El Río Grande as Pedagogy: The Unruly, Unresolved Terrains of the Chamizal Land Dispute

This essay responds to the existing historical literature on the Chamizal Land Dispute (1864–1964) that leaves unattended the political significance of the meandering Río Grande that caused this conflict. Borderlands historiography typically replicates the official US and Mexican state narratives that insist the Chamizal Treaty of 1964 wholly resolved this dispute by eliminating the river's unruliness. This essay, however, demonstrates that this land dispute is not so clear-cut and that it is still unfolding. Drawing on oral histories with El Paso residents displaced from el Chamizal by the treaty and a human geography theoretical framework grounded in the river's unruliness, I argue for engaging this history as an unruly geography of scars. This framework is then applied to analyze (1) the myriad ways the meandering Río Grande undermines and haunts white possessive logics along the El Paso–Ciudad Júarez borderlands, (2) the uncanny land/body disturbances of dislocation on particular Chamizal residents and what they call the "Chamizal diaspora," and (3) the strategies of refusal devised among the residents to challenge the Chamizal Treaty. By thinking with the Río Grande, this essay ultimately argues for how this river's unruliness offers pedagogies to refuse and unsettle white settler colonial processes and structures.