4.16. Biomemories, Migration and Borders

In the aftermath of the Salvadoran Civil War (1980–1992), the traces of violence are inscribed not only in human memory but also across the country’s landscapes. Forests, rivers, and soils still bear the marks of bombings, deforestation, and contamination that disrupted rural life and severed long-standing connections between communities and the environment. These scars, intensified by contemporary extractive industries and climate change, have given rise to what many describe as ecological absence—the silence of vanished species and the disappearance of familiar landscapes that once sustained collective identity. Grounded in long-term collaboration with communities in the departments of Chalatenango, Cuscatlán, and Morazán, this research examines how memory and environment intertwine in the struggle for justice and repair. Through archival work at York University’s Centre for Research on Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CERLAC) and participatory fieldwork methods such as photovoice, oral history, and nature-walk storytelling, the study documents how survivors and their descendants remember ecological loss and mobilize those memories toward restoration. The co-creation of the Atlas of Environmental Memories, a bilingual digital platform, brings together GIS mapping, oral histories, and photographs to trace the relationships between historical violence, environmental degradation, and ecological knowledge. Drawing on de Certeau’s notion of the living archive and Pansardi and Bindi’s idea of power-within, the project approaches memory as a relational and more-than-human process in which landscapes bear witness to both destruction and renewal. The findings suggest that environmental memory strengthens collective agency, ecological restoration, and intergenerational learning. By reimagining the environment as both witness and participant in the work of remembrance, Salvadoran communities are transforming the legacies of war into practices of care, resistance, and sustainable futures.

In this paper I unpack the relationship between aesthetics of the borders as landscapes/borderscapse and the traumas they have harboured through history, to capture the essence borderscapes bare on the imprints of traumatic events. This is based on the concept of landscape memory which suggests that landscapes retain the traumas inflicted upon them as argued by Maria Tumarkin (2005). This memory is evident in the physical scars left by industrial activities—abandoned minds, polluted rivers, and barren lands. Borders are no different. While traditional views of border security have focused primarily on military and defence strategies, there is a growing recognition of the need for a more holistic approach that considers the interconnections between human well-being and environmental health. The premise is that just as human trauma can be studied, shared, and healed, so can the trauma inflicted on the land. Understanding the connection between two is the first step. For this, I focus on four specific border crossings at Hungarian-Serbian border which were prominent during the 2015-16 refugee ‘crisis’. Through photos, novels, poems, nursery rhymes and autobiographical interviews I collected at these sites between 2017-2023, I reflect on how traumascapes participate in the collective narrative of human experiences and the role environmental restoration projects in this borderscape might play in rehabilitating not only the damaged ecosystem due to the barbed-wire fence but also how they might persuade the locals who vote for far right politicians to reconsider their actions through their connection to the land.

This article examines how environments across the Balkans bear witness to migration struggles and how environmental memory connects them to longer histories of displacement, extraction, and resistance. It asks how rivers, forests, and soils remember and mediate the region’s shifting regimes of migration control, turning landscapes into archives where past and present struggles for movement converge. Working at the intersection of critical migration studies and environmental humanities, the article approaches the environment as a witness and environmental memory as a method for tracing the entanglement of ecological and political histories. Combining archival research, geospatial and hydrological data, and multisited ethnographic fieldwork across key crossings in the Balkans, the study shows how war, extraction, and post-socialist infrastructural neglect and environemntal exploitation predate and shape contemporary border ecologies. Rivers such as the Una, Drina, and Evros, mine-suspected forests in Bosnia, and the karst soils of Dalmatia and northern Albania emerge as mnemonic surfaces where residues of violence, abandonment, and struggles persist. The article concludes that environmental memory operates as a connective tissue between struggles across times and shifting geographies of migration.