Date. Tuesday, December 16, 2025, 6-8 pm (c.t.)
Location. SH 1.104

This talk examines the complex interplay of grief, gender, race, and environment along the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. Through the notion of grieving geographies and mourning waters, it traces how Afro-Indigenous and coastal communities confront ecological devastation, extractivism, and slow violence through practices of care, ritual, and resistance. Drawing on decolonial feminist and environmental humanities frameworks, the talk asks how mourning can become a form of political and ecological relation—an embodied response to loss that also gestures toward regeneration. By listening to waters that remember, this work reimagines grief not as a private affect but as a collective, territorial, and more-than-human practice of survival and solidarity.
Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera is an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. They specialize in environmental racism, ecological grief, mestizaje, state violence, and anti/de-colonial feminism in Latin America, with their work intersecting between race, gender, environment, and affect. Their book manuscript (under contract with University of Illinois Press) is tentatively titled “Grieving Geographies, Mourning Waters: Race, Gender, and Environment on the Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico.”