The University of Arizona Press
Borderpunk
Non-Respectable Narratives of the Post-Sixties
The U.S.-Mexico border has long been a home to artists, poets, emos, and punks. In the clandestine undergrounds of borderlands cultural production, there lies an impulse to live below and beyond border surveillance technologies. This book is about the utopic stories that narrate this impulse and the punk literary scenes that facilitate these fabulations.
Using an innovative methodology of “scene-work”—a blend of literary analysis, queer theory, critical regionalism, and auto-ethnography—Borderpunk identifies, aggregates, and outlines the emergent genre of borderpunk cultural productions. Beginning with the post-1960s through the present, author Sophia Martínez Abbud examines how music, playlists, literature, art, and performance borderpunk narratives teach us to elide, undermine, and work against the border’s presumed authority. Through these narratives, readers become attuned to the anarchic sense of abjection that permeates the border regions and the kinds of punk subjectivities emerging from these sites of re-mediation.
Borderpunk offers scenes that refuse notions of respectability at different time periods, geographies, and scales. Following the mechanics of other narrative punk genres, such as cyberpunk or solarpunk, it sketches out the uses of “punk” as a way of being in border spaces—where abjection, relajo, and illegibility become useful tools that encourage us to divest from the norm, participate in horizontal community building, and imagine borders in radical new ways.
“Sophia Martínez Abbud forges a radical reframing of Chicanx borderpunk cultures that eschews the respectability of rasquache and encourages us to consider the more radical, more punk rock undesirability of the abject and the pleasure of relajo. It’s a revolutionary journey of the mind that is never too far from the moldy couches and mosh pits of punk culture.”—Tara López, Winona State University
“Martínez Abbud’s work promises to make significant contributions to the study of Latinx expressive cultures by foregrounding the multifaceted ways in which Chicanx peoples have engaged in concerted refusals to engage in dominant respectability politics reinforced by mainstream social institutions. The book urges us to rethink abjection as a place of re/generation and possibility to contest white supremacist essentialisms of model minority and respectability politics as a clear response to settler colonial logics. It is a must-read for scholars of Latinx media and cultural production from across the borderlands.”—Ramón Resendiz, University of Oregon
