Huellas: Decolonial Ecofeminism, Creative Dialogue with Textile, and Latina Diaspora Relationship with Land

My name is Andrea Miranda, a Mexican-American practice-based PhD researcher at Falmouth University. I am on a journey anchored by horizons, incompletions, and eternal narratives. Growing up across cultural distances created a dialogue shaped by longing—one that pulled me inward, toward my own pluralities. These fractured narratives revealed gaps of the unknown: a language of sinkholes, reflective pools, porous identities, and underground river systems silently moving beneath oppressive structures, actively adapting to survive erasure.

This research into hydrogeographic (water and land bodies) and diasporic identities seeks to reveal the pressures imposed by hegemonic systems of assimilation that erase and homogenise difference. In doing so, these systems further separate the human from the more-than-human—entities that inherently carry wonder, imagination, and diverse ways of being.

Photo by Dorian D1 on Unsplash

Through my research, I explore how creative dialogue, grounded in reflection and sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking), can help us reconnect with the earth’s pulses as a way to navigate our active narratives and coexist within difference. Using a hydrofeminist lens I aim to reimagine relational ways of being through water that centre the unseen, fostering embodied connections between human and more-than-human worlds. Through autoethnography, performance, and textile practice, I develop an ecological pedagogy rooted in cultural resistance.

Poet and scholar Édouard Glissant’s concept of “reductive transparency” speaks to the tension between visibility and opacity: the need to both reveal and withhold. This balance becomes a form of protection against homogenisation. It is within this tension that we must learn to exist, move, and flow.

The cenote, sacred sinkholes of the Yucatán Peninsula, is where I situate and negotiate a hydrofeminist conceptual framework. As geological formations shaped by water over time, cenotes offer a powerful metaphor for diasporic identity: layered, submerged, and regenerative. By exploring the hydrogeographic and colonial histories of the cenotes, I investigate how embodied, somatic relations between land and diaspora can resist linear and hierarchical ways of thinking—opening up more fluid, relational modes of understanding and being.