Yolanda Padilla presents “Borderlands Modernism and Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo”

IAS faculty member Yolanda Padilla presented her work on a panel titled "Recovering Latinx Modernisms" at the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project conference in Houston, TX. The panel centered non dominant literary forms, such as testimonies and periodical writing, to stage a conversation about what it means to recovery Latinx modernism as indispensable to and constitutive of U.S. and Latin American modernisms.

Padilla's presentation, titled "Borderlands Modernism and Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo," examined Mexico's most canonical novel in the context of its little-known publication history in El Paso, Texas. She argued that a shift in emphasis from center to periphery enables an understanding of the text as an example of "borderlands modernism," which she conceptualizes as the expressive dimension of challenges to imperial modernity.