The Southwest is: an atomic testing zone, a paradise, a penal colony, a frontier, a mineral paradise, a fertile space, an arid zone, a forsaken wilderness, a region of mind-boggling biodiversity, an aesthetic haven, a brutal and ugly corpse-field, a mythical highway, the Devil’s Highway, everything, and nothing. This paper begins as an overview o…[Read more]

In this paper, I propose that certain works of contemporary fiction offer us novel ways of imagining “forever” that are specifically tied to momentary (and, often, arbitrary) acts of intimate connection. Considered together via their particular fashioning of “forever,” Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Karen Joy Fowler seem to offer a theory…[Read more]

In this paper, I use Sandra Cisneros’s /Caramelo/ (2002) to examine the “traveling borderlands” in Mexican American migrant narratives. Traveling borderlands names the aesthetic and existential practice of creating contingent home spaces that contest paradigms of fragmentation and essentialism, the former often taken to be a defining feature of ma…[Read more]