Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas
COATLICUE EATS THE APPLE
Boricua City
Pure Bronx
Mexican NY
Afro-Latinidades
A Mexican State of Mind:
New York City & the New Borderlands of Culture
Rutgers UP: ORDER HERE
Notes on and Notes for a Text:
A Mexican State of Mind: Mexican Migrant Creativity in New York City
Mexican Manzana: The Next Great Migration
PART I: The Container
It's the Intermediary that Fucks You
1. - "Sólo Queremos el Respeto": Racialization of Labor in the New York Restaurant Industry
2. - Hermandad, Arte y Rebeldía: Art Collectives and Entrepreneurship in Mexican New York
PART II: The Atlantic Borderlands
"Un movimiento joven, pero con mucho corazón"
3. "Yo Soy Hip Hop": Mexicanidadand Authenticity in Mexican New York
4. "Dejamos una huella": Graffiti and Space Claiming in a New Borderlands
Hauntings & Nightmares:The Visible Border and the Invisible Migrant in a Trump Era
For a full accounting of scholarly activities, download my CV here:
melissa_castillo_planas_cv2019.docx
Book Overview:
A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Cultureexamines the cultural productions of Mexican migrants in New York City within the context of a system of racial capitalism that marginalizes Mexican migrants via an exploitative labor market, criminalizing immigration policy, and racialized systems of surveillance. I begin by juxtaposing three images: "Visible Border," from filmmaker Alex Rivera's The Borders Trilogy; the Brookes Ship, which still powerfully recalls the business of transatlantic slave trade and has been significant for visual artists working from the 1960s to the present; and "la Bestia" ("The Beast"), a freight train running the length of Mexico and frequently used by immigrants on their travels. Although Mexican migrants rarely cross the border in containers, shipping container consumerism is what has allowed for the re-commodification of brown bodies as part of trade routes, post-slavery. As such it is not ironic that the original purpose of the Beast was to move standardized containers across the US-Mexico border, yet ended up as a tragic symbol of migrant desperation. Here, as in The Borders Trilogy, I find a through line to understanding the connection between traditional border crossing and historical Mexican settlement in the southwest and Chicago, and the development of Mexican migration to New York City in a post-NAFTA, post-9/11 world.
Inspired by a dialogue of the landmark works of Paul Gilroy and Gloria Anzaldúa, I develop an analytic framework which bridges Mexican diasporic experiences in New York City and the black diaspora, not as a comparison but in recognition that colonialism, interracial and interethnic contact through trade, migration, and slavery are connected via capitalist economies and technological developments that today manifest at least in part via the container. This spatial move is important, not just because Mexican migration is largely understudied in a New York–East Coast context, but because the Black Atlantic also emphasizes the long history and significance of New York as a capital of the slave trade. As the unearthing of the African burial ground in lower Manhattan in 1991 demonstrates, the financial center of New York is literally built on the bodies of black labor. Since the 1990s, it has been built on the backs of Mexican migrant labor.
As a result of these interventions, I find a rich and ever evolving movement toward creative responses to the containments of labor, illegality, and racial and anti-immigrant prejudice. In five chapters, I present a rich archive of both individual and collaborative expression including arts collectives, graffiti, muralism, hip hop crews, through which the majority young male Mexican population form social networks to cope with this modern-day form of "social death." The Introduction, "Mexican Manzana: The Next Great Migration" introduces the context of Mexican migration to New York City since the 1980s, focusing on the economic changes undergone by the city because of the adoption of the shipping container from an industrial economy to one focused on finance, real estate, and service. It also discusses NYC as an immigrant destination and outlines the characteristics of Mexican migrants and the conditions that greet them in their new destination. Particularly iconic to New York City is the restaurant industry for which the Mexican presence is both vital and largely invisible. Thus, Chapter one, "Sólo Queremos el Respeto: Racialization of labor and hierarchal culture in the US Restaurant Industry," uses that industry as a case study of Mexican migrant containment, to explore active forms of resistance. Chapter two, "Hermandad, Arte y Rebeldía: Art Collectives and Entrepreneurship in Mexican New York" focuses on the development of arts entrepreneurship and successful collectively owned businesses such as tattoo parlors that double as arts spaces. The next chapter, "Yo Soy Hip Hop: Transnationalism and Authenticity in Mexican New York," employs lyrical analysis of Mexican hip hop to explore alternative forms of identity making. The final chapter "Dejamos una huella: Claiming Space in a New Borderlands," describes the way Mexican migrants are claiming space and performing a politics of anti-deportation via the aggressive visibility of graffiti. Consequently, in loosening the bounds of border and mexicanidad,I find new identities that take surprising shapes. And following my subjects on the long journey to and within the Atlantic Borderlands, they teach me the significance of blackness in Mexican lives as well as black scholarship in Chicano/a and migration studies. Here, there is so much more than comparison – rather it is a rich flow of ideas that no border could ever impede.
Related Scholarship & Teaching:
Articles & Book Chapters:
"The Atlantic Borderlands: Mexican American Countercultures of New York City." Centering Borders: Explorations in South Asia and Latin America. Kavita Panjabi and Debra Castillo editors. Kolkota: Worldview, Spring 2017.
"Hermandad, Arte y Rebeldía: Mexican Popular Art of NYC." The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Popular Culture. Frederick Luis Aldama, editor. Routledge, June 2016.
"Yo Soy Hip Hop: Performing an Authentic Mexican Hip Hop in New York." Words. Beats. Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture. 6.1 (Spring 2015).
"La Lucha Sigue: The Legacy and Lessons of Gloria Anzaldúa for Latinas in Academia." Border – Lines. Journal of the Latino Research Center, University of Nevada, Reno. Vol. VIII (Fall 2014).
"Taming the Wild Tongue: A New Call for Young Latina Writers." The Ethnic Reporter. Newsletter of the National Association for Ethnic Studies. 33.3 (Winter 2010).
"Life with a Hyphen." Cartographies of Affect: Across borders in South Asia and the Americas. (Worldview Press 2010).
Teaching & Invited Lectures
"The Impact of Latinx Culture on U.S. Culture."2018 Culture Series Presented by the Notre Dame Club of New York and Fordham University Latin American & Latino Studies Institute, Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus (Dec. 5, 2018).
​"A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture": UCLA Spanish & Portuguese Department, Los Angeles (May 2, 2018).
Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University (Spring 2018): Taught original course HIST-LIT 90DA: From Rock and Roll to Rap en Espanol: Urban Youth Cultures in America.
Lecturer at Tufts University (Spring 2018): Taught HIST-0082/ LST-0094: Special Topics: Introduction to Latino/a History."Yo Soy Hip Hop": Transnationalism and Authenticity in Mexican New York." Seoul National University, Korea (Oct. 2, 2016).
"Yo Soy Hip Hop: Performing an Authentic Mexican Hip Hop in New York." Long Island University- Brooklyn (April 20, 2016).
Teaching Fellow at Yale University (Aug. 2014 – Present): Teaching assistant for Ethnicity, Race and Migration 200; American Studies 191: The Formation of Modern American Culture, 1919-2015. Duties include running sections, grading papers, advising students, supervising community projects.
Conference Presentations:
American Studies Association Conference, Atlanta, GA (Nov. 8-11, 2018): "Dejamos una huella: Claiming Space in a New York City Borderlands."
Latina/o Studies Association Conference, Washington, DC (July 11-15, 2018): "Mexican Manhatitlan: Mexican Literary Migrations through New York City and Latinx Literature."
American Studies Association Conference, Denver, Co. (Nov. 17-20, 2016): "Yo Soy Hip Hop: Transnationalism and Authenticity in Mexican New York."
Latin American Studies Association, New York, NY (May 27-30, 2016): "Hermandad, Arte & Rebeldia: Mexican Popular Art in New York City."
Latino/a Utopias: Futures, Forms and The Will of Literature, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY (April 23-25, 2015): "The Atlantic Borderlands: Mexican American Countercultures of New York City."
Centering Borders: Narrative Explorations in South Asia and Latin America, Center for Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures (CSLALC) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India (7-8 January 2015): "The Atlantic Borderlands: Mexican American Countercultures of New York City."
Latino Studies Association, Chicago, IL (July 17-19, 2014): "The Atlantic Borderlands: Container Politics, Migrant Melancholia and the Post Modern Countercultures of Mexican Americans."
American Studies Association Confernce, Washington, DC (Nov. 21-24, 2013): Sólo Queremos El Respeto: Racialization of labor and hierarchal culture in the US Restaurant Industry."
El Mundo Zurdo: First International Conference on the Life and Death of Gloria Anzaldúa, University of Texas – San Antonio (May 15-17, 2009): "More than Spanglish: Academic Boundaries and Code Switching in the Gloria Anzaldúa's "Nueva Mestiza."
All Content on this site is by Melissa Castillo-Garsow and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.