My current project, Our Home Is Not a Borderlands, employs the vocabularies of space, place, and Indigeneity—landscape, territoriality, sense of place inter alia—to investigate the US-Mexico border and borderlands in Southern Arizona as they coalesce historically and in the present for the Indigenous communities that live in and pass through the borderlands. As I signal with my title, I take “the borderlands” to be a misnomer for our home. v

Based on 15 months of fieldwork and extensive archival research, which has been supported by the National Science Foundation and multiple centers, institutes, and initiatives on the UC Berkeley campus, my dissertation takes an Indigenous approach to study of the Arizona borderlands.  Intervening in scholarship on the borderlands, this research demonstrates how “the Border” materialized and materializes in space and place and in the mundane bureaucracies of jurisdiction, citizen initiatives, case law, and personnel. Reinserting and re-centering  Indigenous peoples who lay claim to this contested landscape, this research lies at the intersection of border studies, western history, Native American Studies,  and comparative ethnic studies. 

 A portion of my historical research on the bordering of the Tohono O’odham Nation can be found in my recent article, “Our Constitution Makes Provisions for All These Things"