Us Mexico Borderland Narratives

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.

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.

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.

This study examines the work of six American poets who visited Mexico in the 1950s, discussing the complex relationships between location, writing, society, history and dislocation. By interacting with Mexican culture and writing about the experience, these poets had to come to terms with the foreign as well as explore their own identities as Americans. Experiencing Mexico inspired these poets to use many different voices in their poetry, a style in opposition to the hegemony of 1950s American culture. This study compares and contrasts the poets, particularly in terms of class, race, sexual orientation, and gender, and which strategies of "going foreign" each uses. Each chapter examines a poem or series of poems based upon a trip to Mexico. Analyzed in detail are Williams' The Desert Music, Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, Corso's "Mexican Impressions" and "Puma in Chapultepec Zoo," Ginsberg's Siesta in Xbalba, Levertov's "Tomatlan" and others, and Hayden's An Inference of Mexico.

"Border Oasis tells how two very different nations developed the delta into an agricultural oasis at enormous environmental cost. Focusing on the years 1940 to 1975 - including the disastrous salinity crisis of the 1960s and 1970s - it combines Mexican, Native American, and U.S. perspectives to demonstrate that the political and diplomatic influences on the delta played as much a part in the region's transformation as did irrigation. Ward reveals how mistrust among political and economic participants has been fueled by conflict between national and local officials on both sides of the border, by Mexican nationalism, and by a mutual recognition that water is the critical ingredient for regional economic development."--BOOK JACKET.

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

"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

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.