ABSTRACT
The two-thousand-mile-long Mexico-U.S. border has been thematised in a vast array of works of literary fi ction, poetry, art, fi lm, theory, and music from both sides of the line. In such works it has been variously conceptualised as a historical wound, a den of sexual licentiousness, an Edenic paradise, and, in the decade of the 1990s, as a privileged theoretical site. As José Manuel Valenzuela Arce points out, “podemos identifi car algunos ejes importantes donde se establecen las metáforas y posicionamientos analíticos sobre la frontera, como la ruptura, la pérdida, la traición, el puente, el muro de contención, los intersticios, la transnacionalisación o los rizomas” [we can identify some important axes on which metaphors and analytical positions on the border have been based, including rupture, loss, betrayal, bridge, containment, interstices, transnationalisation, or rhizomes].3 In the past decade, however, scholars in disciplines such as anthropology, cultural, and literary studies have become increasingly sceptical of some of Valenzuela’s list of concepts. The propensity to speak of the border and its associated fi gure of the migrant as fi gurative tropes rather than as material referents, for example, has meant that “with the border as a dramatic prop, immigrants [have] become symbols in a battle of images.”4 The suspicion about this development appears to be shared by writers and fi lmmakers of border narratives of late, who in different ways can be seen to be restoring the materiality of that border and undocumented migrants’ experience of crossing it to the sometimes theatrical landscape of the region’s cultural production.5 The travel texts considered in this chapter, Rubén Martínez’s Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (New York: Picador, 2001) and Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway (New York: Bay Books/Little, Brown, 2004), chart notorious cases of recent failed border crossings; in what follows they are located within this broader cultural shift as well as within material changes in migratory behaviour.6 Although
they speak to such transformations, however, these travel books self-consciously appeal to the fi ctive in their avowed attempt to tell true stories. Indeed in their imperative and strategic processes of fi ctionalisation, they not only allow for an encounter with what Lacan calls the Real, but they also illuminate the political possibilities of mourning in a landscape which is literally and symbolically spectral. Drawing on Judith Butler’s recent work on vulnerability and mourning, this chapter argues that it is in the journey narrative’s long-standing engagement with and ambivalence in respect of “fi ction”—alluded to in the fi rst epigraph-that the political voltage of Crossing Over and The Devil’s Highway can be appreciated. In effect, then, like the category of thanatography (“writing about death”) to which they owe some debt, these travel accounts are at once both morbid and generative.
