Jorge Hernández, Ph.D.

My book project, Corazones Urbanos: Critical Literary Regionalism and Southwest Cities, examines literary and nonfictional narratives regarding the discursive and spatial displacement of regional Mexican American communities, particularly as manifested in Tucson, Albuquerque, and San Antonio during the 20th century. This project aims to understand how Mexican American writers from these communities have interpreted, mediated, and critiqued the racially charged discourses and radicalized political agendas that have sought to dispossess, disenfranchise, and displace established ethnic communities from historic downtown landscapes in favor of affluent city elites and newcomers and their racialized capitalistic development.

In tandem with my book project, I currently have four article projects.
These essays travel across literary terrains to recover and reframe marginalized voices: in “San Antonio as Yanaguana: Lipan Apache and Payaya Survivance in Carmen Tafolla’s Poetic Geography” I read Tafolla’s place-based poetry as an act of indigenous survivance that reclaims San Antonio’s urban landscape from settler narratives; “From the Flight of ‘El Gavilán’: The Life, Times, and Writings of Mario Suárez” offers a biographical and textual portrait that situates Suárez’s life and work within the social and historical currents shaping Mexican American cultural formations; “Dis/re/membering the Conquistador in A. Gabriel Meléndez’s ‘Etaño’” analyzes how Meléndez disassembles and reconfigures the conquistador figure through strategies of memory, erasure, and counter-narrative to expose enduring colonial legacies; and “Writing the Local in the Flow of the Global: Critical Regional Aesthetics in Demetria Martínez’s Mother Tongue” argues that Martínez forges a critical regional aesthetics that anchors local linguistic and cultural practices even as it engages and resists transnational and globalizing forces.