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1. Spaces of the Southwest: Dis-ease, Disease, and Healing in Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel
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1 / Spaces of the Southwest: Dis-ease, Disease, and Healing in Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel One of the most striking aspects of Denise Chávez’s short-story collection The Last of the Menu Girls and novel Face of an Angel is the figuration of New Mexico’s southwestern terrain as a space of dislocation, unease, and dis-ease. Given the long history of Mexicans (and Mexican Americans) in the Southwest, one would perhaps expect a narrative of rootedness and belonging rather than displacement. Instead, Chávez’s stories depict the geographical, political, and cultural space of the region as a complex environment that has both suppressed and maintained its ancestral legacies and histories, and whose characters, I claim, consequently experience symptoms of disease that can only be healed through the imaginary blurring and conjoining of Mexico and the United States’ nation-spaces. In presenting a troubled and troubling southwestern cultural and physical landscape, Chávez is indirectly responding to one of popular culture’s most powerful and dominant narratives about Mexican Americans in the Southwest: their presence here (whether legal or not) is greatly influenced by the presence of undocumented migrants who cross the border and enter the United States at various places along the nation’s borderland region. As I discussed in the introduction, many critics point out that while undocumented Mexicans are often potentially subject to racial profiling that renders them foreign to the cultural and national identity of the United States, the United States’ racialized notions of citizenship also informally govern all those who appear potentially illegal, so that Mexican Americans who are U.S. citizens or legally resident in the United States can also experience some of the stigma attributed to illegal immigrants.1 Thus Mexican 30 / spaces of the southwest American national identity, even in the Southwest, is particularly marked by a sense of “unbelonging,” an unbelonging that is understood as cultural and physical presence in place. Some critics argue that U.S. Mexican citizens have long been represented as the quintessential illegal aliens, and that Mexican “illegitimacy” in the United States can be understood as a form of spatialized displacement based on the group’s early racialization as nonwhite, secondary, and “alien.”2 Furthermore, the public’s identification of “illegal aliens” with persons of Mexican ancestry is so strong that at times many Mexican Americans and other Latino/a citizens, through sheer cultural practice and presence, are presumed to be undermining the United States’ national character.3 This alienation of Mexicans (and often of all Latin Americans) is also strongly dependent on particular narratives of Latin America that separate it, in historical, cultural, and political terms, from the United States.4 Without question, manifest destiny—the United States’ dominant theme of racial superiority justifying territorial expansion in the nineteenth century—played a crucial role in the nation’s construction of territorial and geographic identity, with particular consequences for the Southwest. Even as early as 1846, the conflict between Mexico and the United States, which began as a dispute over the western boundary of Texas (recently annexed by the United States), signaled the United States’ interest in acquiring land as property from its Southern Hemisphere neighbors. And, of course, the watershed 1848 Treaty of GuadalupeHidalgo , which ended the Mexican American War, definitively ceded the northern Mexican borderlands (from Texas to California and Oregon ) to the United States and resulted in Mexico losing 40 percent of its territory. As Marshall Eakin notes, “Incorporation into the United States and its legal system would have devastating consequences for ‘Hispanics ’ (Californios, Tejanos) and indigenous peoples in what would become the U.S. Southwest.”5 In fact, some descendents of the Spanish-speaking population of the region see the subsequent “occupation” of these lands as a form of colonialism. Clearly, literature coming out of the southwestern borderlands has long reflected the concerns, tensions, and history of this particularly blended cultural, political, and geographic space; many border critics have noted that literature written from, about, and/ or within the U.S.-Mexico border region is subject to the influences of that region. Rosemary A. King, for example, argues that because it is the site where the national territories of the United States and Mexico abut, “The border ‘orders’ the geography of this region,” influencing the ways that “writers construct narrative space” and “the ways their characters [52.55.55.239] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:31 GMT) spaces...