In “Border Rivers and Indigenous Cosmologies,” Emily C. Vázquez Enríquez studies Xilase qui rié di' sicasi rié nisa guiigu' / La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos, by Binnizá/Isthmus Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, a book that foregrounds the contested territories produced by border rivers. Xilase unfolds the multidimensional ways in which Indigenous peoples from southern Mexico engage with and intellectualize waterways. Although the aquatic bodies that appear in Xilase are not named, they are clearly articulated as liquid sites of passage deeply embedded in stories of migration. While it is common to think of national borders as homogeneous and stable entities, no other border configuration challenges such an assumption as rivers do, therefore, Vázquez Enríquez proposes to read Pineda’s poem as a philosophical inquiry into how rivers shape and are shaped by migration processes and environmental degradation.
In “An Ecology of Wonder: Poetry and the Environment in Gloria Gervitz,” Perla Masi focuses on Migraciones: Poema 1976-2020 (2020), a single poem elaborated by the Mexican writer over the course of 44 years, to argue that Gervitz’s work is a tribute to the collective experience of the women who migrated to Mexico from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and the women who were born in Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. Masi proposes to read Migraciones as a poetic manifesto that invites the reader to consider the capacity of poetry to create a livable habitat for both humans and nonhumans. Migraciones is a reflection on how poetic language provides us with a model of communication that is closer to a gif-based rather than an exchange-based economy. Embracing the experience of awe and wonder, Masi argues, Gervitz’s poem advances an analogical mode of reasoning that values similarity over difference and aims at revealing the interconnectedness of all things.
In “Migration, Orientability, and the Novel Form,” Pavel Andrade argues that the patterns that shape the topographical imagination of the Mexican novel of the NAFTA era, assert the physical and material experience of global capitalism. Andrade argues that the interpretative enthusiasm for the literatures produced in the vicinity of the Rio Grande has, for the most part, been used to center the situated knowledge that arises from the border region. Attention to topographic vastness, migrant paths, and hybrid spaces has specified for the U.S.-Mexico border the centrality of place to many of the circuits through which economic globalization is constituted. Alternately, Andrade argues that in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009), the border acts as a non-orientable space. In Signs, the absence of stable perspectival cues produces the migratory journey as a spatiotemporal interval characterized by a permanent struggle for reorientation. Andrade concludes that Herrera’s novel inhabits a spatial ambivalence that produces formal avenues to recompose economic migration into utopian possibility.
Finally, in “Afro-Pacific Teratology: La tunda and the Idiom for Violence in the Ecuador-Colombia Border,” Juan Suárez Ontaneda analyzes the monstrous creature called La tunda from an Afro-diasporic critical lens, to show that this figure acts as a metaphor for the border between Ecuador and Colombia. According to the myth, La tunda kidnaps children and assaults them in the forests of the Pacific coast. Suárez Ontaneda argues that it is possible to connect this monstrous creature with the cycles of violence suffered by Black communities in both countries, from slavery to the compulsory recruitment of children by paramilitary groups. Analyzing ethnographic and folkloric accounts, short stories, and songs from Afro-Esmeraldas communities, Suárez Ontaneda concludes that the teratology of La tunda is analogous to the dismemberment of Black bodies in the Pacific.
12-minute presentations followed by open conversation and discussion between panelists and attendees.