“I Graft a New Tribalism”

In this essay, I engage the makings and evolution of queer Chicana theorist and feminist philosopher of science Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s generative engagements with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and syncretized spiritualities, as well as her (re)visionary disidentifications with the biosciences for matters of speculative visioning and social justice. Stitching together the rich insights of the fields of Chicanx/Latinx studies and queer feminist science and technology studies, I survey how Anzaldúa treads the boundaries between the humanities and biosciences as a means of complicating and rewriting new narratives of identity and belonging. Borrowing from the lexicon of the animal, plant, and other life sciences, Anzaldúa risks repurposing vexed evolutionary metaphors—namely, for the purposes of this essay, the “tree of life” image—to instantiate one part of what I call her “affiliative biofuturities.” Thinking from and through a border/nepantla space, Anzaldúa sifts through and remixes humanistic, scientific, esoteric, and spiritualized modes of inquiry to fashion alternative ways of knowing, seeing, and being in the world. Ultimately, I suggest that Anzaldúa’s Chicanafuturist œuvre radically reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of identity and our relationality to other beings/species while taking seriously the liberatory potentialities of “unruly” knowledge-making practices in times of socioecological crises.