These four presentations cohere and complement each other in both region and theme: while Lomba and Ahlenius discuss how borders reveal the enduring legacies of slavery and race, Guzmán and Ghosh highlight both the precarity and creative agency of laborers under capitalist precarity as they cross or move within national borders. This discussion incorporates a diversity of voices in several regards: first, it includes an equal balance of male and female presenters; second, the panel includes both promising early-career and more advanced scholars, including two PhD candidates, one postdoctoral scholar, and one associate professor.
To ensure equal time allotment and leave time for discussion, each presenter will have a strict limit of 13 minutes to present, enforced by the presider, followed by 15 minutes of open questions and discussion with the audience. To facilitate discussion, each participant will prepare 2 questions for the other discussants.
Andrés Guzmán explores how Chicanx labor, especially migrant labor, has been historically situated at the margins, or “borderlands,” of formal employment. Having always been included through their marginalization and partial exclusion, the experience of Chicanx migrant workers increasingly characterizes the norm of work in late capitalism, as work becomes more precarious, temporary, informal, and mobile. This presentation explores this dynamic through Tomás Rivera’s ...y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), whose novelistic form demonstrates a dialectical torsion in which one transforms oneself through the very labor by which one transforms one’s material world, opening possibilities of radical worldmaking.
Gabriela Lomba Guzmán highlights the crisis of labor, governance, and law in the 20th-century Caribbean through two novels on the 1937 slaughter of sugarcane workers on the Haitian and Dominican border: Jacques Stephen Alexis’s Compère Général Soleil (1955) and Freddy Prestol Castillo’s El masacre se pasa a pie (1973). These novels explore two operative levels of carcerality: first, the hyper-surveilled and violent zone of the border, in which exploitative labor practices emerge as the legacy of plantation slavery; and second, the legal space that creates “criminals” and “prisoners” via a corrupt penal system that perpetuates itself through obscured bureaucracy and (extra)legal violence.
Kuhelika Ghosh discusses the contemporary issue of seed sovereignty, the right of farmers to save, use, exchange, and sell their own seeds in response to agricultural corporations’ dominance over seed ownership and sales. Ghosh discusses Caribbean women's revolutionary acts of seed sovereignty and food justice in Dominican Melania Luisa Marte’s poetry collection, Plantains and Our Becoming and Montserratian-British artist Veronica Ryan’s “Drift Seeds” installation in her 2021 exhibition Along a Spectrum. These works attend to stories of unruly seeds that traverse borders and escape the captivity and corporatization of capitalism through multispecies lines of flight, often hidden in everyday objects associated with locomotion such as blankets and suitcases.
Jason Ahlenius explores the conflicting imaginaries of freedom and equality between Mexican creole elites and Black laborers fleeing from U.S. slavery to Mexico’s northern borderlands. Lorenzo de Zavala, a leading Mexican liberal, envisioned the transformation of Texas from an imperial borderland under Spanish colonial rule into a vanguard of republican freedom and industry based on independent yeoman farmers. The voices of Black men and women, by contrast, are fragmented by the logics of borderland archives, but also open possibilities to speculate on the diverging notions and practices of “freedom” and the non-linear transformation of the "borderlands” into the “U.S.-Mexico border.”