Troubling border representations in Mexican cultural studies and U.S. Central American cultural studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Foregrounding Tell Me How It Ends: an Essay in 40 Questions (2017) by Valeria Luiselli and Unaccompanied (2017) by Javier Zamora, I explore how the authors self-represent in their work and, more pressingly, how they represent the unaccompanied minor experience. I situate Luiselli‘s work as an example of what I consider the Paz-Rodríguez Complex. This transnational cultural process plays out in Luiselli’s nonfiction work, and impacts how Zamora‘s poetry is read. Luiselli and Zamora‘s ethnographic books could be read within Mexican Studies, Latin American Studies, Latinx Studies, and U.S. Central American Studies due to their interdisciplinary content. Zamora‘s text is a crucial pairing with Luiselli because, in some ways, his texts give visibility to the experience that Luiselli simply does not have access to as an outsider gazing from afar.