Imagined California: Emergency Poetics and Transfronter///Rhizo Gnosis and Praxis at the Tijuana/San Diego Borderlands

Jorge Omar Ramírez Pimienta
Spanish and Portuguese
UC Santa Barbara

The border region is often imagined as a line of rupture, a geopolitical threshold separating languages, cultures, and nationalities. Yet this line rests on a much longer history of imaginative and infrastructural projection. Since the colonial conquest, Western regimes of thought have treated movement as a problem to be disciplined, enclosing mobility not only through missions, presidios, and property regimes, but also through linguistic, racial, and cultural protectionisms later formalized in nationalist and supranational infrastructures that regulate circulation and fix notions of home, territory, and belonging. Across four chapters, the book shows how art and poetry emerging from the borderlands do not merely contest imposed spatial orders but actively reimagine California itself. Treating poetry and visual art as forms of knowledge produced under regimes of spatial discipline, the manuscript advances Emergency Poetics to describe cultural practices that emerge under conditions of displacement, enclosure, and infrastructural violence. Through the framework of transfronter///rhizo gnosis and praxis, it examines modes of creation that resist arboreal, nationalist, and institutional logics through mobility, relationality, and counter-mapping, reading these poetic and artistic gestures as critical responses to an infrastructural logic of urbanization and borderfication that generates parallel regimes of displacement on both sides of the border.