caroline eaton tracey
writer

caroline.e.tracey at gmail dot com


photo: graciela iturbide
The Instagram Counter-Archive: Guadalupe Rosales, Graciela Iturbide, and Chicana Representation Across Borders
June 2021
Burlington Contemporary

“The afterlife of Iturbide’s East LA photographs aligns well with her perception of the work as an aesthetic fabrication, focused on formal qualities over ethnographic ones. The poetry and emotional reality of her images have enabled the community to claim and shape them as their own, long after Iturbide left town. The failure of the images as ethnographic, then, allows them to be folded into Chicana narratives and to confirm Rosales’s mission of self-representation. The artistic nature of Iturbide’s images grants a status of archivability that extends beyond the photographs’ frames. And the afterlives of the images demonstrate that it is not only representation itself that matters, but also the reclaiming and reframing of those representations made by outsiders.”






reporting on the Arizona border wall, november 2022 (photo: Eliseu Cavalcante)


with Ellen Waterston and guest judge Raquel Gutiérrez at the 2022 Waterston Desert Writing Prize awards ceremony
Caroline Eaton Tracey writes about environment, migration, art, and literature in the US Southwest, Mexico, and the borderlands between the two. She speaks and works in English, Spanish, and Russian.

Caroline’s reporting appears in the New Yorker, n+1, the Atlantic, and elsewhere, as well as in Spanish in Mexico’s Nexos. In 2022-2023 she was the climate justice fellow at High Country News. In 2022 she was awarded the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing and in 2023 she received Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Journalism and Human and Civil Rights. She is also an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square.

Her essays appear in the Kenyon Review Online, Shenandoah, New South, and elsewhere. “A River Passes By Here” was runner-up in the 2020 Financial Times/Bodley Head essay contest and “The Ephemeral Forever” won Ruminate Magazine’s 2021 VanderMey Nonfiction Contest. Her art writing has appeared in Nexos, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and Burlington Contemporary, and her book reviews appear in the European Review of Books and the Nation.

Caroline holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives with her wife, Mexican architect and sculptor Mariana GJP, between Tucson, Arizona and Mexico City.

She is currently seeking representation for her manuscript SALT LAKES, which combines personal narrative and science journalism to provide a new, queer perspective on climate change in arid environments, and a book proposal about the US-Mexico borderlands. 

Ask her about sugar beets.
Caroline Eaton Tracey escribe sobre el medioambiente, la migración, el arte y la literatura en México, el Suroeste de Estados Unidos y la frontera entre ellos. Habla ingles, español y ruso.

Sus artículos aparecen en The New Yorker, n+1 y The Atlantic, entre otros lugares. En español escribe frecuentemente para la revista Nexos. En 2022-2023, cubría la justicia climática para la revista High Country NewsEn 2022 ganó el Premio Waterston por Escritura del Desierto y en 2023 recibió la beca Ira A. Lipman de periodismo de derechos humanos y civiles de Columbia University. También colabora como editora en Zócalo Public Square.

Sus ensayos aparecen en Kenyon Review Online, Shenandoah y New South, entre otros lugares. “Aquí Pasa Un Río” ganó segundo lugar en el premio de ensayo Financial Times/Bodley Head de 2020; en 2021 “Lo Efímero, Para Siempre” ganó el concurso de no-ficción VanderMey de Ruminate Magazine. Sus reseñas y ensayos sobre el arte han aparecido en Nexos, Open Space (plataforma del Museo de Arte Moderno de San Francisco) y Burlington Contemporary, y sus reseñas literarias en European Review of Books y The Nation.

Caroline es Doctora en Geografía de la Universidad de California–Berkeley. Vive con su esposa, la arquitecta y escultora mexicana Mariana GJP, entre Tucson, Arizona y la Ciudad de México.

Actualmente busca publicar su manuscrito de no-ficción sobre los lagos salados y está preparando una propuesta para un libro sobre la zona fronteriza México-Estados Unidos. 

Pregúntale sobre betabeles.