CULTURE, POWER, SOCIAL CHANGE PRESENTS:

The Fire-Break: Latinx Fire Mitigation Workers and Settler Land Control in Southern California

Thursday 6.4.26 | Haines Hall 352 | 12:15 PM | Pizza served at noon

This presentation discusses the settler practice of managing fire risk to valorize property in Orange County’s wildland urban interface.

The presentation draws on four years of ethnographic research with Latinx fire mitigation workers in the chaparral canyon ecologies of Orange County. It also incorporates over three decades of archival materials from the Orange County Fire Authority and Dr. Zarate’s family’s involvement with the County of Orange fire mitigation program. The presentation contends that workers employ Migrant Ecological Knowledge, a practice grounded in the geographies of dispossession and displacement, to create forms of care and life in places where personal risks related to health, legal, and social precarity accumulate. These affective and social practices amongst workers denaturalize fire management across Southern California as a structure of risk-production that expands settler claims to land through regimes of racialized labor that seek to have Latinx migrants do the work of protecting property from fire and cultural obsolescence.

Salvador Zarate is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at UC Irvine. His work dovetails ethnographic research with historical methods and centers on questions of racialized gender, labor, and the ecology. His recent work explores Latinx residential gardening, drought as a science of land domination, and wildfire as a cultural practice of racial domination and settler conquest. He has published in Anthropology of Work Review, Journal of Political Ecology, Feminist Formations, Catalyst, Practicing Anthropology, Latino Studies, Aztlan, and others. His co-written book on the politics of doing transformative community research, Transforming Science, will be published in May of this year.