Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez

My current book project, Border Biomes: Ecological Imaginaries of American Migration Trails puts into dialogue the fields of border and migration studies with the environmental humanities. This manuscript examines how 20th and 21st-century Mexican, Mexican American, Chicanx, and Indigenous literature and art depict dynamic, unstable geographies that defy common notions of fixed, inanimate borders and become sites of encounters where ontological limits are questioned. With a focus on the Guatemala-Mexico and the Mexico-United States borderlands, this manuscript thinks through border forests, rivers, and deserts to argue that they are key figures that challenge rigid categorizations of territorial boundaries, memorialize and expose the intense entanglement of human and nonhuman entities against the backdrop of border demarcations, and defy and reimagine normative ways of coexistence with nonhuman worlds.