Border Patrol as Global Surveillance
Border Patrol as Global Surveillance
Post-9/11 Chicana/o Detective Fiction
This chapter presents a reading of four novels—Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood (2005), Martín Limón's The Door to Bitterness (2005), and Mario Acevedo's The Nymphos of Rocky Flats (2006) and The Undead Kama Sutra (2008)—and explores the connections between nativism and imperial capital through the figure of the Chicana/o detective. Detective fiction thematizes surveillance and paranoia, both of which emerge as products of the War on Terror, and are represented in the novels in three domains: the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, technologies of surveillance, and discourses of international trade in people and commodities. The novels trace a progression through the shifting spaces of Chicana/o literature and provide a discursive map of its global engagement. This spatial progression charts an expanding arena for Chicana/o racial and ethnic identity, while arguing for a definition of chicanismo as acritical mode of engaging with U.S. power.
Keywords: detective fiction, Chicana/o detective, Desert Blood, The Door to Bitterness, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, The Undead Kama Sutra, Chicana/o literature, chicanismo
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