1 Ewa Antoszek Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin Constructing Nomadic Identities – The Role(s) of the Border in Escandón’s Esperanza’s Box of Saints. Location and space have always played an important role in Chicana discourse, due to the specific situation of this group. The first reason why the spatial is so significant for Chicanos/as is explained by Aída Hurtado, who notes that “Chicano/Mexicano culture is communal culture with deep historical roots in the tending for and caring of the land” (406). Another aspect contributing to the importance of location and space for Mexican American people is the fact that due to historical circumstances the group had to face territorial displacements, which resulted in a particular recognition of space. Consequently, “Chicana/os have been considering space, taking it seriously, not simply as something to produce, but as something to understand, since, as it were, our inception” (Kaup, Extinct Lands 9). Owing to the territorial changes that befell Chicano/Mexicano community, their location shifted towards the margin – the border. Consequently, the border with its multiple meanings has become one of the most significant elements of Chicano/a discourse. Chicana writers recognize specifically the influence of space and this particular location on the process of identity formation, emphasizing the fact that “making identities is integral to making places” (Brady 8). Redefinitions and redesigns of spatial paradigms that took place in the second half of the 20 th century influenced Chicano/a approaches to space and border as well. 1 First of all, Chicano critics and writers at the end of the 20 th century attempted to deconstruct the immigrant–indigenous duality defining the status of Mexican Americans in the U.S. together with nation-based and immigrant paradigms used to describe the group in literature and 1 I conduct a detailed analysis of redefinitions of spatial paradigms, including the border, in Chapter Three of Out of the Margins: Identity Formation in Contemporary Chicana Writings (Peter Lang, 2012).