My book manuscript, tentatively titled Landscapes of Grief: Transborder Memory-Making and Specters of Fort Hood, traces the spectral and bodily remains of Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén and Army Private Ana Fernanda Basaldúa Ruiz, whose deaths occurred at the U.S. Army Base at Fort Hood, Texas, on April 22, 2020, and March 13, 2023, respectively. 

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Landscapes of Grief advances the concept of feminicidal military violence to name a form of gendered killing specific to the U.S. military institution and its structures of impunity. As an analytic, feminicidal military violence explores the intimate connections between gender and sexual violence in the U.S. military and communities impacted by U.S. settler military violence. Drawing on archival and ethnographic fieldwork in California, Texas, and across the Mexican states of Michoacán and Zacatecas, I argue that the study of slain Latina soldiers is inherently transnational and interdisciplinary. 

 

This project charts the multisensorial forms of memory-making inclusive of altars, burials, corridos, letters, marchas (protests), memorials, and murals created in the wake of slain Latina soldiers. Landscapes of Grief deploys a theorization of spectral reading and sensing as a methodology to commune with the transborder archive of memory. At the same time, I advance spectral notes to read against state-authorized memory of death, including military archival documents retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This archive demonstrates that spectral (and bodily) remains are not peripheral or supplementary political spheres, but primary epistemological and counter-archival sites through which transborder communities produce, transmit, and act on (counter)knowledge that state-sanctioned memory suppresses.​