Who Framed Latina/o Literature?: Finding the Body(politic) in Xicoténcatl
Erin Murrah-Mandril
University of Texas Arlington
Erin Murrah-Mandril is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her scholarship focuses on late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature, with an emphasis on Mexican American literature. Murrah-Mandril's peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Aztlán, Arizona Quarterly, Western American Literature, and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series. Her current project, In the Mean Time: Temporal Colonization and the Mexican American Literary Tradition, is a book-length examination of Mexican American authors’ ability to navigate the colonizing force of U.S. time that was based on racialized constructions of progress and development in the century following the U.S.-Mexico War.
Abstract
At the 25th Anniversary of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference in 2017, Jesse Alemán staged an intervention with scholars: Recover from our addiction to discussions of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton... [ view full abstract ]
At the 25th Anniversary of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference in 2017, Jesse Alemán staged an intervention with scholars: Recover from our addiction to discussions of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and “resistance” in early Mexican American Literature. This panel recognizes the heart of his call to suggest that the scholarly climate is hungover from adherence to the same old cocktail of race, place, gender, and empire. However, why should we recover from our addiction to the methodologies that opened the canon and increased the visibility of the Latinx 19th century? How do we experience the jouissance of recovery in new methodologies, texts, and pedagogies? Can we recover from Ruiz de Burton without replicating the same arguments with a new author? Our panel proposes to present alternative methodologies to C19 Latinx literary production that break the cycle Alemán identified at the Recovering conference. Jesse Alemán will serve as the panel’s respondent and comment on the proposed steps to recover from the Ruiz de Burton habit.
The panel begins with “Who Framed Latina/o Literature?: Finding the Body(politic) in Xicoténcatl” which addresses fetishizing of the writing body to establish race and authority. This presentation looks to the anonymously published novel, Xicoténcatl as a text that calls upon readers to develop new contexts. The historical novel fictionalizes Mexico’s national origin myth of Cortez’s conquest of Mexico, focusing on the internal division of the Tlaxcalan people who aided him in order to champion republican government in the face of despotism. It was published in Philadelphia in Spanish in 1826. There is nothing very surprising about an anonymous revolutionary or international author publishing in early 19th-century Philadelphia, but the novels content forces readers to understand Mexican and Latina/o history, generic conventions, and cultural norms. With the absence of a historical body to which we can ascribe authorship, it helps reframe American literature in the context of the Latina/o body politic.
Authors
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Erin Murrah-Mandril
(University of Texas Arlington)
Topic Area
Panel
Session
P48 » Working our Steps: Recovering from the Ruiz de Burton Addiction in the Latinx 19th Century (14:00 - Friday, 23rd March, Enchantment E)
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