UC Berkeley

Bordering the Nation: Land, Life, and Law at the U.S.-Mexico Border and on O’odham Jeved (land), theorizes the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from an Indigenous cultural, epistemological, and political standpoint. How, it asks, do legal, social, and ceremonial demarcations, claims, performances, and authorities in the borderlands shape, and how have they shaped, O’odham jeved (Indigenous land)? Analyzing geopolitical borders as they have been constituted, contested (or ignored), reified, and made permeable over more than a century (1900- 2020), I conclude that settler imaginaries and jurisdictions collaborate in the borderlands under the auspices of border security, conservation, and humanitarian aid to both materially and symbolically undermine and inhibit O’odham connections and claims to land. Following an Indigenous and Ethnic Studies methodology and ethic, my project draws from (1) government archives, records from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, U.S. district courts, and the Tucson City Council; (2) Indigenous and migrant literatures—poetry, court testimonies, and oral histories (3) and ethnographic fieldnotes, which I collected while working alongside O’odham communities between January 2019 and March of 2020. The study is presented in five chapters. Chapter One brings the reader into the Indigenous borderlands and introduces the reader to O’odham jeved. Chapter Two investigates how Bureau of Indian Affairs officials leveraged geopolitical incorporation in the early 1900’s to control Indigenous people and Indigenous land spanning the border. Shifting to the present, Chapter Three, studies the Tucson City Council as a point of contact for actors across O’odham jeved. Looking to city resolutions passed in response to the happenings at the U.S.-Mexico border, I discern the flexibility and rigidity of contemporary jurisdictional power in the borderlands. Chapter Four theorizes the connection between Indigenous land and criminal immigration law by exploring U.S. v. Scott Warren (2019), a case in which a white humanitarian aid worker stood trial for allegedly harboring two undocumented border crossers. Citing the inhospitable landscape, both the prosecution and the defense constructed the land as an agent of violence to be accounted for, defied, or relied upon. Finally, Chapter Five, analyzes the haṣañ̃ (saguaro cactus) as a symbol in Indigenous and migrant literatures through which they contest national jurisdictions and assert their relationships to land.