Part of the special issue, “Desireable futures: Time as possibility, practice, politics.” Edited by Mabel Denzin Gergan, Pallavi Gupta, Lara Lookabaugh, Caitlin McMillina, Carlos Serrano, Sara Smith, & Pavithra Vasudevan.

Abstract: This essay contributes to literature on the intersections of white settler colonialisms, racial capitalism, and U.S.-Mexico borderlands history by tracing the web of spatial, temporal, and legal power relations that produced El Paso, Texas’ seemingly legitimate possession of stolen Mexican territory known as “El Chamizal” in the El Paso-Cd. Juárez borderlands. Drawing on oral histories, court testimonies, and affidavits, this essay demonstrates that this ongoing theft is not a finite or complete project. Rather, the process hinges on a fragile web of spatial, white settler temporal, and legal practices of concealment/denial anchored to a colonial rumor that refuses to open this region to the mystery and wonder of the Río Grande’s “wayward life, beautiful experiment in how to live” (Hartman, 2020).

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Abstract: “Preguntas y frases” is an imagined letter from my grandmother. It is composed of Spanish words and phrases (including missing accents and misspellings) as my grandmother, Esther, wrote them in 1983 in a series of letters she sent to my mother while my mother was living abroad in Ecuador. In those letters, Esther spoken plainly with her daughter—principally, by questioning her decision to leave the United States and asking that my mother back home to Calexico, California.

Many years after my grandmother’s death, my mother found these letters tucked away in the house attic. When my mother shared these letters with me, it was startling for me to see and hear so clearly my grandmother’s voice and way of speaking after so many years since her passing. In response, I wrote “Preguntas y frases para una nieta americana.” The title is inspired by Teresa Palomo Acosta’s poem “Preguntas y frases para una bisabuela española” in which Acosta reflects on her Spanish heritage by writing a letter to her great Spanish grandmother. In contrast, “Preguntas y frases para una nieta americana” reflects on American assimilation and what is lost, protected, and honored across three generations of Mexican American women. The letter is my imagination of what my grandmother would say to me today if she were to write me—and speak plainly—as she had with my mother all those years ago.

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Opinion piece on the unveiling of Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado’s mural “Blurred Boundaries,” a new Chamizal Treaty themed mural, at the Chamizal Recreation Center in El Paso, Texas.

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Biographical encyclopedia entry on the life & legacy of Chamizal resident & community activist Elvira Villa Escajeda for the Handbook of Texas History.

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Winner of the 2024 Antonia I. Castañeda Prize from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

Nominee for 2022 WHA Ray Allen Billington Prize—Nominated by American Quarterly Editorial Board

Abstract: This essay responds to the existing historical literature on the Chamizal Land Dispute (1864–1964) that leaves unattended the political significance of the meandering Río Grande that caused this conflict. Borderlands historiography typically replicates the official US and Mexican state narratives that insist the Chamizal Treaty of 1964 wholly resolved this dispute by eliminating the river's unruliness. This essay, however, demonstrates that this land dispute is not so clear-cut and that it is still unfolding. Drawing on oral histories with El Paso residents displaced from el Chamizal by the treaty and a human geography theoretical framework grounded in the river's unruliness, I argue for engaging this history as an unruly geography of scars. This framework is then applied to analyze (1) the myriad ways the meandering Río Grande undermines and haunts white possessive logics along the El Paso–Ciudad Juarez borderlands, (2) the uncanny land/body disturbances of dislocation on particular Chamizal residents and what they call the "Chamizal diaspora," and (3) the strategies of refusal devised among the residents to challenge the Chamizal Treaty. By thinking with the Río Grande, this essay ultimately argues for how this river's unruliness offers pedagogies to refuse and unsettle white settler colonial processes and structures.

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Encyclopedia entry on the Chamizal Land Dispute fro the Handbook of Texas History.

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