Emerging Agency in Border Communities During Pandemics

This dissertation uncovers the complex natural and social histories of two Texas border counties, El Paso and Hidalgo, to explain how these counties became highly susceptible to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. This work argues that humans engaging with natural resources throughout history created a rhetoric of exploitation and social hierarchy along the Texas/Mexico border. Rhetoric from Spanish and Anglo colonists coupled with environmental phenomena across time displaced Latinx/e bodies living in these counties into precarious communities called colonias, and the presence of these colonias made each county highly susceptible to disease outbreak. I draw on scholarship from subdisciplines in rhetorical studies (the rhetoric of health and medicine, rhetorical new materialism, and environmental rhetoric), cultural architecture, history, and decolonial studies to construct a new methodology that historicizes rhetorical ecologies: a confluence of ecologies. By applying this method to the COVID-19 outbreak in Hidalgo and El Paso Counties, I illustrate the role histories of human and non-human engagements play in making communities precarious to diseases.