they have presence nonetheless, and the officer who has tried to arrest Makina walks away in confusion having read her response. In The Gurugu Pledge however, that characters are instead described as having failing eyesight from staring at the city (Laurel 2017, p. 60). They are forever trapped outside and growing old with the wait. Even though the city is physically close, for most the dream of the city will never be achieved. Such distance cannot be viewed upon a traditional map. As Sheller states (2018, p. 20), mobility exists in relation to “class, race, sexuality, gender and ability, exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales.” Within this work we find not only proof of this statement, but as readers we experience the human impact of such relations.
In the final phase of Signs Preceding the end of the World, Makina walks through a labyrinth of city streets with her guide, Chucho, until they reach a small door, through which she enters alone. She walks down the steps to a place of complete silence, devoid of people. Here, in the underworld, she is given her new documents. She has left her previous self behind, the girl who left Mexico has disappeared, but a new person has been born in her stead. When she reaches the moment of transition, she realises that she is prepared:
…the Big Chilango, all those colors, and she saw that what was happening was not a cataclysm; she understood with all of her body and all of her memory, she truly understood, and when everything in the world fell silent finally she said to herself I’m ready. (Herrera 2015, p. 107)
Conclusion
Each textual journey over multiple ethnic, linguistic, cultural, national and political-economic borders has to be articulated with the historical and contemporary journey of the exile, immigrant and refugee. They are journeys of displacement, alienation, pain loss and, perhaps even in the end for some, of opportunity. The subject of address, the object of representation, unvoiced and invisible, the border crosser met and meets that hostility reserved for the stranger who comes today and the discriminatory and exclusionary legislation shaped for the stranger who stays, or might stay, tomorrow. (Hawley 1996, p. 276)
It is true that for some these journeys offer opportunity, an idea played upon in The Gurugu Pledge “… everyone had a brilliant future that awaited them in Europe” (Laurel 2017, p. 25). However, the idea of the border crosser as ’unvoiced and invisible’ can now be called into question as migration literature works to illuminate these liminal areas while elucidating the impact of such ‘discriminatory and exclusionary legislation’. If border crossers are still perceived to be ‘invisible’ it is because the viewer has refused to look, as shown through the alternative border narratives discussed in this chapter. Thus, in a re-humanisation of the migration debate, works such as these create new maps for our time, depicting the lived experiences of those who interact with the lines that cut across our world maps, while interrogating pre-conceptions of borders and border crossers. The border areas discussed above are by their nature violent, but they are also spaces in which unexpected things may happen. Sites of transition; they hover in the murky zone between life and death. The peripheries, for the very reason that they are further from the centre and the ideas of conformity associated with it, can offer potential; but current motilities (the abilities of different people to move independently through and within spaces) mean that for some they are deadly and for many others damaging.
Migration literature also exists in relation to other literatures that touch upon similar subjects and discuss other histories of movement. The late American writer Toni Cade Bambara provides a powerful example:
Stories are important. They keep us alive. In the ships, in the camps, in the quarters, field, prisons, on the road, on the run, underground, under siege, in the throes, on the verge—the storyteller snatches us back from the edge to hear the next chapter. In which we are the subjects. We, the hero of the tales. Our lives preserved. How it was, how it be. Passing it along in a relay. That is what I work to do: to produce stories that save our lives. (cited in Hawley, 1996, p. 41)
Originally published in 1985 and referring to a long history of slavery and colonisation in the USA this passage could have been written far more recently and refer to contemporary migration and migration literature. It shows the confluence of border narratives, the relationships that exist between colonial, corporeal and planetary histories and interrelations (Sheller 2018, p. 21) and the importance of understanding such texts in relation to each other, thus allowing us to better understand our current border spaces, ourselves as border crossers and the historical, cultural and political contexts which either control or privilege our mobility. The works discussed in this chapter draw maps of two contested borderscapes, they show the damage done, the lives on hold and on the move, the dance of our cultures across these liminal spaces, the choices that need to be made if mobility justice is to be achieved, and the proof that such great changes have previously be attained and are possible.
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