From the fifteenth century to the twenty-first century, the interaction between dispossession and displacement are central questions Martinez channels in writing. Her work represents the struggle of contemporary feminist interventions on issues of international migration within the annals of the New Mexican borderlands. The power to generate reflexivity about gendered displacement begins to remap vision of identity in print that brings the reader to wage the multiple values of American society. Innovations to the experiences of women of multiethnic backgrounds are perhaps one of the strengths of her latest narrative.

Albuquerque is a backdrop where shifts and dislocations of the past shape the verdicts of lived experiences in an effort to inform the present moment. Through the lenses of transnationalism and interdisciplinary feminist analysis, this essay seeks to address the following questions: How are dispossession and displacement represented in The Block Captain’s Daughter? How does Martínez’s attention to displacement address and transform central questions in feminist theory? In particular, how does the narrative advance feminist approaches to larger questions of space, place, and subjectivity? The overarching goal of this essay explores the trials of displacement as a dialogue between the strings of displacement and dispossession in Demetria Martínez’s The Block Captain’s Daughter (2012).