A Mighty Queer River: Rebellious Ecologies in the Mexico-US Borderlands

Abstract

As evidence mounts of the intersecting ecological and social injustices that jeopardize planetary wellbeing, the task of linking academic knowledge to socio-ecological activism remains urgent. No place demonstrates this better than the Rio Grande/Río Bravo watershed at El Paso del Norte, the river crossing that designates an international border within a riparian desert landscape. Since the river in this location has rebelled for centuries against the many efforts to force it to function as a binary boundary line, the watershed has long come under vicious management policies that threaten it with extinction. Consequently, on both sides of the river, ecological and social activists confront numerous articulated issues-- such as permanent drought, fragmented habitat, endangered indigenous livelihoods, entrenched poverty, racist and militarized governance-- within a border region rife with obstacles for forming transnational solidarity. Particularly at the Paso del Norte, where Chihuahua, New Mexico, and Texas converge, there is much need for scholarship that facilitates transnational and socio-ecological justice networks across multiple scales. In acknowledging such challenges, this paper addresses the following: How do the reverberating consequences from conceiving of and managing a watershed as a place of “two sides” (initially within New Spain) reproduce binary epistemologies and fragmented habitats beyond the human domain? How can critical geographic perspectives along with interdisciplinary critical race, LGBTQ+, feminist ecological, and indigenous epistemologies, fortify activist alliances throughout this precarious transnational landscape? How does a river’s refusal to perform as a border contribute to understandings of rebellion and non-binary ways of being in border-landscapes?