October 233:30 PM – 5:00 PM2120 F. Scott Key Hall (Merrill Room)

Dr. Balachandran Orihuela explores the subject formation of the hidalgos living along the US-Mexico borderlands in the aftermath of the Mexican American War. In the face of shifting claims to property and citizenship, as well as the rise in speculative nance capitalism and the monopoly corporation in the US, Balachandran Orihuela proposes that the women in Jovita González’s historical romance, Caballero (1930), and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) best navigate the shifting political economy of the borderlands through property inheritance.

SSharada Balachandran Orihuela is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Her specializations are in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-rst century literature of the Americas; Hemispheric American studies; transnational American literature and economic history; and critical race and gender theory. She is currently working on her rst book project tentatively titled, “From Flags to Freeways: Hemispheric Routes of Exchange, Marginalized Economies, and Liberal Rights.”

Latin American Studies Center

At the Borderlands of Citizenship:Squatting, Settling, and Mexican-American Property