by Scott Adlerberg
Last week in this slot Gabino Iglesias wrote a piece about his new book Zero
Saints. He discussed writing in Spanglish, novelistic violence, and positionality
in today's indie crime fiction. I hadn't read the whole book when I read his
piece last week, but now I have finished it, and looking back at what Gabino
wrote, I find one sentence in particular has been ringing in my head:
"I wanted the novel to explore life after crossing the la
frontera."
La frontera - that long border between the United States and Mexico that never
stops being a source of discussion, contention, interest, outrage...
Okay, how many books have you read, movies have you seen, where somebody has
crossed la frontera, or intends to, heading in a southerly direction?
It's a familiar trope in the popular imagination, and the reasons people
head across the border from the United States to Mexico are many. I'll
list a small number that occur to me:
- To escape the
law: After criminal activity in the U.S, one or more people flee to
Mexico. (See innumerable books and movies not to mention criminals
from real life.)
- To escape the
law and/or kick back with booze and whores for very cheap. (See, for
example, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch).
- To chase and
hunt down Native Americans who struck ranchers and the US Cavalry, then
fled south. (See Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee - but enough with
Peckinpah whose obsession with Mexico is well-known).
- To become a
bullfighter and impress a woman. (See Budd Boetticher's 1951 film The
Bullfighter and The Lady, with Robert Stack).
- To observe a
revolution in action. (See the life of Ambrose Bierce, whose mysterious
last days, probably in Mexico, perhaps at Pancho Villa's side, are
explored in Carlos Fuentes' The Old Gringo.)
- To prospect for
gold. (See The Treasure of Sierra Madre, either the great book by
B. Traven or the great movie directed by John Huston.)
- To ease
personal pain and guilt by bringing a dead friend to his hometown for
burial. (See the film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.)
- To have
adventures of all sorts as you go from boyhood to adulthood. (See Cormac
McCarthy's Border Trilogy).
- Etc.
It
strikes me, looking at this list, that it's very male-oriented, but Mexico
exists as a testing ground or place of escape in women-centered narratives
also. Just to name a few works:
- Set It Off, in which three
of the four African-American women who rob a bank get killed trying to
escape, but one, Stoney, played by Jada Pinkett Smith, escapes on a bus to
Mexico.
- Donald Cammell's
Wild Side, in which Anne Heche and Joan Chen, after many
tribulations, finally get clear of the men in their lives to escape
together, as lovers, to Mexico.
- The recent Sicario,
with Emily Blunt joining a federal task force that does dirty work against
drug cartels on Mexican soil.
- Thelma and
Louise,
a clear example of if only, as in if only Louise had been willing to drive
through Texas, the outlaw pair might very well have escaped getting caught
and made it to Mexico.
There
are so many more examples and I'm sure I could go on for hours. As could you if
you start making your own list. But the point is that for North Americans,
Mexico for a long time has served as "that other place". It's the
place where so much is possible that's not possible "above" the
border. It's a bit like a country that exists symbolically as a gringo's
subconscious. Go to Mexico and anything can happen. It can serve any
number of needs for the North American going there. You can find yourself
in a nightmare or you can find sanctuary. Even if it's just a place to
retire to, it still represents a haven, a place where a North American of
moderate means can live quite well. The weather will be hot, the colors
provided by Nature intense, and you can get yourself a house on the Gulf or the
ocean. To the North American imagination, Mexico is a country and a
psychological space. But what Gabino Iglesias does in Zero Saints
is reverse that trope, and if the reader has any doubts about what he's doing,
he breaks into his crime tale to tell the meaning of "la frontera"
for someone crossing it going north.
A little more than a third of the way through his novel, Gabino has a chapter
that begins, "What happens when you cross la frontera is that you leave
a place to enter a void......You do everything in your power to become a
gringo, to fit in, to become as unnoticeable as the cracks in the
sidewalks. Then you start walking with less confidence because everything
is mysterious and new and scary and you never feel bienvenido.
What
happens when you cross la frontera is that la frontera keeps a piece of you
inside, hasta el hueso, where you can't heal yourself. It slashes
you in places no blade can reach and cripples you in ways you don't
understand...
What
happens when you cross la frontera is that your body becomes a magnet for the
bad stuff that has piled up all along that awful dividing line."
Awful dividing line? That's not how North Americans generally describe
it, unless they say the line is awful because it's porous and we need to build
a gigantic wall....but that's another story.
There's a good bit more to the Zero Saints chapter on la frontera, and I
won't give it all away. It's incisive and painfully honest . In
crime fiction at least, I've rarely seen the reversal of "the
crossing" trope presented so explicitly. If for the North American,
going across the US-Mexican border is a descent into the subconscious,
frequently the id portion of the subconscious, where the shackles one has on up
north can come off, then for the Mexican crossing the other way, it's like a
trip to the land of a harsh super ego - lots of threats and punishments and constraints.
Better behave 'cause if you don't...
Fiction
from the other angle, that's Zero Saints. It serves as a bracing
corrective.
