Like Humidity: Accumulation by Conservation and Subsumption of Work with Animals in Baja California Sur’s Protected Areas

This article demonstrates how protected areas in ejidal lands of Baja California Sur, Mexico, generate labor subordination among peasants working with endemic and invasive species. Drawing on formal and hybrid subsumption, we analyze fishermen, goat farmers, and hunting guides as their labor is reorganized under conservation capital. We propose epistemic subsumption to describe the appropriation and dismissal of situated knowledge through technocratic frameworks that re-signify nature as a service provider. Through a comparative ethnographic case methodology, we show how conservation proponents deploy deception ( embuste ), unpaid labor, enclosures, and ejidal political capture to position themselves as leaders of the productive process. These mechanisms do not extract surplus value in the classical sense; rather, they appropriate biodiversity-rich territories, reorienting them toward environmental services. The analytical focus aims to understand the separation of original producers from their means of production toward increasingly alienating activities.