‘Signs Preceding the End of the World’: An Epic Tale of Migration
A review of ‘Signs Preceding the End of the World’, by Yuri Herrera (And Other Stories, 2016)
Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World) is a striking book. It deals with the journey of a Mexican girl, Makina, to the U.S. to bring home her brother. She is sent across the border because men cannot be trusted with the task, and because she is ‘smart and schooled’ in the words of her mother. But her mother, whose note she carries with her, knows there are risks. In any case, Makina leaves her silver mining town, with its tunnels and streets riddled with bullet-holes, and heads north.
The story, written by a Mexican writer-academic, explores the experience of Latin migrants to America while invoking and evoking the mythological. In the opening pages, the road opens up and swallows a man, car and dog. And like Dante’s pilgrim or Orpheus, Makina has to travel through a kind of underworld — the U.S.-Mexico borderlands — to reach someone missed and loved: her brother, who was promised American land by their father, from whom they are estranged. Makina’s is a sort of hero’s journey, with people-smugglers, vigilantes and treacherous terrain testing Makina’s mettle. But Makina is up for it, able to handle herself in a world of threat, including male predation.
Makina’s is a sort of hero’s journey, with people-smugglers, vigilantes and treacherous terrain testing Makina’s mettle.
It may be a slim book but it is also a rich one, well plotted if formulaic, (which is not per se a bad thing), and written with economy and occasional lyricism. It is also full of made-up words and phrases: ‘new tongue’ means English; ‘anglo’ means American. Mentions of the ‘invisible water monsters’ of the Rio Grande, or of Makina seeming to fly, blend the real and unreal, and Herrera does this with increasing frequency and insistence. He affirms that the ‘crossing’ of migrants to the U.S. from Mexico, through a world of eyeless corpses and primitive men mad with nationalist zeal, is on a par with the great epic tales. Translator Lisa Dillman’s deflty renders all this, including Herrera’s made-up language.
The Guatemalan poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón, who lived in exile in Mexico, once told André Breton that Mexico was ‘a place for the mutable, the disturbing … in a short, a land of dream.’ For many migrants fleeing hardship, it is the U.S. that is the land of dreams. Yuri Herrera’s achievement is mixing the old with the new, the real and the unreal and, in doing so, working within a Mexican artistic tradition and giving it renewed social relevance at a time of fierce debate on immigration in the U.S. and elsewhere.
