Other-Than-Human Movement

This article focuses on the work of American poet Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954- ), who is concerned with Chicana and Native American experiences in her poetry and is a transnationally oriented poet who is interested in “the treatment of borders and border zones in all of their various forms,” an aspect that Paul Jay names as important for transnational literature (Transnational 94). In her first collection, Emplumada (1981), Cervantes writes frequently about crossing borders, a notion that is evident in frequent references to the movement of other-than-human beings and elements that cross or delineate borders. Her most recent collection, Sueño (2013), is thematically broader but similarly evokes the other-than-human. Metaphors related to other-than-human beings, movement, and border crossing can be connected to posthumanism in ways similar to those Thomas Nail employs when he argues that borders are in motion. I examine the experiences of crossing and living on various kinds of borders as they are evident in Emplumada and Sueño, and suggest that Cervantes’s other-than-human animals display an expanded vision for transnational situations where movement is freer and more choices are available than for the poems’ humans.