Resumen de “A Wall of Barbed Lies”: Absent Borders in María Cristina Mena’s Short Fiction
This essay engages in a critical reading of María Cristina Mena’s early fiction as an unorthodox example of “border writing.” In some of her early stories, the apparently absent border assumes the shape of the conflict between two characters, a Mexican “native” and an American visitor. Through a detailed analysis of the author’s narrative strategies in “The Gold Vanity Set” (1913) and “The Education of Popo” (1914), the article reaches the conclusion that these stories, often construed as reinforcing demeaning stereotypes of the Mexicans, can actually be read against the grain, that is, as constituting one of the first examples of oblique resistance in Mexican American literature. Facing a double audience, Mena engages in strategies of double-coding such as dramatic irony and hyperbolic citations, which can be described as techniques of “dissimulation” or “tricksterly” ruses. As a result, these seemingly quaint, “harmless” stories are eventually endowed with a clear oppositional potential that can no longer be ignored Y estás: en el vacío y en la ausencia presente. Ernestina de Champourcín, “Estás”.
