After Anzaldúa: Writing Femicide at the Borders of the Contemporary

Despite the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera (1987) on contemporary Latinx studies, Anzaldúa’s work is rarely cited in scholarship about the femicides in Ciudad Juárez. This article explores femicide literature as border literature after Anzaldúa, elucidating important theoretical approaches to the border by Thomas Nail and Sayak Valencia. This exploration centers on Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 (2004) and Valerie Martínez’s long poem Each and Her (2010), texts that sit at the borders of contemporary and Latinx literature. The author first shows how 2666 and Each and Her attune themselves to the historical dynamics of the US-Mexico border in the 1990s, paying special attention to the texts’ sense of the border as not only a geographic space but also a social process. The second part of the article shows how the most important fact of the new border in both texts is the disruptive transformation wrought by free trade on the border (including, but not limited to, the rise of the maquiladoras). In their irresistible but insufficient seriality, 2666 and Each and Her inscribe the violent consequences of the new border’s economic logic, the ravenous appetite of unbridled gore capitalism.