Meso-Mapping the Borderlands

Among decolonial feminist, performance, and Chicanx studies, I offer a critique of damage-centered migration scholarship and propose meso-mapping to reenvision borderlands spaces through their potential for hospitality. I analyze my experiences of seeing migrant transit sites as deathscapes and investing in indictments of anti-immigrant policy that reproduces migrant vulnerability. Meso-mapping is an iterative heuristic exercise that defines the boundaries and contours of space according to the embodied knowledges that dwell there. I situate a genealogy of Aztlán cartographies as a prototypical example of meso-mapping, and show how the intellectual history of making Chicanx home within the ruins of colonial violences lays the groundwork for epistemically rich, transformative cartographies. I conclude with a meso-mapping experiment that centers the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano, a Mexico-based collective that infuses migrant routes throughout their region with hospitality. I sketch the shape of Contemporary Mesoamerica, a spiritual geography that builds from Paloma Martinez-Cruz’s epistemological terrain, and the web of migrant care that Rubén Figueroa weaves through his organizing across Mexico and Central America. Through my theorization and experimentation, I urge migration studies scholars to pair critiques of dispossession with commitments to documenting possibilities for life.