LA REPRESENTACION DEL ESPACIO FRONTERIZO MEXICANO EN LA NARRATIVA MEXICANA Y MEXICOAMERICANA: 1974-1998

Abstract

The interest on this work emerges out of the aspiration to explore the cultural production about the U.S-Mexican border on its broadest interdisciplinary context. The intention is to analyze contemporary aesthetic representations of the Mexican border space in recent Mexican and Mexican American narratives. In this analysis, subsequent to an exploration of stereotyped images of the “West” of the United State and the “North” of Mexico since the beginning of XIX century, our intent is to compare and contrast two main perspectives when representing Mexican border spaces in fictitious narratives. In the 1980’s Mexico sponsored, in a plan to promote cultural production along its border states, a new group of border artists ascend. This effort had its fruitful results and it offered a new perspective and point of view when producing Mexican border representations. Our goal is to emphasize the differences between border representation made by centralist Mexican writers and border writers. To accomplish the goal I the theories used are the proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his The Production of Space, Luz Aurora Pimentel in El espacio en la ficción, ficciones espaciales: la representación del espacio en los textos narratives, and Terry Eagleton in Ideology: An Introduction. Lefebvre and Pimentel discuss the aesthetic production of space as instruments to conceive and perceive the descriptors’ ideology and social values. In the first chapter there is a discussion of the different theories used in this project. The second chapter offers an overview of how border spaces have been represented in fictitious and historical texts produced by American and Mexican writers since the beginning of the XIX century. In the third, fourth and fifth chapters we analyze the representation of Mexican border space in “Malintzin de las maquilas” by Carlos Fuentes, Sueños de frontera by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Santitos by María Amparo Escandón, El gran Preténder by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, and Peregrinos de Aztlán by Miguel Méndez.