Border Biomes: Ecological Imaginaries of Mexico’s Edges . By Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez

Border Biomes is a combative book. Building on scholarship in the fields of Indigenous studies, border and migration studies, and the environmental humanities writ large, it makes the case that borders are “by their very nature, environmental crimes” (3). The book visits upon poetry and novels by Indigenous, Native American, Mexican, Chicanx, and Latinx authors to argue that, over the past two decades, literature has assumed a key role in “bearing witness” to the environmental degradation of Mexico’s border territories, “making the damage visible, and bringing it into sharper focus” (4). In addition, the book advances the claim that an ecological approach to the study of border regimes “cannot be decoupled from the imperative to advocate for migrant and Indigenous rights” (13). The term “border biomes” bridges the distance between these two arguments by naming “territories that are both Indigenous ancestral homelands and complex ecological systems traversed by colonial histories and geopolitical boundaries” (20). Studying literary representations of border rivers, deserts, and forests, Vázquez Enríquez traces how contemporary literature has contributed to the “disruption” of the geographies of settler colonialism.