From Nepantla to Amerindia: Transnationality in Mexican American Literature and Art

Abstract

In this essay, I will explore a variety of cultural productions by Mexican American writers and artists from the 1990s with the aim of investigating how these texts and artworks revise the conventional script of nationalism. I will argue that these productions reinvent Americanness in a multiplicity of ways and from various subject positions, while at the same time participating in major theoretical debates about globalization, migration, subalternity, gender, sexuality, and ecology. As I will demonstrate, these artists and writers critique and reinterpret linear versions of national culture and identity, constructing new visions of community, identity, and cultural citizenship, and offering alternative readings of “America”. At the same time I will focus on the contradictory aspects of some of these cultural productions, especially as they attempt to replace the national collective with pan-American visions of community. The texts and artworks under study here span the genres of essay, fictional autobiography, performance, travel writing, and muralism. While I will be referring to a series of different authors and artists, I will concentrate on works by Pat Mora, Luis Alfaro, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Yreina Cervántez.