Panel: Self-Representation in Chicana/o and U.S.-Mexico Border
Literature
Copanelists: Carlos Gallego and Charles Tatum
In his 1993 seminal work My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography, critic Genaro Padilla states:
Traditional genre constraints have been exclusionary and must be renegotiated, wedged open to alternate forms of self-representation—historiography, cultural ethnography, folkloristic narratives—that do not focus exclusively on the development of individual personality so much as on the formation, and transformation, of the individual within a community. (30)
Padilla’s comments reflect not only an emergent analytical basis for Mexican American autobiography, but also reveal a series of evolving trends in Chicana/o and US-Mexico border life writings developed over the last fifteen years. This panel aims to undertake a close look at these trends, and frame them under current discussions on autobiography and life writing studies.
This paper will examine in some detail the work of the late border author and critic Ricardo Aguilar (1947–2004) in light of contemporary autobiographical criticism. A native of the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, Texas area, Aguilar was a narrator, poet, translator, essayist, and academic. Considered by some critics as a Chicano writer, his work in my view provides a clear example of the trials and tribulations of border literature on both sides of “la linea” [the divide]. My reading suggests that Aguilar’s literary and critical work, and in particular A barlovento (1999) included in his border trilogy, Que es un soplo la vida (2004), follows what some critics have called autobiographical acts. Rather than emerging from individual and private loci of enunciation, autobiographical acts in Aguilar’s works become textualities that establish a dialogue between a fragmented “I,” the border as a social space, and a collective historical record. In an unpublished paper titled “Life as Fiction, Fiction as Life”— perhaps his last academic reflection—Aguilar critiques in particular Paul de Man’s classic article “Autobiography as De-Facement.” To provide continuity to this unfinished conversation, I will try to establish an exchange between Aguilar’s reflections and Paul de Man’s contentions, particularly as mediated by Jacques Derrida in his theoretical epitaph Memoires for Paul de Man.
Javier Durán, Associate Professor of Spanish and Border Studies at the University of Arizona, is a specialist in cultural and literary studies along the U.S.-Mexico border. His areas of teaching and research include U.S.-Mexican border studies, Latin American women writers, Mexican literature and culture, and Chicana/ Chicano-Latina/Latino narrative. He is the author of José Revueltas. Una poética de la disidencia (Universidad Veracruzana), five co-edited books on Cultural Studies, and numerous articles on literary and cultural themes, and he is currently working on two book manuscripts dealing with border literature and culture: My Border, Not Yours: Local Stories, Migrant Bodies, and Transnational Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontera, and Border Voices: Memory and Self-Representation in Contemporary U.S.-Mexico Border Writing. He has been editorial collaborator and reviewer for journals such as PMLA, Chasqui, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, South Eastern Latin Americanist, and La Palabra y el Hombre, and he is one of the founding members, and current President of the MLA Discussion Group on Mexican Cultural and Literary Studies.