Aqua-Assemblages: (De)b/ordering the Rio Grande

Abstract

As the climate crisis deepens, the Rio Grande risks erasure. To avert the threat of Day Zero, the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) must reimagine its contested landscapes for water-scarce futures. The IBWC has long deployed b/ordering practices as a fix for the fluid river-border. While state-produced cartographies represent the landscape as uncomplicated terrain amenable to b/ordering national interests from above, now local activists form water assemblies to assert counter-mapping as a critical method to reclaim the Rio Grande on the ground. Across parched transborder cities, transgressions deconstruct border infrastructures spanning the river transect: the dam, the wall, and the levee. Shifting the narrative from militarized border security to collective water security, multispecies assemblages organize around drought resilience measures constituting civic counter-monuments: the acequia, the bosque, and the resaca. This thesis not only counter-maps the agency of landscape for hydrodiplomacy, but also repositions landscape architecture as a debordering practice.