Written in response to Rojas’s performance Open Wounds (A Gloria), Valeria Luiselli’s experimental essay Geología de una herida / Geology of a Wound traces the border as both a physical structure and an open wound across bodies, landscapes, and histories. Flowing between Spanish and English, Luiselli interweaves the history of reproductive medicine and the IUD with the construction and militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border, bringing together seemingly disparate histories of medical violence, migration, surveillance, extraction, and biopolitics.

Through copper—a material found within the body and beneath the borderlands—the essay connects intimate bodily histories to the geological and political forces that shape the border. A MacArthur Fellow and one of the most acclaimed contemporary writers working today, Luiselli employs a nonlinear, poetic form that resonates with Rojas’s own engagement with the wound as a recurring metaphor for borders, colonialism, displacement, and survival. Moving from the uterus to the continent, from geological time to contemporary border policy, Geology of a Wound asks how violence becomes inscribed
upon our bodies and landscapes—and how a wound, repeatedly
opened by history, might be traced across generations.