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\"We, the Barbarians\" embarks on a careful and exhaustive reading of three of the most prominent authors in the latest wave of Mexican fiction: Yuri Herrera, Fernanda Melchor, and Valeria Luiselli. Originally published in Mexico in 2021, this work is divided into three parts, one for each author's narrative production. The book analyzes all of the literary works published by Herrera, Melchor, and Luiselli from the beginning of their writing careers until 2021, allowing for a diachronic interpretation of their respective narrative projects as well as for comparative approaches to their aesthetic and ideological contours. Characterized by the fragmentation of civil society and the decomposition of the myths that accompanied the consolidation of the modern nation, Mexican visual and literary arts have explored a myriad of representational avenues to approach the phenomena of violence, institutional decay, and political instability. The critical and theoretical approaches in \"We, the Barbarians\" explore a variety of alternative symbolic representations of topics such as nationalism, community, and affect in times impacted by systemic violence, precariousness, and radical inequality. Moraña perceives the negotiations between regional/local imaginaries and global scenarios characterized by the devaluation and resignification of life, both at individual and collective levels. Though it uses three authors as its focus, this book seeks to more broadly theorize the question of the relationship between literature and the social in the twenty-first century.

Siempre he pensado que los niños son mucho más sabios que nosotros y por eso siempre he intentado incluirlos en mis películas [...] Sin duda, cuanto más tiempo pasamos rodeados de niños, desconectados de otros adultos, más se fltra esa imaginación por las grietas de nuestras endebles estructuras. Valeria Luiselli, Desierto sonoro La presencia de los niños en cualquier obra artística que cuestione las realidades políticas de una era, de un país o de un evento, casi siempre cobra un valor testimonial que nutre tanto la visión crítica del autor como el juicio del lector. En el presente análisis comparativo de las obras de Campobello y Luiselli se tendrán en cuenta tanto el valor testimonial de la voz infantil en la escritura femenina como la forma en la que los niños, en calidad de personajes y narradores de estas obras, interpretan la realidad desde una perspectiva lúdica, como si se tratara de un juego, con el propósito de navegar los dolorosos confictos sociales y lograr sobrevivir. Desierto sonoro -originalmente publicada en inglés, Lost Children Archive (2019)- relata la historia de una documentalista que viaja en coche de Nueva York a Arizona con su marido y sus niños en busca de unas niñas perdidas entre los miles de niños refugiados y detenidos que llegan a la frontera sur de los Estados Unidos. Casi un siglo separa estas dos obras que emplean el sufrimiento y la actitud lúdica de los niños para conmover y provocar el juicio del lector, como ya es característica intrínseca de la escritura testimonial. Si bien en ambos libros la perspectiva y la presencia de los niños nos ofrecen una forma original de ver los confictos que se representan en ambos libros, es a través de la incursión de la perspectiva lúdica-infantil en la cotidianeidad como se intensifca la actitud y el efecto testimonial de las dos obras. Estos dos autores también enfatizan el carácter fundamental del juego en todas culturas.

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures the challenges that “lost”, or undocumented children experience in their attempts to cross the US-Mexico border and provides a stringent critique of the unjust and arbitrary nature of border laws. In this paper, I argue that Luiselli’s novel merges the narrative with the archival to form an “archival novel”, which generates what I call “archival narrative justice”, a form of achieving justice through an archival narrative when legal and institutional justice is absent or inadequate. In doing so, I demonstrate how the narrative form and the practice of archiving, both independently and collectively, are significant avenues for re-conceptualizing “justice” through generating counterhistories and making visible multiple marginalized perspectives. I connect Luiselli’s archival-narrative practice with how the borderlands house such counterhistories by building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on borderlands. I develop the concept of “borderland as archive” to understand how Lost Children Archive recognizes the interstitial space of the borderlands as coded with the knowledges, histories, memories, lived experiences, and resistance of border crossers and border dwellers, from undocumented immigrants to dispossessed Native Americans who have been illegalized by settler-colonial and capitalistic immigration laws.

En 2019, publicó Lost Children Archive, cuya traducción española, Desierto sonoro, salió el mismo año.3 En esta road novel se narra la historia de una madre y su hija de cinco años, apodada Memphis, y de un padre y su hijo de diez años, apodado Pluma Ligera, que forman una familia reconstituida, a punto de deshacerse. Partiré de algunos estudios y teorías sobre el fantasma en la literatura (mexicana), para luego analizar las diferencias senso-perceptivas. Con respecto a estas ideas, Carolyn Wolfenzon abandona el énfasis en lo pasado, y en cambio, propone otras formas de invisibilidad fantasmática para reflexionar sobre una serie de problemas vigentes (27) en la actualidad. Plantea que se utiliza la figura del fantasma como nuevo recurso representacional (27) que sirve como crítica social (19) porque simboliza problemas históricos y políticos no resueltos, y le da una voz a los marginados (26). Aunque Wolfenzon no trata Desierto sonoro,' sus ideas pueden ser aplicadas a la novela, ya que se critica la deshumanización que sufren los refugiados en Estados Unidos, mediante discursos que producen imágenes fantasmáticas. De manera similar, la narradora describe cómo el refugiado, al haber cruzado la frontera mexicano-estadounidense, se encuentra en \"una especie de limbo\" (Luiselli 66). Esta percepción del migrante como una especie fuera de este mundo se aplica también a los niños indocumentados, cuya representación es criticada por la narradora.6 Sufren una doble deshumanización, tanto por la política, que caracteriza a los niños como amenaza externa, sin reconocer a los niños \"como refugiados de una guerra hemisférica\" (70), como por \"la manera en que la cobertura periodística explota la tristeza y la desesperación para construir su representación: tragedia\" (95-6). El silenciamiento como estrategia política es característica de lo que se ha llamado \"spectropolitics\", término que describe \"how, in different parts of the world, particular subjects become prone to social erasure, marginalization, and precari ty\" (Peeren у Blanco 19). La narradora-madre y la dimensión auditiva Tal como indica el título en español, lo auditivo desempeña un papel central en la trama, y en específico para los dos adultos.

This essay introduces the concept of undocutime, the prolonged waiting, permanent temporariness, enforced presentism, devaluation of the time, and persistent patience of the undocumented, by bringing together Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel, Lost Children Archive , and DREAMer narratives, stories by and about would-be beneficiaries of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. To bring undocutime into focus, the article locates DREAMer narratives and Luiselli’s novel in the context of the twenty-first-century boom in child migrant stories, stories by or about a child migrant or former child migrant. This essay argues that, whereas many first-person stories by formerly undocumented child migrants adhere to a Bildung structure and offer closure and the authority of witness, Lost Children Archive uses layered narratives, nonnarrative forms, a nonlinear structure, and non-realism to tell a story about the contemporary child migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border in medias res. Via its content, form, and fictionality, Luiselli’s novel brings into relief the paralysis of witnessing and the slow violence of undocutime.

The second is something I call \"the space-of-the-novel\": rather than being, strictly speaking, a genre, it is a highly ductile rhetorical framework in which writers display (in addition to their technical skills) the existential anxiety that drives the urge to narrate given stories using given (aesthetic) strategies and (political) positions. (In addition to pure and simple resentment, which is, of course, an individual prerogative.) What I am interested in highlighting here, based on the observation of such concrete formal practices as point of view and mimesis, is the way in which these two writers acquire aesthetic authority in a cultural environment that is no longer dominated solely by the relationships between tradition and work (what Harold Bloom called \"the anxiety of influence\"), but also by the relationships the literary object establishes with the dictates of a clear political conscience; something that in other texts I have called \"the angst of legitimacies.\" The second will consider Fernanda Melchor's novels and the complementary and problematizing features both of these authors offer in terms of the aspirations and cultural metonyms of two more or less differentiated sectors of the Mexican middle class. 1 There are three strategies that appear early in two novels by Valeria Luiselli: Los ingrávidos2 and Lost Children Archive. [...]one of the main concerns of many contemporary Mexican novelists is to address the tension between society and the individual through the slippage from an internal focus (the introspective first person, the embodied third person) to an external focus: a voice that, based on the consciousness of some of the characters, recovers in a choral form (that is to say, by definition, transfictional and neurotic since it derives from conjecture rather than experience) events that happened to a collective.

The first step toward winning asylum in the United States is the Credible Fear Interview (CFI), in which the applicant narrates their life in a way that conforms with legal expectations of “credibility.” This interview process appears in several recent literary works, most notably Valeria Luiselli’s nonfiction work, Tell Me How It Ends . However, the narrative situation of the CFI, this moment of high-stakes, transactional storytelling, also provides a way of interpreting recent migration literature and understanding how such works perform credibility for the reader. By analyzing the interplay of legal and literary narratives in Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive , this article positions the CFI as the primal scene of narration for recent migration fiction.

Migrants, in turn, now commonly run the risk of abduction by sicarios and face death if they refuse to join a criminal organization, a family member in the United States does not pay a ransom, or simply because a rival gang oversees their transportation. The San Fernando massacres, along with other tragedies, are evidence of the ubiquitous collaboration of Mexican authorities with different criminal organizations.1 Since 2007, drug cartels have been allowed to operate to such a degree that they have shaped migration patterns and how Mexico positions itself vis-a-vis its southern neighbors.2 While Mexico has painted itself as a hospitable destination for exiles from political conflicts, the experience of transient Central American populations undermines this country's self-conception as a haven from political violence.3 Here, I analyze Diego Quemada-Díez's 2013 film La jaula de oro (Golden Dreams), which describes the perils that migrants encounter on their path from Central America to the United States. Ultimately, my analysis engages with the idea that the unmoored expansion of market forces, and the technological encompassing of the world, for which Martin Heidegger coined the term enframing, are the main cause for the loss of the common ground of politics. While not thoroughly addressing political contexts nor \"push factors\" or immigration triggers, this movie's portrayal of the space comprised of North and Central America cannot be understood without the changes in the political and economic cartographies that resulted from the region's integration.

In 2012, Luiselli was approached by Magalí Arriola and Juan Gaitán, curators of the private contemporary art collection Galería Jumex in Mexico, to write an entry for the catalog of the exhibition El Cazador y la Fábrica (The Hunter and the Factory).4 Part of the commission instructed Luiselli \"to reflect upon the bridges—or the lack thereof—between the featured artwork, the gallery, and the larger context of which the gallery formed part,\" fictionally.5 Housing the large private Colección Jumex, Galería Jumex was located in 2012 in Ecatepec, just outside Mexico City on the grounds of Grupo Jumex's headquarters and factory. The factory workers then recorded their conversations and stories for Luiselli to parse over and incorporate into the novel.8 From these discussions, a narrator was assembled to allegorically account for the very class conditions that exist in such a multioperational site (art gallery + factory). \"9 Philosophical about this lack of access—\"I was in a sense the gatekeeper of a collection of objects of real beauty and truth\"—one can't help but read into him a real factory worker employed by Grupo Jumex, who for nineteen years was relegated to being on the periphery of sites of institutional and aesthetic power.10 More than just a gimmick, then, Luiselli's formula inscribes the novel as a site of social and material exchange. 14 What does it mean for workers to be involved in reimagining artworks that their labor—and predecessor's historic labor—has allowed a wealthy individual to collect? (Eugenio López Alonso, collector, arts patron, and the heir to Grupo Jumex, has been frequently cited as establishing the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo in the mid-1990s in order to share his large collection of contemporary art with the public—similar to other large private collections, such as the Saatchi Gallery and the IBM Collection.15) The gallery and Fundación relied on Luiselli's benevolent interpretation of the brief; as much as it was written for the workers, Luiselli also drew on the stories of the factory workers; the reading group relied on the labor of a gallery assistant in facilitating the conversation; the existence of the collection ultimately relies on the continued labor of the workers in Grupo Jumex.

Literary sympathy and transnational solidarity are still uncomfortable bedfellows in critical thought about the politics of fiction. This essay reconsiders their relation in the context of writing about refugee crises by examining Valeria Luiselli’s reflexive, self-scrutinizing adoption of the sentimental mode. Her novel Lost Children’s Archive both solicits and repurposes sentimental engagement to stage a deeply self-conscious examination of the politics of compassion. Furthermore, it invites readers who are vigilant toward sympathetic involvement to acknowledge how self-gratifying it can be to turn the rejection of such involvement into an ethical virtue.