The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds... A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking work continues to resonate in today’s shifting political and cultural landscapes. Her understanding of the borderland as a space of pain, hybridity, and transformation provides the conceptual foundation for this dossier. Borderlands 2.0 builds on Anzaldúa’s legacy and reimagines the border not only as a geopolitical divide but as a dynamic, intersectional terrain where new futures are imagined and enacted. To inhabit the borderlands is to exist in a space of tension and possibility where violence and resistance, erasure and memory, marginalization and creativity coexist. Borderlands 2.0 is the utopia of the futuro anterior, a space that acknowledges the unresolved past and its erasures as sites of potential becoming. It is a nonlinear, non-essentialist, and non-institutional framework that challenges dominant narratives and embraces dialogical temporality, transculturality, and the logic of the “included third,” as theorized by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s concept of ch’ixi.
In this spirit, we have invited scholars, artists, and practitioners to explore the evolving configurations of borderlands. Their cutting-edge contributions reflect a shared inter- and transdisciplinary commitment to rethinking the violent nature of borders and uncovering the emancipatory potential of life at the intersections of language, gender, race, class, ethnicity, and embodiment. These essays and interventions speak to the urgency of our moment, as exclusionary political projects attempt to erase the fluidity and complexity of lived experiences across the Americas.
Borderlands 2.0: Essays in Dialogue
Anita Huízar-Hernández opens the dossier with “Tracing the Speculative Possibilities of Borderlands 2.0 in Louis Carlos Bernal’s Benitez Suite,” examining how Bernal’s 1977 photographic series, recently exhibited at the Center for Creative Photography, captures the everyday lives of borderland communities. Through the lens of Chicanafuturism, Huízar-Hernández interprets Benitez Suite as a speculative archive that resists erasure and imagines permanence in a space defined by transience. At the same time, Debra A. Castillo’s “New York Borders” expands the geographic and conceptual scope of the borderlands. Through a first-person narrative of a Greyhound journey from Ithaca to Toronto, Castillo overlays personal reflection with historical and contemporary injustices from the legacies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to ICE deportations and mass incarceration. Her essay reframes the Northeast as a borderland, revealing how borders manifest far beyond the U.S.-Mexico divide.
Gabriela Soto’s photo essay “The Dead Are Coming” turns to the ritualized memorialization of undocumented migrants who perish during border crossings. Focusing on both the U.S.-Mexico and E.U.-Mediterranean borders, Soto explores how acts of (re)burial and remembrance become forms of resistance and justice that honor lives lost to state violence and indifference.
Yana Stainova’s “Communities of Borders” bridges personal and ethnographic perspectives. She draws parallels between her upbringing in post-communist Bulgaria and her fieldwork among Latinx artists in Los Angeles. These artists, who often live under threat of deportation, create networks of mutual aid and collective care. Stainova shows how these practices of solidarity and joy form alternative modes of belonging, or borderlands of the heart and home.
Erika Hirugami’s “Weaving the Aesthetics of Undocumentedness” analyzes Las Horas que Caminé/The Hours I Walked (2024) by Zapotec artist Porfirio Gutiérrez. Through spiritual weaving ceremonies and ancestral aesthetics, Gutiérrez’s work becomes a political act, an embodied counter-narrative to anti-migrant brutality. Hirugami positions this practice as a form of healing and resistance, rooted in Indigenous knowledge and futurity.
Isabella Vergara’s “To come: tatiana de la tierra y una poética queer del gesto y la materia” offers a compelling reading of tatiana de la tierra’s work through a lens of the “poetics of gesture”—an affective, linguistic, and bodily act of insurgency. Rather than framing de la tierra’s poetry solely as activism or testimony, Vergara reveals how it disrupts normative categories and reconfigures queerness and Latinidad as fluid, performative practices. Her work resonates with the speculative and affective dimensions explored by Huízar-Hernández, embodying a queer diasporic identity in constant transformation that gestures toward a utopian, ever-unfolding space of becoming.
Tatiana Flores’ “Vectorial Orientations” draws a historical arc between Manuel Maples Arce’s avant-garde manifesto “Actual No. 1” (1921) and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s participatory installation Border Tuner (2019). While Arce’s work embraced modernist ideals of simultaneity and progress, Lozano-Hemmer centers community agency and dialogue across the U.S.-Mexico border. Both works, though separated by nearly a century, challenge static notions of territory and identity, echoing the dossier’s broader concern with temporal and spatial multiplicity.
Voluspa Jarpa’s “El once antes del once” interrogates the legacy of U.S. intervention in Latin America through declassified intelligence archives. Her installation artworks transform redacted documents into affective, visual experiences that expose the violence of erasure and the fragility of historical memory. Jarpa’s work, like de la tierra’s and Gutiérrez’s, insists on the embodied and emotional dimensions of archival recovery and political resistance.
Luis Guzmán’s “Chemical Borders” explores how long-term medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid use disorder can trap individuals in a prolonged state of liminality—what he calls a “chemical border”—where identity gradually erodes. While MAT can prevent relapse and overdose, it can also delay full recovery by keeping individuals suspended between addiction and abstinence, a suspension compounded by stigma and institutional control. Focusing on Puerto Rican communities in the U.S., Guzmán argues that mainstream treatment models often clash with collectivist cultural values. Recovery, Guzmán contends, must be understood not just as a clinical process but as a deeply cultural, and relational journey.
Pablo Biderbost and María Puerta’s “Regreso al futuro: desafíos de la población latina en Estados Unidos en tiempos de incertidumbre” analyzes the evolving challenges faced by the Latino population in the U.S. amid shifting political and economic landscapes. It argues that, despite significant civic and economic contributions, Latinos face heightened uncertainty due to erratic immigration enforcement, economic policies that threaten job stability, and legal challenges to long-standing rights, such as birthright citizenship. The authors contend that these developments create a climate of fear and instability, emphasizing the importance of academic and civic engagement. They believe that units like the LASA Latinx Studies Section can foster critical research to inform advocacy and policy that better address the systemic challenges confronting Latino communities in the U.S.
Américo Mendoza-Mori’s “Runa TikTok” explores how Quechua-speaking diasporas use social media to preserve and reimagine Indigenous identity across borders. His essay highlights the role of digital platforms in sustaining Indigenous knowledge systems and fostering transnational solidarity and echoes Lozano-Hemmer’s participatory ethos and Gutiérrez’s ancestral aesthetics. Meanwhile, Paloma Checa-Gismero’s “Aesthetic Conversions at the Borderlands” critiques the depoliticized aestheticization of the border in international art circuits. In contrast, she foregrounds the activist work of Collective COGNATE and Mujeres Mixtecas, who create “spaces of temporary autonomy” rooted in lived experience. Her analysis resonates with the dossier’s emphasis on situated, embodied, and insurgent practices of resistance.
Charlie Hankin’s “Borders of Yearning in Caribbean Popular Music” theorizes the “temporal borderland” between nostalgia and subjunctivity in Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s concept of emotional residue, Hankin shows how Caribbean music becomes a site of memory and possibility where the past and the not-yet-realized coexist in a space of yearning. And Erika M. Almenara’s “The In-betweenness of the Travesti as Creator of New Ways of Existing and Being in Las Malas by Camila Sosa Villada” analyzes the celebrated Argentine novel as a narrative of travesti life that challenges normative temporality and identity. Through shared vulnerability and disidentification, the novel enacts a poetics of resistance and reimagines kinship beyond hegemonic frameworks. Almenara’s focus on in-betweenness and alternative temporalities ties together many of the themes explored throughout the dossier: fluidity, resistance, and the radical potential of borderland existence.
Christina H. Lee’s “Confabulating the Quest for Kinship of a Transpacific Atravesada in Seventeenth Century Perú” offers a historical lens on the complexities of identity, kinship, and displacement in the colonial borderlands. Through the life of Leonor Álvarez—an Asian woman in colonial Lima who was at different times both enslaved and a slave owner—Lee reveals the emotional and moral ambiguities of life at the intersection of race, gender, and power. Leonor’s will, which grants freedom to her enslaved companion Isabel China and Isabel’s daughter upon her death, reflects the contradictions of seeking familial bonds within a system of bondage. By emphasizing Isabel’s Chinese origin, Leonor both legitimizes her ownership under colonial law and expresses a longing for connection. As an atravesada, or a forcefully displaced subject, her story mirrors the broader themes of this dossier: the entanglement of affection and violence, the search for belonging, and the fractured nature of identity in border spaces.
The dossier concludes with María José Arjona’s essay and artistic intervention “Otras posibles selvas,” which returns us to the Amazon as a site of colonial legacy, biocultural knowledge, and armed conflict. In collaboration with Brigitte Baptiste and Adriana Vásquez Cerón, Arjona reflects on how artistic practice can contribute to the preservation of natural and cultural heritage without reproducing extractivist logic. Drawing on a photograph in which she and Baptiste reenact La Pietá, Arjona challenges Western aesthetic traditions and proposes subtle, nonlinear gestures of resistance and emancipation. Her work honors the Amazon as a living ecosystem as well as an archive of ancestral knowledge and a space of ongoing struggle and reimagination.
The cover of this LASA Forum special issue, Borderland 2.0, features the work of the Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa. The piece, part of her exhibition Sindemia, addresses the social unrest in Chile from October 2019 to March 2020. Syndemics are the synergistic interaction of coexisting diseases or health conditions, which combine with social and environmental factors to amplify their individual effects and contribute to more severe health outcomes and heightened vulnerability (Shelke, Aditi, Saurabh Shelke, Sourya Acharya, et al. 2023). In Sindemia, Jarpa creates new cartographies that reveal the troubling connections between modern state violence and colonial-era destruction, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the Chilean Revuelta and enables the contestation of colonial legacies and current forms of oppression.
Our Critical Present
These essays collectively reimagine the concept of borderlands as Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa developed them in her groundbreaking work Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa once wrote: “I think of the borderlands as Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph, the one spot on earth that contains all other places within it. All people in it, whether natives or immigrants, colored or white, queers or heterosexuals, from this side of the border or del otro lado, are personas del lugar, local people—all of whom relate to the border and to the nepantla states in different ways” (Anzaldúa 2007). This vision of nepantla—a symbolic state of in-betweenness—resonates throughout the dossier. Whether through speculative photography, poetic insurgency, mutual aid, digital Indigeneity, or critical fabulations (Hartman 2008), the contributors to Borderlands 2.0 explore physical but also linguistic, cultural, affective, and epistemological borders. These borderlands are fertile yet fraught spaces where vivir entre lenguas, as Sylvia Molloy once proposed, becomes both a creative and political act. They are zones of resilience and invention, but also of trauma, misunderstanding, and violence.
We publish this dossier as a resurgence of political agendas and cultural imperatives seek to impose rigid, exclusionary identities. Across the Americas, including the United States and increasingly authoritarian and neoconservative regimes in Latin America, rhetoric and policy target immigrants, gender nonconformity, reproductive autonomy, and evolving understandings of embodiment. These developments underscore the mounting pressure faced by communities and individuals who exist in-between, those who traverse borders, categories, and norms and challenge the binaries that dominant ideologies attempt to enforce. In this context, the voices and stories gathered here are not only timely but essential. They speak to the resilience, creativity, and radical imagination of those who inhabit the margins, those who continue to redefine belonging, care, and freedom on their own terms, even as they navigate increasingly hostile and precarious political landscapes.
Together, these contributions create a multidimensional cartography of Borderlands 2.0: a space-time where past and future converge, identities remain fluid and contested, and the work of reimagining alternative possibilities persists notwithstanding political violence and new pedagogies of cruelty (Segato 2018).