“I Graft a New Tribalism”: Affiliative Biofuturities and New Terrains of Mestizaje in the Works of Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Karina A. Vado

Johns Hopkins University

kvado1@jhu.edu

Abstract

In this essay, I engage the makings and evolution of queer Chicana theorist and feminist philosopher of science Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s generative engagements with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and syncretized spiritualities, as well as her (re)visionary disidentifications with the biosciences for matters of speculative visioning and social justice. Stitching together the rich insights of the fields of Chicanx/Latinx studies and queer feminist science and technology studies, I survey how Anzaldúa treads the boundaries between the humanities and biosciences as a means of complicating and rewriting new narratives of identity and belonging. Borrowing from the lexicon of the animal, plant, and other life sciences, Anzaldúa risks repurposing vexed evolutionary metaphors—namely, for the purposes of this essay, the “tree of life” image—to instantiate one part of what I call her “affiliative biofuturities.” Thinking from and through a border/nepantla space, Anzaldúa sifts through and remixes humanistic, scientific, esoteric, and spiritualized modes of inquiry to fashion alternative ways of knowing, seeing, and being in the world. Ultimately, I suggest that Anzaldúa’s Chicanafuturist oeuvre radically reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of identity and our relationality to other beings/species while taking seriously the liberatory potentialities of “unruly” knowledge-making practices in times of socioecological crises.

Resumen

En este ensayo, me ocupo de la creación de la teórica chicana queer y filósofa de la ciencia feminista Gloria E. Anzaldúa, de su compromiso generativo con las onto-epistemologías indígenas y las espiritualidades sincretizadas, así como de sus (re)desidentificaciones visionarias con las biociencias en su relación con la proyección de futuros especulativos y la justicia social. Uniendo las ricas perspectivas de los estudios chicanx/latinx y los estudios feministas queer sobre ciencia y tecnología, examino cómo Anzaldúa se mueve en las fronteras entre las humanidades y las biociencias como medio para complicar y reescribir nuevas narrativas de identidad y pertenencia. Tomando prestado el léxico de las ciencias animales, vegetales y otras ciencias de la vida, Anzaldúa se arriesga a reutilizar metáforas evolutivas controvertidas -en concreto, a efectos de este ensayo, la imagen del «árbol de la vida»- para instanciar una parte de lo que yo llamo sus «biofuturidades afiliativas». Pensando desde y a través de un espacio fronterizo/nepantla, Anzaldúa tamiza y remezcla modos de investigación humanísticos, científicos, esotéricos y espiritualizados para crear formas alternativas de conocer, ver y estar en el mundo. En última instancia, sugiero que la obra chicanafuturista de Anzaldúa reconceptualiza y amplía radicalmente nuestra comprensión de la identidad y nuestra relación con otros seres/especies, al tiempo que se toma en serio el potencial liberador de las prácticas «rebeldes» de creación de conocimiento en tiempos de crisis socioecológica.

Keywords

Gloria Anzaldúa, arboreality, futurity, queer feminist science, spirituality

Introduction

Due to diabetes-related complications, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, the queer Chicana intellectual whose theorizations of geographical and metaphorical borders and borderlands profoundly influenced fields such as Chicanx/Latinx studies, queer and gender studies, and postcolonial studies, among others, would only live to see the first four years of the new millennium. In those four years, however, Anzaldúa witnessed the historic completion of the mapping of the human genome, the September 11 and anthrax attacks, the beginnings of George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror,” and the subsequent mass (re)deployment of (bio)surveillance and military technologies across geographical borders. This period, in short, was marked by both rapid scientific and technological advancement and the expansion of US neoimperial projects across the globe. Yet as Anzaldúa keenly recognized and shared in one of her last writings penned shortly after the attacks of 9/11, the United States’ “real battle” was “with its shadow—its racism, propensity for violence, rapacity for consuming, neglect of its responsibility to global communities and the environment, and unjust treatment of dissenters and the disenfranchised, especially people of color” (2015, 10). Though Anzaldúa’s earlier writings largely focused on her lived experiences as a queer Chicana border artist and writer living in the US-Mexico borderlands, her preoccupations with the future of our planet would increasingly color her inter- and trans-planetary visions of liberation, reparative healing, and justice. Indeed, Anzaldúa considered herself a “citizen of the universe,” and felt a deep sense of kinship with peoples from countries and regions ravaged by the material and psychological violences of US empire. At the same time, Anzaldúa affirmed and respected “the consciousness of all life forms, including ecosystems, planets and galaxies, bacteria, and all matter” (2015, 43), and sought to understand and capture her (and our) relationality to nonhuman beings (including those residing in “otherworlds”). Anzaldúa believed, then, that her “job as an artist” was to “bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal), and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its visions” (10). However, because “[our] reality is too big for any ideological system to contain, and literary realism is too small to contain it,” Anzaldúa sought to create a “different mode of telling stories” that could “simultaneously hold the different models of what [she thought] reality was” (43). Thus, for Anzaldúa, the process of visioning and imagining otherwise vis-à-vis a weaving of new and reclaimed images and words was a laborious yet nevertheless vital task in the broader project of transforming our dystopian present(s).

This seeking of an alternative mode of telling stories, and her lifelong toils with giving shape and meaning to the liberatory worlds she imagined, is perhaps why Anzaldúa read so expansively, consistently transgressing disciplinary and generic boundaries and the presumably impenetrable borders between what she called the “real/imaginal.” For instance, ever a lover of science, Anzaldúa completed advanced courses in fields such as chemistry, microbiology, physics, and other life and physical sciences (2000, 28).¹ She was likewise informed, as philosopher Mariana Alessandri (2020) notes in her exploration and reclamation of Anzaldúa as a legitimate philosopher, by various canonical texts in continental philosophy, reading and adapting concepts from the works of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. She was also exposed early on, via the work of Mexican anthropologist Miguel León- Portilla, to the Nahua philosophies that would so deeply shape her opus. Moreover, Anzaldúa was well acquainted with twentieth-century Mexican philosophy. Alexander V. Stehn and Mariana Alessandri (2020), for instance, trace the influence of Mexican philosophers such as Juana Armanda Alegría, Jorge Carrión, Rosario Castellanos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Samuel Ramos, and, most (in)famously, José Vasconcelos in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. Anzaldúa also read “esoteric” works from figures such as Indian philosopher and maharishi Sri Aurobindo, French Indian “spiritual guru” Mirra Alfassa, and French writer Satprem (the disciple of Alfassa), spiritual teachers Anzaldúa would find useful for her own ideas of the dawning of an evolutionary synthesis of opposites. After all, it was in the realm of the “esoteric” that Anzaldúa would find some of her most potent alternative modes of understanding and organizing the world; past-life regressions, tarot readings, astrological birth charts, and personal experiences with hauntings and extraterrestrial possessions were all part and parcel of Anzaldúa’s theoretical and worldbuilding “toolkit.”² She would also reverentially draw from Eastern, Afro-, and Indigenous spiritual traditions, elevating these to the realm of the scientific, seeing in these a way to radically change what she saw as an imminent “nuevo mundo, [a] new order…[where] we need to create with the choices we make, the acts we perform, and the futures we dream” (Anzaldúa 2015, 17). For Anzaldúa, then, drafting a “new story” where the scientific meets the esoteric/spiritual and where the scientific is itself transformed by the spiritual/immaterial, was the prerequisite for salvaging our planet, its landscapes, and its human and nonhuman cohabitants.

Reading Anzaldúa as a queer feminist philosopher of science, this essay engages the makings and evolution of her generative engagements with Indigenous ontoepistemologies and syncretic spiritualities, as well as her visionary disidentifications with the biosciences for matters of speculative visioning and social justice. Stitching together the rich insights of the fields of Chicanx/Latinx studies and queer feminist science and technology studies, this paper explores how Anzaldúa’s Chicanafuturist oeuvre treads the boundaries between the humanities and biosciences to complicate and rewrite, as she expresses in her posthumously published treatise Light in the Dark / Luz en Lo Oscuro, “new narratives of identity, nationalism, ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics...[to] show (not just tell) how transformation happens” (2015, 7).³ Borrowing, then, from the lexicon of the animal, plant, and other life sciences, I show how Anzaldúa risks repurposing vexed evolutionary metaphors—namely, for the purposes of this essay, the “tree of life” image—to instantiate one part of what she calls “the new synthesis” (1987, 79–80), one that she understands as both affiliative and future oriented.

This new synthesis, or what I read as her “affiliative biofuturities,” strategically enmeshes the biological with the cultural, the mystical with the material, and the human with the nonhuman, and comes to centrally color the reparative worldmaking and supernal qualities Anzaldúa attaches to her theorizations of the border as a place of transgressive and transformative “meetings.” By thinking from and through a border/nepantla space that she likens, albeit briefly, to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s “Aleph,” Anzaldúa generatively sifts through and remixes humanistic, scientific, esoteric, and spiritualized modes of inquiry as means of fashioning alternative ways of being, knowing, and seeing that lend to speculative reimaginings of the ever-entangled terrains of science and politics, biology and the social, and nature and culture. Ultimately, I suggest that Anzaldúa’s imagined new terrains of mestizaje, developed over the span of three decades across her genre-defying and “undisciplined” oeuvre, radically reconceptualize and expand our understanding of identity (racial, gendered, or otherwise) and our relationality to other beings/species while taking seriously the liberatory potentialities of “unruly” knowledge-making practices in times of socioecological crises.⁴

Anzaldúa’s Queer Feminist Studies of Science

Chicanx and Latin/x American studies scholars such as Suzanne Bost, AnaLouise Keating, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer have begun the vital work of “rereading” Anzaldúa’s writings in light of the “new” materialisms and posthumanist thought, and uncovering the ways Anzaldúa’s work anticipated many of the central concerns and guiding questions of these intellectual terrains. Bost, for instance, argues that “before disability studies and posthumanism drew critical attention to the willed ignorance involved in circumscribing a universal form of human life, Anzaldúa was already writing about subjects with fluid sexual morphology (half male, half female), shapeshifting between multiple species, and the ethical and material ties between humans, spirits, and nonhuman nature” (2019, 1567). Interrogating the appended “new” of the new materialisms, Keating similarly reads Anzaldúa’s “object-oriented ontology” as part of a stream of “earlier work by women-of-color theorists who have been producing intensely embodied, materialist theory for decades” (2015, 217).⁵ Likewise, in her essay “Spirit Matters: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Cosmic Becoming Across Human/Nonhuman Borderlands,” Felicity Amaya Schaeffer boldly confronts the “sanitizing” of the spiritual and more esoteric dimensions of Anzaldúa’s work. She considers, first, how Anzaldúa’s “cosmic-spirit-mattering”—which she reads as a “Native-based scientific practice and philosophy that bridges Indigenous cosmologies with a dazzling range of disciplines and knowledges that span alchemy, shamanism, psychology, Western and Native folklore, and science and technology studies”— questions and radically disrupts the new materialisms and posthumanism’s privileging of “rationality,” or that which can be measured and proven vis-à-vis Eurowestern scientific idioms, tools, and methodologies (2018, 1008). Equally important, Schaeffer brings to the fore the elision of race(ism) in new materialist and posthumanist discourse (1008).

Inspired by the “other-than-Humanist” dimensions and the “cosmic-spiritmatters” that Bost, Keating, and Schaeffer have addressed in their serious engagement with Anzaldúa’s oeuvre, I situate Anzaldúa’s wide-ranging opus in the genealogies and frameworks of queer feminist science studies. In their introduction to Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader, the first edited collection to formally gather (feminist) science studies scholarship under the rubric of “queer feminist science,” editors Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David Rubin, and Angela Willey ask, “What does it mean to undertake a queer feminist study of science?” (2017, Introduction). In response to this query, the editors share that one of the key aims of their collection is to “open up the word, concept, and practice of ‘science’ (and therefore ‘science studies’) to new, unexpected, and surprising definitions, inhabitations, and hauntings” (introduction). By adopting the term “queer feminist science studies,” the editors therefore seek to “name, nurture, and transform conversations that are already taking place across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences…offer[ing] it as a figurative space where the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and science are reimagined capaciously to foster new critical and creative knowledge-projects” (introduction). Linking the expansive project of queer feminist science studies to that of feminist science studies while remaining attuned to the distinctive contributions that queer theory offers feminist studies of science, the editors write that the “beauty of the phrase ‘queer feminist science studies’ is perhaps the simultaneity of its material and discursive specificity with its constitutive capaciousness: It grounds and unsettles, offering no fixed archive nor method, but a qualifier—‘queer’—that promises to unsettle some of our cherished givens” (Introduction). It is precisely the unbounded potentialities and capaciousness of queer feminist science studies that I find most useful for reading Anzaldúa’s delightfully unruly and queer intellectual archive.

Though it was no secret during Anzaldúa’s lifetime that she identified as queer and that her felt and embodied queerness shaped much, if not all, of her work, scholars have oft-times sanitized or elided this aspect of Anzaldúa’s identity and her thinking.⁶ Similarly, while she remained open about her belief in and participation in “alternative” knowledge systems, scholars have mostly evaded the spiritual and more esoteric dimensions of her work.⁷ In a 1993 interview with Kakie Urch, Michael Dorn, and J. Abraham, Anzaldúa laments, for instance, how “The ‘safe’ elements in Borderlands are appropriated and used, and the ‘unsafe’ elements are ignored…As long as it’s theoretical and about history, about borders, that’s fine; borders are a concern that everybody has. But when I start talking about nepantla— as a border between the spirit, the psyche, and the mind or as a process—they resist” (1995, 85). Despite these major “two silences” surrounding her work, Anzaldúa risked remaining true to all her “Glorias”: “Gloria the lesbian, Gloria the feminist, Gloria the person interested in philosophy, psychology, psychic phenomena” (Anzaldúa 2000, 61). Indeed, holding these multiple “Glorias” in productive tension enabled Anzaldúa to more fully articulate her feminist politics, her philosophies, and her queer approaches to conjuring, as late queer Latinx theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, “new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (2009, 1). For Anzaldúa, then, her queerness was as much about her racialized sexuality as it was a way to denaturalize the presumably naturalized, “to queer,” to quote Donna Haraway’s “A Game of Cat’s Cradle,” “what counts as nature…queering specific normalized categories…not for the easy frisson of transgression, but for the hope for livable worlds” (1994, 60). To then read Anzaldúa as a feminist philosopher of science allows for a more robust engagement with the complexity of her politics, her writings, and her unwavering conviction that “If science is going to continue as the reigning paradigm, it will have to change its story, change the way it controls reality, and begin acknowledging the paranormal, intuition, and subjective inner life” (2012, 18–19). Further, if science studies, as the editors of Queer Feminist Science Studies suggest, “must concern itself with the quotidian practices of meaning making that trouble, disrupt, and reconfigure assumptions about nature, difference, species, and worldliness,” then we might also look to Anzaldúa’s intellectual archive and her own “embodied interdisciplinarity,” to adapt Banu Subramaniam’s phrasing in Ghost Stories for Darwin, as vital fodder for our own queer feminist studies of science (2014, chap. 6).

My reading of Anzaldúa as a feminist philosopher of science is, moreover, deeply animated by the work of Aimee Bahng, and her vital rereading of Black feminist science fiction writer Octavia Butler, as a feminist philosopher of science par excellence. In “Plasmodial Improprieties: Octavia E. Butler, Slime Molds, and Imagining a Femi-Queer Commons,” Bahng interrogates Butler’s intellectual encounters with slime molds—eukaryotes that live freely as single-cell organisms but that can also combine to form multicellular reproductive structures—and argues that the “imaginative possibilities [that] her [Butler’s] writing and [interdisciplinary] research practices engender constitute an example of feminist scientific inquiry we could call speculative fabulation” (2017, 310). Offering speculative fabulation as a queer feminist science methodology, Bahng adds that Butler’s modes of speculative fabulation generatively “span the space between what speculative realists tend to position diametrically as the sheer ideation of the linguistic turn and the realism of matter” (311). Further, Bahng highlights how Butler’s (re)imaginings of the human, multispecies solidarities, and her speculations of alternative ontologies and modes of organizing and making sense of the world remain critically attuned to histories of empire, enslavement, and colonization and the power imbalances engendered by such histories. Though Butler was not formally trained as a “philosopher” (or as a scientist, for that matter), Bahng beautifully affirms Butler’s yearning to philosophize, finding in her interdisciplinary research and her science fiction writing (as well as her archival material) Butler’s most generative articulations of queer decolonial futures in the making.

Not unlike Butler’s, Anzaldúa’s science-fictional imaginaries audaciously “cros[s] illicit boundaries of disciplinary knowledge-practices and ontology” and refuse the “dictates of rational science that eschew as fantasy or myth the sensual cosmontologies, or cosmic becomings of human, object, matter, the celestial, nature, technology, and animal” (Schaeffer 2018, 1010).⁸ Through these disciplinary border crossings, and her dissolution of the rational/irrational and spiritual/scientific, Anzaldúa advances a more capacious and slippery understanding of what is and counts as “science.” It might be more apt, then, to think of Anzaldúa’s critical meditations on “science,” and its sociopolitical potentials and constraints, as a dynamic pursuit of its etymological precursor: scientia, or “knowledge, a knowing.” This expansive “coming to know” is one that Tewa biologist, scholar, and educator Gregory Cajete describes in Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence as essential to Indigenous sciences. In it, Cajete defines Indigenous science as a “metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and ‘coming to know’ that have evolved through human experience with the natural world,” and, more specifically, through a participatory, reciprocal, and sacred relationship with “space and place” (2000, 2). Native science is, in turn, what Schaeffer calls a “sacredscience,” a term she uses to at once emphasize “Native American understandings with land as scientific, a methodology of collective intelligence that regenerates ancestral knowledges to sustain sacred intrarelationality with land” (2022, 2), and name “practices and knowledges that re-enliven relations with ancestors that activate a calling to nourish intricate web of entanglements that sustain all living beings on earth” (2022, 17–18). The significance, then, of the life-oriented and life-sustaining ethos of Indigenous science-as-sacred science cannot be overstated here; the rapacity of Eurowestern science and its technologies of empire imperil our planetary existence by condoning “the mind theft, spirit murder, exploitation, and genocide de los otros” (Anzaldúa 2015, 18). Thus, in Cajete’s view, Eurowestern science “needs Native science to examine its prevailing worldview and culture” (2000, 307). And while there is an emergent “bridge building” between Indigenous sciences and Eurowestern science, this aspirational “exchange” remains imperfect and riddled with the realities of unequal power distributions. It is Eurowestern science, then, as Cajete emphatically insists, that will have to “move beyond its own bias” and take seriously its “dismissal of the Indigenous worldview” if we are to survive its “dysfunctional cosmology” (2000, 302), and its injurious norms: that of competition, (hyper)individualism, extraction, and soul death.

Anzaldúa’s endless ruminations on “science,” “objectivity,” and “rationality” led her to a similar conclusion to that of Cajete; she “doubts that traditional western science is the best knowledge system, the only true, impartial arbiter of reality…[and] questions its definition of progress, whose manifest imperializes other peoples’ energies and snuffs out their realities and hopes of a better life” (Anzaldúa 2015, 140). The very partiality and the sterility she gleans in Eurowestern sciences is why Anzaldúa looked to Indigenous sciences—which views, as Cajete reminds readers, the integration of science and spirit as fundamental—and saw in their holistic storytelling, modes of imagining, and invocations of the sacred, the possibility of a restorative and justice-oriented transformation of the self, community, and the planet (Anzaldúa 2015, 141–42). Anzaldúa does not, however, ignore Eurowestern scientific ideas completely, opting instead, as was very much her method of theorizing and philosophizing as a queer mestiza and “border intellectual,” to wade through their detritus and critically (re)assess what ideologies, narratives, and (scientized) symbols/metaphors should be salvaged or excised, unmade, or remade. We might better understand her critical adaptation of Eurowestern scientized knowledge practices as a disidentificatory strategy of sorts, one that seeks, as Muñoz writes in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, to “work on and against dominant ideology…[and] transform a cultural logic from within” (1999, 40).⁹ Anzaldúa thus engages in an active process of negotiation that involves, in her writings, a conscious “working on and against” the regimes of truth established by Eurowestern science. In doing so, Anzaldúa critically appropriates and/or refashions scientized idioms for political and critically utopian ends all while narratively laying bare their oppressive dimensions. Thus, Anzaldúa’s adaptation of the “tree of life,” like Butler’s invocation of the slime mold, while imperfect, nevertheless offers a compelling metaphor for imagining more-than-human entanglements and potentially liberatory onto-epistemologies and lifeworlds. As I will show in the next section, it is through the tree of life image, in all its messy genealogical, evolutionary, and cosmological dimensions, that she could imagine, to use Kim TallBear and Angela Willey’s phrasing, “nature and relationality differently” (2019, 5). Let us, then, get to the “roots” of Anzaldúa’s affiliative biofuturities.

Anzaldúa’s Speculative Arborealities

The “tree of life,” one of the most important organizing metaphors for evolution’s “branching-like” patterned structure, has a long and complicated history, from its invocations in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species as the working metaphor for his twinned notions of genealogy and evolution (Hellström 2012) to its vexed deployment in Anglo and Latin American (proto)eugenic discourse from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards.¹⁰ And yet for all its historical baggage, the tree of life remains a seductive metaphor for “origins” and “kinship,” broadly conceived.¹¹ Take, for instance, Geni, a US commercial genealogy and social networking website that has set out to create a “World Family Tree” by linking user-generated family trees from around the globe. As the self-proclaimed “definitive family tree for the entire world,” Geni has, as of January 27, 2025, over 196 million genealogical profiles and seeks to ultimately “connect everyone on earth” (Geni 2025). Similarly, statistical and medical geneticist Anthony Wilder Wohns and fellow researchers at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute have created the “largest-ever family tree,” which links more than 27 million people through a “unified genealogy of modern and ancient human genomes” that promises to “enable applications ranging from improving genome interpretation to deciphering our earliest roots” (Wohns et al. 2022, 6). These contemporary genealogical and evolutionary invocations of the tree of life, premised on the wellmeaning yet reductive “we are one race, the human race” aphorism, only tell a partial story, one where the realities of racism (and all other “isms”) are subsumed by an ethos of a transcendental “borderlessness” and “universality.”

Of course, as Thomas Kuhn (1979), Evelyn Fox Keller (1995, 2003), and Katherine McKittrick (2021) remind us, (scientized) metaphors such as the tree of life are not neutral technologies and thus have the power to liberate and/or constrain. In Dear Science and Other Stories, McKittrick interrogates the power of metaphor as it relates to stories of Black livingness and modes of knowing and argues that “we must reckon with the materiality of metaphor” to avoid reducing Blackness to the realm of the figurative (2021, 10–11). McKittrick thus samples guiding metaphors in “postslave Black geographies” and notes how these metaphors are “often (not always!)…delinked from their material underpinnings or histories, which means racial violence risks being cast and/or read as figurative” (11). Yet McKittrick, drawing from anticolonial thought and Black studies as powerful analytical sites of intervention and speculation, charges readers to “sit with metaphor” (6). Metaphors, in McKittrick’s view, also “offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through…Metaphors function to radically map existing useable (entwined material and imagined) sites of struggle and liberation and joy!” (11–12). As intimated by the book’s title, McKittrick looks to how Black creatives, through a stunning array of audio-visual-textual mediums, “work with scientific concepts in innovative and humanizing ways—attentive to racism, yes, but not understanding scientific racism as the only way to define black life” (1). It seems, then, that it is through interdisciplinary and multigeneric storytelling, rooted always in Black studies and anti-colonial thought, that McKittrick can most powerfully “wade through the complexities of Black intellectual life” (13).

Though McKittrick’s Dear Science is a love(ing) letter to Blackness, Black livingness, and Black liberation, her theorizations on the “materiality of metaphor” and the liberatory potential of interdisciplinary storytelling are instructive for my engagements with the role of metaphor and narrative in what I read as Anzaldúa’s own scientific disidentifications, especially as it pertains to her adaptation of the tree of life as one of the guiding metaphors for her theorizations of identity, relationality, reparations, and justice. For Anzaldúa specifically, “metaphors are gods” and can, moreover, “take on body and life” of their own (2015, 55). In other words, she understands metaphors as animate and animating forces. Anzaldúa therefore privileges “talking with images/stories” rather than “about them,” an important distinction she makes in the introduction to Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro. Talking with images, in Anzaldúa’s estimation, allows her to eschew “writing from any single disciplinary position,” and enables “writing outside official theoretical / philosophical language” (6). Because “[hers] is a struggle of recognizing and legitimizing excluded selves, especially of women, people of color, queer, and othered groups,” Anzaldúa finds that she must “[re]organize and [re]order these ideas as ’stories’” (6). And yet she understands the process of writing, of storying and speculating, as necessarily embodied for the “material body is center, central” (5). That is, interdisciplinary storytelling by way of images and metaphors is its very own form of “theory in the flesh” (Anzaldúa and Moraga 1983, 23). For Anzaldúa, then, images, metaphors, and stories are not divorced from the quotidian lives nor from the systemic violences women, especially queer women of color, are subjected to and forced to navigate. In fact, her famed border metaphor was one Anzaldúa came to theorize from living or being rooted in, so to speak, in the US-Mexico borderlands and witnessing the oppressive material conditions and vexed intimacies produced by and within this “herida abierta” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). Like her metaphor of the border, her symbolic adaptations of the tree of life are borne from her early kinship relations with a literal mesquite, an incredibly resilient tree native to Texas and abundant across the US Southwest, including the US-Mexico borderlands.¹²

While Anzaldúa’s most formalized and expansive exploration of the tree of life appears in Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro, her turn to the arboreal as a means of thinking through and imagining alternative models of being(ness), kinship, and human/nonhuman entanglements appears in her earliest works of fiction. The Mesquite tree features prominently, for instance, in one of her earliest short stories, “El Paisano Is a Bird of Good Omen.”¹³ Originally titled “La Boda,” the story is Anzaldúa’s first foray into “fus[ing] the objective and subjective more tightly together” (Anzaldúa 2009, 51). Set in the 1950s, the story features a queer protagonist, Andrea de la Cruz, and takes place the night before Andrea’s wedding to Zenobio Rios, her cousin and a closeted gay man who fears being outed in a small ranching and farming community in what is presumably southern Texas.

Throughout the narrative, Andrea grapples with her community’s queerphobia and heterosexism and slowly comes to affirm her queerness in all its valences. Hence, from the outset, readers catch glimpses of what Keating reads in her brief introductory note to the story as “Anzaldúa’s holistic, participatory epistemology and her definition of queer, a definition that includes but goes far beyond sexual identity” (2009, 51). In the opening scene, for instance, Anzaldúa writes that Andrea “straddles the mesquite post of the corral…Under her, the hard roundness of the mesquite post seems an appendage of herself, a fifth limb, one that’s also part of the corral, the corral that’s part of the land” (2009, 51). The sensuous “fusion” of Andrea’s human body with that of The Mesquite and her inability to distinguish between the corporeal and arboreal renders the borders between the human and nonhuman artificial and thus permeable.

That said, it is through this cross-species closeness that Andrea reconnects to an ancestral landscape (and its flora and fauna) that she “never tires of looking at…and could never leave” (Anzaldúa 2009, 53). The Mesquite, who “reigns over the portal, the house, the yard” (53), functions, for Andrea, as a material symbol of belonging, interconnectedness (The Mesquite is described as part of a vibrantly diverse ecosystem), and strength, qualities Andrea yearns to unabashedly embody in a community where her sexuality, her overt rebellion against patriarchal conceptions of a “suitable” womanhood, and her sacred closeness to nature writ large (we learn, for instance, that she can communicate with nonhuman animals), gains her the derisive title of “Andrea the Bruja,” or “Andrea the Witch.” The Mesquite’s literal rootedness, then, functions as an aspirational model for a process of reconnection to place and ancestry; Andrea visualizes The Mesquite’s “fifty-or-sixty-foot-deep roots” tapping into an “underground water source,” revealing that “she wants to tap that deep place, too” (53). She then imagines “stay[ing] still long enough [for] her feet [to also] worm roots into the moist core” (53). The invocation of roots here brings to bear the importance of knowing one’s origins, a principle that Anzaldúa will learn from Indigenous philosophies of space and place, and one that would inform her decades-long theorizations of—and search for—queer(ed) kinship models.

It is also these equal parts embodied and spiritual connection to The Mesquite that animates Andrea’s reluctance to lay full claim over it. Throughout the narrative, Anzaldúa deliberately capitalizes “The Mesquite,” rendering it, in effect, an agentic and sentient being. Andrea will thus affirm and respect the being-ness of the tree and is in fact born with the ability to communicate with The Mesquite “in its own language” (53). Andrea’s multisensory experience with The Mesquite, and her keen observations of its qualities and teachings thus evince a sacred praxis central to Indigenous sciences: “learning the language of place and the ‘dialects’ of its plants, animals, and the natural phenomena in the context of a ‘homeland’ is an underlying foundation of Native science” (Cajete 2000, 306). Yet this ability to commune and communicate with flora and fauna is a “faculty” that Andrea will lose over time to the pressures of Chicanx masculinist cultural norms and Catholic-informed notions of good/evil. Her uncle Efrain, for instance, warns against “talking to trees” (Anzaldúa 2009, 54), rendering it a side effect of “embrujamiento,” or bewitchment. These “warnings” are notably tied, for Anzaldúa, to a communal loss of and contempt for Indigenous modes of knowing and healing amongst Chicanx peoples. For instance, in Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro, Anzaldúa discloses that “during [her] childhood, curanderismo and hechicerismo [bewitchment] were an accepted yet disdained part of the Chicano community. Most Mexican Americans, having swallowed the whites’ contempt for indigenous medicine, did not believe that curanderas could restore the soul and heal the body” (2015, 31). It is precisely this sense of ancestral, cultural, and spiritual loss that Anzaldúa would devote her life trying to repair and heal from. Anzaldúa speaks to this loss in a 1982 interview with Linda Smucker, sharing that “when [she] was young [she] was one with the trees, the land, and [her] mother; there weren’t any borders. Then [she] became separate and made other people and parts of myself the other” (Anzaldúa 2000, 41). This severance triggers Anzaldúa’s deep feelings of alienation, a painfully dissociative process she describes as getting “so far from [her] feelings, [her] body, [her] soul [she] was— like, other other other. But then something kept snapping. [She] had to gather” (41). Like Anzaldúa, Andrea spends the remainder of the narrative “gathering” those aspects of herself rendered Other: her intimacy and feelings of kinship with other-than-human beings, her same-sex desire, and her fluid, perhaps even nonbinary, gender identity. Andrea must therefore unlearn and denaturalize normative categories and accompanying narratives of gender, nature, race, sex, and sexuality effected and legitimated by settler-colonial logics and structures if she is, as her Mamagrande (or grandmother) suggests, to fully grow into her “poder” (power). In the story’s final scene, then, Andrea quite literally leans into The Mesquite following the profound realization that (her) queerness “is not a sickness, nor is it evil” (Anzaldúa 2009, 68). Rather, it is a privileged and empowering mode of approaching and being in the world, one Anzaldúa calls “la facultad,” or an intuitive form of knowledge-making that embraces but goes far beyond logical thought and empirical analysis.

Over twenty years after the writing of “El Paisano Is a Bird of Good Omen,” the arboreal remains a constant in Anzaldúa’s speculative intellectual thought. Though it is not the only nature-based metaphor Anzaldúa would draw on— Rebeca Hey-Colón’s (2023) brilliant survey of the vibrant primacy of “water” as spiritual conduit and epistemological producer in Anzaldúa’s work is a recent example—it did remain one of the most central structuring images of her opus. As she writes in Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro, her ever adaptive “árbol de vida” offers a unique “framework or scheme for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality, and [she’ll] organize [her] images, ideas, and knowledge via this [dendritic] mind map” (2015, 25). Though the tree of life was and certainly remains a contentious symbol due to its deployment in Eurowestern scientific and genealogical discourse and the ideas of racial purity and biological degeneration inhered in these, Anzaldúa’s repurposed tree of life allows her to theorize, instead, a crossing of multiple realities and temporalities and with this imagines “tapping,” as does Andrea’s character in “El Paisano Is a Bird of Good Omen,” into a sort of mystical reservoir that functions as ancestral communion, “time travel” medium, and epistemological rewiring. She likens this reservoir, first, to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s “Aleph” described in his eponymous text as “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist” (1998, 127). Yet unlike Borges’s protagonist (a fictionalized version of the author himself), who sees and experiences the Aleph yet casts off its existence because its very infiniteness escapes language, and language itself, at least for Borges, can never adequately articulate “reality,” Anzaldúa sees in this unboundedness an opportunity, and indeed a collective responsibility, especially in times of ongoing environmental devastations and social injustices, to “revise reality by altering our consensual agreements about what is real, what is just and fair…We can trans-shape reality by changing our perspectives and perceptions” (Anzaldúa 2015, 21). At the same time, Anzaldúa likens this underground reservoir to the Mayan cenote, deep water wells found in the Yucatán Peninsula that have been not only important water sources for Mayan peoples but also historically significant sites of Mayan anti-colonial resistance, as well as key actants in the preservation of Mayan culture, spiritual traditions, and ways of knowing (Munro and Melo Zurita 2011). Anzaldúa, in turn, identifies the cenote as an “inner, underground river of information” (2015, 28), or a repository of personal and collective knowledge, and in it locates a privileged source for technologies of “creativity, dreams, fantasies, intuitions, and symbolic events…and the unconscious’s resource of self-knowledge and transformation” (55), all methodological elements and tools deployed in Indigenous science-as-process (Cajete 2000, 66–71). Thinking through and from this cenote space, in turn, offers Anzaldúa one way of “rooting” her reparative “árbol de la vida”:

This story of la Virgen’s (the Virgin’s) tree [as] a healing vision…Spirit and mind, soul and body, are one, and together they perceive a reality greater than the vision experienced in the ordinary world…We receive information from ancestors inhabiting other worlds. We assess that information and learn how to trust that knowing. The mind does not make things up; it just imagines what exists and tells the soul to remember. The soul forgets and must be reminded again and again by signals from nature whose spirits exist in fields, forests, rivers, and other places, and from arrebatamientos (traumatic events). (2015, 24)

In other words, Anzaldúa’s tree of life becomes a sentient conveyor of that which cannot be seen but can be felt. This “feeling,” which Bost characterizes as “feeling pre-Columbian,” is rooted in “Mesoamerican worldviews in which feeling is sacred and objective reason does not form the horizon of corporeal being” (2009, 37). Yet as Bost reminds us, Chicana feminists do not simply retell ancient Mesoamerican history in a way that consigns it to a presumably static past. Rather, Chicana thinkers like Anzaldúa, “reenact it in their own representations. It is something that they feel in the present. Their vision of the past is not essentialist but motivated by contemporary political needs” (Bost 2009, 37–38). This Indigenousbased collapsing of time and space is thus sustained by what Anzaldúa understands as the “tree of life’s” supernal qualities.

Likening it to the cosmic tree or axis mundi, Anzaldúa’s imagines the tree of life as a triptych comprised of

the underworld [that] exists below the Earth’s surface and is represented by the roots; it is the realm of Earth energies, animal spirits, and the dead who have not moved on to the next level of existence…The middle world, the physical plane where we live our ordinary lives, is symbolized by the trunk; it is the realms of the planet and the outer reaches of the universe…Represented by the branches, the upper world above the sky is the world of noncorporeal energies, spirits who are gods and goddesses, spirits of the dead who have progressed beyond the land of the dead. (2015, 25–26)

Not unlike the multiverses that pepper science-fictional imaginaries, these three planes exist in tandem, each a distinct yet conjoined part of the larger cosmos. Though a sense of universality underpins the tree of life image—it is this very universality that allows her to theorize her affiliative or relational futurities— Anzaldúa argues that the meanings and symbologies attached to the tree of life are also mediated by cultural belief systems. Anzaldúa thus anchors her literal and cosmic tree in Nahua and Mayan mythology; her tree of life is rooted in Tamoanchan (a word of Mayan origin), the speculated mythical place of origin of Mesoamerican gods and goddesses. Notably, this notion of an equal parts universal and rooted tree image appears and is in fact central to Indigenous philosophies of science. Cajete writes, for instance, that “the sacred tree of life, as an analogy for the evolving process of Native science and quest for knowledge, presents a cosmological and structural symbol for Native science that embodies its life- and nature-centered orientations” (2000, 58). In turn, the tree, “presents an archetype of life, learning, and development that begins with the sprouting of a seedling from a seed embedded in fertile ground, then moves to the various stages of growth and development through all seasons of life and its trials and tribulations until it begins to form seeds of its own” (58). Because the tree, moreover, is a “natural analogy for a living philosophy,” each “species of tree is of a particular ‘tribe’ originating and rooted in the social of a particular place, living and growing into its own particular form and completing itself in the distinct ways of its species, yet having its own unique and one-of-a-kind expression of life” (58). The very leaves of the arboreal metaphor also signify the infinite manifestations and enlivened expressions of Indigenous science. For Cajete, then, the tree of life image offers a different yet nevertheless compelling story of science, one that conceives science as an expansive “coming to know” that is rooted “in the soil of direct physical and perceptual experience of the earth” (24). Cajete’s enlivened tree of life reminds us, then, that “science in every form…is a story of the world” (27), and, like all stories, can be used to remap and engender new realities and ways of being-with the world. This generative representation of the tree of life as rhizomatic rather than hierarchical, relational rather than insular, is precisely the rendition of the arboreal that will figure prominently in Anzaldúa’s “new tribalism” theorizations.¹⁴

Invoking a memory of her uncle’s “dying orange tree…one still possessed of a strong root system and trunk,” Anzaldúa recalls how her “tío grafted a sturdier variety of orange to it, creating a more vigorous tree” (2015, 140). She later extends her uncle’s horticultural techniques to her own identity and epistemological “graftings” writing,

El árbol de la vida symbolizes my “story” of the new tribalism. Roots represent ancestral/racial origins and biological attributes; branches and leaves represent the characteristics, communities, and cultures that surround us, that we’ve adopted, and that we’re in intimate conversation with. Onto the trunk de mi árbol de la vida I graft a new tribalism. This new tribalism, like other new Chicano / Latino narratives, recognizes that we are responsible participants in the ecosystems (complete set of interrelationships between a network of living organisms and their physical habitats) in whose web we’re individual strands…you [then] “grow into” an identity of mestizaje…by propagating other worldviews, spiritual traditions, and cultures to your árbol de la vida. (2015, 67, 140)

Anzaldúa’s deployment of arboreal, dendritic, and horticultural imagery, and the suturing of genetic, spiritual, and mystical concepts, can be understood as a “mestizaje” or “grafting” of ideas, one that leads to a much needed “[skepticism] of reason and rationality” (119). Yet the invocation of these metaphorical grafting practices, while potentially subversive, is not without problems. Anzaldúa’s adaptation of horticultural and plant science concepts is in fact haunted by a longer history of Mexican eugenic engagements with Lamarckian and, to a lesser degree, Mendelian notions of inheritance (Hedrick 2003; Stepan 1991; Stern 2005). The metaphor of the graft and the (vigorous) hybrid invoked by Vasconcelos in his infamous 1925 publication, La Raza Cósmica / The Cosmic Race, and by other Mexican artists and intellectuals of the period—Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s artistic engagement with US botanist and horticulturist Luther Burbank’s experiments on grafting, hybridization, and the crossbreeding of plants and crops come to mind here, as does Roberto Montenegro’s 1922 “story of national/family origins” in his mural El Árbol de la Vida, commissioned by Vasconcelos himself —offered Vasconcelos a pliable and potent tool for his nation-building efforts in post-revolutionary Mexico. Indeed, it was his imagined stalwart mestizo-of-the-future, as the product of racial and cultural graftings, that would go over and against the “ethnic barricading of the North…the last empire of white supremacy” by bringing forward, via an “aesthetic eugenics,” “a synthetical race…made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples, and, for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision” (Vasconcelos 1997, 20). Yet this assimilative vision remained, despite its aspirations for a sort of racial transcendence, decidedly anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Asian; it is only through the “absorption” of Black, Indigenous, and Asian peoples that Vasconcelos’s cosmic mestizaje could be realized.

And yet for Anzaldúa, the lacking Eurowestern scientific imagination that Vasconcelos cannot seem to resist nor evade in his imagined “grafted” mestizoof- the-future, is not the sole arbiter of what meanings we might make out of (biologized) metaphors, symbols, and analogies; nor is it the only way to pursue knowledge and draft new realities about, and for, ourselves and the world. After all, as theologian and activist-scholar Barbara A. Holmes writes in Race and the Cosmos: An Invitation to View the World Differently, “curiosity about the world neither begins nor ends with the West” (2002, 61). For this reason, Anzaldúa sought to question, via what she calls “conocimiento,” “conventional knowledge’s current categories, classifications, and contents…[and] refuse[d] to accept spirituality as a devalued form of knowledge and instead elevate it to the same level occupied by science and rationality” (2015, 119). While Chicanx and Latin/x American studies scholars are certainly right to critique Chicanx/Latinx instrumentalizations of Indigeneity as well as the indigenist tendency to reductively consign indigenousness to the sphere of the “ephemeral” or “spiritual,” the realm of spirituality, for Anzaldúa, is a legitimate, and indeed vital source—I use “vital” here to foreground its centrality and dynamism—of Indigenous knowledges.¹⁵ More specifically, if science is a mode of learning about and making sense of natural phenomena, then Indigenous spirituality, a focal feature of living Indigenous knowledge systems, need be understood, for Anzaldúa, as one of several modes of actual scientific inquiry. To put it another way, for Indigenous Peoples and folks of the “two-thirds world” (70), as Holmes so powerfully argues, the division between science and spirituality, and the presumed absence of the scientific in the mundane, does not exist.

Writing over and against Vasconcelos’s assimilative and genocidal mestizaje and his investment in a Hispanicized modernity, Anzaldúa’s futurist visions, particularly as imagined in her post-Borderlands writings, refuses what Latin American studies scholar Juliet Hooker describes in Theorizing Race in the Americas as a strain of mestizaje that “continued to operate within an epistemic logic that privileged European ideas and sources…[and] was thus anti-colonial only in a limited sense, insofar as it challenged US imperialism” (2017, 159–60). Hooker, however, contends that Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, while “queering” what she calls Vasconcelos’s “mestizo futurism,” what with its explorations of feminist and queer concerns and its valuation (however partial) of Indigeneity, nevertheless “[adopts] Vasconcelian narratives of harmonious Latin American mixture [that] precluded her from formulating a full intersectional feminist critique of his theory” (192). Yet as Rebeca Hey-Colón writes in Channeling Knowledges, mestizaje, for Anzaldúa, was not “just [about] a mixture of bloodlines” (2023, 92), and actively sought to confront, as we see as early as her Borderlands writings, the persistence of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity (and the overall erasure of other racial formations) in discourses of Mexicanidad and Chicanidad. As such, Anzaldúa’s new terrains of mestizaje cannot be solely understood nor reduced to narratives of cultural and racial mixture, for they radically exceed, as I have attempted to show in this essay, such analytical framing.

While I by no means believe that Anzaldúa is nor should be above critique, I do find it invaluable to engage the myriad ruptures and transformations of Anzaldúa’s intellectual genealogies and philosophies of science. Anzaldúa, for instance, habitually engaged texts, as I learned during my visit to her archives housed at University of Texas at Austin’s Benson Latin American collection in 2019, that cut across disciplinary, national, and generic boundaries and expanded and nuanced the ideas she explored in her later published and unpublished works. We also see, in her living archive, as Keating writes in her editor’s introduction to Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro, how Anzaldúa “viewed indigenous thought as a foundational, vital source of decolonial wisdom for contemporary and future life on this planet and elsewhere. She believed that indigenous philosophies offer alternatives to Cartesian-based knowledge systems which we ignore at our peril” (2015, Introduction). Anzaldúa’s critiques and critical reworkings of Eurowestern (bio)science and its metaphors and her tinkering with concepts such as “nepantla,” “new tribalism” and “new terrains of mestizaje,” are largely indebted to her engagement with Indigenous medicine (including curanderismo), Nahua and Mayan metaphysics, and other Indigenous-based philosophies including those found in Yoruban cultural and spiritual traditions.¹⁶ Hence, an engagement with the complex totality of Anzaldúa’s thinking reveals how her transmutational (and even transtemporal) “new terrains of mestizaje” uniquely envision and prophesize a liberatory coming to consciousness that is just over the horizon, one that “will reach other planets, solar systems, galaxies. Pictured like a diagrammatic model, the universe is a web—tightly woven connections of all living things past, present, and future, having both positive and negative forces” (Anzaldúa 2015, 71).

Not surprisingly, Anzaldúa once again explores these interplanetary and intra- and interspecies entanglements vis-à-vis her critically utopian rendering of the “árbol de la vida” image and her discursive reworking, as I have shown thus far, of horticultural practices. Through a cross-species intimacy with a literal tree— referred to by Anzaldúa as Guadalupe, the name of the syncretized matron saint of Mexico and its diasporas—she is “reminded of something [she’d] forgotten— that [her] body has always sensed trees’ special relationship to humans, that we have a body awareness of trees and they of us. Awareness is not just in the mind, but also includes body knowledge” (2015, 24). This perceived relationality between herself (a human being), and the tree (a nonhuman entity) is credited, by Anzaldúa, to living Indigenous onto-epistemological systems: “According to Indigenous belief, we are embedded in nature and exist in reciprocity with it…We are bonded to this planet in ways we don’t even imagine. We are in partnership with the Earth, but the partnership must go both ways; we must demonstrate trust, love, respect, and reciprocity to make this bond work” (39). It is then through an Indigenous-based understanding of affiliation or a relational bordercrossing of sorts, that Anzaldúa’s “new terrains of mestizaje” can imagine kinship outside of consanguineal forms.

At the same time, the tree of life image enables Anzaldúa to invoke (and revision) popular ideas of ancestry and biological kinship in ways that advance, to use Alondra Nelson’s (2016) phrasing, her speculative “root-seeking” efforts. While Anzaldúa’s root-seeking endeavors are fraught—she repeatedly expresses her anxieties over detribalizing Indigenous Peoples vis-à-vis her new tribalism theorizations and a queer(ed) mestizaje—we can read her root-seeking project as one of generative contradiction. Maylei Blackwell notes, for instance, that Chicanx scholars invested in “anticolonial” approaches to mestizaje are increasingly “standing in the contradictions of what it means to be detribalized but not entirely deindianized and searching out decolonial strategies and life ways, which are most pronounced in the recovery of Indigenous knowledges in the realms of healing and spiritual knowledge, as well as in agriculture, food ways, and seed autonomy” (2017, 103). Further, the tree of life, with all its knotty roots and tangled branches, enabled Anzaldúa, like other mixed-race Chicanx and Latinx peoples, to wade through the complexities, as Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray write in Latinx Environmentalisms, of being “both the perpetrato[r] of colonial violence and object[t] of settler colonial dispossessions (2019, 7). What we “inherit,” for Anzaldúa, is as important as what we do with such inheritances. Thus, before we imagine and build for the decolonial “not-yets” Anzaldúa was already conjuring in her future-oriented writings, we must first, as her tree of life reminds us, get to the “root” of our increasingly authoritarian presents.

Conclusion

The Anti-Eugenics Project, “an interdisciplinary network of scholars, organizers, cultural workers and artists working to understand and bring awareness to the continuing legacies and harm of eugenicist ideologies,” held its first convening, “Dismantling Eugenics,” in late September of 2021. The week-long virtual event acted “as a counter-centennial to the Second International Eugenics Congress, held at the American Museum of Natural History a century prior, which furthered the politics of exclusion that continue to operate in our society today,” and brought together the anti-racist and decolonial work of artists, activists, and scholars from across the Americas and the Global South. One of the sessions, titled “The Eugenics Tree, and the Anti-Eugenics Tree: The Anti-Centennial Through Tapestries,” featured the embroidery work of Abenaki and French Canadian artist, educator, scholar, and basket-maker Judy Dow (2021a). During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Dow recalls witnessing, in real time, the resurgence of eugenic ideas concerning the pathology, disposability, and looming extinction of Black, Indigenous, disabled, poor, and other racialized peoples, and the public legitimization of these ideas by then-former President Donald Trump, who has long been fascinated by questions of genes, bloodlines, and racial purity (I’m thinking here, for instance, of his public invocations of “racehorse theory”). These eugenic hauntings, as Dow shares in her talk, became the artistic fodder for her adaptation, in blanket-style form, of the “Eugenics Tree,” first introduced in 1921 by eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin.

Laughlin’s originary “Eugenics Tree,” one of the most circulated images of the eugenics era, features a black-and-white redwood tree. Emblazoned on each side of the tree’s trunk, we see the words, “Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution.” Below the tree’s roots, a caption reads, “Like a tree eugenics draws from many sources and organizes them into an harmonious entity” (see Wisconsin Historical Society, n.d.). The roots of the original “Eugenics Tree,” in turn, feature a sampling of the myriad fields or disciplines that eugenicists drew from to help imagine and materialize their equal parts genocidal and impoverished fantasies of white supremacist (cis)heterosexual patriarchal futures. Yet despite the historical baggage that comes with said image, Dow intentionally replicates it through her embroidery work. Her textile “monument” of sorts bears witness, as Subramaniam writes of the “ghosts” who “haunt” the science of variation and the world of Harawayian “naturecultures,” to the “countless bodies of the dead, the mutilated, the tortured, the irredeemable, the unwanted, as well as the brilliant talents that have gone unrecognized and unacknowledged—all those unknown, forgotten humans relegated to the rubbish heap of history” (2014, introduction). However, as Anzaldúa’s repurposing of the tree of life reminds us, the narratives that we attach to images, symbols, and metaphors can also be reorganized and remade. Dow, like Anzaldúa, quite literally weaves a new story for the “tree of life,” radically reimagining Laughlin’s eugenic tree by way of a redwood she dubs the “The Anti- Eugenics Tree” (or “The Witness Tree”). Unlike Laughlin’s tree, Dow’s redwood promotes, as she shows in her “Witness Tree” image, the “collective creation of an equitable and healthy world for all” and draws “from various sources and transforms into a one-minded and one-heart way of being” (Dow 2021b). The tree imagined by Dow is then nourished by a network of subterranean roots that feature words she ties to our collective liberation: “education,” “history,” “justice,” “love,” “memory,” “reciprocity,” “reparation,” and “responsibility,” are a few notable examples (2021b). These “roots,” as Dow tells her listeners during The Anti- Eugenics Project’s 2021 online convening, must be “braided and shared as a story that comes from many voices. The root should not extort, ignore historical trauma, or place the land and her peoples into silence but rather weave them together into one path that will benefit all” (2021a). Ever the “theorist of hope” (Sandoval 2005, xiii), Anzaldúa similarly urges readers in one of her last essays before her untimely passing to “possess the steadfastness of trees…the fluidity of fish in our element” and the “collective creativity [to] heal the wounds of hate, ignorance, indifference, [and] dissolve the divisions creating chasms between us” (2015, 158), all for the promise of freer and better tomorrows.

Note