Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don't speak your tongue and don't know how to keep quiet either. We who didn't come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hour. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you'd never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the one who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.

Makina must travel from her home in Mexico over the U.S. border to bring a message from her mother to her brother, who crossed before her. To bring it she must ingratiate herself among Mexico's criminal underground, asking favors from men with names like Mr. Aitch and Mr. Double-U and Mr. Q. They will help her make arrangements with the coyote, the man who assists crossers over the border, but of course they also want something of their own to go with her.

Why do so many cross the border? What are they looking for, and what will they do to get there? When they arrive, what happens to them? Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World approaches these questions with the sensibility of a poet, perhaps one who has recently ingested peyote. The novel's hallucinogenic methods reflect the metaphor that lurks beneath the story: the traveler to the underworld. Makina is like Odysseus, searching in Hades for the shade who will tell him where home can be found. In the novel's opening scene, a mysterious sinkhole opens up in the ground before her, and though she's saved, we understand that her journey across the border is another descent into something strange and subterranean. And like some ancient travelers to the underworld, the greatest risk is that she won't be able to find her way back.

When Makina arrives in the U.S., she discovers that her brother has disappeared. She hears a rumor that he has entered the domestic service of a white military family; tracking down the family's son she discovers her brother himself, having taken the son's place to save him from war. He's a walking metaphor for the requirements and perils of crossing the border: he is indispensable but invisible; more chillingly, he has been transformed into someone else. He refuses to come back with her, and in the end, Makina finds herself in a strange waiting room where new names and identities are being parceled out. Will she, too, be changed by the crossing?

Like Aura Xilonen's The Gringo Champion, another--but very different--novel about migrants crossing the border, the translator must have had fun with this one. In the translator's note, Lisa Dillman discusses the neologism jarchar, a word Herrera adapts from an Arabic term for "to leave." Dillman chooses to translate the word as verse, and suddenly a whole host of new meanings open up in the novel: not just leaving, but crossing, as in transverse. But there are intimations, too, of changing, of conversion and reversion, of turning, and of course, of the poetic "verse." When briefly captured by the border police, Makina grabs a cop's notebook and writes the prose poem above, which he reads aloud. For Herrera (and Dillman), the act of crossing becomes a kind of writing, a story or poem written in deed. Can what is written be unwritten?