Norte, Desierto, Frontera: Countertopographies of the NAFTA Era

Catalog description

Analyzing Mexican, Central American, and Chicanx cultural production, this course examines the uneven reconfiguration of the U.S.-Mexico borderland in the era of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Drawing from critical geography, migration and border studies, and the environmental humanities, we consider how different cultural artifacts have imagined, projected, and challenged the political and socioeconomic boundaries of the Americas. Likewise, we consider how trans-border bodies, spaces and species can help us interrogate the history of the nation-state as well as the social, emotional, and economic toll experienced on both sides of the border from the early 1990s onward. Interdisciplinary in methods and scope, this course strives to develop an understanding of how cultural production responds to and, at the same time, participates in the process of the production of social space. Particularly, we consider how the production of desert and border as sites of socio-ecological devastation prefigures a new paradigm in the relationship between the environment, migration, and the global circulation of capital. Special attention is given to demographic trends and new patterns of forced migration that arose in the aftermath of the so-called Mexican “War on Drugs” (2006). Assignments include presentations, discussion facilitation, and a seminar paper. Alongside readings and class discussions, students will work as a group on a digital timeline/story map using a platform of their choosing (StoryMapJS, ArcGIS StoryMaps, etc.) The goal is to create an annotated cartography of North America’s recent history. The class is structured around four units, each refers to a particular concept that specifies the relation between spatial literary studies and the regional integration of North America: 1. North. Focusing on the entanglements between industrial agriculture and the…