Casting light across the US–Mexico borderlands, this book reveals the region’s “imagined environments”—the frameworks through which its human groups have represented, related to, and resided in their more-than-human worlds. While these imagined environments can feel immersive and even immutable, I explain how they have in fact emerged in everything from Apache pictographs to US and Mexican laws to novels, poems, paintings, and photographs. By showing how the larger imagined environments have shaped and been shaped by such cultural constituents, I revise accepted accounts of relational racialization. Advancing from 1848 to the present, I demonstrate that whiteness has co-evolved with western water infrastructures, that Latinidades have developed through divergent forms of land tenure, and that Native nations have thrived not only by staying in specific places, but also by migrating across vast spaces. With such stories, I complicate the environmental humanities. Even as I argue that media have naturalized our use and abuse of the planet, I still explore how they have helped us love places we have never been and care for creatures we have never met.  

Imagined Environments is appearing in Fall 2026 with the American Crossroads Series at the University of California Press. You can preorder here, using promo code UCPSAVE30 at checkout.