Cartographies
Cartography is often understood as representation.
Here, it is approached as relation.
These cartographies do not seek accuracy in the colonial sense. They do not promise orientation through mastery or control. They attend instead to how land, body, and memory are cut, layered, and reassembled under conditions of rupture.
What is mapped here is not territory alone, but impact.
Fragmentation
Colonial borders do not simply divide land.
They dismember continuity.
Rivers become lines.
Kinship becomes jurisdiction.
Movement becomes trespass.
Fragmentation is not an event that ends. It is a condition that repeats—across generations, across bodies, across emotional life. What appears as personal disorientation often originates in structural severing.
These cartographies begin at the site of that cut.
Re-Membering
To re-member is not to restore an original whole.
It is to practice ethical relation among fragments. Re-membering attends to:
- what was severed
- what adapted to survive
- what continues to ache
- what refuses disappearance
This cartography does not resolve harm. It traces it carefully, refusing both erasure and spectacl
Coyolxauhqui as Orientation
Coyolxauhqui does not offer wholeness.
She offers reassembly without denial.
In this work, Coyolxauhqui is not a symbol to be interpreted, but a method for staying with fragmentation. Her dismemberment names what colonial violence does to bodies, land, and cosmology. Her reassembly refuses the demand to return intact.
Cartography, here, follows her logic: fragments are held in relation, not forced into coherence.
Border as Wound
Borders are not neutral demarcations.
They are technologies of separation.
They interrupt movement that once flowed.
They assign legality to presence.
They produce grief that is disciplined, privatized, and often unnamed.
These maps read borders not as lines, but as sites of ongoing injury—where memory is fractured and bodies learn vigilance as inheritance.
How to Move Here
These cartographies are not meant to be consumed quickly or understood completely. They are offered as a way of noticing how orientation shifts when certainty is released.
There is no final map.
There is only continued relation.
