ABSTRACT
It is a different slippage of the migrational city into the visible and “legal” one that Viramontes encrypts in “The Cariboo Cafe.” In order to address these issues we propose the analysis of Chuck Palahniuk’s story “Slumming: A Story by Lady Baglady,” from the collection titled Haunted, and Helena Viramontes’s "The Cariboo Cafe", from The Moth and Other Stories. Sonya and Macky thus find themselves among the broken glass of back alleys, where they are faced with an indecipherable spatial text they struggle to read and interpret. Places, Walter Benjamin claims in Reflections, and the back alleys where the children become streetwise teach the language of spatial discrimination and invisibility; they are located on “the bad edge of postmodernity,” to make use of Mike Davis’s expression. The false sanctuary reveals its true face: The Cariboo Cafe proves to be the non-place, or the zero-zero place, where the representatives of the migrational city are reminded of their identities and their status.
