Rekonkista: Brownface, Time Travel, and Cyberfascism in “Greater Mexico”
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Published:November 2024
Chapter 4 discusses how Sesshu Foster’s novel Atomik Aztex (2005) reimagines the historical cataclysm of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Turning to the tropes of science fiction exhibits a “Latinxface” performance that revises both minstrelsy traditions and expectations for justice-imagining works of art. The chapter shows how this Asian American novel unsettles key Chicanx concepts like Indigenous identity, ancestry, and nationhood to reveal that Los Angeles never stopped being Mexico. Collapsing the Chicano Movement’s employment of a pre-Columbian homeland (Aztlán), Atomik Aztex showcases the cyclical repetition of violence and the pleasure in reading about it. Foster’s complicated and unstable relationships to Latinx narrative and latinidad signal the messy and slippery position he occupies while expanding the boundaries of the field and its genres.
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