Technologizing Erasure: indigeneity, gender, and the co-production of settler colonialism in the industrialized agriculture of the California Borderlands

Abstract

This dissertation examines how industrialized agriculture in the California Borderlands enacts and sustains settler colonialism through the entanglements of technology, race, and gender. Focusing on Ejido Eréndira in Baja California Norte, I analyze how agricultural technologies are not neutral tools but are co-produced with settler colonial structures that erase Indigenous presence and reshape the meanings of land, labor, and belonging. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and place-based fieldwork, I argue that settler colonialism in this region operates through both narrative and infrastructure. Bridging feminist science and technology studies with settler colonial, postcolonial, and critical development theories, I foreground how power is embedded in the everyday practices of agricultural life. This work reveals how agrarian development and narratives of modernity have been shaped by racialized and gendered ways of knowing and organizing the world, and insists that future agricultural and environmental analyses must attend to these structures of power. Ultimately, Technologizing Erasure contributes to interdisciplinary conversations about land, science, and development by offering a transnational feminist critique of how the tools of progress reproduce dispossession.