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Abstract:
Based on twenty‐one months of ethnography and interviews with transborder commuters in the San Diego‐Tijuana border region, this article develops the notion of “queer limitrophic dwelling.” Building on queer, feminist, and transnational scholarship on home and dwelling, the article demonstrates how transborder commuters negotiate white Euro‐American renditions of home and domesticity that emphasize privacy and fixity as the “proper” ideal vis‐à‐vis the home. It argues that transborder commuters enact several life‐making or queer tactics — practices not necessarily enacted by LGBTQ+ subjects — that spatially decentralize their homes in Tijuana by harnessing transborder kinships and by making queer use of spaces and objects at the San Ysidro port of entry and across San Diego. In doing so, transborder commuters’ domestic labor practices produce ephemeral mobile dwellings when needed, allowing them to navigate multiple temporalities and survive normalized conditions of displacement occasioned by US land ports of entry and racial capitalism. Importantly, queer limitrophic dwelling highlights the US‐Mexico borderland's capabilities to nourish and maintain life while also being a product of US settler colonialism engendered through historic and ongoing border violence and exclusion.