ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a different type of mapping and grid and more directly tackles the connection between race and environmental injustice. It discusses the natural elements reveal the faulty and vexed manner in which nations have constructed borders that fail to address the realities of the author uncontainable lives. Fictional representations of the border region and its resources focus on the unsustainable model of bartering with nature and the violence involved in the purchase and sale of natural resources. The vicious cycle of mining Mexico's resources for foreign gain, which contributes to unprecedented levels of pollution in Mexico, and then brutally repressing voices of discontent or requests for retribution is the cycle that Karen Tei Yamashita's characters are attempting to disrupt. Laboring bodies are generally those of immigrants in Yamashita's novel, but she presents women's bodies as especially susceptible to the perils of globalization.
