

4.  Zooniverse is an online, free platform for citizen science projects and crowdsourcing transcription efforts: zooniverse.org.

5.  K-Sue Park,“Race and Property Law,” Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works 2405 (2021), 4–5. 

6.  Department of the Interior, Census Office, Compendium of the Eleventh Census, 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892). 

7.  The Hacking into History project analyzed 162,160 deeds, written between the 1880s and 1962, to identify those deeds that likely contained racial covenants. From the mid-2020 through spring 2023, over 300 volunteers reviewed and transcribed racial covenants, completing over 10,000 classifications. The project page, officially retired in 2024, can be found here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/tim-maps/hacking-into-history. 

8.  Park, “Race and Property Law”

9.  “National Covenants Research Coalition,” n.d., National Covenants Research Coalition, nationalcovenantsresearchcoalition.com.

Hannah Lucal: We first met doing tech surveillance work at Just Futures Law (JFL). As a movement lawyer and leader in immigrant rights for decades, how have you come to focus on technology?

Paromita Shah: I didn’t start off as a movement lawyer. I began as an immigration lawyer representing immigrant survivors of domestic violence and asylum seekers. I heard harrowing stories from people experiencing enormous flux and tragedy who made a life-affirming choice to journey to the United States. What drives people to leave everything that they have ever known, the families that they love, the people who know and care for them? As a child of immigrants, it is a question that has always lived in my brain.

I came to movement lawyering because of my immigrant parents’ beliefs about principled struggle and justice. They shaped my understanding of immigrant exploitation, genocide, colonialism, racism, and the idea that humans can eradicate histories and peoples for profit and empire. They started their lives in the US in St. Louis during the middle of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, after leaving a country that had freed itself from British imperialism twenty years earlier. Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Erich Fromm, Mahatma Gandhi, and many others were required reading in our home.

But it was 9/11 that made my parents’ teachings real. I saw people who looked like me shoved aside, disappeared, and pushed into a detention center. Within weeks, the US churned out a security state in the name of national security, patriotism, and unity. Nine-eleven made it clear to me how the violence of the state can move.

As an immigration lawyer, I had to help my clients get off a security list that we could neither examine nor challenge. Surveillance, data extraction, and vetting were combined with no-fly lists, government registration for Muslim men,¹ no-bond detention, and the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. My clients needed more than legal terminology and an immigration case; they needed to know how to navigate an inaccessible, violent system that was being deployed not only against the person that they love who is being incarcerated but against their entire family. That made me realize we were not looking at unfair outcomes; we were looking at a systemic problem of deportation, mass incarceration, and criminalization. 

Hannah: Nine-eleven was also a moment of increased funding for surveillance technologies to justify criminalizing and deporting Arab and Muslim communities,² the latest iteration of a long legacy of racialized surveillance.³

Paromita: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established in 2003,⁴ and it was homegrown to be a paramilitary institution. Today it is a $62 billion agency⁵ that has more armed agents than any department outside of the Department of Defense.⁶ I regularly went to meetings with DHS. Often they were focused on identifying and locking up immigrants who had any contact with the criminal justice system, from arrests to prisons. This is why, five years after its formation, they launched Secure Communities—a fingerprint-data-sharing system with the FBI.⁷ It was portrayed as a huge advancement in technology.⁸ Before, when you were booked by a police officer, your fingerprints went to the FBI to check for outstanding warrants. With Secure Communities, your fingerprints were sent to DHS to check your immigration status. This enabled DHS to have the police hold people so ICE would eventually pick them up and put them into removal proceedings.⁹ It massively expanded deportations and went way beyond whatever “targets” they had in mind; because that was never the intention. It swept in so many people.¹⁰ 

This collusion between DHS and local police was also big business. At the same time DHS grew, prisons grew.¹¹ The federal government paid a lot for people to be held in state prisons.¹² States like Georgia, Texas, and Alabama followed their lead and were like, “Yes, let’s have a racialized discussion about immigration and also incarcerate them.”¹³ It created fear, further separated families, and destabilized communities.

Hannah: Isn’t Secure Communities still in place? 

Paromita: The tool that propped up Secure Communities was an “immigration detainer”—a piece of paper from DHS asking the police to hold someone. It was treated as an order, not a request. Once we learned about it, we made it an Achilles’ heel. Groups like the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Mijente, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Immigrant Defense Project, and so many others launched campaigns—and eventually litigation—for cities to stop complying with immigration detainers.¹⁴ 

So, yes, even though Secure Communities still exists in practice,¹⁵ we exposed the government's misrepresentations about the program and birthed detainer campaigns, the foundation for sanctuary cities, and forced the government to change its enforcement practices. DHS misrepresented that cities could opt out of data collection¹⁶ and said there were civil rights protections.¹⁷ So communities took charge of their own safety and demanded cities stand for them. That is how we’ve curtailed the abuses of Secure Communities in Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Washington, DC, New York, Boston—all these places.¹⁸

Hannah: How do you think about using the law to abolish surveillance and policing given that many people would say the law should also be abolished? 

Paromita: I understand why people are frustrated about the law. If you want to make law a weapon, you have to be aware of its limits and strengths. Law is a tactic, not a savior. The legacies of genocide and slavery are embedded in the law.¹⁹ The law is imbued with the idea that human beings are disposable; because we have execution as punishment, and we have prisons. 

What happens if you use the court to strengthen community organizing campaigns? It is the job of lawyers to go beyond accountability measures, audits, and oversight mechanisms to establish different principles in the law that value people to the fullest extent of their dignity and needs. In the meantime, legal work can be powerful if used with community power. 

The law is imbued with the idea that human beings are disposable; because we have execution as punishment, and we have prisons.

Hannah: At the heart of those systems of punishment that the law upholds, there is the profit model and there is anti-Blackness. I think people don’t always think about the immigration system as part of the anti-Black carceral state right away. How does the tech industry not only profit from but actually expand criminalization, surveillance, deportation, and detention targeting Black people, specifically Black immigrants?

Paromita: The settler government, the United States, persists in dominating land, labor, and resources. Incarceration, slavery, exploiting Chinese labor to build railroads,²⁰ exploiting Mexican farmworkers for our food²¹—those are examples of racialized social control that require elimination protocols like jails, arrest, and deportation. 

Borders are sites of technological experiments, and migrants are increasingly blamed as the source of economic scarcity that people are experiencing. Corporations are taking advantage of that xenophobia and contracting with federal and local governments to build “smart border technologies” that capture your face at migrant camps, track your “emotions,” or vacuum information off your phone.²² Many of these systems have their roots in wartime technologies. None are focused on saving lives. Smart border technologies didn’t stop over 600 migrants from dying off the coast of Greece.²³ Hannah: That was never the goal.

Borders are sites of technological experiments.

Paromita: Right? They’re not going to use technology to protect people from dying at borders.

Hannah: So when it comes to tech policy, we are talking about systems of racialized social control being further cemented.

Paromita: Do we have tech policy, or do we have corporations putting out ideas that cement their power? Companies are designing tech policy that will give them an endless supply of federal money. Let’s be honest: we have not yet had a conversation about tech policy. 

Do we have tech policy, or do we have corporations putting out ideas that cement their power?

Hannah: What is the conversation about tech policy that you want to have?

Paromita: The only conversation we’re having about tech policy is around like, The Terminator. What disturbed me about this AI frenzy, which has been masquerading as tech policy, is how easily our governments consumed it. Will tech become an artificial sentient being that disables our military security systems and launches nuclear bombs? But in the meantime, they’re okay deploying a robot dog in the Bronx.²⁴ Will tech save the planet? But right now tech companies are building data farms that steal water and electricity from communities.²⁵ 

While corporations are lobbying for pro-corporate policy and procurement money, they are also exploiting a narrative that “technology for good” is their purview. Yet, they have passed anti-privacy policies in fourteen-plus states.²⁶ Lobbyists clamor about the fear of reducing innovation—you can see that in the newest executive order which highlights innovation first, rights second.²⁷ The crisis is not The Terminator; the crisis is that tech is unregulated. We need communities to set the substance of tech policies so that tech is an asset for communities, not corporations. Governments should focus less on the big-tech talking heads and venture capitalists and engage with organized communities who understand their needs and how to solve them. To do this, we need a disciplined shift away from weak, ineffective policies that focus solely on mitigating risk—such as risk to privacy or transparency—and that rely on carve-outs for law enforcement, immigration, or crime. Hannah: How does JFL apply abolition values to tech policy work? 

Paromita: We look to the horizon when we will not have prisons, police, bans, or walls. We have a framework that tech policy is developed by people who are most impacted by it. We think beyond the current parameters for tech policy, which are limited to privacy protections—which don’t cover most noncitizens—and civil rights, or how we can persuade corporations to do better. Already, we see our government has made massive exceptions in tech policies to allow law enforcement and national security agencies to decide when to exempt themselves from the rules.²⁸ 

Of course, transparency, oversight, and risk assessments matter, but they don’t impact how communities can change the systems being pushed on them. They rely on the assumption that you have to trade your rights for the benefit of the technology. Why should we trade away information about where you live, who you know, your license, your school? You have to surrender your face, your fingerprints, your biometric data to travel in an airport.²⁹ All of this is to obtain a benefit that used to exist before these tools did.

Hannah: I appreciate this principle of refusal with technology. I have seen that happen most at the local policy level.³⁰ I also see the way that the industry has co-opted and pushed the conversation around privacy and civil rights to strengthen their power, and to eliminate the option of refusal.

Paromita: Yes! You’re asked: Do you want to opt out of data collection so you can access this article? Opt-outs are a fakeout, because the industry wants to push people into their products with fewer ways to get out. What most of these industries need, to have their tools work, is data. They need high computing power, data, labor, and energy. We’re beginning to see reports that data is running out,³¹ and the fact that many of these datasets are held by corporations puts pressure on our government to make toxic decisions about what we can opt out of. At the end of the day, there was no opt-out for Secure Communities.³²

Community organizing power should be driving policy, so it doesn’t just live in the Washington, DC beltway and the tokenizing that comes with it. There’s a bad habit of adding impacted groups to the table without having them develop policy, even though communities are the brain of our movements. If you have a community base driving policymaking, you understand the red lines. For example, I want to make sure that local cities have a chance to build out a good tech policy, and I’ll walk away if federal legislation bans that.

Corporations are using tech as an extension of state power. We need to see data as a public resource—like water or air—not a commodity. If you see technology as a resource for everyone, the policies that flow from that are entirely different. We could develop participatory governance systems for technology that go beyond privacy, civil rights, and oversight and further community interests, not the interests of tech and defense industries.

We need to see data as a public resource—like water or air—not a commodity.

1. On the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, see Rights Working Group and the Center for Immigrants’ Rights, The NSEERS Effect: A Decade of Racial Profiling, Fear, and Secrecy, Pennsylvania State University’s Dickinson School of Law, May 2012, pennstatelaw.psu.edu.

2. See, for example, Jessica Katzenstein, Total Information Awareness: The High Costs of Post-9/11 U.S. Mass Surveillance, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, September 26, 2023, watson.brown.edu; Rights Working Group and the Center for Immigrants’ Rights, NSEERS; Diala Shamas and Nermeen Arastu, Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims, Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project, City University of New York School of Law, 2013, law.cuny.edu.

3.  See, for example, Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Katzenstein, Total Information Awareness.

4.  “Creation of the Department of Homeland Security,” Department of Homeland Security, May 8, 2023, dhs.gov.

5. “FY 2025 Budget in Brief,” Department of Homeland Security, n.d., dhs.gov.

6.  Connor Brooks, “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2020 – Statistical Tables,” US Department of Justice, updated September 2023, bjs.ojp.gov; Adam Andrzejewski and Thomas W. Smith, The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies: Non-military Purchases of Guns, Ammunition, and Military-Style Equipment FY2015–FY2019, OpenTheBooks, December 2020, openthebooks.com.

7.  “Secure Communities,” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, May 10, 2024, ice.gov.

8.  “Secure Communities Crash Course,” US Customs and Immigration Enforcement, 2009, ice.gov.

9.  “Secure Communities: A Fact Sheet,” American Immigration Council, November 29, 2011, americanimmigrationcouncil.org.

10.  See, for example, “Opposing the DHS-ICE Secure Communities Program,” American Public Health Association, October 30, 2012, apha.org; Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Mary J. Lopez, “Immigration Policy, Immigrant Detention, and the U.S. Jail System,” Criminology and Public Policy 21, no. 2 (May 2022): 433–60; Lee Romney and Paloma Esquivel, “Noncriminals Swept Up in Federal Deportation Program,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2011, latimes.com.

11.  See, for example, Livia Luan, “Profiting from Enforcement: The Role of Private Prisons in U.S. Immigration Detention,” Migration Policy Institute, May 2, 2018, migrationpolicy.org; Mary Small, “A Toxic Relationship: Private Prisons and U.S. Immigration Detention,” Detention Watch Network, December 2016, detentionwatchnetwork.org; Eunice Hyunhye Cho, “More of the Same: Private Prison Corporations and Immigration Detention under the Biden Administration,” American Civil Liberties Union, October 5, 2021, aclu.org.

12.  National Immigrant Justice Center, Cut the Contracts: It’s Time to End ICE’s Corrupt Detention Management System, March 2021, immigrantjustice.org.

13.  National Immigrant Justice Center, Cut the Contracts.

14.  See, for example, “Legal Issues with Detainer Campaigns,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center, November 2016, ilrc.org; “END S-COMM: Alto Polimigra!,” National Day Laborer Organizing Network, 2019, ndlon.org; “Ending Police Collaboration with Mass Deportation Programs: PEP, ICE Out of Rikers, and Ending S-Comm,” Immigrant Defense Project, immigrantdefenseproject.org.

15.  “Criminal Apprehension Program,” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, May 3, 2023, ice.gov.

16.  See, for example, Shankar Vedantam, “Local Jurisdictions Find They Can’t Opt Out of Federal Immigration Enforcement Program,” Washington Post, September 30, 2010, washingtonpost.com; Romney and Esquivel, “Noncriminals”; American Public Health Association, “Opposing.”

17.  “Missing the Point: ICE’s Secure Communities ‘Reforms’ Ignore Real Problems,” National Immigrant Justice, June 28, 2011, immigrantjustice.org.

18.  See, for example, Lena Graber, Angie Junck, and Nikki Marquez, “Local Options for Protecting Immigrants: A Collection of City and County Policies to Protect Immigrants from Discrimination and Deportation,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center, December 15, 2016, ilrc.org; Krsna Avila et al., “The Rise of Sanctuary: Getting Local Officers Out of the Business of Deportations in the Trump Era,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center, January 2018, ilrc.org; “State Map on Immigration Enforcement,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center, October 31, 2024, ilrc.org.

19.  “The Legal Profession Must Confront Its Role In Slavery,” Citing Slavery Project, citingslavery.org; Ruth Hopkins, “The Indian Removal Act Was Used by the U.S. Government to Commit Ethnic Cleansing,” TeenVogue, May 28, 2021, teenvogue.com.

20.  Jim McMahan, “For Over a Century and a Half: Chinese Workers Abused and Superexploited in U.S.,” Workers World, March 25, 2021, workers.org.

21. Marjorie Zatz, “Using and Abusing Mexican Farmworkers: The Bracero Program and the INS,” Law and Society Review 27, no. 4 (1993): 851–64.

22.  Mizue Aizeki et al., “Smart Borders or a Humane World?,” Immigrant Defense Project and the Transnational Institute, October 6, 2021, tni.org.

23. Hibai Arbide Aza and María Martín, “Greece Imposes Silence around Shipwreck of Overcrowded Migrant Boat,” El Pais, June 20, 2023, english.elpais.com.

24. Karen Matthews, “Robotic Police Dog ‘Digidog’ Rejoins NYPD,” PBS News, April 12, 2023, pbs.org. 

25.  Olivia Solon, “Drought-Stricken Communities Push Back against Data Centers,” NBC News, June 19, 2021, nbcnews.com.

26.  Caitriona Fitzgerald, Kara Williams, and R. J. Cross, The State of Privacy: How State “Privacy” Laws Fail to Protect Privacy and What They Can Do Better, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and US PIRG Information Fund, February 2024, epic.org.

27.  “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” The White House, October 30, 2023, whitehouse.gov.

28.  See, for example, “Executive Order” and “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: Making Automated Systems Work for the American People,” White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, October 2022, whitehouse.gov; Erin Murphy, “The Politics of Privacy in the Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, the Fourth Amendment, and Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions,” Michigan Law Review 111, no. 4 (2013): 485–548; Müge Fazlioglu, “Filling the Void? The 2023 State Privacy Laws and Consumer Health Data,” International Association of Privacy Professionals, March 28, 2023, iapp.org.

29.  “Say hello to the new face of security, safety and efficiency,” US Customs and Border Protection, updated September 2024, cbp.gov; “Biometric Entry-Exit H-1B and L-1 Fees Spend Plan,” Department of Homeland Security, September 18, 2023, dhs.gov. 30.  “Ban Facial Recognition,” Fight for the Future, banfacialrecognition.com.  31.  Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly, “A.I. Companies Are Running Out of Training Data: Study,” Observer, July 19, 2024, observer.com. 32.  Julián Aguilar, “Feds: Secure Communities Not Optional,” Texas Tribune, August 5, 2011, texastribune.org. 

Local officials welcomed Google’s project, promising it would spur further development of Uruguay’s tech sector.⁷ But residents quickly raised concerns regarding the mass amounts of water the data center would likely require.⁸ The region has subsequently suffered from a years-long drought, which in June 2023 pushed Montevideo to declare a state of emergency. ⁹ However, the projected environmental impacts of the data center remained unknown due to a confidentiality requirement in the deal between Google and the government—a condition Google insisted upon, supposedly to protect trade secrets. Conveniently, this agreement also obscured any environmental harms from public view.

Daniel Pena is a researcher at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, where he was born and raised. Enol Nieto Jiménez, who is Spanish, is a researcher with BETA (Biodiversidad, Ecología y Tecnología Ambiental y Alimentaria) Tech Center; he and Pena met during their graduate studies Montevideo, becoming close collaborators in local environmental organizing and suing the Ministry of Environment to gain access to the environmental impact projections. After winning the trial, the documents made public that the data center would require 2 million gallons of water a day to cool its servers—equivalent to the domestic daily use of 55,000 people.¹⁰ 

Logic(s) interviewed Pena and Nieto about the trial’s implications and the ongoing fight for water justice in Uruguay. Note that this interview was conducted asynchronously with the support of a translator. All responses are a collaboration between Pena, Nieto, and Noelia Freire, who translated their responses. 

Your lawsuit to expose the expected environmental impacts of Google’s data center occurred in the context of a broader social movement in Uruguay against the project. Can you tell us about the history of this movement?

To understand our lawsuit against Google’s data center, we must first look at the past twenty years of environmental activism here in Uruguay that preceded it. During this time, Uruguay’s popular movements centered around one key element: water. In 2004, we became the first country in the world to declare water as a human right in our constitution and guarantee public management of water services.¹¹ Trade unions were directly responsible for this reform, from drafting the article to leading a nationwide campaign for its passage. In the end, more than 60 percent of Uruguayans voted in favor.¹² This moment gave rise to the National Commission in Defense of Water and Life (CNDAV), a coalition of grassroots environmental groups, which has remained a key leader in the environmental justice movement ever since.

Over time, other organizations came together to build a coalition with CNDAV, including artist groups, community associations, and labor unions. This coalition has led protests, legal actions, and social media campaigns against various policies and government-backed projects that threatened our water supply, such as the Irrigation Law in 2018 (which legalized damming and privatization of previously public water supplies in rural areas) and the Neptuno Project in 2023 (which privatized de facto the water supply in the metropolitan area of Montevideo). CNDAV succeeded in defeating the Neptuno Project, at least temporarily; a judge recently ruled the project violated the constitutional provision that only the state can provide water services.¹³ 

Then, in 2023, we experienced the most devastating drought in decades. Despite the lack of rainfall, the Uruguayan government failed to limit agro-industrial companies’ water use. Instead, they continued approving private projects with high water requirements and shifted emergency water-rationing measures onto everyday people, banning us from watering our gardens or washing our cars.¹⁴ Meanwhile, authorities began to rely on salinized water from the nearby Rio de la Plata estuary, resulting in nearly undrinkable tap water for millions of residents.¹⁵ The government had essentially failed to uphold our constitutional right to water.

It should be noted that the drought was not borne evenly by all Uruguayans. The media and state have long claimed that racism is not an issue.¹⁶ The narrative that Uruguay has no significant Black or Indigenous population is perpetuated by the government and continues to receive a troubling level of popular support.¹⁷ But due to ongoing advocacy efforts from these communities, an increasing number of people are asserting their Afro-Uruguayan and Charrúa identity and demanding recognition.¹⁸ These communities face the highest rates of extreme poverty and were the most harmed by the drought.¹⁹

In response, social movements quickly organized actions against the government and private interests compromising public access to water. The Coordinación por el Agua (Water Coordination) and the CNDAV played a fundamental role, joining together as autoconvocadxs (self-assembled). After three months of daily protests under the slogan “No es sequía, es saqueo” (It’s not drought, it’s pillage), they forced a public discussion about the government’s role in the drought and how the current system had overloaded water supply.²⁰ Their demands received international media attention.²¹ 

It is in this context that the government announced its contract with Google to build a data center that we later learned would require enormous amounts of water.²² But decades spent organizing had prepared the water justice movement for this moment—to fight the project. 

You were both involved in the lawsuit to expose the expected environmental impacts of Google’s data center. Can you tell us more about the organizing efforts that led to this outcome?

We’re both academics by training and share a vision of the academy as a space connected to and nourished by the social context in which it is situated. At its best, the academy can become a space for political transformation. 

After meeting in our graduate program at the University of the Republic²³, we continued to run into one another in different organizing spaces. Slowly, between the academy and the streets, a friendship emerged. In 2021, we spent time in Daniel’s home in the rural west of Montevideo, where we talked about how to best support struggles for water justice in Uruguay and Spain (where Enol now lives). We also discussed how the data center agreement between Google and the Uruguay government was entirely classified, which the government claimed was necessary to protect Google’s confidential commercial information. But these confidentiality requirements only served to hide the project’s environmental impact from the public. 

We began to look into similar data center projects around the world and realized that they often lead to widespread pushback from the public—like in Chile, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Ireland. Just like in Uruguay, the Chilean government also concealed the environmental impact projections for Google’s proposed data center. But following a social media campaign and series of legal action led by MOSACAT (Movimiento Socioambiental Comunitario por el Agua y el Territorio [Community socio-environmental movement for water and land]), the government announced the project would be paused indefinitely.²⁴

The knowledge that a similar campaign achieved success in Chile made us feel like it was possible to win against Google in Uruguay, particularly given our long history of water activism. So we decided to file a lawsuit against the Ministry of Environment, demanding they publish the environmental projections.²⁵ Relying on Article 47 of the Constitution, which requires the participation of civil society in water-resource management, we challenged the right of the company to keep certain parts of the project confidential. Both CNDAV and the Coordinación por el Agua quickly joined the lawsuit and began to build a campaign to garner public support.

On World Water Day, March 22, 2023, more than forty organizations and over 3,000 people marched through central Montevideo demanding an end to Google’s data center and other projects that further privatized our water. The disproportionate impact of Uruguay’s water crisis on vulnerable populations resulted in a broad coalition involved in the action, including environmental groups, trade unions, and feminist groups. Afro-Uruguayan and Charrúa collectives, such as Clan Chonik, Casa de la Cultura Afro Uruguaya, Consejo de la Nación Charrúa, and Hum pampa also joined the coalition. These groups pushed the coalition to broaden our demands from simply a rejection of Google’s data center and other water-privatization efforts to a full reimagining of our relationship to water. 

A few days after we filed the lawsuit (with the support of our lawyer, Carolina Neme), the courts publicly mandated the Ministry of Environment to release the projected environmental impacts to the public.²⁶ It was then that we learned Google planned to use 7.6 million liters of water per day to keep its data center cool. To put this in perspective, that amount of water is equivalent to the average daily consumption of 55,000 people.²⁷ 

The announcement was met with extensive media attention and public outcry. Both the leading government party (the National Party) and the main opposition party (Frente Amplio) quickly moved to defend the project, anxious to maintain Uruguay’s reputation as friendly to international business interests.²⁸ But a few weeks later, at the hardest moment of the drought, protests broke out once again, and public pressure on the government reached a boiling point. Finally, Google announced that they had decided to modify their project: the proposed data center would be three times smaller and would instead use an air cooling system, rather than a water one. 

Even this reduced plan ensured significant environmental harm. While this revision would decrease the reliance on water, it greatly expanded energy requirements and associated carbon emissions²⁹. The Movimiento por un Uruguay Sustentable (Movement for a sustainable Uruguay) and Amnesty International quickly mobilized a campaign encouraging public comments on the plan to the Ministry of the Environment. In total, the campaign generated over 400 public comments pointing out the new environmental risks and demanding additional studies on the projected energy usage, emissions, and other pollution.³⁰ 

Our fight is still ongoing; the project is moving forward, even though the data center will now be smaller. The government’s refusal to cancel the project is indicative of their commitment to protecting multinational corporations’ interests. However, the legal battle was a major victory because the release of those documents helped to mobilize the public. And we should celebrate that.

How do you understand this data center within Uruguay’s struggle for independence and contemporary turn toward economic liberalization?

This project will further degrade Uruguay’s democracy and economic sovereignty. If finalized, the data center would exist in a free trade zone where companies are exempt from taxes—one of the many free trade zones the government has approved in recent years to attract international capital. The government has justified the tax breaks by claiming the project will generate jobs for us—but once built, the data center will only employ fifty people.³¹ 

The magnitude of its projected environmental harms mirrors the scale of challenges it poses to data sovereignty, leading us to ask: Who should get to own data centers? Should the use and storage of our data be private? Or, perhaps, should decisions regarding our information (and any environmental impacts resulting from these decisions) belong to the public sphere? We are at a key moment in the development of technology and so-called AI. If we don’t grapple with these questions now, we might be too late. 

Who does Google’s data center benefit, anyway? The government claims the project will “improve the business climate” so other American, European, and Chinese companies will want to invest in Uruguay. Supposedly, these investments will eventually benefit the public. But years of similar projects here in Latin America show that these investments will just benefit the companies themselves.³² 

The profit from this data center will be exported out of Uruguay while we are left to deal with the environmental impacts. Our natural resources are exploited for the benefit of the global North. This fact has not changed with the rise of the digital sector. Although tech companies would like us to think otherwise, developing their products requires massive environmental costs. And these costs are often borne by people living in the global South—like in Uruguay.

Our natural resources are exploited for the benefit of the global North. This fact has not changed with the rise of the digital sector.

As you’ve mentioned, Uruguay’s movement against this data center is not a standalone case—similar organizing has occurred in Chile, the Netherlands, and here in the United States. How do you understand your fight in Uruguay within this broader struggle?

Since supply chains are progressively global, complex, and fragmented, socio-environmental struggles have become increasingly organized at the international level; we can share information, strategies, contacts, and so on. The growth of the tech sector raises new challenges for our movement, including the environmental harms this sector generates (which are often invisible to consumers). The products the tech sector creates aren’t designed to serve the needs of the public. Rather, they are designed to generate mass quantities of profit for a small handful of companies, like Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and X (formerly Twitter). But while their products don’t serve our needs, we can still use them to build a stronger, more connected, and more informed global movement. 

For example, it was Chilean activists’ fight against a similar Google-owned data center that initially compelled us to investigate the water impacts of the proposed data center here in Montevideo.³³ Similarly, Greenpeace reports on the energy impacts of data centers in Virginia inspired us to demand that our government conduct similar studies.³⁴ Every local struggle can generate learnings that benefit other local struggles. It is through the culmination of these struggles that we will begin to crack the hegemony of multinational corporations. 

We hope that our mobilization will inspire others to fight for their communities using the tools they have at their disposal, whether through legal actions, street protests, brand boycotts, digital campaigns, or critical research reports. 

For us, it is important to understand that all these cases (in Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, and the US) make visible the hidden costs of tech development. Behind things like algorithmic systems, data processing, and digital platforms, there is the material reality that makes their development possible. They require resources like energy, rare minerals, and water. The so-called digital cloud is not in the sky but here on Earth, in places like Montevideo. We must build social movements that consider the entire production chain of technology, including environmental impacts. It is through this perspective that connections between tech products sold to consumers in the global North and social and environmental crises in the global South can become visible.

The so-called digital cloud is not in the sky but here on Earth, in places like Montevideo.

1. “Discover Our Data Center Locations,” Google, accessed September 9, 2024, google.com/about

2. “Quilicura, Chile – Data Centers – Google,” Google, accessed September 9, 2024, google.com/about. 

3.  “Google huyó de Uruguay por falta de mano de obra calificada,” El Observador, October 23, 2013, elobservador.com.uy.

4. Note that this cable is co-owned by Google and the Uruguayan state-run company Antel; Lachlan Williams, “Uruguay/Google Tannat Cable System Links with Brazil and Argentina,” Rio Times, December 4, 2020,riotimesonline.com.

5. “In Brief: Google to Expand Data Centres in Uruguay,” Latin News, May 17, 2021, latinnews.com. 

6.  Grace Livingstone, “It’s Pillage’: Thirsty Uruguayans Decry Google’s Plan to Exploit Water Supply,” Guardian, July 11, 2023, theguardian.com. 

7.  Georgia Butler, “Google Confirms Construction of Data Center in Uruguay,” Data Center Dynamics, November 7, 2023, datacenterdynamics.com. 

8.  Butler, “Data Center in Uruguay.”

9.  “Alert: Water Crisis Declared by Uruguayan Government,” US Embassy in Uruguay, June 26, 2023, uy.usembassy.gov. 

10.  Livingstone, “It’s Pillage.”

11.  Eduardo Galeano, “Aguas de octubre. Al sur de América hubo elecciones y hubo plebiscito,” Revista Rebelión, November 1, 2004, rebelion.org.

12.  Diego Castro, Mandato y autodeterminación. Pistas para desarmar la trampa estadocéntrica (México: Bajo Tierra, 2022).

13.  “Ruling against US$295mn Project Reignites Uruguay Water Debate,” bnamericas, June 26, 2024, bnamericas.com.

14.  “Uruguay prohíbe utilizar agua para fines no prioritarios,” Deutsche Welle, November 2, 2023, dw.com. 

15.  Alejandro Obaldia and Brendan O’Boyle, “In Parched Uruguay, Tensions Rise as Water Levels Fall,” Reuters, June 30, 2023, reuters.com.

16.  Marisa Bucheli, Maximo Rossi, and Florencia Amábile, “Inequality and Fiscal Policies in Uruguay by Race,” Journal of Economic Inequality 16 (2018): 389–411.

17.  Uruguay is one of the only countries in Latin America that has not ratified the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention—the only international law protecting Indigenous peoples’ right to land. See “Uruguay Does Not Ratify the Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” Rio Times, November 10, 2022, riotimesonline.com.

18.  The Charrúa are an ethnic group Indigenous to Uruguay. See Pablo Albarenga, “Where Did Uruguay’s Indigenous Population Go?,” El País, November 10, 2017, english.elpais.com; Jesús Chucho Garcia, “Afro Uruguayans––between ‘Camdombe’ and Self-Recognition,” trans. Karen Juanita Carrillo, Amsterdam News, July 18, 2024, amsterdamnews.com.

19.  Marisa Bucheli, Maximo Rossi, and Florencia Amábile, “Inequality and Fiscal Policies in Uruguay by Race,” Journal of Economic Inequality 16 (2018): 389–411.

20.  Enol Nieto, “Uruguay: La gota (salada) que colmó el vaso,” Climática, La Marea, June 22, 2023, climatica.coop.

21.  Daniel Pena, “Agua en Uruguay: ¿Por qué es saqueo y no solo sequía?,” Zur, July 14, 2023, zur.uy.

22.  Every mention of Google in this conversation refers also to their subsidiary in Uruguay, Eleanor Applications SRL.

23.  The University of the Republic, which is public, autonomous, and cogoverned, has ongoing involvement in the water justice movement.

24.  Duna, “Duna FM,” Facebook page, facebook.com/RadioDuna; Israel Durán, “Tribunal ambiental frena proyecto ‘Cerrillos Data Center’ de Google y pide analizar sus posibles efectos en el medio ambiente,” Duna, February 27, 2024, duna.cl. 

25.  Neme represented Pena and Jimenez on a pro bono basis.

26.  Mariana Abreu,“Una nube se hace con agua. La opacidad de la información ambiental en el sector tecnológico,” Brecha, March 24, 2023,brecha.com.uy.

27.  Livingstone, “It’s Pillage.”

28.  “Las claves del datacenter de Google: El proyecto ‘estratégico’ que implicará una inversión de US$ 850 millones,” El País, August 30, 2024,elpais.com.uy. 

29.  Daniel Pena, “Una aprobación a ciegas,” August 2, 2024, brecha.com.uy.

30.  Enol Nieto and Daniel Pena, “Google y la Campaña Ciudadana frente a su nuevo proyecto de Datacenter en Uruguay,” Zur, April 1, 2024, zur.uy.

31.  Informe final área de evaluación de impacto ambiental, Ministry of the Environment (Uruguay), April 20, 2024, ambiente.gub.uy.

32.  For example, the government allowed a Finish forestry company to build multiple pulp mills, promising the project would raise Uruguay’s annual GDP by 2 percent. “Finnish Forestry Firm to Transform Uruguay with $2.7bn Pulp Mill,” KPMG, n.d., subcontractors.uy. In reality, the project has displaced rural populations and degraded soil and water quality in the neighboring regions. “Uruguay: The Fraudulent Campaign of the Finnish Multinational UPM Is Unmasked,” World Rainforest Movement, March 5, 2020, wrm.org.uy. 

33.  Fabian Cambero, “Chile Partially Pulls Google Data Center Permit, Seeks Tougher Environmental Checks,” Reuters, February 28, 2024, reuters.com.

34.  Gary Cook, “Clicking Clean: Who Is Winning the Race to Build a Green Internet?,” Greenpeace, 2017, 31–32, greenpeace.org.