UC San Diego

This dissertation positions together cartographies of containment such as the archive, the border, transcolonial zones, and transfigured colonial carceral institutions alongside geographies of excessive fluidity such as the cuerpo-agua, difuentes, descendant spatial excess, and abolitionist autonomies to illustrate different practices of mapping relations through violence and through felt narratives of survivance and resistance. The project models a felt methodology that fleshes the archive through theoretical memoir, critical native and women of color feminist geography, and multi-directional eco-memory to theorize descendant spatial excess to the colonial archive. In doing so the project examines the colonial carcerality of the U.S.-Mexico border and theorizes anti-colonial abolitionist autonomy. Colonial carcerality is defined as the way that colonialism accompanies the development of the carceral state through the process of making space bounded, extractable, accumulatable alongside marking bodies for death, dispossession, and disappearance through the nexus of extraction, genocide, slavery, war, racialization, partition, and gendering regimes of domination. Colonial carceral geographies are most evident in transcolonial zones such as the Yuma Crossing, a point on the lower Colorado River in Yuma, Arizona, that are occupied by both Spanish and U.S. colonialisms that transfigure each other’s institutions and practices of extraction, representation, carcerality, and memory in ways that reinforce both colonial projects. The mutual transfigurations of Spanish and Anglo colonialisms limit and erase indigeneity and reproduce anti-blackness, as is illustrated through the dispossession and detribalization of O’odham and Yaqui laborers in Yuma in the early 1900s. Radical Mexican accompliceship is examined through analyzing how the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), whose leadership was once incarcerated in the Yuma Territorial Prison, developed a nuanced critique of colonialism and carceral statecraft that led to a politic of regeneración, anti-colonial abolitionist autonomy, during the 1910 Mexican revolution. Indigenous regeneration theorized in English is put into conversation with Mexican anarchist regeneración to imagine a cartographic unbounding of colonial carceral geographies through acts of abolition (burning the mission) and regeneration (re-storying and restoring relationships between native women’s and women of colors’ bodies and liberated geographies). Cuerpo-agua geographies and epistemologies are centered in this process.