1st Edition
(In)Hospitable Encounters in Chicanx and Latinx Literature, Culture, and Thought
This volume addresses the notion of (in)hospitality in the culture, literature, and thought of Chicanx and Latinx in the United States. It underscores those “stranger others” against whom nativist fear and state violence are directed: undocumented migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Critical analyses focus on the topics of immigration and state violence, hospitality in written and visual narratives, and the role of hospitality in the translation of academic and literary works. All essays explore the conditional character of hospitality towards Chicanx and Latinx and its attending myths and discourses. Dwelling on the predicament that individuals and groups face as strangers, unwelcome guests, and unwilling hosts, the essays also explore the ways in which Latinx writers, artists, and film makers may or may not challenge the guest-host relationship. The ethical concern that runs through the volume considers material history and the institutional, disciplinary regulation of the uncertainty of hospitality acts as factors determining the narratives about foreign others.
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Integrating Western and Decolonial Approaches to Hospitality
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger and Pere Gifra-Adroher
Defining (In)hospitable Encounters
Immigration, Hospitality, and State Violence
Critical Tropes of (In)Hospitality in Chicanx and Latinx Cultural Studies
Translation as Hospitality
Part I: Immigration, Hospitality, and State Violence
Chapter 1. (In)Hospitality in Tornillo, Texas: Unaccompanied Minors, Art, and Resilience
María-Socorro Tabuenca-Córdoba
Chapter 2. Convivial Solidarities versus Border Necropolitics in Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River. Dispatches from the Border
Esther Álvarez-López
Chapter 3. Penelope's House and the Immigration Courts on a ‘Hostipitalitarian’ Border
Rocío Irene Mejía
Chapter 4. Power and Visibility: The Unfinished Story of The Infiltrators
Alex Rivera
Part II: Narratives of (In)Hospitality
Chapter 5. Hospitality, Nepantilism, and a Sentipensante Approach to the US-Mexico Borderlands
Norma E. Cantú
Chapter 6. “Aquí te falta,” “Aquí te sobra:” (In)Hospitality in Ramón “Tianguis” Pérez’s Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant
Marta E. Sánchez
Chapter 7. Photographing Dreams: Cinema against the Reality of US Hospitality
Juan G. Etxeberria
Chapter 8. Metafiction in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper: In and Out of a Blurred Text of Hospitality
Francisco A. Lomelí
Part III: Translation as Hospitality
Chapter 9. Translation as Bienvenida: The Digital Threshold of The Codex Nepantla Project
Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Chapter 10. Linguistic and Narrative Hospitality in the Translation of Daisy Hernández’s ‘Before Love, Memory’
Mattea Cussel
Postscript
Bearing Witness: Inhospitable Encounters with The Politics of Rage, Hate, and Grievance
Norma Alarcón
Index
Biography
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger is Associate Professor at the Humanities Department of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Her most recent research focuses on the testimonial, documentary, and auto-ethnographic aspects of Chicanx and Latinx literature. She is the author of Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas (2003). She is also the editor of Diaspora and Return in American Literature (Routledge, 2015) and of a special issue devoted to Rethinking Hospitality through the Culture, Literature, and Thought of Contemporary US Women of Color for Lectora: Revista de dones i textualitat (2023). She has published essays in journals such as Melus, Aztlán, Signs, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Journal of American Studies, and in edited volumes published by Routledge, Brill, and Palgrave Macmillan.
Pere Gifra-Adroher is Associate Professor of English at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain). His research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, Anglophone travel writing on Spain, and cross-cultural relations between the Iberian Peninsula and the English-speaking world. He is the author of Between History and Romance: Travel Writing on Spain in the Early Nineteenth-Century United States (2000) and editor of a special issue on “American Travel Writing on Spain” for the Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna (2019). He has also co-edited, with Montserrat Cots and Glyn Hambrook, Interrogating Gazes: Comparative Critical Views on the Representation of Foreignness and Otherness (2013), and with Jacqueline Hurtley Hannah Lynch and Spain (2018).
