Home on the border in Ana Castillo's "The Guardians": the colonial matrix of power, epistemic disobedience, and decolonial love

After 9/11, more than ever in the history of the United States of America, security and domesticity have become paradoxical antonyms in racially and ethnically mixed areas, like that of the US-Mexican border. The borderland‘s history is further complicated by the issue of illegal immigration and its corollaries, such as strict border control and mass deportations of ―aliens,‖ as well as the rising crime rate. Even though it is protected by a fence and monitored by heavily armed border patrols, the area‘s notoriety for narcosmuggling, human trafficking and femicide keeps growing. Paradoxically, the more drastic the security measures used, the more dangerous the borderland becomes. In her 2007 novel The Guardians, Ana Castillo suggests that tighter control itself is responsible for criminalizing the border. Focusing on a Mexican American woman‘s search for her brother lost during an illegal crossing, the novel presents a complex dynamic between security and domesticity. The following article attempts to trace this dynamic through the epistemic lens of decolonial methodology.Después del 11-S, más que nunca antes en la historia de los Estados Unidos de América, la seguridad y la domesticidad se han convertido en antónimos paradójicos en zonas de abundante mezcla racial y étnica como la frontera entre México y EE. UU. La historia de la zona fronteriza se ve complicada, además, por la cuestión de la inmigración ilegal y sus distintos corolarios, como por ejemplo el estricto control aduanero existente, las deportaciones en masa de ―extranjeros‖ o el aumento de los índices de criminalidad. Incluso aunque se halle protegida por una valla y aunque esté monitorizada por patrullas fronterizas fuertemente armadas, la ya notoria reputación del área por el contrabando de drogas y personas, así como por el feminicidio, sigue empeorando. Paradójicamente, cuanto más drásticas son las medidas de seguridad empleadas, más peligrosa se vuelve la frontera. En su novela de 2007, Guardianes de la frontera, Ana Castillo sugiere que el recrudecimiento del control fronterizo es en sí responsable de la criminalización de la zona fronteriza. Centrándose en la historia de una mujer mexicano-estadounidense que busca a su hermano perdido durante un cruce ilegal de la frontera, la novela presenta una compleja dinámica entre seguridad y domesticidad. El presente artículo tiene como objeto explorar esta dinámica a través de la lente epistémica que ofrece la aplicación de una metodología decolonial

On Becoming Human in Lingít Aaní: Encountering Levinas through Indigenous Inspirations

Calls for taking up wisdom in its place risk re-inscribing coloniality at the level of signification if attempts to resituate intelligibility in the specificity of place are not enacted through a careful translation of experience between victims and perpetrators of colonial violence. At some level, decolonization ought to be conceived as a kind of translation. Emmanuel Levinas' project to "translate" Judaism into Greek is one way of staging such decolonial translation by providing us an internal critique of coloniality while remaining receptive to indigenous inspirations that enrich eco-phenomenological ways of encountering place. In the final instance, however, this paper calls for encountering place through the indigenous languages that make place ethically legible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]Ye

river woman by Katherena Vermette

Review of Katherena Vermette\u27s river woma

PERFORMATIVITY, SOCIAL ONTOLOGY, AND THE USES OF NARRATIVES IN LATIN AMERICA

ABSTRACT: This article explains the relationship between performativity and social ontology in the case of Latin American narratives of resistance and liberation. In particular, it shows how these narratives construct social facts and provide social reality to experiences of oppression and to efforts of resistance and liberation, by means of performative functions tied to the creation and maintenance of social ontologies and to the struggle for identity, social recognition, sources of legitimacy, and hegemony. Latin America is not singular in the use of these kinds of narratives but it is special in the centrality that it gives to them and in its awareness of it. By way of example, the article touches upon four narratives that displa

“Introduction: Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistempologies, and Transpacific American Studies”

Excerpt from Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistempologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnso

“We don\u27t care about these kids”: Chicago, Ethnic Studies, and the Politics of Caring

This article juxtaposes two recent Chicago Public Schools (CPS) policies and expands upon Angela Valenzuela’s (1999) “politics of caring.” Given the unique space of Chicago for modeling neoliberal school reform policies, I analyze both the 2013 massive CPS closings that targeted predominantly Black communities and the subsequent institutionalization of African American and Latina/o Studies through CPS committees and curriculum. These CPS school closings and ethnic studies policies, I argue, mark a foundational relationship of racial and colonial power between students and communities of color and the settler city-state. Drawing upon community testimonies, news and popular media, and critical caring and ethnic studies scholarship, this article interrogates that racial-colonial relationship by tracing the manipulation of the politics of aesthetic and authentic caring through the Chicago public schooling apparatus. Finally, given current community struggles for education, I examine the possibilities of theorizing beyond authentic caring and towards a decolonial politics of caring

Diversity as an Orientalist Discourse

The goal of promoting diversity is deep-rooted in the post-civil rights activities of U.S. educational institutions. Universities across the country attempt to foster diversity by seeking a diverse student body, creating initiatives that promote diversity, institutionalizing committees and administrative positions with the sole purpose of overseeing diversity, and implementing curricular strategies to support academic diversity. The pursuit of diversity is so integral to the survival and attractiveness of college campuses that some universities even lie in order to appear diverse to potential students and public supporters. Such was the case of the University of Wisconsin, Madison whose officials digitally inserted the face of a black student into an image of white football fans in order to portray a diverse picture of the university\u27s student body. Etemonstrating that diversity is valued is a staple of any academically competitive US university

Curls, Kinks and Colonization: The Decolonization of Afrodescendant Women’s Bodies in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

This paper documents the experiences of Afrodescendant women in the Dominican Republic who choose to wear their hair naturally curly, despite the norm to straighten it. I argue that Afrodescendant Dominican women are decolonizing racial and gendered discourses of the Afrodescendant body through their pursuit of beauty, blackness, health and self-definition. I draw on Ana Irma Rivera Lassén\u27s allegory of the spiderweb to suggest that my informants are the spiders of their webs, weaving the discourses of the Afrodescendant female body into a web in which they are free to move in/through their multiple identities and find empowerment

The decolonial empathy of two Maya documentaries shown at the XIII CLACPI film festival : FicMayab

In this article, I analyze two short documentaries Kat at Kat’ex? (2017) and Sepur Zarco: la vida después de la sentencia (2018), both directed by the Maya-K’iche-Kaqchikel media maker from Guatemala, Eduardo Say, and shown at the XIII CLACPI Film Festival-FicMayab’. Both movies feature Mayan witnesses to and survivors of the violence of the civil war in Guatemala. They share their stories of loss and pain with the diverse audiences convened by the festival. I argue that these movies, in referring to the past, constitute platforms in which these witnesses enact forms of reproduction of life through embodied social practices and acts of care that, in turn, portray them as agents of the reconstitution of their own present. I contend that these movies extend an invitation to the Western(ized) viewer to relate to the Maya testimonios of pain and realities, both within the films’ frame and outside of it. I use the term “decolonial empathy” to refer to this invitation that considers the Maya peoples’ self-determination in the face of state violence and its legacies.peer-reviewe