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Imagined Environments
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03 November 2026

Casting light across the US-Mexico borderlands, Carlos Alonso Nugent 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, Nugent explains 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, he revises accepted accounts of relational racialization. Advancing from 1848 to the present, he demonstrates that whiteness has coevolved 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, Nugent complicates the environmental humanities; even as he argues that media have naturalized our use and abuse of the planet, he still explores how they have helped us love places we have never been and care for creatures we have never met.
Carlos Alonso Nugent is Assistant Professor at Columbia University, where he is appointed in both the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part One. The Many Maps of the Borderlands, from the End of the US-Mexico War to the End of the US-Apache Wars
1. Drawing and Disrupting Borders in the Wake of the US-Mexico War
2. Land and Latinidad During and After the California Gold Rush
Part Two. The Rise of Environmental Obliviousness, from Developing the Transcontinental Railroad to Detonating the First Atomic Bomb
3. Whiteness and/as Water Infrastructure Along the Colorado River
4. Primitive Landscapes Across Mass Culture and Modernism
Part Three. Latina/o Experiments in Environmental Awareness, from the Mexican Revolution to the NAFTA Era
5. Publics, Counterpublics, and the Fight for Lost Lands
6. Migrant Farmworker Media in the US-Mexico Food System
Conclusion: Reimagining Life and Death Under “Prevention Through Deterrence”
Notes
Bibliography
Index