“Nature Divided, Scientists United”: Multispecies World-making in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

• In Event: STS from the Wounds II

Abstract

I analyze an emerging alliance of immigrants, indigneous peoples, scientists, conservationists, and artists who imagine the future of human migrant groups as inextricable from the future of biodiversity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Nearly 3,000 scientists in Mexico, the U.S. and elsewhere signed a 2018 article in Bioscience (“Nature Divided, Scientists United”), which found that Donald Trump’s proposed border wall construction would doom over 94 endangered species to extinction. As the first STS analysis of representations of borderlands biodiversity in scientific and cultural discourse following the election of Trump, I illuminate the rhetoric and metaphors shared among scientific publications, conservation photography, visual art, and art activism. By using endangered species such as the jaguar that migrate across the border as symbols of habitat fragmentation and border militarization, the makers of scientific and cultural representations challenge the construction of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a militarized wasteland, and generate new narratives about the tenacity, inventiveness, and mutual interdependence of borderlands inhabitants. Here, I show how representations that portray the inextricability of biological, cultural, and sexual diversity open up possibilities for new identities, relationships, and ultimately, new multispecies worlds. Using Latinx decolonial environmentalisms and queer of color theory, I argue that this emergent coalition of scientists, environmentalists, activists and artists provides a distinctive political vision for the future of the borderlands in which human, animal, and plant inhabitants flourish together beyond the historical wounds of borders and binaries.

Author

• Meg Perret, Harvard University