The Body Adrift: Borders, Race, and Resistance from the Rio Grande to the Pacific

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel examines the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and Pacific water border as spaces of heated dialogue, where power is contested through the language of race, the semantics of sovereignty, and the whispers of insurgency. As the late-stage American empire reconfigures its technologies of control—through surveillance, militarized borders, and the securitization of migration—historical actors in these spaces have long resisted and subverted imperial power through alternative imaginations of belonging in “America.” Drawing on critical perspectives from Borderland Studies, Cultural Resistance, archival theory, this panel examines key transitions in U.S. imperial practices of racialized governance and how subjugated communities responded.

Jazmin Muñoz's paper examines the emergence of borderlands radicalism in the early 20th-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands, focusing on ethnic Mexican resistance to U.S. settler colonialism and capitalist expansion, framing acts of sabotage as politically motivated insurgency. Positioning these acts within the context of transnational resistance, this paper argues that these examples of borderlands radicalism were a struggle for power, contributing to future Mexican American labor and social movements while challenging conventional narratives of passive assimilation.

Rivers Liu’s paper offers a (re)narration of El Paso at the turn of the 20th century through the ontologies of Chinese settlers, whose funeral processions defied a colonial landscape forged in conditions of dispossession, fugitivity, subjugation, and disappearance. Liu employs a necropolitical critique of the US-Mexico border as the fragmented site where US democracy maintained its colony within, and the Chinese border-crosser caught between. Their paper explores multiple narrations of death: death as a space where the Chinese infused everyday meaning with cosmological imaginaries and, inversely, death as the negative space, wherein the creation of the “Chinese American” subject was one couched in their social death as ruled by the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Crys Zhao’s paper examines the United States Coast Guard's (USCG) transition from life-saving services to an immigration interdiction agency through the enactment of Executive Order 12807. Through a case study of USCG’s engagement of Chinese migrant boats during the 1990s, they analyze the racialization of Chinese bodies as diseased and commodified alongside the increased racialized fear of China as a national security threat. This paper argues that the USCG’s transition to immigration interdiction contributes to the U.S. empire’s desire to expand its geographical control of the Pacific Ocean, using militarized water borders as both a barrier of entry and a space of exclusion.

Together, these papers highlight the many forms that border communities resist power, and the narrative possibilities they offer to scholars contesting US state supremacy. While the U.S. empire continuously aims to expand, communities assert their agency sovereignty of people through overt political resistance and everyday practices of reclaiming space. These histories expose the contradictions of empire and offer alternative epistemologies for understanding belonging, resistance, and state power today.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Heavenly Bodies, Earthly Remains: Chinese El Pasoans, Funerals, and the Borderlands Archive, 1882-1917 - Rivers Liu, University of Texas at Austin

• Wavering Water Border through United States Coast Guard: Chinese Racialization, National Security, and the Militarization - Crys Zhao, University of Texas At Austin

• The Dialectics of Borderlands Radicalism: Weapons of the Weak in the US-Mexico Borderlands - Jazmin N Muñoz, University of Texas at Austin

• Metaphors Of Immigration And Transnational Identity In “Señales Que Precederán El Fin Del Mundo” By Yuri Herrera - David Yague Gonzalez, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chair

• Amanda Lee Tovar, University of Texas At Austin

Biographical Information

Rivers Liu is a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Their work investigates the structures and processes of knowledge production in the creation of Asian American subjectivity. They graduated with a BA in History from Vassar College.

Crys Zhao (they/them/ta) is a doctoral student in the Department ofAmerican Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Their current research investigates the ocean as a form of boundary in cultural memory and nation-state borders. Crys is also interested in Asian American cultural production, digital humanities, and social movements in educational institutions. They graduated with a B.A. in Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies and a minor in Asian American Studies from UW-Madison.

Jazmin N. Muñoz (she/her/ella) is a first-gen queer Chicana raised in Southern Colorado (Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho land). She is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include twentieth-century feminist interracial social movements, coalition practices among leftist political organizations, police brutality, lateral violence, surveillance studies, and public history. She received her B.A. in Women's and Ethnic Studies with a minor in Communication from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and later earned her M.A. in Bicultural Studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio.