Columba Gonzalez

Columba Gonzalez

Biography

Columba Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral thesis elucidates the conservation dynamics surrounding the monarch butterfly across the Eastern Conservation Corridor, comprised by different territories in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Her study reveals the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the conservation of the monarch butterfly, as well as the politics embedded in classrooms, laboratories, national parks and among citizen-scientists from the U.S. and Canada, in relation to Mexican rural peasants who co-habit with the monarch butterfly across the migration route. This dissertation builds on ethnographic data obtained at two conservation areas in Canada, a laboratory focused on monarch biology at the University of Minnesota in the U.S., and at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, which protects the forest where the butterfly hibernates. In order to reveal the connections between these four sites, her work elaborates on a post-humanist framework that highlights the way in which humans and butterflies mutually constitute each other enabling the existence of the conservation corridor. The research also aims to reveal the ways in which these four sites—despite their differences—are connected by the butterfly, as well as through the social and natural arrangements that transformed these sites after the implementation of NAFTA.