Re-Existences amid the Ruins of the Fossil City: Specters of Agri-Food Landscapes and Struggles over World-Making Meanings in the Global South

Abstract

The essay explores the place occupied in the collective imagination by the weeds that grow in the urban environment of Mexico City. Faced with the crisis of sensory perception caused by industrial modernity, proposes reorienting our gaze toward the biocultural networks of vegetation as a central arena of struggle. On the basis of an approach to epistemologies of the south, it examines the unseen vegetation that proliferates on sidewalks and urban wastelands, which is proposed as an index of the epistemic racism that regulates our relationships with the territory, food traditions, and ways of knowing. Its contribution consists of recognizing these invisible materialities and suggesting how, by confronting them through a policy of attention, is possible to open up biocultural frameworks that go beyond food autonomy and contribute to reconfiguring the sensible.