Introduction¹

“It’s great you’re here! I mean, we all live in the same watershed.”²

Francesca Claverie Cantú, native plant specialist, town council member and manager of Borderlands Nursery and Seed, smiled as she welcomed a new visitor from a neighboring town to the annual Monsoon Plant Sale. ³ Francesca’s oldest dog, Chiltepín, named after a favorite regional chile pepper, watched from the shade as people stopped in, made admiring comments about the greenhouses, shared anecdotes about their plants, and left with new species including pollinators, soil fixers and habitat and shade providers like milkweed, tepary bean, sacatón and velvet ash. Monsoon season in Southern Arizona softens the relentless intensity of summer heat. People look forward to dramatic clouds rolling in (fig. 1), temperatures cooling down, lightning, and that unmistakable scent of creosote signaling the nearness of water. For many desert dwellers, the monsoons are a highly anticipated, beloved time of year–and a critical event for re-charging the water table. During my fieldwork in the summer of 2023, the desert monsoons started late. People complained about its tardiness and wondered whether or not the monsoons would come at all. Any little bit of rainfall garnered attention.

Water talk—how much, how little, when and if it would rain—featured noticeably in conversations. In an arid region, currently experiencing a decades-long, mega drought, access to water is an existential question. Outside the region, however, the presence, absence and well-being of water doesn’t generally come to mind when thinking of the U.S.- Mexico borderlands. Ignorance and disinformation about the region has notoriously led to devastating human, environmental and political outcomes.⁴ In this context, Francesca’s hydro-social thinking, how she builds relationality through the physical knowledge of a shared watershed, introduces the conceptual pivot I wish to make in this article. De-centering “The Border Wall” and repositioning it in relation to a broader hydro-geological framework—a shared watershed—offers compelling possibilities for the urgent task of reimagining the borderlands. Within a landscape of necropolitical policies of deterrence (De Leon, 2015), mining extraction, and some of the most biologically diverse ecological networks in the Americas, the re-imagining of the borderlands takes many shapes. Of particular interest for this project is the work of environmental stewards, citizen-scientists, and community activists who employ diverse practices to protect and rehabilitate waterways and wildlife travel corridors.⁵

This article draws upon a water/landscape ethnography that examines ecological practices of care as a politics of otherwise (Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2020; Haraway, 2016; Kohn, 2013; Povinelli, 2014; Tsing, 2015).^{6, 7} Kehr has argued that researching “spaces of the otherwise and thereby contributing to their existence” (2020: 41) is one role anthropology can play in response to the environmental and political demands of our times. She writes, “It is through letting oneself be affected by, thinking from and writing about the otherwise (…) that we can grasp what’s at stake, and make a political contribution to crafting such spaces” (Ibid). In a region plagued by extractive and settler-colonial violence, there is indeed much at stake.⁸ Through a reflexive discussion of multimodal practice, including filmmaking and poetry, I offer glimpses into a work in progress exploring this mosaic of a border multiple and the everyday practices and local actors that shape it.⁹

The research is based in the Sonoita Creek watershed, a tributary of the Santa Cruz basin–a tri-national watershed in the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham people. In a small (approximately 900 people) town in Southern Arizona, I began on-site fieldwork in winter/spring of 2022 making poems, video and audio recordings and accompanying diverse stakeholders in their daily engagements with plants, rivers, springs, water feeders, mining companies, birds, and surveillance infrastructure. Conversations with research participants were audio-recorded as they walked me through their places and practices. In the summer of 2023, I continued multimodal fieldwork and began volunteering with two human ecology organizations and one local environmental defense group. Activities included checking motion sensor cameras, planting wild-harvested seedlings and potting native plants, accompanying local volunteers involved in a cross-species (migratory bats/agave cactus) conservation project, and watershed protection efforts. In particular, “spring seeking” to gather baseline data on regional springs that stand to be impacted by the South 32 mine emerged as an issue of pressing concern.^{10, 11} Taken together, these divergent activities introduced me to local actors and granted opportunities to observe how borderlands dwellers advocate for, and learn from, complex, vibrant assemblages in the Madrean Sky Islands.

 

 

Madrean Sky Islands

Spanning northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States are over fifty mountain ranges known locally as the Madrean Sky Islands.¹² These pine and oak mountain ‘islands’ are surrounded by the desert and grassland ‘seas,’ and range between 915 – 3,300 meters in elevation. Connecting the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts to the subtropical Sierra Madres in the south and the temperate Rockies to the north, the Madrean Sky Islands are home to a rich panoply of biodiversity including coatimundi, jaguar and ocelot. Among the most biologically diverse eco-regions in the Americas (López-Hoffman & Quijada Mascareñas, 2012), the Sky Islands are comprised of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of diverse habitat including subalpine forests, deserts, grasslands, riparian streams, endangered wetlands and impassable wilderness (Davidson, 2021). For ten years, I had the good fortune to live in the Sky Islands. After working in El Salvador as an investigator with the Salvadoran Association in Search of Disappeared Children, Pro Búsqueda, I moved back to the US in 1998. I wanted to live in a bilingual Spanish-English environment with a strong history of advocacy for refugee rights,’ and Chicano/e/x and Indigenous social movement organizing. Tucson offered all of that, and more. I volunteered with different migrant rights organizations and began work as an adult educator. A colleague told me about her housemate, a wildlife biologist, who studied mountain lions and taught people how to identify animal tracks. I signed up for a volunteer trip with the Sky Island Alliance, an organization with a curiously poetic name. Volunteers and environmental stewards from the organization met at a gas station in midtown Tucson and together we carpooled south toward the headlands of the Santa Cruz River. At that time, during most of the year, the river was dry, an arroyo, but during heavy winter rains and summer monsoons, the river came alive with powerfully rushing water. Arroyos are important migratory corridors, animal byways, and this is where we studied how to identify tracks. That first trip to the San Rafael Valley marked the beginning of my interest in the Sky Islands. It wasn’t until many years later, after following a Ph.D. fellowship to Europe, that I found an opportunity to return, this time as a multimodal anthropologist.

 

 

 

In the wake of the border wall

The current border wall is a multi-form apparatus of economic extraction, political use, and state-sanctioned violence. The borderization apparatus creates a kind of “one-world world” (Law, 2015) in which all other worlds are obscured. De la Cadena and Blaser explain, “Extractivism…actively creates space for the tangible expansion of the one-world world by rendering empty the places it occupies and making absent the worlds that make those places” (2018: 3). De la Cadena and Blaser’s discussion of extractivism provides a productive framework for apprehending a process of dispossession in which heterogeneous, multi-relational places are rendered empty. Indeed, this particular “extractive zone” (Gómez-Barris, 2017) has been weaponized by political pundits and politicians as an “inherently dangerous” “no-man’s land” (Del Bosque, 2024). Furthermore, building upon recent scholarship on race and technoscience (Benjamin, et al., 2020) that examines the inter-connections between surveillance technologies, policing and prisons, the expansion of the border regime and its attendant technologies and border security industries could also be understood as constituting a “carceral continuum” (Foucault, 1977; Shedd, 2011).

In Southern Arizona technologies of borderization include a “virtual wall” of integrated fixed towers (IFTs), mobile video surveillance systems, Predator B surveillance drones, mobile X-ray units, automated license-plate readers, and cellphone tracking towers (Aizeki et al., 2021). This resource-intensive infrastructure produces massive surveillance data (Muñiz, 2022). Based on his decades-long engagement with borderlands communities, investigative journalist Todd Miller (2014) contends that border regime technologies, policing and infrastructure produce a sense of “militarized occupation” on both sides of the border. Additionally, the material infrastructure of the border wall—new roads, operating bases, stadium lights—eliminates habitat, kills animals directly and threatens the well-being, mobility and future existence of multiple species (Cordova & de la Parra, 2007; Schlyer, 2012; Traphagen, 2022). Its physical presence severs the ecosystem, prohibiting endangered and endemic species alike access to water, food, habitat and opportunities to find shelter and mate (Greenwald et al., 2017; Lambroso, 2021). As Peters et al. write, the border “infrastructure fragments habitats (thereby subdividing populations into smaller, more vulnerable units), reduces habitat connectivity, erodes soils, changes fire regimes, and alters hydrological processes (e.g., by causing floods) (2018: 740).

 

 

Sensory Invasion

How do local actors understand the border apparatus? At the beginning of the research, when I first began speaking informally with local people about the questions that most concerned their everyday lives, the answers I heard back did not include questions of border security or surveillance infrastructure. Instead, people spoke about the need for affordable housing, better job opportunities and wages, the pressures of gentrification and the rising cost of living, the looming environmental and social impacts of the South 32 mine, and water.¹³ When I explicitly asked about the border wall apparatus, interviewees did note how the presence of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel and infrastructure has changed their habits and sense of well-being. For example, one interlocutor, a musician, teacher and civil rights organizer who has lived in Nogales for several decades told me,

Given the limited cloud coverage and relatively low levels of light pollution, the presence of a clear, vibrant night sky is a cherished aspect of desert life.¹⁴ In this context, Lozano Aranda conceptualizes surveillance as an invasion of the senses that creates disorientation and fear. He continues,

This sensory invasion of being watched and flooded with artificial light is inextricably linked to human intervention. Gustavo also spoke to his involvement with the local human and civil rights organization, the Border Action Network. Formed in 1999, the group organizes and educates Arizona-Mexico border residents in Nogales, Douglas and Tucson, in addition to advocating for Indigenous and international migrants and refugees. One of their slogans declares, “Our Communities Are Not War Zones.” The slogan discursively disrupts a militarized conceptualization of the borderlands that position borderlands communities as ‘dangerous,’ ‘suspect’ and ‘criminal.’ Another interviewee, a retired high school history teacher from the Nogales school district who has lived in the borderlands his entire life, told me the following,

We laughed at the dry humor of this unexpected answer to border patrol. Presumably, only a local person would know the cardinal direction in which they were moving. The devastating reality is that asylum seekers and other migrants, unfamiliar with the terrain of the Sonoran Desert, get lost, sustain injuries, go missing, and even die on their journeys. My research participant’s concern about the growing presence of cameras raises fundamental questions about the purpose of said infrastructure. In their photo essay on surveillance in the borderlands, Thomas and Meyer (2024) describe one of their documentary research photos. In a chilling passage they discuss a photograph marking the death of Javier Mendoza in 2021, one of the thousands of people who have died on their journey north. They write,

The death of Javier Mendoza was monitored and recorded by publicly-funded, multi-billion-dollar, state-of-art border surveillance infrastructure. Ana Muñiz locates the power of The Wall in “the cruel symbolism of its message” (2022: 134). She writes, “The US-Mexico border wall is monolith of white supremacy and the supremacy of the Global North, an anti-beacon warning outsiders to turn back because there is no shelter for you here” (Ibid). Of course, the conspicuous statecraft of The Wall is not only symbolic, and it also impacts other mammals throughout the region. In documenting the inevitable death created in the wake of the border wall, environmental stewards have used motion-sensor camera footage of mammals and birds trapped, wounded or killed by the apparatus.

 

Other-than-human entanglements: watershed portraits and ethnographic poetry

To dig beneath the surface stability of any entity is to encounter a host of different phenomena and processes working in concert. The radical nature of this vision becomes more apparent when one realizes how any particular assemblage is itself composed of different discrete assemblages which are themselves multiple (Haggerty & Ericson, 2003: 608).

The camera and sound work I developed to perceive and document more-than-human entanglements emerged from what I learned by observing local volunteers, hydrologists, and environmental stewards. While out walking and searching for springs, for example, I learned how to better perceive a complex waterscape of inter-connected surface and groundwater that requires close observation.¹⁷ Chuck Bowden (1985) has named the finite resource of groundwater, “hidden water.” Once you begin sensing and looking for water in the desert, its traces are everywhere in the form of downcutting, and in the presence of certain species of trees, plants and insects. This led to my experiments making audiovisual water portraits, or portraits from within a watershed. The formal approach was informed by geological filmmaking as conceptualized by Sasha Litvintseva (2022), feminist sensory ethnography as theorized by Elena Guzmán and Emily Hong (2022) and slow cinema from works including El Mar/La Mar (Bonnetta & Sniadecki, 2017) as well as the films of John Akomfrah (2010) and James Benning (1991; 2000; 2001). I began first with audio recordings. I then filmed static tableaus held for up to eight minutes. James Benning has called this approach, a “test of patience” (MacDonald, 2007). It’s unclear if he refers to the patience required of the viewer to watch the material or of the filmmaker in making it, but I initially found it hard to be still. As planned, I would drive, and hike and haul my equipment through the heat to one particular spot, and record. At each location, I would set up the sound first: tripod up, mics in, cables out, mixer ready, headphones on. I made hand-held video recordings, but mostly captured stationary footage; I placed the camera on the tripod, set the balance, adjusted the focal length and aperture, pressed the record button and stood as still and quiet as possible. The detailed, procedural care created a purposeful engagement with this water/landscape. Slowing down, and the observational work itself offered both an entry point for engagement and an expression of my epistemological desire for a politics of otherwise.

 

 

An aesthetics of accountability (Ginsburg, 2018) shaped my practice. Who am I looking for? What am I observing? What do I want the viewer to see, consider, feel? For the edit, I made my aesthetic choices based on the framework of a watershed. I asked myself, who are the actors and actants that comprise this assemblage? I wanted the human presence to feel attenuated. People are not absent, but they are not central. There is no dialogue in the video and I chose not to include any of the recorded interviews–for now. Instead, I focused on ambient sounds recorded on location. Insects chirping and scattering. The buzzing zing of hummingbird wings. The cry of grey hawks. Music as it slips from a home on the south side of the international divide and mingles with the low pulsation of the border wall (fig. 4). The sounds of water as it moves through tributaries, seeps, and springs, and as it rushes from a greenhouse hose. Cows bellowing across dry river beds (fig. 6). The loud, invasive clamor of the South 32 mine (fig. 8), a man in a hard hat and yellow vest standing near a mining truck behind a fence. Two men standing on the other side of the fence, watching. Truck engines, air conditioning. Thunder and wind. Rain hitting leaves, barriers and hard earth. Through this percussive, teeming, more-than-human world I want to surprise the viewer. This, too, is the borderlands. Here, beneath, between, behind these images, is the concept of hidden water–its life-giving necessity, its fragile uncertainty.

Every evening, I would watch material recorded during the day, but I didn’t listen to my audio recordings until I had returned to Europe. When I did listen, what I noticed first was my loud, impatient body. My stomach grumbled. I exhaled deeply, shuffled my feet, swatted mosquitoes and flies. It seemed hard to be still. Nevertheless, I waited to see what might unfold before the lens, and this impatient waiting reminded me of the limitations of audiovisual capture. While looking through the lens, I felt a heightened receptivity to the senses that could not easily be perceived by the camera–the exquisite shift of possibility made by a breeze against my skin on a furnace-hot day. Or the senses that were out of reach to the camera but breathtakingly present to me–the intense, ivy-green scent of yerba mansa co-mingling with wild spearmint (fig. 5), or the funky smell of a mesquite bosque (forest) just after a monsoon downpour. There was also this internal jump my body would make at the anticipation of a presence in the corner of my eye–a rattlesnake, a javelina, a mountain lion? In other words, these moments reinforced my conceptualization of the audiovisual portraits as one piece of a larger multimodal puzzle that also includes poetry. In his discussion of the role of poetry, poet and educator Terrance Hayes writes, (…) “poetry bridges, synthesizes, transforms. Like water it does not give in so much as give away, give a way. Poetry is where we influence and are influenced by what influences us. Poetry is where we shape and take the shape of what shapes us (2018:84). Hayes names this approach ‘the poetics of liquid,’ and the way giving that is offered through the practice of making a poem is particularly instructive for this project. The following poem provides a snapshot of me at work with my camera.¹⁸ It begins in the uncanny moment just before a monsoon downpour.

 

Late-July Monsoon

Orange-thick, still
the sky. Ravens, cactus
wrens, Gila woodpeckers,

hummingbirds—each one
gone—hiding. To better observe,
I walk the water-riveted

soil, toward the crest. From the door
of your adobe, I see you wave
and turn out the lights. Thoughtful

neighbor. Above
the house, a gathering of ashen cloud
collects. Below, the musty pool

of mesquite forest wanting
for a downpour. I start recording. Light
—rayos, relámpagos, corrientes—

traces air. The currents
do not touch down, yet
I am (always

impatient) anxious. Who’s to say
this lightning won’t land
somewhere that hurts? My skin

reminds me each time I step
into a midday sun;
all this love can burn.

 

Environmental stewardship and motion sensor cameras

 

“What am I looking at?” I asked, “What are these oaks?” “So many varieties,” Bryon Lichtenhan, an environmental steward with the Sky Island Alliance answered, “Emory Oaks, Mexican Blues, Arizona White Oaks, Silver Leaf, Canyon Live Oaks, Gambels.” He picked a few bellotas from one of the oaks for us to taste. Still a little unripe, the seed was butter yellow and I popped it into my mouth—bitter, but satisfying. We had left town early in the summer morning to check on a collection of motion-sensor cameras for a US-Mexico study documenting the impacts of border wall infrastructure on diverse species. As we ate the acorns, we looked southward over the rolling “sea” of sky islands. The diversity of well-established oaks, the variety of blooming agaves, the red and sage of manzanita brush—one hill in “Mexico” and another hill in the “United States” looked the same.

Environmental agencies and local stewards regularly employ motion-sensor cameras in their advocacy and conservation efforts. Beginning in March, 2020, the Border Wildlife Study directed by the Sky Island Alliance began gathering data from 65 cameras on both sides of the border. They state, “our cameras kept watch to understand how wildlife respond to the remaining gap in the wall across the San Rafael Valley, where species like mountain lions, black bears, porcupines, and pronghorns can still move between Sonora and Arizona.”¹⁹ Based on the camera data, the organization is able to compare border infrastructure—ranging between the more permeable vehicle barrier walls and the less permeable barriers of 5- and 9-meter walls—toward policy that better protects and cares for the unique biodiversity of the region. Environmental steward, Lichtenhan told me that their previous studies had placed cameras where they had expected to find wildlife—near water sources, for example. This study was designed to get a broadscale look at the entire wildlife community. When asked about what had most surprised him from the data, he pointed out a few findings. These included the widespread presence of diverse fauna on the images collected and the relative absence of people captured on camera in this particular section of the border. He told me,

During our outing to gather data from the cameras, somewhere after the current dig from the South 32 Mine and just before the abandoned remnants of the Duquesne Mine, Bryon pointed out a large, pink-grey Western Coachwhip. He stopped the truck and we dropped down from the vehicle but before we had a chance to see the snake up close, it had traveled on. At each camera stop, we worked as a team. While Bryon unlocked the motion sensor camera attached to the trees, and removed each one from its metal cage, I unpacked six batteries and handed them over. He then called out the data and I noted everything down. For example: Battery: 100%. Card: Not full (250 pictures). Date: Correct. Time: 2 mins. off

At a couple camera stations, Bryon pointed out photographs of wildlife circumventing the wall—deer jumping over, crawling under, finding an opportunity to get through. He noted,

The camera infrastructure has created new resources for birds and insects. For example, in the San Rafael Valley, near the headlands of the Santa Cruz River, the camera stakes have become perches that kestrels use for hunting. The metal camera casings serve as tiny preserves for different insects. Along the route we found several crickets, a caterpillar, a cockroach, and spider casings inside the camera boxes. Throughout the day, as we traveled up and down the border along narrow, poorly maintained dirt roads in search of the camera data, we talked about environmental stewardship, the Sky Islands, and big cats. Bryon told me about a solo trip to the Galiuro Wilderness when a full-grown mountain lion came across his camp. The first time, Bryon was cooking dinner when he heard a loud clunk from a log in the river beneath the cave where he was camped. The lion seemed completely unaware of Bryon’s presence. It had been moving loudly, un-self-consciously, along the river—as if stumbling over to the fridge for an evening snack. From a distance of about 7 meters, he watched the cat. Once the lion registered his presence, it changed before Bryon’s eyes. It became stealth, and continued on its way down the canyon—this time, without a sound, with barely a noticeable motion—before disappearing into the sycamore, ash, elder and mesquite of the riparian oasis. We talked about wildlife tracking and the use of digital images to advocate for the protection of wildlife corridors. He explained that a photograph of an animal track is hard to read but a sensor image of a jaguar or mountain lion, “that’s something people get excited about in the Sky Islands.” In fact, in December 2023, a previously undocumented jaguar made national and local news when a wildlife camera enthusiast captured its image on a trail camera. In a press release, the Center for Biological Diversity confirmed the cat to be the eighth wild jaguar recorded in the region over the past thirty years. Southwest conservation steward, Russ McSpadden stated, “…these majestic felines continue to reestablish previously occupied territory despite border wall construction, new mines and other threats to their habitat.”²⁰

 

Conclusion

This article proposes a pivot in our conceptualization of the borderlands in Southern Arizona, foregrounding ecological practices of care as a politics of otherwise, in tension with a bordering apparatus that endangers the lives and well-being of desert dwellers. In particular, vernacular surveillance is discussed as one practice helpful for understanding how local communities and land stewards document and remediate the multiple violences wrought by border militarization. Further, in a region marked by lethal migration policies, pervasive surveillance of mobility, transnational mining extraction, and the privilege of exceptional ecological diversity, a focus on the existential and imaginative possibilities of watershed thinking offers a productive framework. It facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the inter-connected crises of environmental degradation, human displacement, and economic inequality—issues deeply rooted in the geopolitical and environmental history of this region. Additionally, as Tsing, Mathews and Bubandt argue, “the great ecological shifts of the Anthropocene require special attention to the landscape disturbances of imperialism and industry” (2019: 188). I have demonstrated how multimodal engagement might attend to these disturbances, circumventing entrenched perceptions and cultivating sensorial curiosity. Through audiovisual watershed portraiture, landscape ethnography and poetry, I introduce actors, ideas, and practices within the Sky Islands that offer pathways for apprehending a border multiple. Moreover, the imaginative practices of filmmaking and ethnographic poetry allow for an exploratory engagement, where slowing down to listen and observe provide entry points into these ecological and political landscapes. In this way, the research underscores the potential affordances of recognizing shared watersheds as inter-relational spaces—sites of connection that transcend borders, revealing practices of otherwise that are rooted in care, solidarity, and potential reimagination.

Ecological practices of care depend upon broad collaborations with diverse stakeholders, including tribal councils, federal and state agencies, scientists from multiple fields of expertise, and private land owners, among others. Since the inaguration of Donald Trump in 2025, this labor has become more difficult in troubling ways. Unjustified layoffs of federal public servants, cuts to operational funding, threats to scientific research and academic freedom, disregard for the rule of law, and content-related directives such as the Executive Order banning terms such as “climate change” and “women” from federal grants, among other threats, present far-reaching, detrimental impacts to the ecological, political and social well-being of the Sky Islands. During a time that is profoundly overwhelming and uncertain for so many, I am hesitant to draw conclusions. What is clear to me is that this region offers a vital site for rethinking the interconnectedness of human, ecological, and political struggles, urging us to adopt more holistic frameworks of care and solidarity.

 

---

^{1. I take my cue from Annemarie Moll’s evocative concept of the “body multiple” (2003). ↩}

^{2. “A watershed is an area of land that drains or “sheds” water into a specific waterbody. Every body of water has a watershed. Watersheds drain rainfall and snowmelt into streams and rivers. These smaller bodies of water flow into larger ones, including lakes, bays, and oceans.” https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/watershed/ ↩}

^{3. The nursery is a project of Borderlands Restoration Network. The organization’s mission is “to grow a restorative economy by rebuilding healthy ecosystems, restoring habitat for plants and wildlife, and reconnecting our border communities to the land through shared learning.” https://www.borderlandsplants.org/native-plant-program ↩}

^{4. The first Trump Administration’s campaign to, “Build the Wall!” is one contemporary example. The administration waived dozens of federal and state environmental protection and cultural heritage laws to access and irreparably damage public lands and remote wilderness areas. In their efforts to build 18-30 ft. sections of wall, they bulldozed ancient saguaros and organ pipe cactus, blew up entire mountainsides and introduced unnecessary infrastructure into endangered ecosystems. ↩}

^{5. The research presented in this article draws upon the multi-year project, “Entre Ríos: Surveillance and Futurity in the Sky Islands.” Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), Entre Rios is a subproject of “Big Data Lives: Anthropological Perspectives on Tech Imaginaries and Human Transformations,” https://bigdatalives.ch ↩}

^{6. See, for example, Mathews (2018). ↩}

^{7. Here, I build on the critique of care and conceptualize care as located in practice. See, for example, Domínguez Guzmán, et al. (2021), Moll, Moser & Polls (2015), Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) and Reisman (2021).  ↩}

^{8. See Dunbar-Ortiz (2014), Nakano Glen (2015), and Rana (2010) for discussions of settler colonialism in a U.S. context. ↩}

^{9. Watersheds I and II are edited from my documentary film in development. Throughout the article are video stills from the videos, along with photographs from the Sky Islands. ↩}

^{10. Read local coverage about the initiative: https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/090123_hermosa_springs/volunteers-spring-survey-water-patagonia-mountains-before-mine-begins-pumping/ accessed August 20, 2024. ↩}

^{11. The South 32 industrial mining project is a multi-billion-dollar initiative that plans to mine for “transitional minerals” like manganese and zinc. To reach the mineral deposits, the mining operation must first “de-water” the Patagonia Mountains to the tune of 6.4 million gallons of water per day. The local watchdog organization, Patagonia Area Resource Alliance has been monitoring the initiative: https://www.patagoniaalliance.org/start-here/ accessed August 20, 2024. ↩}

^{12. According to the Sky Island Alliance, the first publication of the term appeared in a 1943 and was later popularized by nature writer Weldon Heald in his book, Sky Island (1967); the idea of mountains as habitat islands took hold in the scientific community around the same time as Heald’s publication. Although the sky island concept appears to have originated in the Madrean Sky Islands, the idea can be applied anywhere in the world where mountains are separated from other mountain ranges by dramatically different environments in lowland habitats (https://skyislandalliance.org/our-region/the-sky-islands/) accessed August 20, 2024 ↩}

^{13. The Sky Islands have a long history of mineral resource extraction. For a visual nonfiction consideration of mining, see Redniss (2020), which focuses on three generations of Apache family members and their struggle to protect Indigenous sovereignty, public health, and economic and sociocultural wellbeing for their people and land. ↩}

^{14. Scientific interest in the human-environmental impact of artificial light at night (ALAN) and dark-sky preservation is growing. Greater research will be needed into the ways in which high-intensity border lighting impacts local communities, mammals, threatened and endangered species, and pollinators, for example. During the first Trump Administration, without scientific or legal analysis, over 1,800 stadium lights were authorized by the Department of Homeland Security and installed in some of the most bioderse regions of Southern Arizona (McSpadden, Jordahl and Bradley, 2023). ↩}

^{15. I conducted interviews in Spanish and English depending on the language preferred by the interviewee. All translations from Spanish to English are mine.  ↩}

^{16. https://tribunodelpueblo.org/surveillance-occupation-in-the-u-s-borderlands-a-narrative-photo-essay-by-colter-thomas-and-dugan-meyer/, accessed August 20, 2024. ↩}

^{17. My sincere gratitude and thanks to Bob Proctor, Kate Tirion, Kerry Schwartz, Carolyn Shafer, Alex Johnson, John Hughes, Sarah Truebe, Bryon Lichtenhan and Aaron Mrotek for generously sharing their knowledge and letting me tag along. ↩}

^{18. For a discussion of poetry as recognition and accompaniment, listen to my interview on ethnographic poetry with Cory-Alice André Johnson, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/what-does-anthropology-sound-like-poetry, accessed August 20, 2024. ↩}

^{19. Border Wildlife Study: https://skyislandalliance.org/our-work/science/borderwildlife/, accessed August 20, 2024. ↩}

^{20. https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/southern-arizona-jaguar-video-confirms-new-cat-2024-01-05/, accessed 20 August, 2024. ↩}

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