Writing Refugee Crisis in the Age of Amazon: Lost Children Archive's Reenactment Play

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Patricia Stuelke
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Central American ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Colonial Capitalism ◽  
Road Novel ◽  
Colonial Frontier ◽  
Us Mexico Border

This essay analyzes Valeria Luiselli's 2019 novel Lost Children Archive's attempt to imagine anti-imperialist solidarity aesthetics in a moment of the increasing imbrication of the US literary sphere and settler colonial capitalist surveillance of the US-Mexico border, as well as the nonprofit care regime that has arisen to oppose and ameliorate its effects. Because these structures converge around overt and subterranean investments in settler colonial frontier fantasy, the essay focuses particularly on Lost Children Archive's engagement with the tradition of the white male road novel Western in the Americas—Luiselli's attempts to write both through and against this form—as part of the novel's larger attempt to grapple with the formal problems that adhere in representing the temporality and scale of ongoing Central American Indigenous dispossession and refugee displacement in settler colonial capitalism. In exploring the degree to which the Western genre's tradition of, per Philip Deloria, “playing Indian” might oppose the brutal bureaucratic violence of the xenophobic carceral settler US state, the novel builds a critique of the frontier road novel fantasy that it cannot quite sustain.

scholarly journals "Icebox" and the Exceptionality Intrinsic to Institutional Violence on the US-Mexico Border

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-58
Author(s):  
Anna Marta Marini
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Central American ◽  
Gray Area ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
American Children ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Immigration And Customs Enforcement ◽  
Us Mexico Border

In 2018, Daniel Sawka directed independent feature length movie Icebox, which narrates the story of a 12-year old Honduran boy whose parents push him to migrate northbound in order to escape forced gang recruitment. Without giving way to ideological bias, Sawka reproduces his journey, providing a useful tool for raising awareness on some of the key matters related to the ongoing debate on US immigration and border policies. The operation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities and the detention of Central American children at the US- Mexico border represent a transnational gray area in the extension of sovereign power, turning the border itself in a kenotic space of exception legitimated by the construction of a specific public discourse on immigration and national boundaries. Furthermore, the movie describes the existence of the evident normalization of inhumanity intrinsic to the detention process and praxis, leading to dehumanization of detainees and a suspension—both individual and public—of questioning the tasks performed by border enforcement agencies from an ethical or moral perspective.

Invented Geographies: The Material and Immaterial Geopoetics of Sandra Cisneros’s “Pilón”

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-172
Author(s):  
Teresa Hernández
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Material Part ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Us Mexico Border

Abstract Current scholarship on Sandra Cisneros's novel Caramelo (2002) has focused on the Reyes family's transnational migrant narrative and their explicit traversing of the US-Mexico border. However, Cisneros's final offering at the close of the novel, “Pilón,” has been excluded from these significant discussions. My essay focuses primarily on this cuento and how it relates to Caramelo as an (im)material part of the novel. I propose that “Pilón” partakes in a dialogic relationship to the novel proper—existing inside and outside of Caramelo through its location after the “fin” of the novel but within the binding of the text. By assessing the material and immaterial borders presented—I particularly explore three fundamental borders in “Pilón” (textual, geopoetical, and corporal)—I claim that “Pilón” presents an urgency in redefining a transnational border experience. Ultimately, I explore the imagining of the US-Mexico (m)otherland within “Pilón,” the limits of this imagining, and the (im)possibility of its geography through the nostalgic and spiritual analytic of the ofrenda.

Mourning across Borders: Multidirectional Memory in Tim Z. Hernandez's All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
MARIA ANTÒNIA OLIVER-ROTGER
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Mexican Migrant ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Multidirectional Memory ◽  
Us Mexico Border

In the documentary novel All They Will Call You (2017) Tim Z. Hernandez brings to light the life stories of the Mexican migrant workers who fatally died in a plane accident as they were being deported from California to Mexico in 1948. Inspired by Woody Guthrie's song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon” (1961), the novel interweaves testimony, documentation, historical contextualization, and fictional mechanisms to involve the reader ethically in the pursuit of an alternative truth – one that underscores the dialectical relationship between the migrants’ lives, their communities, and neocolonial US–Mexico relations. The author entwines the lives and deaths of US and Mexican citizens and gives them historical and affective significance within the “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg) of a community of mourning enacted within and beyond his narrative. His “mestizx consciousness” (Anzaldúa), a lived awareness of the power imbalances that silence the subaltern across the US–Mexico border, manifests itself through the phenomenological leitmotif of la huesera. This southwestern tale and feminine archetype explains the impulse to bring into being a “new memory” (Irizarry) of a reconstructed community around the plane wreck and to challenge the “hierarchy of grief” (Butler) that silenced the migrants’ life stories.

Violence and the Transnational Question

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-252
Author(s):  
B. V. Olguín
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Central American ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
North Central ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Us Mexico Border

Chapter 4 disentangles the distinct ideologies often conflated under the expansive and notoriously vague rubric of Latina/o “transnationalism.” It first interrogates the limits of Radical Regionalism Studies by explicating the specter of nationalism in Emma Pérez’s ostensibly contestatory Tejana lesbian feminist regionalist historical fiction. The chapter further deconstructs the Latina/o Studies fixation on hyperlocalities and celebratory transnationalisms by interrogating the various aestheticizations of violence in Latina/o literatures about Central American civil wars, femicide in the US-Mexico border, and revolutionary insurgencies throughout North, Central, and South America, in addition to the Caribbean. It closes by underscoring Pan-Latina/o political diversity through the recovery of testimonial prose and poetry from Latina/o internationalist partisans and combatants vis-à-vis the antitestimonial memoirs, novels, and poetry by and about right-wing Latina/o soldiers and CIA officers.

scholarly journals Eco-Cosmopolitan Strangers: Migration, Toxicity and Vulnerability in the US-Mexico Border Through a Revision of Lucha Corpi’s Cactus Blood

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
María Isabel Pérez Ramos ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Border Region ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Migration Flows ◽  
Us Mexico Border

Migration flows are common in the US-Mexico border region. However, it has never been so complicated for Latinas/os to cross northwards as it is today. This is due not only to political factors, but also to worsening environmental conditions. Migration, environmental degradation, toxicity and vulnerability are all entangled issues in the US-Mexico border region, as Lucha Corpi’s novel Cactus Blood (1995) depicts. When analyzed from an eco-cosmopolitan perspective, the migrant character in the novel, understood as a “stranger”–in the sense of an in-between, insider-outsider character that makes boundaries porous–discloses an environmental awareness that she can use to face her own vulnerability, while at the same time revealing the (global) networks responsible for the environmental degradation and toxicity of certain places, such as the US-Mexico border region. A socio-environmental revision of Cactus Blood–a novel written a quarter of a century ago–highlights issues that are extremely pertinent to confront contemporary challenges.

Media, place-making, and concept-metaphors: the US-Mexico border during the rise of Donald Trump

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 880-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Jill Fleuriet ◽  
Mari Castellano
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Central American ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
American Concept ◽  
Us Mexico Border

In this article, we trace shifting representations of a US-Mexico border region in national mainstream news media during the rise of Donald Trump. We argue that the border is an American concept-metaphor that circulates and reshapes in media in response to political actors. We compare articles published in 2015, 2016, and 2017 about the Texas borderlands where the majority of Central American asylum seekers arrived. Crucial to Trump’s success, the narrow, racialized rendering of the border inadvertently provoked a wider array of representations in national news media but remained rooted in how Americans think about Others, sovereignty, and immigration. Our work contributes to scholarship that connects discursive regimes and statecraft with life in borderlands to lay bare underlying social tensions and potential violence. Analysis of concept-metaphors can open spaces for new articulations of key cultural domains and interrogate hidden assumptions about places, crucial during times of surging populism and nationalism.

scholarly journals The Caravan (portfolio)

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Guillermo Arias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Dream ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Large Groups ◽  
Us Mexico Border

Portfolio by Guillermo Arias The Caravan documents the journey of thousands of Central American migrants traveling in large groups of self-called caravans to the United States in hopes of a better life; the challenges they experienced during their journey through Mexico, the difficulties once they reach the US–Mexico border and finally, the struggle and desperation to cross by any means the physical border barriers to pursue their American dream.

California

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Alvarez
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Social Cartography ◽  
Family Network ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Police Surveillance ◽  
Us Mexico Border

I utilize my situated position as anthropologist, academician, and citizen to argue not only that we should “think” California, but also that we should “rethink” our state—both its condition and its social cartography. To be clear, I see all my research and endeavors—my research on the US/Mexico border; my time among the markets and entrepreneurs I have worked and lived with; my focus on those places in which I was raised: Lemon Grove, Logan Heights; the family network and my community ethnographic work—as personal. I am in this academic game and the telling of our story because it is personal. When Lemon Grove was segregated, it was about my family; when Logan Heights was split by the construction of Interstate 5 and threatened by police surveillance, it was about our community; when the border was sanctioned and militarized it again was about the communities of which I am a part. A rethinking California is rooted in the experience of living California, of knowing and feeling the condition and the struggles we are experiencing and the crises we have gone through. We need to rethink California, especially the current failure of the state. This too is ultimately personal, because it affects each and every one of us, especially those historically unrepresented folks who have endured over the decades.

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