Policing the border: Politics and place in the work of Miguel Mendez, Marisela Norte, and Leslie Marmon Silko.

摘要

In Policing the Border, I argue that Miguel Mendez' 1974 novel Peregrinos de Aztlan, Marisela Norte's 1991 spoken word piece "Act of the Faithless," and Leslie Marmon Silko's 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead refocus the discussion of illegality by shifting the reader's/listener's gaze from the bodies of border crossers and border dwellers to the cross-border movement of global capitalism and capitalist exploitation. Policing the Border shows that these texts expose the ways in which the U.S. nation-state and its concomitant ideological apparatuses focus upon brown bodies beyond or crossing the border, and work in tandem with capitalist structures of exploitation. These texts not only seek to make the U.S. nation-state and capitalism's international crimes on the border more visible, but they also denounce these crimes. The complex representation of the relationship between the geographical, material, social, and cultural entity of the border and capitalist exploitation provided by the writings of these border authors makes clear as well the critical links between knowledges about the border and their manipulation by both capital and resistance movements.;On the one hand, Policing the Border attempts to open up the traditionally separate area of literary border studies to an interdisciplinary/inter-literary approach by reading two Chicana/o texts beside a Laguna Pueblo text. Too, each of the texts selected for this study shares particular features of fragmentation and ambiguity. Finally, each of these three texts also makes a call to memory, to the recording, re-construction, and preservation of the past---all pasts---as necessary to produce change for the better. These authors use art to question the policing gaze of state/capital and to suggest the deregulation of the border space that is home to workers on both sides of the legal border, even while calling for a counter-policing.;Policing the Border sets out to demonstrate that there are and have been powerful texts written by people of color in the U.S. that re-narrate, deconstruct, and re-remember the dominant notions and histories that facilitate the very coercive and policing structures of the U.S.-Mexico border, by using art as a cultural weapon against historical structures of dominance, oppression, repression, and exploitation---that is, by using art to "police" the border. Finally, Policing the Border participates in and brings together conversations in all fields of study that seek to question the categories of citizen, nation, the border, and America. I show how these three texts imagine and narrate an alternative understanding of what America means and where its borders lie. Policing the Border points to the many insights and analyses provided by the cultural production of three writers from marginalized communities who theorize and historicize the other side of America and the American dream.