ABSTRACT
The subtle violence of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is that its abstractions and promises construct a work of fiction, one in which the border disappears or, at the very least, its problems can be ignored. But of course, the fantasy of "free" trade as it pertains to the US–Mexico border is always full of contradictions. For a Nobel-winning poet to weigh in on the potential of the free trade agreement suggests the ways in which NAFTA pushed the conversation around free-market economics into the literary imagination. In applying the framework of risk to NAFTA, what La frontera cristal makes clear is that one's experience within the market depends very much upon whether a person has chosen to take on risk or been made vulnerable to the hazards through the very structures of free trade. Risk economies are inherently illogical, but, Fuentes suggests, they are the fundamental condition of the free trade economy.
