ABSTRACT
In Chapter 9 of the Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, Hoffmann focuses on human and more-than-human relationships with ancestral waterways and examines ways ecocultural identity is constructed through memory. The author looks at oral history and interview-documented memories of elders of multiple ethnicities living in a primarily working class urban agricultural neighborhood in the U.S. Southwest. Analyzing interviews conducted for the New Mexico South Valley Oral History Project in 1995–1996 and Hoffmann’s own interviews and fieldwork in 2014 and 2017 with traditional farmers building community farming cooperatives dependent on gravity-fed acequia irrigation, the author argues that community elders’ memories have the capacity to shape ecocultural identity in the present and future. Hoffmann shows how ecocultural memory creates a foundation of trust upon which ancient, shared relationships with water survive, but also how these memories illuminate cultural and ecological anxieties stemming from the long-term violence (against both humans and the more-than-human world) of contemporary urban development. Hoffmann demonstrates ways a dialectical tension between trust and anxiety may help motivate people to develop restorative ecocultural identities, but at the same time how historical anxieties can impede communities’ abilities to collectively organize to protect and restore ancestral waterways.
