Carrying the Border with You: Recalibrating Chicana/o Spaces from a Legacy of Dislocation

Authors

• Michael P. Moreno
• Kristin C. Brunnemer

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Los Angeles has long been known for its sprawling freeways, gentrifying landscapes, and loose networks of debilitating spheres partitioned by decentralizing freeway systems and deterritorialized communities. Caught within the historical, cultural, and political ebb and flow of the region’s transformations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the Chicana/o community has been exiled to and marginalized in these spaces, the city generating often a spatial incarceration of the Chicana/o to contest and re-inscribe Los Angeles as a matrix for Chicanismo. This article explores how central characters in Helena María Viramontes’ 2007 novel Their Dogs Came with Them and the 2006 film Quinceañera reconstruct Chicana/o identities within the ideological dust and rubble of marginalization. Whereas Their Dogs Came with Them challenges common conceptions of the urban topography of Los Angeles by showing how the spaces of “los barrios,” spaces forced beneath the shadow of freeways, offer sacred and secular havens among the memory of home, the silent cemeteries, and the graffitied streets that generate a borderlands of community resistance and redesign, Quinceañera demonstrates how Chicana/os are forced to reestablish their cultural landscape to resist gentrification, capitalist mores, and familial/cultural sexual expectations. In these texts, the protagonists resist spatial and capitalist exile by creating their own sites of location, spaces wherein they can defy marginalization. As a result, these works demonstrate Pat Mora’s theory of napantla/, or “place in the middle” (5) as well as Cherríe Moraga’s call for a Queer Aztlán, both made possible through the narratives within these Chicana/o communities.