On Border Consciousness
Michael Mejia
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
In the middle of his novel Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera’s heroine Makina, finds herself immersed in a new language. She’s recently crossed the border on a mission to find her brother, who migrated years before and from whom her family’s heard nothing in some time. Makina is carrying a message from their mother. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s been sent to retrieve her brother, to recover him from the other side, and bring him home.
Makina is determined not to stay herself, having witnessed how crossing and remaining too long in the “North” affected another man from her town: Everything was still the same, but now somehow different, or everything was similar but not the same: his mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brothers and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they’d been copied off an original that no longer existed.
You’re alienated from your home, your origin, your motherland, in the most personal of ways. There’s a hint of annoyance, too, the beginnings of intolerance, in those “difficult names and improbable mannerisms.” Not only do you not quite recognize your people, you’re also not sure you can stand them anymore. Why would you want to come back (not home) to that?
● ● ●
WHAT BORDER?
Herrera declines to say exactly, though a few hints—the direction North, a river crossing, references to anglo tongue and latin tongue as transparent code for English and Spanish—seem to confirm what we expect.
And yet, there must be a reason for Herrera’s evasiveness, his abstractions and tweaks to a rather familiar story, one we encounter in many ways, in many genres, but maybe most frequently as an issue rather than as a detailed, personal narrative experienced by real individuals.
“
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.
- Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
That is, Herrera is asking us to encounter the migrant’s journey in a new way, with new eyes, through other words, as if traveling from one alien planet to another. His protagonist is unusual: A young woman with no need to cross, no desire to stay, who suffers along her route, but who also displays great craft, will, and resilience. These last qualities are a necessity for any migrant risking her life to cross treacherous landscapes, relying on predatory smugglers, appealing to the mercy of unsympathetic authorities. But Makina is clearly special, and she’s aided, protected, guided, by seemingly supernatural forces of dark power and prescience.
Which is to say that Herrera has imbued Makina’s tale with the qualities of myth. Readers may sense several possible references, but the clearest, in terms of image and form, is the Mexica myth of the journey to Mictlán, the Land of the Dead. We probably shouldn’t take the implications of this schema too personally. As Makina’s final destination, the U.S. isn’t hell exactly, just the underworld, a place of transformation, translation, and transition, a land of eternal repose that the soul must struggle to achieve through nine stages of trials, from a river crossing to being assailed by winds and arrows, and, finally, by a jaguar set to tear out your heart.
● ● ●
The new language Makina experiences in the North isn’t anglo or latin tongue, but she’s heard it before. She even knows how to speak it. As a telephone exchange operator in her hometown, part of Makina’s job is to facilitate re-connection between those who’ve migrated and their loved ones at home. When necessary, she translates. If you’ve “forgotten the local lingo,” she’ll speak to you “in [your] own new tongue.”
But on the other side, in the North, immersed for the first time within the culture of yet-tobe assimilated immigrants that creates this Everything was still the same, but now somehow different, or everything was similar but not the same: his mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brothers and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they’d been copied off an original that no longer existed. “intermediary tongue,” Makina perceives its qualities much more fully. Like her, the operator, the language produces unique connections between “two like but distant souls.” It embodies “both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people”: More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born…. Makina senses in their tongue not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift…. In it brims a nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there…. It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects.
● ● ●
I’m in love with this passage because of its ambiguous, unsettled hope, expressed not as prediction or desire, but as fact. It is not a facet of Herrera’s fictional tale, which, as myth, as allegory— symbolic modes for telling truths—is no fiction at all. It is, rather, a moment of reportage. This, Herrera is telling us, is what’s happening right now, all around us, every day, in immigrant communities along the border and elsewhere, in the frequently hidden experiences of immigrants arriving in the US from all over the world, through a variety of means, wanting to make this place, the North, their home.
We might say that the experience Herrera describes is not exactly the one the immigrant is looking for, and maybe also not what
many Americans are hoping for for them, though that’s largely because they don’t know it’s happening or what it may mean. Or for those Americans who fear immigrants, Herrera’s description may be another way of articulating exactly what it is they dread.
What I’m talking about is the process of cultural transformation, a process of invention and remaking that, unlike the journey, works in multiple directions at once. Through the new tongue, through the goodwill and negotiation of its creators, a new culture, a hybrid culture, is produced, continuously and always in the present. At least for a short time, maybe a generation, until assimilation, until America takes hold.
“
The Borderlands are physically present, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.
Change, hybridity, continuous transition: there are a lot of ifs in these processes, there is a lot of instability, a lot of newness that never quite settles into dominance. That is, understandably, a little frightening. It is, quite literally, unsettling. And yet, it’s also uniquely exciting. What if, I wonder with my students, during our discussions of Herrera’s novel, we, too, could live perpetually in this culture of negotiation and transformation, “the world happening anew”? Wouldn’t that require us to perform the immigrant’s challenge of transition in the other direction? Wouldn’t it require us to surrender what we know, too, what our dominant language and culture seem to make certain, allowing us to participate in this always-new culture of perpetual change?
Wouldn’t that be a true embrace of the immigrant? Wouldn’t that show gratitude for their struggle, their arrival, their contributions, their desire? Wouldn’t that be love?
● ● ●
When I say we and us, of course, I’m not sure who I mean. Or that’s not true, because I have folks in mind, but I don’t really mean me. Or I do, because, while I identify as Latinx, I am an American. I was born far from the border, in Sacramento, California, one generation removed from my ancestors’ arrival from Mexico on my father’s side, two generations from the Italians and Irish on my mother’s. So I’m a relatively common kind of American hybrid. I have green eyes and brownish skin. I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish, but I’m learning because I want to connect. Or reconnect? Because I want to know even more about what I don’t know, and to use that knowledge to meliorate the alienation of new arrivals. I want to collaborate and imagine together “the world happening anew.”
● ● ●
It’s interesting that Herrera ties new tongue so specifically to place. A “nebulous territory,” he calls it, and we might also name it the Borderlands. More than a distinct geographical region, the Borderlands is a cultural space defined by mixture—mezcla—by ambiguity and hybridity—mestizaje: the intertwining of personal and national histories and the hope of futures enriched by respect for multiple perspectives. The Borderlands “is not a comfortable territory to live in,” Gloria Anzaldúa tells us in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. “No, not comfortable but home.”
Makina’s recognition of new tongue expressing “wonderment” and the “promise of new things” turns the language of discovery on its head. The language of the Age of Discovery, that is, of a period (the 15th to the 18th century), not simply of wonder and novelty—as it’s mostly portrayed in narratives of European explorers adventuring in Africa, Asia, and the Americas—but also of colonization and cruelty, of the exploitation of humans and natural resources, and the naturalization of ideologies and institutions (including universities) that have created persistent inequities frequently linked to ethnicity and place of origin.
The New World of new tongue, as Makina hears it, feels much more generous, much less certain, more full of promise for those who’ve traditionally been oppressed. It’s a form of evasion and resistance, but also, I think, an invitation for anyone with a will to participate in rethinking communities and culture on more equitable terms.
● ● ●
“[T]he Borderlands are physically present,” Anzaldúa says, “where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.” We begin speaking to each other in any tongue by introducing ourselves, by acknowledging our shared presence and then opening up, observing, revealing what we see and hear and taste, what we feel. We seek common ground, we generously negotiate differences. We listen, we speculate. We language together.
I introduce my students to Makina’s journey and linger on this particular passage about language, because I hope I can help my little pod better see the experience of immigrants in the US, and of the Borderlands more generally, as one in which they can share, with which they should seek to struggle in a hybrid language. It’s
why I’ve brought Herrera himself to Utah, in the first of two Borderlands Conferences, to be in conversation with us and with other authors writing in latin and anglo and new tongue—Cristina Rivera Garza, Francisco Cantú, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Julián Herbert, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Fernanda Melchor, Eduardo Halfon.
Not comfortable but home, the Borderlands: its cultures, its languages, its histories, its presents, its futures, its literatures—and all of these, I believe, in the broadest, most hemispheric sense, ours together to suffer and to shape, and within which to be transformed, made more hybrid, more whole, again and again.
On Border Consciousness
Michael Mejia
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
In the middle of his novel Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera’s heroine Makina, finds herself immersed in a new language. She’s recently crossed the border on a mission to find her brother, who migrated years before and from whom her family’s heard nothing in some time. Makina is carrying a message from their mother. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s been sent to retrieve her brother, to recover him from the other side, and bring him home.
Makina is determined not to stay herself, having witnessed how crossing and remaining too long in the “North” affected another man from her town: Everything was still the same, but now somehow different, or everything was similar but not the same: his mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brothers and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they’d been copied off an original that no longer existed.
You’re alienated from your home, your origin, your motherland, in the most personal of ways. There’s a hint of annoyance, too, the beginnings of intolerance, in those “difficult names and improbable mannerisms.” Not only do you not quite recognize your people, you’re also not sure you can stand them anymore. Why would you want to come back (not home) to that?
● ● ●
“
A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.
- Gloria Anzaldúa,
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
WHAT BORDER?
Herrera declines to say exactly, though a few hints—the direction North, a river crossing, references to anglo tongue and latin tongue as transparent code for English and Spanish—seem to confirm what we expect.
And yet, there must be a reason for Herrera’s evasiveness, his abstractions and tweaks to a rather familiar story, one we encounter in many ways, in many genres, but maybe most frequently as an issue rather than as a detailed, personal narrative experienced by real individuals.
That is, Herrera is asking us to encounter the migrant’s journey in a new way, with new eyes, through other words, as if traveling from one alien planet to another. His protagonist is unusual: A young woman with no need to cross, no desire to stay, who suffers along her route, but who also displays great craft, will, and resilience. These last qualities are a necessity for any migrant risking her life to cross treacherous landscapes, relying on predatory smugglers, appealing to the mercy of unsympathetic authorities. But Makina is clearly special, and she’s aided, protected, guided, by seemingly supernatural forces of dark power and prescience.
Which is to say that Herrera has imbued Makina’s tale with the qualities of myth. Readers may sense several possible references, but the clearest, in terms of image and form, is the Mexica myth of the journey to Mictlán, the Land of the Dead. We probably shouldn’t take the implications of this schema too personally. As Makina’s final destination, the U.S. isn’t hell exactly, just the underworld, a place of transformation, translation, and transition, a land of eternal repose that the soul must struggle to achieve through nine stages of trials, from a river crossing to being assailed by winds and arrows, and, finally, by a jaguar set to tear out your heart.
● ● ●
The new language Makina experiences in the North isn’t anglo or latin tongue, but she’s heard it before. She even knows how to speak it. As a telephone exchange operator in her hometown, part of Makina’s job is to facilitate re-connection between those who’ve migrated and their loved ones at home. When necessary, she translates. If you’ve “forgotten the local lingo,” she’ll speak to you “in [your] own new tongue.”
But on the other side, in the North, immersed for the first time within the culture of yet-tobe assimilated immigrants that creates this Everything was still the same, but now somehow different, or everything was similar but not the same: his mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brothers and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they’d been copied off an original that no longer existed. “intermediary tongue,” Makina perceives its qualities much more fully. Like her, the operator, the language produces unique connections between “two like but distant souls.” It embodies “both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people”: More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born…. Makina senses in their tongue not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift…. In it brims a nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there…. It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects.
● ● ●
I’m in love with this passage because of its ambiguous, unsettled hope, expressed not as prediction or desire, but as fact. It is not a facet of Herrera’s fictional tale, which, as myth, as allegory— symbolic modes for telling truths—is no fiction at all. It is, rather, a moment of reportage. This, Herrera is telling us, is what’s happening right now, all around us, every day, in immigrant communities along the border and elsewhere, in the frequently hidden experiences of immigrants arriving in the US from all over the world, through a variety of means, wanting to make this place, the North, their home.
We might say that the experience Herrera describes is not exactly the one the immigrant is looking for, and maybe also not what many Americans are hoping for for them, though that’s largely because they don’t know it’s happening or what it may mean. Or for those Americans who fear immigrants, Herrera’s description may be another way of articulating exactly what it is they dread.
What I’m talking about is the process of cultural transformation, a process of invention and remaking that, unlike the journey, works in multiple directions at once. Through the new tongue, through the goodwill and negotiation of its creators, a new culture, a hybrid culture, is produced, continuously and always in the present. At least for a short time, maybe a generation, until assimilation, until America takes hold.
“
The Borderlands are physically present, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.
Change, hybridity, continuous transition: there are a lot of ifs in these processes, there is a lot of instability, a lot of newness that never quite settles into dominance. That is, understandably, a little frightening. It is, quite literally, unsettling. And yet, it’s also uniquely exciting. What if, I wonder with my students, during our discussions of Herrera’s novel, we, too, could live perpetually in this culture of negotiation and transformation, “the world happening anew”? Wouldn’t that require us to perform the immigrant’s challenge of transition in the other direction? Wouldn’t it require us to surrender what we know, too, what our dominant language and culture seem to make certain, allowing us to participate in this always-new culture of perpetual change?
Wouldn’t that be a true embrace of the immigrant? Wouldn’t that show gratitude for their struggle, their arrival, their contributions, their desire? Wouldn’t that be love?
● ● ●
When I say we and us, of course, I’m not sure who I mean. Or that’s not true, because I have folks in mind, but I don’t really mean me. Or I do, because, while I identify as Latinx, I am an American. I was born far from the border, in Sacramento, California, one generation removed from my ancestors’ arrival from Mexico on my father’s side, two generations from the Italians and Irish on my mother’s. So I’m a relatively common kind of American hybrid. I have green eyes and brownish skin. I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish, but I’m learning because I want to connect. Or reconnect? Because I want to know even more about what I don’t know, and to use that knowledge to meliorate the alienation of new arrivals. I want to collaborate and imagine together “the world happening anew.”
● ● ●
It’s interesting that Herrera ties new tongue so specifically to place. A “nebulous territory,” he calls it, and we might also name it the Borderlands. More than a distinct geographical region, the Borderlands is a cultural space defined by mixture—mezcla—by ambiguity and hybridity—mestizaje: the intertwining of personal and national histories and the hope of futures enriched by respect for multiple perspectives. The Borderlands “is not a comfortable territory to live in,” Gloria Anzaldúa tells us in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. “No, not comfortable but home.”
Makina’s recognition of new tongue expressing “wonderment” and the “promise of new things” turns the language of discovery on its head. The language of the Age of Discovery, that is, of a period (the 15th to the 18th century), not simply of wonder and novelty—as it’s mostly portrayed in narratives of European explorers adventuring in Africa, Asia, and the Americas—but also of colonization and cruelty, of the exploitation of humans and natural resources, and the naturalization of ideologies and institutions (including universities) that have created persistent inequities frequently linked to ethnicity and place of origin.
The New World of new tongue, as Makina hears it, feels much more generous, much less certain, more full of promise for those who’ve traditionally been oppressed. It’s a form of evasion and resistance, but also, I think, an invitation for anyone with a will to participate in rethinking communities and culture on more equitable terms.
● ● ●
“[T]he Borderlands are physically present,” Anzaldúa says, “where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.” We begin speaking to each other in any tongue by introducing ourselves, by acknowledging our shared presence and then opening up, observing, revealing what we see and hear and taste, what we feel. We seek common ground, we generously negotiate differences. We listen, we speculate. We language together.
I introduce my students to Makina’s journey and linger on this particular passage about language, because I hope I can help my little pod better see the experience of immigrants in the US, and of the Borderlands more generally, as one in which they can share, with which they should seek to struggle in a hybrid language.
It’s why I’ve brought Herrera himself to Utah, in the first of two Borderlands Conferences, to be in conversation with us and with other authors writing in latin and anglo and new tongue—Cristina Rivera Garza, Francisco Cantú, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, Julián Herbert, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Fernanda Melchor, Eduardo Halfon.
Not comfortable but home, the Borderlands: its cultures, its languages, its histories, its presents, its futures, its literatures—and all of these, I believe, in the broadest, most hemispheric sense, ours together to suffer and to shape, and within which to be transformed, made more hybrid, more whole, again and again.