Borderland Brutalities - (Path to Open) by Laura Elena Belmonte (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In Borderland Brutalities, Laura Elena Belmonte analyzes how border violence is perpetuated and sanctioned by private corporations as well as the US and Mexican governments and how this violence is represented through border literature and cultural production. Belmonte examines literature, art, and film produced by artists living on both sides of the border to explore how they portray this violence and how they use their art to actively resist it. In doing so Belmonte explores a range of topics, including how these nation-states define borders and the violence of those definitions, how they define and differentiate between asylum and refugee status, and how questions of citizenship serve to 'otherize' those who live along the US-Mexico borderlands, particularly those populations that do not conform to white heteronormative expectations. This important analysis of the border will be required reading for decades to come and lays the groundwork for additional studies on borderland violence and resistance"--Back cover.

Book Synopsis

Laura Elena Belmonte/Albuquerque/NM

In Borderland Brutalities, Laura Elena Belmonte analyzes how border violence is perpetuated and sanctioned by private corporations as well as the US and Mexican governments and how this violence is represented through border literature and cultural production. Belmonte examines literature, art, and film produced by artists living on both sides of the border to explore how they portray this violence and how they use their art to actively resist it. This important analysis of the border will be required reading for decades to come and lays the groundwork for additional studies on borderland violence and resistance.

Review Quotes

"Belmonte brings an important, timely, and focused study on the various types of both daily and extreme violence that have occurred from the late twentieth century to the present within the US-Mexico borderlands through an investigation of cultural productions by people of the borderlands. More than just an examination, however, Borderland Brutalities is a celebration of the resistance, love, and healing within these communities from a scholar who intimately understands these wounds."--Melissa Castillo Planas, author of A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture

About the Author

Laura Elena Belmonte is an assistant professor in the University of New Mexico's Chicana and Chicano Studies Department.