Tracing Relational Care Across Borders: Towards Geopolitical Imaginaries Otherwise

In this paper, we enrich feminist theorizing on care by tracing more-than-human relationalities that are grounded in place but also stretch across México, the United States, and Canada. In three brief vignettes, we outline how geopolitical conditions of im/mobility intersect with specific material, semiotic, and affective relations of care involving Sonoran Desert soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies. In line with Indigenous theorizing on the myriad ways borders have colonized our political imaginaries, we suggest that more-than-human care is relational, not territorial—not contained by borders.

En este artículo, enriquecemos la teoría feminista sobre el cuidado al rastrear relaciones más-que-humanas que están arraigadas al lugar pero que también se extienden a lo largo de México, los Estados Unidos y Canadá. En tres breves viñetas, describimos cómo las condiciones geopolíticas de in/movilidad se entrelazan con diferentes aspectos del cuidado, desde sus relaciones materiales, semióticas y afectivas hasta las más específicas que involucran los suelos del desierto de sonora, frutos rojos, toxinas y humanos en movimiento. En línea con la teoría indígena sobre las formas en que las fronteras han colonizado nuestros imaginarios políticos, sugerimos que el cuidado más-que-humano es relacional, no territorial. No está contenido por fronteras.

In this paper, we enrich feminist theorizing of care in science studies by tracing more-than-human relationalities across borders. Building on recent Indigenous theorizing, we further criticisms of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) by also considering the coloniality and anthropocentrism of geopolitical bordering (Aguilar Gil 2020; Cabnal 2016; Daigle 2023; A. Simpson 2014; L. Simpson 2017). As Ayuuk linguist Yásnaya Aguilar Gil (2020) suggests, “state borders were not established instantaneously, but, once they were, they colonized even our imagination. A country’s silhouette marks a boundary on the map of the world, but what it really signifies today is the separation of families, death, human trafficking, and torture.” Indeed, the intensified militarization and surveillance of borders work to repress and erase Indigenous people’s sovereignty while also preventing certain humans and animals from freely and safely moving across. As politicians push hyper-nationalist geopolitical imaginaries tinged with white supremacy and human exceptionalism, we call for methodologies oriented to following mobile materialities relationally across space without reifying settlerstate borders.

To operationalize a transboundary methodology, this paper traces more-thanhuman relations of care that are grounded in place but also stretch across three settler-colonial states: México, the United States, and Canada. Specifically, we present three vignettes from our individual research sites in locations connected by monarch butterflies as they migrate between their wintering grounds in México and summering grounds in the US and Canada. At each site, we attend to the ways geopolitical conditions of im/mobility intersect with specific material, semiotic, and affective relations of care enacted by humans and other-thanhumans, including Sonoran Desert soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies.

In our first vignette, we address the material life of soils and the care work they perform in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, located on the US-México border. While soils generate the very ground for border enforcement, the US Border Patrol’s actions have contradictory outcomes, with spatial and temporal implications for a multitude of desert dwellers and those transiting through. Our second and third vignettes trace the berries grown within and circulating through the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in central México and monarch summering grounds in Halifax, Canada. As we show, free trade agreements between the United States, México, and Canada have transformed berries into transboundary objects of complex and even reactionary relations of care, with lethal consequences that span across North America. Placing these stories about the im/mobilities of material bodies into conversation enables us to highlight the myriad, asymmetrical ways more-than-human care exceeds settler-colonial borders (Daigle 2023; Murphy 2015; Wimmer and Schiller 2003).

To elaborate our methodological approach, we first situate our collaboration. Next, we introduce feminist theorizing about care, especially more-than-human care. Our approach foregrounds the contributions of Indigenous scholars who insist on thinking about care beyond settler-state borders. Then, we turn to stories from our individual research in places that have long been connected by Indigenous seasonal and ceremonial movements; animal migration routes; imperial contests to control territory and trade; labor migration; and settler-state complicity to both contain and limit access. We begin at the US-México border, where policies to militarize enforcement coincide with the free movement of berries and toxins between México, the US, and Canada.

Our respective research on borders and more-than-human geographies brought us together in 2019 (González-Duarte 2021, 2024; Sundberg 2011, 2023). Since then, we have cultivated a shared practice of reflecting on the ethics and politics of multispecies research and the borders of settler states in which we live and work. We see our collaboration as a feminist practice of weaving our thoughts together to learn more than we would from working individually.¹

Although our journeys have been different, our projects are located in and funded by settler-colonial universities on lands stolen from Indigenous Peoples. Columba is a woman born and raised in México with privileges provided by a scale of whiteness associated with class; she was an academic in Canada and now in the US. Juanita is a white woman raised in Central America, a citizen of one settlercolonial state and an academic working in another. The analysis presented here learns from and builds on Indigenous feminist theorizing on the ways colonial borders limit our political imaginaries (Aguilar Gil 2020; Cabnal 2016; Daigle 2023; A. Simpson 2014; L. Simpson 2017).

Here, we outline feminist theorizing about care, especially more-than-human care. Along with many others, we build on feminists Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto’s definition of care as a “species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (1990, 40, emphasis in original). We contribute to this work by calling for research oriented to transboundary relations of more-than-human care.

Although Fisher and Tronto (1990) described care as the work of the human species, subsequent feminists have emphasized that caring practices involve but also affect other-than-humans (Curtin 1993; Donovan and Adams 1996). María Puig de la Bellacasa extends Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) definition to accent “care as vital in interweaving a web of life” (2017, 4), which inevitably involves interdependent relations with more-than-humans. Puig de la Bellacasa calls for conceptualizations of care that decenter humans, to avoid “reinstating the binaries and moralism of anthropocentric ethics” (13) that characterize the Western tradition.

Indigenous understandings of care always and already recognize other-thanhumans as kin who extend life-sustaining care to humans, just as humans develop reciprocal relations of care for other-than-human kin (Cabnal 2016; Cajete 1999; Daigle 2023; Kimmerer 2013; Salmón 2000; Todd 2018; Watts 2013; Whyte and Cuomo 2017). Indigenous political ontologies draw attention to human practices of care for others—human and other-than-human—as well as the daily activities of plants, animals, insects, and collective entities such as deserts, soils, forests, and so on that generate and enable life on earth for humans and many others (Kanngieser and Todd 2020).

Latin American feminists frame more-than-human care as practices that transcend the immediacy of time and space (Rico Rodriguez et al. 2024). Linear temporal framings so common to Western thinking fail to capture how many communities approach more-than-human care—especially in the Americas, where the wounds of colonialism continuously animate ecologies in the present. For instance, many Indigenous communities conceptualize care in terms of responsibilities to ancestors and generations yet to be born (Rico Rodriguez et al. 2024; Watts 2013; L. Simpson 2017). For some feminists in Abya Yala, cuidados (care) conveys an ethical disposition that encompasses “the little nothings,” everyday practices that express ways of being toward life and death (González- Duarte 2024 Salamanca Gonzalez 2024). From such perspectives, more-thanhuman care is a never-ending process; “daily caring practices” are iterative, hence always incomplete (Rico Rodriguez et al. 2024; see also Ressiore et al. 2024).

Michelle Daigle’s reflections on Indigenous care work address the spatial dimensions of care and draw attention to the ways “care work is embodied through movement to sustain, rebuild, and be accountable to the relationships that shape Indigenous life” (2023, 85). As relations with more-than-humans extend across landscapes and waterscapes, so too do human communities and, therefore, the care practices they perform (Daigle 2023, 85). Indigenous relationalities, Daigle argues, “exceed colonial territories” (83) upheld by settlercolonial regimes, including First Nations reserves, treaty territories, and geopolitical borders.²From this perspective, the effects of care in one place also may affect others in distant places (Watts 2013). Dissimilar and discontinuous acts of care and generosity across a multiplicity of beings serve to promote and sustain life (Cabnal 2016; Rico Rodriguez et al. 2024).

M. Murphy’s (2015) analysis of transnational, feminist-informed projects to address cervical cancer offers additional perspectives on care across borders. Murphy identifies how such efforts to mobilize care were fraught with “romantic temptations” (2015, 725) to disconnect doing good from entangled histories and arrangements of colonialism, racialization, and political economy (see also Duclos and Criado 2020). Alongside Murphy, we aim to foster a “critical feminist politics of care” (719), which recognizes the enormous need for care-full relations that give and support flourishing while also addressing the tensions, contradictions, and asymmetries built into relations of more-than-human care in contemporary settler-colonial political formations.

Building on this vibrant and growing body of work, we elaborate a transboundary methodology. In the stories that follow, we operationalize our approach to highlight how more-than-human care relations involving soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies are entangled with asymmetrical colonial capitalist relations in place and across space.

The political border between the United States and México has existed on paper for over 170 years; however, major infrastructure projects to demarcate a divide have only materialized in the last 30 years, with innumerable consequences for communities (Nevins 2002; St. John 2011). In this section, I, Juanita, reconsider my research on border militarization in the Sonoran Desert, which is divided by the international border between the US and México. Specifically, I address my research on soils, which constitute the very ground of the US-México border (Sundberg 2023). I draw attention to concerns for soils articulated in the US, while also showing how such concerns are articulated in terms bound by settler borders and a white supremacist imagined community (Benedict 1983). Mobilizing our transboundary analytic, I examine how care is expressed for soils as well as the care work soils enact for creatures in place but also those transiting through the desert and across the international border.

The international border dividing the Sonoran Desert is the outcome of imperial struggles for territorial possession, which resulted in the US declaring war on México in 1846. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war in 1848, requiring México to cede lands it claimed to the US. Establishing the border line brought additional violence, as the O’odham peoples, ancestral caretakers of these lands, were forced to choose whether to live in one settler-colonial state or another (Leza 2019; Ramon-Sauberan 2023). In the US, O’odham communities were forced onto reservations in the early twentieth century. As a result, parts of the desert lost its caretakers and the sacred duties they performed to support soil, plant, and animal communities (Ramon-Sauberan 2023).

Meanwhile, with the support of US Armed Forces, European and Euro-American settlers subjected desert lands to mining and cattle ranching (Truett 2006). Consequently, in the mid-twentieth century, the federal government designated areas to protect wilderness, a settler-colonial category that evokes an imaginary separation between humans and nature (Cronon 1996). Thus, a press release announcing the establishment of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument erased the O’odham people’s presence in the desert since time immemorial, by stating the area was “little changed from…500 million years ago…[existed at] the borderland between the habitable world and the uninhabitable… [and is] a desert country so waterless and formidable that it has rarely been visited by white men” (cited in Piekielek 2016, 4). The forced removal and resettlement of the O’odham transformed vast areas into uninhabited desert.

Despite these attempts at erasure, soils hold the stories of O’odham people who reside in and travel throughout these desert lands. Soils remember the O’odham’s dispossession and displacement, for they continuously reveal evidence of O’odham farming strategies, grinding techniques to transform mesquite pods into flour, gatherings around firepits, journeys to the sea, harvesting saguaro flowers, and so on (Nabhan 1982; Ramon-Sauberan 2023). Soils remember because they are alive.

Soils are orchestrated by heterogeneous communities of microorganisms— bacteria, fungi, microbes—which, in interaction with rocks below and the water and plant and animal communities above, break down dead animal and plant matter. On the desert floor, soils can be thousands of years old and just as many feet deep; the care work that soils perform far exceeds human timescales (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015). Soil work offers care to a multiplicity of desert dwellers. Soils also make life possible for those transiting through, including people, jaguars, pronghorn, and monarch butterflies (Hidetoshi et al. 2016). In this way, soils enact and ground convivial—from the Latin convivere, to live together—worlds in the Sonoran Desert built on interaction and interdependence (Given⁠ 2018).³

In 1994, however, convivial relations were challenged once again by “prevention through deterrence,” a US border enforcement strategy that framed “natural barriers such as rivers, mountains, and the harsh terrain of the desert” as weapons of deterrence (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2001, 24). Border Patrol operations established in urban areas were intended to push migrating humans entering the US without inspection onto desert lands in southwestern Arizona (U.S. Border Patrol 1994). Within a short period of time, prevention through deterrence transformed the desert into a “death trap,” the graveyard of thousands of migrants (Hing 2012, 165; De León 2015). Illegalized by a white supremacist settler society, many have lost their lives, overheated, dehydrated, and alone (Boyce and Chambers 2021).

Although prevention through deterrence generates dangerous conditions for migrants, the US government and popular media frame migrants as threats to the desert’s natural landscape (Provenzano and Nevins 2019; Sundberg and Kaserman 2007). When boundary enforcement operations intensified at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, staff—now the primary caretakers of these desert lands—articulated great concern for desert soils (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 2011). Initially, their attention was directed primarily at so-called smugglers, who had begun transporting migrants across desert lands, often abandoning vehicles when they became stuck.

In this context, the news media responded with narratives such as this from the Chicago Tribute, which became common in the first fifteen years of prevention through deterrence: “Foot trails and car tracks scar the delicate sandy ground in all directions” (Dellios 2003). This framing positions the desert as a stand-in for an imagined national body whose skin is scarred by illegalized migration (Sundberg and Kaserman 2007). This quote from the Arizona Daily Star is another illustration of the trend: “They'll [abandoned vehicles] probably have to be removed by helicopter to minimize further damage to the cryptobiotic soil that serves as the living ‘skin’ of the desert” (Tobin 2002). While these articles and others in their image appear to articulate concern for desert soils, their use of the body as a metaphor indicates their actual concern is an imagined national community that situates wilderness as foundational to whiteness.

As the Border Patrol increased its presence in protected areas on the border, protected area staff shifted their concerns from migrants to enforcement operations. Although Border Patrol agents are not permitted to drive off-road in wilderness areas, except in the case of emergencies involving the life and safety of human beings or threats to national security, they do it all the time (Howard et al.2014). Driving off-road creates new tracts on the desert floor; other agents then see these tracts and believe them to be authorized roads. When heavy vehicles repeatedly drive over soils rich with microorganisms, they compact the soil, destroying living organisms and their social fabric.⁴

Soil particles hold water; however, compaction flattens the space between particles where water would be held. Without water, the particles dry out, transforming soil into infertile moon dust, a vernacular term for the resulting fine, powdery substance that makes roads impassable. The degree of damage is dependent on factors such as the mode and conditions of exposure as well as temporal elements; a one-time event is different from repeated impacts (Webb et al. 2013). Repeated drive-overs increase the degree of compaction and dehydration, which puts Border Patrol agents at risk of getting stuck in moon dust.

Figure 1. Desert road showing signs of erosion and compaction, causing moon dust; mats are placed over the compacted soil to allow travel. Photograph by J. Sundberg.

In an ironic twist, moon dust inhibits the Border Patrol’s ability to harness the desert as an instrument of deterrence. Instead, the agency is required to spend additional time and energy to ensure agents can patrol the compacted desert floor. Moreover, the agency recently has had to pay for remediation (U.S. National Park Service 2015). Nonetheless, the increasing number of Border Patrol roads is causing desertification of the Sonoran Desert, with untold implications for so many desert dwellers along with those who migrate through.

In sum, militarized policing of the border makes soil unable to sustain a multiplicity of beings today and in the future, for the temporality of social reproduction and repair is not apace with geopolitical imperatives (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015). Hence, moon dust undermines possibilities for convivial futures. Ultimately, desertification caused by border enforcement in the Sonoran Desert will expose desert dwellers and those in transit—whether human or other-thanhuman— to increased risk of premature death.

By attending to the care work of desert soils, we highlight the limitations of methodologies that naturalize settler borders and human-centered temporalities. Care is not only relational but also temporally complex.

In the early twentieth century, as white settlers were moving west and occupying Indigenous lands in what is now called the US, México was undergoing a revolution. The 1910 revolution was a partial win for Indigenous and peasant communities: Land grabbed during colonial and postcolonial occupation was given back. Post revolution land back movements (restitución de tierras in Spanish) effectively ended in 1994, however, when México, the US and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).⁵ Since this time, the Mexican government has subjected land back movements, like that of the Zapatistas, to systematic militarized policies that pressure communities to abandon attachments to land and soil, interdependent relations with more-than-humans, and, ultimately, their capacities to stay in their land according to their vision of a dignified life. NAFTA has resulted in increased dispossession throughout México (González-Duarte 2021; Herrera 2019). Indigenous communities are especially affected as multinational corporations have been given free rein to expand agribusinesses and other extractivist projects such as mining (Tetreault 2022).

The US implemented prevention through deterrence in 1994, the same year NAFTA came into effect (Nevins 2002). Border policy documents demonstrate the strategy intended to contain individuals dispossessed by NAFTA even as corporations were permitted to work across political boundaries. In practice, this policy means that human mobility from south to north is enmeshed in intensified border control mechanisms across North America (Fernández-Kelly and Massey 2007). Border control and corporate extractivism make a fatal pairing in which people and other earth beings are simultaneously displaced and contained within settler-state boundaries (Altamirano-Jiménez 2023; Nevins 2008). We suggest this centuries-long process of racialized erasure and dispossession is a form of settler extractivism that potentializes itself through border control across the three settler state’s borders (Saldaña-Portillo 2016). In concrete ways, the US and Canada generate such pressures, and México enables them to do so.

Indigenous communities in México opposed NAFTA because they saw it as a deliberate effort to deprive them of their land and livelihood (Bartra and Otero 2005). Indeed, the Mexican government reversed the revolutionary era’s commitment to land back by allowing communal land holders to divide and sell their land. In addition, the Mexican government replaced its goal to support small and medium-sized maize producers with policies allowing the importation of government-subsidized maize from the US (Otero 2011). Combined, these policy changes represent an attack on small-scale household economies centered around the milpa, a cultivation system organized around maize, squash, and beans, also called “the three sisters” by Indigenous communities in the north.

Such policies affecting land markets and maize protections have made México into an importer of corn and exporter of labor (Fitting 2006). In essence, NAFTA makes milpa cultivation unsustainable. Consequently, many Indigenous peasants pursue work in the north. Others, however, either sell their small plots of land or switch to slightly more profitable cash crops such as berries.

NAFTA has fundamentally altered diets in the US and Canada by making fruits and vegetables that once were available seasonally now accessible throughout the year (Gálvez 2018; Orozco-Ramírez et al. 2017). Berries are a prime example of this shift: Strawberry, raspberry, and blueberry production increased globally from 6.5 to 10.5 million tons between 2005 and 2018 (González-Ramírez et al. 2020). Corporations based in the US are driving this growth, and Mexicans increasingly are producing berries for export (Palmer-Rubin 2024). For instance, Mexican blueberry production increased from 4 million pounds in 2009 to around 89 million pounds in 2018; this growth has continued over the past five years (Wu and Guan 2021).

Catering to year-round demands for berries has generated a “berry revolution” in rural México, especially Jalisco and Michoacán (Palmer-Rubin 2024). Regions historically focused on production for domestic markets now are covered with monoculture berry fields for export (González-Ramírez et al. 2020). Small to medium-sized producers contract with US firms via intermediaries that enforce stringent quality controls yet offer low prices; all risks are offloaded to producers (González-Ramírez et al. 2020). Meanwhile, the shift to berries requires enormous resources, including water, pesticides, fertilizers, and plastic. Such changes are manifest in Michoacán, the very region that is home to monarch butterflies. Monarchs migrating across North America must contend with militarized border policies, as elaborated above, as well as fragmented habitat. In turn, berry producers face innumerable risks.

In this section, I, Columba, propose that care is enacted in relational practices that extend across species and entities. I connect my long-term research on monarch butterflies with the “berry revolution” in the context of NAFTA, while also demonstrating how ancestral forms of land care persist within the berry fields. By mobilizing our transboundary analytic, I examine how care is expressed through reciprocal relationships that involve more-than-human entities, but also through the daily labor to produce berries for export, which often exposes bodies to toxic landscapes. I connect the stories of two women—one in México and the other in Canada—who harvest berries under similar conditions while battling cancer.

Eulalia lives at the edge of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in México. I have been visiting this area as a researcher and friend for the last decade as part of my interest in multispecies mobility justice. I met Eulalia on December 12, 2022, when her nephew, a traditional dancer in the community, invited me to their community’s festival celebrating the anniversary of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s appearance in 1531. Guadalupe, also called the virgencita, is the most sought-after religious figure in México and is celebrated annually on December 12.

In 2022 Eulalia co-sponsored the town’s celebration. As I followed those carrying a statue of the virgin, Eulalia told me about her berries. She actually used the word in English, likely because the mediators who buy from her call them berries too. After the beautiful celebration, Eulalia invited me to visit her berry fields the following day—yes, she worked the day after hosting a party for five hundred people! Eulalia wanted to show me her raspberry field and the care or cuidados she put into the plants and their small red fruits.

On December 13, we met at Eulalia’s field. Eulalia, her two kids, her recently newmom dog and puppies, and her husband were all involved in different activities in the berry field. I hugged her and complimented her work ethic: “I can’t believe you are standing and working after such a wonderful party.” She smiled back as if she did not fully understand my compliment. It was then I noticed something I had not seen the previous day, at the party for the virgencita. Because Eulalia was wearing a cap instead of the fancy hat she had worn the day before, I could see that she had lost her hair. I did not ask her about it. Instead, we talked about the field, her dogs, her kids, and how she works in the field every afternoon with all the family, including the animals, because she feels sorry about leaving the dogs and puppies alone.

As I walked through the tiny rows of raspberry plants, I noticed that the plants were narrowly spaced, and, because of their spiny branches, I imagined it was difficult to pick each berry manually. Eulalia, however, stood at the edge of her field. I paused and looked back at her, indicating I was waiting for her to walk the berry field with me. From the field’s edge, where she firmly remained, she told me she could not continue walking with me, as per her doctor’s recommendation.

Figure 2. Virgin celebration. Photograph taken by Columba González-Duarte, 2022.

At that point, I stopped to think about the field with more attunement. I looked at Eulalia’s husband, who was wearing a simple mask like those we used during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the same mask he had worn the day before and, most likely, had worn for days. However, neither Eulalia nor her kids, dogs, or I were wearing any protection, yet the fields were doused with pesticides and herbicides. Many of these pesticides are banned in other countries (Rosas-Sánchez et al. 2022, 101). Not surprisingly, studies suggest that extended periods of pesticide exposure are associated with higher risks of cancer (Valencia-Quintana et al. 2022, Valencia Quintana et al. 2023). There we stood, exposed to the toxins that made Eulalia sick with cancer.

From the edge of the field, where she stood, Eulalia said she was in recovery and that approaching the plants could expose her to relapse or further harm her body. I paused to look at the berries. They seemed harmless and even nourishing. But they are not. I looked up at the surrounding mountains that host monarchs, also threatened by the very herbicides and pesticides sprayed onto the berry fields. I tried to make sense of Eulalia’s framing of berry cultivation as an act of care; she referred to the berries as crops that need cuidados or care.

In addition to using the language of care, Eulalia showed me the ancestral practices of care and reciprocity common in the area, which involve placing Santa Maria flowers woven into the shape of a cross at the edges and center of her field to care for and protect the berries. These flowers mediate between humans and divine entities. Through the act of offering flowers, humans express their respect for divine entities and seek to receive care in return, often in the form of favorable weather conditions for a successful harvest (González-Duarte and Méndez- Arreola 2024). Rather than merely a situated human experience, such practices of care aim to protect humans and land. Care is enacted as relational, stretching across species and entities.

Although I was familiar with care practices in Mazahua (Jñarto) and Otomi (Hñähñu) maize cultivation, as well as in Eulalia’s community, this was the first time I witnessed these practices being used for a NAFTA cash crop. Eulalia and her family were caring for the berry just as they had cared for maize ancestrally—the very maize that NAFTA’s neoliberal corn regime displaced (Fitting 2006). However, another factor made these acts of care for berries more important. Eulalia needed the berries to be export-quality to meet the aesthetic demands of affluent consumers in the North. She expressed a sense of duty to those who were going to eat her carefully cultivated product. The berries she cared for made her sick, yet Eulalia was proud of feeding North Americans with her land and labor. Ultimately, Eulalia continues to cultivate berries, not only as a way to uphold attachments to her land, as her community has done since colonization, but also to sustain her family and to pay back the debt acquired to co-sponsor the virgencita’s celebration.

When we parted, Eulalia gave me a plate full of export-quality berries to take home. I confess, it was hard to eat them but, since Eulalia had gifted them, I settled on rinsing the berries a few times, despite the futility of eliminating the toxins they carry.

People in the US and Canada, along with elites in México, increasingly consume berries for their health benefits. Indeed, the demand for fresh berries is skyrocketing among households in the $100,000-and-over income brackets (Karst 2024). Positioned as “superfoods,” berries are celebrated for being highly nutritious, low-calorie foods that are rich in fiber and striking in color. Even with substantial increases in production, berries command a premium price, and their popularity continues to rise (Karst 2024). Berries are an especially popular food for children, and families purchase them even when doing so strains their incomes (Karst 2024; Onion 2021).

In the face of corporate competition, Driscoll’s, a fourth-generation family business, set out to make berries accessible “all year around” (Goodyear 2017). The company’s brand strategists have worked relentlessly to develop the shape, color, and smell of berries, and Driscoll’s now controls nearly one-third of the berry market in the US (Goodyear 2017). Driscoll’s research suggests consumers associate berries with happiness, conviviality, and harmony, while a simple Google search reveals that berries are widely recommended as healthy superfoods.

To design the perfect strawberry, Driscoll’s relied on wild fruits that formed part of an assemblage of care for Indigenous societies in coastal California (Goodyear 2017). The “California strawberry gold rush” contributed to dismantling the ecosystems that offered gifts annually and transformed the strawberry into a product that feeds contemporary fantasies of self-care. Today, care of the self has become disassociated from care as a web of reciprocal relations (Duclos and Criado 2020). Ultimately, we suggest, berries have become reactionary symbols of good health as they are simultaneously vehicles of violence toward racialized humans and other-than-human beings (e.g., butterflies and contaminated soils) who do not count as subjects of care.

The demand for berries is not exclusive to inhabitants of the US. In Canada, berries are also in increasing demand for the same reasons and are produced under similar conditions to those in México. However, production in Canada is facilitated by a guest worker program that “invites” foreign workers to labor on berry farms.

Canada is a significant exporter of berries. Blueberries are Canada’s top fruit export and accounted for 57 percent of the country’s fruit export value in 2023 (Government of Canada 2024). The province of Nova Scotia is the third-highest producer, as the weather is suitable for fruit and berry cultivation. As with many other agricultural crops, berries are tended by guest workers. Since 1966 Canada has admitted foreigners to work temporarily in the agricultural sector through the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). The program initially focused on admitting Caribbean laborers; after México was added in 1974, Mexicans came to outnumber workers from the Caribbean (Preibisch and Binford 2007; Satzewich 2007). The SAWP allows farmers to contract de-skilled workers for low-paid work in high-risk conditions for up to eight months each year.

The temporal restrictions on guest worker programs are rooted in racist immigration policies intended to prohibit the admission of racialized peoples (Satzewich 1991). The SAWP was designed to address demands for low paid labor while ensuring that agricultural workers solicited from the Caribbean did not settle in Canada and disrupt “the Canadian way of life” (Satzewich 1991, 191). After Caribbean administrations attempted to negotiate better wages and working conditions, the program expanded to include Mexicans, who are perceived as less demanding (Preibisch and Binford 2007; Satzewich 2007). The program enables Canada to invite the perfect migrant worker who stays just long enough for the employer to extract the migrant’s labor (Binford 2013). In sum, these workers are made “permanently temporary” (Walia 2021).

Leigh Binford (2013) describes the program as distinct from, yet akin to, slavery. While workers have a contract and are paid for their labor, their mobility is curtailed and controlled (Reid-Musson 2017). Contracts through the SAWP tie workers to a single employer, who provides housing, transportation to stores and banks, and access to healthcare (Binford 2013). Krysta Lynes calls these conditions of work “carceral infrastructures” that control and enclose a set of “multispecies interactions” (2023, 2).

Numerous studies have revealed the dangerous conditions facing SAWP workers and the lack of state or independent monitoring of housing and working conditions (Bejan et al. 2024; Hennebry et al. 2016). However, workers need to support their families; consequently, most try to avoid making complaints or even seeking healthcare to ensure their employers will invite them back each year. In the face of such precarious and often inhumane conditions, each province hosting the SAWP has seen the emergence of formal and informal groups offering logistic and legal support to workers (Gabriel and Macdonald 2014; Sinkowski 2017).

Kerian is a Jamaican woman in her forties who forms part of the decades-long movement of Caribbean workers traveling to Canada through the SAWP. In 2022 Kerian was working on a strawberry farm in Nova Scotia. Unlike most other provinces, where large-scale commercial farms prevail, farms in Nova Scotia tend to be smaller (Fitting et al. 2023). In part, this difference is due to Nova Scotia’s long-standing tradition of local, alternative food production initiatives. Today, Nova Scotia hosts the highest number of farmers’ markets per capita in Canada, and the provincial government celebrates buying local through marketing campaigns such as “Taste of Nova Scotia” (Fitting et al. 2023). Nonetheless, farmers argue, provincial support for small-scale environmentally sustainable agriculture is insufficient and they are forced to cut costs in the only area they can: labor. Hence, farmers turn to the SAWP to hire workers.

I, Columba, met Kerian while volunteering with No One Is Illegal, an organization that was supporting her after emergency surgery. Sick or injured seasonal workers tend to be cut from the program and sent home immediately, without receiving any treatment. Kerian lost her job when she was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. However, her condition deteriorated so quickly that her physician recommended Kerian remain in Nova Scotia for life-saving surgery followed by chemotherapy treatment. During treatment, Kerian needed a place to stay. No One Is Illegal asked the community for help with Kerian’s care. When we finally found her a home, Kerian was in excruciating pain and needed treatment for a wound that had remained open months after her surgery. Because Kerian’s employer fired her as soon as she got sick, Kerian had no way to pay for medical treatment or medicines to manage her pain.

Over the course of two years, with the support of No One Is Illegal, Kerian fought successfully to get healthcare treatment by arguing she was a resident when she became sick. As Kerian told a reporter in 2024, after receiving her work permit and healthcare card, “We come here to Nova Scotia year after year to do work and we are part of your community and we pay taxes so we should get the same services as anybody else” (Glynn 2024). In fighting for care, Kerian disrupted the seasonal workers program’s grammar of dividing workers into those who are seasonal guests and those who are residents with rights to healthcare. From this perspective, Kerian’s story is one of partial victory. However, Kerian currently struggles with health-related problems and is unable to go back home to visit relatives. When I last spoke with her, however, Kerian was hopeful she would be able to work again soon in Canada.

While discussing Kerian’s defense strategy with No One Is Illegal and its community members, questions were raised about whether Kerian got cancer in Canada. Could we really “pin down” where she became ill? And would this uncertainty not undermine her insistence that the provincial and federal governments cover her treatment?

However, the desire to pinpoint the source and cause of her illness reveals how settler borders have colonized our political imagination (Aguilar Gil 2020). Seeking to blame Kerian’s cancer on a particular state creates material and symbolic traps that make it harder to capture the ways toxic landscapes affect transnational farmworkers. The relevant question here is not where Kerian was exposed to agrarian capitalism’s harmful conditions, but how her body, along with Eulalia’s, became a territory on which are inscribed the violences of settlercolonial borders, displacement, and extraction. As a result of state complicity in enacting violence across North America, Kerian and Eulalia have become portable sites of toxicity. The concept of portable toxicity extends our transboundary methodology by highlighting and challenging the assumption that people are contained by state’s borders. As this case shows, neoliberal borders move through bodies and places at the expense of making people and more-than-humans sick.

Exposure to toxic compounds from agribusiness has been a long-standing issue. Over sixty years ago, Cesar Chavez’s farmworker movement highlighted this during the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott (Jenkins 1985). The boycott connected producers and consumers across time and space by informing consumers about the conditions of producing and consuming pesticide-treated grapes. However, political economic conditions today are spatially distinct from those in which Chavez’s movement emerged. Such differences matter to our focus on borders.

Eulalia’s and Kerian’s stories illustrate how neoliberalization has changed agribusiness in North America. Whereas once landscapes and bodies were polluted in localized regions that recruited migrant labor (e.g., California’s Valley, the Lower Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, the US Corn Belt, and Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia in Canada), toxicity is no longer confined to place (Shotwell 2021). Hence, butterflies moving across the sites wherein Eulalia and Kerian work also absorb such toxicity (Olaya-Arenas and Kaplan 2019). Food, chemicals, and living beings are part of an assemblage of entities that constitute toxic landscapes across the continent. Mobile humans and more-than-humans constitute this toxicity as well, once both are integrated into these fluxes of deadly chemicals. However, Eulalia and Kerian are not merely passive subjects absorbing waste. Both are committed to seeing work as relational care and to resisting the cannibalization of care (Fraser 2022).

Kerian’s victory is significant because it held the Canadian government accountable for farmer’s efforts to avoid covering healthcare. That said, refusing to assign blame to a specific state or employer for Kerian’s and Eulalia’s cancer reveals the conditions neoliberalization has created. Neoliberal regulatory frameworks allow the agribusiness frontier to expand at the expense of farmworkers’ health. The settler states propelling this expansion wash away their responsibilities precisely by resorting to citizenship.

The concept of portable toxicity also highlights the contradictory and reactionary dimensions of im/mobility and care (Sheller 2018). Although associations between berries and health suggest we can physically separate ourselves from toxicity by washing berries of their socioecological relations, research across borders shows that we cannot. It is a fantasy to imagine national borders and national-level environmental protections will keep us safe (Duclos and Criado 2020). In offering portable toxicities, we recapture the claims of Chavez and migrant workers of eating injustice—not only the direct injustice to those cultivating the food we eat, but also the injustices that affect all of us. Indeed, we all end up ingesting toxic air, water, soil, and foods, albeit in asymmetrical ways and with asymmetrical access to medical care to address the resulting illnesses and injuries. Portable toxicities invoke our interdependence and call on all of us to demand accountability across space and time.

What do moon dust, Eulalia, toxic berries, and Kerian offer to thinking differently about care and borders? Putting these stories into conversation prompted us to elaborate a feminist transboundary methodology oriented to tracing materialities relationally across space, while also refusing to reify settler-state borders. By analyzing more-than-human enactments of care in relation to soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies, we highlight the myriad ways care exceeds settler borders. As our reflections on militarized policing of the US southern border suggests, border enforcement strategies are slowly tearing up the fabric that holds Sonoran Desert soils together. The violent transformation of soils into moon dust threatens convivial desert worlds built on interaction and interdependence, while also exposing those in transit—whether human or otherthan- human—to increased risks of premature death. Even as land managers articulate care for desert soils, settler borders limit their imaginaries. And yet, as we suggest, the care work soils enact is relational, not territorial. In other words, soils teach us to consider that convivial futures depend upon relationships able to stretch across time and space.

Likewise, ethnographic research with people whose labor transcends borders allows us to trace the asymmetrical mechanisms through which some bodies incorporate the waste of agrarian capitalism, as well as how those same bodies are enlisted to create new landscapes for further expansion of the agribusiness frontier. Eulalia’s story about cultivating berries while living with toxic contamination suggests that care and toxicity transcend national borders through neoliberal food cultivation. Despite her lethal entanglement with this toxic import-export model, Eulalia cares for her land.

Eulalia’s and Kerian’s stories also highlight reactionary imaginaries of care: Elite consumers want fresh and frozen berries year-round, regardless of the herbicides and pesticides required and the ensuing consequences for those laboring in fields. This vision of care, we argue, depends on racialized imaginaries of human exceptionalism: independent humans superior to and separate from nature, as well as humans cast as inferior who therefore naturally belong in the fields. Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program allows those of us secure enough in our exceptionalism to deny our dependency on the care work done by others. Developing a relational understanding of care in connection with portable toxicities holds us accountable for our roles in these dynamics.

By collaboratively reflecting on our individual findings on regimes of im/mobility, soils, berries, toxicity, and humans across North America, we broadened our perspectives on how the coloniality of borders threaten care—conceived as relational practices connecting humans and more-than-humans. The stories offered here also highlight that we all are implicated in relational care, including us as researchers residing on this continent. We offer this transboundary methodology in the hopes of inspiring political imaginaries that exceed colonial borders.

¹ We presented an initial version of this paper at York University’s Summer School in International Political Economy and Ecology in May 2024. We thank Carlota McAllister, Philip F. Kelly, and other audience members for questions and comments that served to improve our analysis.

² Daigle’s (2023) framing of colonial territorialities includes fixed notions of Indigeneity and family.

³ Although conviviality can be used in a facile way to convey feasting or making merry together, Michael Given’s (2018) interpretation of living together on earth implies collaboration but also conflict and death.

⁴ To avoid relying on scientific language here, I explain the process of compaction as it was explained to me by a retired land manager.

⁵ NAFTA was renegotiated in 2020 and became the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

References

Aguilar Gil, Yásnaya Elena. 2020. “National Borders Have Colonized Our Imagination.” Translated by Ellen Jones. The Baffler, October 26. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-map-and-the-territory-aguilar-gil.

Altamirano-Jiménez, Isabel. 2023. “Neoliberalism and Resource Extraction: Colonial Continuities.” In Neoliberal Contentions: Diagnosing the Present, edited by Lois Harder, Catherine Kellogg, and Steven Patten, 68–88. University of Toronto Press.

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Editions.

Bartra, Armando, and Gerardo Otero. 2005. “Indian Peasant Movements in Mexico: The Struggle for Land, Autonomy, and Democracy.” In Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, 383–410. Zed Books.

Bejan, Roxana, Kate Allain, Taylor Glynn, and Patricia Soto Flores. 2024. Falling Short: Troubles with the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Nova Scotia. TFW Maritimes and CCPA Nova Scotia Office.

Binford, Leigh. 2013. Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest: Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy. University of Texas Press.

Boyce, Geoffrey A., and Shannon N. Chambers. 2021. “The Corral Apparatus: Counterinsurgency and the Architecture of Death and Deterrence Along the Mexico/United States Border.” Geoforum, no. 120, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.01.007.

Cabnal, Lorena. 2016. “De las opresiones a las emancipaciones: Mujeres indígenas en defensa del territorio cuerpo-tierra.” Bio Diversidad LA (blog). July 13. https://www.biodiversidadla.org/Documentos/De_las_opresiones_a_las_emancipaci ones_Mujeres_indigenas_en_defensa_del_territorio_cuerpo-tierra.

Cajete, Gregory. 1999. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Clear Light Publishers.

Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1 (1): 7–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985059.

Curtin, Deane. 1991. “Toward an ecological ethic of care.” Hypatia 6 (1): 60-74.

Daigle, Michelle. 2023. “Indigenous Methodologies of Care and Movement.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 46 (3): 81–100. https://doi.org/10.17953/A3.1554.

De León, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press.

Dellios, Hugh. 2003. “Cross-Border Traffic Ravages Desert Park – Drug Runners, Migrants Blamed.” Chicago Tribune, August 19.

Donovan, Josephine, and Carol Adams, eds. 1996. Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals. Continuum.

Duclos, Vincent, and Tomás Sánchez Criado. 2020. “Care in Trouble: Ecologies of Support from Below and Beyond.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34 (2): 153–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12540.

Fernández-Kelly, Patricia, and Douglas S. Massey. 2007. “Borders for Whom? The Role of NAFTA in Mexico-US Migration.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (1): 98–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716206297449.

Fisher, Berenice, and Joan Tronto. 1990. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring.” In Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women's Lives, edited by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson, 35–62. SUNY Press.

Fitting, Elizabeth. 2006. “Importing Corn, Exporting Labor: The Neoliberal Corn Regime, GMOs, and the Erosion of Mexican Biodiversity.” Agriculture and Human Values, no. 23, 15–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-004-5862-y.

Fitting, Elizabeth, Catherine Bryan, Karen Foster, and Jason W.M. Ellsworth. 2023. “Re-Centering Labour in Local Food: Local Washing and the Growing Reliance on Permanently Temporary Migrant Farmworkers in Nova Scotia.” Agriculture and Human Values 40 (3): 973–88. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10397-0.

Fraser, Nancy. 2022. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—And What We Can Do About It. Verso.

Gabriel, Christina, and Laura Macdonald. 2014. “‘Domestic Transnationalism’: Legal Advocacy for Mexican Migrant Workers’ Rights in Canada.” Citizenship Studies 18 (3– 4): 243–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2014.905264.

Gálvez, Alyshia. 2018. Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico. University of California Press.

Given, Michael. 2018. “Conviviality and the Life of Soil.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28 (1): 127–43. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774317000609.

Glynn, Tracy. 2024. “Nova Scotia Migrant Farmworker with Cancer Gets Public Health Care.” NB Media Co-op, March 26. https://nbmediacoop.org/2024/03/26/nova-scotiamigrant- farmworker-with-cancer-gets-public-health-care/.

González-Duarte, Columba. 2021. “Butterflies, Organized Crime, and ‘Sad Trees’: A Critique of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve Program in a Context of Rural Violence.” World Development 142 (June): 105420. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105420.

González-Duarte, Columba. 2024. “The Many Care Worlds a Butterfly Crosses.” Environmental Humanities 16 (3). https://colab.ws/articles/10.1215%2F22011919-11327396#.

González-Duarte, Columba, and Roberto Méndez-Arreola. 2024. “‘Living in the Time of the Butterfly’: Engaging More-than-Human Temporalities to Rethink Biodiversity Conservation.” Journal of Political Ecology 31 (1). https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5015.

González-Ramírez, María Guadalupe, Vincio Horacio Santoyo-Cortés, José Jaime Arana-Coronado, and Manrrubio Muñoz-Rodríguez. 2020. “The Insertion of Mexico into the Global Value Chain of Berries.” World Development Perspectives, no. 20, 100240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2020.100240.

Goodyear, Dana. 2017. “How Driscoll’s Reinvented the Strawberry.” The New Yorker, August 14. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/how-driscollsreinvented- the-strawberry.

Government of Canada. 2024. “Statistical Overview of the Canadian Fruit Industry, 2023.” https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/sector/horticulture/reports/statisticaloverview- canadian-fruit-industry-2023.

Hennebry, Jenna. 2012. “Permanently Temporary? Agricultural Migrant Workers and Their Integration in Canada.” IRPP Study, no. 26. https://irpp.org/researchstudies/permanently-temporary/.

Hennebry, Jenna, Janet McLaughlin, and Kerry Preibisch. 2016. “Out of the Loop: (In)Access to Health Care for Migrant Workers in Canada.” International Migration & Integration, no. 17: 521–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-015-0417-1.

Herrera, Joel Salvador. 2019. “Cultivating Violence: Trade Liberalization, Illicit Labor, and the Mexican Drug Trade.” Latin American Politics and Society 61 (3): 129–53. https://doi.org/10.1017/lap.2019.8.

Hidetoshi, Inamine, Stephen P. Ellner, James P. Springer, and Anurag A. Agrawal. 2016. “Linking the Continental Migratory Cycle of the Monarch Butterfly to Understand Its Population Decline.” Oikos 125 (8): 1081–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.03196.

Hing, Bill Ong. 2012. Defining America: Through Immigration Policy. Temple University Press.

Howard, S. M., S. Rutman, R. Tietjen, and M. Sturm. 2014. Inventory and Assessment of Unauthorized Vehicle Routes on Department of the Interior Lands in the SBInet Ajo-1 Project Area and Vicinity, Southwestern Arizona. Natural Resource Technical Report NPS/ORPI/NRTR—2014/900. National Park Service. https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/Reference/Profile/2214834.

Jenkins, J. Craig. 1985. The Politics of Insurgency. The Farm Worker Movement in the 1960s. Columbia University Press.

Kanngieser, Anja, and Zoe Todd. 2020. “From Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study.” History and Theory 59 (3): 385–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12166.

Karst, Tom. 2024. “Fresh Trends Data Shows Demographic Data Behind Berry Purchases.” The Packer (blog), May 8. https://www.thepacker.com/news/producecrops/ fresh-trends-data-shows-demographic-data-behind-berry-purchases.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.

Leza, Christina. 2019. Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border. University of Arizona Press.

Lynes, Krista. 2023. “Pollination and the Horrors of the Yield: Scarcity and Survival in the Glasshouse.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9 (1): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.38174.

Murphy, M. 2015. “Unsettling Care: Troubling Transnational Itineraries of Care in Feminist Health Practices.” Social Studies of Science 45 (5): 717–37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43829053.

Nabhan, Gary Paul. 1982. The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’odham Country. University of Arizona Press.

Nevins, Joseph. 2002. Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. Routledge.

Nevins, Joseph. 2008. Dying to Live: A Story of US Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid. City Lights Books.

Olaya-Arenas, Paola, and Ian Kaplan. 2019. “Quantifying Pesticide Exposure Risk for Monarch Caterpillars on Milkweeds Bordering Agricultural Land.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7 (June 13). https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00223.

Onion, Rebecca. 2021. “How Berries Became the Juiciest Battle of Kid-Food Instagram.” Slate, April 25. https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/04/invasion-ofthe- berry-snackers.html.

Otero, Gerardo. 2011. “Neoliberal Globalization, NAFTA, and Migration: Mexico’s Loss of Food and Labor Sovereignty.” Journal of Poverty 15 (4): 384–402. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10875549.2011.614514.

Orozco-Ramírez, Quetzalcóatl, Marta Astier, and Sara Barrasa. 2017. “Agricultural Land Use Change After NAFTA in Central West Mexico.” Land 6 (4): 66. https://doi.org/10.3390/land6040066.

Palmer-Rubin, Brian. 2024. “The Berry Revolution: Non-Traditional Agriculture and Economic Opportunity in Mexico.” ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America, February 25. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/the-berry-revolution-non-traditionalagriculture- and-economic-opportunity-in-mexico/.

Piekielek, Jessica. 2016. “Creating a Park, Building a Border: The Establishment of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Solidification of the U.S.-Mexico Border.” Journal of the Southwest 58 (1): 1–27. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26310344.

Preibisch, Kerry, and Leigh Binford. 2007. “Interrogating Racialized Global Labour Supply: An Exploration of the Racial/National Replacement of Foreign Agricultural Workers in Canada.” Canadian Review of Sociology 44 (1): 5–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-618X.2007.tb01146.x.

Provenzano, Adriana, and Joseph Nevins. 2019. “Arming the Environment, and Colonizing Nature, Territory, and Mobility in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 18 (2): 456–85. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i2.1612.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2015. “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity Pace of Care.” Social Studies of Science 45 (5): 691–716. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715599851.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Ramon-Sauberan, Jacelle. 2023. “History of Land and Water in San Xavier.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/669677.

Reid-Musson, Emily. 2017. “Grown Close to Home™: Migrant Farmworker (Im)mobilities and Unfreedom on Canadian Family Farms.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107 (3): 716–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1261683.

Ressiore C., Adriana, David Ludwig, and Charbel El-Hani. 2024. “The Conceptual Potential of ‘More-Than-Human Care’: A Reflection with an Artisanal Fishing Village in Brazil.” Geo: Geography and Environment 11 (2): e00159. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.159.

Rico Rodriguez, Tyaniff, Adriana Ressiore, Jessica Malinalli Coyotecatl Contreras, Alberto Morales E., Columba González-Duarte, and Mara Dicenta. 2024. “Un/Repairing Through More-than-Human Care in Latin America: Conversatorio.” Engagement, August 29. .

Rosas-Sánchez, Jael, Hugo Saldarriaga-Norena, Luis A. Chavez-Almazán, Josefina Vergara-Sanchez, and Mario Alfonso Murillo-Tovar. 2022. “Agricultural Pesticide Exposure and Risk Assessment to Human Health in Mexico.” In Pesticide Toxicology: Methods in Pharmacology and Toxicology, edited by E. Gallardo and M. Barroso, 101– 18. Humana. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1928-5_6.

Salamanca Gonzalez, Maria Grace. 2024. “El cuidado tejido de ética y estética.” Paper presented at the virtual conference Políticas y Poéticas del Cuidado en el Antropoceno: Pistas para Sentipensar Modos de Re-existencia en un Mundo en Crisis, January 16.

Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. 2016. Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States. Duke University Press.

Salmón, Enrique. 2000. “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human– Nature Relationship.” Ecological Applications 10 (5): 1327–33.

Satzewich, Vic. 2007. “Business or Bureaucratic Dominance in Immigration Policymaking in Canada: Why was Mexico included in the Caribbean seasonal agricultural workers program in 1974?.” Journal of International Migration and Integration/Revue de l'integration et de la Migration Internationale 8: 255-275.

Satzewich, Vic. 1991. Racism and the Incorporation of Foreign Labour: Farm Labour Migration to Canada Since 1945. Routledge.

Sheller, Mimi. 2018. Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. Verso.

Shotwell, Alexis. 2021. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. University of Minnesota Press.

Simpson, A., 2020. Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press.

Sinkowski, Cara. 2017. “Advocates with Status: A Snapshot of Three NGOs in the Canadian Migrant Agricultural Workers’ Movement.” In Civil Society Engagement: Achieving Better in Canada, edited by Patricia Daenzer, 137–43. Routledge.

St. John, Rachel C. 2011. Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US-Mexico Border. Princeton University Press.

Sundberg, Juanita. 2011. “Diabolic Caminos in the Desert and Cat Fights on the Río: A Posthumanist Political Ecology of Boundary Enforcement in the United States– Mexico Borderlands.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101 (2): 318– 36. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2010.538323.

Sundberg, Juanita. 2023. “Geologic Temporalities and Geopolitical Operations.” In Border Environments, edited by Ricardo Badano, Tomas Percival, and Susan Schuppli, 40–59 Spector Books.

Sundberg, Juanita, and Bonnie Kaserman. 2007. “Cactus Carvings and Desert Defecations: Embodying Representations of Border Crossings in Protected Areas on the Mexico-US Border.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (4): 727– 44. https://doi.org/10.1068/d75j.

Tetreault, Darcy. 2022. “Two Sides of the Same Coin: Increasing Material Extraction Rates and Social Environmental Conflicts in Mexico.” Environment, Development and Sustainability 24 (12): 14163–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-021-02025-4.

Tobin, Mitch. 2002. “Perilous Parks: Border's Sensitive Areas Are Trampled.” Arizona Daily Star, September 9, A1.

Todd, Zoe. 2018. “Refracting the State Through Human-Fish Relations: Fishing, Indigenous Legal Orders and Colonialism in North/Western Canada.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 7 (1): 60–75. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/30393.

Truett, Samuel. 2006. Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Yale University Press.

U.S. Border Patrol. 1994. Border Patrol Strategic Plan, 1994 and Beyond. U.S. Border Patrol.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2001. INS’ Southwest Border Strategy: Resourced and Impact Issues Remain after Seven Years. GAO-01-842. U.S. Government Accountability Office.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 2011. Vehicle Trails Associated with Illegal Border Activities on Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. https://rewilding.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Cabeza-Prieta-Vehicle- Trails_2011July.pdf.

U.S. National Park Service. 2015. Restoration of Undesignated Vehicle Routes (UVRs). National Park Service Internal Report. Accessed June 21, 2022.

Valencia-Quintana, Rafael, Rosa María López-Durán, Mirta Milić, et al. 2021. “Assessment of Cytogenetic Damage and Cholinesterases’ Activity in Workers Occupationally Exposed to Pesticides in Zamora-Jacona, Michoacan, Mexico.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18 (12): 6269. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18126269.

Walia, Harsha. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket Books.

Watts, Vanessa. 2013. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (1): 20–34. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/19145.

Webb, Robert H., Todd C. Esque, Kenneth E. Nussear, and Mark Sturm. 2013. “Disruption Rates for One Vulnerable Soil in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona, USA.” Journal of Arid Environments 95 (August): 75–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaridenv.2013.03.016.

Whyte, Kyle P., and Chris Cuomo. 2017. “Ethics of Caring in Environmental Ethics: Indigenous and Feminist Philosophies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, edited by Stephen M. Gardiner and Allen Thompson, 234–47. Oxford University Press.

Wimmer, Andreas, and Nina Glick Schiller. 2003. “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology.” International Migration Review 37 (3): 576–610. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747- 7379.2003.tb00151.x.

Wu, Feng, and Zhengfei Guan. 2021. “An Overview of the Mexican Blueberry Industry.” Publication #FE1106. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FE1106.

Author Bio

Columba González-Duarte is assistant professor in anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her academic practice is shaped by feminist ethics of care, promoting a different form of justice that values the well-being of both humans and more-than-humans during their migratory journeys across North America.

Columba González-Duarte es profesora de antropología en la New School for Social Research, Nueva York. Su práctica académica está moldeada por la ética feminista de los cuidados, que promueve una forma diferente de justicia y valora el bienestar tanto de los humanos como de los más-que-humanos en movimeinto por América del Norte.

Juanita Sundberg is associate professor of geography and Latin American studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research builds on feminist political ecology, more-than-human geographies, and anti-colonial theory.

Juanita Sundberg es profesora de geografía y estudios latinoamericanos en la universidad de British Columbia, Canada. Su investigación se basa en la ecología política feminista, las geografías más-que-humanas y la teoría anticolonial.