Abstract
This chapter examines how Nena, the protagonist of Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula, comes of age in the Mexico-Texas borderlands. This chapter presents Chicanx border literature in general and Canícula in particular as discursive spaces where the borderlands are presented as a real place inhabited by real people. Then it moves on to analyze the various gendered performances depicted in the text, focusing on how Nena and the rest of the female characters alternatively embrace and contest the patriarchal archetypes (the solterona, the devoted and self-sacrificing mother, the virgin, and the whore) that shape the Mexico-Texas borderlands. Finally, this chapter examines those episodes in which the border’s significance is challenged and those in which it is reinscribed.
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Fernández-García, A. (2020). Life on the Mexico-US Border: Femininity, Transborderism, and the Reinscription of Boundaries in Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera. In: Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20107-4_4
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