Butterfly Crossings: Traversing Boundaries of Space and Species in North America

Abstract

Migration is a bedrock reality of earthly life. This truth invites us to imagine the span of the Americas beginning not with borders and walls but instead with movement beyond them. What might our continents and countries begin to look and feel like if we acknowledged the necessity of these crossings, the kinship and well-being that movement sustains? The essay explores these questions through a series of meditations on the monarch butterfly, a creature that has become in recent years the symbol of a more expansive vision of North American belonging. Anand Pandian describes affinities for the butterfly articulated and expressed by artists, migrant rights activists, butterfly enthusiasts, and migrants themselves, in the United States and in Mexico. In the company of migrants, both human and lepidopteran, Pandian explores an alternative vision of collective life beyond national walls and borders. With the lifeways of the monarch butterfly, the most crucial lesson has to do with the relationships that propel movement across borders, the ties that draw together those within and those without. A society of rigid walls and borders may seek to repudiate their reality, or their necessity. And yet these relationships remain at work in our world of pervasive motion and migration, binding our fates together with living beings and distant places far beyond the span of the lines we draw.