Rethinking the Indigenous in Mexican Narratives of the Nation: From Glorious Genealogy to Unsettling Present

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The post-revolutionary Mexican national project made extensive recourse to certain indigenous cultures to construct a glorious genealogy even as contemporary indigenous peoples remained marginal and subordinate to national centers of power and symbolic representation. Although the legitimating ideologies for the state have shifted, this contradictory relationship has continued. This panel will analyze Mexican literary and theatrical works which grapple with the tensions generated by this split relationship to the indigenous. The panel will pay special attention to how these works simultaneously reflect and rethink discourses of the nation and the people, race, gender, history and historicity, and ideology.

Sub Track

• Literary Studies: Contemporary

Session Organizer

• Jozef Engel Szwaja Franken, Bellevue College, Washington

Chair

• Analola Santana, Dartmouth College

Individual Presentations

• El anacronismo del presente: pensar la ideología de “Las dos orillas” de Carlos Fuentes - Jozef Engel Szwaja Franken, Bellevue College, Washington

• La rebelión de lo cotidiano: la inquietante irrupción de lo indígena en dos cuentos de Carlos Fuentes y Elena Garro. - Judith Iliana Villanueva Chavez, University of Washington (Spanish and Portuguese)

• From Calibán to the People: The Visual Consumption of Corporeal Difference - Analola Santana, Dartmouth College

• La simbolización de la periferia mexicana en Crónicas de una oriunda del kilómetro X en Michoacán - Veronica Quezada, Soka University of America