Paper short abstract:

A water poetics of the Madrean Sky Islands–a contested region of vital biodiversity–emerges from walk-and-talk interviews with local stakeholders, ethnographic poetry, and an audiovisual portrait from the hydro-social research, Entre Rios: Surveillance and Futurity in the US-Mexico Borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

"A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It has a head. It remembers everything," Natalie Diaz (Postcolonial Love Poem, 2020: 50).

In her poem, “The First Water Is the Body,” Pulitzer-prize-winning Mohave American poet Natalie Diaz positions her people’s river, the Colorado, as an enactment, an entry point, for reckoning with vulnerability and ongoing white settler violence in the face of environmental crisis. Building from Diaz’s poetry, I seek a water poetics that can be placed into conversation with competing notions of futurity in the Madrean Sky Islands–a vital biodiversity eco-region spanning Mexico and the United States and comprised of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of diverse habitat including desert, subalpine forests, grasslands, and riparian streams (Davidson, 2021). Toward this endeavor, I will discuss preliminary research findings. Drawing from walk-and-talk interviews with local stakeholders, ethnographic poetry, and on-site audiovisual recordings, I will present a first audiovisual portrait of the Sonoita Creek, a tributary of the Santa Cruz River – one of the watersheds in my hydro-social research, Entre Rios: Surveillance and Futurity in the US-Mexico Borderlands. Due to the centrality of water in this arid region, water defense activism, watershed maintenance, and restoration, restoration of habitat and wildlife corridors, and sensor-tracking documentation of borderlands wildlife are conceptualized as hydro-social practices of care that ‘imagine otherwise’ during uncertain times.