Rosemary King

Border Confluences

Rosemary King provides readers with profound insights into the social, political, and economic relations of people living in the US-Mexico borderlands.

Writers focusing on the US-Mexico border are keen observers of cultural interaction, and their work offers a key to understanding the region and its most important issues. For more than 150 years, novelists from both the US and Mexico have spun stories about the borderlands in which characters react to cultural differences in the region, and this has become a dominant theme in border fiction. Authors such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Carlos Fuentes, Cormac McCarthy, and Leslie Marmon Silko have created important literature that has helped define the border.

King shows how fictional characters’ various responses to cultural encounters—adapting, resisting, challenging, sympathizing—depend on the artistic rendering of spaces and places around them, and she examines the connection between writers’ evocation of place and the presence of cultural interaction along the border as expressed in novels written since the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on historical romances, Hispanic coming-of-age novels, travel narratives, and utopian literature, King offers plot summaries of such key words as Ramona, All the Pretty Horses, and Almanac of the Dead as she analyzes representations of both the spaces in which characters function and the places they inhabit relative to the border.