Lifting “the Weight of the Continent”

Abstract

Shortly before the turn of the twentieth century, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that “the line of most rapid and effective Americanization” was along the American frontier— though only for an implicitly white population of pioneers— before summarily pronouncing the frontier closed.¹ Nearly one hundred years later, Gloria Anzaldúa would describe la frontera, a borderland between the United States and Mexico, as “a vague and undetermined space created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.”² The inhabitants of this “closed country,” Anzaldúa says, be they Chicano or indigenous or black, are denied Americanization even as they are alienated from their preconquest identities. Thus both the borderland and the frontier represent an unobtainable homeland for marginalized peoples in North America. Yet, in drawing on the magical realist mode and its capability to navigate anything that may be seemingly inaccessible, numerous contemporary authors reinhabit these closed, postcolonial spaces to speak about and for the margins. As the Turnerian thesis— and the iconographic images (such as the log cabin, buffalo, or wagon train) and people (pioneers, settlers, and cowboys and “Injuns”) on which it has come to rely— continues to persist in American sensibilities, authors employ the magical realist mode to reopen a larger frontier, reclaiming liminal spaces in order to confront the encroachment of the Westernized ideals when those ideals would erect borders or reserve for themselves a distinctly Anglo North America self-identity.