Decolonial Rhetoric in Texas Borderland Gardens

Gardens are intimate spaces; they are the products of patience, attendance, and caregiving. In the Texas Borderlands, my home, gardens are also the products of carefully cultivated and long-standing rhetorical relationships. In this research study, I constellate several connected disciplinary approaches – a Chicana Feminist Epistemology (CFE), an indigenous ontology, translingual and embodied multimodal frameworks, and a cultural rhetorics methodology that employs narrative methods to explore how women in the Borderlands cultivate these rhetorical relationships with their plants, gardens, and the land. I visited Texas Borderland gardens to learn more about these rhetorical interactions. I employed a walk-thru method, the act of having a garden’s caregiver guide me through their garden and share their garden’s stories with me. My project is one of constellations, a closer look at plant-human relationality through culture, history, language, and land. Through garden walk-thrus and subsequent interviews, I learned that gardens are spaces that contain a distributed agency and an extended co-constitutive languaging. Women in the Borderlands are attuned to this type of rhetoric in ways we can learn from, as they provide examples of decolonial praxis and a rhetorical curanderisma that orients us toward spirituality and healing.