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Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds, 2021
Nepantla Familias brings together Mexican American narratives that explore and negotiate the many permutations of living in between different worlds—how the authors or their characters create, or fail to create, a cohesive identity amid the contradictions in their lives. Nepantla—or living in the in-between space of the borderland—is the focus of this anthology. The essays, poems, and short stories explore the in-between moments in Mexican American life—the family dynamics of living between traditional and contemporary worlds, between Spanish and English, between cultures with traditional and shifting identities. In times of change, family values are either adapted or discarded in the quest for self-discovery, part of the process of selecting and composing elements of a changing identity. Edited by award-winning writer and scholar Sergio Troncoso, this anthology includes works from familiar and acclaimed voices such as David Dorado Romo, Sandra Cisneros, Alex Espinoza, Reyna Grande, and Francisco Cantú, as well as from important new voices, such as Stephanie Li, David Dominguez, and ire’ne lara silva. These are writers who open and expose the in-between places: through or at borders; among the past, present, and future; from tradition to innovation; between languages; in gender; about the wounds of the past and the victories of the present; of life and death. Sergio Troncoso, David Dorado Romo, Reyna Grande, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Francisco Cantú, Rigoberto González, Alex Espinoza, Domingo Martinez, Oscar Cásares, Lorraine M. López, David Dominguez, Stephanie Li, Sheryl Luna, José Antonio Rodríguez, Deborah Paredez, Octavio Quintanilla, Sandra Cisneros, Diana Marie Delgado, Diana López, Severo Perez, Octavio Solis, ire'ne lara silva, Rubén Degollado, Helena María Viramontes, Daniel Chacón, Matt Mendez.
IAFOR Journal of Arts & Humanities
The constant movement of populations in search of a better standard of living is a phenomenon that has always defined the human condition. In recent decades, Europe has been facing a relentless migratory wave that has been transforming its social, political, cultural and economic dynamics. Spain has experienced the impact of this movement by accepting migrants from Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In an effort to better portray the migratory situation in the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish playwrights have been staging characters who are either torn by stereotypes confronting the unknown Other or who turn their backs to the cruel reality of drowned bodies. Ignacio del Moral in La Mirada del hombre oscuro (1991) and José Moreno Arenas in La playa (2004) endow their Spanish characters with sharp and provocative language while at the same time questioning their assumptions regarding the Other. In both plays, migrant characters remain silent, immobile and unable to react to or communicate with the Spaniards. This paper aims to discuss the silence and immobility of migrant characters and portray how they actually become an essential point of reference and eventually overpower the Spanish protagonists. José Moreno Arenas and Ignacio del Moral invite the audience/reader to reflect upon the accuracy of certain judgments toward the Other, to reexamine the way in which we perceive ourselves and the ones around us, and to gain a deeper understanding of human commonalities.
It’s a Dog’s Life: Canine Ethics in Leonardo Padura’s El hombre que amaba a los perros
2015
El hombre que amaba a los perros (the man who loved dogs), the title of Leonardo Padura’s 2009 novel, is also the nickname that the novel’s protagonist Ivan Cardenas Maturell, a frustrated writer and sometime veterinarian’s assistant, gives to the elderly Spanish gentleman that he meets walking his borzois on a Havana beach. The man is later revealed to be Ramon Mercader, Catalan Stalinist and Leon Trotsky’s infamous assasin. Mercader is not the only character who could be identified as “a man who loves dogs,” however, as an unusually strong affection for their canine companions unites all three of the novel’s protagonists: the exiled communist Trotsky, his assassin Mercader, and Ivan, Mercader’s Cuban interlocutor, who will go on to record their interwoven stories. The appearance of dogs at significant moments in the narrative is one of the ways that Padura guides the reader through a complex web of stories and shifting alliances and identities. Yet dogs are more than a simple leit...
Decapitation, Castration and Creativity in Elena Garro’s Andamos Huyendo Lola [We Are Fleeing Lola]
2004
In Andamos huyendo Lola [We Are Fleeing Lola], the Mexican writer Elena Garro examines the process of writing and the consequences of authorship for the female writer. By creating a discourse of silence, characterized by omission, marginal perspectives, ambiguity, displacement and troping, Garro narratively represents the silence to which her writer-protagonist is condemned. Through this "silent," hidden discourse, her authorial personna, Lelinca, challenges the hegemony of the ubiquitous, unidentified male persecutors/censors who appear as "heads," "invisible bodies," or government representatives. Just as Garro displaces her authorial persona onto her writer-protagonist, Lelinca displaces her own authorial voice onto a cat, Lola, a frog, and male narrators in order to tell her story while appearing to submit to injuctions to silence. As she does so, she reappropriates silence and passivity, the model of femininity in Mexican thought, to develop a femino-centric text in which the creative "I" is both silent and expressive.
Death and the adorable orphan: Marcelino pan y vino (1954; 1991; 2000)
Journal of Romance Studies, 2004
The Spanish journalist and writer Jost Maria Sinchez-Silva, unaware that he was adapting a folk tale about religious devotion rewarded, produced a complex narrative about the mother-son dyad: Marcelinopan y uino (1952). This was the basis of a popular Spanish film adaptation directed by Ladislao Vajda, released in 1954. It was then remade in 1991 as an ItalianlSpanishIFrench CO-production, directed by Luigi Comencini, and, recently, it has been translated into animation for television, the result of SpanishIJapaneseJFrench collaboration in 2000. This article analyses how each version reveals shifiing perceptions of childhood by focusing on the ideological hnction of the orphan child and the spectacle of the 'adorable boy'.
The X and the Door: A Fable of Mexicanness
A contracorriente, 2023
The Pan-American highway runs from Ushuaia, Argentina to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Of these 19,000 miles, there is a stretch of twenty that tells the past, present, and future of the neoliberal era. 1 This section of road-through Ciudad Juárez and El Paso-opens with a possibility, a door, and closes with a prohibition, an X. 2 This is the story of the rise and fall of that X; it is a fable. Telling fables always skirts the border of lying, but in the name of truth. A fable uses animals, for example, to transmit useful lessons-a truth deeper than whether or not animals actually talk-to their readers. Here, there are no animals, but rather monuments and some useful truths. This is the tale of how the enthusiasm surrounding the X's construction was forgotten, how it was misunderstood by its own maker, then subsequently abandoned, and especially how this monumental X marks Ciudad Juárez as a choke point of migrant humanity. This essay establishes a dialogue between bodies, the spaces they inhabit, and the monuments that mark this city at the U.S.-Mexico border. Until now, this relation