Transitional Space: Reading Contemporary Border Literature Through Historical Representations of Baja California

Abstract

Critical approaches to border literature rely on and reinforce stereotypes about local culture. This article reads the work of contemporary authors written near the U.S./Mexico border through the frame of Baja Californian history, offering a corrective to readings which center their marginality to U.S. and central Mexican literary production. These works draw on new and old myths about the peninsula, and its long history of representation in the writings of explorers and missionaries. Jesuit missionaries, for example, experienced the peninsula’s extremity in terms of psychological challenges for which ethnographic practices provided relief and a sense of control. In contrast, contemporary writers Regina Swain and Aglae Margalli analogize bodily experiences like crying, sweating and breathing to environmental processes of flooding and erosion, showing that the relationship between subject and environment can be negotiated, rather than imposed. In this way they demonstrate the embodied limits of colonial historiography and articulate the gendered logic behind the idea that writing from a place means being resigned to, determined by, or representative of it.