Space, Place, and Belonging in Borderlines: Map-Making in the Installations of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s attention to cartography emerges from a decolonial imaginary. My presentation seeks to understand the counter-hegemonic visualization of space in her work. Contextualized in the history of map-making and its role in engendering, producing, and securing colonial and imperial domination, I seek to analyze the different meaning behind Jimenez Underwood’s cartography. She creates earthly contours, nationalist boundaries, waterscapes, and man-made as well as natural borders, but these maps convey different meanings. The cartography of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood visualizes Indigenous resistance and struggle as well as sublime beauty and grace, historization, and a sense of belonging that does not depend upon the geo-political uses and abuses of space. Much of her decolonial imaginary can be found in the installations, Diaspora, Undocumented Border Flowers (2009), Flowers, Border, and Threads, Oh My! (2013), Welcome to Border-landia! (2013), and the series Land Grabs 500 Years. As an interdisciplinary project grounded in Chicana feminist theory, art history, and Critical Race Theory, this presentation aims to examine her work for its formal qualities—media, composition, color, perspective, for example—and its socio-political meanings.