Exporting Manhood: Adaptation and the Post-NAFTA Latinx Novel

This essay examines the figure of the vanishing male in a trio of novels—Cristina Rivera Garza’s La muerte me da, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North, and James Cañon’s Tales from the Town of Widows—whose circa-2007 publication speaks to the fifteen-year legacy of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The essay argues for a notion of “adaptive belonging” as a formal and political strategy for coping with neoliberal policies’ hemispheric shift.