In this episode, Ligia Arguilez shares her piece “How My Nana Taught Me To Listen to Plants.”
A fronteriza with deep ties on both sides of the border, Ligia Arguilez (she/her) is a PhD student in the Borderlands History program at the University of Texas, El Paso. She studies the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through culture and the environment. Her dissertation focuses on the human-plant relationship between the dominant desert shrub—the creosote bush—and the diverse peoples of the region over centuries. Her research reveals the plant’s ties to paradigms of progress and modernity, identity, memory, ecosensorial attachments to place, land use patterns, and perceptions of the arid North American deserts. Ligia is currently creating an oral history archive of people-plant histories from the U.S.-Mexico border. Her undergraduate research was on barbed wire and the incarceration of Mexican nationals in the U.S. at Mexican internment camps along the border in 1913-1914.
This episode can also be listened on SoundCloud and Apple Podcasts.
For a transcript, click here.
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Notes
– See also Ligia’s work on ecological oral history here.
This show is produced and edited by Emma Moesswilde and Natalie Wilkinson, with music provided by Natalie Wilkinson and Christine Murphy. Special thanks to Elizabeth Hameeteman. For more on Ecotones Now, click here. Thanks for listening!