![]() ![]() Since these exchanges acknowledge the power of Wayúu communities hosting future wind farms to disrupt their operations and infrastructures, they enable recipients to carve out a space of accountability by entangling the corporation in long-term relationships of obligation and negotiating the ethical ways of harnessing wind in Wayúu land. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, I analyze how the intimate, reciprocal, and meaningful social exchanges that take place as part of the gift-giving practices between Jemeiwaa Kai and Wayúu residents are critical for the renewability of wind energy itself, as they create and maintain the conditions for harnessing this resource without interruption. more This article examines the circulation of gifts that binds dozens of indigenous Wayúu communities and Jemeiwaa Kai, a wind energy corporation that intends to build five wind farms in Colombia's coastal region of La Guajira. This article examines the circulation of gifts that binds dozens of indigenous Wayúu communities. In unraveling the competing yet entangled agendas of coal and wind companies, this article renders visible the continuities between fossil fuels and renewable energy in Latin America and beyond. Drawing on insights from the political ecology of energy transitions and low-carbon infrastructures, we contend that corporate transition agendas are more than smoke and mirrors they are tangible and consequential processes that perpetuate environmental conflicts, sustain forms of "green" accumulation, and foreclose the possibility of a just transition. Based on ethnographic evidence from coal mining and wind energy companies, we argue that the corporate co-optation of the energy transition agenda plays out in public narratives and representations, environmental projects, and community relations. Using a case study from La Guajira, in Northeastern Colombia, we argue that energy corporations are appropriating and deploying the concept of energy transitions to fashion themselves as climate conscious, post-extractive, and environmentally caring actors. Now, the region is pushing for an "energy transition" by opening its own electric grid to renewable sources. more Latin America has long been a key site of resource extraction, acting as a sacrifice zone for the Global North's fossil fuel needs. My research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.Latin America has long been a key site of resource extraction, acting as a sacrifice zone for the. My academic writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Economic Anthropology, Anthropology News, Istor, and other publications. ![]() ![]() My ethnographic projects integrate environmental anthropology, development studies, and critical indigenous studies, and have a regional focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. My work centers on the environmental conflicts and forms of dispossession that arise amidst wind energy developments in the Global South, and the conditions under which indigenous actors can advance decolonial ideas about energy governance and climate justice. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colorado College. ![]() I was born and raised in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. ![]()
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