Thick mapping: the processes of collecting, aggregating, and visualizing ever more layers of geographic or place-specific data…
...Thick maps are conjoined with stories, and stories are conjoined with maps, such that ever more ocomplex context for meaning are created. As such, thick maps are never finished and meanings are never definitive. They are infinitely extensible and participatory, open to the unknown and to futures that have not yet come.
(HyperCities, p. 17-19)
In it’s totality, my counter-narrative of Selena constitutes a thick map. Like Baudelaire's flaneur, I am ambling along the hidden, or faded traces of the Tejana singer’s past. Along the way, I excavate forgotten secretes in an effort to enliven the present with new, alternative possibilities. I do not claim to be the objective cartographer. On the contrary, the friction that arises between my counter-narrative and the narratives that came before will not only add to the thickness of space, but in doing so, make transparent my queer cartographic tendencies.
Among the various coordinates on my map, which span between Los Angeles and the Texas/Mexican borderlands, the thickest, or deepest point in space would be the Knight's Inn Motel, formerly known as the Days Inn Motel, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Like Anzaldúa’s nepantla, Pérez’s “third space feminism,” Borges “Aleph,” and Soja’s “thirdspace,” the motel is the space of collapse between subjectivity and objectivity, “the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable...the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history” (Soja, 56-57). Like a digital dandy, I stand materially, digitally and imaginatively outside room 150, formerly room 158, and [de]map, [re]map, the counter-story of the space. Mine is just one of an infinite number of possible stories, none of which are bound by linear space or time. As I conjure up alternative narratives of space, my map becomes thick with multiple, co-existing pasts, made legible for the first time in the present moment.
For the purposes of my story, the motel is the limitless, anti-temporal navel of my map. It becomes the central point through which my protagonist travels back into history, back to Corpus Christi and Ciudad Juarez of 1995 in order to gather up forgotten stories of the past, some real, some imagined, but all of which serve to brighten our present with a queer futurity.
...Thick maps are conjoined with stories, and stories are conjoined with maps, such that ever more ocomplex context for meaning are created. As such, thick maps are never finished and meanings are never definitive. They are infinitely extensible and participatory, open to the unknown and to futures that have not yet come.
(HyperCities, p. 17-19)
In it’s totality, my counter-narrative of Selena constitutes a thick map. Like Baudelaire's flaneur, I am ambling along the hidden, or faded traces of the Tejana singer’s past. Along the way, I excavate forgotten secretes in an effort to enliven the present with new, alternative possibilities. I do not claim to be the objective cartographer. On the contrary, the friction that arises between my counter-narrative and the narratives that came before will not only add to the thickness of space, but in doing so, make transparent my queer cartographic tendencies.
Among the various coordinates on my map, which span between Los Angeles and the Texas/Mexican borderlands, the thickest, or deepest point in space would be the Knight's Inn Motel, formerly known as the Days Inn Motel, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Like Anzaldúa’s nepantla, Pérez’s “third space feminism,” Borges “Aleph,” and Soja’s “thirdspace,” the motel is the space of collapse between subjectivity and objectivity, “the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable...the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history” (Soja, 56-57). Like a digital dandy, I stand materially, digitally and imaginatively outside room 150, formerly room 158, and [de]map, [re]map, the counter-story of the space. Mine is just one of an infinite number of possible stories, none of which are bound by linear space or time. As I conjure up alternative narratives of space, my map becomes thick with multiple, co-existing pasts, made legible for the first time in the present moment.
For the purposes of my story, the motel is the limitless, anti-temporal navel of my map. It becomes the central point through which my protagonist travels back into history, back to Corpus Christi and Ciudad Juarez of 1995 in order to gather up forgotten stories of the past, some real, some imagined, but all of which serve to brighten our present with a queer futurity.