UC Davis

This dissertation examines how Chicanx literature and art from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth-century responds to various spatial regimes. I argue that Chicanx cultural producers in this historical period deploy a range of aesthetic strategies that often contradict one another but that nevertheless express resistance, subjection, and at times complicity towards the reproduction of spatial violence across racial geographies. My dissertation traces these contradictory aesthetic strategies through a materialist methodology that attends to the historical and material sites of production in which Chicanx writers, artists, and activists have utilized poetry, performance, literary fiction, and photography as aesthetic forms that can directly respond to spatial regimes, such as policing, gentrification, environmental risk, and geographical displacement. With a particular focus on California, I interrogate how spatialized violence works across urban, carceral, rural, and transnational geographies within the state as interconnected spaces that are both real and imagined, shaping the everyday of Chicanx communities while manifesting in the content and form of Chicanx literature and art.I begin my dissertation with an analysis of Raúl Salinas’ poetry and activism, examining how the production and circulation of his work destabilize carceral space within and beyond the prison space proper. I then move to the works of Asco, situating their performances as material responses to the Chicano Moratorium demonstrations and their legacies. From there, I examine the fictional works of Chicana feminist writer Helena María Viramontes, expressing how her literature interrogates the ways that violence is spatialized on a transnational scale. My dissertation then concludes with a consideration of Harry Gamboa Jr.’s photography and the ways his images produce spatial networks and bonds that interrogate race, gender, and sexuality across photographic frames.