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El R�o Grande as Pedagogy: The Unruly, Unresolved Terrains of the Chamizal Land Dispute
Abstract
This dissertation responds to the existing historical literature on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that leaves unattended the socio-political significance of the Chamizal Land Dispute (1864-1964) and the meandering R�o Grande that caused this conflict. In 1964, the Chamizal Treaty returned contested land known as “El Chamizal” to Cd. Ju�rez—making it the first and only time the U.S. has ever returned land to Mexico. Returning El Chamizal was only possible, however, by canalizing the R�o Grande along a redrawn boundary and displacing 5,600 mostly Mexican American El Paso residents—recalling the Chicana/o Movement’s refrain, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Despite this conflict’s ongoing significance to the El Paso-Cd. Ju�rez borderlands, the Chamizal Dispute has most often been consigned to a trivial, marginal past by scholarship on this region. In turn, the treaty has been memorialized as a “borderlands beacon” to the U.S.-Mexico diplomacy that finally and completely ended this conflict by ushering in “progress” to the region.
I offer a new analysis of this history, however, that demonstrates this conflict is not so clear cut and still unfolding. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, I first uncover the layered, ongoing efforts to conceal El Chamizal and the stories of its diverse, minoritized claimants (Manso, Suma, Apache, Tigua Pueblo, Mexicano, Anglo American, and Mexican American). I then leverage this terrain’s wayward, absented presence to reshape popular geographies and transnational histories of this region. In doing so, I argue that if we engage this conflict as a much longer, far more complicated, and ongoing story, the Chamizal Dispute is a stunning microcosm for studying legacies of displacement and dispossession across differentially racialized nonwhite peoples in this region, for studying the American frontier, white settler colonialism and racial capitalism, environmental history, the relationship between cultural memory and the built environment, and resistance to colonial domination—and all of these things from the Spanish colonial period to the present. I execute this project through two interventions. First, I demonstrate that El Chamizal was/is produced by overlapping native and colonial (Spanish, Mexican, and U.S.) sovereignties and inter-ethnic/racial relations to and place-making practices within El Chamizal. My second intervention comes from examining the river’s unruliness as a lens through which to theorize its land-based pedagogies of refusal. I argue these pedagogies denaturalize the white possessive logics (borders, property, racial capitalism, citizenship, etc.) required to enact the U.S. and Mexico as settler states. Ultimately, then, I demonstrate how El Chamizal is neither a reconciled conflict nor a wholly dominated landscape. Rather, El Chamizal is an unfinished, contested, and gendered fugitive landscape imbued with struggle, refusal, and challenges/alternatives to the status quo.
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