Contested spaces/striated spaces: Representations of the border in Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us: A Memoir

Ewa Antoszek

doi:10.18290/rh.2016.64.11-8

Ewa Antoszek Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh.2016.64.11-8

Keywords: Mexican-American border; border crossings; Chicana/Latina literature; home; transational identity; hybrid subjectivities; twin cities

Abstract

The border with its multiple roles and interpretations has always played an important role in Chicana and Latina discourse in the U.S. Redefinitions and redesigns of spatial paradigms that took place in the second half of the 20th century resulted in proliferation of border imagery in literature that presented complex roles of the border. The aforementioned transformations were reflected in the shift of focus in Chicana discourse on the spatial, from location to mobility, “from land to roads” (Kaup 200). This shift in turn, led to alterative constructions of space and remappings of geographic locations that included creation of in-between spaces and rewriting of the border from a demarcation line into a contact zone. Due to the interdependence between space and identity formation, the new concepts of the border predetermine a different approach towards Latina identity formation. Contemporary Chicana literature often focuses on roads rather than dwellings (Kaup 228) and discusses the issue of identity formation construed in in-between spaces. Chicana authors often examine the experience of nomadic subjects traveling both within the U.S. and/or Mexico or crossing the border, presenting multiple reasons behind such travels, as well as different experiences and outcomes resulting from these journeys. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the redefinitions of the border are reflected in Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us: A Memoir and how border crossings presented by the author contribute to the displacement of the main character and her family, triggering the notion of simultaneously belonging and unbelonging, or becoming “Othered,” which results in the construction of transnational identities.

References

Aguirre, Manuel, Roberta Quance, Philip Sutton. Margins and Tresholds. An Enquiry into the Concept of Liminality in text Studies. Studies in Liminality and Literature 1. Madrid: The Gateway Press, 2000. Print.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco: 1999. Print.

Antoszek, Ewa. “La Línea vs. La Frontera—Representations of the Border and Border Crossings in Grande’s Across a Hundred Mountains.” A View from Elsewhere. Eds. Marcel Arbeit and Roman Trušník. Palacký University Olomouc, 2014. 195–214. Print.

Arteaga, Alfred. Chicano Poetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Print.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984. Print.

Benito Jesús and Ana M. Manzanas. “Border(lands) and Norder Writing: Introductory Essay.” Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands. Eds. Ana M. Manzanas and Jesús Benito. Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam–New York: 2002. Print.

Davis, Mike. Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City. Verso, New York: 2008. Print.

Diener, Alexander C. and Joshua Hagen. Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. London: Harvester Publishing, 1980. Print.

Fox, Claire F. “Portable Border: Site-Specificity, Art, and the US-Mexico Frontier.” Social Text, No. 41 (Winter, 1994) Duke University Press. pp. 61–82. Print.

Grande, Reyna. The Distance Between Us. A Memoir. Washington Square Press, New York: 2012. Print.

Kaup, Monika. Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Print.

Nair, Rama. “The Concept of Identity in Indian Immigrant Women in America: A Literary Perspective.” Studies in Postcolonial Literature. Ed. M.Q. Khan and Bijay Kumar Das. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007. 74–83. Print.

Ochoa, Enrique C. “Constructing Fronteras: Teaching the History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands in the Age of Proposition 187 and Free Trade.” Radical History Review 70: 119–130 1998. Print.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturaltion. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. “Twenty-First-Century Chicana/o Border Writing.” South Atlantic Quarterly 105.4 (2006): 717–743. Print.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. Print.

Toobin, Jeffrey. “American Limbo: While politicians block reform, what is happening to immigrant families?” The New Yorker 27 July 2015: 30–35. Print.