Border Bodies: Building Sex and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Southwest Borderlands

Dr. Hernández examines the nineteenth-century text Who Would Have Thought It? by María Amparo Ruiz de Burtom in relation to sex, intimacy, and sexuality. This paper is concerned with what Ruiz de Burton both forecloses... [ view full abstract ]

Dr. Hernández examines the nineteenth-century text Who Would Have Thought It? by María Amparo Ruiz de Burtom in relation to sex, intimacy, and sexuality. This paper is concerned with what Ruiz de Burton both forecloses and opens up in her construction of gender, sex, sexualization, and femininity within U.S. empire through a hemispheric lens and Doña Theresa's testimonio. With the social and political climate of the testimonio being a mediated source by someone whose positionality is threatened, the multiple layers of gender, sex, sexualization, and femininity at the height of U.S. empire cannot be seen by only centering the U.S. and must be interrogated through how this text knit the extended Americas together in complex narratives of interdependence, focusing on how Latinx literature produces meaning.  Thus, Who Would Have Thought It? by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton delivers the ‘failed white feminine’ but evokes a hemispheric ideological turn that is buttressed off the colonial and hemispheric logic of anti-blackness and settler colonialism, therefore opening up this novel to be read not only as a meta-testimonio through Doña Theresa’s narrative, but as a potential mirrored testimonio through Lola’s narrative.