UC San Diego

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the discourses of spatial policy and literature during the neo-liberal transition experienced by Mexican society in the last three decades of the twentieth century. It investigates how space is socially organized through discourses of urban planning at a, national, regional, and metropolitan level. It posits that cartographic artifacts (cadastral maps, Atlas, theories of urban planning), together with an ensemble of spatial discourses in a (neo)liberal society, are both constitutive and constituent for the socio-economic and political system. Through the use of mapping, a State makes its territory legible, but also creates the material infrastructure for the system to operate, while simultaneously redrawing the Nation and its territory. Cultural producers, especially urban writers, keen to the nuances of lived experience and space, are at the forefront of not only documenting the changing landscape, but their literature points to how culture is mediated through this relationship with the social-spatial. Previous sociological, geographical, and literary urban studies have failed to go beyond a descriptive analysis of representation, this dissertation argues and shows that literature maps not only the changing landscape, but creates an alternative cultural cartography and public sphere for the critique of the cultural, ideological, and spatial apparatuses of the State and private enterprise that try to control the city, its organization, its relationships of production, and the ability to form subjects and their subjectivities; further more, it shows that in a period that redefines the concept of public space, the public sphere created in literature and culture can act as a cognitive map and model of cultural practices of resistance to the expanding neo-liberal commodification of daily life that the spatial discourses of the State and private enterprise make possible