Living on the stirpe. Mexico triplessl y border in Tu cabello es la frontera by J. Jesús Esquivel

Abstract

The mexican journalist J. Jesús Esquivel creates with Tu cabello es la frontera (2019) an atmospheric novel, at times ethnographic, that allows us to reflect on the flow of existence in a border territory: Ciudad Juarez. The main narrative value of the work is not found in its concrete plot, that is, in the life story of each character, but rather, being a tale of customs, a social radiography, the characters are able to be typologically representative of a reality still inhospitable and dominated by exclusion, that which has narratively given rise to the emergence of subgenres such as border literature. In this way, the reading of the novel, at least as an approach, serves to understand the meanings in dispute and the environmental conditions that link the daily activities of the people of Juarez and the perception of Ciudad Juarez itself on both sides of the border. Beyond the discriminatory dichotomy that has classically been transferred to the collective imaginary between this territory and "El Chuco", the author shows those two other border lines that are determinant in the identity configuration of the people of Juarez: the one that divides the north from the rest of Mexico and the one that diffusely separates legality from illegality, giving rise, in turn, to an alternative "paralegal" order of specific regulation. Thus, from the forbidden to the legal, from the licit to the illicit, from the proper to the foreign, Mexico presents itself as a triple border subject.