Linda Margarita Greenberg (Associate Professor and Chair of English at Cal State Los Angeles) Seas of Desire and Disgust: Border-Crossing in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them.

English Literature Research Seminar

16.30–18.00, Friday 17 January, in Screening Room (G.04), 50 George Square.

Linda Margarita Greenberg (Associate Professor and Chair of English at Cal State Los Angeles)

Seas of Desire and Disgust: Border-Crossing in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them.

[English Literature Research Seminar ]

In Helena María Viramontes’ novel, Their Dogs Came with Them, borders operate through a tension between unfettered spatial and temporal geographies and the violent demarcations of national and local territories.  The novel layers Hernan Cortés’s landing in the Gulf of Mexico in 1519 within the rise of the Chicano Movement in the 1960s, ebbing and flowing across hundreds of years and between two oceans.  Despite the firmly demarcated national borders and quarantined city lines of East LA that mark the territory of the novel, this flow of ocean tides obscures and reveals an ever-present geography beneath.  This talk explores how the territorial conquests of precolonial Americas shadow the violent regulation of East Los Angeles through urban development projects, policed neighborhood roadblocks and curfews, and competing gang territories.  In particular, the paper mines the feelings of desire and disgust—even from within the Latino/a community—manifested towards those who cross borders, whether as an undocumented immigrant, through non-binary gender identification, or because of mental illness.  Through it all, the oceans flow.