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Curations of a nepantlera: Forever Betwixt and

Between Inés Estrada’s Impatience (2016)

Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio

To cite this article: Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (2022) Curations of a nepantlera: Forever
Betwixt and Between Inés Estrada’s Impatience (2016), Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies, 31:2, 295-321, DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2022.2107497

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2022.2107497

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa

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Published online: 26 Sep 2022.

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2022
Vol. 31, No. 2, 295–321, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2022.2107497

Villavisencio
Andrea Aramburu

CURATIONS OF A NEPANTLERA: FOREVER

BETWIXT AND BETWEEN INÉS ESTRADA’S
IMPATIENCE (2016)

This article takes as its subject Impatience, a self-published collection of short and
medium-length comics made between 2012 and 2016 by Mexican comics artist In
es
Estrada. Inspired by the queer curations of Gayatri Gopinath (2018), I develop a
curatorial reading of Estrada’s comics in dialogue with the work of Chicana theorist
and writer Gloria E. Anzald
ua. I draw especially on Anzald
ua’s take on the Nahuatl
concept of nepantla and her theory of the nepantlera, that is, those who offer
strategies for tactically navigating the transitional, whether that is via their writing,
healing practices, art, and/or activism. My close reading of three comics in the
collection, namely “The multiverse is inside of you / You are inside of the multiverse”,
“Cenote”, and “V
ıbora”, examines how Estrada gives form to the epistemological,
affective, and embodied materiality conveyed by Anzald
ua’s nepantla. My aim is to
situate the account of the human presented by Impatience within a transtemporal
genealogy of Latina and women-of-colour feminist and queer thought. In keeping with
this, I argue that Estrada’s collection envisions the human body as a material entity
that communes with the nonhuman and the environment, and it does so by
experimenting with the specificities and formal capacity of the comics medium.

Keywords: Borderlands; comics studies; Gayatri Gopinath; Gloria

Anzald
ua; In
es Estrada; Latin American comics; nepantleras;
queer curations

“Chamanas, curanderas, artistas, and spiritual activists, like nepantleras, are liminal
people, at the thresholds of form, forever betwixt and between” (Anzald
ua 2015,
22). Thus writes Chicana writer, poet, and feminist Gloria Anzald
ua in her book
Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, penned during the last decade of her life and
published posthumously in 2015. Nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning “in-between
space” (Keating 2005, 322), is the inspiration for Anzald
ua’s theory of the nepan-
tlera. In “(Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces”, the preface to this bridge we call
home: radical visions for transformation, Anzald
ua uses a note to explain her defini-
tions of nepantla and nepantlera. She writes:

# 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which
permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
296 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

I use the word nepantla to theorize liminality and to talk about those who
facilitate passages between worlds, whom I’ve named nepantleras. I
associate nepantla with states of mind that question old ideas and beliefs,
acquire new perspectives, change worldviews, and shift from one world to
another. (2002, 1)

Both nepantla and the nepantlera account for an important development of her
famous notions of the borderlands and the New Mestiza.1 Anzald
ua situates these
later concepts in the same physical space that gave birth to her early theories: the
US-Mexico border, with the key difference that nepantla encompasses a broader
dynamic of embodiment and political struggle, one fuelled by “temporal, spatial,
psychic, and/or intellectual” contradictions, as her friend, editor, and one of the
most prominent scholars of her work AnaLouise Keating (2005, 322) points out.
Nepantleras, for Keating, are apprehensive of “both identity-related issues and epis-
temological concerns” (2005, 7). They are above all characterised by a liminal
logic, being enablers who offer strategies for tactically navigating the transitional,
whether that is via their writing, healing practices, art, and/or activism.
Anzald
ua, by drawing on her Indigenous heritage to give form to her arguments,
pays tribute to ways of knowing, seeing, and feeling that preceded her, and thinks
the self as immersed within a constellation of knowledges, images, and stories.2
Even so, some of her theorisations, such as those regarding the nepantlera, have
been criticised for being “overly metaphorical” (Ortega 2016, 29). Following this,
the examination of an aesthetic project that I consider to lie “at the thresholds of
form, forever betwixt and between” (Anzald
ua 2015, 22) might indeed prove use-
ful to argue for the material grounds underpinning such liminal, abstract concepts.
This essay advances this project through a curatorial close reading of Impatience
(2016), a self-published collection of short and medium-length comics made
between 2012 and 2016 by Mexican comics artist In
es Estrada. My close reading
of three comics in the collection, namely “The multiverse is inside of you / You
are inside of the multiverse”, “Cenote”, and “V
ıbora”, will examine how Estrada
gives form in her comics to the epistemological, affective, and embodied material-
ity conveyed by Anzald
ua’s nepantla. I will argue that Estrada – this article’s
nepantlera – can be positioned within a transtemporal genealogy of Latina and
women-of-colour feminist and queer thought, exemplified yet not exhausted by
Anzald
ua’s queer conceptual imaginary.
The curatorial method I practise here owes a great deal to Gayatri Gopinath’s
queer curations, especially those developed in her 2018 book Unruly Visions.
Gopinath establishes her queer curations as a way of reading “discontinuous or
unrelated” objects alongside each other, where a particular reading of the rendering
of the world put forth by one object can bring into view through “collisions and
encounters” (2018, 4) new vantage points from which to read another object. She
focuses on curating a set of visual artworks from different times and places that
represent queer desires, paying special attention to how reading them together can
be generative of a further form of queer embodiment. Gopinath sees her own
queer curatorial practice as a way of “carefully attending to aesthetic practices
through writing”, and because “to ‘care for’ is also to ‘care about’ (...) the project
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 297

of queer curation”, as she establishes it, “is the obligation to impart that ‘caring
about’ to others” (2018, 4).
What this essay understands by “queer” follows Gopinath in her formulation of
the concept as an aesthetic practice of care, but it is also forcefully grounded in
some of Anzald
ua’s contributions. For Anzald
ua, being queer not only encompassed
her sexuality (sometimes she identified as lesbian and sometimes as queer), it was
also a key concept that helped her materialise her overdetermined identity on the
borderlands. To be queer, for her, was to be simultaneously a Chicana, lesbian,
feminist, woman that grew up on the interstices of Mexican and Southwestern US
cultures. Anzald
ua, as such, is a crucial bastion in the development of a queer cri-
tique of colour that gives the term an intersectional, racial perspective and situates
bodily experience within a complex dynamic of power that transcends sexuality.
But being queer for Anzald
ua, like for Gopinath, also meant dissenting from the
norm in an aesthetic manner, enacting multiplicity through her writing and concep-
tual imaginary. This essay will show how Estrada’s work, read alongside Anzald
ua,
is a particular way to think through queerness in relation to the aesthetic via the
comics medium, without losing the term’s situated and historical specificities.
I take Gopinath’s method as a foundation from which to begin, divert, and digress
because I see her affective cartography as an active weaving of threads of relationality.
I am drawn towards her constellation of aesthetic projects that may be regionally or
temporally distant, but formally and conceptually perform practices of South-South
commonality.3 Accordingly, as much as I see in Anzald
ua and Estrada a shared interest
in many images, I consider it key to acknowledge their dissimilar concerns and their
different material conditions of departure. Anzald
ua, on the one hand, draws on her
Indigenous heritage while dealing with more singular, bodily matters, and with the
contemporary political concerns she faces as a Chicana, lesbian, and activist woman
fighting to make a space for her communities at the end of the twentieth century.
Estrada, on the other, was born in the 90s, and grew up during the noughties in
the early days of the world 2.0. As a self-taught illustrator and do-it-yourself (DIY)
comics artist in Mexico City, she was brought up in an underground zine scene.
Her zine-heavy aesthetics4 gives her comics an abstract countercultural force that
sets her apart from other Latin American comics artists (for instance, from the
more autobiographical style of Powerpaola or the naïve-like aesthetics of Sof
ıa La
Watson). Even so, her comics can be read from a regional viewpoint, in tandem
with those produced by women’s collectives, such as Chicks on Comics,5 and have
been included in internationally known Latin American anthologies, such as El
Volc
an: Un presente de la historieta latinoamericana (2017). Impatience is Estrada’s
second collection of comics, self-published while she was living in Texas in 2016.6
This explains why the book showcases a bilingual writing practice, including some
comics in English and others in Spanish. Similarly, her aesthetics is also at the
thresholds of form. Her unique style takes on some of the forms and tones from the
underground women comics scene that was prominent in the US and Canada dur-
ing the 90s, and at the same time offers glimpses of a Mayan mythological imagin-
ary, one which envisions the body in commune with the universe.
Following this last characteristic of Estrada’s comics, this essay attempts to
understand how the material account of the human presented by Impatience is
298 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

connected to ways of being in nepantla. I believe there is a nuanced affinity

between Anzald
ua and Estrada, a kinship “on a cellular, soul-ular, level” (Neile
2005, 21), or as Gopinath would put it, a few “transtemporal relays of affective
relationality” (2018, 1). My hope is to show how Estrada can be productively read
within Anzald
ua’s conceptual borderlands, taking from the latter a historicised
materiality and a situated, embodied spatiality that will give the former’s comics a
whole new visual significance.

La nepantlera
Before delving into a close reading of Estrada’s comics, it is useful to outline the
main characteristics of Anzald
ua’s notion of la nepantlera further as it relates to self-
hood and identity. For Mariana Ortega, “[Anzald
ua’s] elaboration of la nepantlera”
presents “a view of self that does not rely on external forms of identification”
(Ortega 2016, 11). As such, the shift from the new mestiza towards the nepantlera is
part of Anzald
ua’s complex journey in trying to negotiate notions of selfhood
(Ortega 2016, 24). La nepantlera allows Anzald
ua to embrace a view of selfhood that
operates at the thresholds of multiple identities, without claiming external identifica-
tion from any. This particular characteristic of the nepantlera has been criticised, for,
as Ortega reminds us, “pervasive racial oppression remains, and this oppression
needs to be acknowledged rather than covered over by rhetoric about race neu-
trality” (23).
Martina Koegeler-Abdi’s article “Shifting Subjectivities: Mestizas, Nepantleras,
and Gloria Anzald
ua's Legacy” is illuminating in this matter and considers the
“non-restricted subjectivity” that Anzald
ua seeks to capture with her later concep-
tion of the nepantlera (2013, 72). Koegeler-Abdi encourages us to understand la
nepantlera not as a new post-racial identity but rather as a space which is enacted
and that is disruptive of identity in its practice. For the purposes of my reading,
this last approach is key. I am drawn to the nepantlera because, with this notion,
Anzald
ua introduces a symbolic space from where to see and read reality “from the
cracks between the worlds”, through the practice of aesthetic contradiction. In one
of her many manifestations, the nepantlera develops the situated subjectivity of the
new mestiza into a queer practice of artistic exploration that “choose[s] to see
through the holes in reality, choose[s] to perceive something from multiple angles”
(Anzald
ua 2015, 93).

The kaleidoscopic body: Estrada’s corporeal aesthetics

We can enter into the world of Impatience through its opening comic, “The multi-
verse is inside of you/You are inside of the multiverse” (2016, 5–17), composed
of a stream of illustrations. First, a naked female body is depicted, which is then,
on the next two pages, fragmented into two kaleidoscopic images (Figure 1), as if
it had traversed a threshold engendering a multiplicity of forms and patterns
(Figure 2).
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 299

s Estrada, cover panel of “The multiverse is inside of you / You are inside of
Figure 1 Ine

xico DF: Ine
the multiverse” in Impatience, 2016 (Me
s Estrada), 5. All contents # Ine

s
Estrada 2012–2016.

Because the kaleidoscope is a worlding instrument, I believe it is an apt metaphor

for navigating Impatience. Here, “worlding” refers to the ability to imagine an
enmeshment wherein multiple perspectives converge, wherein an ongoing
exchange between materialities can hold together shifts in modes of being. Helen
Palmer and Vicky Hunter sum it up by saying that “worlding is a particular blend-
ing of the material and the semiotic that removes the boundaries between subject
and environment” and as such it “affords the opportunity for the cessation of habit-
ual temporalities and modes of being” (2018). Although not a metaphor directly
used by Anzald
ua, the kaleidoscope embodies a way of both thinking and being in
nepantla. Anzald
ua’s conception of the body is kaleidoscopic because it imagines
the body as a mediator of realities, wherein “all filters through from one world to
another, from one mode of consciousness to another” (Anzald
ua 2009, 106–108).
300 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

s Estrada, panels from “The multiverse is inside of you / You are inside of the
Figure 2 Ine

xico DF: Ine
multiverse” in Impatience, 2016 (Me
s Estrada), 6–7. All contents # Ine

s
Estrada 2012–2016.

Making the body pass through a kaleidoscopic lens, I want to suggest, queers
the relational patterns that exist in the very act of seeing the world through the
body. As a metaphor, it helps me present two juxtaposed claims. First, that
Estrada proposes a kaleidoscopic aesthetics of the body, that is, one that presents
the body through the differential configurations (Barad 2003, 814) of its parts, and
not as a unified and fixed whole. Secondly, that she is bringing attention to the
corporeal not as essence, but rather as a material entity that is part of a larger
relational network, and thus open to change and transformation.
Both these ideas are clearly seen in the two opening illustrations (Figure 2), where
the body's head is first placed at the centre of a geometric frame and then fragmented
by pairing each of its parts with a correlative element in nature. Here, Estrada con-
structs an assemblage of both human and nonhuman forms: a fragment of hair is
paired with roots; a set of hands, with trees; a patch of skin, with a river; a torso,
with mountains; a pair of eyes, with what seems to be a black hole; and a seated
body facing backwards, with a volcano. In the spirit of the kaleidoscope’s technology,
that is, its functioning through mirrors enacting both a mirroring and fragmenting
logic, Estrada plays both with the metaphorical and the material. She unsettles the
reader’s usual patterns of seeing by breaking forms into fragments which make it
hard to distinguish their constitution as a whole. While the fragmented mirroring of
shapes enacts an organism that emerges mimicking disjointed material forms, the
geometric frame in which these forms are contained brings them together as a point
of convergence, allowing these formations to forge kaleidoscopic connections, bind-
ing and unbinding, whether with other parts of the body or with elements of nature.
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 301

s Estrada, panels from “The multiverse is inside of you / You are inside of the
Figure 3 Ine

xico DF: Ine
multiverse” in Impatience, 2016 (Me
s Estrada), 12–13. All contents # Ine

s
Estrada 2012–2016.

As an encounter between modes of being, this illustration invites us to think with

some of the claims of New Materialism, an assemblage of ideas inaugurated by Manuel
De Landa and Rosi Braidotti during the late 1990s. Feminist scholar Jane Bennett, in
this vein, underscores “the vitality intrinsic to matter itself” (2010, 10) and thinks of
the human in terms of a shared materiality. She writes that thinking about the mater-
ial composition of the human body does not require an epistemological change of
gears, for it is easy to think our bodies in terms of “the minerality of our bones, or
the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons” (10). Bennett theorises
these bodily materials as “self–organising” (10), referring to how they can be actants
themselves (that is, maintain agency or identity) instead of just being mechanical
means operating “under the direction of something nonmaterial, that is, an active soul
or mind” (10). While admitting the former claim – how humans are composed of
various materials – is not “uncontroversial” (10), she writes that understanding the
latter is more complex. In fact, such complexity arises, at least in part, because think-
ing of matter as self-organising involves the abstract paradox by which an organism
maintains a relatively stable identity precisely through exchanges across the boundaries
between the self and the other. In “You are inside of the multiverse (...)”, Estrada
foregrounds this vital materialisation of the body by emphasising the kaleidoscopic
worlding that takes place between the human body and the multiverse.
This is seen more clearly in one of the last panels of the comic, where in an
especially striking image filling two facing pages (Figure 3), Estrada depicts a
see-through body twice, allowing the reader to see first its organs, and then its
302 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

circulatory system. In the first body, one of the eyes pops outwards into an erod-
ing multiverse. The outline of the human body, to put it in the words of
Braidotti, becomes a “threshold of transformations” (2012, 34), giving way to a
multiplicity of nonhuman bodies. Some of these bodies are also see-through, letting
the reader peek into the inside of all those other bodies which simultaneously
make up the human: the rat’s and the dolphin’s brains, the monkey’s hand, the
inside of the mushrooms and the shells. Here, beyond enacting the Spinozist idea
that the mind is always and already an idea of the body (Barad 2012, 48), that is
to say, inherently material, Estrada highlights how neither subject nor multiverse
function here as the categorical root from which the other stems.
While these illustrations call for a new materialist reading of subjectivity, our
take on this double panel can also pay tribute to Anzald
ua’s theorisations. One
can follow her imagistic awareness inspired in nagualismo, an important aspect of
the Mayan cosmovision that names the ability of some humans to change their
form, taking the nonhuman shape of animals or elements of nature. These trans-
formations are possible, for Anzald
ua, because consciousness is not thought of as
“local” or merely human; it may begin with the human, yet expands outwards, as
she declared in an interview with Irene Lara: “My concept of consciousness, my
sense of myself, no se para at my skin; it extends outward, and if it extends
then it also mingles with your consciousness, las de las flores, la del mar, la de
los animales [ … ] Consciousness is not local” (Anzald
ua quoted in Lara 2005,
53–54). For Estrada and for Anzald
ua, as well as for the New Materialists the body is
not only an enmeshment of organs (Ortega 2016, 78), but also a way of worlding, that
binds together self and environment. However, to look at Estrada’s kaleidoscopic
worlding via Anzald
ua’s expanded notion of consciousness allows us to read the draw-
ing as manifesting a deep interrelatedness to the material that can co-exist with a
humanistic perspective, focused on negotiating multiple marginalised identities, such
as Anzald
ua’s.
Chela Sandoval’s concept of “oppositional consciousness” can be helpful to explain
this last point. Sandoval develops a methodology based on a differential mode of
knowledge formation that she links to US third-world feminism. She identifies in
“Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzald
ua, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Cherr
ıe
Moraga” (Sandoval 2000, 45), amongst others, an oppositional dimension that gives
postmodern formulations of identity a new organization through a “kaleidoscope”
and “queer sight” (43). Taking Anzald
ua’s new mestiza as a starting point for her for-
mulations, Sandoval uses the kaleidoscope figure to describe her mobile conscious-
ness as a necessary tool that equips the thinker with decolonial lenses and allows
them to act “between and among” subjective positions (53). In her account, US
third-world feminists not only read subjects across various positions, from a post-
modern or globalised point of view, but they emphasise that this kaleidoscopic rup-
ture is constituted by a decolonising matrix. Sandoval builds on Fredric Jameson’s
call for a “cognitive mapping” (28), in order to heighten the need of charting one’s
“sense of place” within a larger system of racial and colonial relations. As such, the
importance of a “decolonising matrix” in her methodology complicates some of the
claims made by feminist New Materialists, such as Braidotti, since it asserts that one
cannot think of any worlding between human and nonhuman agents, or any
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 303

dissolution of subjectivity for that matter, without first considering that these experi-
ences are always already tied to colonial ways of thinking and representing
the world.
Estrada’s comic, especially Figure 2, provides a representation of Sandoval’s
oppositional consciousness in both material and abstract terms. My point is not that
Estrada and Anzald
ua or Sandoval share a similar struggle, but rather that Estrada’s
illustration, when read through decolonial lenses, can serve to represent a spatialisa-
tion of this oppositional consciousness. Estrada depicts the body as losing its bounda-
ries, making both the subject of her comic, as well as her reader, more receptive to
situated “shifts in consciousness” (Keating 2005, 1). Read in this manner, one might
say that Estrada takes interest in the human-environment worlding not to differenti-
ate the body from other entities (minerals, plants, animals), but instead with regard
to how it attunes “to the more-than that composes us” (Manning 2019, 8), while
observing all at the same time “the complexities” of the “lived experience in the bor-
derlands” (Ortega 2016, 24). Anzald
ua would say that nepantleras have a particular
way with words and language, and that they see the body as a shape-shifting model
for their artistic practices. In reading Estrada as a nepantlera, we also give her comics
an embodied dimension, within a Latinx genealogy of queer thought that envisions
an oppositional consciousness as a tactic to decolonise the imagination.

Interlude: expanded sights

As has been said already in this essay’s introduction, Estrada’s comics are read here
(amongst other things) as an illustration of how the comics medium can develop and
add nuances to Anzald
ua’s rich conceptual imaginary. Indeed, this follows on
Anzald
ua’s lifelong aim to craft through her writing “an epistemology of the imagin-
ation, a psychology of the image” (Anzald
ua 2015, 2). Albeit in a slightly different
manner, within comics theory, this quest for an epistemology of the image has been
similarly pursued. One example is artist and researcher Nick Sousanis’s graphic novel
Unflattening.7 Therein, Sousanis introduces readers to a fictional flat world, popu-
lated by flatlanders who are trapped within “the confines of limited dimensionality”
(2015, 23). Gradually, he invites the reader into a world beyond that of the flat-
landers, challenging their one-dimensional view by staging in turn “an engagement of
multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing” (32).
Unlike Anzald
ua, who developed a psychology of the image to challenge rigid
models of subjectivity, Unflattening was written as a critique of the world of educa-
tion, where ways of seeing, knowing, and being are standardised under normative
paradigms. Sousanis’s reading adds to the comics scholarship of Charles Hatfield,
Hilary Chute, and more recently Frederik Køhlert, Henry Jenkins, and Tahneer
Oksman, amongst others,8 who all read comics less for their sequential plotlines,
and more for their rhizomatic formal interventions. Many of them build on
Groensteen’s concept of “general arthrology”, which he coined to theorise comics’
unique ontological system, where “linkages are always made between pages that
are not simultaneously offered to the gaze” ([1999] 2007, 39) and where readers
304 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

are required to produce a braiding throughout the narrative as a whole, and not
just in a sequential or chronological order.
While Sousanis’s approach heavily echoes that of Groensteen, what is innovative
about his own theorising is that he does it using the comics form, that is to say, he
puts his own claims into practice through the same medium with which his research
engages. For Sousanis, one way of explaining comics’ “unflattening” effect is by turn-
ing to the kaleidoscope metaphor; as he notes, “to step beyond the flat and narrow we
need a kaleidoscope of views that convey both our dimensionality and dynamic capa-
bility” (2015, 146). My reading of Estrada's illustrations builds on Sousanis' assertion
that comics are kaleidoscopic in the sense they bring both the author's and the reader's
eyesight to be figuratively expanded (Sousanis 2015, 130). Estrada's drawings, with
their mirror-like and fragmented forms, intensify what Sousanis finds that comics can
do: how they encourage readers to find space through the imaginal and mechanical
lenses of the page, shifting their perception to adopt multiple vantage points.
Estrada’s comics materialise what Sousanis calls an “expansive way of seeing” that
“corresponds to an understanding of ecosystems which, despite visual boundaries,
remain rhizomatically bound” (Sousanis 2015, 45). One can look once again at
Figure 3, where the expanding entanglement between bodies pictured in the first
drawing is heightened in the facing panel showing the body’s circulation system. This
body not only lacks an outlining frame, but also seems to be reaching outwards, into
a similar rhizomatic network that is not self-contained. In both panels, the illustra-
tions are boundless, encouraging an unflattening of the readers’ perception into the
incommensurability of the multiverse. Like Anzald
ua’s nepantla, Sousanis’s concept
of unflattening is a tool for increasing awareness. It aims to consciously decentre our
modes of approaching objects, opening “our own monolithic and closed world” to
“the great world of one’s own plus the others” (Bakhtin quoted in Sousanis 2015, 39)
whereby “our literal ways of seeing metaphorically serve to encompass other ways of
making meaning and experiencing the world” (Sousanis 2015, 41).
For Sousanis, comics map processes of thought, and thereby allow authors and
readers to “tap into [their] visual system and [their] ability of seeing in relation”
(2015, 79). For the reader, this means an invitation to enter into relation with the
comics page, encouraging a non-linear reading experience that constantly allows one
to see things anew. For example, on most pages of Unflattening, the panels are
arranged in a way that allows the reader to adopt multiple perspectives. There is a
sequence in which the overall frame takes the circular form of an eye. Inside of this
frame, the panels picture an eye as it moves from different angles and at various
scales, playing with our viewpoint of the object. Here, as well as on other pages of
the comic, the understanding of the narrative will vary depending on which element
we take in first. In this particular page, the circular outer frame foregrounds how,
like the eye itself, our reading of the comic can also shift, adjusting and readjusting
perspectives in the process. This enactment of multiplicity leads Sousanis to the
claim that comics perform ways of embodiment on the page that would be impos-
sible outside of it. On the flat page, paradoxically, subjects can thus be unflattened,
represented as being in many worlds at once. So, by saying that comics allow readers
to tap into a way of seeing in relation, Sousanis is also stressing that one can be
inspired by this expanded eyesight to assess one’s own ways of being beyond the
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 305

page. This resonates with Anzald
ua’s take on artistic practice, that is, as “a rereading
and rewriting of reality – a rearrangement or reordering of preexisting elements”
(2015, 40) that places special emphasis on decolonising hegemonic or one-sided
compositions. Thinking together with Sousanis and Estrada’s comics, one might be
able to contemplate how comics can materialise within their pages the aesthetic vis-
ual systems or worldings that Anzald
ua claims as a crucial “framewor[k] for theoriz-
ing everyday experiences” (Anzald
ua 2015, 4). In what follows, my readings of
“Cenote” and “V
ıbora” take these thoughts as guiding compasses.

“Cenote”, or the fifth dimension

In her comic “Cenote”, Estrada offers yet another imaginative take on more-than-
human configurations of subjectivity, this time playing more with the medium’s
own materiality. Generally associated with Mexico’s Yucat
an peninsula, cenotes
are natural underground reservoirs of water, often connected by a hidden labyrin-
thine structure of tunnels. They were formed thousands of years ago, after the col-
lapse of the limestone ceilings of what used to be closed chambers. For the Maya,
cenotes were especially useful as water supply sources, but they also held sacred
connotations that were once central during sacrificial offerings and rituals.
Anzald
ua, for instance, reads cenotes as a material manifestation of nepantla.
Because a cenote reveals an underworld network, she thinks of them as the rajadu-
ras of this world, the liminal cracks that separate our reality from other dimensions
(Anzald
ua 2015, 108). As she points out in Light in the dark/Luz en lo oscuro, this
“perspective from the cracks” has its bases in “Nagualismo’s basic assumptions”:
“shapeshifting (the ability to become an animal or thing) and traveling to other
realities”. In the chamaner
ıa (healing practices) associated with nagualismo, cenotes
are a manifestation of these less available, more sacred dimensions, which one can
only access by interrupting the habitual (Anzald
ua 2015, 32).
In her blog World Wide Hueva (2015), Estrada described “Cenote” as a piece on
swimming and masturbation (2015). The comic, in fact, opens with an unremark-
able, intimate scene: a woman playing with her phone as she lies on her bed
(Figure 4). Following this scene, a series of sequenced panels illustrate a masturba-
tory act, where the vagina progressively becomes a threshold that lets the woman
into the deep waters of a cenote, across the ocean and finally onto the seashore of
a beach. Estrada, in my view, manages to elude a plot-driven narrative, despite
presenting the reader with a seemingly linear action. Instead, I want to suggest,
she experiments with the formal capacity inherent to comics in order to fore-
ground an entangled, non-linear, and material relationship between body and
nature. To put it in Sousanis’s terms, “Cenote” acts as an unflattening device that
explicitly makes use of the medium’s fifth dimension. For Sousanis, images in com-
ics put imagination to work, giving space to a “fifth dimension” that allows both the
artist and the reader to access otherwise unknown material perspectives (2015,
88). “Cenote” achieves this effect by means of its formal architecture, as it jumps
between human and nonhuman vantage points.
306 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

s Estrada, panels from “Cenote” in Impatience, 2016 (Me

Figure 4 Ine
xico DF: Ine

s Estrada),

s Estrada 2012–2016.
24. All contents # Ine

On its second page, the comic already offers the reader a glimpse into the
mechanics of this fifth dimension, though it is only retrospectively that these first
panels take on a multidimensional meaning. Here, frames switch perspectives,
offering the reader an external view of the protagonist’s room and an internal one,
where we face the insides of the body (Figure 5). Our view shifts from the woman
masturbating on her bed to a close-up of her fingers as they reach into the body,
moving towards us, as if they were coming from behind the page. Both the play
with scale and the framing and reframing between these two perspectives encour-
age a practice of reading which positions the reader spatially in a fluctuating man-
ner between the outsides of the body and its insides. In the frames that suggest
the interiors of a vulva, the close-up that Estrada uses is sufficient to let the labia
and its close surroundings fill the entire panel. According to feminist film theorist
Laura Marks, close-ups act on the body by fragmenting and, in doing so, fore-
ground bodily texture over visual form. “By refusing to make their images access-
ible to vision”, writes Marks, “the viewer must resort to other senses, such as
touch, in order to perceive the image” (2000, 159). Comparing these ideas to
Estrada’s comic, one can point out how her close framing mechanism brings
“vision as close as possible to the image” (Marks 2000, 159). Hence the effect on
the reader is not only visual, but also haptic: the close-up figuratively makes the
skin of the body felt, so to speak.
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 307

s Estrada, panels from “Cenote” in Impatience, 2016 (Me

Figure 5 Ine
xico DF: Ine

s Estrada),

s Estrada 2012–2016.
25. All contents # Ine

It is only here, once the reader has affectively engaged with the comic at a bodily
level, that the narrative takes a conceptual detour. On the next page (Figure 6), it
is no longer one finger that is coming through the opening, but the protagonist’s
whole body, whose scale has now also shifted. At this point, we realise that the
insides of the vulva are also an entryway into a cenote. Hereafter, the closely
framed opening, outlined with thin brushstrokes, works both as part of the wom-
an’s body and as the walls that frame the natural water well; subject and world, as
their boundaries become permeable, spill into each other.
So, as the protagonist is shown swimming across the watery underworld, a para-
dox occurs that only imagination can explain: her entire body slips into her own
body. Put in a more sophisticated manner, the comic takes on a folded structure,
in which the subject’s body can be pictured in a metaphysical sense as subsumed
by her own bodily self precisely because that self is also another, namely, the
308 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

s Estrada, panels from “Cenote” in Impatience, 2016 (Me

Figure 6 Ine
xico DF: Ine

s Estrada),

s Estrada 2012–2016.
26–27. All contents # Ine

cenote’s body of water. I choose the phrase folded structure to gesture towards
Gilles Deleuze’s writings on the fold, a Leibnizian concept which maps out how
self and space merge into each other in a process of ongoing worldliness (Deleuze
1993, 35). The conceptual folding between self and cenote evokes the body as it
folds onto the world, while the world keeps folding back onto the body. This con-
tinuous enmeshment, though it happens primordially on a conceptual level, also
takes on a material significance when pictured through Sousanis’s fifth dimension.
In the world of Unflattening, the reader’s vision hits upon a target before jumping
to another one, getting “disconnected static snapshots, an incomplete picture
riddled with gaps”, while imagination, in turn, acts as a bridge, spanning “gaps in
perception” (Sousanis 2015, 90–91). In “Cenote”, as in Nagualism’s chamaner
ıa,
Estrada interrupts the habitual patterns of the mind through the work of imagin-
ation, encouraging an arthrological shift in perspective. She plays with our experi-
ence of the comic: by the time we get to the end of the sequence, our perspective
changes, so that a thing that we had thought was one thing turns out to be some-
thing else, but without losing its previous referent. Her folded aesthetics takes us
beyond the “flat and narrow”, conveying “both our dimensionality and dynamic
capability” (Sousanis 2015, 146).
While it becomes clear that the formal architecture of “Cenote” accentuates the
network of passages composing the labyrinthine structure of the Mayan underworld,
one cannot overlook the suggested analogy between the womb and the cenote’s well.
In the light of the aesthetic-political projects of both Anzald
ua and Estrada, this
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 309

analogy is of interest for two main reasons. First, given that the scene that opens the
comic is one of self-eroticism, we can assume that Estrada is not interested in imag-
ining the female reproductive system precisely from the view of its reprosexual log-
ics. Instead, the comic suggests the vulva as a space for self-pleasure. I read this not
as an engagement with the anti-social perspective against reproductive futurism, in
the vein of Lee Edelman9 for example, but rather as a search for hope in other forms
of queer reproduction. As the protagonist enters her own body, there is a transform-
ation of that same body into that of the cenote; consequently, a reproduction of sorts
does happen, though in the form of a becoming other, in the terms used by Elizabeth
Grosz, where the human undoes its constitutive form in becoming something else
(Grosz and Stirner 2016, 19). Hence, my second point: even if Estrada begins with a
body able to reproduce itself, soon her proposal takes a posthuman turn. She moves
away from the human body as the only reproductive source of life, embracing a
“watery gestationality”, as Astrida Neimanis would call it. Neimanis, in her book
Bodies of Water, thinks of the human body as one bathed into existence by other
earthly watery bodies and decentralises the primacy of human reprosexual wombs
(2017, 3). For her, a posthuman gestationality “challenges the primacy of human het-
eronormative reprosexuality as the cornerstone for proliferating life, yet without
washing away a feminist commitment to thinking the difference of maternal, femin-
ine, and otherwise gendered and sexed bodies” (2017, 4).
I am drawn to this perspective because it suggests that we can start from femin-
ine difference, as proposed by “Cenote”, without falling into the fixed essentialism
of a heteroreproductive view. In this sense, the comic also hints at Anzald
ua's
thoughts on the naguala. As mentioned earlier, many of Anzald
ua’s formulations
take the philosophical premises of Nagualism as starting points, even though she
uses the feminine form and writes instead about la naguala. This is because, for
her, a woman’s body is intimately linked to an alternative way of producing know-
ledge; it is an entryway into nepantla, where “[y]ou experience reality as fluid,
expanding and contracting” (Anzald
ua 2002, 544). Anzald
ua’s naguala puts forward
an alternative form of bodily knowledge that is not exclusively produced under
normative reprosexual terms. As mentioned in the introduction, her lifetime quest
for a borderlands identity was indeed openly queer and committed to the search
for fertility outside of heteronormative paradigms, unfolding through her own
writing, her activism, and her tribute to other mestiza voices and her Indigenous
heritage. In Estrada’s comic, in the same vein, we witness how an act that begins
as seemingly mundane and autonomous is generative of larger sources of liveliness
beyond the human.
Unlike psychoanalysis,10 my reading of the comic begins from the premise that
the subject is ultimately relational. What I regard as key in Anzald
ua is her inter-
pretation of the cenote as a reserve that is her body –“for me, esta hoya is the
body” (2009, 292) – to which she can turn to find inspiration, but which is at the
same time a space for turning her own body outwards, towards ancestral, transtem-
poral knowledges. In her theories, the cenote as a material figuration of human
implication in a worldly matrix of being and becoming is indebted to an
Indigenous cosmovision, in which, as Walter Mignolo tells us, nature and humanity
are not opposites, and even if they were, they could co-exist without negating
310 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

each other (2007, 22). For cultural theorist Jackie Wang, for example, this would
count as a vitalist take on the oceanic, representative of a more “affective phil-
osophy” rooted in “ecological thought” (21), such as Spinoza’s, and thus “more
socially and politically enabling” (19). Wang, appropriately, asks the following
questions: “What would it mean to socialize (or communize) oceanic feeling?
Could the oceanic act as a feeling in-common that serves as the experiential basis
for the co-construction of new worlds?” (22).
Echoing Wang’s call for a social dimension to this oceanic feeling, to read
“Cenote” in its sociality implies asking about Estrada’s ability not to illustrate the
human body, or the geographical cenote, but rather to speak to us about our
implication in larger structures of relationality. For example, how can we think
embodiment through the cenote?11 The comic’s back-and-forth shift in perspectives
helps to expand the reader’s one-dimensional viewpoint to one filled with multiple
frames of reference; it augments the connections and associations between previ-
ously unrelated elements. But as Anzald
ua reminds us, it is the nepantlera’s task “to
involve the reader in the work as completely as possible without letting the reader
forget that it’s a work of art even as s/he interacts with it as if it were reality”
(2015, 41). Put in a different way, one might say that “Cenote” provides an aes-
thetic framework for the construction of new worlds. This idea is evoked by the
comic’s final panels, where the protagonist also struggles to reach for air, to re-
surface (Figure 7), ending up at the seashore, back on terrestrial land, instead of
swimming across the cenote’s watery insides. Estrada here proves true “the
demand to surface”, an “orientational constraint” that Neimanis associates with all
human beings (2017, 2). However, read via Anzald
ua, this final panel might also
urge us to re-approach reality with a deeper, oceanic awareness. As Anzald
ua
writes “the outside world does exist beyond our small individual and collective
minds, and we as physical fleshandblood entities must participate fully with that
world” (2015, 43). Having considered how “Cenote” brings the reader’s perception
to embrace an oceanic awareness, I will now contemplate how, with other comics
in Impatience, Estrada continues to picture human and nonhuman encounters to
advance an alternative, multispecies form of relationality.

Becoming-snake: to enter into the serpent

There is an image at the beginning of “Traducciones”, the longest comic included

in Impatience, that is especially Anzald
uan. The comic starts with a dream in which
snakes take over Luc
ıa’s kitchen (Figure 8). First, the space is filled with spiders
and cobwebs, and in the last frames of Luc
ıa’s dream, the structure of the dish
rack starts to become wobbly and the lines that compose it become serpents. She
wakes up.
As I take in these frames, it is impossible for me not to think about El nagual in
my house, a specific passage in Anzald
ua’s “Light in the dark/Luz en lo oscuro”:

As I walk into my living room, a shadowy figure undulates across my carpet.

My heart leaps. Es una v
ıbora, a familiar thing, and my heart settles when I
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 311

s Estrada, panel from “Cenote” in Impatience, 2016 (Me

Figure 7 Ine
xico DF: Ine

s Estrada),

s Estrada 2012–2016.
28. All contents # Ine

recognize it. I’ve encountered “real” snakes countless times in my life, but this
snake has entered my house – for the second time in ten years. This snake
lives under my house; it came into my living room, up through a hole in the
square of uncovered ground in the entryway where a large plant grows.

On this night sue~no con la v
ıbora; an imaginal snake (a psychic inner

gure), appears in one of my dreams, and two days later, as I’m walking
across Lighthouse Field Park, another “real” snake crosses my path. (...)
Whether material or imaginal, este animal symbolically represents
transformation for me: encounters where nature – a bird, a tree, the
wind – catches my attention and awakens me to another reality, a healing
spirituality that calls for soul recovery. (Anzald
ua 2015, 27)

The snake is Anzald
ua’s animal spirit. Serpents, in her queer imaginary, are sym-
bols of the soul (Anzald
ua 2009, 94). They encourage the same kind of trans-
formative encounter that she finds in the deep waters of the cenote, where the
self awakens to another reality. She writes often about dreaming of snakes, about
becoming them. In “Entering into the Serpent”, one of the most cited chapters in
her famous Borderlands/La Frontera, she experiences a metamorphosis into a serpent
in her dreams. The passage begins by perpetuating the Western fear of the animal,
largely derived from its Catholic associations with vice and sexuality. Her mother
warns her of the horrific power of snakes “in the dream state” – they are
“autonomous phalloi that rape women” (Lioi 2008, 79), she tells her. But as the
essay goes on, in a passage titled “Ella tiene su tono” (She grasps her animal soul),
Anzald
ua proposes a “counternarrative” (Lioi 2008, 79). She writes that after being
312 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

s Estrada, panels from “Traducciones” in Impatience, 2016 (Me

Figure 8 Ine
xico DF: Ine

s

s Estrada 2012–2016.
Estrada), 35. All contents # Ine

bitten by the snake, she experienced the enhancing effects of taking in the reptile’s
venom; by becoming the snake, she is blessed with a different kind of optics. As
she says, she now has entered inside the animal, as much as the animal has entered
inside her body.
In Estrada’s Impatience, snakes make multiple appearances. As noted, they are
featured in “Traducciones” as part of the protagonist’s dreamworld. But it is the
comic entitled “V
ıbora” (Estrada 2016, 148–149) which most clearly visualises
Estrada’s more-than-human entanglements. “V
ıbora” is a silent comic that can be
interpreted in a multiplicity of manners. It opens with a scene similar to what we
find in “Cenote”: a woman lies on her bed using her computer, performing a
seemingly mundane task. Over the next few panels, the protagonist approaches
her pet snake curiously, kissing her, and letting the animal curl around her chest.
On the next and final page (Figure 9), the serpent begins to engage physically
with the woman’s body, rolling on her chest, and subsequently leaving her on the
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 313

s Estrada, panels from “V
ıbora” in Impatience, 2016 (Me

Figure 9 Ine
xico DF: Ine

s Estrada),

s Estrada 2012–2016.
148–149. All contents # Ine

floor. The last two panels show the snake as it penetrates the woman’s vagina,
finally coming out through one of her eyes.
The penetrative act in “V
ıbora” is not necessarily consensual. The protago-
nist’s reaction to the snake coming into her body raises the question of
whether she is being wounded by the animal or rather engaging in a sort of
out-of-body experience which transgresses the boundaries between pleasure and
pain. The comic, I believe, encourages us to think about the complexity of the
human-nonhuman embodied encounter through a queer optics, playing on the
verge of eroticism to advance alternative embodiments of multispecies
relationality.
This resonates deeply with Amat Escalante’s film La regi
on salvaje (2016), where
humans engage with a tentacle/alien creature in an explicitly sexual encounter.
Jenner (2019) references Escalante’s film when writing on the contemporary turn
“towards a chthonic spectatorship”. For him, contemporary cinema seems to be
fascinated with underwater life and sea-creatures, especially those bearing tentacles,
thereby promoting a spectatorship that engages with more-than-human forms of
embodiment, and no longer taking the human-on-screen as the only point of iden-
tification. This coming together of different modes of embodiment beyond the
human is what I see in “V
ıbora”, where Estrada also seems to be encouraging a
multispecies form of kin, characteristic of what Donna Haraway has named the
Chthulucene. For Haraway,
314 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse,

human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with
all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings
are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth
are the main story. (2016, 55)

As the body contours-with the snake, the comic heightens the embodied exist-
ence of the snake as material, underscoring her agency and making her equally
part of the main story. The panels set into motion an encounter with otherness
and the foreign as it is mediated through the body, where both parties shift
and accommodate as they take each other in. The serpent, to be clear, appears
as a living entity that performs different interfaces between the material and
the mythical. By this, I intend to point out that one cannot overlook this ani-
mal’s historical associations: its mythological associations to an underground
creature, still tethered to religious connotations as a symbol of sin and horror;
indeed, in the view of the myths surrounding the reptile, it would not be
uncommon to read the human as prey of the serpent’s temptation and evil.
Without going too far, due to its phallic associations, when reading “V
ıbora”,
we are most likely to conceptualise the scene as the snake entering the
human body.
Visually, this is what is happening: the snake enters into the body of the
protagonist, and not the other way around. Yet, I wonder if it might be pos-
sible to picture the image as a kind of series of multiple foldings, in which
both beings become-with each other, in a sort of metaphorical interpenetration.
This imaginative take is perhaps closer, on a conceptual level, to the “species
interdependence” theorised by Haraway, “the name of the worlding game on
earth” (2008, 19), and takes us back to the kaleidoscopic worldings analysed
in this essay’s first section. I propose to read Estrada’s “V
ıbora” as a comic
that enacts the affective atmosphere of this worlding interdependence, also
playing with the idea of the queer vision that one gains when species meet
(echoing Haraway’s book title), as suggested by Anzald
ua in “Entering into
the Serpent”.
Unlike “Cenote”, “V
ıbora” does not explicitly play with the medium’s formal
potentialities. But in its conceptual narrative, it does encourage a shift in
vision, advancing once again the production of a differential consciousness
through the body. The final panel (Figure 10) depicts the snake coming out
through one of the protagonist’s eyes and taking her eyeball in the process.
This finale, for me, foregrounds a visual shift in gear in relation to the comic’s
expected spectatorship. For the eye of the protagonist is now affected by the
snake’s surrounding materiality. “V
ıbora”, one might conclude, does not reject
all human agency, but it does ultimately imagine a kind of human that can be
materially altered in a becoming-with the nonhuman. This metaphorical reading
echoes the reaction of the young Anzald
ua to the snake venom in “Entering
into the Serpent”. After consciously taking in the venom, Anzald
ua sees
“through snake eyes, [and feels] snake blood course through [her] body”. “The
serpent ‘becomes her’ tono, my animal counterpart. I was immune to its
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 315

s Estrada, panel from “V
ıbora” in Impatience, 2016 (Me

Figure 10 Ine
xico DF: Ine

s Estrada),

s Estrada 2012–2016.
149. All contents # Ine

venom. Forever immune” (Anzald
ua [1987] 2012, 48). In “La herencia de

Coatlicue”, another passage in Borderlands/La Frontera, she says: “Let the wound
caused by the serpent be cured by the serpent” (1987, 72). In the cases of
both Anzald
ua and Estrada, while the mythical connotations of the serpent
remain, our relationship to such meanings shift: the human becomes something
other by inhabiting the snake’s spirit of contradiction.12 Estrada, here, pictures
cohabitation as one way of imagining the relationship between the self and
the other.
Later on, in two other comics, she uses a different image to conceptualise this
interaction, that of actual transformation. In “Hot Day” (2016, 96–100), a woman
claims to use her “last strength to turn into a cat and flee into the wilderness”
(100), while in “Beeing” (2016, 193–194) (Figure 11), another woman is bitten by
a bee and her hand starts to change shape. As it swells, her “whole body start[s]
growing too”. She outgrows her house, leaves the city and walks away. “Time
passed and plants grew all over me”, writes the narrator, “a river started flowing
from my guts/And so I became a mountain” (193). The metamorphosis depicted
in this last comic does not reach totality. The final image of the transformation is
neither a woman nor a mountain, but a hybrid.
Remembering Sousanis’s point that in comics we take the page as a whole
before letting our eyes wander, here our vision would most likely settle for the
face of this creature and the human form of their body, before noticing their
non-human characteristics. Despite this being the naturalised orientation in which
our thought moves, by reading Estrada alongside an alternative, queer optics such
as Anzald
ua’s, we are able to figuratively enter into the serpent, that is to say, we
may imagine this creature through non-hierarchical visual lenses. Read in this
way, the comic also echoes some of Marisol de la Cadena’s contributions from
her book Earth Beings, where she reflects extensively on Ausangate, a mountain in
the Andes of Peru. For de la Cadena, Ausangate is an example of how, for many
316 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

s Estrada, panel from “Beeing” in Impatience, 2016 (Me

Figure 11 Ine
xico DF: Ine

s Estrada),

s Estrada 2012–2016.
195. All contents # Ine

people in this region, marks in the landscape – a mountain or a river, for

example – can transcend the modern separation between nature and culture, and
as such both animate and mediate a practice of cosmopolitics, in her words,
“relations among divergent worlds as a decolonial practice of politics with no
other guarantee than the absence of ontological sameness” (2015, 281). The last
panel of “Beeing” makes these ideas reverberate: it pictures a way of being in
which human and nonhuman forms may coexist without merging into each other,
keeping always the mechanism of relation in place and active. The title, where
“bee” modifies “being”, already suggests an entanglement between divergent ontol-
ogies. Here, it is the middle point, neither woman nor mountain, which performs
a mode of thinking about encounters in a dynamic way without losing the self
while also preserving alterity.

Conclusions

When reading Anzald
ua’s writings, AnaLouise Keating describes her “praxis of

imagination” as a “shaman aesthetics”. She highlights Anzald
ua’s “belief in art’s
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 317

healing, transformative power and her shape-shifting approach to language and the
body” (2009, 121). I borrow these words to conclude my queer curations of
Estrada’s Impatience, for it seems to me they offer an appropriate note on which to
do so. It is indeed a sort of shaman aesthetics that structures Estrada’s collection,
one which activates, to put it in Sandoval’s terms, “a set of processes, procedures,
and technologies for decolonizing the imagination” (2000, 68). What fuels
Impatience, as I have advanced throughout this work, is an aesthetics of nepantla.
Estrada, in my view, can be read as an artistic nepantlera whose aesthetics is situ-
ated at the thresholds of form, paying tribute to a queer and Latinx spatial genealogy.
In these brief meditations, I have tried to determine how Impatience indeed comes
to matter compositionally alongside said embodied history of thought. Queerly
reading objects together, Gopinath suggests, begins here: in the ethical obligation
to carefully attend to otherwise unrelated aesthetic practices (2018, 4).
Accordingly, I hope to have honoured Anzald
ua’s own curatorial practice of think-
ing, one that is undergirded in turn by her own desire to make heard the “voices
of fleshy Latina selves”, “voices who transport you to the particularities of bodies,
who are grounded in their own lived experience”, as Mariana Ortega beautifully
phrases it (2016, 3).
In taking the encounters between human and multiverse, body and cenote, and
between woman and snake, as lasting, productive, and most importantly embod-
ied contradictions, I rewrite them as borderland figures embodying non-dualistic
forms of subjectivity and relationality, whereby the human point of view, includ-
ing that of the reader, is open to relational and transformational collisions with
that of the nonhuman. The comics that I have looked at are examples both
conceptually and formally of the folds in space and in vision which the medium
that concerns us is capable of achieving. In this sense, this essay has also pre-
sented a way to think through a queer and kaleidoscopic aesthetics via the comics
medium.
If anything, what lies at the heart of Impatience is how it encourages a reading
practice, as Barad puts it so simply, that takes “account of the entangled material-
ization of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new
possibilities” (2012, 69). When I suggested at the beginning of this essay that
Estrada is a nepantlera, I intended to point out her capacity for mediating between
worlds, but I also wanted to convey her ability to speak in tongues – to use
Anzald
ua’s expression – that is, her dextrous artistic ability to enact the kaleido-
scopic and to shapeshift her panels and, in turn, to get us to transform our own.

Notes
1. These concepts are at the core of Anzald
ua’s most cited work, Borderlands/La
Frontera: The New Mestiza. They point at the same time to the materiality of the
US-Mexico border, and to cultural and racial in-betweenness. The nepantlera is a
development of Anzald
ua’s mestiza consciousness (see Koegeler-Abdi 2013 on this
important subject).
2. Though many of Anzald
ua’s theories draw on her Indigenous mythological heritage, her
writings are actually a combination of several histories of knowledge. On this matter, see
318 J O U R N A L O F L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

for example Anthony Lioi, who writes on the spectral quality of Anzald
ua’s work, naming it
a “combination of Aztec, Nahua, Catholic and Neopagan spiritualities” (2008, 75).
3. In using the concept of South-South commonality, I draw on Gopinath, who looks for
“lines of connection and commonality, a kind of South-South relationality, between
seemingly discrete regional spaces that in fact bypass the nation” (2018, 5). Even though
Anzald
ua and Estrada are both associated with the Mexico-US borderland space, I find
that a South-South commonality can also be found between temporally distant practices
or between two formally distinct mediums.
4. Estrada has edited and self-published together with Enrique Arriaga the book Fanzinolog
ıa
mexicana 1985–2015, which brings together three decades of fanzine production
in Mexico.
5. Chicks on Comics is an international comics collective formed by seven artists from
Argentina, Colombia, Holland, Latvia, and Singapore. They publish an online dialogue in
the comics form. They have also recently published the book Las ciudades que
somos (2018).
6. Estrada has now moved back to Mexico City. Before Impatience, she also self-published
another collection in 2012, Ojitos borrosos. Her first graphic novel, Lapsos was released in
2014 by the Swedish publishing house C’est Bon Kultur and then by Valencia-based
Ediciones Valientes. In 2019, Seattle-based Fantagraphics released Alienation, her second
graphic novel, previously self-published by Estrada in the format of six zines.
7. Unflattening was first written as Nick Sousanis’s PhD dissertation for Columbia
University.
8. See Hillary Chute (2010 and 2016), Charles Hatfield (2015), Henry Jenkins (2020),
Frederik B. Køhlert (2019), and Thaneer Oksman (2016).
9. On this subject, see Lee Edelman (2004).
10. It remains crucial to note here that my approach to “Cenote” is not a psychoanalytic
one, although a reading of this kind could certainly be advanced. Certainly, Anzald
ua
finds in the Yucat
an cenotes a sacred spirituality and a source of otherworldly
inspiration for her praxis as artist and activist that partially comes from the unconscious
or, as she writes, from “the subterranean psychic norias or reserves containing our
depth consciousness and ancestral knowledges, to well up in the poem, story, painting
[or] dance” (2009, 291). At the same time, it makes sense, when reading Estrada’s
comic, that the representation of an underground reservoir of water that takes in the
conscious self could be interpreted as a journey into an oceanic unconscious, to put it
in Jackie Wang’s terms, as a Freudian return to the mother’s womb or, a la Julia
Kristeva, as an “infantile regression” tied to melancholia (Wang, 5). In these readings,
as Wang would have it, the “oceanic” is “mediated and managed by the psychoanalytic
practice of signification”, so that it is named, preventing the self from going into
absolute dissolution (13).
11. On this matter, see Jue (2020), who investigates how media concepts – such as interface
and database – “hold up” once we think them through seawater. For her, this goes
beyond some of the research of the so-called Blue Humanities; it implies an awareness of
how our hegemonic habits of perception and thinking have terrestrial orientations, and
thrive only in certain environments and cultural milieus (xi).
12. Ortega considers another important critique that has been made of Anzald
ua: her several
attempts to name a process which she tries to conceptualise as always in the making. She
references Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, who points out the tension produced in recognising
an in-between subjectivity via the expression “mestiza consciousness”, a term which
 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 319

crystallises an identity (Ortega 2016, 33). Ortega’s counterargument is that Anzald
ua’s

use of generative contradictions is part of her own liminal thinking.

Acknowledgements
I would like to kindly thank Dr Joanna Page, my PhD supervisor, for her guidance and comments while
preparing this essay. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their valuable and insightful feedback on
my work. Finally, a warm thank you to Michael for proofreading my piece.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by Gates Cambridge Trust.

ORCID
Andrea Arambur
u Villavisencio http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4057-9905

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 A. ARAMBURÚ VILLAVISENCIO 321

Andrea Aramburu
Villavisencio is from Lima, Peru
. She is a doctoral candidate at the
Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge, working on queer and
feminist approaches to contemporary Latin American comics. Her research is funded by
Gates Cambridge. She is also the recipient of the Trinity-MCSC Honorary Scholarship.
She holds a Master of Arts in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory from King’s
College London, and a BA in Hispanic Literature from Pontificia Universidad Cato
lica


del Peru (PUCP).