John Ochoa

John Ochoa is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on Mexican intellectual and cultural history and on the comparative literature of the Americas, with particular interests in national identity, travel and mobility, the picaresque, and the relationships between literary form and cultural history. His work also draws extensively on psychoanalytic theory, particularly questions of subject formation, trauma, loss, and memory, across fields ranging from Chicano and border narratives to the Petrarchan lyric tradition.

His first book, The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity (University of Texas Press, 2004), examines the recurrent representation of failure in Mexican cultural discourse and its role in the construction and critique of national identity. His work on Mexico has also addressed writers and intellectuals including Bernal Díaz del Castillo, José Vasconcelos, Agustín Yáñez, Carlos Fuentes, Alfonso Reyes, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, as well as questions of border culture, colonial and postcolonial history, and official state culture.

His second monograph, Fellow Travelers: Dispatches of Empire in the Literature and Film of the Americas (University of Virginia Press, 2021), develops a comparative approach to travel and mobility across the Americas. Bringing together North American and Latin American texts and films, the book examines travel writing, the picaresque, and the road genre in relation to empire, revolution, national identity, and the cultural legacies of the Cold War.

Ochoa has also combined scholarship, editing, translation, and pedagogy. For the Modern Language Association, he prepared a two-volume companion edition of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s Don Catrín de la Fachenda (2021), bringing a lesser-known work by one of Mexico’s foundational nineteenth-century writers into a format designed for both scholarship and the classroom. The project pairs his annotated edition of the Spanish text with the first published English translation, by Bonnie Loder; Ochoa prepared the introductions, annotations, bibliographies, linguistic notes, and other scholarly apparatus for the two volumes. He also co-edited, with Monika Kaup, From the Americas to the World: Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora (Lexington, 2021), to which he contributed an essay on Alejo Carpentier’s Concierto barroco, transoceanic picaresques, and revolution.

Ochoa’s research increasingly extends these comparative interests to intersections between the ancient Mediterranean and the Americas, particularly Greek literature and culture. This work brings classical materials into conversation with recurring concerns in his scholarship on Mexico and the Americas, including travel and cultural encounter, collective identity, literary form, and the uses of the past.

Selected Publications

• Fellow Travelers: Dispatches of Empire in the Literature and Film of the Americas. University of Virginia Press, 2021.
• With Monika Kaup, eds. From the Americas to the World: Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora. Lexington Press, 2021.
• José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Vida y hechos del famoso caballero Don Catrín de la Fachenda. Edited with introduction, notes, and scholarly apparatus by John Ochoa. Modern Language Association, 2021.
• José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, Life and Deeds of the Famous Gentleman Don Catrín de la Fachenda. Translated by Bonnie Loder; edited with introduction, notes, and scholarly apparatus by John Ochoa. Modern Language Association, 2021.
• “The Poet Becomes Poem: The Missing Object and Petrarch’s Ends in the Canzoniere.” Romance Quarterly 65.1 (2018).
• “Fuentes the Young.” PMLA 128.3 (2013).
• “Professors on the Run: How Marcos’s Narratives of Zapatismo Refashion North American Cold War Anxiety.” Comparative American Studies 11.1 (2013): 52–73.
• The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity. University of Texas Press, 2004.