Nuestra ciencia as transborder ecological knowledge and survival

Abstract

This article frames what one of my collaborators calls nuestra ciencia (our science) as a concept that expresses a transborder worldview based on region-specific scientific land and healing practices. I trace the ways Indigenous science came into fierce conflict with the twentieth-century wave of Anglo settler-colonial land grabs in south Texas and how the resulting force of mass agriculture enabled mass destruction and biodiversity loss in the region. It offers an environmental, archival, and ethnographic analysis of curanderismo (Mexican traditional medicine) as science and explores its relationship to settler colonialism, environmental degradation, and processes of racialization in relation to health, science, and medical technologies, as well as tracing the ongoing material record of its practice. I frame Mexican transborder healing traditions (curanderismo and plant medicine) as serious social, scientific, and ecological processes. I make it clear that although this practice is often considered a Mexican tradition, de-Indigenized mestizos also practice, exploit, and appropriate it, while its roots lie in Indigenous lifeways and knowledge.