Migración y Derechos Humanos: Un encuentro multidisciplinario en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea

Abstract

This dissertation pursues a new strategy for the study of contemporary Mexican narrative —particularly that which is produced on the border with the United States— using human rights as an analytical framework. By examining Mexican narrative through a human rights hermeneutics, I argue that we can better situate the intricate negotiations among legal, cultural, and political discourses of subjectivity they set in motion. This negotiation is particularly fraught in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the drastic shift in public and legal stances on immigration that followed them. The dissertation’s introduction outlines human rights theory and positions this study of resistance literature at the nexus between postcolonial, legal, and human rights theory. Chapter One examines the notion that immigrants are vulnerable subjects of human rights as recognized by intergovernmental organizations such as the International Labor Organization, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States. It then further reviews this condition as portrayed through international laws and treaties designed by the above entities to protect these subjects. Chapter Two demonstrates that immigration policies established by state and federal authorities in the United States breach international treaties and have caused the “criminalization” of Mexican immigrants. Here, I analyze ethnographic and statistical data from the perspective of cultural anthropology with the purpose of finding an explanation of the relationship between human rights violations of Mexican immigrants and the increment of border enforcement in the United States. Chapter three sets up the analytical categories derived from the framework created in the first two chapters and establishes a dialogue between human rights and Mexican narratives depicting immigrants. The following chapters then apply these categories to the study of an array of literary works created by Mexican authors such as Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Hugo Salcedo, J. Humberto Robles Arenas, Victor Hugo Rascón Banda, and Rosario Sanmiguel. In particular, I look to examine the ways in which these works represent the effects of human rights violations of Mexican immigrants and thereby enter into salient debates within the field of human rights, mainly the debate regarding national sovereignty versus individual rights.