Borderlands ethics: Visions of incorporation in Chicana/o fiction.

Abstract

This dissertation project examines the manner in which Chicana/o borderlands fiction provides an ethical vision of U.S. society that disrupts and interrogates the justice of established laws and social norms. The first chapter examines how the fiction of nineteenth-century writer, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, imagines a vision of an ethical Anglo-Mexican borderlands society based on an economic allegiance, which functions outside the plundering economy of the U.S. imperial project. The second chapter argues that Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh's <italic>Caballero</italic> engages in a borderlands ethical praxis through its response to eugenics discourse. <italic>Caballero</italic> creates a eugenic argument for Anglo-Mexican marriages between elites in order to imagine Mexican Americans' escape from the pre-modern realm and their full incorporation into U.S. modernity. For Chicana/os writing during and after the Chicano Movement, the ethical treatment of Chicanas and Chicanos involved the formation of a political alliance that was based on the incorporation between self and other. The third chapter examines how Rudolfo Anaya's <italic>Heart of Aztlan</italic> (1976) and Ron Arias's <italic>The Road to Tamazunchale</italic> (1975) use Mexican myth and tradition in order to critique and restructure American modernity. Chapter four examines how ghost stories of the undocumented in the work of writers Maria Helena Viramontes, Guy Garcia and Daniel Chacon create an ethical call that pushes the United States to weaken its borders, abolish distinctions between citizen and non-citizen, and allow communities to function outside the dynamics of nation-states. Chapter five focuses on the work of three native Latina/o ethnographers---Ruth Behar, Ralph Cintron, and Jose Limon---in order to examine how a borderlands narrative ethics can help bridge the gap between the academy and the barrio. In these very different stories of incorporation and merger movements, a borderlands narrative ethics involves narrating a story that gives readers a sense of hope, by allowing them to imagine a society that will one day abolish the lines of separation that prevent us from bridging the ethical gap from what is to what ought to be.