Abstract
In the wake of heightened border policing measures including Operation Gatekeeper (1994) and Operation Hold-the-Line (1993), and the subsequent escalating deaths of undocumented migrants crossing the border, writers including Ana Castillo, Reyna Grande, and Susan Straight have begun to narrate the deaths and disappearances of undocumented border crossers as a form of cultural trauma that fragments Latino and Mexican families and communities. Expanding the notion of the “disappeared” to take into account migrant disappearances at the border, these novels increasingly attend to the significance of absent bodies that interrupt narratives of belonging and identity. In assigning responsibility for cultural trauma, the novels condemn nativism, the demand for cheap and exploitable labor, and the institution of border enforcement initiatives that knowingly increase the possibility of migrant deaths, in an effort to bring attention to the human costs of inhumane border and immigration policies. But they also suggest the construction of collective identities based on a recognition and narration of the trauma caused by migration and disappearance.
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Notes
The dead and disappeared in Guatemala numbered 75,000 by 1985 (Gonzalez, 2000, 138), reached 87,000 by 1991 in El Salvador (Stephen, 1995, 808) and totaled 30,000 in Argentina (Feitlowitz, 1998, ix, 257). Relevant scholarship includes Cleary (1997), Feitlowitz (1998), Fisher (1989), Saxon (2007), Taylor (1997), Lewis (2002), Cardenas (2009).
Chicana- and Latina-authored fiction and poetry of previous decades constructed a transborder collective group identity and solidarity by representing the trauma of Central American disappearances. See, for example, works by Viramontes (1985), Fernández (1991), Limón (1993), Martínez (1994, 1998) and Benítez (2000).
The past decade has in addition witnessed the production of a host of documentary and fictional films dealing with the dangers of undocumented crossing and/or the trauma of family separation and disappearance, including: Crossing Arizona, Crossing Over, Under the Same Moon, Al Otro Lado, Sin Nombre, Mojados, Wetbacks and the HBO documentary Which Way Home.
Urrea and Ramos both describe the stages of death by hyperthermia; Nazario details the many hazards to which migrant train hoppers are subject, including theft, rape and loss of limbs, if not death; Annerino includes photographs of corpses found in the desert.
Straight's Highwire Moon actually incorporates extensive depictions of both forms of trauma.
For a detailed investigation of the genre of testimonial novel and its relation to testimonio, see Craft (1997).
The novels also fit squarely within a tradition of Chicano/a border writing of previous decades, while extending that tradition. They share with earlier “border fictions” a concern with Mexican-American (and Mexican) marginalization within US culture and with continuing manifestations of US imperialism (Sadowski-Smith, 2008, 2–6).
The novels have yet to be the subject of significant literary scholarship, owing to their very recent publication. It is also the case, however, that literary scholarship has yet to fully account for the ways in which recent immigration debates have shaped Latino/a literary production.
Consider a website in which a viewer posts a photograph of a “help” tower for lost migrants with a panic button that can summon border patrol in the case of dire distress – along with the caption: “Our tax dollars at work … keeping felons alive” (Steve's Public Gallery). The implication is that the pain, the bodies and indeed the lives of undocumented migrants don’t matter.
Feldman (2004) notes as an example that the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina have “refuse[d] a final state-sponsored memorial for their disappeared children precisely because such commemoration would subject the politically deleted and absent to biographical closure, and thus excuse the state from ongoing historical accountability” (166).
One difference between the use of the term “disappeared” in its Latin American and border contexts is the relative visibility of the disappearances themselves. Under Latin American military regimes, disappearance was often a highly public and visible phenomenon – indeed, an arranged spectacle meant to provoke terror in bystanders (see Taylor, 1997, 98–99; Feitlowitz, 1998, 150–151). By contrast, border disappearances are usually unwitnessed.
The words are an obvious allusion to a literary ancestry, reminding readers of course of Tomás Rivera's short story cycle of migrant workers, Y No Se Lo Tragó La Tierra.
The title of Urrea's non-fictional The Devil's Highway is, likewise, clearly meant to convey the sense of the desert as killing fields: “Cutting through this region, and lending its name to the terrible landscape, was the Devil's Highway, more death, another desert” (2004, 4).
Schwab (2006) argues, further, that individual trauma can also be transmitted non-verbally, through an individual's “moods or modes of being” (104). It follows that young children in a family that has lost someone to border disappearance may not only experience that loss first-hand, but also may experience trauma second-hand through the non-verbal manifestations of trauma by adults.
Consider, for example, Gloria Anzaldúa's account in Borderlands/La Frontera of witnessing as a child the forced “repatriation” of a relative to Mexico, even though he was an American citizen (1987, 26).
Elvia's friend Hector has a similarly failed narrative of origins. Because his college aspirations have separated him from his migrant farmworker parents, he “can’t figure out what he got from his parents. He's like alien boy” (114).
Cornell and Hartmann (1998) note that, in its representation and popular understanding, “Ethnicity is family writ very large indeed” (20).
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Acknowledgements
I thank the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas for supporting the research and writing of this article with a Hall Center Research Fellowship. This investigation was, in addition, supported by the University of Kansas General Research Fund allocation #2301341-003; and Smithsonian Institution Latino Studies Research Fellowship supported work in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this article as well as to the Editorial Board of Latino Studies for their enormously helpful suggestions. Finally, I also thank Suzanne Oboler for her support and encouragement of my work.
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Caminero-Santangelo, M. The lost ones: Post-gatekeeper border fictions and the construction of cultural trauma. Lat Stud 8, 304–327 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2010.27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2010.27