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http://www.terrain.org/2014/columns/trans-waters-coalitional-thinking-on-art-and-environment/

Trans~Waters~ Coalitional Thinking on Art + Environment by

Adela C. Licona and Eva S. Hayward
As the fifith in a series of cross-posts with the University of Arizonas Institute of the
Environments Proximities, Terrain.org features a conversation between the
University of Arizonas Adela C. Licona and Eva S. Hayward.
Licona and Haywards collaborative photo essaywritten in a form they present as a type of experimental coalitional
thinkinggets at links between environmental degradation and issues of social justice, between climate change and
racism, between dead fish and desolation, between personal loss and liminal thinking and seeing, and between multispecies solidarities and decomposition.
This piece takes place in two (physical and web) locations: Guaymas, Sonora here in Terrain.org, and the Salton Sea
in Proximities.

Trans~ as Coalitional
What follows is a gathering of notes, incomplete journal entries, photographs, and stories that illustrate how
coalitional thinking might begin. A thought here, then a reflection, perhaps a question that prompts another story, and
some illustrations help get at shared insights, and probably a walk full of pointing and talking: coalition is a trans~
knowledge. Translation, transfiguration, transformation, trans-differentiation, and transcription: the prefix trans~
promises movements across, but never without holding tightly to the locations that it is moving from. Trans~ is a
prefix that is prepositionalit is a crossing of spacetime, a movement within relationship. As such, trans~ materializes
the process of movements; trans~ marks the where-ness of with-ness. We might say trans~ is moving-mattering,
foregrounding political lines and possibilities, and refusing to dissolve difference in favor of recognizing coalitional
modes of emergence as possibilities.
Trans~Waters~ marks, here, are shared commitments to the environment, anti-racism, and trans~ knowledges. We
mean this work to be a glimpse into a rather preliminary exchange between colleagues and friends who are getting to
know one another and recognizing affinities. We are deeply troubled by environmental injustices that play themselves
out always unevenly in bodies of water, bodies of knowledges and histories, our human and more-than-human
bodies, and the Earth. How do we understand the mutual natures of ecological violences and modes of racism? Can
a trans~ heuristic (a way of knowing through trans~) provide insights into environmental injustice? How are our
differently marked bodies and histories entry points into understanding and acting on ecological problems? As such,
this composition should be read as a transaction. A start. A possibility.

Guaymas

life@ /and beneath the swirls & the surfaces on the sea of cortez series.
Photo by Adela C. Licona.

Shortly after my mother died, friends suggested my partner and I drive to their home in San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico to
get away from Tucson for a while. They were well aware of the emotional and physical toll we had experienced as a
result of the year-long daily care we had given my mother at the end of her lifes journey. My mother had lived with us
for many years. In her final year, we had in-home hospice support but we accepted primary responsibility for her daily
care and almost never left her side; certainly not together. My sister and her husband would travel to Tucson to be
with us from time to time, and I thought to invite them to San Carlos so that they, too, might experience this bit of
reprieve our friends were so generously offering.
Hospice is fecund with patterns of involvement: to host, to be hospitable. To host a guest is an ethics of care, a
willingness to remain open to a guest without anticipation or expectation. But even here, to host (however Holy)
carries both hostel and hostile. For those of us who have been hospitalized for complications associated with AIDS,
we know the electrifying force of these resonances: my body is a host to infection; the hospital treats my unwanted
guest; the doctors are hostile to me (the host) and my infection (hostile guest). Anti-virals do not get rid of HIVthe
virus digs deep into bones, brain, and nervebut they alter the equation of hostile to hostel. Is this what is meant by
hospitality?
Once in San Carlos, we mostly sat. By the water. We did, however, occasion a day trip to Guaymas to see the Port
City and to find fresh shrimp. I recollected a memory. I remembered my father had traveled to Guaymas for business
in my childhood. I imagined him here. The city is industrial and gritty the way I like a place. Evidence of labor, of
things falling apart, and of things coming back together. Urban artscapes at work. Still-public spaces. Wealth and
poverty comingling openly and as a disavowal of other cities efforts to hide the parts that remind us of the cost of
uneven and inequitable development and exploitation. Not hidden or hiding behind walls or gates. So many
expressed contradictions. The angry and productive underbelly. Real and raw. All of it more honest. Like my mother.
She held disdain for pretense and the erasures it performed. While she knew the comforts of particular class
positionings, she knew poverty too. She understood class locations to be never about merit.
As my partner and I, together with my sister and her husband, meandered through the city streets in search of shrimp
and of nothing in particular, we stopped here and there so that I could take photographs, a practice I had come to
during the last year of my mothers life. Photography stilled me. It quieted me. And it moved me. To deep
contemplation. Closer looks. New ways of seeing. I had spent the last year exploring the world around me through a
macro lens. Focusing. Searching? Being house-bound, often my subjects were the cacti in the garden around our

home. Their imperfect and unlikely contradictionsgrotesqueness and splendor, death and life, delicacy and
treachery, softness and stingcaptivated my attention and offered me new lessons in loving the dry and the
desiccate. It all made sense to me, especially as I witnessed the disintegration of my mothers body together with an
almost imperceptible reintegration of her parts back into our spaces and structures and beings I recalled her mobile
of mirrors reflecting the morning sun, refracting her degeneration. Parts of her dispersed into the universe beyond our
family of five, made up of three generations of women. Transgenerational. Regenerations. I got closer and closer to
the intricacies of the cacti especially in their lived liminalities between de-composings and re-composings.

1 to 3 series.
Photo by Adela C. Licona.

One of the things I love about prefixes like de-, re-, trans-, and un- are their liminality. Hear the liquid constants in
liminal? How the mouth juices around those sounds? I love how those airy modulations become soupy. When my
mouth was full of KS lesions, my tongue would lick and worry their thick-warty shape. The words leaving my mouth
were wet from my tongues curiosity. What can feel more liminal than when your T-cells drop below 10, face covered
with empurpled cancers, and every conversation has you spilling your mouthy broth? Liminal is a threshold without a
value, a doorway without assurance.
There had been a hard winter freeze and I was fascinated by the exposure of the insides of the cacti and by the ways
parts of their outsides were ceasing to be while simultaneously beginning again I would frequently return with my
camera in hand to bear witness to some new growth that came together with the deformations and disfigurements
accomplished by the freeze. The seeming monotony undone by the tiny glory of subtle change. These details and
their relational contradictions and expressed ambiguities called and captivated me. Were meaningful to me. The
world around me was animating the false divide between life and death. The fluttering veil. La Muerte at play. I
focused my attentions for one year on a life~death~life continuum and on different prefixial composings as alwayssimultaneous processes.
The verb to decompose is to decay, to rot; what is composed is undone with that reversing prefix de-. Decomposing
marks the loss of composure, of control. And yet, as has always been true, this loss of composure is exactly what
exposes the composite shape of life. There is no absolute divide between composed and decomposed, the prefixial
work of de- is a marking, a watermark for the relationships already underway in compose. In a way, de- reminds us of
our indebtedness to the relationships that make us up in the flesh. Decomposing is a reminder of our obligations to
the world, a retelling that we are not simply in the world, but are of the world. This is not to glorify decompositionfor
too many of us the verb to decompose seems an imperative of late capitalismbut to remember (even this word, re-

member, tells the same story) that composure is predicated on the material conditions of many others. Said
differently, to de-compose is the promise we must keep.
When I cut my mothers hair, I was aware of that the part of her living self that fell to the floor got swept up with the
dog and cat hair, and found its way to the bird nest that was visible just outside her window. I imagined myself
breathing in her breath and tried to visualize the parts of her being that were spinning off in tiny sometimesimperceptible bits filling my lungs. I thought of her lungs. I saw our lungs in the exposed skeletal and lace-like
interiors of the cacti on their way to un/becoming something else. Other.

Uncarnival in Guaymas: Encountering the Unexpected, #1.

Photo by Adela C. Licona.

Consider how loss shapes our relationship to the living. We may mourn a loved one, feeling the world has become
poor and empty through their death. But, in the psychic calculus of melancholy, what is lost can become what is
preserved as part of the self. Unavailable to consciousness, melancholia marks this ambivalence of loss and
remembering. Perhaps melancholia also describes loss of loved ecosystems. If our sense of self is composed in
relationship to an environment, then as that environment sickens and dies we harbor the loss. Might this be why our
response to environmental catastrophe seems waylaid or insufficient? Or, perhaps more painfully, even the gift of
ambivalence (after all, the self aims toward composure, however ambivalent) is no longer possible in the face of
ecological un-livability. The loss of plants and landscapes is an effect of our human doingwhat we loved we must
have also hated to have treated it with such disregard. This is an unbearable equation, and the consequence has
become un-inhabitable for many already. Catastrophe is not awaiting us in some future; we are already living in
catastrophe. These pronouncements of hope and of salvation seem to only come from those whose privilege has kept
them sheltered for (and from) the moment. Be clear: most of the world is already living in the end times.
Photographing the inside structures of cacti that had fallen to the ground after that winters freeze, I imagined my
mothers capillary assemblies, recognized her now-fragile dermis, blackened and worn down lungs, and new mole
growths. My mother recomposing the world. I was learning a new grammar of animacy[1]. I made my way to San
Carlos with this sense of the world, of life-death-life, and of radical de-, re-, and interconnections. I turned my camera
lens to the water in the Sea of Cortez fascinated by the realization that I could never take the same photograph of the
seawater twice. Constant recomposings.
On the roads through Guaymas, I asked my brother-in-law to circle back to an inlet in the road where I saw gigantic
paper-mch sea creatures on floats. Disintegrating. It was evidence of a carnival gone by and in its present undoing.

Like me. Like my mother. Like my memories. And hers. Imaginary sea creatures in their slow undoing. Coming
undone. The gift of a slow departure. Allowing me to recollect. Re-member. Their presence, like that of the world I had
been attentive to for the last year, was evidence of something that had come before. And, somehow, the (false)
promise of it coming again. It brought back childhood memories of excess and delight, freaks, fright, and
exploitations. Too much sugar. Surprise. And disappointment. Larger than life. Grotesque. Alluring. Captivating.
Calling. Their juxtaposition in this contradictory scape of sea, desert, and mountainssurreal.

Uncarnival in Guaymas: Encountering the Unexpected, #2.

Photo by Adela C. Licona.

Sea creatures drying to pieces in the desert: a seahorsethe figure of sexual ambiguity with the male giving birthis
stationary to the left of the image. Surrealists appreciated the seahorse as a figure of surreal in the real, a living
condensation and displacement of what people imagined as real. For this papery seahorse, its constructed stage is
falling apart (so too are the worlds oceans), having washed inland to desiccate. The pealing green of a mer-creature
in the middle of a noiseless tune is another reminder of the burning heat of the land, of loss, and the yearning to
remember. In the flaking decomposition of this watery scene we encounter the collapse of opposites: ocean/desert,
noise/silence, promise/loss, living/nonliving, human/animal. There is a gorgeous sadness to these decaying
opposites. We recognize how little is needed to prompt the imagination: paint, wheels, and wood. And just as quickly
as these incite fantasy, they fall into dilapidated memory. Half remembered, half forgotten, left in the desert of rarely
seen again. It is the witnessing of this loss that stages its allure: what falls apart lays bare the ribs of its making.
I read somewhere that Guaymas was the city of carnival. Carne. Feasting before the fast. Cuaresma. Tied to Lent and
to Fat Tuesday and to excess and extremes before the imposition of religious restrictions. Again, the contradictions.
People masqued and made un/real. A play with notions of authenticity. Ambiguity. Queered recomposings. Originally
intended for the upper classes, carnival has become an event for the masses. La gente. La raza. Brown bodies in the
street. Newly surveilled. And newly contained. But not here. Now. In its undoing. Uncarnival. Scattered, scattering life.
Parts dispersed into the desert. The mountains. The sea. I found and ate shrimp. Sea creatures of this desert ocean.
The carnival is in me. And I am reconfigured. Recomposed. Unreal. Queer. She, too, makes me so.
Neither fish nor woman, neither seaworthy nor desert survivor, this mermaid resting against faux red coral is a
testament to pleasure. This mer-creature that has only pulsed with imagination, and the labor in making her, will
crumble to ruins. She is queer, she is trans~: she is a border figure. These are not utopic locations, they also mark
her stranded-ness; she is caught in a drying wound that weeps dust and debris. She is a forgotten monument to
thousands of women working the maquiladoras. Their labor is hidden and yet everywhere and in everything. Too

often we think of the border as site of crossing (of trans~ and queer), but more often than not the border (take for
instance the US/Mexico or land/ocean borders) is a space about who and what cannot move, of who and what falls
apart, or of who and what is lost. US/Mexico border is an infected wound, oozing militarization, racism, and
transnational exploitation. This mermaid cannot swim all these divides, even as she is signifier of that possibility. Her
body, like so many who bleed, will not survive border crossings even as she must try.

Reference
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Learning the Grammar of Animacy. The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural
World. Eds. Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy. Milkweed Editions, 2011, 167-77.

Read the Salton Sea at Proximities

View more photos by Adela C. Licona: Uncarnival in Guaymas: Encountering the Unexpected and Matters
of Scale: The Haunted Ecosystem of the Salton Sea

Adela C. Licona is Associate Professor & Director, UA Graduate Program in Rhetoric,

Composition, and the Teaching of English and affiliated faculty in Gender & Womens
Studies, Family Studies & Human Development, Institute of the Environment, and Mexican
American Studies. She serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee for the Institute for LGBT
Studies. Licona co-edited Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward (JHUP 2009)
and authored Zines In Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (SUNY
Press 2012). She is co-director of Crossroads Collaborative and co-founder of Feminist
Action Research in Rhetoric (FARR). She serves on the board for Womens Studies in
Communication, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking , Tucson Youth Poetry Slam, and
Orion magazine.
Eva S. Hayward is an assistant professor in Gender & Womens Studies at the University of
Arizona. Hayward was hired as part of the Transgender Studies initiative underway at the
university. Her research focuses on aesthetics, environmental and science studies, and
transgender theory. She has recently published articles in Cultural Anthropology, differences,
Parallax, Womens Studies Quarterly, Women and Performance. Her book, SymbioSeas, on
underwater representations and trans-species mediations, is forthcoming from Penn State
University Press.
The authors want to thank Francisco Galarte for providing editorial insights and
encouragement and Jamie A. Lee for generously reading early drafts of this essay.
Header photo, Uncarnival in Guaymas: Encountering the Unexpected, #5, by Adela C. Licona.