Positioning Analysis of Intercultural Information Processing in a Multicultural Borderland: Rudolfo A. Anaya's "Bless Me, Ultima"

The cognitive map that Anaya designs for the reader in the Chicano growthnovel Bless Me, Ultima charts the multicultural borderland of the American Southwest for the controlling fictional mind, Antonio Márez, with a much higher number and much more intricate pattern of borders, border-operations, and border-dilemmas than the storyworld or the textual discourse can reveal at first sight. What the narrative processes is: the narrator (Antonio) processing the multicultural borderland, which is a land of conflicting and interlocking borderzones rather than a "borderland." By examining how exactly Antonio is mentally processing intercultural information the reader can develop a better sense of how and why this young Chicano keeps positioning and repositioning himself interculturally, through inter- and intramental processes, mental maneuvering, inner knowledge-representations, cognitive strategies of action, and by sorting through cognitive scripts as well as overwriting them. Some of the guiding theories will be multi- and intercultural theory, borderland studies, cognitive science, cognitive cultural studies, cognitive psychology, cultural narratology, cognitive narratology, and possible worlds theory.