ABSTRACT
The “1st Trans Gay Migrant Caravan,” Arcoíris 17 (Rainbow 17 or Rainbow Caravan), marched in Nogales, Mexico, making their case for acceptance into the United States on August 10, 2017. This chapter focuses on their recorded press event and subsequent march in Nogales to understand how trans and queer migrant epistemologies embody rhetorical productions against the colonial legacies of race. The Rainbow Caravan’s queer worldmaking crafted from lived experience is rhetorically shared through their bodies, attire, testimonios, and chants, exclaiming their ability to survive and belong. I point to their migration as a decolonial act—one of critique—where queer and trans bodies move to communicate and displace nationalists and colonial legacies of the modern/gender colonial system. The migratory refusal of containment, or migration as a worldmaking practice, by trans and queer migrants becomes a humanizing representation of survival against domineering systems that punish and contain other racialized and queer subjectivities.
