Set on and/or crossing the border between two nations, borderlands fiction is a unique, trans-national type of literature whose meaning derives from de-centering nation-based imagined communities, identities, geographies, histories. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the centuries of mass migrations and intensifying modernization and globalization, such narratives have been proliferating. This course will examine selected works of borderlands fiction from the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1920s to the present. We will examine the following questions: if borderlands fiction is about living between two worlds, is it possible to belong to both sides or does one have to choose? What are the differences between borderlands fiction from the U.S. and northern Mexico? What different identity and narrative scripts arise from voluntary migration to the U.S. vs involuntary incorporation (by way of colonialism)? Why do borderlands create their own saints and cults of saints? How is U.S. immigrant fiction changed when migrants decide to return to Mexico? What is the difference between borderlands fiction written by natives of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and that written by migrants to the area? How has the rise of drug-related violence changed borderlands fiction?


Required texts:
Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Paul Flores, Along the Border Lies
Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Ana Castillo, The Guardians
Daniel Venegas, The Adventures of Don Chipote; or, when Parrots Breastfeed
selected short stories by Rosina Conde and Rosario SanMiguel