Date of Award
2025-12-01
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
Creative Writing
Advisor(s)
Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny
Abstract
As a Terrestrial is a hybrid, transmedia novel that investigates the polysemy of the concept Alien as a point of intersection between three figures: the migrant, the extraterrestrial, and the subject alienated by the institutional machinery of the border. The project weaves together narrative prose, poetry, documentary archive, screenplay, and sonic transcription, proposing an aesthetic device that disrupts conventional forms of representing the borderlands.
The story follows Magdalena, a writer who crosses with her son into the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso region and who, alongside her entry into a creative writing program, develops an inquiry into the language that classifies bodies, territories, and experiences under the category of alien. Through documents, sound recordings, and audiovisual materials—including files recovered from the desert and the record of the trauma experienced by Gustav, a former CBP agent— the novel examines how institutions project fear and dehumanization through their systems of naming.
The project proposes that formal hybridity is not ornamental but a critical methodology: each medium allows the Alien phenomenon to be interrogated from a different plane (visual, sonic, narrative, affective), revealing fractures between perception, body, and landscape. In this way, the novel unfolds a prismatic structure in which parallel stories—the search for a missing migrant, the emotional collapse of a border agent, and radio transmissions that connect the human and the extraterrestrial— function as parts of a shared semantic and political field.
As a Terrestrial argues that the desert is not a geographic void but an ontological construction. In this sense, the work explores how writing, listening, and image operate as alternatives for dismantling the dualist logic of language and for proposing non-extractive modes of knowledge. The result is a novel that operates as archive, map, and critical deconstruction, inviting a reconsideration of the border as a space where the figure of the alien returns as a reflection of our own mechanisms of exclusion.
Language
es
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
Copyright Date
2025-12
File Size
193 p.
File Format
application/pdf
Rights Holder
Facundo Santiago Torrieri
Recommended Citation
Torrieri, Facundo Santiago, "As A Terrestrial" (2025). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 4598.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/open_etd/4598