Classical and International Languages

The idea of re-doing or returning to a once highly censored history of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist regime that followed is at the core of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's Spanish films. In El espinazo del Diablo (The Devil's Backbone), El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), and his most recent (executive producer role only) , El orfanato (The Orphanage), del Toro uses different vehicles or forms of the monstrous, ranging from ghosts to serial killers to human and imaginary monsters in

In the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, Jesús Juárez Mazo, better known as Jesús Malverde or the green devil was a legendary social bandit who reportedly stole from the rich and gave to the poor during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. The haunting and the miracles around his gravesite have garnered much sensationalism surrounding this figure today. However, it is his association with narcotraffickers and his glorification in narcocorridos or drug ballads that have made this figure along with the drug smuggler both a topic of censorship as well as admiration. The narco criminal is a mythic persona either censored on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border as monstrous and innately barbaric or glamorized and representative of a modern-day social hero. This paper examines the dichotomy of such a persona as exposed by Mexico's contemporary cultural critic, Carlos Monsiváis who explores the media's fascination and repulsion with the most renowned of criminals in Mexico. In his analysis of Mexico's controversial criminal, Monsiváis teases out the sensational version of Mexico's deadliest bad guy to uncover the more rational if not mundane qualities of the narco 'monster'.

Cristina Santos is an Associate Professor at Brock University where she teaches in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and Director of Studies in Comparative Literatures and the Arts. Her current research and scholarship reflects an interest in investigation the monstrous depictions of women as aberrations of feminine nature vis-à-vis the socio-culturally proscribed norm.

With the publication of Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La frontera (1987), women's testimonial literature has been viewed as an important genre that breaks silences, raises consciousness and builds solidarity among women, especially Latinas and Chicanas. Testimonial writing functions as one means through which Latina/ Chicana writers, scholars, educators, and students are resisting traditional patriarchal conditions and constructs of motherhood to revise the institution as one based on empowerment through solidarity and sisterhood. In this paper, we explore the testimonial model established by the Latina Feminist Group as a vehicle through which to identify the diverse forms and contexts of mothering practices occurring at the borderlands of bi-geographical and bi-cultural identities. This paper is organized by way of four sections. The first provides an overview of Latin American and Chicana testimonial theory while the second section identifies testimonial writing as a pedagogy and site of diverse and multi-dimensional practices by Latina/Chicana mothers. For the final two divisions of the paper, we elaborate on the themes of solidarity and agency exemplified by the Latina Feminist Group as pedagogies for transformational (m)othering of the borderlands. Necesitamos teorías [We need theories] that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries-new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods. We need theories that will point out ways to maneuver between our particular experiences and the necessity of forming our own categories and theoretical models for the patterns we uncover. We need theories that examine the implications of situations and look at what's behind them. And we need to find practical cristina santos and tracy crowe morey (M)othering the Borderlands Testimony and the Latina Feminist Group