Introduction
Knowing Borders: Materialidades, ecologías, estéticas
Arizona State University
University of Arizona
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Abstract
Borders are complex configurations intertwined with political regimes, ecosystems, flows of bodies, objects, technologies, and affects. Feminist STS, with its attention to infrastructure and its intimacies, more-than-human relationalities, and investigative aesthetics, is ripe for a re-engagement with contemporary securitized borders and their lifeworlds. Using a mix of Spanish and English, we perform and theorize the importance of pocho linguistic third spaces for feminist community and offer practical tools for reading beyond English to frame the Spanish-language contributions in this Special Section. We ask how we can “know borders” otherwise and offer three emergent paths of reflexive engagement: Materialidades: Intimate Infrastructures, Ecologías: More-than- Human Migrations and Ecologies of Care, and Estéticas: The Research-Creation Nexus. After a curated review of the literature on borders and migration in the United States and Mexico, we suggest the analytic power of these lenses to nurture feminist attention to both the vibrancy and violences of contemporary borders and foster a grounded and generative politics of care and solidarity.
Resumen
Las fronteras son configuraciones complejas entrelazadas con regímenes políticos, ecosistemas y flujos de cuerpos, tecnologías y afectos. Los estudios feministas de la ciencia, con su atención puesta en la infraestructura y sus intimidades, las relaciones más-que-humanas y las estéticas investigativas, están maduros para un nuevo compromiso con las fronteras contemporáneas securitizadas y sus mundos de vida y muerte. Transitando entre el español y el inglés, y habitando lo que llamamos aquí un espacio de práctica pocho, exploramos y teorizamos sobre las posibilidades de los terceros espacios lingüísticos para la comunidad feminista y ofrecemos herramientas prácticas para leer más allá de los marcos interpretativos anglosajones hegemónicos. En esta sección especial abordamos la cuestión de cómo “conocer las fronteras” de otro modo, y ofrecemos tres vías emergentes de compromiso reflexivo: Materialidades: Infraestructuras íntimas, ecologías: Migraciones más que humanas y ecologías del cuidado, y estéticas: El nexo entre investigación y creación. Tras llevar a cabo una revisión cuidadosa de las literaturas sobre fronteras y migración en los Estados Unidos y México, sugerimos el poder analítico de estos lentes para nutrir la atención feminista tanto a las violencias como a la vitalidad y las potencias que se despliegan en las fronteras contemporáneas, abogando por una política situada de la solidaridad y el cuidado.
Keywords
US-Mexico border, migration, more-than-human, borderlands, intimate infrastructures, research-creation practices, linguistic third spaces
Y el Bordo se hizo río
Tijuana, September 2022
La inundación. “Rara vez llueve en esta ciudad, pero cuando llueve, se cae el
cielo.” It is September 6, 2022, 8 p.m. It is already dark. It is raining heavily, and
the line of authorized airport cabs is endless. On the street, just in front of the
main exit, across the avenue, the sight of la barda (the wall) imposes itself. Graffiti
covers much of its surface, announcing “Esto es Tijuana.” Beyond the wall, San
Diego. The cab driver takes the fast lane that runs parallel to la línea (the line) on
one side and on the other, el bordo, a paved channel just a few meters from the
wall that crosses the city and shelters migrants and deportees waiting for a
chance to cross the line. But this time, instead of el bordo, the concrete, las pintas
(graffiti), the migrant camps, el trasiego or the everyday exchange of food and
substances, and the intimidating routine police patrols, there is a river. A fast-flowing river, at times unbridled. It is the Tijuana River, an intermittent body of
water that snakes between Mexico and the United States along the borderline.
El bordo becoming a river is a disruptive image, a political reconfiguration of the
sensible experience of the border that enables other ways of thinking, an
invitation to see differently, to pay attention to other transits, temporalities, and
ways of inhabiting this territory.
Attending to the Tijuana River and its transformations—disappearing urban river,
political canvas for graffiti artists, hyper-politicized infrastructure, concrete
chasm, migrant camp, flood—invites us to consider the unique ecological,
infrastructural, aesthetic, and political connections and disconnections of
different places along continental migratory routes and border territories. The
Tijuana River, its channeling and its overflows, the modes of life and death that it
organizes, and the sensory and systemic experiences that it enables combine to
give us a lucid image of the links that interweave this Special Section: the intimate
infrastructures of borders, more-than-human migrations, and the aesthetic as the
political configuration of the sensible. We highlight the intricate forms of political
and environmental violences that unfold in the bordering spaces of colonial
modernity while also attending to the possibility for new forms of care and
resistance to flourish, such as the artistic, activist, and scientific movements with
which the authors in this Special Section engage.
Since the work of Chicana feminists Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Cherríe L. Moraga in
the 1980s, borders and borderlands have been a central topic of inquiry for many
feminist scholars and activists. Moraga and Anzaldúa (1983) were among the first
to offer expansive, critical, and theoretically provocative engagements based on
their subjective intimacies with borders and the lives unfolding in dialogue with
them. Through the concept of borderlands, Anzaldúa offered feminists a new
engagement with borders in empirical, theoretical, and linguistic registers. La
Frontera became a place to challenge binaries, attend to the hybridity and cultural
profusion of encounter, as well as a space marked by deep capitalist, patriarchal,
and racial violences. In Anzaldúa’s words, “the Borderlands are physically present
wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races
occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch,
where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (1987, preface).
These complex and multiple bordering realities intertwine politically, ecologically,
and historically.
Following this path of intersectional or bordering reflexivity and centering
materialidades, ecologías, and estéticas, we bring together transdisciplinary
research at the intersection of art, philosophy, and literature that has reinvigorated
scholarship on the historical connections between social and ecological devastation
in particular bordering territories (Meszaros 2018; Rivera-Garza 2019, 2022; Villalobos-Ruminott 2016), with feminist STS concerns with multispecies care,
materiality and infrastructure, and new forms of activism at the intersection of
knowledge production and aesthetics (Barad 2011; Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016;
Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Stengers 2015; Tsing et al. 2017). In light of these
perspectives, we believe it is necessary to re-examine our ways of knowing borders
from new frameworks that pay careful attention to material intertwinings, morethan-
human temporalities, and long-term historical processes—both political and
environmental. From a feminist materialist, decolonial, and more-than-human
approach, our intention is not to homogenize and discipline new knowledge but to
enrich and multiply the relationships and meanings that populate these dense
bordering worlds (De la Cadena 2015; Despret 2021).
Knowing Borders: Materialidades, ecologías, estéticas, as a thematic Special Section,
emerges as increasingly violent rhetoric and immigration practices that have put
our communities, political networks, and intellectual practices under attack—
something that has become grotesquely visible after the 2024 US election. The
continued dominance of racist, anti-migratory, ecocidal, and imperialist politics,
and the very real violences that these ideologies create for migrants (on borders),
demands a grounded politics of care and solidarity with/in the borderlands—for
humans and more-than-humans alike. The contributions here are all the more
important now in the face of the uncertainty of new policies that explicitly threaten
land, life, and community in La Frontera. Borderlands politics, solidarity, and modes
of resistance offer models for confronting the current moment, and the questions
we tackle offer clues for living in the midst: How can we know borders through
capacious lenses that allow us to trace the vibrant intersections between
multispecies relationalities, land, landscape, and infrastructure, as well as activism,
migration, violence, and art? How do we create and sustain linguistic third spaces
of practice, solidarity, and scholarship? What modes of attention allow us to
recognize the entrenched infrastructural violencias and dispossession of border
politics and revindicar (defend) solidarity, care, and multispecies flourishing?
The authors in this section provide rich accounts of such grounded politics of care
and solidarity. Dan Kabella’s paper on Quebrar’s anticolonial struggles in New
Mexico, for example, shows how contemporary grassroots harm reduction
organizing and its community practices of care are inextricably linked to longterm
borderlands antiracist and abolitionist activist culture kindled by oppressive
colonial and bordering infrastructures. Columba González-Duarte and Juanita
Sundberg’s attention to the relations between migrant farm workers, monarch
butterflies, and desert soils across North America offers a potent path forward for
intellectual and methodological reflexivity. We can also find examples in the
research-based artistic praxis of the Colorado River archive, Roberto Mendez-
Arreola’s community–bird relationships, Carla Macal’s healing cartographies, and
Carina Vado’s re-engagement with Anzaldúa. These authors offer us new
pathways to both know borders and inhabit them in the richness of solidarity.
It is also necessary to build a politics that recognizes that the renewed violence of
the present (large-scale deportation, encampment, racial and ethnic profiling) has
deep roots that intertwine with the very foundations of bordering techniques and
technologies in both the United States and Mexico. Alethia Fernández de la
Reguera offers a potent analysis of the centrality of checkpoints in the
increasingly militarized southern border of Mexico, while Iván Sandoval-
Cervantes interrogates how human-dog relationalities come to reflect and refract
deeply entrenched border ideologies. This Special Section includes a translated
interview with renowned Mexican journalist Marcela Turati, whose writing on
structured forms of violence in Mexico has transformed our contemporary
understanding of migration, bordering, and authorized crime. These
contributions provide political, theoretical, and methodological anchor points for
resistance, solidarity, and care within and beyond the sometimes complacent and
complicit spaces of academic knowledge production.
In what follows, we first discuss how this Special Section uses multiple languages
to foster linguistic third spaces for feminist STS praxis. We include articles in
Spanish in addition to the English-language articles Catalyst traditionally features,
as well as many articles that include untranslated Spanish text. Providing
intellectual and practical tools to engage in imperfect multilingual collaboration,
we guide our readers through the discomfort of imperfect mastery to meet our
authors in a pocho third space. We then review contemporary border and
migration literatures in the United States in Mexico as they intersect with feminist
and STS concerns to outline the theoretical and empirical ground in which we
work and write. We conclude with an overview of the Special Section, which puts
the authors collected here into dialogue to highlight how an attention to intimate
infrastructures, more-than-human migrations and ecologies of care, and the
research-creation nexus offers new pathways of engagement with migration and
borders. We include ethnographic vignettes and orienting photos from our shared
field research on Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala to locate our
intervention in particular spaces with their rich histories and lived materialities.
Hablar en lenguas
Our first intervention is linguistic and cultural, as we invite authors writing on the borderlands to publish in either English or Spanish, creating the first bilingual—en el sentido pocho—Special Section published in Catalyst. We seek to respond infrastructurally to the reality that English-language dominance confines vibrant feminist exchange. Asking why American feminists do not read and engage with the work of feminists from Latin America, Tania Pérez-Bustos (2017) identifies language disparities and asymmetries as generative of divides that reproduce systemic global inequalities. Too often, language limits who we read and how we engage. Translation, as a tool, aids this process but does little to address Englishlanguage hegemony. As anyone who has communicated in a second language knows, the subtlety of language can be lost in translation: our linguistic poetry, humor, and cultural signs.
Figure 1. América invertida. Photo: Nirvana Paz, 2021.
For non-native English speakers, language is a complicated and persistent career
challenge. Leandro Rodriguez Medina (2019), the former editor of Tapuya: Latin
American Science, Technology and Society, describes how, despite his formal
proficiency in English, his so-called “bad English” was a roadblock in his career. His
reflections are familiar to non-native or bilingual English speakers—the out-ofplaceness
and concrete barriers that language creates in a global academy
dominated by English. When pocho-style writing (grammatical, linguistic, and
citational “inconsistencies”) is reframed as “bad English,” the response is to teach
us to write better to meet the scholarly standards of English without questioning
what is lost in translation. To read a scholar in their second language is often to
gain the essence but miss the nuance of the exchange (Ryan and Viete 2009).
In contrast, there is no equivalent requirement for native English-speaking
researchers to read or research in other languages. Although most fields reward
multilingualism, outside of language programs and field-based research,
additional languages are primarily a benefit to the researcher, not a requirement
for participation. Moreover, the lack of language parity translates into entrenched
blind spots in scholarship where, despite a few critical “translators,” fields can
remain disconnected based on geography. Even with critical pedagogical approaches (Perez Comisso et al. 2024), English-language exchange becomes the
default in STS, reiterating knowledge dissemination from the center to the
periphery. Pérez-Bustos (2017) asks us to consider what norms are being enforced
and what traditions, structures of thoughts, and worlds are diminished through
the call to write on these terms in a world where reciprocity is not expected (Lyons
et al. 2017).
After conversations with the contributors and editors of this journal, we decided
not to make a bilingual edition in the traditional sense—that is, presenting each of
the texts in both Spanish and English. Instead, we offer a pocho, “Spanglish”
edition (una edición pocha) that shakes us from our complacency and invites
readers to meet us halfway, requiring them to inhabit an uncomfortable space of
inbetweeness. Pocho/a is a Mexican slang term for Americans of Mexican descent
and means withered or overripe (Sorbazo 2016). Although initially a derogatory
term used to mark American Mexicans as outsiders within Mexico with their bad
Spanish and out-of-date cultural practices, it has been revindicated and reclaimed
as a space that is neither fully American nor Mexican (Anzaldúa 1987; Vera-Rosas
and Guerrero 2021; Tracey 2023).
In this pocho space, we offer the reader the possibility of connections with perhaps
new, unexpected, and refreshing perspectives and thinkers, as well as the
opportunity to examine the habits and assumptions that root our intellectual and
academic practices (modes of argumentation, academic styles, and modes of
evidencing, among others). Creating a linguistic third space is not just a theoretical
gesture but an intentional, insistent collective praxis. This praxis has been
mediated by texts, images, sounds, workshops, charlas y caminatas, email
exchanges, palabras, bastard languages, and tongues, among other cultural
practices and artifacts, across borders and over time and space. Our work as guest
editors has been complex, requiring intensive listening, care, and accompaniment,
demanding the generation of third spaces for conversation and translation, in the
broadest sense of this term, and forcing us to precariously build bridges across
linguistic, institutional, disciplinary, and structural borders.
This space es pocho quizá solo tentativamente, lacking a more appropriate term.
It is pocho not because it is a space that is necessarily our own, built on identity or
belonging, or because it aspires to inclusion and equity in a liberal academic
sense. It is pocho because, for lack of a better term, it refers to a series of
collective practices (lingüísticas, culturales, de conocimiento, de traducción, etc.)
que son por momentos deficientes, mal habladas, precarias, incompletas:
contaminating and yet rich and generative, border(ing) practices, fronterizas. It is
pocho because, borrowing Anzaldúa’s words, it is “[u]n nuevo lenguaje, siempre
por nacer, siempre bastardo. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de
vivir…[It] is not proper, not incorrect, it is a living language” (1987, 35–36).
Although this is far from the only or first pocho linguistic space, given that the major STS journals (including Tapuya) publish articles only in English, we
revindicate the need for generative linguistic third spaces in our field that invite
readers into new forms of community.
The scholars, activists, and artists participating in this Special Section are mostly
Spanish-speaking and operate in an English-speaking or Mexican academic
context. Some do not or barely speak English, aunque algunos pueden leerlo.
Some are fluent in both languages. Others, descended from Spanish-speaking
and Indigenous communities, were alienated from their language through the
forced assimilation, acculturation, and memory loss entrenched in the political
and educational infrastructures of borderlands territories in both the US and
Mexico. For some contributors, Spanish was embraced as a refuge and a
generative force. Yet we recognize it is a colonial language and part of an
oppressive historical assemblage to dominate non-Western languages and
cultures (Cusicanqui 2012).
The US-Mexico border transects the homelands and territories of the Apaches,
Cucapá, Kikapú, O’odham, Pai, and Yaqui (Alianza Indígena Sin Fronteras 2019),
while Mexico’s southern border transects the homelands of many Maya groups
especially the Mam, K’iche, and Q’eqchi (Tzul Tzul 2024). The politics of
Indigeneity are multiple and diverse in Mexico and the United States with multiple
strategies for revindicating Indigenous rights and sovereignties, often in
opposition to state-based assimilationist projects like mestizaje (Lopez-Beltran
and García-Deister 2013; Wade et al. 2014). The continuous resistance of
Indigenous Peoples is materially constitutive of the contemporary borderlands
(Aguilar Gil 2020, 2021; Estes 2021; Hernández-Castillo 2001a, 2001b; Ventura
Trujillo 2022), while at the same time, their languages, cultures, and ways of living
have been uniquely harmed. O’odham poet and activist Ophelia Rivas (n.d.) writes
in her poem “Surveillance Tower in Ali Jegk,” “The lives of all O’odham are
altered… / When our world comes under attack the warriors only need a signal.
They are there willing to stand firm. Here I stand.”
Despite this intricate, intimate relationship, Indigenous border communities are
too rarely invited to participate in conversations about the borderlands. We want
to acknowledge this systematic exclusion, even as this Special Section reproduces
it. Although we invited Indigenous colleagues to participate, the realities of
historical exclusions and their legacies in the limited frameworks academia
currently sets for Indigenous participation (so-called inclusion or representation)
and the seeming irrelevance of feminist STS to Indigenous-lived realities and
struggles on the border, led to their principled refusal to participate. Even as we
failed to generate this exchange here, we want to echo our colleagues’ critique
and support their call for a forum where border Indigenous groups in Mexico and
the United States can set their own priorities, knowledge frameworks, and terms
of participation.
Hablar en lenguas, in Anzaldúa’s (1981) terms, always implies a risk of exclusion
and the loss of control over the circulation, translations, and interpretations, if
any, that are made of your work: “Calcular el daño es un acto peligroso,” writes
Moraga (1984, 32). However, this challenge provides us with an intimate space to
resist and unlearn the assumptions and conventions that academia has forced us
to assume. In inhabiting and nurturing imperfect linguistic third spaces, the
pocho, we sought to create a generative academic space of exchange filled with
imperfections: sentences begun in one language and finished in another, a
speaker who only used English or Spanish and relied on others to translate the
essence of the exchange, forgotten accents and added articles, refusals, absences,
and unexpected communion. The pocho foregrounds exchange and mutuality
over correctness in the spirit of generative encounter. We hope this gesture, with
all its problems and limitations, also invites our readers to occupy this space,
allowing for other contesting and contaminating languages and ways of being in
academia to flourish and multiply.
We invited the contributors to write en la lengua y registro, which they felt most
comfortable with, but the challenges have been extensive. Writing in Spanish in
an Anglo journal can imply a political statement against the hegemony of the
Anglosajon academia and an ethical commitment to the diversity of languages
and cultural registers. However, writing against the language norms of a journal or
field also risks exclusion from intellectual and political circles that matter. On a
practical level, this approach can also put authors in a vulnerable position as
English-language publishing is increasingly valued and weighted more heavily in
local advancement in Latin America and the United States. Most contributors in
this Special Section chose to publish in English, even when writing from the
Mexican academy. Only two contributors published their articles in Spanish,
Méndez-Arreola writing about birding and the limits of citizen science in the
borderlands, and Jessica Sevilla and Rosela del Bosque exploring the power of
archives and artistic collaborations to engage with the profound ecological
transformation of Mexicali’s waterscapes.
To facilitate our readers’ participation in the pocho third space of the Special
Section, we have collected a toolkit for navigating the articles and approaching
words or content that may not be fully legible to English-language readers. We have
created an accompanying website (https://www.knowingborders.com) where
readers can access resources and tools to generate imperfect translations: online
translators, a glossary of terms, references, chats, and interviews with the authors,
as well as links to other works by our authors that have been translated into English.
Twenty-First-Century Borders and the Mexican Migration Crisis
Tenosique, July 2022
Las oficinas del Sindicato de Ferrocarrileros de Tenosique are all the remain of
that working-class world, el viejo mundo obrero. Hundreds of people worked on
the railways for decades and the train was crucial for the construction and
expansion of the city: era el modo de transporte hacia otras partes del país, la
principal actividad económica y el origen de procesos de construcción de una
identidad social y de clase. The old building is now the only vestige of these rail
infrastructures. Todo lo demás ha sido demolido. In some sense, it is a santuario
for a disappeared species: the proletarian worker. The first generation of workers
were campesinos, que, en los años cuarenta del siglo XX, se transformaron en
obreros; como aquellos que aparecen en los escritos de Marx y Engels o en los de
Weber. It was also a space of construction of a masculinity que entró en crisis con
la economía estatal y los relatos del estado-nación mexicano.
El tren que pasó por Tenosique venía desde la península de Yucatán y seguía hacia
el estado de Veracruz. En 1949 ambos ramales se conectaron en una localidad
llamada La Unión, en Chiapas. The oldest workers swear that the spikes placed at
the joining of these lines were made of gold. By the 1980s, la empresa estatal was
increasingly underfinanced and finally privatized. A finales de 1999 llegaron
funcionarios federales a liquidar lo que quedaba. The union was transformed into
an organization of workers who had been let go. Las reestructuraciones
neoliberales de la economía mexicana pusieron fin a ese mundo.
Figure 2. Oficina del Sindicato de Ferrocarrileros / Train Union’s headquarters. Photos: Nirvana Paz, 2021.
Tenosique, a small town in Tabasco, about thirty minutes from Mexico’s border
with Guatemala, has been the first stop along a migratory route from Central
America to the United States for decades, as it allowed recent border crossers
access to Mexico's train infrastructure northward. Las 72, a migrant shelter created
to provide services and solidarity to migrants, was within sight of the old train
tracks. Migrants organized round-the-clock shifts to watch for the train, known as
La Bestia, raising a cry, “el tren, el tren,” when it approached, allowing—those who
dared to risk the significant danger of climbing aboard the train—a chance to run
up alongside and ascend to the roof to facilitate their journey (Parrini-Roses and
Flores-Pérez 2018; Vogt 2017). In July 2022 the co-editors, cover photographer
Nirvana Paz, and two PhD students (Octavio Muciño and Alix Almendra) began
their first research collaboration in Tenosique. This Special Section emerged from
that collaboration and the questions we encountered as Mexico’s southern border
was being remade by the converging forces of the pandemic, Mexico’s ongoing
“guerra contra el narco,” border militarization, the use of asylum as a technology of
migration containment (Varela 2019), and massive development projects in hightech
infrastructure and agricultural production.
Figure 3. Viejo tren, nuevas vías / Old train, new tracks. Photos: Nirvana Paz, 2021.
Borders are a potent space in contemporary life and politics. They act as a space
for the articulation of sovereignty (Mignolo 2012); a site of violence, surveillance,
and control (Aas 2011; Angulo-Pasel 2022); a transnational space of mobility and
hybridity (Chávez 2016; Cunningham and Heyman 2004); a space premised on
externalization and exploitation of labor (Estévez 2021; Mezzadra and Neilson
2013), and culturally resonant, vibrant, and innovative places of encounter
(Canclini 2012; Paredes 2010). Research on racialization and criminalization has
pointed to the borderlands as an overdetermined site of difference-making and
othering (Rosas 2012), which has, through explicit changes in US border policy
toward “deterrence” (Nevins 2001), led to migrant death and disappearance (De
León 2015). Building on recent work in STS on the technologically mediated
violence of contemporary borders and the migration they seek to control (e.g.,
Muñiz 2022; López 2024), we bring attention to how technologically mediated,
systemic violence is also always intertwined with multiple spaces of resistance,
multispecies solidarity, alternative infrastructures and ways of knowing otherwise.
Within this broader scholarly context of border studies, this Special Section lies at
the intersection of migration and bordering. Mexican feminist thinkers have
offered a rich theoretical foundation at this nexus through their decades-long
attention to femicide (Borzacchiello 2024; Washington Valdez 2005) and how
global capital and hypermasculine violence have led to the systematic death and
disappearance of women in Mexico’s northern industrial cities (Valencia 2018).
Carolina Robledo Silvestre and Rosalva Hernández Castillo (2019) describe a
“disappearing device” being applied to the bodies of poor and racialized women in
Ciudad Juárez. Their bodies were “built as disposable in a classist, racist and sexist
society, where the brown bodies of poor women can be violated, mutilated,
discarded and used to mark territories, with the direct or silent complicity of the
security forces” (Silvestre and Castillo 2019, 11). Feminist thinkers and theorists
have pointed out the importance of analyzing what Rita Laura Segato calls
“pedagogy of cruelty” as an “expressive rather than instrumental violence” that
promotes and normalizes the “spectacle of the plundering of life until waste, until
leaving only remains” (2013, 83).
In addition to the femicides in border cities, scholars have brought renewed
attention to migration-related death and disappearance (García-Deister and Smith 2020; Soto 2022; Torres 2022), pointing to multiple factors fueling the
crisis, from the hardening of the border and the war on drugs to the remittance
economy of Mexico and Central America and the increasing criminalization of
migration both in the United States and Mexico. However, much of the work on
migration in the western hemisphere has focused on the US-Mexico border.
Scholars working on transnational migration have pointed to the vulnerability of
migrants as they traverse Mexico and Central America (Vogt 2013). Migrants are
disproportionately viewed in their countries of origin and along migration routes
according to the markings of internal outsiders: rural, Indigenous, impoverished,
and linguistically other (Villafuerte Solís and García Aguilar 2011). Class, race, and
gender dynamics that shape modes of national belonging make migrants
particularly vulnerable to exploitation by police, national authorities, and extralegal
transnational networks such as drug cartels and human traffickers.
Tenosique, La 72, the wearing down of migrants through policies of containment,
bureaucracy, and enclosure, the disappearing freight and passenger train
infrastructure and its miraculous resurrection as an elevated, inaccessible high-tech
tourist train, and the more-than-human ontologies that transverse migration stories
from the hope and terror of rivers to the peril and promise of remote, inaccessible
landscapes invites us to new feminist engagements with borders as they are made and
remade by infrastructural and multispecies entanglements. By focusing on feminist
STS and border theory in place, this Special Section invites readers to think with
particular borders (Mexico’s northern and southern borders) and their reconfiguration
through materiality, more-than-human relationalities, and aesthetics.
Materialidades, ecologías, estéticas
Río Usumacinta, Tenosique, July 2022
La Frontera Líquida. The Usumacinta is the last living river in Mexico, o al menos
eso dicen los que viven a sus orillas. It is also the most lively and voluminous,
whose historical porosity draws and blurs Mexico’s political border with
Guatemala. It is an old river, so old that its history seeps into deep geological
waters. This river, still navigable in some parts, nourishes a complex jungle
ecosystem that encompasses the Lacandon region in Mexico, the Cuchumatanes,
a large part of the Petén, and the Guatemalan altiplano (highlands), today known
as the hydrological region RH30 (Grijalva-Usumacinta).
The river, difficult to cross regularly, made this region one of the last conquered
frontiers by European settlers. Territorios “vírgenes” del trópico. The perceived
“under-exploitation” and “underdevelopment” of the transboundary Usumacinta
River basin made it the target for development projects throughout the twentieth
century that sought to tame its waters to supply energy to new industries and
sustain agricultural expansion projects that deforested the “jungle” to clear land
for grazing, cocoa and, more recently, palm oil production. The colonial-era woods such as cedar and mahogany and industrial necessities such as rubber (or
chicle), which traveled downriver to Puerto Frontera on the Gulf of Mexico, gave
way in the twentieth century to promises of progress provided by the new
Mexican nation-state. The development of the railroad and highway systems
between the 1950s and 1960s only accelerated this process of economic
modernization, deepening the social and environmental problems historically
present in the region. The river then became a border, la frontera. The landscape,
dotted today by hydroelectric plants, palm plantations, security and organized
crime forces, migrant camps, and NGOs, has been made and remade, becoming a
crucial node of (control of) flows of goods and people.
Figure 4. Río Usumacinta. Photos: Nirvana Paz, 2021.
The Usumacinta River was ever present but rarely discussed by those living in
Tenosique. For the migrants locked down in the shelter who were enduring a
seemingly endless asylum process and locals hoping for a revitalization of tourism
and business, the train and its replacement with the new high-speed rail was
paramount. The river emerged in stories about migration and borders, standing in
for the other more famous border rivers. Traffickers, they told us, would take
migrants’ money and lead them on winding journeys through the jungle, finally
dropping them on the banks of the Usumacinta, only twenty miles from town,
telling them they had reached the banks of the Río Grande or Colorado and that
the US was only a short swim away.
To approach the entangled question of how we “know borders” otherwise, from el
Río Tijuana to el Río Usumacinta, de norte a sur, we offer three emergent
pathways for engaging with contemporary migration and bordering ecologies in
these territories: Materialidades: Intimate infrastructures; Ecologías: More-thanhuman
migrations and ecologies of care; and Estéticas: The research-creation
nexus. We weave together these threads of feminist thought to ask how they
offer new entries into our understanding of the borderlands.
Materialidades: Intimate Infrastructures
The invisibility of the modern border, as it is technologically dematerialized and at
the same time dramatically militarized has cut off communities from the material
infrastructure of empire, rendering engagement with regimes of visibility and
absence essential. Modern infrastructure studies in STS have a central feminist
genealogy in the work of Susan Leigh Star, who, through her ecological approach
(Star and Ruhleder 1994), has invited a generation of scholars to think capaciously
about technology, the built environment, and social structure. Anthropologist
Nicholas De Genova (2013) argues for conceptualizing borders and their material
and semiotic infrastructures as spectacular, wherein migrant illegality is
naturalized, and the ongoing exploitation and recruitment of labor is hidden.
Attending to the lived intimacy of borders and their spectacle, we bring attention
to the material and technological assemblages that allow us to trace the coproduction
of politics and science in the Mexican borderlands (Jasanoff 2004;
Varela 2019). In this Special Section, our contributing authors build on this
tradition of infrastructure studies focusing on intimate infrastructures, meaning
the interface between technology, the built environment, and human bodies and
subjectivities (Moore and Strasser 2022; Puig de la Bellacasa 2016).
In her article, Alethia Fernández de la Reguera examines the emergent
technology of the checkpoint as a tool of enclosure in Mexico. She shows how
checkpoint enforcement is a patchwork: a shifting, purposely incoherent
infrastructure that functions both to mitigate legal migration and further the
diverse and competing interests of regional authorities, the national government,
and organized crime. Through her writing and attention to intersectionality, she
shows how checkpoints act on certain bodies, creating both a generalized risk and
specific types of enclosures for racialized subjects. Dan Kabella analyzes the
history of addiction research and treatment in New Mexico, documenting how
Chicano organizing and liberation became embedded in treatment
infrastructures. From building treatment centers on reclaimed ancestral land
holdings to centering cultural revival and community in addiction recovery,
Kabella shows how the New Mexican borderlands, with their specific mix of
Hispanic empowerment and dispossession, allowed activists to create liberatory
infrastructures in the face of carceral structures. Zenia Yébenes and Rodrigo
Parrini-Roses invite Marcela Turati, one of Mexico’s most important journalists
documenting violence and disappearance, to reflect on her recent book San
Fernando: Ultima parada (2023). In a wide-ranging discussion, she sheds light on
the infrastructure behind organized crime, judicial inaction, and widespread
disappearance, showing what committed long-term research can render visible.
At the same time, she candidly describes how the work of documenting the dead,
the machine of death, and the complicity of the state was haunting and
challenging work that required spiritual care.
Ecologías: More-than-Human Migrations and Ecologies of Care
Within these border(ing) configurations, security policies intersect with nature
conservation and human rights protections (Meierotto 2014); deserts and rivers
are strategically weaponized against migrants in transit (De León 2015). Building
on the work of scholars rethinking the relationship between frontiers and borders
(Grandin 2019), the more-than-human allows us to articulate imaginaries of hightech
surveillance and militarization with those of wild spaces in “need” of
domestication (Schaeffer 2022). Attending to multispecies relationalities renders
visible forms of resistance that bring into play new notions and practices of truth
(production) and justice (Lyons 2020), together with other logics of care (Puig de
la Bellacasa 2017) that include more-than-human beings and histories (De la
Cadena 2015; Haraway 2016).
In this Special Section, contributors show the asymmetrical relations of care and
suffering that shape border landscapes while offering possibilities for new
multispecies relationalities to flourish. Columba González-Duarte and Juanita
Sundberg illustrate how conservation projects and agribusiness reorganize border
dynamics, displacing nodes of multispecies reciprocity and care, exposing
monarch butterflies, ocelots, Sonoran Desert soils, Mexican migrant workers, and
Indigenous communities to violence. Iván Sandoval-Cervantes analyzes the
struggles of activist communities for the rights of dogs on the border between
Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, stressing how certain practices and discourses of care
that emerge in the Mexico-US border reinforce classist and racist narratives of
animal suffering, rescue, and mobility that involve a clear demarcation between a
“before” and an “after,” south and north, across the border lines. In contrast to
positivist/rationalist technoscientific approaches, Roberto Méndez-Arreola
examines how mundane everyday practices of care and knowledge production
between people and birds in Ciudad Juárez contribute to the reconfiguration of
the city and its borders, presenting new forms of multispecies collaboration and
enabling more habitable worlds.
Estéticas: The Research-Creation Nexus
Borders have been prominently reconfigured and resisted through artistic
interventions, from a living archive of human-water relations in the Colorado River
Delta to speculative poetry or anonymous maps painted on the walls of a migrant
shelter. Artistic and activist practices offer much-needed, diverse ways of seeing
and listening, representing and mediating, among other research-creative
practices. In this Special Section, we explore and extend the possibilities posed by
“investigative aesthetics” (Fuller and Weizman 2021). This term stresses an
investigative sensibility in the arts that redefines the practice of aesthetics as “una
herramienta en el conflicto” (a tool in the conflict) (Barenblit and Medina 2017,
23). Through this lens, we understand aesthetics not in relation to historical
beauty but to the sharpness of a sensible knowledge. This understanding echoes French philosopher Jacques Rancière's (2006) notion of aesthetics as the political
distribution/configuration of the senses, in which the sensible is deployed for truth
(production) and the political. Echoing our contributors Jessica Sevilla and Rosela
del Bosque, we work at the research-creation nexus, not because we engage with
“la producción o el objeto artístico per se,” but because such an aesthetics
encompasses knowledge production practices that are embodied and situated in
particular geographies and political regimes and, as Sevilla and del Bosque put it,
“el espacio frontera entre afecto y racionalidad que reconocemos como
experiencia estética” (the border space between sensibility and rationality that we
recognize as aesthetic experience.)
From artistic, curatorial, and pedagogical practices, Sevilla and del Bosque
articulate their work around the Colorado River Family Archive. This collective
research project seeks to reflect on their relationships with water in the Colorado
River Delta region. This living archive functions as a self-managing technology to
produce knowledge situated in loops of praxis, learning from the geological and
more-than-human relationships in which we exist. Karina Vado examines
Anzaldúa’s later work, which is often overlooked because it engaged with
spiritual, esoteric, and scientific themes that can be hard to reconcile. Vado shows
how this rich engagement with spiritual themes was central to drafting a new
language and kind of storytelling, creating “affiliative biofuturities,” a purposive
boundary-transgressing for the speculative reimagining of our world. In her essay,
Carla Macal invites her readers to think along with transnational Guatemalan
justice organizing to explore what connections, circulations, and creations are
necessary to chart healing cartographies. Through community workshops focused
on the body, healing, and testimony, she shows how tenuous connections are
formed and sustained through plural communication and artistic creation.
Conclusion
In this pocho Special Section, we invite our readers to engage with borders and
migration through the lens of feminist STS theory. Writing in English, Spanish,
and a mix of both, we seek to constitute a linguistic third space for feminist
collaboration that brings attention to English-language hegemony in publishing
and offers clues for nurturing multilingual communities. Our interventions follow
three lines of inquiry: the promise of attending to intimate infrastructures to
interrogate borders and their materialities, the ways in which more than human
migrations and ecologies of care offer new engagements with the threatened
multispecies landscapes of the Mexican borderlands, and finally the power of
artistic and activist engagements to render visible systemic forms of erasure and
nurture community in the face of persistent violence.
The Usumacinta, dicen, is a noble river. At times, bent and tamed. At times,
insurgent and traicionero. Its course runs parallel to the technoscientific project of
modernity to dominate “nature,” but, like a cut or an open wound, it also threatens to overflow and contaminate modernity’s limits and boundaries—
ontological, epistemological, and territorial (Harding 2017). Like the insistent,
disruptive image of the flood in Tijuana and the old train rails and its workers in
Tenosique, the Usumacinta offers an entry to knowing borders otherwise, one
that requires attention to stratified, more-than-human histories and violences and
the use of other senses, relations, and aesthetic sensibilities. The authors
assembled in this Special Section unpack these layered histories and overlapping
border practices of technoscientific development, multispecies resistance, and
ways of living and dying, past and future. As Karen Barad writes, “the yearning for
justice, a yearning larger than any individual or sets of individuals, is necessarily
about our connections and responsibilities to one another—that is,
entanglements” (2007, xi). Weaving these borderlands ecological, material, and
aesthetic entanglements matter.
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Author Bio
Lindsay Smith is an ethnographer and STS scholar who works on migration,
community-led science, and social movements in Latin America. She is an Associate
Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation at Arizona State University.
Lindsay Smith
es etnógrafa, especialista en ciencia, tecnología e innovación que
trabaja sobre migración, ciencia comunitaria y movimientos sociales en América
Latina. Es profesora asociada en the School for the Future of Innovation en Arizona
State University.
María Torres is a philosopher of science whose work is situated at the intersection of
activism, technoscience, and contemporary art practices. They are currently a
postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona.
María Torreses una filósofa de la ciencia cuyo trabajo se sitúa en la intersección del
activismo, la tecnociencia y las prácticas artísticas contemporáneas. Actualmente es
becaria postdoctoral en la Universidad de Arizona.
Rodrigo Parrini-Rosesis an anthropologist, ethnographer and Professor at the Department of Education and Communication, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Xochimilco. México. For eighteen years, he has done ethnographic work on the social production of desire in Tenosique, a city on the border between Mexico and Guatemala.
Rodrigo Parrini-Roses es antropólogo, etnógrafo y profesor del Departamento de Educación y Comunicación de la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Xochimilco, México. Durante dieciocho años ha realizado trabajo etnográfico sobre la producción social del deseo en Tenosique, ciudad fronteriza entre México y Guatemala.