This dissertation examines how narratives from Mexican and Mexican-American writers interconnect urban landscapes and cultures in the transnational context of the twenty-first century. This study focuses on what I call “trans-urban narratives,” a method of literary analysis by comparing the urban environment of Mexico City with three global centers in the U.S.: Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. In these narratives, Mexican writers (Valeria Luiselli and Juan Villoro) and Mexican-American writers (Sandra Cisneros and Alejandro Morales) portray the transitional experience of their protagonists within two global cities, two urban realities located in opposite sides of the U.S./Mexico border. They create bi-national and hemispheric connections through the juxtaposition of urban landscapes from both countries. While in the twentieth century urban narratives focus mainly in one specific urban environment, my project argues that in the twenty-first century the Mexican and Mexican-American literary productions are building transnational spaces within the city that allow the cross-border communication of their cultures.

In Chapter One, I examine the intersection, interconnection and fusion of Mexico City and Chicago in post-national narratives. I analyze the short story “Chicago” (2008) by Juan Villoro, focusing on how the main character –a Mexican taxi driver who has lived in the United States– produces a mental map by overlapping the geographies of Mexico City and Chicago. I argue that this alternative cartography draws a new geopolitical space that eliminates cultural boundaries.

In Chapter Two, I continue the social, political and cultural exploration of Chicago and Mexico City but through the analysis of Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros. In this chapter, I argue that the multiple trips between Chicago and Mexico City portrayed in the novel reveal a historical migratory route between these two cities that dislocates the hierarchies between the Global North and the Global South.

In Chapter Three, by analyzing Mexican-American writer Alejandro Morales's novel, The Rag Doll Plagues (1992), I introduce the intrinsic mechanisms of spatial decolonization that allow to heal processes of segregation, aberrant social practices, and technological oppression in colonial Mexico City, postmodern Los Angeles, and the dystopian LAMEX.

In Chapter Four, I analyze the material and immaterial connections between Mexico City and New York. In Valeria Luiselli's Los ingrávidos (2011), I explore the ghostly, almost ethereal nature (ingravidez) of her protagonists –a young woman living in Mexico City, and the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen in New York. I argue that these characters or urban ghosts represent transitional subjectivities that flow between temporal, spatial and gender contexts: from past memories to present situations; from the overwhelming streets of New York to the secluded space of a house in Mexico City; from a female voice to a male narrative.

In my dissertation, I examine Mexican detective fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries written by Mexican feminist writers whose literary works include Mexican female detective characters. Writers and works I analyze in this dissertation are María Elvira Bermúdez's "Detente, sombra," (1962) and "Las cosas hablan" (1985) in conjunction with Bermúdez's socio-historical study, La vida familiar del mexicano (1955), argenmex writer Myriam Laurini's Morena en rojo (1994), and Patricia Valldares' Tan frío como el infierno (2014). All three writers challenge previous criticism that had relegated the genre to low-art, entertainment literature and redefine the social and literary roles writers of detective fiction play in Mexican social history through the lenses of decolonial feminism, legal-storytelling, and hemispheric studies. In Chapter One, I examine the evolution of the detective genre beginning with founding father Edgar Allen Poe, moving eastward into Europe with the inclusion of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, I then head towards the Américas, with the U.S. hard-boiled novel and Latin America's novela negra, that places the genre as a tool for social critique and I further discuss the presence of detective, crime, and mystery fiction in Mexico. In Chapter Two, I discuss María Elvira Bermúdez's legacy as one of the first women in twentieth-century Mexico to earn a university degree, attend law school, and become a Supreme Court judge while she simultaneously and passionately dedicated herself to writing and critiquing detective fiction. In Chapter Three, I underscore the value argenmex writer Myriam Laurini brings to the genre with her itinerant Afro-Mexican detective, la Morena. The narrative serves as an ethnographic narrative on Mexican women's issues involving race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. Chapter Four introduces Patricia Valladares' first novel, Tan frío como el infierno taking place in post-modern twenty-first century Mexico City with the radical feminist detective Milena Ruiz who traces the social histories and geographies of women's bodies as "territorios de guerra." Chapter Five discusses what happens to crime fiction in the hands of Mexican feminist writers, women who as writer-activists forge their professional and creative lives within the wider context of the history of Mexican feminism.

In my dissertation, I examine the representation of prostitution in the novels of twentieth-century Mexicana writers. This study will focus on what I call the Mexicana novel of prostitution, texts that feature female protagonists who have been compelled to enter the profession of prostitution out of necessity for financial or personal reasons. Examples of this genre that I analyze include Antonia Mora's "Del oficio" (1972), Sarah Sefchovich's Demasiado amor (1990), and Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie me verá llorar (1999). Although the Mexicana novels of prostitution in some ways are a continuation of the social and historical approach to prostitution established in the nineteenth century, they constitute a literary genre that dialogues and also breaks with the male-authored literary discourses of the past. In Chapter One, I examine the expansion and industrialization of Paris, London, Madrid, New York, and Mexico City along with the emergence of the male novel of prostitution in this socio-historical context. I also consider legislation that emerged during the nineteenth century to control prostitutes. These important components of the emergence of the modern city are examined in order to establish the literary, social, and historical background of the Mexicana novel of prostitution. In Chapter Two, I focus on Antonia Mora's Del oficio (1972). In this urban testimonio, Mora professes to be a strong authority on the subject of prostitution, based on her personal experience. Because her novel is in no way a moralizing tale but rather is an honest portrayal of life in "el oficio," a life that has not been appropriated by anyone else, I assert that a strong distinction can be made between Mora's work and that of the male authors that precede her. In Chapter Three, I focus on Sara Sefchovich's Mexicana novel of prostitution, Demasiado amor (1990), as a response to and a dramatic departure from the Mexican literature of the mid-eighties. I conclude this chapter by analyzing the novel's relation to Sefchovich's most recent work of fiction, Vivir la vida (2000), positing that in both works the main characters live lives shaped mostly by oppressive circumstances that they are unable to escape, even in exile and death. The author uses her novels to reflect on the fact that the situation of women in Mexico has not sufficiently improved. In Chapter Four, I examine Cristina Rivera Garza's Nadie me verá llorar (1999), arguing that her identity as a fronteriza writer with a Chicana/Latina sensibility shapes her novel. Indeed, the novel presents within itself a theory of what a novel should be; it is an "interview" and exploration of a historical document that merges photography, history, and the author's own written voice and lived experience. Finally, Chapter Five, analyzes the current state of prostitution in Mexico City and reflects on the state of Mexican Feminism manifested in the Mexicana novel of prostitution and in the streets through the activism of mujeres "en la vida."

El presente trabajo conceptualiza la producción novelística de la diáspora centroamericana proponiendo los postulados teóricos de la colonialidad del poder como herramientas útiles para el análisis literario. Enfocándose en novelas escritas afuera de la región ístmica a partir de la década de los años ochentas, este trabajo explora las representaciones de la posguerra en el imaginario social diaspórico centroamericano; las consecuencias y articulaciones subjetivas y materiales del exilio y la emigración masiva de poblaciones ístmicas a lugares como Estados Unidos, México y Europa; el desvestimiento identitario y político del sujeto ex-militante centroamericano; el trabajo de la memoria y el olvido afuera del espacio nación; la experiencia de las subjetividades ístmicas en los nuevos espacios post-nacionales habitados; las codificaciones del cuerpo social diaspórico centroamericano en cuerpo perennemente explotable dentro de regímenes de sujeción actuales, y; entre otras circunstancias, la posibilidad de articular una alternativa a dichos condicionamientos desde la propia reconfiguración de la palabra centroamericana. Se sostienen por lo tanto, las siguientes interrogantes y preocupaciones: ¿Cuál es el significado del momento de la diáspora y cómo se representa discursiva y simbólicamente? ¿Cómo se manifiesta, conduce y reproduce la colonialidad del poder en dicha producción novelística? ¿Cuáles son los efectos de ésta en las experiencias vividas de los seres bajo representación? ¿Es la colonialidad un elemento del poder posible de transgredir desde el plano de lo literario? ¿Por qué la necesidad de una práctica de lectura consciente a las infiltraciones de la colonialidad del poder en el ejercicio escritorial centroamericano?

This dissertation studies the socio-cultural connections of the United States and Mexico’s Pan-African selected twentieth- and twenty-first century sites of struggle through literature, film, and music. Novels and movies such as La negra Angustias (1948/1950), Imitation of Life (1933/1959), Angelitos negros (1948/1970), Como agua para chocolate saga (1989, 2016, 2017), and film (1992), as well as music of racial activism by Mexican and Afro-Latino artists such as Negro Jos� and Afro-Chicano band Third Root, are all key elements of my project to study the formation and understanding what of Mexico’s Tercera Ra�z entails historically, politically, and culturally.

I focus my study on the development of black racial consciousness in twentieth-century Mexican cultural life, and I consequently explore the manner in which Mexican writers, filmmakers and artists have managed the relationship between Afro-Mexicans and majority populations of white and mestizo Mexicans, as well as the racial bridge existent between the United States’ black history, and Mexico’s Third Root. After the realization that there are Mexican oeuvres (filmic and literary) with racial overtones have been inspired by works of American and/or African American authors, who approach racial consciousness in a completely different manner, I take into consideration such cultural philosophies and apply them to the Mexican context. With this said, a great part of my project on blackness in Mexico is based on African-American intellectuals that, due to the lack of black studies in Mexico, shed light on new ways of uncovering the racial consciousness of Mexican mestizos and Afro-Mexicans.

To understand the cultural enigma of the Afro-Mexican, my project explores some of the following inquiries: the ideology of mestizaje directed towards the Spaniard-Indigenous binary; the representation of Afro-Mexican women treated in literature and film; mutual influences of the United States and Mexico through visual media and music to expose topics on blackness; the absence of official black intellectuals, centers of research, and curricula in universities in Mexico; and lastly, the benefit of drawing on foreign ideologies of blackness to explain Mexico’s tripartite racial origins.