Calling Out and In: In Plain Sight and Queer Feminist Care at the Border(s)

Abstract

Gloria Anzaldúa concludes her 1987 multilingual poem “To live in the Borderlands means you” with: “To survive the Borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads.” This ending prompts the question: How can we both live without borders (Anzaldúa’s provided translation of sin fronteras) and be a crossroads? The both–and dynamic connotes an approach to the politics of in/visibility and il/legibility that asks us to consider how altering public spaces, like the U.S.–Mexico border and immigrant detention centers, concomitantly alter our perceptions of the concepts and systems they represent. By turning to public art and engaging with language, this article examines what happens when queer feminist artists extend Anzaldúa’s words to address imperial violence. I use Cassils’s and rafa esparza’s 2020 co-led skytyping project In Plain Sight as a case study, which worked with eighty artists to skytype a range of phrases above U.S. detention centers and to offer a form of countermapping. By focusing on In Plain Sight, this article analyzes: how transmedia works complicate spatial, textual, and geopolitical borders; how an activist call-in and -out may be simultaneously articulated; and how features of embodied practice shape our understandings of queer feminist worldmaking.