Jugarse La Vida: Urban Political Ecologies of Oil and Marronage

Environmental justice scholarship recognises and denounces the uneven spatio‐temporal patterns of toxic exposures. In doing so, it often prioritises oppositional acts and standardised metrics of evidence of harm. In this essay, I explore the concept of jugarse la vida (wagering life) as a philosophy of vitality in toxic spaces to argue that desire and human agency have been obscured in environmental justice scholarship, specifically, the embodied and ordinary dimensions of how life is lived under conditions of environmental unfreedom. The essay proposes that locally developed analytics such as jugarse la vida can stand in for a theory of life under toxic conditions, specifically, a theory of marronage, and pushes for a critical engagement with the coloniality of North‐centric concepts and frameworks in understanding environmental injustices in the global South.