Trespassing the U.S.-Mexico Border in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange

The 1990s, which marked the five-hundred year anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas, coincided with the emergence of new additions to the canon of dystopian literature. Produced by authors who are not typically associated with the genre, these novels argue that dystopia is not something we need to imagine because it is already here. Two examples—Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997)—overly equate our dystopia with the ruinous impact that colonialism and capitalism have on racialized non-white persons.