The Power of the Voice: Listening to Mexican and Central American Immigrant Experiences (1997-2010)

The Power of the Voice: Listening to Mexican and Central American Immigrant Experiences (1997-2010) BY Megan L. Thornton Submitted to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ______________________________ Dr. Jill S. Kuhnheim, Chairperson ______________________________ Dr. Vicky Unruh ______________________________ Dr. Yajaira Padilla ______________________________ Dr. Stuart Day ______________________________ Dr. Ketty Wong Date Defended: _________________ ii The Dissertation Committee for Megan L. Thornton certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Power of the Voice: Listening to Mexican and Central American Immigrant Experiences (1997-2010) Committee: ______________________________ Dr. Jill S. Kuhnheim, Chairperson ______________________________ Dr. Vicky Unruh ______________________________ Dr. Yajaira Padilla ______________________________ Dr. Stuart Day ______________________________ Dr. Ketty Wong Date Defended: _________________ iii Abstract Megan L. Thornton, Ph.D. Department of Spanish and Portuguese, April 2010 University of Kansas This dissertation examines representations of immigrant experiences in Mexican and Central American cultural texts at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. By examining immigrant experiences through the lenses of testimonial writing, fictional narrative, documentary film, and popular music, this project offers perspectives from multiple interpretive fields and dialogues with recent scholarship on mobility, transnationalism, and border studies. This multi-genre and cultural studies approach allows me to focus on a diverse group of writers and artists who either tell their own immigrant stories or create experience-based narratives by listening to the subaltern and challenging more canonical systems of representation. All of the texts examined here dialogue with Latin America’s testimonial tradition, in that they give testimony, often personal and eye-witness accounts, to explore the many social, cultural, political, and individual facets of migration. Moreover, the narratives discussed here use discursive strategies of orality to emphasize the power of voice and, by showcasing immigrant voices, provide a social space for imagining alternative communities that expose “contact zones” in the Americas. Each chapter focuses on a different country and genre to show the convergences and divergences between representations of immigrant experiences. I also discuss reader and audience responses to the different texts by examining reviews and criticisms to better understand the impact of these representations. Chapter 1 draws on debates about testimonio and introduces the theme of orality by looking at the self-representations of Mexican immigrant iv experiences in the United States in Ramón Tianguis Pérez’s Diario de un mojado (2003), J.M. Servín’s Por amor al dólar (2006), and Alberto López Fernández’s Los perros de Cook Inlet (1998). Chapter 2 examines an aesthetic of orality in postwar fictional narratives about Salvadoran immigrant experiences through close readings of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El asco (1997), Mario Bencastro’s Odisea del Norte (1999), and Claudia Hernández’s short story “La han despedido de nuevo” from her collection Olvida uno (2005). Chapter 3 focuses on the performance of affect and orality in four documentaries about Nicaraguan experiences in Costa Rica, thus presenting different perspectives on the less studied phenomenon of intra-regional migration. Chapter 4 ties together the histories, encounters, and communities discussed in the previous chapters by listening to transnational musical representations of Mexican, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan immigrant experiences. The influence of the Mexican corrido and Latin America’s nueva canción are considered in my analysis of the music, lyrics, and audiences of a variety of artists, including the Mexican norteño ensemble Los Tigres del Norte, the Salvadoran group Tex Bronco, and the Nicaraguan singer-songwriter Flor Urbina. Finally, my conclusion sets the stage for future work on representations of immigrant experiences to better understand the movements and migrations that continue to foster encounters between different cultures throughout the Americas and the world. v For my mom vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements (vii) Introduction Theorizing Cultural Representations of Immigrant Experiences (1) Chapter One Representations of Community and Orality in Recent Testimonios about Undocumented Mexican Immigrants in the United States (25) Chapter Two An Aesthetic of Orality in Postwar Narratives about Salvadoran Immigrant Experiences (80) Chapter Three A Performance of Affect through Oral Testimonies: Filmic Representations of Nicaraguan Immigrants in Costa Rica (119) Chapter Four Listening to the Aural Borderlands: Musical Representations of Mexican, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan Immigrant Experiences (159) Conclusion Situating lo latinoamericano in the Twenty-First Century (203) Works Cited (208) vii Acknowledgements I have many people to thank for their help with this dissertation. I am especially grateful to my committee chair Jill Kuhnheim, who provided invaluable feedback and support, and also to the other members of my committee, Yajaira Padilla, Vicky Unruh, Stuart Day, and Ketty Wong. Danny Anderson helped shape the early stages of my work on cultural representations of migration. Yajaira Padilla offered insightful information about Central America and invited me to participate on her 2009 LASA panel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. KU’s Center of Latin American Studies funded a trip to Costa Rica and Nicaragua in May 2008, which was instrumental in my research. In Central America, the following people and institutions facilitated my research: Mercedes Ramírez, Patricia Fumero, María Lourdes Cortés, Jürgen Ureña, Martha Clarissa Hernández, Karly Gaitán, Omar García, Jorge Eduardo Arellano, the Centro Costarricense de Producciones Cinematográficas (CCPC), and the University of Costa Rica’s Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales. I am also indebted to family and friends for their intellectual and emotional support. I would especially like to thank my parents for funding trips to Mexico and for letting me indulge my cultural curiosities; my sister, for being my friend; Erin Finzer, for letting me talk and always providing helpful advice; Señora Salmeron, who first piqued my interest in Spanish; my friends in Mexico, for teaching me what a classroom cannot; and also Sangeetha, John, Nancy, Scott, Stacy, and the many dear friends in KU’s Spanish graduate program. 1 Introduction Theorizing Cultural Representations of Immigrant Experiences In spring 2006 millions of people took to the streets in most major cities in the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, to protest or support immigrant rights in this country. The rallies and demonstrations responded to proposed legislation (HR 4437) that sought to increase penalties for illegal immigration and to prosecute undocumented immigrants, their families, and supporters as felons. Although the legislation failed, it demonstrates the intensity of growing immigration debates in this country. Within these debates, Latin/o American immigrants have been especially targeted by protests and reforms because they constitute the largest immigrant group in the United States and because of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border, described as one of the most globalized and heavily traveled international borders in the world (Suarez-Orozco, “Right Moves?” 6). Mexicans and Central Americans, in particular, may cross this border in search of the “American Dream” to escape political turmoil and economic hardships in their own countries. However, not all Latin American economic immigrants travel north, for many settle in other countries in the region as evidenced by large numbers of Bolivians in Argentina, Peruvians in Chile, and Nicaraguans in Costa Rica. Like their counterparts in the U.S., these displaced communities have encountered discrimination in their host societies, a situation which has often intensified due to economic crises in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Costa Rica, for example, Nicaraguan immigrants have been the target of police raids and political ploys, culminating with legislation in 2006 that redefined immigration as a security issue (Sandoval García, “Introducción” xiv-xv). Recent shifts in immigration policies seem to counter the politics of globalization that encourage the free flow of people, products, and ideas, and this situation led me to examine recent cultural 2 representations of immigrant tensions and experiences to see how Mexicans and Salvadorans in the United States and Nicaraguans in Costa Rica communicate their stories to claim rights and belonging. This dissertation looks at how cultural workers represent Mexican and Central American immigrant experiences through the lenses of testimonial writing, fictional narrative, documentary film, and popular music. Focusing on representations of migration to the United States and also within Central America goes beyond the often studied U.S.-Mexico border to show similarities and differences with the intra-regional migration of Nicaraguans to Costa Rica. This broadens the scope of my dissertation and offers an innovative perspective on a common issue in diverse parts of the Americas

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