Imagining a borderlands south: literature from Mexico and the United Utates, 1845-1950
Date
2014
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Imagining a Borderlands South: Literature from Mexico and the United States, 1845-1950 grounds study of the global south in the too often neglected southern space of the borderlands. Building on recent scholarship to restore neglected political, economic, and literary exchanges between Mexico and the U.S., this study considers a group of writers who transcended the geopolitical, cultural, lingual, and racial borders dividing the nations. In the years surrounding the U.S.-Mexican War, U.S. Civil War, and Mexican Revolution, rhetorics of racial singularity, specifically U.S. whiteness and Mexican mestizoness, dominated national politics and public opinion. Against all of this, writers like James Russell Lowell, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Scott Coleman, Xavier Villaurrutia, Langston Hughes, Jovita Gonzalez, and Margaret Eimer represent a group of intellectuals and artists who rejected the strict national and racial identities imposed by Mexico and the U.S. and in their writing pursued multiple and flexible expressions of identity in the borderlands south. This project revises the traditional landscape of southern studies as it explores a south defined by constantly shifting boundaries, peoples, and histories; restores the historical relationship between Mexico and the U.S. South; and transcends the national, regional, and racial boundaries of traditional Southern literature to include often neglected Mexican, Mexican-American, and African-American voices.
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Keywords
Borderlands, Global south, Nationalism, U.S.-Mexico border, Mexican-American, Expressions of identity