| مستخلص: |
Federico Ronstadt's Borderman, a memoir written between 1944 and 1954, recounts the businessman's immigration to Tucson and his life in the Sonora- Arizona borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Paradigms of opposition that inform the recovery of early Mexican American memoir and autobiography--centering the life writings of elite, dispossessed Mexican Americans and Hispanic immigrant literature written in Spanish--have discouraged study of Ronstadt's English-language, seemingly assimilationist memoir. In my critical recovery of Borderman, I argue that it should be read as part of the legacy of oppositional literature written by people of Mexican descent in the United States. I historicize Ronstadt's writing moment as the decade that culminated in Operation Wetback and introduce images from his archive to support a critical reading of Borderman as oppositional to the anti-Mexican border policies of its era. Building upon Genaro Padilla's, Tey Diana Rebolledo's, and Nicolas Kanellos's discussions of oppositional textual politics, and mobilizing Chicana literary spatial studies, I use the term "cartographic opposition" to evaluate Borderman's discursive remapping of southern Arizona from associations with the Anglo Southwest to a transfrontera geopolitical and cultural expanse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
