Border Confluences

Border Confluences PDF

Author: Rosemary A. King

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2004-02

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0816523355

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Border Confluences examines how the theme of cultural difference influences the ways that writers construct narrative space and the ways their characters negotiate those spaces, from domestic sphere to national territory, public school to utopia."--BOOK JACKET.

US-Mexico Borderland Narratives

US-Mexico Borderland Narratives PDF

Author: Rosemary A. King

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13:

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For over 150 years, borderland authors from both Mexico and the United States have developed novels which owe their narrative power to compelling relationships between literary constructions of space and artistic expressions of conflicts, characters, and cultural encounter. This study explores those relationships by analyzing representations of the spaces in which characters function-whether barrio, ballroom, or border city as well as the places characters inhabit relative to the border-occupying native or foreign territory, traveling temporarily, or settling permanently. Concomitant with close attention to the conceptualization of space in border literature is a foregrounding of the genres that border writers employ, such as historical romance and the Hispanic bildungsroman, as well as the literary traditions from which they draw, such as travel narratives or utopian literature. Assessing geopoetics in border writing from the Mexican American War to the present, including writers such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Jovita Gonzalez, Ernesto Galarza, Americo Paredes, Harriet Doerr, Cormac McCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Miguel Mendez provides a paradigm for tracing the development and changes in individual responses to this space as well as a broad range of responses based on class and gender. This corpus of literature demonstrates that the various ways in which characters respond to cultural encounter-adapting, resisting, challenging, sympathizing-depends on artistic rendering of spaces and places around them. Thus, the central argument of this project is that character responses to cultural encounters arise out of geopoetics-the artistic expression of space and place-from the earliest to the most recent border narratives.

Border Identifications

Border Identifications PDF

Author: Pablo Vila

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2009-06-03

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0292773838

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From poets to sociologists, many people who write about life on the U.S.-Mexico border use terms such as "border crossing" and "hybridity" which suggest that a unified culture—neither Mexican nor American, but an amalgamation of both—has arisen in the borderlands. But talking to people who actually live on either side of the border reveals no single commonly shared sense of identity, as Pablo Vila demonstrated in his book Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Instead, people living near the border, like people everywhere, base their sense of identity on a constellation of interacting factors that includes regional identity, but also nationality, ethnicity, and race. In this book, Vila continues the exploration of identities he began in Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders by looking at how religion, gender, and class also affect people's identifications of self and "others" among Mexican nationals, Mexican immigrants, Mexican Americans, Anglos, and African Americans in the Cuidad Juárez-El Paso area. Among the many fascinating issues he raises are how the perception that "all Mexicans are Catholic" affects Mexican Protestants and Pentecostals; how the discourse about proper gender roles may feed the violence against women that has made Juárez the "women's murder capital of the world"; and why class consciousness is paradoxically absent in a region with great disparities of wealth. His research underscores the complexity of the process of social identification and confirms that the idealized notion of "hybridity" is only partially adequate to define people's identity on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Border images, border narratives

Border images, border narratives PDF

Author: Johan Schimanski

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1526146258

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This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and narratives in different borderscapes. Written by experienced scholars in the field, Border images, border narratives provides fresh insight into how borders, borderscapes, and migration are imagined and narrated in public and private spheres. Offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border and its ambiguities, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the methodological renewal of border studies and presents ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes. Influenced by the thinking of philosopher Jacques Rancière, this timely volume argues that narrated and mediated images of borders and borderscapes are central to the political process, as they contribute to the public negotiation of borders and address issues such as the in/visiblity of migrants and the formation of alternative borderscapes. The contributions analyse narratives and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, border art, and documentaries, as well as problems related to borderland identities, migration, and trauma. The case studies provide a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from Northern Europe and Britain, via Mediterranean and Mexican-USA borderlands, to Chinese borderlands from the perspectives of critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies, and political geography.

Continental Crossroads

Continental Crossroads PDF

Author: Samuel Truett

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9780822333890

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Focuses on the modern Mexican-American borderlands, where a boundary line seems to separate two dissimilar cultures and economies.

Telling Border Life Stories

Telling Border Life Stories PDF

Author: Donna M Kabalen de Bichara

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2013-05-21

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1603448047

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Voices from the borderlands push against boundaries in more ways than one, as Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara ably demonstrates in this investigation into the twentieth-century autobiographical writing of four women of Mexican origin who lived in the American Southwest. Until recently, little attention has been paid to the writing of the women included in this study. As Kabalen de Bichara notes, it is precisely such historical exclusion of texts written by Mexican American women that gives particular significance to the reexamination of the five autobiographical works that provide the focus for this in-depth study. “Early Life and Education” and Dew on the Thorn by Jovita González (1904–83), deal with life experiences in Texas and were likely written between 1926 and the 1940s; both texts were published in 1997. Romance of a Little Village Girl, first published in 1955, focuses on life in New Mexico, and was written by Cleofas Jaramillo (1878–1956) when the author was in her seventies. A Beautiful, Cruel Country, by Eva Antonio Wilbur-Cruce (1904–98), introduces the reader to history and a way of life that developed in the cultural space of Arizona. Created over a ten-year period, this text was published in 1987, just eleven years before the author’s death. Hoyt Street, by Mary Helen Ponce (b. 1938), began as a research paper during the period of the autobiographer’s undergraduate studies (1974–80), and was published in its present form in 1993. These border autobiographies can be understood as attempts on the part of the Mexican American female autobiographers to put themselves into the text and thus write their experiences into existence.

Rhetoric and Reality on the U.S.—Mexico Border

Rhetoric and Reality on the U.S.—Mexico Border PDF

Author: K. Jill Fleuriet

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-04-03

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 3030635570

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Stemming from four years of ethnographic research, media analysis of over 750 national news articles published in the 2010s, and decades of the author’s professional and personal immersion in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, Rhetoric and Reality illuminates a place at the heart of our national conversation: the U.S.-Mexico border. K. Jill Fleuriet contrasts the rhetoric of national political and media discourse with that of local border leaders in economics, health care, politics, education, law enforcement, philanthropy, and activism. As she deconstructs the common narrative of a border in need of external intervention to control corruption, poverty, sickness, and violence, Fleuriet engagingly illustrates the range of regional organizing, local development strategies, and community responses in the borderlands that ultimately situate the Rio Grande Valley as the “true North” of the U.S. national compass—where the Valley goes, the rest of the country soon will follow. Rhetoric and Reality asks us to question our own assumptions, especially about those areas that drive national decisions about resource allocation, economic development and national security. “Rhetoric and Reality is an important ethnographic study of the deeply misunderstood, increasingly vilified, Rio Grande Valley located on the Texas-Mexico border. Fleuriet presents a balanced counter-narrative that that shows the region as one of growth, innovation, complexity, and rich with meaning. Rhetoric and Reality is an excellent example of place-based, reflexive scholarship appropriate for use in courses on border theory, applied anthropology, and research methods. Written clearly and crisply with a wide readership in mind, Rhetoric and Reality is mandatory reading for those wanting to better understand the US-Mexico border region and the people who live there.” --Margaret A. Graham, Professor and Chair, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA “This is an important book, as it describes life in the Rio Grande Valley rather than ‘on the border.’ The notion of ‘the border’ as an open range in need of external help is challenged, as the author illustrates the wide range of leadership and programmatic change occurring in the Rio Grande Valley.” --Roberto R. Alvarez, Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, USA

The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport

The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport PDF

Author: Tyche Hendricks

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0520269802

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"There are other books dealing with life at the border, but none as intelligent, searching, objective or encompassing as Tyche Hendricks' vivid evocation of this region--its people, its landscape, its industry, its problems and its unique culture."—Peter Schrag, author of Not Fit for Society: Immigration and Nativism in America "This vivid, evocative book made me think of the Robert Frost line, 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall.' Tyche Hendricks' multilayered portrait of the human communities that transcend the U.S.-Mexico border should remind us all of what an artificial thing barriers, fences and checkpoints are. Maybe, just maybe, someday we, like so much of western Europe, can do without them."—Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains "This is an ambitious undertaking and Hendricks excels, finding stories along the way that illustrate the clash between, within and along that nearly 2,000-mile stretch of territory. Her reporting illustrates that for many U.S.-Mexico border residents, the international bridge is something you cross on your way to visit family, shop for groceries, get to a doctor or work."—Macarena Del Rocio Hernandez, University of Houston "Dear President Obama, next time you are at Camp David spend a couple of hours reading The Wind Doesn't Need a Passport. While the Health Care overhaul may well come to define your presidency, immigration will define the future of our country. In this marvelous book—rigorously grounded, smartly argued, beautifully crafted, Tyche Hendricks captures, in stories of biblical proportion, the contours of the magical line that at once unites us and divides us as Americans and as neighbors of our indispensable partner in the South. Ms. Hendricks's book, Mr. President, will remind you just what is at stake in getting immigration reform right. All Californians, Texans, and Arizonians, who think they know the border, should read this book. It is essential reading for our times."—Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Fisher Membership Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, and co-author of Latinos: Remaking America

Fugitive Landscapes

Fugitive Landscapes PDF

Author: Samuel Truett

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0300135327

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Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest StudiesIn the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.–Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain. Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona–Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a “wild” frontier were stymied by labor struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.–Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms. By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age.