ABSTRACT
In the last decade, the term ecomedia has acquired multiple meanings: most concretely, it has become a basis for comparing the signifying strategies that humans use to represent nonhumans; more broadly, it has become a way of acknowledging the extent to which media are at once human and nonhuman. Drawing on and developing such meanings, this chapter discusses how some ecomedia have worked against empire—how African films have critiqued extractive industries, and how Indigenous pictographs have countered European cartographies. It then focuses on the ways that other ecomedia have in fact intensified imperialism. Blending ecomedia studies with ethnic studies, the chapter reconsiders the New Mexico Bureau of Immigration (NMBI), which emerged in 1880 to solve a perceived problem of land and water use: under the period’s racial logic, the New Mexico Territory did not have enough white farmers to become a fully fledged state. As the essay demonstrates, the NMBI used lithographs, photographs, and other ecomedia to provide whites with new environmental expectations. By making it seem as if Natives and Nuevomexicanas/os had lost their struggles for sovereignty, and by acting as if the lands and waters themselves were destined for economic efficiency, the NMBI remediated—and reshaped—the borderlands.
