UC San Diego

This thesis argues that nepantla, a Nahuatl term meaning “in-between,” must be understood not only as an ontological and cultural condition, as developed in Mexican existentialism and Chicana feminist thought, but also as a decolonial method. Drawing on the work of Emilio Uranga, Elsa Frost, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Carlos Sánchez, I examine nepantla through three key philosophical dimensions: ontology, temporality, and liberation. I show that nepantla names a mode of being marked by existential suspension between worlds, histories, and epistemologies; a temporal structure in which past and present remain mutually entangled; and a liberatory method for resisting the different forms of domination produced by coloniality and modernity.I turn to my hometown Calexico in the prologue, interlude, and epilogue of this paper, reflecting on how the borderlands exemplify what I call “technological nepantla.” This highlights the limits of human fragility under technocolonial forces such as surveillance technologies, border enforcement, extractive industries, and environmental degradation, which plague the region. Through community efforts for solidarity, particularly through art and murals, I show how nepantla becomes a method of survival, creativity, and resistance. By tracing nepantla from its Nahua origins to its contemporary philosophical reinterpretations, I argue that its future lies not in universalization, but in its power as a decolonial framework for inhabiting and transforming the fractures of coloniality. Ultimately, nepantla reveals that being is a project which is always unfinished, and that liberation emerges from learning to act, imagine, and create within the in-between.