Vision de la frontera en la obra de Miguel Mendez.

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to study the literary discourse in the narrative texts of Miguel Mendez, contextualizing them within the specific historical time and space of the U.S.-Mexican border during the contemporary period. It is our specific aim to demonstrate that his literary texts are structured upon base that lends them coherence and gives them continuity. A symbolization of an historical rupture or break has meaning on a personal, internal level because it represents the author's irrevocable loss of the cultural milieu of childhood, a history of affective-spiritual disintegration due to specific events in his life. As a literary structural technique found in the narrative world of Miguel Mendez's fictional works, this symbolization presents the characteristics of an ambivalent poetics of rupture that questions the unity of historical reality. The image in his work of polysymmetrical reality has two faces, two perspectives: on one hand, a tragic, pessimistic view of the contemporary world; and on the other, a hopeful, ironic, and optimistic view of life. This bipolar stance is a consequence of a real break, of a concrete separation, of an historical barrier: the geopolitical and cultural border that is viewed as a powerful obstacle that impedes and makes difficult a collective conviviality between cultures, and ultimately the possibility of a better world. In this sense, Mendez's poetics reflects an external social division. That is, Mendez's view of an imaginary world recreates and is a manifestation, a representation of a border society profoundly and intentionally divided. This division, which occurred ostensibly to establish racial and ethnic order, is reproduced aesthetically and at the effective level in his works as an overall image of disenchantment, disillusionment, and deceit. His is a poetics that symbolizes the dichotomy of separation, barriers, and disintegration. At the same time, it is a poetics that holds out the hope of a new integration of limits and borders. This basic signification that gives coherence to Miguel Mendez's narrative fiction services as a thread that can be traced throughout his works, and it is one that gives them unity. This thread of meaning allows us, on a literary interpretative level, to establish relationships between the various themes found in his most important fictional works. The web of relationships comprise the cultural system whose underlying aspect is the border.