Nohely Guzmán
Biography
My work is rooted in the Bolivian Amazon. Over the past ten years, I have collaborated with Indigenous communities on a wide range of topics that, at their core, foreground the knowledge systems and relationalities that sustain life in the rainforest. My research examines the intricate relationships between Indigenous communities, the Bolivian state, and large-scale infrastructure projects of transnational interest anchored in the Amazon. Threading through these entanglements, I have engaged with territorial poetry, memoryscapes, letter-writing, cooking recipes, affective body-mapping, ancestral medicinal syrup preparation, soundscapes, and, more recently, geographic data production for territorial monitoring. Across these engagements, I have cultivated a research expertise that lies at the nexus of Indigenous feminist geographies, political ecology, state formation, and agrarian dynamics.
Education
2021 M. A. Latin American Studies. The University of Texas at Austin. Austin, Texas.
Thesis: “Esta carretera nos atraviesa”: Indigenous girls’ body-territory mapping in the emergence of Chinese capital in the Bolivian Amazon.
2015 B.A. Psychology. Universidad Católica Boliviana. La Paz, Bolivia.
Research
My dissertation examines the establishment of the first Indigenous autonomy in the Bolivian Amazon, emerging at the intersection of landowners and the settler nation-state. I explore the political, ecological, and subjective formations that arise from state-sanctioned Indigenous autonomy and the role of ancestral knowledge systems in struggles for life in freedom. Ethnographically, I weave critical analyses of conservation, women's ancestral healing practices, cartographic fabulations, and the entanglements of navigating state recognition of Indigenous self-governance. Through this lens, my research illustrates how Indigenous autonomy operates as both a condition of possibility and a constraint, taking root within the very structures that seek to contain it.
