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Current Book Project

My first book project is a significantly modified expansion of the first chapter of my dissertation project. Tentatively titled Borderscapes: The Agency of US-Mexico Border Spaces, Places, and Barriers in the Prevention Through Deterrence Era, the project is grounded in transnational border ecological communities impacted by the US-based PTD policy as told through literary and aesthetic texts.

Dissertation Project

“Border crisis” is a term that the US-Mexico borderlands just can’t seem to shake. Stories of the borderlands narrate the sensational, violent, and chaotic.There is a “crisis” at the border; but it is a multispecies one that spreads across time and space. Signs of Crossing: Tracing Borderscapes Through the US-Mexico Middle Place, is an interdisciplinary, Environmental Humanities (EH) reading of the US-Mexico border space that traces the slow violences of environmental degradation and loss in borderscapes of US Latinx, Mexican, Mexican American, Central American, crossing narratives, transnational borderland texts, and aesthetic representations.

I analyze the loss of homelands, the destruction of complex landscapes and ecosystems, the marginalization of binational native tribes, the disappearances of migrant bodies, and the erasure of migrant stories, as well as the removal and eradication of migrant objects and artifacts as a calculated step in the State-sanctioned militarization of the borderlands.

Forthcoming publications:

• “They have wrapped the fibers of my plants around their naked feet: Plants and Animals of the US-Mexico Borderscape” in Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultures (ed. by Cristina E. Pardo Porto and Oscar A. Pérez) University Press of Florida, under contract.
• “Crossing Signs: Tracing Migrant Objects through US-Mexico Crossing Narratives in Latino/a Studies, manuscript in preparation with a peer reviewed journal.
• “From Eco-Anxiety to Eco-Optimism: Affect, Action, and Mothering Amidst Climate Chaos in Contemporary Latin American Climate Fiction.” Mothers, Mothering and Climate Change, eds. Carolina Toscano and Sarah Marie Wiebe, Demeter Press, under review.
• “Once one mango falls off, the others do as well: Solastalgia, Ecological Grief, and Childhood Migration in 21st Century Crossing Literature” is in preparation for inclusion in the edited collection Feeling and Resisting Emotional Hostility: Latin American and Latine/x Youths’ Migration, Agency, and Politics of Emotions (eds. Eric Macias and Melisa Argañaraz).