This panel explores how twenty-first-century Latina/o literature and film draw on nineteenth-century Latina/o narratives to disrupt, shape, and inspire discussions over citizenship, labor, disease, migration, and the body. In... [ view full abstract ]
This panel explores how twenty-first-century Latina/o literature and film draw on nineteenth-century Latina/o narratives to disrupt, shape, and inspire discussions over citizenship, labor, disease, migration, and the body. In bringing together Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, Rosuara Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148, and Alejandro Morales’ The Rag Doll Plagues as works that reframe earlier Latina/o narratives, the panel calls attention to the ways in which Latina/o authors and filmmakers challenge the “structural institutions and neoliberal projects such as prisons, gentrification, and educational systems that attempt to keep Latinas/os ‘in line’” today. Rodriguez, Sánchez and Pita, and Morales critique the long histories of criminalization, erasure, and fear that have haunted Latina/o and other ethnic communities since the nineteenth century and before. In so doing, these works also offer models, suggestions, and also cautions for building solidarity. By bringing together nineteenth-century and contemporary narratives; literature and film; and literary, cultural, legal, science fictional, and medical discourses, the panel emphasizes the continually (un)disciplinary nature of Latina/o narratives and Latina/o Studies.
Marissa K. López’s paper considers the historiographic impulse in Morales’ 1991 novel as a strategy for exploring non-human agency. The Rag Doll Plagues moves from colonial Mexico, to 1990’s Orange County, and to the LAMEX (Los Angeles-Mexico City) of the future, with frequent allusions to 19th century California. The novel pits the patterns of history against history’s writing, setting up a tension between human activity and agency and the patterns of politics and disease that recur cyclically throughout. Employing inchoate disease as the novel’s organizing metaphor, Morales asks if humans are free thinking, sensitive individuals, or conglomerations of blood and bone cast to the winds of historical fate and the effects of self-organizing matter.
Jeanelle Horcasitas analyzes how Sánchez and Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009) reflects upon nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Latino history through a non-linear, polyvocal, and fragmented narrative: a digital archive of “nanotexts” that explore life during the twenty-second century. Sánchez and Pita imagine a future in which marginalized populations continue to face settler colonialism, neoliberalism, and the cultural/historical erasure of indigenous communities—practices that recall events from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the Bracero Program. Lunar Braceros invokes these histories not only to remember the past and the present, but also to encourage Latinos to create alternative histories and a better future for themselves and their communities.
Maria A. Windell argues that while the sex, blood spatter, and calculated injustice of Rodriguez’s Machete (2010) certainly harken back to the glory days of exploitation cinema, they just as surely reveal the continued relevance of the nineteenth-century literary sensationalism that framed the earliest Joaquín Murrieta narratives—a sensationalism that emerges from the legacies of Manifest Destiny, internal colonization, and the US-Mexican War. Both Murrieta narratives and Rodriguez’s film challenge what Jodie Michelle Lawston and Ruben R. Murillo describe as “the ‘criminal/noncriminal’ logic [that] dominates conversations about immigration and imprisonment.” Machete, however, protests the institutionalization of migrant criminalization and deportation, however, it also rejects the nation’s terms of engagement.
