Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism After Darwin

The final chapter focuses on drug cartel violence and the militarization of the southern border, as well as the birthday festivities as an opportunity to stage interventions – from a silent protest coordinated by parents of missing children at the 2006 performance to a mother sewing monarch butterflies—patron saints of unauthorized migrants—onto the dress her daughter wore to an abrazo ceremony. Border patrol agents have also intervened in the performance, embracing play to counteract negative press about their use of force. Though the festivities are restored behavior—a recovery of a previous doing—what Peña calls the “expectation of ritual” also facilitates creative interventions or repurposings. When writing about the 2006 silent protest, Peña observes “their choice of location spoke for them” (116). To return to the book’s opening, border infrastructure does not set the stage. It is the stage. It speaks. Elaine Peña brings together performance, border studies, and material religion to think about Washington birthday festivities on the US-Mexico border. Viva George takes ritual and play seriously, affirming that not all knowledge is written down and embracing the embodied archive. Rather than disparaging “controversial racial performance,” such as “playing Indian,” “playing Mexican,” or “playing colonial,” Elaine Peña writes a masterful study of the material economy of religion in the borderlands. She considers how practices of repurposing ports and bridges simultaneously deterritorialize and reterritorialize the southern border. She suggests that border actors engage with place and space in all sorts of ways—refusing to accept lines between nation-states as static or permanent. Play is key here, and it is at once world-building and world-shattering.