Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (Latin America Otherwise)

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 communitythese 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 mallsa 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, Cherre Moraga, Terri de la Pea, Norma Cant, Monserrat Fontes, Gloria Anzalda, and others, Brady shows how categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are spatially enacted and createdand made to appear natural and unyielding. In a spatial critique of the war on drugs, she reveals how scalethe process by which space is divided, organized, and categorizedhas become a crucial tool in the management and policing of the narcotics economy.