Elizabeth Russ (“Negotiating Other Borders in Julia Alvarez’s A Wedding in Haiti,”) studies how Julia Álvarez’s memoir A Wedding in Haiti (2012), uncovers a distinct migratory trajectory between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Russ shows how Álvarez’s memoir scrutinizes the borders—physical, historical, cultural, and linguistic—that simultaneously conjoin and divide the island nations through a narrative that is further complicated by the author’s positionality as an upper-class U.S. citizen. Working through theories of Dominican and U.S./Dominican diasporic identity, Russ concludes by considering how Álvarez’s meditation on the border relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic intersects with other Latinx representations of border crossings.

Pavel Andrade (“Formal Intervals, Spatial Openings: the Mexico-U.S. Border in the Time of Global Capital”) makes use of the architectural notion of opening to argue that the Mexican novel of the NAFTA era produces spatial situations (North, Desert, and Border) that operate as spatiotemporal intervals in the global circulation of capital. Focusing on works by Cristina Rivera Garza, David Toscana, and Elmer Mendoza, Andrade studies how the spatial composition of the Mexican novel of the 1990s registers the spatial struggles that have come to shape the global contemporary, in particular the environmental devastation associated with the urban climateric and the demographic trends sparked by new patterns of international forced migration.

Tamara Mitchell (“Marking Time: The Sounds of Neoliberal Temporality at the Mexico-U.S. Border”) turns to Chicana artist-scholar Maria Gaspar’s sound and video installation, “On the Border of What is Formless and Monstrous” (2016), to argue how sound and visuality makes palpable the circumscribed temporality and mobility of incarceration. Mitchell reads Gaspar’s aesthetic meditation on the prison industrial complex alongside Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as a means of reflecting on the structure, temporality, and differential mobility engendered by neoliberal capitalism. As Mitchell argues, in both Luiselli’s sonic novel and Gaspar’s installation, sound opens a zone of encounter and potential resistance to the logics of neoliberal capitalism.

Finally, Alberto Fonseca (“Subjetividades migrantes en Moronga de Horacio Castellanos Moya”) turns to Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Moronga (2018), a novel centered around the lives of two Salvadoran migrants in the United States, to analyze the linguistic and cultural tensions at stake in border crossings. Fonseca argues that Moronga gives form to national anxieties in post-war El Salvador nurtured by economic displacement, labor flexibilization, and the impossibility of escaping one’s own country. By focusing on the experience of the Salvadoran exile in the United States, Moronga shows the accumulated burden that weighs upon Central American immigrants and their disenchantment vis à vis contemporary political processes.

This panel will be chaired by Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez. Presentations will be limited to 12 minutes. Followed by 25 minutes of unstructured discussion among panelists and with the audience.