Narrating the Non-Nation: Literary Journalism and "Illegal" Border Crossings

The twenty-first century has been hailed as ushering in a new era of globalization and "post-nationalism," in which the nation-state is becoming an increasingly "obsolete" category (Appadurai 169). Such grand claims are belied, however, by the strong wave of resurgent nativism in the U.S. that has accompanied immigration reform debates of the last decade—most recently manifested in Arizona's notorious SB 1070 and similar legislative efforts in other states¹—as well as by the accompanying escalation in "boundary enforcement" at the U.S.-Mexican border (Nevins 158-59). As immigration spiked to ever higher numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s in the wake of NAFTA, policy enforcement "crack-downs" suggested a new level of border policing. Operation Hold-the-Line in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 implemented more rigorous enforcement at highly populated points such as San Diego and El Paso, driving border crossers through less populous areas and harsh desert conditions (Eschbach 4, 9). These developments resulted in large numbers of immigrant deaths due to dehydration, suffocation, hypothermia, and hyperthermia. The United States Government Accountability Office reports that border crossing deaths as a whole more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, although this increase was not accompanied by a corresponding rise in illegal entries.

In response, the last decade has seen a flurry of books on the subject of undocumented immigrant crossings and deaths including: Dead in their Tracks: Crossing America's Desert Borderlands (1999) by John Annerino; Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001) by Rubén Martínez; The Devil's Highway (2004) by Luis Alberto Urrea; Dying to Cross: The Worst Immigrant Tragedy in American History (2005) by Jorge Ramos; Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite With His Mother (2006) by Sonia Nazario; and The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands (2010) by Margaret Regan. These texts reframe the immigration debate through graphic narrative accounts of the human costs of our border policy, and they emphasize the pressing urgency of this crisis through the haunting leitmotif of border deaths.

The title of this essay clearly takes its cue from Homi Bhabha's postulation that "nation" (understood as a sense of collective peoplehood that is geographically bounded and claims the right to sovereignty) is brought into being largely by stories, including shared histories and myths as well as "literature." Because stories of nation generally strive for a sense of homogeneity, they inevitably obscure or leave out elements that do not easily fit into the "imagined community" (Benedict Anderson's famous coinage) of the nation. The now standard labeling of undocumented immigrants as "illegals" in mainstream media suggests the degree to which this population has been narratively constructed as not fitting into the boundaries of the American "nation"—indeed, as fundamentally threatening that nation. Perceptions of Latinos as a national threat, Leo R. Chavez argues, have been shaped by "a history of ideas, laws, narratives, myths, and knowledge production in social sciences, sciences, the media, and the arts" that constitute a powerful set of "discursive formations" (22; Hall 6, qtd. in Chavez). In the wake of 9/11, titles linking immigration to threats to America's national security and even survival have proliferated.²

The authors of the border-crossing texts that I examine here clearly seek to intervene in this strident narrative of immigration as a threat to the existence of the nation by offering alternative narratives in which undocumented people are not imagined, first and foremost, as "aliens." These texts offer counter-discourses, reframing the story of immigration in terms that tend to shift the focus from the borders of "our" imagined community, to construct alternative notions of ethical communities. As works of literary journalism, these accounts capitalize on a culture in which "life narratives" have become not only instrumental in discourses on human rights, but also eminently marketable (Schaffer and Smith 7, 25, 27). The current popularity of life writing suggests the degree to which these books might be instrumental in advocacy by reaching...