Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific

12. Crossing Borders, Locating Home: Ethical Responsibility in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange

The U.S.-Mexico border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.—gloria anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza The concept of borderlands has garnered much debate in contemporary U.S. cultural representations.1 In Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, José Saldívar argues for “changing borderland subjectivities” within the U.S.-Mexican border and points to Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) as a border novel that illustrates an “emerging U.S.-Mexico frontera imaginary .”2 Saldívar traces how physical and discursive spaces of the U.S.-Mexican border inflect the reality of U.S. cultural productions . By adding an Asian presence to the border, Yamashita complicates Saldívar’s notion of an exclusive U.S.-Mexican border. This Asian presence on the border also signals the effects of the process of globalization. Tracing the changing nature of borderlands, Yamashita examines how borders redefine notions of home and how increased globalization unmoors fixed ethnic, national, and geographic identities. Chapter 12 Crossing Borders, Locating Home Ethical Responsibility in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange Stella Oh stella oh 360 Globalization necessarily involves movement and deterritorialization , creating new nonterritorial identities and social activities. Globalization also increases our interconnectedness and hastens the process of change that underpins modern society. In this essay , I examine how the characters of Yamashita’s text experience national (dis)identification and a sense of “homelessness”: Bobby, a Chinese Singaporean Koreatown workaholic; Rafaela, a Mexican mother; Emi, a Japanese American media producer; Gabriel , a Mexican American journalist; Arcangel, a Mexican prophet and fighter; Buzzworm, an African American Vietnam vet, a.k.a. “Angel of Mercy”; and Manzanar, a homeless sansei surgeon conducting symphonies on the freeway. Their multiple positioning inscribes their bodies as material sites for reevaluating concepts of identities based on racial essentialism and nation-states. Yamashita not only criticizes the formation of nations as circumscribed by borders, but more important, creates new modes of cross-cultural and transnational homelands that respond to recent transformations in globalization, exploring the possibility of making new homes while traveling through difference. This journey is exempli fied by several passages in the novel: capital flows of poisoned oranges from Brazil to Mexico to California; the organ-smuggling operation from Mexico to the United States; the geopolitical transformation from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Orange; Arcangel ’s journey north to fight supernafta, an allegorical figure who embodies the neocolonial mechanism of capitalism; Rafaela and Bobby’s journey south; and the inaudible symphonies that Manzanar Marukami conducts on the overpass of the Los Angeles Freeway. All these movements signal discourses of displacement as the characters travel different routes searching for their roots. The Commerce of Humankind Standing on a freeway overpass in Los Angeles, Manzanar Marukami conducts the “excruciatingly beautiful” traffic of automobiles, their drivers, and the cargo they carry on the serpentine highway, a “great root system, an organic living entity.” He “understood the crossing borders, locating home 361 nature of the truck beast, whose purpose was to transport the great products of civilization: home and office appliances, steel beams and turbines, fruits, vegetables, meats, and grain, Coca-Cola and Sparkeletts, Hollywood sets, this fall’s fashions, military hardware, gasoline, concrete, and garbage. Nothing was more and less important .”3 The highway that carries all the products of “civilization ” is “an organic living entity.” The route of the highway transforms into a “great root system” that anchors civilization. While goods and vehicles are made organic, human beings are commodi fied in the novel. Yamashita reveals this highly ironic situation by contextualizing the novel within the larger black market trafficking of drugs, human labor, and baby organs. While the material goods of civilization are made visible, the people who compose that civilization are rendered invisible. When a large fire erupts on the freeway, we witness thousands of homeless come out from their encampments under the freeway. As Manzanar continued to conduct, “even he, who knew the dense hidden community living on the no-man’s-land of public property, was surprised by the numbers of people who descended the slopes.”4 The underpass represents a borderland that Gloria Anzaldúa argues is inhabited by the prohibited...