“Drawing and Disrupting Borders in the Wake of the US–Mexico War,” Representations 166 (2024)
This article advances an argument about two “imagined environments”—my term for the frameworks that human groups use to depict and dwell in more-than-human worlds. The first of these imagined environments arose around the US–Mexican Boundary Commission (1849–59): while failing to fulfill its official objective of building physical border monuments, this team of explorers and engineers still made media that helped two settler states conceptualize and control their borderlands. Against this increasingly efficient exploitation of both humans and nonhumans, a second imagined environment persisted in Mescalero Apache pictographs, Chihene Apache performances, and other Apache media. On our precarious planet, this imagined environment can teach us to stop defining ourselves around fixed places and to remainresilient while migrating through shifting spaces.
“The Limits of Latinx Representation,” American Literary History 35.1 (2023)
This essay examines a crisis in the literary form we call “the novel” and the political form we call “democracy.” As many scholars have argued, these forms had a crucial convergence in the late eighteenth century: while novels made it easier for subjects to identify as rational decision-makers in secular social worlds, democracy became these subjects’ preferred way of imagining and institutionalizing political power. To be sure, most early novels helped consolidate the middle and upper classes, but with each passing decade, an increasing number have sought to open democracy to the disenfranchised. However, when novels have taken up the cause of unauthorized migration across the Americas, they have often failed to raise cultural awareness—and have overwhelmingly failed to produce political change. Facing these failures, this essay explores how Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) tries to see—and see beyond—three limits of Latinx representation. Against a literary lineage that prizes complete portrayals of exemplary people, the novel demonstrates that completion and comprehension are often impossible. Similarly, amidst a culture industry in which “representation matters,” it explains why the category “Latinx” is usually inadequate to the diversity of migrant life. Finally, in a nation said to be a “representative democracy,” it shows how divisions between citizens and migrants are untenable. While theorizing these limits, Lost Children Archive does not propound a particular political agenda: instead, it considers the conditions under which such an agenda might become widely communicable. Replacing self-assurance with self-awareness, the novel lays foundations for futures in which citizens and migrants may meet on equal terms to expand those democracies that already exist and dream the democracies that might yet be.
“Limits” won the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize, which recognizes essays that have “(1) demonstrated an exceptional level of critical engagement with literary tradition(s) and trends in one of the several subdisciplines comprising American literature and/or (2) forged an innovative scholarly trajectory in the field more generally.” Read the article here or here.
“Lost Archives, Lost Lands: Rereading New Mexico’s Imagined Environments,” American Literature 92.2 (June 2020)
This article describes how Nuevomexicanas/os have used texts, images, and other media to reclaim the lands that they lost after the US-Mexico War. Along the way, it models a method for reading “imagined environments”—frameworks through which humans explore spaces, engage with beings, and consume objects. It focuses on two generations of writer-activists. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Adelina Otero-Warren and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca situated themselves in the “Precarious Desert,” an imagined environment of constraints, contingencies, and struggles for survival. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes revived the “Pueblo Olvidado,” an imagined environment saturated with laws, treaties, and cultural traditions. Each generation developed a distinct aesthetic strategy; while the former addressed English-language texts to the Anglo public, the latter circulated multilingual media for a Nuevomexicana/o counterpublic. In turn, each generation created a conflicting ethno-racial identity; while the first saw itself as light-skinned, high-class, and “Hispana/o,” the second claimed to be mixed-race, working-class, and “Indo-Hispana/o.” Despite their differences, both generations shared a desire to settle on and profit from Native lands. But though they never became environmentalists (at least not in the way we usually use the term), they still experimented with environmental writing—and environmental politics. By recovering these experiments, this article shows how media produce—rather than simply portray—lands and waters. As it builds on new work at the edges of ecocriticism, ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies, it argues that human differences both divide and define nonhuman environments. Ultimately, it tells the story of the borderlands as a series of struggles over what environments are, whom they can contain, and how they should be used.
“Lost Archives, Lost Lands” won the Norman Foerster Prize for the Best Essay of the Year in American Literature. Read the article here or here.
“Latinx Literature in the Anthropocene,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27.3 (Summer 2020)
We are living in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch in which we wield power over the entire planet. But who, exactly, is the “we” in that sentence? While answering this question, scholars tend to focus on our differentiated responsibilities (“the Global North has caused climate change”) and vulnerabilities (“the Global South will suffer climate change’s most severe effects”). As a result, they often overlook our differentiated perspectives (“how,” they frequently fail to ask, “have multiple groups represented, related to, and resided in a single earth system?”). To teach scholars how to play with perspectives, this article uses the concrete context of Latinx literature to reinterpret the abstract arguments about the Anthropocene. Working through José Martí’s seminal statement on “Nuestra América” (1891), it explores how the larger category “Latinx” unites (and fails to unite) smaller social groups. Then, reading “Nuestra América” into a long (but long-neglected) lineage of environmental aesthetics, it complicates the claims about responsibility and vulnerability. As this article demonstrates, Latinx literature has contributed to anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and environmental degradation. At the same time, though, it has helped publics come to grips with these challenges. Amidst and against the familiar frameworks of environmentalism and environmental justice, Latinx literature has evolved as a way of surviving on (but not saving) our planet. At once problematic and powerful, Latinx literature can help us cope with droughts along the US-Mexico border, climate disasters in the Caribbean, and environmental conflicts across the Americas.
“Modernist Institutions, Modern Infrastructures, and the Making of the US-Mexico Borderlands,” Modernism / Modernity Print Plus 5.2 (November 2020).
In the 1920s and 1930s, many modernists worked at Mabel Dodge’s Taos salon, Mary Austin’s Santa Fe home, and similar sites across the US-Mexico borderlands. By drawing on and developing Native and Latinx traditions (sometimes respectfully, other times disrespectfully), these modernists pushed back against the prevailing ways of depicting and dwelling in the region. However, while they went out in search of environmental awareness, they ended up entrenching environmental unconsciousness: since they associated the borderlands with spirituality and creativity, they made it harder for their publics to respond to—or even recognize—the interlocking processes of capitalist dispossession and ecological degradation. To tell this double-edged tale, this article reexamines the relationships between “modernist institutions” (the social sites at which modernists made their media) and “modern infrastructures” (the dams, aqueducts, and reservoirs that fueled the new borderlands ecology). By recovering understudied archival materials, it explains why different modernists developed similar strategies for (mis)representing their more-than-human worlds. Then, by reading Ansel Adams and Mary Austin’s Taos Pueblo (1930), it shows how radical experiments in aesthetic pleasure disguised—and thereby deepened—a racialized regime of environmental power. In the end, this article argues that modernist institutions were entangled with modern infrastructures: while dams and aqueducts gave writers and artists the resources that they needed to work, texts and images made it possible for publics to ignore environmental problems.
Read the article here.
“Ecomedia and Empire in the US-Mexico Borderlands,” Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, ed. Alenda Chang et al. (New York: Routledge, 2023)
In the last decade, the term “ecomedia” has acquired multiple meanings: most concretely, it has become a basis for comparing the signifying strategies that humans use to represent nonhumans; more broadly, it has become a way of acknowledging the extent to which media are at once human and nonhuman. Drawing on and developing such meanings, this chapter discusses how some ecomedia have worked against empire—how African films have critiqued extractive industries, and how Indigenous pictographs have countered European cartographies. It then focuses on the ways that other ecomedia have in fact intensified imperialism. Blending ecomedia studies with ethnic studies, the chapter reconsiders the New Mexico Bureau of Immigration (NMBI), which emerged in 1880 to solve a perceived problem of land and water use: under the period’s racial logic, the New Mexico Territory did not have enough white farmers to become a fully-fledged state. As the essay demonstrates, the NMBI used lithographs, photographs, and other ecomedia to provide whites with new environmental expectations. By making it seem as if Natives and Nuevomexicanas/os had lost their struggles for sovereignty, and by acting as if the lands and waters themselves were destined for economic efficiency, the NMBI remediated—and reshaped—the borderlands.
Read the chapter here.
Review of Edgar Garcia, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu, in ASAP/J, May 14, 2020.
Read the review here.
