{"title":"Immigrant Intimacies: Understanding Mediated Relationships Across Borders","authors":"Gretel H. Vera-Rosas","doi":"10.2979/chiricu.5.1.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.5.1.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay considers Almudena Carracedo's Made in LA (2007) and Theo Rigby's Sin País/Without Country (2010) as two cinematic texts that render visible the sociocultural and affective role that visual and communication technologies play in the everyday life of transnational families, particularly those who reside outside the boundaries of legality. My overall analysis of these two cinematic texts focuses on the representation of practices of kin work, as they manifest through the performance or enactment of communication or mediated connection. I engage with theories of visuality, affect, and technology to show how the objects/media (homemade movies, audio cassettes, photographs) that transnational families keep and exchange to remain in touch with each other and their differential uses of new technologies (videophone calls, online instant messages, etc.) compose an archive from below, one activated by affections and loss that cannot be quantified, a record of emotions that often escapes official histories of migration, deportation, and transnational parenthood. I am specifically concerned with how through their visualization of technologically mediated familial relationships, these films produce potential counter visual narratives of hemispheric displacement, particularly in relation to war, US intervention, and the Central American migratory experience.","PeriodicalId":240236,"journal":{"name":"Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115594907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Makeshift Barracks of Migrant Despair","authors":"Amanda J. Ellis","doi":"10.2979/chiricu.5.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.5.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article closely reads Manuel Muñoz's short story \"Campo,\" from his 2003 collection Zigzagger, and argues that he depicts the entanglements of terror, care work, vulnerability, desire, and detention to chart a unique geography of the borderlands that is characterized by despair. The article highlights how Muñoz contributes to a post-Anzaldúan legacy by engaging Anzaldúa's critical paradigm of la herida abierta and subsequently redrawing its coordinates through his fiction. By focusing on Muñoz's use of the built form, this article illuminates how \"Campo\" recasts constructions of the migrant body, by imagining queer Chicano masculine desire and highlighting the daily herculean feats required of migrant youth who simply long to experience freedom, comfort, safety, and the sanctuary of home.","PeriodicalId":240236,"journal":{"name":"Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121334398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sci-Fi Ain't Nothing but Mojo Misspelled: Latinx Futurism in Smoking Mirror Blues","authors":"Micah K. Donohue","doi":"10.2979/chiricu.5.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.5.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay, through a reading of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), challenges the entrenched subordination of fantasy and supernatural to the supposed rationality of science fiction. It explores how Chicanx and Latinx futurisms, of which Hogan's novel provides an exemplary text, reimagine the present as a world that no longer adheres to or is strictly determined by the tenets of western rationalism and scientific thought. Smoking Mirror Blues opposes a strictly scientific way of looking at and understanding (organizing and hierarchizing) reality that has roots in the racist and patriarchal histories of modernity and colonialism. Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Catherine S. Ramírez, Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson, B. V. Olguín, and other scholars of Latinx futurism, I argue that Hogan's novel twists the scientific and the supernatural together into a Möbius-like strip, not only to exemplify the combinatorial poetics of Latinx futurism, but to demonstrate through that fusion the emancipatory potential of what Merla-Watson and Olguín call \"the Latin@ speculative arts\" The recombinatorial nature of Hogan's novel, and Latinx futurism in general, has ethical as well as aesthetic significance. Smoking Mirror Blues aligns with and, I claim, can be productively studied through the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel's transmodern ethics of liberation.","PeriodicalId":240236,"journal":{"name":"Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122490100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Editor: The Autumn of Our Discontent","authors":"John M. Nieto-Phillips","doi":"10.2979/chiricu.5.1.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.5.1.01","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":240236,"journal":{"name":"Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures","volume":"1995 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115344779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Translating Silence into Story: An Interview with Angie Cruz","authors":"Ylce Irizarry, Angie Cruz","doi":"10.2979/chiricu.5.1.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/chiricu.5.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":240236,"journal":{"name":"Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129179993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}