Twenty-first-century Chicana/o border writing

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 105, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 717-743

  Sadowski Smith, Claudia ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950634856     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2006-009     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. Ito Romo, El Puente = The Bridge (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000);
2. Richard Yañez, El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003);
3. and Lucretia Guerrero, Chasing Shadows: Stories (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000). Subsequent citations are given in parentheses in the text.
4. The conflation of terrorism and undocumented immigration in reference to U. S. borders is manifested in the recent institutional transformation of the Border Patrol. While its primary task had been to police undocumented immigration and drug smuggling at U.S. borders, in March 2003 the Border Patrol became a division of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP is a unified U.S. border agency within the Department of Homeland Security, whose priority is to prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the country. See the Border Patrol Web site at www.cbp.gov. For one of many examples of public discourses that conflate Mexican undocumented immigration and Middle Eastern terrorism, see "Who Left the Door Open," Time, September 20, 2004, 51-66.
5. Norma Elia Cantú's Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995);
6. Dagoberto Gilb's The Magic of Blood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993);
7. Miguel M. Méndez's Peregrinos de Aztlán/Pilgrims in Aztlán trans. David William Foster (Tempe: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1992);
8. Américo Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand (1958; reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970);
9. John Rechy's City of Night (New York: Grove Press, 1963)
10. Sergio Troncoso's The Last Tortilla and Other Stories (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999);
11. and Helene Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (New York: Dutton, 1995)
12. and The Moths and Other Stories (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985).
13. Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Fronlerd: The New Mestizo (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987);
14. Juan Flores, "Latino Studies: New Contexts, New Concepts," in Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, ed. Juan Poblete, 191-205 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 198.
15. Joni Adamson stresses that Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera describes the negative effects of the transition from small-scale farming to agribusiness on the physical environment of the border; see Adamson, "Literature-and-Environment Studies and the Influence of the Environmental Justice Movement," in Blackwell Companion to American Literature and Culture, ed. Paul Lauter (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).
16. And Terrel Dixon writes that Anzaldúa's work reveals the cultural origin of environmental destruction in the borderlands, which is created to enforce ethnic, economic, and class divisions; see Dixon, "Letter," Contribution to Forum on Literatures of the Environment, PMLA 114 (October 1999): 1094.
17. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson were among the first scholars to criticize the Chicana/o narrative of the Southwest as one of property, possession, and genealogy of occupation, where the borderlands are claimed by Chicano culture; see "Border Secrets: An Introduction," in Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, 1-39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16.
18. See, e.g., Debra Castillo and Tabuenca Córdoba, Border Women: Writing from la Fronlera (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
19. Saskia Sassen, "Globalization: Developing a Field for Research and Teaching," paper presented at Dartmouth College as part of the conference "Globalization of the Academy," November 15, 2000.
20. See Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9-11.
21. Monika Kaup, Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 8.
22. Margot Kelley, "A Minor Revolution: Chicana/o Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre," in Ethnicity and the American Short Story, ed. Julie Brown, 63-83 (New York: Garland, 1997), 70.
23. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 2.
24. See also Jovita Gonzáles, Dew on the Thorn (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997) and Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990).
25. José F. Aranda Jr., When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 22.
26. John R. Chávez, "The Image of the Southwest in the Chicano Novel, 1970-1979," Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue 14.3 (September-December 1987-88): 41-56.
27. and Cherríe Moraga (Loving in the War Years, 1983) as precursors to Anzaldúa's critical examination of Chicanismo. He posits that these two works construct a cultural imaginary that confronts the exclusionary practices of the Chicana/o movement even though they identify with many of its aims. See Aranda, When We Arrive, 24-33.
28. Kaup, Rewriting North American Borders, 12.
29. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 2-3.
30. José Aranda lists several 1990s works of Chicana/o critical theory that have been influenced by Anzaldua's work, including Hector Calderôn and José David Saldivar's Criticism in the Borderlands, Carl Gutiérrez-Jones's Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
31. José Limón's Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994)
32. Rafael Pérez-Torres's Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
33. Alvina Quintana's Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996)
34. José David Saldívar's The Dialectics of Our America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)
35. Ramón Saldívar's Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)
36. and Rosaura Sánchez's Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 33.
37. Katherine Payant, "Borderland Themes in Sandra Cisneros's Women Hollering Creek," in The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche, ed. Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose, 95-108 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999);
38. Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1991).
39. Cisneros's most recent novel, Caramelo or puro cuento (New York: Knopf, 2002), is also partially set in San Antonio, Texas, where the author now lives.
40. Payant, "Borderland Themes," 95.
41. Jesús Benito and Ana María Manzanas, "Borderlands and Border Writing: Introductory Essay," in Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands, ed. Benito and Manzanas, 1-21 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 3.
42. Pablo Vila has criticized Chicana/o border scholarship for overlooking divisions between Mexican and Mexican American border residents; see Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 11.
43. Daniel Cooper-Alarcón and José Aranda have argued that the territorial linkage between Chicanas/os and the Southwest erases the historical record of Native tribes who were harassed, killed, converted to Catholicism, forced into slavery, dispossessed of their tribal lands, and forcibly inducted into European systems of socialization, as well as U.S. Native Americans' nationalist struggles for sovereignty that are based in aboriginal land claims; see Daniel Cooper-Alarcón, The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997)
44. and Aranda, When We Arrive. María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba has posited that the conflation of Chicana/o identity with the Southwest creates "a multicultural space in the United States" (154) that does not recognize the existence of the northern Mexican borderlands; see Tabuenca Córdoba, "Viewing the Border: Perspectives from 'the Open Wound,'" Discourse 18.1-2 (Fall/Winter 1995-96): 146-68.
45. Robert McKee Irwin (2001) similarly argues that Chicana/o border scholarship and fiction have given voice to the Chicana/o point of view, while rarely venturing into the Mexican side of the border; see Irwin, "Toward a Border Gnosis of the Borderlands: Joaquín Murrieta and Nineteenth-Century U.S.-Mexico Border Culture," Nepantla 2.3 (2001): 509-37. Some exceptions do exist. Alberto Ríos's Pig Cookies, for example, is set in a northern Mexican border town; see Ríos, Pig Cookies and Other Stories (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995).
46. Juan Bruce-Novoa, RetroSpace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature, Theory, and History (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990).
47. Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders, 8.
48. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 83.
49. This demographic information comes from the 2000 census. See laredo.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm (accessed April 18, 2006).
50. Quoted in Angela Becerra, "Bridging the Two Laredos: The Day the River Turned Red," San Antonio Living, available at www.woai.com/living/ books/story.aspx?content-id=15AD48F7-7962-4360-B6F7- FB5CBD483796 (accessed August 1, 2005).
51. Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition (New York: Twayne, 1995), 15-16.
52. About the formal experimentation of her first novel. House on Mango Street, Cisneros has said that she "wanted to write a series of stories that you could open up at any point. You didn't have to know anything before or after and you would understand each story like a little pearl, or you could look at the whole thing like a necklace" (quoted in Feroza F. Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock, Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992], 305).
53. Mark Spalding, "Addressing Border Environmental Problems Now and in the Future: Border XXI and Related Efforts," in The U.S.-Mexican Border Environment: A Road Map to a Sustainable 2020, ed. Paul Ganster, 105-37 (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 2000), 113.
54. Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 71;
55. Neil Larsen, "The 'Boom' Novel and the Cold War in Latin America," Modern Fiction Studies 38.3 (Autumn 1992): 778.
56. Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 1.
57. and Frederick Luis Aldama, Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
58. Molly Monet-Viera points to a new wave of "post-boom magical realism" in Latin America, including work by Chilean writer Isabel Allende, Mexican author Laura Esquivel, and Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, some of which has moved beyond the political commitments central to magical realism; see Monet-Viera, "Post-Boom Magical Realism: Appropriations and Transformations of a Genre," Revista de Estudios Hispanicos 38.1 (January 2004): 95-117.
59. Michael Valdez Moses has argued that because it is written for readers in the first world by cosmopolitan writers, contemporary magical realism allows an imaginary return to a premodern organic virtual community without the danger of having to assume its burdens that are past or passing away; see Valdez Moses, "Magical Realism at World's End," Literary Imagination 3.1 (Winter 2001): 106.
60. Michael Denning similarly writes that the new label "world literature" serves as "a marketing device that flattens distinct regional and linguistic traditions into a worldbeat, with magical realism serving as the aesthetic of globalization" (Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 51).
61. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
62. For accounts of border militarization and their effects, see, for example, Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000);
63. Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: CMAS Books, 1996);
64. and Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002).
65. The leading cause of death for undocumented immigrants in the mid-1980s was drowning (mostly in the Rio Grande), while in the late 1980s it became homicide and autopedestrian accidents; see Karl Eschbach, Jacqueline Hagan, and Nestor Rodriguez, "Deaths during Undocumented Migration: Trends and Policy Implications in the New Era of Homeland Security," Defense of the Alien 26 (2003): 11-12, 14.
66. But since urban places like San Diego and El Paso have become nearly sealed, undocumented immigrants have been forced to try to cross the desert terrain of southern Arizona. The Border Patrol, which counts only bodies that it processes, reported a record 172 deaths in fiscal 2004 at the Arizona border, a tenfold increase over the last decade; see, for example, www.maryknollogc.org/ ecojustice/hilldropo70505.pdf (accessed April 19, 2006). According to Eschbach, Hagan, and Rodriguez, the INS hoped that by closing of relatively easy terrains to migrants, the difficult terrain of the desert would act as an additional deterrent to migration, discouraging migrants from even attempting the journey because of additional physical difficulty ("Deaths during Undocumented Migration," 5).
67. Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 235.
68. David Simcox, "Growth without Prosperity Plagues the Borderlands," Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy 10 (1995): 80-83.
69. Raymond A. Rocco, "Latino Los Angeles: Reframing Boundaries/Borders," in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, 365-89 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
70. Wendy Caldwell, "Narrating the Border: An Interview with Lucrecia Guerrero," South Carolina Modern Language Review 2.1 (Spring 2004), available at http://alpha1.fmarion.edu/∼scmlr/V3/newvoice.htm (accessed October 5, 2005).
71. Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper, 45.
72. Caldwell, "Narrating the Border."
73. Arthur Ramírez, "Feminist Neo-Indigenism in Chicana Aztlán," Studies in American Literature 7.4 (Winter 1995): 71-78.
74. Viramontes, The Moth and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus;
75. Gilb, The Magic of Blood;
76. and Alberto Rios, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), The Curtain of Trees: Stories (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), and Pig Cookies.