A Poet Finds New Life in America’s Borderlands

Poets have based entire works on the resilience of lives in the borderlands: Consider the theories of U.S. Chicana literature developed in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera; the English and Spanish in the verse of Eduardo C. Corral; or the translations, mistranslations, misunderstandings, and righteous objections that drive the new poems of Natalie Scenters-Zapico. U.S. readers—and U.S. poets—could hardly see the U.S. Southwest, or the Mexican northwest, without them.

As field biologists and historians know, new forms of life emerge, new questions arise, and necessities prompt inventions in the places where regions overlap and collide. Creoles and pidgins form and combine where lines of battle or vectors of commerce run; endangered species, like the Amur leopard, are said to flourish in the Korean DMZ, where borders mean they’re left alone. The U.S.-Mexico border is another such zone enforced by laws and walls but ignored by desert flora and fauna. The border has been a source of trouble and literary reaction, or creation, for generations of writers in both English and Spanish, as well as First Nations’ languages and in mixtures of tongues.

As field biologists and historians know, new forms of life emerge, new questions arise, and necessities prompt inventions in the places where regions overlap and collide. Creoles and pidgins form and combine where lines of battle or vectors of commerce run; endangered species, like the Amur leopard, are said to flourish in the Korean DMZ, where borders mean they’re left alone. The U.S.-Mexico border is another such zone enforced by laws and walls but ignored by desert flora and fauna.