Description
Book Synopsis2023 Outstanding Book Award, National Association for Ethnic Studies
A thorough examination of the political and economic exploitation of Latinx subjects, migrants, and workers through the lens of Latinx literature, photography, and film.
Globalization in the United States can seem paradoxical: free trade coincides with fortification of the southern border, while immigration is reimagined as a national-security threat. US politics turn aggressively against Latinx migrants and subjects even as post-NAFTA markets become thoroughly reliant on migrant and racialized workers. But in fact, there is no incongruity here. Rather, anti-immigrant politics reflect a strategy whereby capital uses specialized forms of violence to create a reserve army of the living, laboring dead.
Visible Borders, Invisible Economies turns to Latinx literature, photography, and films that render this unseen scheme shockingly vivid. Works such as Valeria Luiselli’
Trade Review
Ulibarri offers a model for reading other Latinx literature in the context of rising immigrant detentions . . . The interplay of border visibility and economic invisibility reveals a politically charged truth about the disposability of immigrant life hidden within the auspices of border/national security. Further, these truths are visible in the imagined world of art be it prose, photography, or film. * Latin@ Literatures *
Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Imagination in the Age of National Security and Market Neoliberalization
- Part I. Documenting the Living Dead
- Chapter 1. Games of Enterprise and Security in Luis Urrea, Valeria Luiselli, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Chapter 2. Documenting the US-Mexico Border: Photography, Movement, and Paradox
- Chapter 3. Latinx Realisms: The Cinematic Borderworlds of Josefina López, David Riker, and Alex Rivera
- Part II. Imagining the Living Dead
- Chapter 4. Markets of Resurrection: Cat Ghosts, Aztec Zombies, and the Living Dead Economy
- Chapter 5. Speculative Governances of the Dead: The Underclass, Underworld, and Undercommons
- Coda: Dreaming of Deportation, or, When Everything “Goes South”
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
