Geographies of Identity: Mapping, Crossing, and Transgressing Urban and Human Boundaries

Spatial categories and images are essential for the construction of identity. Human cartographies, defined as much by race as by ethnicity, gender, and class, can be explored through a “geography of identity” that articulates the creation of maps of territories and borders, as well as the dialectical terrain of interior, exterior, center and margin. Geographies of Identity: Mapping, Crossing, and Transgressing Urban and Human Boundaries aims to point to the city / urban as an important demarcation in the geographies of Chicano and Latino identity. It tries to explore how this identity is determined by urban life and its consequent human encounters, interactions, and affects, its spatial and mental (dis)locations, through the crossing of physical and emotional boundaries and the transgression of real and imaginary limits (literary and artistic).