Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature

6. Border Patrol as Global Surveillance: Post-9/11 Chicana/o Detective Fiction

6 / Border Patrol as Global Surveillance: Post-9/11 Chicana/o Detective Fiction The peregrinations of Ana Castillo’s characters in the previous chapter illustrate just how much notions of national space and subjects have shifted since the mid-nineteenth century. Writers like Domingo Sarmiento, Lorenzo de Zavala, and Vicente Pérez Rosales traced the emergence of race as an organizing principle of space. As national economies have become increasingly interdependent and global, the clear borders of the nation-state, which came into focus for the writers in Chapter 1, have become less functions of state and geographic boundaries, as our Latin American travelers would have experienced them, and constituted more, as political geographers Louis Amoore, Stephen Marmura, and Mark Salter argue, by interstate information exchanges, biometrics, and broad enclosure zones (96). The fuzziness of borders has become even more marked since the September 11, 2001, attacks. Since 9/11, the difficulty of policing and demarcating borders has become a topic of much public debate and, as the political philosopher Willem de Lint describes, performance. While contemporary security practices that have proliferated in the wake of 9/11, like intensified airport screenings, have their roots in liberal, nineteenth-century borders, their spectacular performances of security are meant more to manipulate a vulnerablepolitythantoachieverealsecurityaims(deLint174).Like9/11 itself, the post-9/11 border poses a conceptual difficulty unimagined by Sarmiento, Zavala, or Pérez Rosales.1 They narrated the rise of American borders that construed an emerging Latino collectivity as alien. The four novels discussed in this chapter, on the other hand, narrate a moment 172 / border patrol as global surveillance of “surveillance creep” or “border spread” (de Lint 173) that gives the appearance of more permeable global borders while in fact solidifying the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the nation-state. Borders and national space, in other words, are more important than ever, all appearances , global flows of capital, and people notwithstanding. This paradox is entirely familiar to Latina/o immigrants in the United States, upon whose inexpensive labor local economies depend but who are nevertheless subject to paranoid legislation and increasingly inhumane deportation practices at the beginning of the twenty-first century. How, then, to imagine the place of Chicanas/os and Latinas/os in the U.S. national imaginary? Post-9/11 Chicana/o detective fiction takes up this question. The novels treated here chart a course through the shifting spaces of Chicana/o literature and provide a discursive map of its global engagement. In the first two—Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood (2005) and Martín Limón’s The Door to Bitterness (2005)—characters frequently do not know where they are or find themselves searching for unstable places, mobile sites, or unmapped territories. The last two novels—Mario Acevedo’s The Nymphos of Rocky Flats (2006) and The Undead Kama Sutra (2008)—repudiate spatial knowledge altogether in their allegorizations of U.S. political debate as intergalactic conflict. Taken together these novels map a journey from the U.S.-Mexico border, to Korea, and finally to outer space, where U.S. xenophobia and paranoia are satirized for a primarily U.S. readership. Gaspar de Alba, Limón, and Acevedo do not just represent immigrant or Chicana/o experiences but attempt to parse the meaning of locating one’s brown body in U.S. national space and to challenge hierarchies of space in the Americas. The spatial progression found in their novels charts an expanding arena for Chicana/o racial and ethnic identity, showing no one place as epicenter, arguing instead for a definition of chicanismo as a critical mode of engaging with U.S. power. Chicana/o space thus emerges in post-9/11 Chicana/o detective fiction as an expansive and abstract terrain that hearkens back to the transamerican visions espoused by the Latin American travelers of Chapter 1. Sarmiento’s, Zavala’s, and Pérez Rosales’s American cartographies show the advent of spatial hierarchies and make plain the claim of Edward Soja and the Los Angeles school of urban geographers that space is a mutable construct. Chicana/o studies scholars have built on these observations to argue further that spatial processes are fraught with racial ideologies,2 an idea that lies at the heart of this book’s assertion that representations of the nation in Chicana/o literature are part of a long border patrol as global surveillance / 173 history of...