Sample Introduction

One way to begin an introduction is with a startlng or surprising statement. Open on to your larger argument by complicating or explaining that initial claim.


In the warm and sun-filled days
I remember in the haze
The happy sounds of children laughing,
The rustle of the cottonwoods.
Now all is old and cold and dark
Underneath Presidio Park.
- Patricia Preciado Martin
"The Journey"

Arizona began as a mistake. The United States government used a mistake on a map to take what is now called southern Arizona from Sonora, Mexico - to abscond with it. This far-from-innocent (mis)taking emerged out of contradictions and shifting interpretations; the mistake showcases the seeming aporia structuring the distinction between the metaphorical and the material, the real and the mapped. Consideration of this particular (mis)take also exposes the politicality of space, revealing a battle over how to characterize space and how to produce places that then almost magically become background or setting, and thereby hide space as a formative, intimate participant in the pleasures and work of sociality and subject formation. Unpacking that mistake, resignifying a dibious nineteenth-century error, requires beginning with contrasting accounts, not of the mistake exactly, but of the spatial work that evolved from it.

Patricia Preciado Martin's short story "The Journey" (1980) offers a layered excavation of spatial memories that function as tstimonio, narraive monument, critique, and reportage of the production of Arizona and the lengthy struggle to remember Mexicano culture and life that such production seemed to pave over. The story begins with the poem quoted above, which invokes memories of a community and place that through the "haze" of dust, smog, memory, and years now lies "old and cold and dark / Underneath Presidio Park." The six-line poem works almost as a chan, conjuring the "disappeared" community and, with reference to Presidio Park, locating it in Tucson, Arizona - a bit northwest of the originary site of the "mistake" but very much germane to the ultimate (mis)taking.

Brady, Mary Pat. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002.