Editor's Introduction

Exemplifying Meridians's mission to bring race and transnationalism into feminist conversation, the pieces in this issue illuminate what is at stake in our quests to grapple with settler colonial and imperialist legacies that flow through us. Like rivers, at times these legacies carry us along, at others they pull us under or require that we gather all our energies to swim against the current, and oftentimes these legacies demand that we remedy and protect them from the toxic wastes of earlier generations. As a group of indigenous midwives at the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camps cogently explained, water—whether amniotic fluid, drinking water, or rivers and oceans—must be a core aspect of feminist freedom struggles because "we're all downriver at some point."¹ From ending forced sterilization or forced pregnancy alike, to naming and preventing obstetric violence to intervening in the blithe disregard for the health of the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock nation, feminist water protectors make visible the legacies connecting birth-mothers, other-mothers, motherlands, and mother earth. Thus this issue's cover art by Elizabeth LaPensée, Our Grandmothers Carry Water from the Other World, by Elizabeth LaPensée, honors the legacy of (grand)mothers who remind us that we are "simultaneously separated and united by" water, as poignantly phrased by Lily Mabura in this issue.

Similarly, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's poetic memoir, "Whale Songs," brings together the legacies carried across the waters by her Ashanti, Shinnecock, and Irish grandmothers from their Caribbean, New York, and British island homelands. Together, these disparate legacies engender new "songs of oceanic longing" that sustain their "shipwrecked granddaughter." Here, too, in their seemingly unquenchable thirst for profits and for what they deem … "progress," settler-colonists prioritize access to oil over life-sustaining water. Along the way, Gumbs's speaker notes the cruel irony that the descendants of settler-colonists "who forced the whaling indigenous into sale instead of ceremony" later decided upon finding "other sources of oil" that "they could save the whales once they knew they didn't need them" (emphasis added, Gumbs, 10–11).

Following the ocean current across the Atlantic, we arrive at Gabeba Baderoon's poem "The Law of the Mother." In it, Baderoon presents a Moroccan speaker whose parents offer divergent maps for a sexual coming of age. The "law of the mother" calls for lovers who are "gentle with each other and take [their] time" nudging aside, rather than breaking, the membrane that stands between virginity and experience, much as a swimmer moves through and with water. In the father's world, however, loss of virginity is a "breaking" that sentences the speaker to a life of shame within a "bitter body." After a lifetime of nearly drowning in this legacy, the speaker maps a return to her body and a self that "enters again each knot and hollow" of her being with the help of a woman who loves women. (Baderoon, 16).

From one mother's "deep-souled" affirming legacy, we arrive at another much less so in Marie Sarita Gaytán's essay on the madre abnegada/selfless mother. The madre abnegada is "a martyr-like maternal figure" in Mexican culture that submerges class, ethnoracial, and gender inequities as well as violence in order to sustain the "fantasy of national unity." Gaytán argues that the madre abnegada ideal portrayed by Spanish-heritage actor Sara García was central to the development of a new postrevolutionary national identity that emphasized a "sentimental relationship between … nation and citizen" that cast mothers as vessels for, rather than members of, the Mexican body politic (Gaytán, 20). By contrast, Emily Lederman argues in "Queering the Chicana/o Archive in Felicia Luna Lemus's Like Son" that the novel's trans-man protagonist, "Frank. Born Francisca," rejects the madre abnegada's destructive legacy in a Mexican diasporic landscape (Lederman, 44). Lederman argues that in so doing, texts like Lemus's "open up space for moving toward a queer future that is nevertheless grounded and informed by messy and often traumatic inheritances from the past" (59).

Likewise, in "Illustrated Connections: Family, Memories, and Imagination in...