My dissertation examines the use of the speculative—namely, horror, and the dystopian—as a self-chosen mode of cultural representation for contemporary Tejana feminist literary and cultural producers located in and influenced by the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. I situate the phantasmagoric figure of the bruja (witch) as representative of the specific regional border imaginary that is the Rio Grande Valley (the Valley). Rooted in the rural lives and histories of the Valley, a site of conquest and rebellion, the cultural producers whose works comprise my archive—ire’ne lara silva, Noemi Martinez, and Celeste De Luna—engage the speculative to render quotidian border life disorienting and unfamiliar through a deployment of rage, effectively disrupting the hegemonic affective structures of numbness and fear that compel its inhabitants to normalize the border as a site of a permanent state of emergency. By identifying and tracing how each of the cultural producers in my archive engage aspects of the bruja to animate rage’s liberatory, reactionary, and even vengeful potentialities, I uncover the bruja as a hermeneutic that materializes from the ways in which Tejanas envision their affective, historical, and embodied selves through cultural modes grounded in the speculative. As a hermeneutic, the figure of the bruja enables us to read a broader contemporary Tejana feminist border affect premised on rage. Building on Clare Hemmings, Sara Ahmed, and José Esteban Muñoz, I insist upon an affective mapping—an understanding of the relation between the geographic and psychic terrain of feelings—of the Texas-Mexico border. I employ Hemmings’s and Ahmed’s understandings of how hegemony functions through the creation and circulation of affective structures by extending their understandings to the border region. Furthermore, I invert Muñoz’s concept of disidentification by focusing on how Tejana cultural producers foment a sense of disorientation that renders the familiar unfamiliar. Through this matrix of affect theory, I uncover how Tejana feminist cultural producers create spatial disidentifications that disrupt the numbing affect and invisibilization of historical and current instances of state-sanctioned violences on the border by making and unmaking particular affective worlds—inviting their audiences to enter the affective realm of rage.
My first chapter, “In the Footsteps of the Bruja: The Monstrous Chicana Body in ire’ne lara silva’s ‘tecolotl,’” engages the bruja as a figure of marginalization that cannot simply be recast as a figure of healing through a willfully utopic decolonial reading. Through silva’s short story, which tells of a young woman’s initial transformation into a lechuza (owl), I read the figure of the bruja as animating a form of counterpower through fear and bloodlust. My second chapter, “‘my mother, my longest lover’: Cripping South Texas in Noemi Martinez’s The South Texas Experience Zine Project (2005) and South Texas Experience: Love Letters (2015),” analyzes how, through a zine adaptation of the epistolary form, Martinez tropes the rural South Texas landscape as an oppressive force against the queer crip body of color. Through the figure of the bruja, I read Martinez’s descriptions of the South Texas atmosphere as a menacing force as an engagement of the dystopian. My final chapter, “Border Horrors: Carving Coraje in Celeste De Luna's Visual Art,” locates the presence of the bruja within the affective structures of cruelty, pleasure, and hate. De Luna utilizes traditionally gendered domestic practices and materials such as quilting, lace, and handmade party decorations to create large scale block prints that address issues such as the U.S. Border Patrol’s use of “Prevention through Deterrence,” which weaponizes South Texas’ harsh climate conditions against migrant bodies. The use of whimsical materials to display large scale prints of migrant bodies amid a desert landscape serves to monstrously enhance and mirror to audiences the enmeshment of cruelty and pleasure that form part of U.S. immigration policy.