Aranda, José F.2024-08-302024-082024-07-15August 202https://hdl.handle.net/1911/117785This project identifies a post-sixties genre of political dissent in Mexican-American literature: borderpunk. In these narratives, clandestine, quotidian, and infrapolitical crossings of the US-Mexico border produce a countercultural negative affect towards the policies, physical barriers, and neoliberal technologies of surveillance which sustain it. I argue that such technologies include the kinds of respectability politics that have come to exemplify accepted means of political dissent for racialized populations since the 1960s. In contrast, I trace what other Chicanx writers have presented as the alternative: a preference for queerness and abjection, as well as a divestment from individualist consumerism and toward radical community-building. Drawing from a punk framework that emphasizes unproductive, ephemeral, and do-it-yourself (DIY) strategies, I interrogate the political implications of actions, affects, and attitudes that have been identified on both sides of the border as distractive from and indifferent to the pursuit of neoliberal respectability. In all, the project showcases how political dissent, abjection, and participatory praxes coalesce in narratives that refuse to abide by bordering logics and which, when aggregated, present a borderpunk alternative.application/pdfenPunkChicana/o LiteratureU.S.-Mexico BorderNeoliberalismRespectability PoliticsAbjectionThesis2024-08-30