Off-campus WSU users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your WSU access ID and password, then click the "Off-campus Download" button below.
Non-WSU users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Access Type
WSU Access
Date of Award
January 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
First Advisor
Elena Past
Second Advisor
Hernán García
Abstract
“Border crisis” is a term that the US-Mexico borderlands just can’t seem to shake. There is a “crisis” at the border, but it is a multispecies one that spreads across time and space. Signs of Crossing: Tracing Borderscapes Through the US-Mexico Middle Place is an Environmental Humanities reading of the US-Mexico border space that traces environmental degradation and loss in borderscapes of US Latinx, Mexican, Mexican American, crossing narratives, and borderland texts and aesthetic representations. I analyze the destruction and militarization of complex landscapes and ecosystems (Chapter 1); the shared vulnerabilities and collective threats on human and nonhuman animal bodies amidst border militarization, habitat loss, and increased human activity (Chapter 2); the fragmentation and degradation of border plant ecosystems (Chapter 3); and the removal and eradication of migrant objects and artifacts as a calculated step in the militarization of the borderlands (Chapter 4). I argue that the US-Mexico borderlands are spaces of shared vulnerability, indistinction, and open possibility between human and more-than-human life. Here, survival amidst climate chaos means forming rebellious and eco-imaginative interspecific kinships that seek ecojustice for all border crossers. Through place-based, community, and scholarly research, I seek out critical pathways of posthuman solidarity along the border by highlighting multispecies activism, coalition, ecojustice, and radical, anticolonial joy in order to countermap and counternarrate the US-MX border “crisis”. The “crisis” at the border is a multispecies one, and it offers lessons in survival and flourishing amidst an age of increased militarization of borders, limitations on the right to movement, and climate chaos.
Recommended Citation
Ostrom, Kate Elizabeth, "Signs Of Crossing: Tracing Borderscapes Through The Us-Mexico Middle Place" (2025). Wayne State University Dissertations. 4230.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/4230