Overview

Globalization in the United States can seem paradoxical: free trade coincides with fortification of the southern border, while immigration is reimagined as a national-security threat. US politics turn aggressively against Latinx migrants and subjects even as post-NAFTA markets become thoroughly reliant on migrant and racialized workers. But in fact, there is no incongruity here. Rather, anti-immigrant politics reflect a strategy whereby capital uses specialized forms of violence to create a reserve army of the living, laboring dead. Visible Borders, Invisible Economies turns to Latinx literature, photography, and films that render this unseen scheme shockingly vivid. Works such as Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer crystallize the experience of Latinx subjects and migrants subjugated to social death, their political existence erased by disenfranchisement and racist violence while their bodies still toil in behalf of corporate profits. In Kristy L. Ulibarri's telling, art clarifies what power obscures: the national-security state performs anti-immigrant and xenophobic politics that substitute cathartic nationalism for protections from the free market while ensuring maximal corporate profits through the manufacture of disposable migrant labor.

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9781477326572

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Reviews

Stylistically compact, but packing a mighty punch, Visible Borders, Invisible Economies is intellectually ambitious in its aim to analyze instances of death in Latinx literary and cultural texts. This work stands out from much of the scholarship in contemporary Latinx literary studies because it brings the literature into a conversation with the political and economic needs of capitalism. -- Marta Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, author of Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper Kristy Ulibarri's compelling book shows the interconnections between neoliberal market logics, immigration policies, and Latinx violence and death, both social and physical. -- Maritza Cardenas, University of Arizona, author of Constituting Central American-Americans

Ulibarri offers a model for reading other Latinx literature in the context of rising immigrant detentions . . .  The interplay of border visibility and economic invisibility reveals a politically charged truth about the disposability of immigrant life hidden within the auspices of border/national security. Further, these truths are visible in the imagined world of art be it prose, photography, or film. * Latin@ Literatures * Ubarri’s analysis of Latinx narratives...is expansive and illuminating...The book’s strength is its uncompromisingly interdisciplinary approach, which is essential for understanding contemporary migration narratives. * Journal of Borderland Studies *

Stylistically compact, but packing a mighty punch, Visible Borders, Invisible Economies is intellectually ambitious in its aim to analyze instances of death in Latinx literary and cultural texts. This work stands out from much of the scholarship in contemporary Latinx literary studies because it brings the literature into a conversation with the political and economic needs of capitalism. -- Marta Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, author of Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper Kristy Ulibarri’s compelling book shows the interconnections between neoliberal market logics, immigration policies, and Latinx violence and death, both social and physical. -- Maritza Cárdenas, University of Arizona, author of Constituting Central American-Americans

Author Information

Kristy L. Ulibarri is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.

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