Engaging with contemporary Latinx and Indigenous border literatures and films, my dissertation considers the tensions between Latinx migration and Indigenous sovereignty, claiming that their uneasy relation demands sustained critical and political attention. While Latinx cross-border migration and Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty struggles share important connections in the context of a colonial-racial capitalist system of oppression, they cannot be easily collapsed into each other. Expanding upon Marisol de la Cadena’s concept of “partial connection,” my dissertation counters theoretical discourses that insist on commonality as the basis for Indigenous and Latinx intragroup solidarities. Moving beyond Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands concept with its promise of hybridity, I instead focus on reading borders as sites of profound tension for Indigenous and Latinx groups. In doing so, I treat borders not as locations that produce comradeship and mutual healing automatically, but as a condition that demands a reckoning with what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call the “unfriendliness” between contested positions. My dissertation proposes that literature, film, and other cultural forms can assist with the hard work of grappling with these difficult tensions, working through them instead of wishing them away.