Revista de estudios norteamericanos - 2017 - Nº 21

URI permanente para esta colecciónhttps://hdl.handle.net/11441/76001

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Home on the border in Ana Castillo's "The Guardians": the colonial matrix of power, epistemic disobedience, and decolonial love
(Universidad de Sevilla, 2017) Poks, Malgorzata
After 9/11, more than ever in the history of the United States of America, security and domesticity have become paradoxical antonyms in racially and ethnically mixed areas, like that of the US-Mexican border. The borderland‘s history is further complicated by the issue of illegal immigration and its corollaries, such as strict border control and mass deportations of ―aliens,‖ as well as the rising crime rate. Even though it is protected by a fence and monitored by heavily armed border patrols, the area‘s notoriety for narcosmuggling, human trafficking and femicide keeps growing. Paradoxically, the more drastic the security measures used, the more dangerous the borderland becomes. In her 2007 novel The Guardians, Ana Castillo suggests that tighter control itself is responsible for criminalizing the border. Focusing on a Mexican American woman‘s search for her brother lost during an illegal crossing, the novel presents a complex dynamic between security and domesticity. The following article attempts to trace this dynamic through the epistemic lens of decolonial methodology.