UC San Diego

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION“Witnessing: The Fragmented Reality of Militarization and Displacement of Chicana/o Latine Communities”

ByMarisol Cuong

Doctor Of Philosophy in Literature

University of California San Diego, 2024

Professor Gloria Chacón, Chair

This dissertation anchors an interdisciplinary approach to magnify relationalities through narratives in urban communities from 1960 to 2022. I draw on Chicana/o and Latine cultural productions to underscore a fragmented reality that centers community critical witnessing as a contestation to systemic violence targeted at and disproportionately impacting communities of color. “Witnessing: The Fragmented Reality of Militarization and Displacement of Chicana/o Latine Communities,” proves that contrary to being bystanders to the systemic deaths that surround the Chicana/o Latine communities, Chicana/o Latine’s critical witnessing actively negates the normalization of violence. I rely on the different narrative aesthetics (eg. novel, episodes, art, memoir) to showcase the act of bearing witness as a refusal to hide away from systemic violence and instead confront it at its core. In what follows, I illustrate marginalized communities' interconnected and relational experiences, to examine their common threads of militarization, displacement, and sexualization while showcasing resilience in narratives. Chapter one, “Settler Colonialism the Militarization and the Militarized'' examines Alfredo Véa Jr.’s novel Gods Go Begging (1999), which addresses settler colonialism through the militarization of Chicanos during the VietNam War (1954-1975). Through the critical witnessing of a Chicano soldier, this chapter draws attention to the 80,000 Mexican Americans being drafted and placed on the frontlines, returning to face more discrimination, displacement, and death. Chapter two, “Gendered Violence and Life-making as Insurgency,” juxtaposes an episode of a TV series Chicago PD “Promise” and a mural “Entre Todas Las Mujeres: A Vanessa Guillen Mural [Among all the women: A Vanessa Guillen Mural]” as exemplary narratives that engage in critical witnessing Latinas’ deaths. I problematize common narrations that link the Latina body as a marker for exploitation and overt sexualization. Read as cultural productions, these texts make it evident that violence against women relies on the interrelated processes of racialization, exploitation, sexualization, and militarization. In chapter three, “(Memoir)alizing” I take the memoir The Undocumented Americans (2020) by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and “The Power of the Vote,” an episode from the Netflix series Immigration Nation, to examine the paradox of value placed on undocumented Chicana/o Latine bodies within the United States. I contrast undocumented people’s narratives in life and posthumously after having served as first responders in times of crisis following the events of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan. Critically witnessing in this chapter on the one hand demonstrates the flaws of granting citizenship while also in a literary sense critical witnessing comes to exist through the genre of a memoir. Through (memoir)ializing this chapter illustrates undocumented displaced communities' deaths and their bodies as beyond “living death” and or “socially death”. Instead, it seeks to honor the Chicana/o Latine undocumented community as creators of resilient epistemologies that fail to normalize violence.