Long a migrant-sending country, in recent years Mexico has become one of return. Between 2010 and 2018, 2.6 million Mexicans left the United States, 55% by deportation and 45% by return (Warren 2020). In response, a body of deportation scholarship has emerged (De Genova and Peutz 2010, Golash-Boza 2015, Brotherton and Kretsedemas 2018). Mexican sociologists and geographers have also begun to study return migration (Hirai 2013, Cruz Islas 2019, Rivera Sanchez 2019). Yet both literatures have systematically overlooked women deportees and returnees. Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo (2013) argue that deportation is a gendered form of surplus labor control; other texts in deportation studies point to a difficulty in finding women to interview (Dingeman 2018, Caldwell 2019). This dissertation, an ethnographic account of motherist, feminist, queer and trans deportee/returnee activism, challenges the idea that non-male deportees are ancillary to deportation and return migration as phenomena and objects of academic study. It argues that these return migrants' cultural production, community- building, and knowledge of the bureaucracies of the US and Mexico has improved long-term emplacement for all return migrants and their families, at the same time as they have developed novel practices of community-building and binational cultural production.

The introduction, "Gender, Emplacement, and Diasporic Intimacy," reviews existing scholarship in deportation and return migration studies to show how it has focused on the experiences of cis-male migrants and nuclear families. Thinking with the terms "emplacement" and "diasporic intimacy," I argue that my dissertation's nexus of sustained ethnographic methods, focus on long-term strategies of belonging in Mexico City, and perspective informed by theories of the global intimate, ethnographies of legal consciousness and bureaucracy, and queer and trans theories of migration intervenes in both deportation/return migration studies and studies of gender and migration. Chapter 1, "Making the Great Expulsion," interprets the history of US migration policy, focusing on the gradual creation of a permanent undocumented class that included entire families, and laid the groundwork for current flows of deportation and return. Chapter 2, "Routes from the Streets," shows how deported mothers take on the logistical labor of navigating the Mexican bureaucracy and improve the possibilities of "political emplacement" of the entire deportee/returnee community. It argues that the women's use of intimacy as an organizing affect has enabled them to develop a knowledge of the Mexican bureaucracy so intimate that they have succeeded in influencing it. Chapter 3, "Las Pochas," follows four women who are at the heart of a movement in Mexico City to reclaim the word pocha, a pejorative term for someone of Mexican descent who speaks less-than-fluent Spanish or is otherwise "Americanized." It argues that this activism diverges from activism that centers of rights to belong in the US, organizing instead around binational identity and just rights to mobility. Chapter 4, "The Dislocation of Illegality," draws on accompaniment and activism alongside transgender deportees and returnees. It argues that while trans deportees experience intersecting forms of "administrative violence" (Spade 2015), their vectors of movement, desire, and belonging flout traditional northward narratives of LGBT migration, giving rise to organizing in solidarity with Central American migrants residing or seeking asylum in Mexico City that are unique within migration activism. Finally, the Conclusion, "Deportee/Returnee Communities at the Start of the Covid-19 Pandemic," describes how deportee/returnee organizing changed at the beginning of the Covid- 19 pandemic, and how the existing solidarities and activist formations I describe earlier in the dissertation prepared the community to create mutual aid networks. At a moment in which migration is a volatile flashpoint in US politics, Binational Politics from Intimate Scales provides a crucial, humanistic perspective on deportation and return migration, using an ethnographic granularity to reframe not only migration flows but forms of belonging in the binational space of the US and Mexico.

Federal reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in the mid-1990s was widely hailed as one of the great conservation successes of the 20th century, and has become an emblematic touchstone for rewilding – an emerging discourse and set of practices for conservation in the Anthropocene. As wolves have grown in number and range, however, so too has socio-political conflict, particularly around predation as threat to livestock production. Reaction appears to far exceed wolves’ material impacts, however, and persists 25 years after reintroduction despite development and deployment of compensation measures and coexistence strategies. The wolf is thus also an exemplary instance of human-wildlife conflict, an increasingly prominent and intractable concern for megafauna conservation around the world. And while volumes have been written on wolves in Yellowstone, there has been relatively little scholarly attention to Idaho even as it highlights the challenges of shared space across the working landscapes of the American West.

Between 2015 and 2018, I conducted a case study of the Wood River Wolf Project (WRWP), a collaboration between sheep ranchers, environmental organizations, and governmental agencies in Blaine County, Idaho that has pursued wolf-livestock coexistence for over a decade. Grazing thousands of sheep on its project area in the Sawtooth Mountains while boasting the lowest depredation loss rates in the state, the WRWP has garnered international attention as a model of nonlethal management, holding out the possibility of a peaceful end to the wolf wars. Based in ethnographic and archival research and drawing insights from political ecology and critical “more-than-human” geography, I ask what we might learn from this critical case, guided by two overarching questions: First, how can we account for the persistence and seemingly disproportionate intensity of conflict surrounding wolves in the American West? And second, what are the necessary preconditions for and obstacles to scaling up and sustaining collaborative coexistence?

In the included articles, I explore the Project’s emergence and practices and how these have evolved over time, as partners have contended with political economic pressures and the delisting of wolves from federal protection and transition to Idaho state management. I highlight the value of qualitative research methods for questions of human-wildlife conflict, and the fundamentally situated and relational quality of risk perception and decision-making. I argue that anti-wolf hostility cannot be read simply as cultural-historical animosity, nor as mere biopolitical concern over an agricultural pest, but rather must be understood amid so-called “New West” transitions and ongoing legal-political tensions over the governance and use of public lands. This story stresses the inseparability of political economic, cultural-symbolic, and environmental concerns, connecting the wolf question to regional transformations, divergent land use priorities, and contemporary right-wing populism. I show how the political-symbolic enrollment of wolves by different social actors through a cultural politics of wilderness in fact perpetuates polarization and undermines on-the-ground efforts at coexistence between conservation and rural livelihoods – even as I highlight alternative political possibilities around themes of commoning and convivial conservation.

Along with mechanization and scientific plant breeding, modern forms of industrial agriculture are premised on the use of synthetic chemicals to sustain yield, irrigate fields, decrease erosion, and provide defense against pests and disease. Chemicalized agriculture has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the presence of industrially produced chemicals became available on domestic and international markets, as crop production specialized, and as scientists, farmers, and policy makers turned to chemicals to “fix” fertility, pest, and labor issues. While the use of agricultural chemicals has created the conditions for astonishing yields, their generalized use has also resulted in the pollution and degradation of ecosystems, harmful effects on consumers and farm workers, and large greenhouse gas emissions.

This dissertation investigates the relationships between the late 19th and early 20th century US mining, chemical, and petroleum refining industries, their waste byproducts, and the promotion and naturalization of economic poisons in US agriculture. Specifically, I explore the transition from the ad hoc use of economic poisons on US farms to the use of economic poisons as an agricultural necessity by focusing on the complex and multidirectional links between industrial and chemical waste and the use of a rapidly industrializing and specializing agriculture as an efficacious and profitable outlet for industrial byproducts. Drawing from fourteen archives across the US, I use the history of mining and smelting companies, chemical and petrochemical manufacturers, marketers and dealers, industrial R&D, governmental institutions, university scientists and extension agents, capital investment, environmental regulation, the military, along with politics of an inchoate toxicological science, to narrate the political economic thresholds of industrial waste’s transmutation and US agriculture’s chemicalization. In other words, I relay the historical and political economic origins of economic poisons in US agriculture from the mid 1860s to the end of WWII through the lens of industrial waste.