In Guadalupe Nettel’s narratives, the representation of disability deconstructs various Latin American paradigms of 'normalcy', within a global context. Drawing primarily from her novel, Después del invierno (2014), this study focuses on the processes that confront the restrictive and oppressive notions of 'the feminine' and 'the masculine'. Following theoretical postulates that define disability as a social construction, as well as contemporary theories on gender and masculinities, this essay seeks to uncover the ways in which...

This article aims to build the biographical narrative of Aslan, a Jew from Aleppo origin, who immigrated to Mexico at the beginning of the 20th Century. In this story, personal, family, community, local and national aspects converge, whose organizing axis is the economic itinerary in the context of the growth of the urban capitalism in Mexico City. It seeks to characterize the ethos of the life world of Aslán, that is, that cultural nucleus that...

The present article analyses Sor Juana’s metatheatrality and self-fashioning in the loas that precede the autos sacramentales El Mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo and El Divino Narciso, starting from the hypothesis that Sor Juana uses authorial figures to highlight her authority as Creole writer and educated woman in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Interpreted from the angle of the Creole consciousness, the implied author positions herself between the new and the old world, knowing both...

The article investigates the transcultural exchanges and the traces of a creole consciousness in the loa of the auto sacramental El Divino Narciso by Juana Inés de la Cruz. Our reading of this allegorical play takes the concept of belonging as a tool for the analysis of the multifaceted dynamics of cultural identification and differentiation that are deployed in this literary text from the Mexican colonial baroque of the 17th century. We will focus on...

The printing revolution of the 17th century made possible the development of the “Theories of the Earth”, an interdisciplinary set of publications that included different visual representations of the earth as a globe, as well as debates and dialogues regarding its shape. Magruder states that global sections (a type of wedge) and global views (only showing the surface) were the two most common ways to represent the earth. Sor Juana contributes to the so called...

Recently discovered documents dating back to the time of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz call for a reappraisal of the Novo-Hispanic poet’s biography. While perusing documents related to her family, her court life, and her conventual destiny, we perceive the contours of a “novel” portrait of her person in her own lifetime. We already have what we could call “data”, pointing to an integral and multifaceted biography: Sor Juana the thinker, the intellectual, the...

The readings of the work dedicated by Sor Juana to her patron, the Countess de Paredes, have followed different paths: between literature and life, rhetoric of courteous love and feminine friendship, poetic and politics, Sapphic, Neoplatonic or Petrarchan tradition. This work focuses on the exchange of representations between the poet and her patron and proposes that in this dialogue of figurations new feminine agencies arise in the XVII century, from an orbital place with respect...

iMex XVIII. US-MEXICAN ENCOUNTERS IN CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN FILM / ENCUENTROS ESTADOUNIDENSES-MEXICANOS EN LA OBRA CINEMATOGRÁFICA NORTEAMERICANA CONTEMPORÁNEA, 2020/2, año 9, n° 18, 148 pp.| Guido Rings / Stephen Trinder(ed.)

An archaeology of media approach guides this analysis of the film Coco, a 3D animated fiction movie inspired by the Day of the Dead or Dia de los muertos in Mexico, and released by Pixar Animation Studios, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, in 2017. In particular, I explore the tensions and contradictions within Pixar's most successful movie at the box office in taking a stand against Donald Trump's presentation of Mexicans as "rapists and...

The discourse about borders, frontiers and all sorts of liminal phenomena, including transbordering or border-crossing, seems to be older than the current one on globalization and post-colonialism. The idea that globalization will wipe out all borders and limitations is problematic, and the strange, a result of cultural construction, will not disappear. Borders are never only limes, borders, fences, or walls, but at the same time they are also spaces between contact zones. Human space is...

In this article I focus on a pedagogical notion inspired by Anzaldua’s ‘left hand maneuvers’ as critical thinking, which I call Tilting Pedagogies. Tilting Pedagogies are left hand maneuvers – connecting critical operations – that cross over to meet social urgencies as a way to incarnate theoretical thought inside the classroom. Tilting pedagogies represent those notions, actions and maneuvers that allow us to ‘incline’ – tilt – from academia to social urgencies, from Spanish to...

The perspective on the Mexican-US Border is modified when looked at as frontera norte or as Southern Border. Along this enormous division line, the crossing of persons or merchandise between two distinct geopolitical entities becomes possible or is restricted. It is an emblematic zone to conceive the phenomenon of crossing. Contemporary literature, cinema and arts reflect a focus on displacements, a tendency that can be understood as a movement towards a transborder approach. Which phenomena...

iMex XVII. Transborder Matters, año 9, n°17 | Romana Radlwimmer(ed.)

This paper is a personal account of the intentions behind our reggaeton ME DUELE LA CARA DE SER TAN GÜERX (MY FACE SO GÜERO IT HURTS), a song that we wrote with the desire to challenge the internal and external güero – in our bodies and our group, and by/in our surrounding/s, respectively –, as well as to thwart the reggaeton genre itself. The paper combines collective narration and analysis of Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept nepantla,...

The present article offers an interpretation of Alberto Chimal’s first novel, The Slaves, published by this Mexican author in 2009, a novel proposing an analysis of sadomasochistic sexual relations. In the center of the narration, we encounter two couples, both homosexual, acting out various sadomasochistic practices ‒ some of them of an extreme nature: On the one hand, two women, one of them already older (Marlene) and (supposedly) the director of pornographic movies, and the...

This article employs Igor Primoratz’s ethics of sexuality to analyze the incestuous relationship between a thirteen year old girl and her uncle in the novel El lenguaje the las orquídeas (2007), by Adriana González Mateos. My critical inquiry starts with a basic question: What hides behind the multiple ways in which incest is represented here? The obvious answer would be: the disintegration of the family. By analogy, if the family falls apart, so does the...

Ana Clavel’s second novel, Shipwrecked Body (2005), focuses on the identity crisis experienced by Antonia, who awakens one morning in a man’s body and asks herself if she continues to be the same or if her new body has made her into a different person. In contrast to novels that chart identity through the exploration of the past, Antonia’s search for selfhood gravitates around her current physical, social and cultural circumstances. The present study analyzes...

The present essay examines the place of Ana Clavel in critical studies on contemporary Mexican fiction. Instead of situating her production vis-à-vis female contemporaries in what has been labeled the Boom Femenino, I argue that Clavel’s novels embody the ethos of a queer literature. A queer literature unpacks, decenters, and disobeys norms of gender, sex, and sexuality, and favors the posing of questions versus the providing of neatly packaged answers. Moving away from the subject,...

Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo, was part of a large Converso family that moved from Spain to New Spain (Colonial Mexico) in 1580. While some members of his family, like his brother Gaspar, a Dominican friar, and his uncle, Luis de Carvajal, el Viejo, a regional governor, were devout Catholics, Luis and most of his immediate family were passionately devoted to crypto-Judaism. Luis crafts a powerful narrative of religious sacrifice and creativity in his spiritual...

This article aims to give an overview of the life of an Irish accused by the Court of the Inquisition in Mexico, in the seventeenth century, considered a heretic and a rebel seeking independence from New Spain. His captivity for 17 years, from 1642 until his death in 1659, made his prison known to the Viceroy and the King in Spain. In it he found the Judaizers who had arrived in that city from Portugal...

The construction of the memory of immigrants from the Middle East went through several stages. Lebanese Maronites and Jews from the region left their places of origin to "make America" without a national identity; the latter emerged in exile. It developed with the events that took place in the territories that expelled them.