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chapter 1 ROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY AND THE ADVANCE OF LATE CAPITALISM IN BELKEN COUNTY Rolando Hinojosa’s writing has been dedicated to creating a fictional microcosm of social relations in the South Texas Rio Grande Valley and along the U.S.-Mexico border. He has developed a fictional county, Belken , with all the insight and inspiration with which Faulkner brought his Yoknapatawpha to life. While antebellum and postbellum race relations between blacks and whites absorbed Faulkner’s imagination, it is the transborder class, cultural, and social relations between Mexico and South Texas that occupy Hinojosa. His Klail City Death Trip1 series is, as José David Saldívar notes, ‘‘a sensitive and skillful literary metahistory of the Río Grande Valley’’ (‘‘Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip’’ 44). In the nearly dozen volumes that constitute the kcdt series, Hinojosa supplies the reader with vignettes, stories, sketches, and portraits that illuminate the inner workings of his developing county, a county that mirrors the historical development of Texas and Mexico and covers roughly three generations of Mexicana/o and Chicana/o inhabitants—those born in the late nineteenth century who left Texas to fight in the Mexican Revolution of 1910; those born in the 1930s; and those who fought in the Korean War.2 Within the context of this metahistory and literary oeuvre, I am most interested in the two police procedurals that Hinojosa penned— Partners in Crime (1985) and Ask a Policeman (1998).These two novels, which come late in the kcdt chronology, speak to the tension Saldívar observes in the series as ‘‘tradition in the past versus ‘reification’ in the present and future’’ (ibid. 50).This tension reaches its apotheosis in the two novels, where crime and disorder threaten to eclipse tradition and order. These competing tensions have long been a staple of the detective genre, from the classic, or locked-room, mystery where crime is an aberration to the hard-boiled where crime and mean streets are the norm. Consequently, the very form of the detective novel suits the thematic and ideological concerns of Hinojosa’s inquiry into the rapidly changing economic and social relations along the border and in the Valley in the late twentieth century. As Hinojosa relates in a 1985 interview, he is concerned with writing about ‘‘the false economy in the Valley; [. . .] that economy which has been brought in by the drug trafficking down there’’ (Saldívar, ‘‘Our Southwest’’ 183).3 Partners and its sequel, Policeman, bring the reader into a world in which corruption runs rampant in the Valley, an area that despite external threats remained ‘‘an idyllic place where the collective spirit reigned amidst heterogeneity’’ (R. Sánchez 77). In Hinojosa ’s detective fiction, the instrumental rationality of late capitalism flattens out social relations, thereby demonstrating how material economic encounters can alienate one from home and family. In a postnationalist landscape and post-industrial economy, the inhabitants of Belken, and by extension Aztlán,4 can no longer find refuge in a mythologized Chicana/o homeland of solidarity and ethnic unity. Rather, this space intertwines and overlaps5 with the dominant economic and social relations of the late twentieth century. Unlike the other authors in this study, Hinojosa does not foreground his protagonist’s personal quest for identity. As Hector Calderón has argued about earlier novels in the kcdt series, Hinojosa’s focus differs from much other Chicana/o fiction that has concerned itself with the individual’s identity—instead, Hinojosa explores the development of a collective character (140–141). His project engages with the mutually constitutive relationship between economy and culture as he maps the cultural and political geography of a developing Rio Grande Valley. While the focus is not on individual identities, the novels’ illumination of economic and social relations in South Texas under late capitalism provides a historical context of the post-nationalist period necessary to understanding the pursuits of identity in Nava, Corpi, Ramos, and Anaya. Partners immerses us in the 1970s, when late capitalism was consolidating its forces and the Chicana/o Movement was on the wane, and Policeman brings us into the post-nationalist era, which the novel depicts as a period of unchecked violence in which greed is the order of the day and avarice trumps family, the one-time place marker of Mexicana/o and Chicana/o unity. Moreover, the kcdt series in general and these two detective novels in particular illustrate the everROLANDO HINOJOSA’S KCDT SERIES...

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