ABSTRACT
The Atlantic Borderlands is an analytic framework which bridges Mexican American experiences and black diaspora not as a comparison but in recognition that colonialism, interracial and interethnic contact through trade, migration, and slavery are all part of the same capitalist economy and technological development that today manifests at least in part, via the shipping container. Through the reference to the middle passage, we are reminded of slavery as a trade and a particular moment of industrialization and modernization. Today, the image of the container is revealing the gendered peculiarities of social death on the Atlantic Borderlands. As the unearthing of the African burial ground in lower Manhattan in 1991 demonstrates, the financial centre of New York is literally built on the bodies of black labour. Since the 1990s, it has been built on the backs of Mexican migrant labour. Building from the foundational theories of Paul Gilroy, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other writers of the Black Atlantic/Borderlands, this project examines a diverse set of texts to bring together black and brown bodies in a longer history of containment with relation to labour.
