A Big “X” in the Open Wound: A Queer and Decolonial Borderlands Tale of the Chamizal Parklands

The Chamizal parklands at the Mexico–U.S. border emerged from a 1963 treaty signed between the two countries to resolve a century-old territorial dispute. The agreement further reengineered the mighty Rio Grande/Río Bravo river to affix it to the borderline that runs through the Chamizal parklands at the conjoined hearts of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas. Initially designated by Spanish colonizers as a boundary through an Indigenous crossroads at El Paso del Norte, the wild river regularly nourished its floodplains regardless of geopolitical borders. The treaty sought to discipline this border-non-conforming river by forcing its unruly waters into the concrete banks slicing through its watershed. By looking closer at the entangled socioecological landscapes of the Chamizal parklands as an object lesson for better understanding the challenges confronting a precarious borderland region, we see a geography characterized by a fluid interdependence rather than a binary borderline. In our retelling of the Chamizal story, this article engages with queer, decolonial, and borderlands literature to contextualize the parklands within an interdependent geography, and a fierce river that is its lifeblood, that has been gouged, as Gloria Anzaldúa powerfully described, by the “open wound” of a violent border and the many binaries it reproduces across this landscape.