Freeways and Free Speech, Rail Cars and Rancheras: Geographic and Linguistic Mobility in Contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American Cultural Production

Abstract

This dissertation considers mobility in contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American cultural production (1960s-2000s) and specifically demonstrates how characters utilize creative language to induce an alternate mobility in instances when geographic movement is limited, coerced, or impossible. The analysis of novels and plays highlights the possibilities of human agency via deployments of voice (poetry, song, code-switching, storytelling, parody, and protest, among others). These deployments allow characters to move emotionally to desired places and, in certain situations, to participate in larger social movements against injustices. The first chapter centers on the use of music and poetry as an alternate way of moving in two plays by Hugo Salcedo, El viaje de los cantores (1990), based on the lives of male migrants who die in a boxcar on their journey to the US, and Sinfonía en una botella (1990), on Mexican citizens who attempt to cross the border in automobiles only to find themselves stuck in gridlock traffic. Chapter 2 considers what I term "narrative motion" in Carlos Morton's play Johnny Tenorio (1983) in which a Chicano Don Juan code-switches, and in María Amparo Escandón's González and Daughter Trucking Co. (2005) in which truck-driving protagonist Libertad tells stories to her fellow inmates. The third chapter analyzes what I call "vocal derailments" through the use of orality and parody in Emilio Carballido's play, Yo también hablo de la rosa (1966), and his novella, El tren que corría (1984). Chapter 4 considers the connection between creative language and action in the farmworker movement by analyzing the use of the künstlerroman (artist's) genre in ...y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971) by Tomás Rivera and Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) by Helena María Viramontes. I demonstrate the way the works underscore the need for artists in the movement to continually move against injustice in the fields. This study adds to studies on migration and literature by highlighting the diversity of (im)mobile experiences in Mexican and Mexican-American cultural production and by signaling the possibilities of the tactical voice for those in limiting circumstances on both sides of the border.