Erin Murrah-Mandril – författare

What does it mean to center joy in a world that insists on Latinx suffering? Genealogies of Joy: The Pleasure of Latinx Literature argues that joy is not a luxury or distraction but a radical, sustaining force woven through Latinx literature and culture. From humor and food to protest, friendship, sexuality, and aging, the essays gathered here reveal joy as an embodied, communal practice—one that refuses racialized shame and imagines liberatory futures. Organized into three sections—Memory, Method, and Maps—the volume traces a genealogy of joy across time and space. Contributors explore how writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Julia de Burgos, Erika Sánchez, Javier Zamora, Myriam Gurba, Aidan Thomas, and Sandra Cisneros transform grief into resilience, invert dominant narratives, and reclaim pleasure as political praxis. Whether through irreverent laughter, queer desire, culinary memory, or vulnerable resistance, Latinx authors insist that pleasure and politics are bound together. Engaging affect theory, Black joy scholarship, borderlands studies, and archival studies, this collection asserts that Latinx joy resists the quantification and commodification of late-stage capitalism. At once rigorous and celebratory, Genealogies of Joy invites readers to recognize joy as a human right and a vital source of connection, creativity, and collective flourishing. Contributors Soffía Blystra Norma Cantú Margaret Cantú-Sánchez Karina Diaz Stephanie Fetta Elena Foulis Eva Maria Geicht Leigh Johnson Mark J. Mascia Regina Marie Mills Erin Murrah-Mandril Jeannine Ortega Nancy Ríos Rey M. Rodríguez Rosarito Rodríguez-González Alexandra Rodríguez Sabogal Karen Roybal Bianca S. Rubalcava Suzanne Uzzilia Natalia Villanueva-Nieves Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán

2020 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleThe 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which transferred more than a third of Mexico’s territory to the United States, deferred full U.S. citizenship for Mexican Americans but promised, “in the mean time,” to protect their property and liberty. Erin Murrah-Mandril demonstrates that the U.S. government deployed a colonization of time in the Southwest to insure political and economic underdevelopment in the region and to justify excluding Mexican Americans from narratives of U.S. progress. With In the Mean Time, Murrah-Mandril contends that Mexican American authors challenged modern conceptions of empty, homogeneous, linear, and progressive time to contest U.S. colonization.Taking a cue from Latina/o and borderlands spatial theories, Murrah-Mandril argues that time, like space, is a socially constructed, ideologically charged medium of power in the Southwest. In the Mean Time draws on literature, autobiography, political documents, and historical narratives composed between 1870 and 1940 to examine the way U.S. colonization altered time in the borderlands.Rather than reinforce the colonial time structure, early Mexican American authors exploited the internal contradictions of Manifest Destiny and U.S. progress to resist domination and situate themselves within the shifting political, economic, and historical present. Read as decolonial narratives, the Mexican American cultural productions examined in this book also offer a new way of understanding Latina/o literary history.