Carceral jaguar geographies along the US/México border and the case for border abolition

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jaguars carry deep cultural and spiritual significance throughout the Americas, from sports mascots to their associations with Indigenous deities to their veneration as a vulnerable and charismatic megafauna. Though thought to be extinct in the US for much of the twentieth century, they maintain a small but powerful presence along the US/México border region. The continued viability of these jaguar populations is severely threatened by the border walls that the US government has been working to erect since the early 2000s. By examining the entanglements between jaguar and border geographies on the one hand, and racially disposable migrants, Indigenous peoples, and racial capitalism on the other, this article argues that carceral configurations of nation-state borders, conservation, and immigration enforcement are incompatible with liberatory notions of human and nonhuman survival. It poses border abolition that takes seriously the nonhuman, vis-à-vis jaguars, is essential to making abolition geographies and ecologies within and beyond the US/México borderlands.