For its fifteenth anniversary, the Tepoztlán Institute turns its attention to bodies of water, where flows, wars, floods, and wakes address the lasting effects of North Atlantic colonialism, including: the Middle Passage and conflicts over hemispheric spaces, migrations, commodity flux, movement in and through the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and indigenous struggles over natural resources and the environment. The Institute invites participants to consider oceans, seas, and rivers as connecting and contesting sites in historical struggles over power and empire, as well as the meanings and symbolic uses of water in the lives, consciousness, resistances, and spirituality of indigenous and African-descendant peoples in the Americas. Our theme takes inspiration from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (2016), which claims that a wake is “a track left on the water’s surface,” a “disturbance” created by movement in water, and thus attends to life in the wake as “living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present,” including the afterlives of colonization in the Americas and contemporary iterations of racial capitalism.
 
We do not understand water as a neutral element of interest primarily to scientists and environmentalists. Rather, water is an active medium, a receptive or reluctant participant upon which historical traces are constantly written and often quick to disappear.  Yet something remains (underneath, on the coasts and territories they join, in shiplogs and weblogs and papers archived far from the waves) to reveal what  bodies of water allow, mean, and hold. Torrential rains, monsoons, floods, trickles, and drought all give us strong reason to consider water not as inert but as capable, agential, present. Waters overflow with gods—which some might call stories—from Tláloc to Oshun/Oxúm and Yemojá/Iemanjá, Aegaeon and Poseidon, Varuna, Wirnpa, Mami Wata, Navahine, Sedna, and on. As Derek Walcott sang to blue depths, Sea Is History.
 
This year’s CFP invites reflections on the multiple connections, shapes, and tasks of bodies of water. How have bodies of water been crucial to the creation and expansion of empires, slavery, dispossession; to the flow of commerce and the transport of products and people; and to the expansion of racial capitalism? How have bodies of water been sources of life as as well as struggle, generative scenes as well as tombs for the enslaved and the disappeared. We welcome participants to consider the legal status of bodies of or in water in relation to that of land in different contexts and at various scales, along with economic, philosophical, cultural aesthetic and epistemological frameworks that have shaped water’s ebbs and flows among such diverse actors as pirates, the enslaved, traders, migrants, exiles, and tourists.
 
Especially relevant are historical or contemporary struggles to defend water as a natural resource and subject of human culture in the face of privatization and commodification. So too are analyses of the political and epistemological systems that inform indigenous, black, campesino, and women’s struggles for their communities. We encourage reflection on how international, national, and local interests clash and/or coincide in the context of these struggles. Essays might also address waters as chemical processes, as cycles, as tributary systems, as oceanic networks, as nature; as a resource for agriculture, cattle-raising, and mining; as scarcity or abundance; or as a source for literature, the arts, and critical thought.