Latino Immigration Stories Shape U.S. Imagination in Gatekeeper Era

"Marta Caminero-Santangelo, who chairs KU’s English department, is writing the first full-length study addressing how a literary mix of novels, journalistic accounts, personal narratives and oral histories by Latino writers represents undocumented immigration in the Gatekeeper era — the years following the implementation of Operation Gatekeeper at the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego in 1994 that have been marked by an escalation of border policing and immigration crackdowns.  “Stories have always had the power to shape how we understand the world and ourselves in relation to the world,” Caminero-Santangelo says. The stories emerging in that literary mix “are crucial in shaping our ideas about groups; about who counts as an American; about who counts as a Latino or Latina.”  In an article appearing this summer in “Biography: An Interdsiciplinary Quarterly,” titled “Documenting the Undocumented: Life Narratives of ‘Illegal’ Immigrants,” Caminero-Santangelo says the voices of undocumented immigrants are just beginning to be heard – especially in the national debates on immigration." - infoZine, Apr. 23, 2012.