Literature of the Chicano/a borderlands and the Filipino/a diaspora

My dissertation focuses on Filipino/a diaspora and Chicano/a borderlands literature, foregrounding the legacies of Spanish colonization, U.S. colonialism and imperialism, and labor exploitation of Filipinos/as and Chicanos/as. I note the traces of these subaltern histories in their literature, analyzing six novels: Maria Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885), Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere (1886), Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart (1946), Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (1991), Helena MariaViramontes' Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), and Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo (2002).; Chapter One provides the theoretical and historical rationale for comparing Chicano/a borderlands and Filipino/a diaspora literature. Chapter Two, "Maria Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don and Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere: Early Writings of the Chicano/a Borderlands and the Filipino/a Diaspora," explores the biographies of Ruiz de Burton and Rizal, discussing how their historical contexts marked their oeuvre and shaped the political concerns of their novels and the social relations depicted. I argue that these novels introduced borderlands and diasporic thinking rooted in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist consciousness long before the concepts of borderlands and diaspora had been theorized.; Chapter Three, "'She believed her heart powerful enough': Collective Consciousness in Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's When the Rainbow Goddess Wept and Helena Maria Viramontes' Under the Feet of Jesus ," examines the protagonists' coming into consciousness about their social location, informed by their developing awareness of social hierarchies. Additionally, I highlight the presence of anti-imperialist critiques in these novels. I show that the role of imperialism is explicit in Brainard's novel while exploring how Viramontes' novel reveals a subtle anti-imperialist sentiment that links labor exploitation to neo-imperialist relations.; In Chapter Four, "Borderlands, Diaspora, and the 'Laboring of Culture' in Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart and Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo," I argue that Bulosan and Cisneros' novels blur the boundary between diapora and borderlands literature. Using cultural critic Michael Dennings' idea of the "laboring of American culture," I suggest that the novels' representations of labor and the idioms of working class culture are means through which the spatial categories of borderlands and diaspora are destabilized.