LAW-Defense at the border: Margo Tamez’s rhetorics of survivance
LAW-Defense at the border: Margo Tamez’s rhetorics of survivance

Summary/Abstract: The article analyzes Margo Tamez’s artistic, scholarly, and activist work as a decolonial practice of truthing that aims at dismantling contemporary discourses of nation- and border-building as part of rhetorical imperialism that legitimizes the colonially-rooted ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples in the name of the safety and sovereignty of a settler colonial nation-state. I argue that Tamez’s work, be it in the form of the written text, the spoken word, or performance, should be seen as a site of rhetorical power aimed at identifying and confronting the forces that have framed the Lipan Apache people as walled-in and thus non-existent in the state-engineered discourses of border and nation security.

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