Browsing by Subject "Chicana literature"
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Item Fictionalizing Juárez : feminicide, violence, and myth-making in the borderlands(2014-05) Castro Villarreal, Mario Nicolas; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole MarieIn the early 1990s, a series of gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, a city located in the U.S.-Mexico border, shook the political landscape of Mexico. A decade later, the strange and violent murders, known as the feminicides or feminicidios of Juárez, reached international infamy across hemispheres and continents. During this time, the city and the cases became the subjects of an extensive body of scholarship and of any imaginable artistic medium (narrative, poetry, theater, performance, music, and so on). Eventually, the complexity and overexposure of the cases and the sociopolitical conditions of Ciudad Juárez placed them at the center of a paradoxical debate: on one hand, the work of activists, feminists, and scholars of social sciences (like anthropologists and sociologists) studied the murders as a localized example of a larger phenomenon of mysoginistic violence; on the other, journalistic and media investigations of Juárez understood the murders as the products of specific agents (serial killers, murderers, drug cartels, amongst others) and the fractures within the Mexican Nation-State. And yet, despite the expansion and overlapping of these discourses, fictional representations of Juárez remained tangential to this intricate debate. Thus, this research explores the different ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers deployed and negotiated existent perspectives on the feminicides within fictional environments. As a result of the vast amount of published work available on Ciudad Juárez, I narrowed the objects of my research through a transnational scope. The resulting sample of texts transverses borders (Mexico and the U.S.), continents (Latin America and Europe), genres (fiction and nonfiction), and mediums (literature and film). The first chapter explores the connections of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the theoretical framework of the possible worlds of fiction. The second chapter moves to issues of representation, gender, and race through the analysis of two novels written by Chicana scholars: Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez. Finally, the third chapter focuses on film representations of Juárez and the feminicides in the form of Gregory Nava’s Bordertown and Carlos Carrera’s Backyard/El Traspatio.Item Indigeneity and mestizaje in Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead(2014-05) Hernandez, Zachary Robert; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-In an attempt to narrow a perceived gap between two literary fields, this thesis provides a comparative analysis of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Humminbird’s Daughter, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. I explore and critique the ways in which Luis Alberto Urrea mobilizes mestizaje and Chicana/o nationalist rhetoric. I argue that mestizaje stems from colonial representations that inscribe indigenous people into a narrative of erasure. Furthermore, I address Leslie Marmon Silko’s critique of mestizaje within Almanac of the Dead.Item Literary translations : telenovelas in contemporary Chicana literature(2008-12) Graf, Amara Ann; Perez, Domino Renee, 1967-Chicana literature is often discussed in relation to broad literary or theoretical movements (post-modernism, magic realism, or feminism) but these approaches often fail to account for or even consider other culturally derived sources of critical interrogation. For example, Chicana authors, through direct references or allusions, demonstrate that Spanish-language soap operas, known as telenovelas, have a cultural currency that can bridge people across generations, nationalities, and class differences. Telenovelas also have theoretical value, for these productions often feature stories that address issues of race, class, gender, nationality, language, and violence. Reading contemporary Chicana literature through the lens of the telenovela, including its history and status as a cultural form, reveals the ways in which Chicana authors not only rely on but also revise the form. They disrupt the rigid Manichean world view present in telenovelas by challenging heteronormative romance and traditional gender roles to allow for alternate stories, where endings are not always tidy or happy. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in communication studies, I examine the history of Spanish-language television within the U.S. to substantiate the cultural currency of and show how the telenovela permeates and informs Mexican-American identity. Relying on the work of Jesús Martín-Barbero, I trace the development of the melodrama and romance genres out of which telenovelas emerge, evolving from newspaper serials, radionovelas, fotonovelas, to comic strip novels or libros semanales. I focus on the literary roots of the telenovela genre (with its origins in 19th century European serialized fiction) in relation to early Mexican-American historical romance narratives (María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita González, and Eve Raleigh). Based on Gustavo Aprea and Rolando C. Martínez Mendoza's definition of the telenovela genre, I examine how contemporary Chicana fiction (Denise Chávez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Nina Marie Martínez) both conforms to and deviates from the generic conventions. I provide a culturally based critical strategy for offering alternate readings of Chicana literature to show how these authors use the popularity of the telenovela form to reach a specific audience and lend new insight into how viewers, familiar with the genre conventions, are comparable to literary critics.