Excavating narrative memories, Across Canons examines literary allusions to a classic Latin American canon that resurface in the work of Latin American writers who live and work in the United States. The immigrant literature of Edmundo Paz Soldán, Alberto Fuguet, and Cristina Rivera Garza from the late 1990s and early 2000s provides an important glimpse into representations of Latin America’s relationship with the United States and how immigration has shaped it.
 
Author Thania Muñoz D. looks at immigrant experiences impacted by a prism of social and political factors, including free trade agreements, drug trafficking, political violence, massive foreign debt, and economic dependency. The author examines why these writers refuse to identify as immigrants and reject stereotypical portrayals. Throughout, Muñoz D. makes the case for a new field within Latinx literature: Latin American immigrant writing in Spanish. She explains why this type of literary work is critical across Latin American, Latinx, and U.S. literature.
 
This book highlights the benefits of comparative, interdisciplinary interpretations that allow readers and scholars to grapple with the realities of a multilingual Latin American–origin literary present and future of the United States.
 

2023 Outstanding Book Award, National Association for Ethnic Studies

A thorough examination of the political and economic exploitation of Latinx subjects, migrants, and workers through the lens of Latinx literature, photography, and film.

Globalization in the United States can seem paradoxical: free trade coincides with fortification of the southern border, while immigration is reimagined as a national-security threat. US politics turn aggressively against Latinx migrants and subjects even as post-NAFTA markets become thoroughly reliant on migrant and racialized workers. But in fact, there is no incongruity here. Rather, anti-immigrant politics reflect a strategy whereby capital uses specialized forms of violence to create a reserve army of the living, laboring dead.

Visible Borders, Invisible Economies turns to Latinx literature, photography, and films that render this unseen scheme shockingly vivid. Works such as Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer crystallize the experience of Latinx subjects and migrants subjugated to social death, their political existence erased by disenfranchisement and racist violence while their bodies still toil in behalf of corporate profits. In Kristy L. Ulibarri’s telling, art clarifies what power obscures: the national-security state performs anti-immigrant and xenophobic politics that substitute cathartic nationalism for protections from the free market while ensuring maximal corporate profits through the manufacture of disposable migrant labor.