Border Biomes: Coexistence and Interference on American Migration Trails

Emily Vázquez Enríquez
Spanish and Portuguese
UC Davis

Framed within the fields of border and migration studies and the environmental humanities, “Border Biomes: Coexistence and Interference on American Migration Trails,” examines how 21st-century Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicanx literature and art depict dynamic geographies that defy common notions of fixed, inanimate borders and become sites of encounters where ontological limits are questioned. With a focus on the Guatemala-Mexico and the Mexico-US borderlands, this manuscript thinks through border forests, rivers, and deserts to argue that they are central figures of representation through which the authors I write about challenge rigid categorizations of territorial boundaries, memorialize and expose the intense entanglement of human and nonhuman entities against the backdrop of border demarcations, and defy normative ways of coexistence with nonhuman worlds. “Border Biomes” studies artistic and literary representations of the consequences of border security measures over both people and the environment, the intimate, conflictive, and often lethal encounters between migrants and border ecologies, and the deep-seated relationships linking these biomes with their inhabitants. Through a coalescence of academic inquiry and field work, this manuscript foregrounds the multi-layered connections between biomes, geopolitical articulations, migrants, and border communities.