Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization

Acknowledgments

xiii Acknowledgments My belief in the cooperative dimensions of intellectual work and the necessity of collectivist solutions to the problems of our current historical moment often clash with my preference for working in solitude. I say with certainty, however, that the ideas in this book are valuable only insofar as they have emerged from, and inspire, conversation. I may claim the initial plans and final forms of the ideas in Broken Souths, but the bricks and mortar holding them together would have been impossible without the helping hands of other scholars, mentors, and colleagues. As a fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities’ summer seminar “Toward a Hemispheric American Literature” at Columbia University, my early thinking on the project especially benefitted from the insights of Rachel Adams, Caroline Levander, Marissa López, and Justin Read. My year as a faculty fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center fundamentally shaped the project’s modes of critique. Weekly conversations with David Harvey and Peter Hitchcock and other seminarians sharpened my ideas about neoliberalism and culture. Feedback from Amy Chazkel and Karen Miller, in particular, refined my thinking about the poetics of Mexico City. Three mentors have continued to provide essential support. I will always be thankful for the incomparable Linda Wagner-Martin. María DeGuzm án jump-started my thinking on Ciudad Juárez and offered superb feedback on the organization of the chapters. And John McGowan’s generosity and practical advice have been invaluable; I admire him greatly and hope to emulate his intellectual and mentorship model. Many conference panels and presentations also advanced my thinking on this project. Audience comments at my talk in September 2010 in the Latina/o Cultures Speakers Series at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were essential in puzzling out the connotations of the “broken” in Broken Souths. xiv • Acknowledgments I am proud to teach at Hunter College, where my students consistently inspire and challenge me. Their insightful, engaged readings of Juan Felipe Herrera and of femicide texts were especially helpful during the latter stages of this project. I have many terrific colleagues at Hunter; Jeff Allred and Cristina Alfar have been particularly supportive, while Thom Taylor and the English Department administrative staff have been indispensable. Our union, the PSC-CUNY, has been a bulwark against the neoliberalization of public higher education. I am especially grateful to Hunter’s president Jennifer Raab and the President’s Fund for Faculty Advancement, which provided essential funding to complete this project. I also want to thank the research librarians at the Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College and at the New York Public Library at Bryant Park for their assistance. Some of the discussion in Broken Souths first appeared elsewhere in dramatically different forms. An article on Puerto Rican poetry appeared in a special issue of MELUS on multiethnic poetics coedited by Keith Leonard and Meta Jones; their questions probing the poetic dimensions of my argument there remained valuable in composing this book. An article in College Literature featured an early version of part of the argument in chapter 1, an article in Appalachian Journal the core of chapter 4, and an article in Hispanic Review part of chapter 6. I want to give special thanks to Francisco Aragón, Sandy Ballard at Appalachian Journal, Edward Carvalho , Martín Espada, and Maurice Kilwein Guevara for their generosity and support. The University of Arizona Press has made an outstanding home for this project. Two anonymous reviewers offered excellent comments for improving the manuscript, especially in regard to the conceptual and theoretical framework. My editor at the University of Arizona Press, Kristen Buckles, has been insightful, supportive, and enthusiastic, and I am extremely grateful for her professional stewardship of the process. In addition to its visionary social dimensions, poetry is, as José Emilio Pacheco writes, “a form of love that exists only in silence.” A scholar who invests years in a book relies on many such forms of love that often go unacknowledged. My parents, brother, parents-in-law, and de facto sisters offer widely divergent but durable forms of love; each sustained me over the course of this project. Finally, my partner, Shelley Welton, steadied me when I wobbled and pushed me when I wanted a nudge. Broken Souths is for her and for our daughter, Alice. broken...