The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature by Cordelia E. Barrera

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature by Cordelia E. Barrera Bailey Moorhead Cordelia E. Barrera, The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2022. 224 pp. Hardcover, $39.95; e-book, $19.95. Cordelia E. Barrera draws from Chicana and Indigenous cultural theory, critical regionalism, genre studies, decolonialism, ecocriticism, and critiques of capitalism to develop an informed and innovative reexamination of the Borderlands. Spanning ideology and embodiment, The Haunted Southwest reads contemporary fiction, film, lived experience, and performance to “re-situate the histories and ruling mythologies of cultures and people . . . whose stories, and thus memories, have been effectively silenced by official doctrines and policies” (xviii). Much like William Faulkner described the US South’s past as “never dead—it’s not even past,” Barrera delineates a Southwest whose past is “not dead, but reshaped, revised, and silenced” (xii). Through this lens, her book concerns historical yet ongoing issues of environmental and social justice that demand recuperation through multivocal perspectives. Barrera astutely acknowledges from the outset that “re-situating” these histories and mythologies is a complicated process due to the enmeshed quality of Borderland existence. A long timeline of meetings, crossings, and mixtures of ethnicities, languages, and cultures has generated many competing narratives in and about the Southwest. To address these complexities, Barrera introduces the term “Bordered frontier”: a container for the “intrinsic connections” between “border and frontier imaginaries” that accommodates “a discursive mixture of registers from American literary forms—such as the Gothic—alongside conceptions that speak to Indigeneity, Aztec and Mayan mythologies, and precon-quest ways of living in the world” (xvi). In this way she confronts [End Page 95] the contemporary inextricability of multiple perspectives while still accounting for the gaps often left between “official” narratives of the Southwest and stories erased by such dominant discourses. Her invocation of the Gothic alongside preconquest methodologies reflects her titular nod to “haunting,” as she seeks counternarratives through “spectral forms and absences” that surface “where unresolved forms of imperialist violence push through” (xix). Barrera’s “Bordered frontier” then provides an ideal model through which to channel such ghostly matters and logics, as it integrates and synthesizes elements of overlapping and contested spaces in which these hauntings appear, leaving room to incorporate their decolonial ways of meaning-making. Barrera argues that these specters that haunt the Southwestern landscape help us envision a more embodied and culturally attuned “ethics of place” (xliv), an approach that “foregrounds the nature and necessity of change” and “embeds aspects, dispositions, and properties of Indigeneity” that contradict colonial narratives of supposedly vanished cultures and memories (77, 87). Barrera exemplifies this process through characters “who are haunted and embody aspects of return and recovery . . . or who exist within haunted landscapes and therefore fear what could return” (xlv). She identifies such “haunted” characters within a wide range of texts and real-world events: John Sayles’s 1996 film Lone Star; the Laredo, Texas, area pageantry performances of the [George] Washington’s Birthday Celebration Association; Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Arturo Islas’s The Rain God (1984); various frontier cowboy stories by Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry; and Alex Rivera’s 2008 film Sleep Dealer. This variety of mediums over six relatively short chapters highlights the breadth of her methodology’s applications while maintaining an engaging pace for the text and further reflects the diverse qualities of multivocal counter discourses. Building upon foundational criticism of the West and Borderlands, Barrera makes vital contributions to scholarship within and beyond these fields, as her book “re-situate[s] the frontier within border narratives that are bound not by linear constructions of space but by a place-based poetics” that “disrupt[s] a monologic [End Page 96] frontier mythology” (xlv, xl). Barrera’s “haunted” “Bordered frontier” offers exciting applications, and her “ethics of place” priori-tizes cultural memory and material history to shift dominant narratives of the Southwest. Her careful attention to the “dialogic nature of complex ideologies” (xvii) invokes Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness as well as José E. Limón’s anchoring of the global in the local, as Barrera finds new, hybridized ways of...