Shifting Borderlands: Teaching la frontera in Its Caribbean Context

• In Event: New Versions of “Border Crossing” in U.S. Latino Literatures

Abstract

In this presentation I seek to demonstrate that the depiction of the Caribbean Sea region as both border and borderland challenges the hegemonic symbolism of the U.S.-Mexico border, which has traditionally informed immigration rhetoric in the United States and U.S. Latino literary/cultural theory. The prevalence of the topic of undocumented migration in U.S. Latino/a Caribbean literature in the last two decades not only reflects the upsurge of cases of illegal crossings, but calls for a theory of the border that is grounded, yet distinct, from the U.S.-Mexico one. I will examine literary works by U.S. Latino/a Caribbean poets Adrián Castro (Cuban-Dominican-American) and Richard Blanco (Cuban-American). I hope to demonstrate how their poems serve to denounce the crisis of intra-Caribbean undocumented migration by emphasizing perilous conditions of that type of border crossing. My analysis challenges the now hegemonic concept of the frontera and aims to stir debate regarding how to think of it in more inclusive terms. I propose that the historical patterns of undocumented migration in the Hispanic Caribbean, especially in recent decades, merits the same level of critical analysis as its U.S.-Mexico counterpart. Thinking of the Caribbean as a frontera is the next necessary step to move the field of Latino Studies forward.

Author

• Marisel C Moreno, University of Notre Dame