Abstract: This essay corrects the tendency in critical transnational migration studies to evacuate the significance of land and its relationship to Indigenous sovereignty. Using Gloria Anzaldúa's attention to the agency of land in her conceptualization of borderlands as a starting point, I apply the theoretical orientations offered by settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies to reexamine central analytics in migration studies. I frame deportation as a form of settler carcerality. The combination of crime and immigration controls naturalizes the United States' territorial power to obscure Indigenous landcentered presence and politics. I argue that the abolitionist segment of the antideportation movement, by refusing to abandon im/migrants with criminal records, confronts settler carcerality. The organizers provide new frameworks to instigate decarceral and decolonial action amid a massive expansion of the carceral state, which threatens Indigenous land and self-determination.
Abstract: This essay describes the US–Mexico borderlands from the perspective of inter-regional interaction and the material culture of Indigenous peoples from Aztlán, an area encompassing the Southwest and its proximity to Mesoamerica. Although the focus is on the period between AD 1000 and 1400, it is concurrent with modern periods marked by significant movement, the exchange of goods, and the sharing of medicinal practices among various peoples and groups. Aztlán archaeologies as a methodology unearths new possibilities of inquiry and offers a hopeful vision of Turtle Island's overlapping Indigenous territories during disturbing and violent times under the current Trump administration. The work views the Aztlán cultural area as a cuna of spirit praxis: a cradle where cycles of giving and receiving prevail, and a model without settler borders emerges through nighttime cosmology and early morning phenomena.
Abstract: Taking up the Indigenous borderlands of the Columbia Plateau in the late nineteenth century, this essay argues that the Chinese exclusion regime of the 1880s and 1890s developed partly as a response to the persistence of Indigenous mobility and autonomy in the Pacific Northwest. While Chinese migrants were incorporated into borderlands dynamics of accommodation grounded in Indigenous Plateau practices, these forms of sociality stymied attempts to enforce restrictive national borders beginning in 1882. Drawing on government records and newspaper accounts, I show how settlers employed discourses of gender deviance and lawlessness to express anxieties about Chinese–Indigenous contact in and around the Colville Indian Reservation. These anxieties mobilized political pressure toward both the intensification of immigration policing and the dispossession of the reservation's North Half, as the forty-ninth parallel became a line that rendered Chinese racial outsiders while incorporating transborder Indigenous peoples as domestic dependent nations.
