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Immigration and Gender in American Literature
from Part III - New Directions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2021
A key development in Cristina Henríquez’s 2014 novel The Book of Unknown Americans comes when an immigrant family from Mexico loses their U.S. visas, and ultimately their daughter’s spot in a special needs school, because the father has lost his job. By narrating the personal repercussions of this shift in documentation, Henriquez insists on making visible the human cost of immigration policies and the precarity of documentation, a longstanding precarity that has taken on heightened resonance in our current political moment. This chapter takes up the gendered inflections and devastating effects of shifting states of documentation in contemporary novels by women writers, including Henríquez, Ruth Ozeki, Julie Otsuka, Lisa Ko, and Bich Minh Nguyen. These texts reveal not just a project of rendering immigrant and undocumented life visible, but also an emphasis on documentation and broader gendered and racialized conceptions of U.S. national identity as vulnerable states.
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