Endangered Border Subjects: Eco-Nationalism and The Crisis of Citizenship

• In Event: Beyond Settler Nations: Sites and Relations of Indigenous Im/migrant Solidarity 

Abstract

In understanding that the landscape of citizenship and borders is continuously shifting, my essay centers border environmental discourse to imagine the symbiotic and intimate entanglement between “subject formation” and the environment where such formations take place. I consider the (im)material overlapping of histories and cultures within the geopolitics of the Texas/Mexico border. More specifically, I analyze 21st century environmentalist efforts surrounding the 1,000-year-old Montezuma Bald Cypress in Abram, Texas, and the eco-nationalist politics the movement engages that simultaneously reifies the nation-states it aims to defy. My project looks at what we cannot negotiate: the desire to belong and the ways in which Latinidad and border activism often renders many others—especially Indigenous im/migrants and the undocumented—as illegible and violable in the pursuit of legibility within the nation-state. The discourse and cultural analysis draws from deconstructionist theory, women of color feminist theory, and subaltern studies.

Author

• Teresa Hernández, Willamette University