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Abstract
In this article, I follow the footsteps of Makina, protagonist of Yuri Herrera’s Citation2009 Señales que precederán al fin del mundo. In line with existing criticism on the text, I frame her migratory voyage as a form of pilgrimage. Departing from other readings of the novel, I center the protagonist’s embodied experience through her journey, tracing her corporeal sensations in order to understand the border itself as a living geography traversed by vital bodies. Walking emerges as a dominant trope in Herrera’s text, as the narration returns repeatedly to the protagonist’s determined footsteps. By understanding Makina’s journey as a pilgrimage, I reconcile the ways in which she simultaneously occupies a material and a spiritual realm. As an inherent element of pilgrimage, Makina undergoes a painful loss of identity, but also demonstrates her capacity for change by rendering her subjectivity fluid. This constructs the border itself as a liminal zone, a space in flux. As a walking woman, Makina offers a framework of border representation that moves beyond and answers the limitations of existing conceptual models of the border that emphasize multiculturalism and hybridity. Reading the border through the trope of walking, I argue, points to the political potential of migrants to rewrite current border reality.
Notes
1 In an interview, Herrera states: “these books can be considered a trilogy, but only in terms of the presence of certain topics, certain ways of using of the language … the protagonists in all three novels are what I would call ‘border characters.’” (Body).
2 Herrera’s avoidance of proper nouns further blurs the distinctions between the mythic and contemporary realms, maintaining a critical ambiguity in setting. Although readers can situate themselves in the border region by inference, he does not refer to cities in Mexico or the U.S., nor the levels of Mictlán, by name, untethering the narrative from concrete referents in this world or any other. He explains in an interview that before writing he makes “lists of words that [he] won’t use…that has to do with the need to avoid cliches, to not repeat certain predigested concepts in place of problems or emotions that are much more complex than those concepts” (Figueroa and Stefkova).
3 The brother’s pursuit of a mythologized homeland evokes Chicano nationalist’s belief in Aztlán as the spiritual homeland of Mexican-Americans, located in the U.S. Southwest.
4 These postcolonial theorists all address processes of identity formation through difference. In The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy centers the transatlantic slave trade as the basis for his new model of diasporic existence, which privileges hybridity. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (Bhabha Citation1994) theorizes the mutual construction of subjectivities within a colonial framework, in the contradictory and ambivalent contact zone that he labels the Third Space. Stuart Hall, in Questions of Cultural Identity (Hall and de Gay), examines the diasporic cultural identity in the context of the Caribbean, and maintains that Black diasporic identity goes through a process of constant reinvention through encounters with difference. In Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography (1996), Spivak emphasizes the heterogeneity of the subaltern subject within the reality of ongoing colonial processes (Spivak).
5 Canclini’s understanding of processes of hybridization has evolved over the years, as he notes in a 2009 interview that hybridity needs “to be articulated along with concepts of contradiction and inequality…it is not enough to look at what can be fused together: we must also consider what is left out, other processes of contradiction and of conflict” (Montezemolo740). His later comments and new introduction to the 2001 version of Hybrid Cultures suggest a desire to merge the notion of hybridity with material conditions of inequality, but other critics maintain that border studies needs to move beyond the concept.
6 While Canclini modified his conceptualization of hybridity years after the publication of Culturas híbridas, the concept of the border as a hybrid culture had already solidified in the public imaginary. “La teoría hibridista fue atractiva por su simultáneo festejo del mercado y la diferencia,” making it difficult to move beyond (Yépez 979).
7 Theorists who, following Canclini, tended to celebrate hybridity and develop the idea of a conceptual border as a metaphor for identity formation include Walter Mignolo, Homi Bhabha, Renato Rosaldo, Emily Hicks, and others.
8 These include Gabriel Trujillo, Humberto Félix Berumen, Sergio Gómez Montero, and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba. Northern Mexican author Rosina Conde chose to leave the Taller de Arte Fronterizo organized by Guillermo Gómez-Peña because she found herself being forced into a hybrid aesthetic that did not represent her reality: “They wanted to turn us into pseudo-Chicanos/as, or into a fronterizo/a that did not represent us” (Castillo 13).
9 Notable examples include Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, which relates the deaths of fourteen men trying to cross the border into the southern Arizona desert in 2001, and details the corporeal processes through which the human body fails when severely dehydrated and overheated (Urrea). Margaret Regan’s The Death of Josseline travels to a morgue to count the distressing details of migrants’ corpses (Regan). In The Border Patrol Ate My Dust, Alicia Alarcón collects the testimonies of border crossers, whose stories of walking, running, and hiding share a material immediacy (Alarcón).
10 The living geography of the borderlands is made up of both human and non-human bodies in motion. The border subject not only walks; it also slithers; it blows, flows, crawls, flies, and pollinates.
11 Both critics frame their analysis of Makina’s pilgrimage through readings of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), in which he identifies the construction of the illegal subject, excluded from basic rights and treated as disposable by the state.
12 While some pilgrimage studies scholars such as Greeley and Badone argue for a broad understanding of pilgrimage as physical movement paired with transcendent experience, others have more rigid guidelines for the concept. Scholars agree that pilgrimage traditionally has four purposes for communicating with the divine: to demonstrate faith, to do penance, to request assistance, and to give thanks for a past favor granted (Gros 111).
13 Peter Jan Margry cautions against broadening the term, classifying “secular pilgrimage” as an “oxymoron or contradiction in terms” (Margry 14). He defines pilgrimage as journeys with spiritual inspiration, and the desire to “seek a transcendental encounter with a specific cult object” (36). He admits, though, that religious journeys can happen outside of institutional religion; people can have spiritual encounters with secular places or objects.
14 Gros suggests that the act of walking exists outside of everyday perception of time and routine: “When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings” (84). Later, he argues that walking enables an experience that exists outside of time, or in opposition to it: “Walking makes time reversible” (128). Gros notes, for example, the experiences of Tibetan monks, who experience a “hallucinatory trance state produced by the repetition of [their] tread” (216).
15 Santiago Navarro Pastór, Edgardo Iniquez, and Ian Almond also examine these connections (Almond).
16 When Makina asks why her brother will not return, he responds: “No, ya no. Ya peleé por esta gente. Debe de haber algo por lo que pelean tanto. Por eso me quedé en el ejército, mientras averiguo de qué se trata” (103). His own motivations and sense of belonging have become subsumed by U.S. nationalism and the military industry.
17 Internal northward migration of young Mexican women also grew enormously as the maquiladora industry exploded throughout the 1990s, targeting young women for essentialized traits such as submissiveness and dexterity. Cordelia Barrera notes that Makina’s name evokes the maquila industry: “the name ‘Makina’ alludes to border maquilas to suggest her gendered and racialized position as a working body that produces capital” (477).
18 Sexual violence against female migrants is so common that contraception is seen as an essential tool for travelling with a coyote (Falcón 204).
19 Janet Wolff responds to the default masculinity of bodies in public space, using feminist sociology to account for women’s experience of modernity and the segregation of the sexes (Wolff).
20 While historically, most writing on walking has been approached through a male perspective, recent years have seen a notable rise in U.S. publications that feature female walkers. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012) details a young woman’s journey of healing through solo hiking over one thousand miles. Ben Montgomery’s Grandma Gatewood’s Walk (2014) is a biography of a woman in her 60s who hiked the entire Appalachian Trail three times in the 1950s. Shelley Armitage’s Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place (2016) is an eco-memoir that details the author’s rediscovery of the land of West Texas, in which she links the acts of walking, writing, and listening to the land. Kerry Andrews’ Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (2020) tells the history of ten women across the past three centuries who have defined themselves through their walking, while Annabel Abbs’ Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women (2021) combines memoir and inquiry into creative women throughout history who have found their voices through walking.
21 The border region is also home to permanent residents who are not migrants. While their motions are more limited in scope, a critical framework that attends to their embodied experiences consistently positions the border region as one of fluidity.
22 Abbott’s comment was: “The only thing we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder” (Gamboa).