Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line.

312 Pages·2007·1.41 MB·English

by  Ana M? Manzanas

Border Transits
Critical Approaches to
Ethnic American Literature
No 2
General Editors:
Jesús Benito Sánchez (Universidad de Valladolid)
Ana Mª Manzanas (Universidad de Salamanca)
Editorial Board:
Carmen Flys Junquera (Universidad de Alcalá)
Aitor Ibarrola (Universidad de Deusto)
Paul Lauter (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut)
Shirley Lim (U. California, Santa Barbara)
Begoña Simal (Universidade da Coruña)
Santiago Vaquera (Penn State University)
Border Transits
Literature and Culture
across the Line
Edited by
Ana Mª Manzanas
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
"ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence".
ISBN: 978-90-420-2249-2
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Printed in The Netherlands
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
Border Dynamics: From Terminus to Terminator 1
Ana Mª Manzanas
Part I: (B)orders and Lines: A Theoretical Intervention
Circles and Crosses: Reconsidering Lines of Demarcation 9
Ana Mª Manzanas
Part II: Visions of the U.S.-Mexican Border
Up against the Border: A Literary Response 35
José Pablo Villalobos
Dispelling the Border Myth:
Zonkey Writers and the Black Legend 53
Édgar Cota-Torres
Border Voices: Life Writings and Self-Representation
of the U.S.-Mexico Frontera 61
Javier Durán
Postcards from the Border: In Tijuana, Revolución is an Avenue 79
Santiago Vaquera
Part III: Cultural Intersections
“To Hear Another Language”: Lifting the Veil
between Langston Hughes and Federico García Lorca 101
Isabel Soto
vi Contents
The Brown/Mestiza Metaphor,
or the Impertinence against Borders 119
Isabel Durán
“A Wall of Barbed Lies”: Absent Borders in
María Cristina Mena’s Short Fiction 147
Begoña Simal
Part IV: Trans-Nations
Ethnographies of Transnational Migration in
Rubén Martínez’s Crossing Over (2001) 181
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Mapping the Trans/Hispanic Atlantic:
Nuyol, Miami, Tenerife, Tangier 205
Manuel Martín-Rodríguez
Part V: Trans-Lations
Resisting through Hyphenation:
The Ethics of Translating (Im)pure Texts 225
África Vidal
Trespassers of Body Boundaries: The Cyborg and
the Construction of a Postgendered Posthuman Identity 243
Ángel Mateos-Aparicio
Bibliography 277
Contributors 297
Index 301
Acknowledgments
“There will always be time, space perhaps not,” claims Carlos
Monsiváis. Yet, one may think, one needs time to think about space
and the way it splits and bifurcates around us. That gift of time is
precisely what the Universidad de Salamanca has granted me. Wake
Forest University, for its part, has provided the right atmosphere to
conduct the research for this project, and to put this volume together.
The support of The Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia for the research
projects “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature” (references
BFF2003-07004 and HUM2006-04919), as well as the financial
backing of the Junta de Castilla y León for the project “Borders,
Identities and Mestizaje” (reference SA048A06) have also been
instrumental for the completion of this book of essays.
My colleagues and friends from SAAS (Spanish Association for
American Studies), especially Constante González, Cristina Garrigós,
Francisco Collado, Isabel Durán and Barbara Ozieblo, as well as the
“Studies in Liminality” group, led by Manuel Aguirre, have always
provided a solid rock of faith on this and other projects. I would also
like to acknowledge the support of the American Embassy in Madrid.
I am especially grateful to Carmen González, Ed Loo and Marti Estell.
Chrissi Harris has always been generous with her time and has
done a superb job as style editor. My gratitude goes to dear friends
such as Mary DeShazer, Anna Tefft and Win Lee, Jerry and Bonnie
Whitmire, L.D. Russell, Richard and Maria Giacoma, Paul Lauter and
Anne Fitzgerald, Shirley Lim, Heinz Ickstadt, and Isabel Caldeira.
Together with colleagues at the Universidad de Salamanca, they have
always eased the process of putting together this collection of articles.
I am most indebted to the critics who have collaborated to produce
this book; over a period of two years we have been exchanging visions
and revisions of the border and its multiple manifestations.
This project, like the series “Critical Approaches to Ethnic
American Literature,” would have never been possible without Jesús
viii Acknowledgments
Benito, co-editor of CAEAL, and Editions Rodopi. Marieke Schilling,
for her part, has provided her constant guidance throughout the
process.
And my thanks to my family, who most naturally and generously
share their time with me in changing spaces.
Border Dynamics: From Terminus to Terminator
Ana Mª Manzanas
Let me start with a story from a Spanish newspaper: Every night,
Fortuna García performs a transgression of sorts. She sings a lullaby
to her daughter Carmen when her six-year-old goes to sleep in
Cochabamba, Bolivia. Fortuna lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland, as an
illegal immigrant, and she has not seen her daughter since she left
Bolivia three years ago. Yet, each night, thanks to a phone card, she
sings to Carmen till the girl falls asleep (Naím 2005). How many
Fortuna Garcías, I wonder, are out there, lulling children to sleep in
other countries and continents? How many lullabies dart across the
night sky? Do voices get effectively “illegal” at some stage of their
trajectories? Circulating in the mesh of wires between the two
countries, the lullaby traverses the lines Fortuna García is not allowed
to crisscross. The lullaby relaxes vigilance between temporal
opposites, day and night, vigil and sleep, as it crosses spatial
discontinuities between countries and continents. Fortunately, the
lullaby does not care for boundaries and stop signs between mother
and daughter. And the stop signs are ever growing, from the projected
“iron curtain” that will separate Mexico from the United States, to the
tri-dimensional wall that will divide Morocco from Ceuta and Melilla,
the two Spanish autonomous cities in North Africa.
This collection of articles stems precisely from the impulse to
inquire into those aural and written texts that travel across borders and
boundaries in visible and invisible reticulations. It also responds, in
part, to John W. House’s claim that there is an urgent need both for
empirical and comparative studies on border situations (in Baud and
Van Schendel 1997: 212). Yet questions arise as to the possiblity of
establishing this comparative field: What constitutes a border
situation? How translatable and “portable” is “the border”? What are
the borders of words surrounding the border? In its five sections,
Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line intends to