Border crossings in Mexico: The cultural location of emigration
Description
As the sending country, Mexico is impacted on a national scale by emigration, but little has been said in relation to Mexican emigration's influence on culture, especially in the humanities. The Mexican emigrant is constructed as part of the Mexican national imaginary even if s/he lives in the United States, although often in ways that problematize constructions of the national. My dissertation, then, argues that migration shows Mexico as a transnational community that attempts to represent its constituents regardless of their location. I approach each of the chapters from a Border Studies perspective, problematizing the commonly held notion that migration is a key issue of the U.S.-Mexican border. I argue that, instead, migration should be analyzed within a local context that includes the sending areas, the U.S.-Mexican border, and the receiving areas in the United States. Migration is a process that is changing our concepts of national identity and that makes transnational communities possible. While the nation/state has not disappeared, transnational communities, many of which work outside the scheme of nation identity, make us aware of the possible decomposition or the transformation of the nation/state My dissertation analyzes how Mexican emigration is represented in various types of cultural production such as film, music, and literature. My first chapter argues that, while Mexican American representations of migration are influenced by U.S. ethnic politics, the representations of migration in Mexico work within a centrist national scheme. In chapter two, I look at allegorical romances as representations of the state of the national identity during the 1990s and 2000. The films included in this chapter are El jardin del Eden (Maria Novaro, 1994), Santitos (Alejandro Springall, 1998), and De ida y vuelta (Salvador Aguirre, 2000). My third chapter analyzes border crossings in Mexican rock music by Tijuana No, El Gran Silencio, and other bands. My final chapter takes a look at the role of migration in la literatura de la frontera , as represented in the works of Eduardo Antonio Parra, Rosario Sanmiguel, and Luis Humberto Crosthwaite