From Aztlán to Mictlán: New Border Crossings in Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez's Nocturno de frontera and Yuri Herrera's Señales que precederán al fin del mundo
- From Aztlán to Mictlán:New Border Crossings in Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez's Nocturno de frontera and Yuri Herrera's Señales que precederán al fin del mundo
Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez's Nocturno de frontera (2020) and Yuri Herrera's Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (2009) are two texts that re-imagine the journey motif prevalent in many border crossing narratives. Vaquera-Vásquez and Herrera belong to a growing corpus of literature produced from the United States in Spanish that has been named as New Latino Boom by Naida Saavedra. Vaquera-Vásquez and Herrera not only share the two crucial characteristics of this literary occurrence —time-period and language of their texts— but also the academic space in the US (Saavedra 16). This space has enabled many of these authors to sustain their craft in their native language while making a living through teaching, often instructing nonnative and heritage Spanish speakers and literature produced in it.
In this essay I examine the uniqueness of Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez and Yuri Herrera, as authors within New Latino Boom, and their texts that offer a new perspective on the journey motif commonly associated with immigrant narratives. Vaquera-Vásquez's protagonist, Daniel, is a first-generation Chicano who embarks on a road-trip retracing some of his own experiences through the Southwest, a space reimagined as the Chicano Aztlán. On the other hand, Herrera's protagonist, Makina takes a more traditional border crossing voyage with a coyote into the US, framed as the Nahua after-life journey to Mictlán. [End Page 81]
Saavedra's Definition and Castillo's Nuevo Latino
Naida Saavedra in her book #NewLatinoBoom: Cartografía de la narrativa en español de EEUU (2020) characterizes New Latino Boom as a twenty-first century movement primarily fueled by adult immigrants with experiences and educational formations from their home countries. Many of them started publishing only after arriving to the US, and the majority, if not all, maintain other occupations to sustain themselves financially. However, they all choose Spanish as their literary language, to which she says, "Todos eligen el idioma de la resistencia" (Saavedra 14).
The first-generation immigrant writers of Spanish identified by Saavedra have parallelly also been classified as "new/nuevo" Latinos by Debra Castillo, who sees them as interrupters of Hispanism. Castillo suggests a serious reevaluation both in Latin America and the US because of the challenges brought on by "los latinos en los Estados Unidos al proyecto cultural del hispanismo" (441).
Latinos writing in Spanish, especially the "new" Latinos, have shifted the paradigm of what constitutes both Spanish American and Latinx literature. However, the question of who belongs where within the framework of national literatures has perhaps been more about issues of territoriality and dialectical elitism within the academia and the intelligentsia on both sides, rather than a concern for the authors themselves. Nonetheless, it is not erroneous to say that many of the first-generation authors prefer to be identified as Latin Americans and not as Latinx. This preference has often contributed to their invisibility within Latinx literary studies in the US. In Imaginar países (2021), a collection of interviews of "escritoras latinoamericanas en Estados Unidos," Lina Meruane identifies herself as a Chilean or Latin American author and not as Latinx: "Sencillamente, porque yo llegué a Estados Unidos a los 30 años y, por lo tanto, soy formada y criada en Chile y mi conciencia es latinoamericana y se escribe en castellano" (34). As Meruane highlights, not identifying as Latinx is not a rejection of the pan-ethnic identity used to categorize individuals with Latin American heritage in the US. Rather it is a subjective decision based on her personal formation. In the same collection of interviews, Melanie Márquez Adams makes an interesting distinction between her personal and professional identities. She writes, "Como mujer y como persona me percibo ecuatoriana —por lo tanto latinoamericana" (209). She elaborates on her growth as an author, initially perceiving the reality of the US through an Ecuadorian/Latin American sensibility. It was only when she began...
