Abstract: This article examines the complex interplay of scavenging, reuse, and urban agriculture in Hugo Martínez-Serros's The Last Laugh and Other Stories . Set on Chicago's South Side during the first half of the twentieth century, Martínez-Serros traces a distinct tradition of Latin American placemaking across four stories in the collection centered on a single Mexican American family. This fiction offers a generative occasion to consider the role of garbage and disused space in relation to unorthodox configurations of pastoralism. While the bulk of the narrative is spent at two sites where the Rivera sons accompany their father to scavenge food and work the land, the importance of maternal and domestic labor asserts itself as the series concludes. Drawing on regenerative principles of Mesoamerican land use, the practices of milpa cultivation pursued by the Rivera family are instructively compromised, providing a fictional model of the potentialities, techniques, and impasses encountered on terrain depleted and rearranged by global capitalism.
Riley Hanick (Sat,) studied this question.