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Author ORCID Identifier
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Hispanic Literatures & Linguistics
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Luis A. Marentes
Second Advisor
Jose N. Ornelas
Third Advisor
Peter A. Stern
Subject Categories
Latin American Literature | Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
Abstract
What purchase does the concept of sanctity hold for a secularized modernity or post-modernity? This dissertation studies how the life and work of Teresa Urrea (1873-1906), a popular saint of the Mexico-US Borderlands, is scripted in two contemporary representations in order to ascertain how narrative plays a role in defining sanctity. In particular, I demonstrate the flexibility afforded by the genre of hagiography as it meets modernity in Borderlands literature by augmenting Arjun Appadurai’s anthropological theory of “scapes” to include a literary-scape: a cultural flow of story-telling that admits no geo-political boundaries and which interacts on equal footing with more canonical trajectories like the political or the economic. One the one hand, I examine how recent historical narratives of Teresa, which contextualize her as a product of her cultural moment, effectively de-sanctify la santa de Cabora. In this sense, by demoticizing her extraordinariness, they operate as anti-hagiographies. On the other hand, I document how feminist novelist Brianda Domecq elects essay and novel writing (rather than history-writing) in order to expose the underlying issue of women’s erasure as a product of pernicious mythological tropes about women. I argue that Domecq reimagines Teresa’s sanctity, crafting her as a Feminist Saint whose trajectory of demythologization demonstrates a possible a path of liberation and salvation from the restrictive, socially constructed identities that have been imposed upon women. I conclude that la Santa de Cabora could be all things to all people because the modern hagiography of the Borderlands allows for the development of divergent logics of sanctity across innumerable literary-scapes.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/14149837
Recommended Citation
Reino, Jayne, "SCRIPTING SANCTITY IN THE BORDERLANDS: TERESA URREA, LA SANTA DE CABORA" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1586.
https://doi.org/10.7275/14149837
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1586