An Ecology of Hope: Remapping the Borderlands in Cisneros's and Fuentes's Short Stories

This thesis aims to move border theory towards what cultural philosopher Jonathan Lear calls “radical hope.” It uses Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek” and Carlos Fuentes’s “Malintzin de las maquilas” to explore the U.S.-Mexico border as a space of haunted historicity, but also as a space that generates hope. By examining the female mystical and quasi-mystical archetypes that both authors incorporate in their narratives, this thesis aims not to ignore or disregard the haunting of history that has generated both the hemispheric gothic as a literary genre and border theory as an analytical mode, but to do quite the contrary, which is to synthesize them as critical frameworks that work toward the generating of radical hope in the U.S.-Mexico border.