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33 - The Mesoamerican Corridor, Central American Transits, and Latina/o Becomings

from Part IV - Literary Migrations across the Americas, 1980–2017

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2018

John Morán González
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Laura Lomas
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Summary

This essay focuses on contemporary events of “other” Latinos in the making through the Mesoamerican corridor, alongside the inception of an ever-expanding Latinidad to divergent spaces in the twenty-first century. It examines how Latino otherness appears and functions in transit, before it is “delivered” and takes on life as U.S. Latino and in the context of migrants from Central America’s Northern Triangle traveling up toward the United States on cargo trains known as “The Beast.” Drawing from journalist Óscar Martínez’s autobiographies of migrants’ lives, as chronicled in The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, this analysis turns to the Mexico of train tracks, a tenebrific geography serving as a site of Central American-American abjection that maps the “mega-slummisation” of migrant inhumanity. Central Americans become a regional body––or no-bodies that are “just” a body––striving for human aspiration.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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References

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