Border and Becoming as Sites of Theory

Abstract

This paper travels backwards, imagining impossibly a particular time and place in the past, to consider how the Texas–Mexico border helps make sense of our own becomings as teachers, scholars, and persons. Drawing on St. Pierre’s notion of the past as a site of theory, we ruminate on the Rio Grande Valley as “the literal ground of our consciousness”. To do this qualitative work, we turn to others who have made sense of the border fictionally, as non-scholarly forms present different possibilities for research. We explore, nostalgically, the persons we might become in a Valley long past—an openness now restricted—and ways of (re)imagining becoming, of refusing narratives that foreclose hope—work crucially exigent for the precarious lives of those on the border today and the stories we tell about them.