| My dissertation explores the relationship between the nation and a “free market” economy in 20th- and 21 st-century Latina/o literature and film. Although new political theories pronounce the “withering away of the state”—once a Marxist dream and now a neoliberal one—I challenge these theories by arguing that contemporary Latina/o literature and film reveals and exemplifies the remaining centrality of the nation even with neoliberal efforts to transcend it. For instance, in the cyberpunk tradition of Samuel Delaney and William Gibson, Alex Rivera's film Sleep Dealer imagines a future where the capitalist needs of cheap labor in the U.S. are fulfilled without physical migrations or citizen outcries of an “alien invasion”: the border (and thus the nation) remains intact, while Mexican laborers stay in Mexico operating U.S. machines through a Matrix-like virtual reality. The film's speculative premise demonstrates a compatibility with the maintenance of national difference and the creation of international/global markets. My dissertation explores how Latina/o literature and film exposes and embodies an interdependent, albeit contradictory, relationship between the nation and a “free,” privatized economy, where a sci-fi film like Sleep Dealer or a canonical novel like Helena María Viramontes' Their Dogs Came with Them demonstrate a market logic that relies on nationalisms to operate.;Violent Fronteras approaches the relationship between the nation and the neoliberal economy through two overarching parts—the first concentrating on representations of nationalisms (chapters 2-4) and the second on the nation-state (chapters 5-6). I begin by analyzing figures like one of Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Latina heroines who performs the stereotypical role of a “spicy Chicana” for her job in The Dirty Girl Social Club, which, I argue, emblematizes an interlocking relationship between economic institutions and cultural nationalisms in the equal-opportunity workplace. Where cultural nationalism gains a certain economic leverage in this novel, Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban is another novel that builds upon the way the economy normalizes nationalisms and sexualities. The third-generation Cuban-American teen who buys punk albums to pay homage to her idealist vision of socialist Cuba, in the novel, portrays how nationalisms are understood as a mechanism of economic consumption and also as a perpetuation of uneven development. Thus, the market depends on and regulates, rather than undermines, the nation. My dissertation ends on the way the nation-state continues to maintain the border while simultaneously promoting policies such as NAFTA, where capital is mobile but people are not. Looking, for instance, at Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, where workers are smuggled into the U.S. and then virtually forgotten, I consider how the economic needs of the U.S. are contradictorily reliant on the nation-state border walls and immigration laws. These questions of immigration and labor are central in American literature, from Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers to Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, but I show that Latina/o cultural production uncovers and exemplifies mystifications, contradictions, and the violence at the heart of the neoliberal state's unprecedented rule. |
