Beyond Borders

This project thus focuses on four writers from Latin America, widely considered among the most influential of their generations---Jorge Franco of Colombia, Chilean-born Alberto Fuguet, Dominican-American Junot Diaz, and the formerly exiled Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela. I argue that the efforts of Latin American immigrants, of varying social classes, to assimilate to mainstream U.S. culture hinge largely on two interrelated dynamics of immigrant performativity which I am calling scripted assimilation and triangulation.