This dissertation examines the role of literary and cultural dialogues between South and North America that resulted from the Southern Cone's exile communities in the U.S. during the late 20th century. The political shift towards military dictatorships in the late 1970s, particularly in Chile and Argentina, caused a mass exodus of South Americans to go into exile across the world. As such, this study proposes an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of Juan Jose Jusid's film, Made in Argentina (1987), Ariel Dorfman's memoir, Heading South, Looking North (1998), and Alicia Kozameh's semiautobiographical novel, 259 saltos, uno inmortal (2001) that describe such crossings from South to North and back. Given the protagonists' complex responses to their respective exile journeys and returns, I argue that the protagonists embody "hemispheric liminality". This concept is most fitting because it describes how exiles exist at the threshold of myriad cultural and linguistic borders, and it seeks to reevaluate previously unexplored nuances in these three objects. The three challenges or formal discrepancies that unfold in the film and both texts as hemispheric liminality are the following: a) the rupture or fragmentation of spatial and temporal limits b) contact with other cultures as border zones, or liminal spaces and c) the representation of "truth".

Existing scholarship on Southern Cone exile and migration studies largely focus on transatlantic perspectives between South America and Europe given that the vast majority of intellectual exiles who faced persecution by the military dictatorships fled to these countries. In other instances, scholars have also noted internal exile, as a different experience for many of those in the Southern Cone, which maintain and limit their literary and cultural expressions of exile to a single national identity. However, fewer critical literary and film studies have noted the displacement of Chileans and Argentines within the Anglophone context of the United States and their respective transnational or hemispheric representations.

Thus, my hemispheric scope lies within the South to North, and North to South dialogues within the context of Chile, Argentina, and the United States. Both texts and film explore cultural and linguistic repercussions as a part of their transnational or hemispheric experiences in the Americas, and whose hemispheric liminality has not been previously explored. I have limited my analysis to context of these nations and their cultural expressions because of the need to reevaluate and further question how these exilic representations of Chilean and Argentine culture intersect with the growing body of literature and studies on Latin American and U.S. Latino literature and culture.