Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and The Urgency of Space (review)

"Land is becoming extinct"

(Livia Leon Montiel)

Derived from a doctoral dissertation, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies. Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space, is a book about Chicana experience in a border Arizona town during the 1980s. It is also a book about Chicana writers' struggles to build an identity while rejecting colonizing Unites States occupations and taking into account the ever-changing condition of their communities. This is certainly a challenging task, one that requires the critic to look closely at Chicana literature and its struggles for interpretative power, and one that demands a careful examination of the U.S. nineteenth-century occupation of Mexico, which culminated in 1848, when the lands which became the future states of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, California, and Texas were fully taken. To meet these ends Mary Pat Brady activates a dialogue with a selected body of Chicana criticism and literature (from 1870 foundational narratives to contemporary fiction) and bases her study on the core question of Chicana feminism: the need to construct identity in relation to an occupied space and vis-à-vis categories of gender, generation, sexual preference, class, race and regional distinctions.

Framed by a theoretics of space, Brady's analysis aims to understand what she calls the "manipulation of space" by U.S. corporate capital. Shocked by the spatial transformations of Douglas, her Arizona hometown, she wants to discern the forces that made of Douglas first a neo-classical beaux arts style railroad depot, in 1912 (during the copper boom years) and then a post-industrial police station in the 1980s (in response to an increasingly globalized narcotics economy). The railroad depot that became a police station is a powerful image in Brady's narrative, and opens the way to a seductive form of academicism that embraces Chicana feminism by absorbing recent theorizations on the geopolitics of space (Doreen Massey, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Kristin Ross, José David Saldívar, Edward Soja). Brady reads Chicana literature—but also Latino presence in the U.S.—against Anglo politics that define and perform space with colonial imperatives. Her book is divided into six chapters prefaced by a general introduction and finished with a brief conclusion.

Chapter 1 starts with a historical review of Arizona history by stressing the fact that this territory came into existence as a nineteenth-century mistake. For Brady this error (which historians would call "neocolonialism" and define as an informal sort of colonization by outside power associated in Latin America with the 1880-1930 period) opens the way to think of space as something that can be mis-taken and, therefore, produced within the context of a fraudulent reality. Only this reality (an Anglo Arizona) never really buried the memory of disappeared communities and of three hundred years of Mexican cultural history. The centrality of "spatiality" in early Chicana culture and literature is then analyzed in a number of foundational narratives (plays, essays, testimonies, and journalism) produced between 1870 and1880 as a clear sign of political and cultural resistance to Anglo occupation of Mexican territories. Brady shows to what extent these foundational textualities envision situations that will be crucial for future Chicana feminism, such as the utopia of alternative spatial narratives embodied in mythical remembrances of "Aztlán"; 1 and the ever present racial, gender and patriarchal hierarchies that oriented Anglo (but also Mexican) subjectivity during this early period of imperial capitalism and Mexican landscape's domestication. In this context, the building of the Southwestern Railroad Depot in 1912 is read as symptomatic of the triumph of Anglo hegemony over the region and the first steps toward the capitalization of the Southern border.

Along these lines, Chapter 2 opens with a provocative plan: it aims to understand the ontology of the U.S.-Mexico border. Following the argumentative structure of the previous chapter, Brady first engages in...