Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child by Mary Pat Brady

Abstract

Reviewed by: Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child by Mary Pat Brady Sarah J. Ropp Mary Pat Brady, Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2022. 297 pp. Cloth, $104.95; paper, $27.95; e-book, $15.37. “Scale, like it or not, is beloved by scholars,” Mary Pat Brady writes in the conclusion to Scales of Captivity, “beloved for its promise of mastery, its premise that we live in only one world, not many, and that such a world can be wholly known, contained, bracketed, held captive” (239). The book is her effort to seduce us away from that promise. Brady reads a collection of Latine narratives spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries and focused in Greater [End Page 428] Mexico/the western United States as first a series of testimonios bearing witness to the ways in which rescaling—the expansion of economic and political power—always depends on structures of captivity, as the increased mobility and freedom of some are predicated on the necessary containment of others. Secondly, Brady reads these various narratives as providing alternatives to scalar logics, namely density and queer horizontality, which signify for Brady an acceptance of many worlds less easily containable or knowable, as well as a recognition of mutual vulnerability and interconnectedness. The captive or cast-off child is centered as a crucial figure within all three of these projects. Within the “phallic verticality” of the “scaffold imaginary” that propels colonialist/capitalist expansion (19), racialized children are denied the protection of childhood even as racialized adults are conceptualized as perpetual children considered incapable of consent or self-governance. Within the Latine literature that Brady studies, the cast-off child functions as a surrogate, a stand-in for the violence and vulnerability endured by entire populations, impelling the reader’s “reparative witnessing.” And, because the child characters within these narratives often mobilize outside of the scalar logic that contains them, developmentally or socially, as children, they are also made to function in Brady’s analysis as symbols of or vehicles for density and queer horizontality. Brady begins in chapter 1 with María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?, set during the American Civil War, arguing that the novel uses burlesque forms to expose as ridiculous the essential dependence of the notion of liberal consent on forms of captivity. Having established the racialized, captive child as central to any examination of US sovereignty, Ruiz de Burton’s novel is referred back to in every chapter that follows as a template for subsequent texts. Chapter 2 examines three novels that bear witness to postbellum practices of capture and containment via forced labor and anti-Indigenous violence in the settlement of the West: Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero, Oscar Casares’s Amigoland, and Lorraine López’s The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters. In chapter 3 Brady highlights narratives that contradict the romantic vision of the expansion of freeways and highways in the western [End Page 429] United States in the mid-twentieth century as liberating and expose them instead as forms of enclosure: Helena María Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came With Them, José Montoya’s poem “Gabby Took the 99,” and Manuel Muñoz’s short story collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. In perhaps her most convincing and clearly argued chapter, chapter 4, Brady demonstrates the crucial interrelatedness between anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policy in the post-Reagan era of Clinton and NAFTA, analyzing novels that depict melodramas of migration into the US Southwest focused on unaccompanied girls (Illegal by Bettina Restrepo and Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande) as well as painting and poetry focused on day laborers in California and Laura Angélica Simón’s film Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary. Finally, chapter 5 engages novels that speak to deportation itself (and what happens after) as a form of captivity: The Deportation of Wopper Barraza by Maceo Montoya, Sofi Mendoza’s Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico by Malín Alegrío, and Bang by Daniel Peña. Scholars of western American literature will...