Stanford Humanities Center
Victor (they/them) is a cyborgian writer and artist from El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Mexico, majoring in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity with a focus on Identity Diversity Aesthetics. Their research complicates and detonates normative representations of the U.S.- Mexico borderlands to find more resonant ways of articulating border atrocity. By researching the work of experimental artists from the borderlands, Victor writes towards an anti-border poetics that imagines fugitive futurities outside and despite walls of containment. In their free time, they love making scrappy-experimental-poetry short films, discovering underground queer latin rave music, and watching all that good television.
SHC Project
Queer Notes on Border Atrocity
Advisor: Usha Iyer
What is the focus of your current research?
My research aims to find/write/(de)compose a broken language through which to understand the (my) queer U.S.-Mexico borderland experience. I think with, through, and against borderland scholars, artists, archives, and testimonios to grapple with these hyper-militarized borderlands as a site of both beauty/refusal and death/terror. In my honors thesis, I attempt to find this broken language via a consideration/analysis of the more-than-human of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. What does paying attention the stories, journeys, and behaviors of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts’ plants, animals, and geologic features reveal about the logics of border formation? What do they reveal about how the dispossessed, the border-crosser, and the refugee might navigate this treacherous, hyper-surveilled terrain? My honors thesis questions and critiques popular political ecology analyses of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by placing these analyses in conversation with queer theory, Black studies and categories of the (H)uman, and Indigenous cosmo-epistemologies of relationality. I especially think through the Rio Grande as a site of haunting, tracing its histories of uncontrollable movement, its enforced channelization, and its significance as a place of both migrant death and liberatory desire, to tell a fuller story of U.S.- Mexico border violence. Interestingly, I find glimpses of this broken language I seek through a consideration of artists who have attempted to make sense of the borderlands’ disorientation through creative and experimental means. Turning to these artists allows me to formulate a very personal embodied theory of the borderlands experience, and to make an offering of what can happen—conceptually, metaphysically, literally—when we think of this militarized stretch of land through the agentic lenses of river water and human/non-human breath.
What drew you to this topic?
My lived experiences growing up in the Chihuahuan desert—both of privilege and of brutality—are never not pulsing through my veins. They make up the very fabric of my intellectual and artistic yearnings and desires. So, I see my work as a deeply imperfect commitment to make sense of the borderlands’ scars. I pay homage to the plants, animals, and rivers that held me growing up because it is my obligation to be in reciprocal relation to them. What else to do but engage in this honoring?
How are you conducting your research?
I am conducting my research primarily through a literary and artistic analysis. Since my thesis is an Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA) Creative Honors Thesis, it includes both a written portion and a creative portion. For the latter portion, I will make a queer, poetic experimental short film about my experiences in the borderlands (which is also a story about the river, about the border wall, about my mother, and about my queerness; all of these are inseparable for me and they cannot be articulated without considering the other).
What would people be surprised to learn about the topic you are working on?
1) Jaguars have historically roamed the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. 2) The Rio Grande has historically flooded and naturally altered its course, literally giving the United States and Mexico countless instances of trouble when it comes to clearly demarcating their respective nation-state boundaries of terror.
In your view, why is it valuable to study this topic?
To say that studying this topic is valuable is to severely water down and institutionalize the significance of this work. My stories, the stories of my community, and the stories of the borderlands are not to be reduced to a status of value. To me, what I write is not just an argument, or a research topic, or part of an intellectual endeavor. These are experiences and emotions that people living and crossing through the borderlands carry in their bodies. It means everything to make sense of these violences, to name them, to find meaning in all of these wounds. This work is not merely valuable, then. It is one way that I survive.
How is your honors thesis impacting you academically and/or personally?
My honors thesis is, more than anything, an intellectual and artistic meditation of my bordered childhood. To be completely honest, it has been rather difficult to sit down and write about the immense terror of border death. It is not an easy endeavor. At the same time, it is also an endeavor that has healed my barbed wire wounds in countless ways. My words in this thesis are an offering to myself, to my mother, to the Chihuahuan desert, and to those people that raised me.
How do you anticipate the fellowship will be able to support your research?
I admire and hold close so much of the work of the fellows at the Humanities Center, and I am genuinely looking forward to being in deep and intentional conversation with them. It would be remiss of me to not mention the stipend, as well, which will support me immensely as I embark on the creative portion of my thesis project.
