In This Issue

Abstract

In This Issue Malcolm Alan Compitello, Executive Editor Emeritus The essays that comprise Volume 26 of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies embrace a variety of modalities of cultural analysis and subject matter from interpretations of under scrutinized cultural works and original approaches to more canonical ones, to engagement with the relationship between recent forms of cultural diffusion, important social movements, and politics. Spatial and border issues have always been well represented in the pages of this publication. That is certainly the case in Volume 26. Irune Del Rio Gabiola deploys recent work in neocolonial examines how communities combat "geografías extractivistas" or "zonas de no-ser" with peaceful tactics of resistance to achieve social and environmental justice in Honduras. Space, in this case affective mapping, also frames Julia R. Brown's reassessment of the works that Rosario Castellanos sites in Chiapas, Mexico. Professor Brown's spatial analysis of Balún Canán, Ciudad Real, and Oficio de tinieblas argues that Castellanos deploys affective mapping to highlight social inequality in Chiapas. The border has also been central to the scholarship the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies has published. In this issue it is the focus of essays one jointly authored by Claudia Sandberg and Glenda Mejía and the other by Tess Renker. Professors Sandberg and Mejía focus on Diego Quemada-Díaz's first work, La jaula de oro and what it contributes to the growing bibliography on the traumatic effects of those who navigate crossing the border between the United States and Mexico. Professor Renker aligns José María Arguedas's El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971), a critique of inequality with Yuri Herrera's Señales que precederán al final del mundo (2010). His essay proposes that Arguedas novel, which highlights issues of migration, work, and global capitalism, offers an excellent theory and method to interpret recent work that deals with similar issues. The impact of new media is at the center of Daniel Runnels's contribution. It explores how contemporary social resistance movements use a politics of refusal as a form of contesting power. He draws his arguments from social media posts of supporters of Black Lives Matter and the Chilean revuelta, vogueing which the author views as "exercises against state performance of legibility." With the assistance of Luis Buñuel, several of whose most famous films he directed in the early 1960s, the Mexican producer/director Gustavo Alatriste released his adaptation of La casa de Bernarda Alba in 1982. Using archival material, Buñuel's close connection to Lorca [End Page 4] and interviews with one of the film's actors, Braden Clinger offers an assessment of Alatriste's non-canonical interpretation of Lorca's play in a film that has received little attention from scholars. Ramón Gómez de la Serna's vanguardist literary production is fundamentally linked to the tertulia he initiated at the Café Pombo in Madrid. María Soledad Fernández Utrera uncovers an unexplored aspect of the Pombo, its stimulation of what the author labels "sociabilidad anarquista" as a crucible for utopian ideas in Spain before the Spanish Civil War. Like the works of García Lorca and Gómez de la Serna, Horacio Quiroga's fiction is challenging and canonical at the same time. Carlos Abreu Mendoza employs Pierre Boudieu's critique of biography, a study of narrative techniques and recent work on biofiction to scrutinize three recent televised biographical works on Quiroga to challenge common perceptions about the relationship between his fiction and personal life. I have long admired Robert Frost's poem "On Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." Like the speaking voice in Frost's eloquent poem, I find myself at a point of inflection. Twenty-seven years ago, with the support a dean, a colleague, and a graduate student, I turned a suggestion from David Herzberger into a reality and the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies was born. Dean Chuck Tatum retired some time ago, my colleague Amy Williamsen passed away in a tragic accident, Professor Susan Larson now holds the Qualia Chair at Texas Tech and I retired from full time activity...