Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares

Cover

Download PDF (5.5 MB)
 

Title page

Download PDF (65.4 KB)
 

Copyright

Download PDF (53.2 KB)
 

Contents

Download PDF (33.6 KB)
pp. vii-

Acknowledgments

Download PDF (29.8 KB)
pp. ix-

This book is dedicated to the memory of Antony Higgins, who taught me about the academic profession and true friendship. I would like to thank him and all the people who have been key to the realization of this book. Gwen Kirkpatrick and Danny J. ...

Introduction

Download PDF (165.5 KB)
pp. 1-42

These words from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) contemplating the importance of history and its impact on the future reflect a critical paradigm for contemporary Latin American and US Latino writers as they confront the social and political changes accompanying rapid modernization and ...

Chapter One. The Brave New World of Carlos Fuentes’s Cristóbal Nonato

Download PDF (187.2 KB)
pp. 43-90

Since his monumental 1975 novel Terra nostra, the internationally known Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes has evidenced a particular concern with the implications of the 1492 Euro-American encounter for contemporary global culture and society.¹ A dozen years later, and some half dozen years before the signing ...

Chapter Two. Cultural Identity and Dystopia in Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues

Download PDF (176.2 KB)
pp. 91-134

Debates about identity politics have had a significant impact on literary production in Latin America and the United States in recent decades, as is evidenced by the vast number of contemporary narratives on the theme of ethnicity. Inspired by the anticipation of the 1992 commemoration of five centuries of ...

Chapter Three. The Dream of Mestizo Mexico

Download PDF (151.0 KB)
pp. 135-173

Like Chicano writer Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, Mexican author Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra (1997) examines the transformation of utopian dreams into apocalyptic nightmares in the colonial past, postrevolutionary present, and postnational future, pointing to the disjunction between nature ...

Chapter Four

Download PDF (212.6 KB)
pp. 175-229

While in the previous chapters, we read how Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues and Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra trace a pattern of racial exclusion and ecological devastation of nature in three different time periods, in Homero Aridjis’s novels, we see the environmental and human cost of industrialization ...

Conclusion: The Angel of History and the Postapocalyptic Consciousness

Download PDF (47.2 KB)
pp. 231-237

As I write the final lines of this book, a decade has gone by since NAFTA went into effect and the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas began; as Josefina Saldaña-Portillo observes: “The Zapatista uprising has brought the Mexican nationalistic project to a crisis and has challenged mestizaje as its dominant trope for ...

Notes

Download PDF (194.0 KB)
pp. 239-266

Bibliography

Download PDF (89.6 KB)
pp. 267-285

Index

Download PDF (46.4 KB)
pp. 287-293

About the Author

Download PDF (4.5 MB)
pp. 294-

About the Author Miguel L�pez-Lozano, University of New Mexico, teaches Latin American narrative and Border Studies. His research focuses on Mexican women indigenist writers, and on utopia, ...