In This Issue

Another volume of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, another year of cross-disciplinary border raiding. Many of the essays in this volume are engaged in the task of restructuring the hard lines of disciplinary borders and renovating the aims of traditional scholarship. There are four identifiable themes in this volume, which I believe reflect our own times of ecological and political instability. First, you will find that a number of articles in this volume trace the histories and cultural meanings of such basic commodities as water and common modern technologies such as television and the car. The social sciences, literature and critical theory make their way into the work of Tatjana Gajic who studies the importance of two discourses of the scarcity of water found in two seemingly distinct but interrelated periods: the late nineteenth-century Regenerationist movement and the twenty-first century Spanish National Hydrology Plan. By looking in particular at the biopolitics of politician Joaquín Costa, novelist Juan Benet and contemporary government documents, her study demonstrates how water has alternately been used as a tool to unite and modernize and then as a product to be consumed on a more transnational scale. The Spanish television series Cuéntame cómo pasó is understood as a way for Spaniards to consider the existence of a wide variety of different experiences of the same time period—the second half of the Franco regime—in a way that repoliticizes historical memory for younger generations. Similarly, Jorge Pérez looks at the competing discourses present during this same time period in the 1967 popular comedy film Sor Citroen, which extols the miracle of desarrollismo as a balance between the economic success in modernizing and industrializing the nation, and the preservation of two of the salient values underpinning Francoism: Catholic moral rigidity and patriarchal domination.

Other essays in this volume focus on social institutions such as family and incarceration. Irune del Río Gabiola centers her attention on the concept of family, examining the ways the social and ideological construction of the familia is subverted in Puerto Rican author Mayra Santos-Febres's 2000 novel Sirena Selena vestida de pena. Focusing on "family time" and transgender bodies, the author argues that the characters attempt to survive by constructing their own sense of community, family and romance by using their marginality in strategic ways. Araceli Masterson likewise focuses on changing discourses of the family as she traces the gynocentric genealogy of what she calls the new "mestiza" families represented in Iciar Bollaín's 1999 film Flores de otro mundo. M. Edurne Portela reads the carceral space as an active entity of repression in the 1977 En el infierno: Ser mujer en las cárceles de España published by Lidia Falcón. Based on Falcón's personal confinement in the Yeserías prison in Madrid during the last few years of the Franco regime, the text is imbued with Falcón's feminist understanding of a space where unequal relations of power and gender oppression were maximized and contested.

No less than three of the pieces in this volume ask readers to consider the social and political archaeologies of different concepts of space. Benjamin Fraser's interdisciplinary bridge-building essay on Manuel Delgado's El animal público demonstrates exactly how the work of Henri Lefebvre and Delgado both contain a strong Bergsonian undercurrent that points to the differential unity of memory and space that inevitably connects philosophical, anthropological, and geographical concerns. This crucial interconnection is a fruitful way to approach the complexity of 'public' and 'private' cityspaces. Downtown Tucson, the home of the Arizona Journal, is featured at the center of Lane Van Ham's study of El Tiradito shrine, where every Thursday evening since 2000 the Tucson-based immigration advocacy group Coalición de Derechos Humanos holds a vigil to memorialize migrants who die in their attempts to illegally enter the United States from Mexico. His work explains how secular and religious ideologies can combine into a universalist concern over immigrant fatalities and serve as a way to build coalitions for the future among disparate groups. Nathan Richardson encourages us...