Marissa K. López
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814752616
- eISBN:
- 9780814753293
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814752616.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
This chapter looks at two novels by Ana Castillo, who was an a movimiento activist in Chicago, but whose writing challenged movimiento theorizations of history, identity, and narrative, as well as ...
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This chapter looks at two novels by Ana Castillo, who was an a movimiento activist in Chicago, but whose writing challenged movimiento theorizations of history, identity, and narrative, as well as their critical descendents. Scholars understand Castillo as part of the queer, feminist critique of movimiento nationalism. In comparing Sapogonia (1990), an early novel, with her more recent The Guardians (2007), the chapter aims to connect this critique to a long history of Chicana/o nationalist debate extending far back into the nineteenth century. Castillo's novels depict the new networks of affiliation engendered by cross-border flows of capital and people that rapidly accelerated after World War II. Her contribution is in recognizing the connections between nativism and imperial capital, connections toward which the writers in the previous chapters could only indicate.Less
This chapter looks at two novels by Ana Castillo, who was an a movimiento activist in Chicago, but whose writing challenged movimiento theorizations of history, identity, and narrative, as well as their critical descendents. Scholars understand Castillo as part of the queer, feminist critique of movimiento nationalism. In comparing Sapogonia (1990), an early novel, with her more recent The Guardians (2007), the chapter aims to connect this critique to a long history of Chicana/o nationalist debate extending far back into the nineteenth century. Castillo's novels depict the new networks of affiliation engendered by cross-border flows of capital and people that rapidly accelerated after World War II. Her contribution is in recognizing the connections between nativism and imperial capital, connections toward which the writers in the previous chapters could only indicate.
Marta Caminero-Santangelo
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780813062594
- eISBN:
- 9780813051611
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813062594.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
This chapter considers novels including The Guardians by Ana Castillo, Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande, and Highwire Moon by Susan Straight, which represent border crossing deaths and ...
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This chapter considers novels including The Guardians by Ana Castillo, Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande, and Highwire Moon by Susan Straight, which represent border crossing deaths and disappearances as a new form of cultural trauma. These novels mark a shift in U.S. border fiction by attending squarely to the traumatic effects of increased border security measures on those crossing north. The chapter follows theorists such as Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelser, who argue that cultural trauma is not inherent in events themselves but rather is constructed through repeated representations of particular events as fundamentalinjuries to a “people.” The chapter also argues that border fiction written in the years after Operation Gatekeeper appropriates from its Latin American context the notion of the “disappeared”—with all its connotations of state violence—to construct migrant disappearances as a cultural trauma that violently separates families and introduces profound instability into notions of individual and group identity. Such texts of border crossing, death, and “disappearance” serve as forms of testimonial fiction against U.S. immigration and border policies at home, which ignore the realities of labor needs and which have steep human costs.Less
This chapter considers novels including The Guardians by Ana Castillo, Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande, and Highwire Moon by Susan Straight, which represent border crossing deaths and disappearances as a new form of cultural trauma. These novels mark a shift in U.S. border fiction by attending squarely to the traumatic effects of increased border security measures on those crossing north. The chapter follows theorists such as Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelser, who argue that cultural trauma is not inherent in events themselves but rather is constructed through repeated representations of particular events as fundamentalinjuries to a “people.” The chapter also argues that border fiction written in the years after Operation Gatekeeper appropriates from its Latin American context the notion of the “disappeared”—with all its connotations of state violence—to construct migrant disappearances as a cultural trauma that violently separates families and introduces profound instability into notions of individual and group identity. Such texts of border crossing, death, and “disappearance” serve as forms of testimonial fiction against U.S. immigration and border policies at home, which ignore the realities of labor needs and which have steep human costs.
