Paper short abstract:

This paper traces practices of care in the US-Mexico borderlands through an examination of hydro-social engagements–including poetry that enacts water relations. Juxtaposing two desert watersheds within a contested ‘carceral landscape,’ the paper examines multi-species ideologies of care.

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,” Mohave poet Natalie Diaz positions her people’s river–today known as the Colorado–as an enactment, an entry point, for reckoning with vulnerability and on-going white settler violence in the face of environmental degradation. Recent scholarship on race and carceral technoscience examines how technologies originally developed for policing, border regimes, and prisons have expanded along a “carceral continuum” (Shedd, 2011) to extend beyond spaces of exclusion and detainment. While anti-immigrant zealots within the current US Administration have attacked and undermined federal laws aimed to uphold the international right to asylum, the US Mexico border has played the avatar for xenophobic and racist diversions to “Build the Wall!” As Sonoran borderlands peoples and ecosystems are experiencing a decades-long drought, increased food insecurity, and some of the highest rates of Covid-19 infection per capita in the world, the construction of this carceral landscape is endangering one of the largest and most environmentally unique ecosystems in North America. In this paper, I build from the poetry of Natalie Diaz, superimpose the idea of the carceral continuum, and draw from ethnographic research to examine long-standing hydro-social interventions of extraction, as well as practices of care–watershed restoration, maintenance, and harvesting–in the Sonoran borderlands.