The Final Border
In both works the final physical border crossing is in fact a culmination of all the borders that have come before, though we meet the characters at the gates of Europe or America, their very beings hold the journeys taken, borders crossed and maps traversed up until that point. And in Signs Preceding the End of the World, even when Makina is in the USA, echoes of the border continue and she continues to cross them. This is often embodied in language. The people Makina meets in the US are both “homegrown” and “anglo”—“Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people” (Herrera 2015, p. 63). They speak an “intermediary” tongue described as a “hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.” (Herrera 2015, p. 63) and “their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born” (Herrera 2015, p. 63), thus creating “the world happening anew…” (Herrera 2015, p. 66).
And what of the border itself, the site of physical transition. As soon as she crosses the sky it already looks different to Makina, “more distant or less blue.” (Herrera 2015, p. 40), is has gained something, distance, and lost something, colour and familiarity, just as Makina will. She arranges for her crossing back while she is still at home because of a friend who returned and:
…everything was similar but not the same: his mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brother and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they’d been copied off an original that no longer existed; even the air, he said, warmed his chest in a different way. (Herrera 2015, p. 20)
The border changes the make-up of things, the transition from one to the other is visible even in sentence structure. When Makina meets her brother he has assumed an American identity and will not come home. He has become, through the process of border crossing, another person. She is not his sister. His mother is not his mother. The boy she knew is gone.
The fragility of the body, its ability to be appropriated, damaged or destroyed also takes more concrete form. In Signs Preceding the End of the World they find a corpse at the border. From afar it looks like a pregnant woman, but it is in fact a bloated body. And in The Gurugu Pledge hospitals don’t treat “blacks without papers” (Laurel 2017, p. 77) reasserting the idea that vulnerability is actually an imposed state rather than a natural one. Towards the end of the novel, a journalist who visits those living on Mount Gurugu shows a video of dead Africans on a beach, and states that they have not drowned, but been shot, presumably by state actors (Laurel 2017, p. 178), thus reinforcing Jones’ description of the border as creating the violence which takes place there. Border crossing in both novels is a form of death “I’m dead, Makina said to herself…” on the first page, and later in the text someone asks her, “Off to the other side?” (Herrera, 2015, p. 14), directly linking the transition between Mexico and the USA to that between life and death.
In discussing the relationship between the migrant and the society to which they move, Iain Chambers suggests an appropriation of the metropolitan by the figure of the migrant. In this way he links migrant experience and the cityscape:
There is an emergence at the centre of the previously peripheral and marginal. For the modern metropolitan figure is the migrant: she and he are the active formulators of metropolitan aesthetics and lifestyles, reinventing the language and appropriating the streets of the master. (Chambers 1994, p. 23)
Makina’s character also speaks to this relationship, though in stronger words. Having been caught without papers by a police officer she has to write poetry on behalf of another arrestee:
We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians. (Herrera 2015, p.99)
Here the presence of Mexicans in the Big Chilango (the name given to the American city described in the novel) is violently drawn, but they have presence nonetheless, and the officer who has tried to arrest Makina walks away in confusion having read her response. In The Gurugu Pledge however, that characters are instead described as having failing eyesight from staring at the city (Laurel 2017, p. 60). They are forever trapped outside and growing old with the wait. Even though the city is physically close, for most the dream of the city will never be achieved. Such distance cannot be viewed upon a traditional map. As Sheller states (2018, p. 20), mobility exists in relation to “class, race, sexuality, gender and ability, exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales.” Within this work we find not only proof of this statement, but as readers we experience the human impact of such relations.
In the final phase of Signs Preceding the end of the World, Makina walks through a labyrinth of city streets with her guide, Chucho, until they reach a small door, through which she enters alone. She walks down the steps to a place of complete silence, devoid of people. Here, in the underworld, she is given her new documents. She has left her previous self behind, the girl who left Mexico has disappeared, but a new person has been born in her stead. When she reaches the moment of transition, she realises that she is prepared:
…the Big Chilango, all those colors, and she saw that what was happening was not a cataclysm; she understood with all of her body and all of her memory, she truly understood, and when everything in the world fell silent finally she said to herself I’m ready. (Herrera 2015, p. 107)
Conclusion
Each textual journey over multiple ethnic, linguistic, cultural, national and political-economic borders has to be articulated with the historical and contemporary journey of the exile, immigrant and refugee. They are journeys of displacement, alienation, pain loss and, perhaps even in the end for some, of opportunity. The subject of address, the object of representation, unvoiced and invisible, the border crosser met and meets that hostility reserved for the stranger who comes today and the discriminatory and exclusionary legislation shaped for the stranger who stays, or might stay, tomorrow. (Hawley 1996, p. 276)
It is true that for some these journeys offer opportunity, an idea played upon in The Gurugu Pledge “… everyone had a brilliant future that awaited them in Europe” (Laurel 2017, p. 25). However, the idea of the border crosser as ’unvoiced and invisible’ can now be called into question as migration literature works to illuminate these liminal areas while elucidating the impact of such ‘discriminatory and exclusionary legislation’. If border crossers are still perceived to be ‘invisible’ it is because the viewer has refused to look, as shown through the alternative border narratives discussed in this chapter. Thus, in a re-humanisation of the migration debate, works such as these create new maps for our time, depicting the lived experiences of those who interact with the lines that cut across our world maps, while interrogating pre-conceptions of borders and border crossers. The border areas discussed above are by their nature violent, but they are also spaces in which unexpected things may happen. Sites of transition; they hover in the murky zone between life and death. The peripheries, for the very reason that they are further from the centre and the ideas of conformity associated with it, can offer potential; but current motilities (the abilities of different people to move independently through and within spaces) mean that for some they are deadly and for many others damaging.
Migration literature also exists in relation to other literatures that touch upon similar subjects and discuss other histories of movement. The late American