Territoriality
“Quisqueya,” “Borinquen,” “México de afuera,” “Aztlán,” “Greater Cuba”: these richly evocative names describe and collate familiar topos and draw together felt affinities, carefully harbored histories, and methods of knowing that shift between institutional abstractions and more intimate articulations. These names and concepts produce territoriality—which is to say they provide opportunities to ascribe forms of belonging that reach across and away from national and imperial claims to a monopoly on violent control of a geospatial arena. These are terms that circulate with the currents of nationalism, but that also try to plumb the decolonial depths in order to undo the work that territoriality typically does in an imperial register.