Project Overview: 

The final image of Alex Rivera’s film trilogy “Visible Border,” is a haunting x-ray of immigrant bodies hiding as bananas inside a shipping container (The Borders Trilogy). In bringing together the container and the immigrant body in this evocative picture of global labor and economy another equally horrifying images arises. The visual similarities of these government x-rays to abolitionist pamphlets that incorporated navel style drawings of slave ships is startling. Representations like “Description of a Slave Ship” (1789), were exemplars of navel drawing’s precision for schematic diagrams, in this case of seven numbered sections, each filled with tiny darkened figures representing the bodies of slaves. Like the bright white x-rayed images, there are no distinguishable individuals, just interchangeable laboring bodies that must be transported and/or deported.

In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy uses the “image of ships in motion” as his central organizing principle for understanding and analyzing what he terms “the Black Atlantic,” his mode of analysis in critiquing and expanding thought around black diasporas and black identities. In highlighting the similarities between the current day situation of immigrant transfer in containers and the legacies of the middle passage, Alex Rivera’s work and others, not only brings attention to new ways the borderland is being represented and imagined, but also, the impact of legacies of slavery on these conceptions. As such, I propose that reading these two units of analysis – that of the Borderlands and the Black Atlantic, two influential and foundational modes of thinking - highlights important considerations about how the brown laboring body in movement is being replicated and responded to today exness brokers. In an attempt to bring the Black Atlantic into the modern day borderlands, this “Atlantic Borderlands” offers a new means of critique in an new age of global labor.

My dissertation, “A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture" establishes a much needed dialogue between African American and Borderlands studies by considering the recent history of Mexican migration to New York within the context of a much longer history of black and brown laboring bodies.  In particular, I introduce a new theoretical framework,  "the Atlantic Borderlands," which allows me to make three key interventions in the fields of Latin@, migration, and Mexican/ Chican@ studies.  First, it brings Mexicans to the Atlantic Ocean – New York – to understand how they are changing, and have changed the US's most iconic immigrant city, as well as the global economic center of the US. Next, this shift moves border studies geographically out from the Southwest in order to develop a new meaning of border in which the Wall both haunts but is not visibly present. Instead, consumption and containment as symbolized by the shipping container becomes a central metaphor of post-NAFTA global trade, which has motivated so many Mexicans to new destinations, such as New York City. Lastly, the Atlantic Borderlands puts Chican@/ Latin@ studies into dialogue with African American Studies in new and profound ways. Beyond the Afro-Latin@ subject, then, I ask what does it mean to truly place Black and Latin@ theory into difficult and often uncomfortable conversations? What can be learned from these confluences and conflicts? And most importantly, what is gained from un-privileging a white western theoretical model of comparison exness legal in india?