![]() Through silva’s short story, which tells of a young woman’s initial transformation into a lechuza (owl), I read the figure of the bruja as animating a form of counterpower through fear and bloodlust. My first chapter, “In the Footsteps of the Bruja: The Monstrous Chicana Body in ire’ne lara silva’s ‘tecolotl,’” engages the bruja as a figure of marginalization that cannot simply be recast as a figure of healing through a willfully utopic decolonial reading. Through this matrix of affect theory, I uncover how Tejana feminist cultural producers create spatial disidentifications that disrupt the numbing affect and invisibilization of historical and current instances of state-sanctioned violences on the border by making and unmaking particular affective worlds-inviting their audiences to enter the affective realm of rage. Furthermore, I invert Muñoz’s concept of disidentification by focusing on how Tejana cultural producers foment a sense of disorientation that renders the familiar unfamiliar. I employ Hemmings’s and Ahmed’s understandings of how hegemony functions through the creation and circulation of affective structures by extending their understandings to the border region. Building on Clare Hemmings, Sara Ahmed, and José Esteban Muñoz, I insist upon an affective mapping-an understanding of the relation between the geographic and psychic terrain of feelings-of the Texas-Mexico border. As a hermeneutic, the figure of the bruja enables us to read a broader contemporary Tejana feminist border affect premised on rage. By identifying and tracing how each of the cultural producers in my archive engage aspects of the bruja to animate rage’s liberatory, reactionary, and even vengeful potentialities, I uncover the bruja as a hermeneutic that materializes from the ways in which Tejanas envision their affective, historical, and embodied selves through cultural modes grounded in the speculative. Rooted in the rural lives and histories of the Valley, a site of conquest and rebellion, the cultural producers whose works comprise my archive-ire’ne lara silva, Noemi Martinez, and Celeste De Luna-engage the speculative to render quotidian border life disorienting and unfamiliar through a deployment of rage, effectively disrupting the hegemonic affective structures of numbness and fear that compel its inhabitants to normalize the border as a site of a permanent state of emergency. I situate the phantasmagoric figure of the bruja (witch) as representative of the specific regional border imaginary that is the Rio Grande Valley (the Valley). ![]() Omega will have to decide what’s more important-trusting the instincts of others or learning to trust in herself.My dissertation examines the use of the speculative-namely, horror, and the dystopian-as a self-chosen mode of cultural representation for contemporary Tejana feminist literary and cultural producers located in and influenced by the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Suddenly Omega’s magic begins to change, and the key to understanding her powers is more complicated than she thought. ![]() When a witch with the power to transform herself into an owl-known in Mexican folklore as La Lechuza-shows up unannounced, Omega, her best friend Clau (who happens to be a ghost), and her cousin Carlitos must conduct a séance under a full moon in order to unravel the mystery of the legend. ![]() But Omega’s powers don’t quite work, and it leaves her feeling like an outsider in her own family. So Omega’s family keeps to themselves, and in private, they’re Empaths-diviners who can read and manipulate the emotions of people and objects around them. But over the years, the town's reputation for the supernatural is no longer one the people carry with pride. Omega Morales’s family has been practicing magic for centuries in Noche Buena. Fans of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Paola Santiago and the River of Tears, and Disney's Encanto will be captivated by this fantastical novel about a girl who must learn to trust her ancestral powers when she comes face-to-face with the Mexican legend La Lechuza. ![]()
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