Undocumented Literature

This panel approaches Latina/o Studies from a Mexican perspective. It proposes thinking beyond geopolitical borders, and in opposition to normative and exclusionary practices of citizenship, introducing the term "cuirdadanía"... [ view full abstract ]

This panel approaches Latina/o Studies from a Mexican perspective. It proposes thinking beyond geopolitical borders, and in opposition to normative and exclusionary practices of citizenship, introducing the term "cuirdadanía" (queerizenship) to address issues of g/local subalternization on both sides of the border. Likewise, it responds to what some critics have called "borderism" by looking at changing significations of "chicano" in the borderlands (concretely, in the context of recent border cinema), especially as they move beyond well known tropes and stereotypes that mark Mexican Americans as essentially different from Mexicans, and instead point to strategies of transnational collaboration. It also looks to the quintessential borderlands genre, the corrido, to pry at some of the tensions produced on both sides of the border by the context of migration. It furthermore seeks to break down the disciplinary border that often focuses Latina/o Studies on the experiences and struggles occurring in the United States, and implies, for example, that only those emigrants who actually successfully arrive in the country, and manage to stay, come under the field's purview - while those who get turned back at the border, or are deported get left out. Likewise, while some immigrants earn a privileged place in Latina/o activism (e.g., dreamers, unaccompanied minors), others remain at its margins, if they are included at all. The panel proposes the term "undocumented literature" to address the status of some stories that Latina/o studies has not recognized or endorsed, such as those of incarcerated immigrants, or deportees. Our archives draw from border cinema, popular balladry (el corrido), testimonial narratives of prisoners and deportees, and the practices of transfeminism and sexual dissent. The panelists, all of whom are specialists in the Mexican borderlands, are eager to promote dialogue between Mexican cultural studies and Mexican American/Chicana/o cultural studies. We turn to queer, decolonial and border theory for productive ways to foment promiscuity and to undiscipline Latina/o studies, in order to better foster dialogue and collaboration.

Panel 134