Paper short abstract:

In this paper I present a portrait of a town at the Amazonian frontier of Ecuadorian settler colonialism, Macas. I do this by going back and forth across the borders and divisions (class, gender, race, sexuality, temporality) that constitute it, and that constitute it as a frontier town.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I present a portrait of a town at the Amazonian frontier of Ecuadorian settler colonialism, Macas. I do this by going back and forth across the borders and divisions (class, gender, race, sexuality, temporality) that constitute it, and that constitute it as a frontier town.

This paper will dialogue with two important work in Latin American thinking about borders and frontiers. Borderland / La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldua is an autobiographical reflection on what it is to live at the borderland between Mexico and the US, but also between heterosexuality and homosexuality, between male and female, and other such binaries. Razon de la Frontera y Fronteras de la Razon, by Colombian mathematician Fernando Zalamea, examines the tools used by marginal scientists and artists to think the border and go beyond the limits of reason, especially the divide between science and art.

In these maps of pleasure and desire, I look for the points where they turn into their opposite, pain and aversion, or vanish into numbness and indifference. I also follow people who themselves go back and forth across these borders, such as indigenous transgender people, or mestizo settlers sent by the State to indigenous territories, and interrogate the knowledge that they produce. What do they do to concepts such as « border », « liminality », « mestizaje », « transition », « transgender », « crisis », « alternation », or « dialectics » ?