Topographies of Resistance: Cognitive Mapping in Chicano/a Migrant Literature

Despite the popularity of the occupy movements and the critiques of corporate greed that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, the machinations of transnational capitalism continue to remain elusive to most Americans. The effects of global economic systems on people’s everyday lives—from foreclosures to unemployment—are experienced in a highly personal manner but are difficult to understand due to the intricate and abstract nature of international markets and global finance. Compounding this conceptual difficulty are the overlapping financial interests of transnational corporations and the sociopolitical interests of nation-states. In the southwestern United States, for example, the overlap between the local experience of citizens and the effects of global financial/political networks has exploded into an ideological war regarding the so-called undocumented immigration problem. In places like Arizona, the global effects of transnational capitalism are blatantly minimized or completely dismissed in favor of the “real” criminal threat posed by undocumented migration. Laws such as Arizona’s infamous SB1070 appear as easy and popular solutions to the complicated problems concerning the effects of the global on the local.

I begin with the 2008 financial crisis and the issue of undocumented immigration because I find that this specific intersection provides a timely illustration of failures in cognitive mapping. A widely used concept in the social sciences that dates back to the 1940s, cognitive mapping refers to the mental maps we create when structuring and storing spatial knowledge and information. A common example is the imaginative relationship we all have to the geographic spaces we inhabit, a knowledge that allows us to navigate physical space without getting lost or harming ourselves. Cognitive mapping is, in its simplest form, what allows us to give directions to people on the street or navigate our way in the darkness of our homes when the lights are off. In a practical manner, cognitive mapping is something we all do every day without, ironically, thinking too much about it.

Despite cognitive mapping’s long history, my methodological approach is primarily informed by Fredric Jameson’s recent work on the topic, especially since his approach highlights cognitive mapping’s relevancy to cultural and literary analysis. Moreover, Jameson’s understanding of cognitive mapping is heavily Marxist, particularly his conceptualization of totality and ideology. As Jameson explains, his understanding of cognitive mapping is “something of a synthesis between Althusser and Kevin Lynch . . . the author of a classic work, The Image of the City, which . . . spawned the whole low-level subdiscipline . . . [of] cognitive mapping” (282). According to Jameson, Lynch’s “mental map of city space . . . can be extrapolated to that mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms” (282). It is this mapping of totality that interconnects Lynch’s theory with Althusser’s famous definition of ideology as an imaginary relationship to real conditions of existence. Speaking to this interconnection, Jameson argues that ideology, “as a necessary function in any form of social life has the great merit of stressing the gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is situated, a gap between phenomenological perception and a reality that transcends all individual thinking or experience” (283). As a “play of figuration,” cognitive mapping functions similarly to ideology, providing the individual subject with a sense of his/her situatedness in the larger network of social relations. Like ideology, cognitive mapping is necessarily incomplete and inaccurate but fundamental and important, as it reflects our predilection toward either knowledge or fantasy—to what we know, want to know, cannot know, or do not want to know about our respective social situatedness.

That cognitively mapping the totality of global capitalist relations is an impossible task should not, however, minimize the importance of thinking in terms of such a totality. This is precisely Jameson’s main argument regarding cognitive mapping—that its importance lies in its gesture toward totality, in tracing the relationships between local and global networks of social, economic, cultural, and political influence. This explains why cognitive mapping’s...