Brutal New World. Cultural Hybridity in the Representations of the Border in Recent Mexican Literature

Abstract

While the Mexican northern border began to assert itself in literature with the novel of Mexican Revolution and is present in stories by Juan Rulfo and José Revueltas, its imaginary explosion has metamorphosed itself in recent years within the overlapping frame-works of economic globalization (NAFTA), drug trafficking and migration. Since the beginning of the 90's, the velocity of economic, social and demographic change has heavily hybridized the border's culture inducing both social science studies and literature to the writing of hybrid narratives that try to capture a dynamic, complex and violent contemporary reality: short stories as television scripts or plays (Luis Humberto Crosthwaite); kaleidoscopic novel (Carlos Fuentes); elegiac crime chronicle (Sergio González Rodríguez), rhythmic novelization of horror (Roberto Bolaño), fables of initiation (Yuri Herrera). The border, Terra incognita and blueprint for the future, condenses the features of a new literary space, mythic and poetic, yet not wholly devoid of realistic aspects. It reaches the status of metaphor of the literary territory to explore.