Quisieron Enterrarnos

Abstract

Through the lenses of environmental humanities, decolonial thought, and new materialism, this essay considers expressions of interspecies and transnational solidarity and relationships of mutual interest and identification in certain strategic alliances between human and more-than-human communities. I argue that the literary works of Chicanx writers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Alejandro Morales illuminate, open space for, and prefigure many of the more-than-human turns taken in the discourse of contemporary transnational migrant rights movements. The essay historicizes Western colonial hierarchies as the anthropocentric and speciesist bases for the racist, anti-immigrant discourse that has been publicly weaponized against immigrant people over the past half century. From there, it illustrates some of the productive struggles with and creative responses to the dehumanizing tendencies of this discourse and Mexico-US border enforcement. Although many of these examples occur in response to oppressive and often cruelly uneven valuations of life in the borderlands, I especially explore the creative, transformative, and often fearless decolonial expressions of individual and collective identity that these responses articulate.