Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá: Lingering with Black Women’s Lives and Losses along Texas Shores

• In Event: Black and Indigenous Ecologies: Race, Place, and the Politics of Water

Description for Program

On May 20, 1852, Margaret Guest– a woman formerly enslaved in Coahuila y Téjas and freed in the state of Texas–gained formal freedom for her and her child through the Supreme Court of Texas. The trial represented the culmination of efforts to assert her freedom following the U.S. invasion of Mexico, which shifted the border between the two nations from the Sabine River to the Rio Grande, thus propelling Margaret’s free status into uncertain territory. Throughout the nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexico border, chiefly along the Sabine River and the Rio Grande, became a focal point for geopolitical debates regarding the legitimacy of North American slavery and mercurial notions about black citizenship and freedom that greatly influenced how these concepts were negotiated at the level of state, national, and international politics. The rivers marked the boundaries of slavery and thus served as testing grounds for Anglo-American economic expansion and the transformation of blackness. As politicians clashed over the correct coordinates of the boundary between slavery and freedom, enslaved women like Margaret Guest negotiated and determined the contours of the border in practice. Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá details the lives and losses of those enslaved and free women of African descent who sought to challenge border solidification through their movements, binational social networks, legal claims, and extralegal interventions. The paper builds upon the perspectives in borderland studies, slavery studies, and black feminist theory at the juncture where blackness and lotic waters meet to explore how "lingering" – a methodological practice rooted in storytelling focused on the intricate details of black lives – is a viable intellectual approach to explicate the mutual constitution of law and space through notions of race and gender.

Author

• Zaria El-Fil, University of Chicago