Critical Storytelling from the Borderlands

From this set of critical stories emerges a timely confession from marginalized imagined communities at the physical and metaphorical Mexican-American border. These hybrid storytellers create a multivalence of experiences and genres. Composers of this ground-breaking collection draw readers into an affective connection with the borderlands, offering critical examinations of legal status, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, social class, family, and health. Additionally, creative representations across genres explore notions of geography, vulnerability, suffering, trauma, pain as well as joy, healing, and love. By posing questions about loss of innocence, they incite new literary and visual spaces for fusing together fragments of the remains of land, body, and/or being, all the while creating a site of fresh confessions where critical stories are illuminated collages assembled together from within la linea. Contributors are: Kiri Avelar, Irving Ayala, Carmella J. Braniger, Roxana Fragoso Carrillo, Marisa V. Cervantes, Guadalupe Chavez, Julio Enriquez-Ornelas, Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Veronica Gaona, Andrea Gomez, Filiberto Mares Hernandez, Victor M. Macias-Gonzalez, Carol Mariano, Ana Silvia Monzon Monterroso, Juana Moriel-Payne, Rachel Neff, Jumko Ogata-Aguilar, Jose Olivarez, Isabela Ortega, Paul Pedroza, Jorge Omar Ramirez Pimienta, Raphaella Prange, Felipe Quetzalcoatl Quintanilla, Erica Reyes, Fidel Garcia Reyes, Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana and Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez