The Smell of Petroleum: Citizenship, Health, and Insecurity in ‘Revolutionary’ Ecuador

Nicholas Welcome
Cultural Anthropology
UC Riverside

This dissertation explores how residents of an industrial community in Ecuador use disputes over their health to interpret the meaning of their citizenship. For more than three decades Ecuador’s National Petroleum Refinery has spewed toxic effluence into the communities surrounding it, exposing residents to contamination through their air, water, and food.
While the state has denied a link between the refinery and local health problems a recent constitutional project proposed a “new” citizenship oriented around concerns of the public health, wellbeing and quality of life that gave community members hope for systematic change. This dissertation traces how community members attempt to use this alternative conceptualization of citizenship, legal and scientific strategies, and everyday spectacles to push for a livable environment and to make contamination and its health effects “visible” to the national public.