Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space

by Mary Pat Brady

A train station becomes a police station; lands held sacred by Apaches and Mexicanos are turned into commercial and residential zones; freeway construction hollows out a community; a rancho becomes a retirement community—these are the kinds of spatial transformations that concern Mary Pat Brady in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, a book bringing together Chicana feminism, cultural geography, and literary theory to analyze an unusual mix of Chicana texts through the concept of space. Beginning with nineteenth-century short stories and essays and concluding with contemporary fiction, this book reveals how Chicana literature offers a valuable theoretics of space.The history of the American Southwest in large part entails the transformation of lived, embodied space into zones of police surveillance, warehouse districts, highway interchanges, and shopping malls—a movement that Chicana writers have contested from its inception. Brady examines this long-standing engagement with space, first in the work of early newspaper essayists and fiction writers who opposed Anglo characterizations of Northern Sonora that were highly detrimental to Mexican Americans, and then in the work of authors who explore border crossing. Through the writing of Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, Terri de la Peña, Norma Cantú, Monserrat Fontes, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others, Brady shows how categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are spatially enacted and created—and made to appear natural and unyielding. In a spatial critique of the war on drugs, she reveals how scale—the process by which space is divided, organized, and categorized—has become a crucial tool in the management and policing of the narcotics economy.

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brady examines the production of space in Chicana literature. She examines how the process of reterriorialization (see Neil Brenner) produces extinct landscapes. She examines the way nation-states exist in their own temporal geographies. She examines how particular chicana texts (including those by Cisneros, Moraga, Canta, and Anzaldua) de-naturalize space by exposing its production and the way power operates through the articulation of spatial relationships. This book blends an engaging application of cultural geography with enjoyable readings of key texts in Chicana literature.

[Salvador Herrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seminal text for those interested in learning about Chicana literature, border studies, the “War on Drugs,” U.S. public policy and foreign intervention, and third-world/women of color feminism through the lens of spatiality.