{"id":2172,"date":"2023-05-13T11:04:03","date_gmt":"2023-05-13T18:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=2172"},"modified":"2023-05-13T11:05:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-13T18:05:09","slug":"bookshelf-signs-preceding-the-end-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timporter.com\/seconddraft\/?p=2172","title":{"rendered":"Bookshelf \u2013 Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the borderlands of the West \u2013 America\u2019s south and Mexico\u2019s north \u2013 reality is fluid: much is not what it seems, permanence is an illusion, and culture and language are trafficked as commonly as contraband.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The monied North hungers for labor and drugs and flat-screen TVs assembled at sub-minimum wages; the impoverished South, conquered and corrupted, huddled in tribes held together by blood, fear, and power, feeds the northern beast, both willingly and by necessity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this thin, magical novel (2009), Yuri Herrera<\/a> distills the complexities of the American-Mexican symbiosis into the clarity of a single purpose: self-preservation: the North to keep what it has, the South to survive what it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a story set against archetypes: the Village, the Little Town, the Big Chilango; gunmen named Thug .45 and Thug .38 for their favored weapons; the \u201ctop dogs,\u201d the caciques, Mr. Double-U, Mr. Aitch, Mr. Q, whose favors carry indebtedness. Two-dimensional places and figures, they are stand-ins for the stereotypical American perspective of the lands to its south: dusty, dangerous, and dismal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within this anonymity lives sharply defined Makina, a fierce, independent young woman from the Village, a human switchboard who take calls and passes messages, connecting the North and the South. She speaks the local lingo (an indigenous dialect), anglo, and the latin (Spanish), and \u201cknew how to keep quiet in all three.\u201d Makina enforces a set of rules that gain her the trust of all:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t lift other people\u2019s petticoats.
You don\u2019t stop to wonder about other people\u2019s business.
You don\u2019t decide which messages to deliver and which to not.
You are the door, not the one who walks through it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Makina\u2019s mother sends her North to search for her brother, and there, on the far side of the river, she finds herself entangled in the amorphous nature of the region and its people, both white and brown:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey are homegrown and they are anglo and both things with rapid intensity; with restrained fervor they can be the meekest and at the same time the most querulous of citizens, albeit grumbling under their breath. Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of new people. And then they speak. They speak in an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it\u2019s like her: malleable, erasable, permeable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story is too compact to reveal more, but the depth of Herrera\u2019s perception is unlimited. Signs Preceding the End of the World<\/a> is a marvelous ode, lyrical at times, hard-edged at others, to the incessant river of language, ideas, and bodies that flow across \u201cla frontera,\u201d impeded by government, exploited by mafia, but as impossible as the tide to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is one of the most compelling books I\u2019ve read about trans-border culture \u2013 and more timely now than when it was written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n