Border Voices: Life Writings and Self-Representation of the U.S.-Mexico Frontera

The aim of this paper is to look at how the border region and its cultural and spatial manifestations impact on writings concerned with memory, the personal, and the self. Durán concentrates on Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, written by Alberto Ríos.¹ His reading gravitates around the role of the narrating “I” as the family ethnographer or as the re-collector of “cultural artifacts,” in this case, anecdotes, stories, pictures, and food recipes of those family members who “do not write.” In what follows, Durán specifically discusses how identity is constructed as a relational process in life writings. There are three aspects in this discussion: first, the role and meaning of particular objects and images in the construction of spatial memories; second, the title of the text and its cultural and culinary interconnections with family and regional traditions; and third, the role of photographs in the making of a personal and a collective spatial identity through the memoir A Ricardo, in memoriam ²,.