This dissertation is a study on the topics of migration, power, and subjectivity in Chicana/o literature. Much critical cultural studies work which focuses on (im)migration in Chicana/o cultural texts has tended to portray it as an emancipatory project, and thus, has forgone a more complex understanding of this movement. I analyze Tomás Rivera's short stories, Arturo Islas's The Rain God, Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, and Helena Maria Viramontes's Their Dogs Came With Them to examine how these narratives depict migration not only in its physical and geographical dimensions, but also as a psychological, gendered, queered, often violent, ideological movement that is shaped by contradicting sources of power and material realities. I argue that these narratives embed the various aspects of this migration in their form, including through a migratory narrative structure, metafiction, skeptical fantasy, and editorial excision. Through the lens of women of color, queer, and political theories, I contend that this literature embodies the tension between transnational and global circuits of power on the one hand and the simultaneous reinforcement of sovereignty, territoriality, and the law on the other to reveal within these narratives moments of resistance and complicity in dominant ideologies like patriarchy, cultural nationalism, and limited expressions of citizenship. I contend that this literature necessarily reproduces this tension in fractured narrative forms that theorize power and lay bare how Chicana/o writers posit both literary and embodied protests to hegemonic formations of power.

Abstract

Border Encounters: American Cultural Politics and the U.S.-Mexico Border

byJennifer Andrea Reimer

Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor José David Saldívar, Co-Chair

Professor Laura E. Pérez, Co-Chair

Border Encounters: American Cultural Politics and the U.S.-Mexico Border is a transnational, interdisciplinary cultural study of the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border that argues for the critical role of the international border in the racial past, present, and future of the Americas. Through critical readings of contemporary photography, music, fiction, and poetry, this dissertation shows how the border is not only a contact zone for Mexican, white, and Native peoples, but also a more heterogeneous geography that includes a fluid set of diverse racialized subjectivities. I bring together a distinct collection of multiracial cultural texts to demonstrate how they interrogate issues of nation, race, and belonging through the representation of certain critical terms and issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border and the borderlands studies (immigration; feminicide; trafficking; NAFTA; maquila labor; the structural inequalities between the United States and Mexico, and the trope of boundary crossing, among others). By grounding literary, visual, and musical analyses in the material realities of the borderlands, Border Encounters engages the U.S.-Mexico border as a complex site of innovative cultural production while simultaneously revealing how global operations of power work through the series of specific geographies we call the borderlands.

In the first section, I bring together a series of experimental cultural texts in order to demonstrate how a diverse group of artists use innovative aesthetics to comment on material realities in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I begin with an analysis of the transnational collaborative photo-textual book, Here Is Tijuana! by Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta, and Heriberto Yépez (2006). Expanding transa's field of reference from Tijuana to the greater U.S.-Mexico borderlands, my second chapter reads Harryette Mullen's epic poem, Muse & Drudge, as a text of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I conclude this section with a comparative analysis of experimental fictions by Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes and Asian American writer Karen Tei Yamashita. The second section compares and contrasts representations of the U.S.-Mexico border by two different white artists in order to explore the under-theorized relationship between whiteness and cultural production in U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Chapter Four turns to Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy and argues against reading McCarthy as a "revisionist" Western historian, and critiques McCarthy's sexualized representation of Mexican women on the border as a dominant, if ambivalent, white masculine narrative. By contrast, my final chapter analyzes the lyrics and musical forms of the Roger Clyne & Peacemakers, a contemporary rock band from Tempe, Arizona, identifying how the band advocates for a peaceful cross-cultural coexistence.

This dissertation offers a critical reading of the figure of the non-citizen in American Renaissance literature. Key literary scenes register the effects of restrictive citizenship on law, sovereignty, speech, and expressed political morality. In particular, dramatic techniques and form in the American Renaissance reveal the effects of pre-established semantic divisions such as "slave," "human," and "alien." I argue a specific literary mode of dramatization stages the failures of deliberative democracy and the fissures in juridical form.

Herman Melville's literary style stands out in this regard. The crafting of theatrical scene, gesture, intonation, lighting, music, and masquerade parodies legal rationality, while contrasting political authority and powerlessness. In several major scenes, the ship returns as an allegory of political repression and regulation. At the same time, representations of figures turned to stone show the perpetual entrapment of the disempowered non-citizen and allude to the violence of political exclusion. A key example is how punishments such as ritual floggings become ways of deratifying a claim to citizenship.

In general, what my work points out is that literature captures the brutal contradictions between the rhetoric of American democracy and practices of regulation.

Another feature that makes possible a critique of restrictive citizenship is the interpolation of dramatic technique into the novel form. In this context, scenic effect in Redburn and Moby-Dick importantly figures a spectator as a witness and casts this form of spectatorship as an obligation of democratic life.

Finally, I examine how a number of political theorists turn to the dramatic scene within American Renaissance writings to consider citizenship, democracy, law, and national sovereignty in the literary text. In the process, I put forth a comparative model of reading between nineteenth-century American literature, political philosophy, and cultural thought today.