Listening to sargasso beyond the sargasso sea: multispecies storytelling and seaweed blooms in the Mexican Caribbean

Abstract

Sargasso seaweed has been beaching on the Mexican Caribbean coast in unprecedented and massive volumes since 2014, with devastating consequences for human and other-than-human communities. Whereas in Mexico sargasso is frequently framed as an invader, this article suggests sargasso has very different stories to tell about its forays beyond the Sargasso Sea. Building on vegetal geographies and multispecies storytelling, we address sargasso as an interlocutor and examine what it means to learn from and rethink our relations with algae. Listening to sargasso, we argue, is an invitation to move beyond European colonial knowledge systems rooted in human exceptionalism. Indeed, sargasso’s changing corporeal rhetoric restories the human as entangled and interdependent. Ultimately, listening to sargasso transforms how environmental change is understood and addressed in the Mexican Caribbean and beyond.