Kristín Guðrún Jónsdóttir: „You never listen to us“. The U.S.-Mexico border in Mexican and Chicano literature
This article aims to provide a survey of the literature of the U.S.-Mexican border. It focuses mainly on the literary production from the Mexican side and in a lesser degree on the Chicano literary production from the U.S. side. For this purpose it is necessary to examine the history of the border and how it has been viewed as a cultural desert in a centralized country like Mexico. This situation has prevented the development of a full-fledged literary voice in the Mexican borderlands. However, this has been changing since the eighties with a growing literary production in the area. The article studies how the border is represented in Mexican literature from the border as well as the literature that has emerged from the center. As for the U.S. side, many Mexicans became U.S. citizens when the border was drawn in 1848. Their decendants, the Chicanos, have carried out their own struggle for gaining a voice within a dominant Anglo-American culture.
Keywords: US-Mexico border, border literature, Mexican literature, borderlands, Chicano literature