Borderland Brutalities

Violence and Resistance along the US-Mexico Borderlands in Literature, Film, and Culture

Laura Elena Belmonte

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780826368867
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Reprint from hardcover, this work takes the actual violence of the southwestern United States and demonstrates how writers, artists, and filmmakers create and comment on the brutalities of our real world.

In Borderland Brutalities, Laura Elena Belmonte analyzes how border violence is perpetuated and sanctioned by private corporations as well as the US and Mexican governments and how this violence is represented through border literature and cultural production. Belmonte examines literature, art, and film produced by artists living on both sides of the border to explore how they portray this violence and how they use their art to actively resist it. This important analysis of the border will be required reading for decades to come and lays the groundwork for additional studies on borderland violence and resistance.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. The Life of Teresa Urrea and the Yaqui Resistance Represented in Luis Alberto Urrea’s Novel The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)
• Chapter Two. Capitalism and Complicity between the US Government and Railroad Corporations along the US-Mexico Borderlands
• Chapter Three. “May We Break the Spell of the Official Story”: The Criminalization of Refugees of Color Represented in Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue (1994) and Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana (2005)
• Chapter Four. Priestess y Pastora: Transnational Female Spiritual Leadership in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993) and María Amparo Escandón’s Esperanza’s Box of Saints (1998)
• Chapter Five. The Coatlicue State and Moebius Strip: Mirrors and Mirroring in Artwork of the US-Mexico Border
• Chapter Six. Making Waves in “Tranquil Waters”: Chicanafuturism and the Invisibilization of Violence
• Epilogue. Fibroblast Migration and Borderlands Consciousness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index