This dissertation focuses on representations of the unavailability of spatial and environmental justice in Los Angeles in 1940s-1990s. The project includes several fictional and non-fictional counternarratives particularly in regards to displacement and dispossession in multi-ethnic U.S. literature and film, in relation to several regions of the city: Chavez Ravine, East L.A., Downtown L.A. neighborhoods, including Crown Hill, Pico-Union and Skid Row; and the communities of South Central and Koreatown during this period. The counternarratives include Culture Clash’s fictional play Chavez Ravine (2003) in Chapter 2, Helena María Viramontes’s fictional novel Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) in Chapter 3, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s and Christine Choy’s documentary film Sa-I-Gu (1993), John Ridley’s documentary film Let it Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992 (2017), Anna Deveare Smith’s non-fictional play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), and Héctor Tobar’s fictional novel The Tattooed Soldier (1998) in Chapter 4. In the project, I argue that all of the selected counternarratives feature several L.A. residents, both fictional and non-fictional, who encounter spatial and environmental injustice related crises that must be dealt with by the residents. I argue that the authors and filmmakers of the selected counternarratives use the metaphors of haunting and ghosts and other devices to critique and challenge (1) the erasure of people of color from the city’s history, (2) the recurring master narrative of supercity progress, specifically regarding the uses of “eminent domain” via “urban renewal” modernization, and (3) the simplistic mainstream interpretation of the uprising popularized by the local Los Angeles and national television news media networks, constructing it as an African-American versus Korean binary system, which uses half-truths to mischaracterize the rebellion as the “L.A. Riots”, while simultaneously ignoring many other complex factors and issues which help explain the significance of the L.A. Uprising. Moreover, the narrative devices that will be discussed in the project to examine the selected counternarratives, where appropriate, include the following: the metaphors of haunting and ghosts in conjunction with non-linear and disjointed uses of time, figurative language, “rasquachismo” aesthetics, “composite characters”, film noir stylization, “jumping” geographic scales, and documentary evidence.

Up until recently, Micronesia has occupied an “absent” place within Oceanic studies. This absence has been characterized in part by a dearth of published literature produced by and about Micronesia’s indigenous peoples. It is only within the last ten to fifteen years that a handful of authors have emerged to depict Micronesian culture from within. This dissertation focuses on the works of three writers who have made important contributions to this expanding body of literature: Robert Barclay (Meļaļ), Craig Santos Perez (from unincorporated territory series), and Emelihter Kihleng (My Urohs). As I argue, the emergence of these authors is closely connected to Micronesia’s complex colonial histories. The prominence of U.S. strategic military interests, in particular, has postponed processes of decolonization in the region, resulting in a similar delay in the formation of Micronesians’ literary traditions. This project seeks to amplify Micronesia’s new voices of resistance, as well as to explore the interrelationships between culture and the political-economic transformations undergirding them. Another objective of this dissertation is to reveal the newest mechanisms of colonial control underway in Oceania. While hailing from different parts of Micronesia, the texts examined share much in common in their representation of themes of militarization, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Reading literature as “symptoms” of the political-economic realities that produced them, I argue that Meļaļ, from unincorporated territory, and My Urohs foreground the increasingly insidious, economic as well as environmental forms assumed by 21st century colonialism.

Since this project is ultimately concerned with how culture reflects (and responds to) political and economic realities, each chapter tends to privilege these realities as fundamental. While Chapter One discusses the historical causes for Micronesia’s delayed literary renaissance, Chapter Two examines Barclay’s novel, Meļaļ, to uncover the Compact of Free Association as a vital tool of U.S. neocolonialism. Turning to Kihleng’s poetry, Chapter Three shows how U.S. “colonial” food has perpetuated economic dependency between Micronesia and the U.S. Finally, Chapter Four, which focuses on Perez’s “long poetry,” argues that the from unincorporated territory series contributes to the radical revision of Guahån’s histories of colonialism and militarization from below.

This dissertation deploys an interdisciplinary framework that draws from literary studies, history, and critical human geography to critically examine counter-mapping acts in L.A. from 1965 to 2015, specifically those that shed light on the social and material conditions of Latinas/os. “Another Los Angeles” traces the counter-mapping practices of Chicana/o Latina/o communities as seen in fiction, visual art, and film. Counter-mapping as an oppositional practice reflects a non-dominant view of space and asserts subaltern histories and memories, challenging dominant discourses that render them invisible. In the first chapter, I analyze historical detective fiction by black and brown authors and argue that their novelistic return to the 1965-71 period remembers the long-standing issue of policing in the segregated ghetto and barrio and the flourishing of social justice movements of that era that were responding to inequitable policing and other injustices. In chapter two, I examine Hector Tobar’s 1998 novel, The Tattooed Soldier and its interwoven narrative structure to highlight the co-constitutive relationship between Central American spaces and the making of Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s as produced by neoliberal policies in the hemispheric Americas. In the last two chapters I shift focus to the visual and sonic to explore the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of the raced, classed, and gendered Latina/o body in urban space. In chapter 3, I trace the tradition of Chicana/o public art from the 1960s to the 21st century as a conceptually and politically useful medium for L.A. Chicana/o artists to reflect an ethos of urban vulnerability and enact critical spatializing practices. In the last chapter, I examine the Hollywood film, A Better Life, as a bricolage of visual and sound parts of L.A. communities of color that portray a “third space” reflective of and created by immigrants’ cultural, sonic, and spatial practices. Ultimately, “Another Los Angeles” privileges the counter-mapping practices of Los Angeles’ brown, black, and immigrant populations as they ascertain their vantage points in a city that while vastly present in the national imaginary, often forgets or flattens the spaces of communities of color.

"Reclaiming the Future: A Speculative Cultural Study" examines authors of color who use speculative fiction as a tool of resistance and empowerment to (re)imagine the past, present and future for people of color in the US. This dissertation is organized into three parts: 1) Speculative Fictions from the Early 20th Century, 2) Speculative Fictions From the 1970s to Now, and 3) Critical Dystopias in the 21st Century and Beyond. The first part explores two novels from the early 20th century, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902-03) and Daniel Venegas’s The Adventures of Don Chipote (1928). These chapters explore issues of racist science and experimentation in medicine and science on black people; and the utopian and dystopian symbol of the American Dream for Mexican immigrant laborers during the 1900s-1930s. The second part investigates texts from the late 20th century and 21st century, specifically Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed (1980) and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017). These chapters discuss issues of reproductive oppression and sterilization abuse of poor women of color in the 1970s, and the speculative horror of real and imagined criminalization and mass incarceration of black people today. The final part analyzes two texts from 2009, Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer and Rosaura Sánchez’s and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148. These chapters interrogate issues of the future, such as: surrogate humanity and the invisibility of virtual laborers outsourced around the world; and the remapping of nation-states that use settler colonialism to displace people of color onto neo-Reservations and the moon. Despite these dystopian realities, my analysis emphasizes what science fiction scholar Tom Moylan calls the “enclaves of resistance” that exist in these texts to develop a critical dystopia so that people of color can reclaim these narratives and write themselves into the future. I argue that authors of color use speculative fiction as a practice to explore the lived and living experiences of their present dystopian realities and historically oppressive and violent pasts. My speculative cultural study highlights the social activism of people of color in the rewriting and world making of more equitable futures.

The U.S.-backed Chilean military coup that deposed leftist President Salvador Allende and initiated the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-90) sparked large-scale opposition as Chileans faced torture, disappearance, and exile. The Latinx Radical Imaginary and Chile: Transnational Feminisms, Chilean Exile, and Culture examines the U.S.-based anti-Pinochet movement, with a particular focus on the activism of Latinas. Opposition to the regime in Chile and the United States was spearheaded by women and these transnational feminist networks were at the forefront of challenging the dictatorship. These Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Chilean women’s opposition to Pinochet was rooted in their support for Allende-era politics. I read archives, interviews, and cultural texts for moments that provide insight into how the Allende era impacted what I call the radical imaginary of these activists. I define the radical imaginary as a set of ideas that expand notions of what is possible, invoke hope and creativity, and spark inquiry into people’s perspectives on revolutionary politics.While scholars have noted the influence of the Cuban revolution and the Vietnam war on U.S. activists, much less is known about how activists responded to other events in the Global South. My research suggests that non-Chilean anti-Pinochet activists are a crucial overlooked aspect of the Chile solidarity movement and, conversely, that Chile was important to the revolutionary and anti-imperialist politics of U.S-based activists, particularly the Chicano movement’s transnational turn and the expansion of women of color feminism’s transnational politics. Moreover, while the literature on the Chile solidarity movement has focused almost exclusively on Chilean exiles, I highlight how the U.S. Chilean exile movement cannot be viewed in isolation from a wider network of anti-Pinochet activity. The dissertation is organized around three core chapters that focus on a particular political genealogy for this radical imaginary as well a specific cultural form that shaped it. Chapter One centers Chicana Marxists and their use of nuevo cine chileno produced during the Allende era to highlight Chilean women’s fight for a reorganization of social reproduction. I focus on the contributions of activist Virgina Garza, who traveled to Chile during Allende’s presidency to witness the revolutionary process taking place. When the coup hit a few months later, Garza opposed the Pinochet regime by lecturing in tandem with the exhibition of these films, arguing that working-class women had gained the most during that time. Chapter Two explores opposition to the Pinochet regime in the seminal women of color literary anthologies Cuentos: Stories by Latinas and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Through collaboration on these anthologies, these U.S.-based feminists forged connections with the anti-Pinochet feminist movement in Chile. Together they exposed the everyday violence of capitalism and patriarchy, framing the dictatorship as a counterrevolutionary attack on people’s desires for a better world. Finally, Chapter Three centers arpilleras, patchwork tapestries, created by women in Chile and in exile. I examine how a multiracial campaign in Austin, Texas to bring Cecilia Ubilla, a Chilean woman who had been imprisoned, into exile helped build the Chilean feminist exile movement in California because she sponsored more exiles and brought them to the region. Together they circulated arpilleras that paid homage to the Allende era and shared their experiences participating in Allende-era revolutionary politics with other racial and immigrant groups here. Overall, my dissertation contributes to literatures on Allende-era politics and culture, the Chile solidarity movement, Chilean immigration and exile, and Latinx feminisms.

Talking Back: Disabled Women’s Autobiography examines the life and writing of four disabled women in the United States from the antebellum period through the end of the Progressive Era. I examine how these women use autobiography to represent the intersections of disability with other identities such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and social positions such as enslavement and enfreakment. My methodology involves close readings of various genres of life writing including autobiographies, memoirs, dairies, letters, and filmic representations that are juxtaposed with popular representations of disabled people within historical contexts such as slavery, early medicine, and freak shows. From my investigation I have found that these women use autobiography to call into question the values of individualism that influence popular representations of disabled people as helpless, dependent, and pitiable. I argue these women challenge cultural conventions of independence and autonomy, including those that undergird the genre of autobiography. In doing so, these women offer important alternatives of disabled women as powerful and disruptive of traditional conventions.

Chapter one examines issues of race and disability in Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, a black indentured servant in the antebellum north. I argue that Wilson challenges dominate proslavery and antislavery representations of disabled blacks and repositions dependency as a means to negotiate economic and social agency. Chapter two investigates The Little Locksmith by Katherine Butler Hathaway, an upper class white woman that is bedridden with spinal tuberculosis. I argue Katherine complicates conceptions of dependent disabled women through interdependent relationships and offers an alternate model of reciprocity that challenges ideals of individualism and self-determinism. Chapter three looks at the context of the early twentieth century freak show through The Loves and Lives of the Hilton Sisters, about conjoined twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton. The narrative points to the linguistic and generic attempts that are meant to norm and contain bodies within conventions of individualism. As conjoined twins, their embodiment challenges ideals of singular self-reliant individuals just as their narrative disrupts the linguistic and generic conventions meant to contain and explain their anomalous embodiment.

Detective fiction, as established in Anglo-American traditions, posed a formula for portraying crime and justice. Since its popularity in the 19th century, Latin America and Chicano authors have developed their own forms of detective fiction to portray the realistic conditions of their respective cities. The dissertation employs an interdisciplinary framework that engages with Hemispheric studies, literature studies, and cultural geography to explore the form and political commitment that Latin American and Latino authors use to provide counter-narratives of the city and their communities. Using the framework of hemispheric studies, I bridge Chicano/a and Latin American studies to explore detective novels in in Santiago, Chile, Mexico City, Mexicali, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. I explore how social and geopolitical spaces inform the crimes and characterization of the detective in these respective spaces. Chapter one and two explores vigilante detectives and their nostalgic memory of democracy in their respective cities. Chapter three and four transitions to the U.S.-Mexico border where Mexican and Chicano detectives define crime in terms of how their border cities' socio-economic conditions facilitate the production of crime vis-a-vis the trafficking of women and drugs. Lastly, Chapter five focuses on Chicano/a detectives in Albuquerque to examine how city politics disenfranchise Chicano/a communities in the city. My dissertation concludes with reflections on the development of detective fiction by Latin American and Chicana/o authors. I reflect on how these authors shape a genre of the “Americas” through a political commitment against state corruption and marginalization of dominant cultures.

According to Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, our abilities to think historically and to imagine a future different from the present have both atrophied beyond recognition. As Jameson puts it, we are suffering from “a consequent weakening of historicity” (Postmodernism 6). This project is an attempt to redress this ahistorical tendency of our own contemporary historical situation. Each of the chapters that follows is interested in understanding how some contemporary examples of science fiction and speculative fiction (SF, broadly defined, published between 2013 and 2021) experiment with different narrative forms as they think through the complex temporalities of our present. The first chapter examines how several recent alternate-history novels might be read as critical utopias that are able to resurrect revolutionary moments of the colonized past. The second chapter looks at a constellation of SF texts of the long 2010s that represent the longue durée of the capitalist mode of production (and sometimes even longer spans of time), and, in so doing, open up the possibility of imagining a transition to a new mode of production. By juxtaposing moments from the past, present, and future within a single narrative, they are able to provide glimpses of the utopian horizon. The final chapter interprets several recent novels set in the future that attempt to imagine both the end of the capitalist mode of production and the emergence of a future commons. Hopefully, a close reading of these anticipatory narratives will contribute to the reawakening of our species’ slumbering historical consciousness. By connecting us to another order of time, they will be our guide as we exit from pre-history into history proper, into that more utopian future which is still possible, and yet never guaranteed.

This study examines the current resurgence of the witch, or la Bruja, in Chicana/ Latina/ Indigenous/Caribbean cultural production. I argue that women are connecting the history of witch-hunts with the oppression of their own communities and are reclaiming la Bruja for political purposes. This phenomenon points to a growing feminist consciousness among young women that the dark history of persecution of witches as women who resist patriarchy can be equated with the intensification of attacks on women’s rights and on nature as a whole under the current phase of neoliberal capitalism. These historically based issues are inspiring cultural production that engages with this recognition of the past. Thus, I connect the historic women-led resistance to the colonial regime in the Americas that sought to obliterate native religious practices and healing knowledge by deeming it “devil worship,” to the contemporary call by women of color through cultural texts to reclaim la Bruja. This project considers work produced by or about Indigenous, Chicana/Latina and Caribbean female artists, writers, filmmakers, rappers, poets and zine-makers that speaks to the challenges faced in their communities by drawing on Indigenous and African healing knowledge that once would have been deemed brujería. I view altars and offerings as symbolic of a Bruja aesthetic in the context of feminist poetry and an art zine produced by the L.A Chicana collective, Mujeres de Maíz. I examine the work of Zapotec rapper, Mare Advertencia Lirika, and her song and music video, “Mujer Maíz,” and consider the maize diviner in the video as symbolic of a Bruja-healer. I also look at the history of hexing and poisoning as a form of resistance by enslaved women to examine two digital brujería (witchcraft) texts by Caribbean women who use the witch trope to hex Trump, alongside the novel, Daughters of the Stone by Afro-Puerto Rican author, Dahlma Llanos Figueroa. Finally, I analyze the documentary, Catching Babies, about a birth center in the US-Mexico borderlands and discuss the role of midwives, victims of witch-hunts in Europe and the Americas, to argue for humanizing birthing options. Ultimately, this study shows that la Bruja in cultural production is a response to gender inequality, gender violence and attacks on women’s rights under neoliberal capitalism and that Bruja knowledge is as relevant today as it was in the past, as life as we know it —humans, plants and animals—face an existential threat.