Crash Course Latin American Literature

Borders shape our reality.

If you're born on this side, you pay in pesos and get a passport with an eagle on it.

If you're born on this side, you pay in dollars and get a passport... also... with an eagle on it.

But before the U.S.-Mexico border looked like this, it looked like this.

Before that?

This.

And before that?

"The United States" and "Mexico" didn't exist.

So, borders aren't exactly permanent.

They can and do change, and get crossed.

Both in life... and in literature.

Hi!

I'm Curly Velasquez and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

[THEME MUSIC] Where you are affects who you are.

And for many Latin American authors, moving across borders has shaped their identity, sparked their imagination, and inspired them to push literary borders, too.

Like, during the "Boom era" of the 1960s and '70s, which we talked about in a previous episode, many Latin American writers went into exile in Europe.

They fled dictatorships or political persecution - either by force or by choice.

One of them was Julio Cortzar.

Frustrated with Argentina's government, he booked it to Paris.

And living far from his home country inspired him to break the literary mold.

Take his 1963 novel "Rayuela," or "Hopscotch."

It starts out as a story about an Argentine lost in Paris and his relationship with La Maga, the OG manic pixie dream girl.

And it's divided into three sections: "From the Other Side" takes place in Paris, "From This Side" is set in Argentina, and "From Diverse Sides"?

Well, this section he calls "expendable."

Just skip it if you want.

But this is not my first literary mindgame, Julio!

I know, that you know, that I'm gonna wanna know what happens there.

The novel comes with a tablero de direcciones, "table of instructions," that gives us two options: you can read in the usual, linear way.

Or you can follow a numbered chart that'll have you hopping between all 155 chapters out of order.

Except instead of reaching "The End," you'll bounce between chapters 58 and 131 forever.

And ever... and ever... and ever... and forever...

*Gasp!

* Woah, okay.

Infinite hopscotch!

Somehow both zany and meticulous!

It's no wonder that "Rayuela" gets described as an antinovela - a novel that deliberately defies our expectations of what a novel should be.

Or as a book that requires a lector cmplice - "reader as accomplice" - because it invites us to actively participate in how the story gets told.

*gasp* Irresistible.

I love being in cahoots.

Not only is the book's structure super-experimental - it really wilds out with the words, too.

Cortzar leans into an Argentine variant of Spanish.

And he uses an invented language he calls "glglico" for a scene where "she tordled her hurgales" until they reached "the slobberdigging raimouth of the orgumion."

I tordled my hurgales in 1997 and I have never been the same.

But at its heart, the novel isn't about slobberdigging; it's about the experience of leaving behind everything you once knew.

If I could sum up the novel in one scene, it's this one: A character named Talita, living in Argentina, gets talked into walking across a rickety bridge between two buildings.

High above the street, Talita starts feeling sick and keeps saying she wants to go back.

But as she's out there in the middle, her friends are like, "Keep going!

You're almost there!"

and Talita says, "Anything is better than being out here like this, in between the two windows."

Which, sure, you could read as a normal reaction to being fifty feet in the air.

But you could also read it as a metaphor for the unease of being in-between two places.

You can't easily go back there.

But you're not fully here.

You're sort of...in the middle.

And that's real.

I've felt like that myself, like when I'm not Latino enough for the Latinos but too "ethnic" for the white folk - and suddenly I don't fit in anywhere.

And for some, carrying around a hyphenated identity - like Salvadoran hyphen American - feels heavy.

Like being split between two places, except neither exactly feels like home.

So, a number of Latin American cultures have embraced terms that focus on who they are, rather than the countries they're supposedly split between.

Like in the 1960s and '70s, some Americans of Mexican descent started embracing the term "Chicano," reclaiming a word for "Mexican American" that had previously been used as an insult.

With that, they flipped the idea of being divided between two places and said, actually?

We belong to both.

El Movimiento, also called the Chicano Movement, celebrated Chicanismo as an expression of cultural pride, while pushing for social change and civil rights after decades of discrimination.

Then, in the 1980s, through the Chicana literature movement, women started calling attention to the fact that they face oppression both as Chicanas, and as women.

Take the Chicana writer Gloria Anzalda.

Having grown up in South Texas, she refers to herself as a "border woman."

But when she talks about borders, she doesn't just mean a line on a map that separates two countries.

She's talking about the invisible lines of society's expectations, dividing people by class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.

Her 1987 book, "Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza," explores those borders through her own identity.

She's mestiza, or mixed, with both Indigenous and European ancestry.

But her identity is also informed by identifying as queer and by being a woman of Mexican descent living in Texas, a distinct community all its own.

To describe all these intersections, she uses the Nahuatl word nepantla - an Indigenous concept meaning "the in-between."

She compares nepantla to the stage of writing "where you have all these ideas, all these images, sentences and paragraphs, and where you are trying to make them into one piece."

In other words, rather than thinking of identity in terms of hyphens, or divided parts, she's thinking about identity - and writing - as an act of creative combination.

Like: I'm not half of this and half of that!

I'm a whole lotta all of it.

And Anzalda goes all in on exploring the in-between.

She writes in what she calls "Chicano Spanish" - slipping between English, Nahuatl, and different variants of Spanish.

On top of that, "Borderlands" blends multiple genres.

Is it a novel?

A memoir?

A book of poems?

Essays?

Yes, all of the above.

See, it's these in-between spaces where literary innovation so often happens.

And along borders in the real world, we also find a kind of cultural innovation as peoples blend and merge to create something new.

Let me show you what I mean over in the Curly Notes... Mexican writer Yuri Herrera's 2009 novel "Seales que precedern al fin del mundo," "Signs Preceding the End of the World," follows Makina, a young woman working as a switchboard operator in rural Mexico, connecting people and information across three languages.

She's a girl between worlds, mediating across borders.

And she takes that role seriously, telling herself, "You are the door, not the one who walks through it."

But Makina's brother is so gullible, and has crossed the border after falling for false promises of free land.

So Makina heads north to try to bring him home.

Along the way, she faces the very real trials and dangers that Mexican migrants face.

Among them, she's sexually harassed and shot at.

At the same time, her story echoes Greek and Mesoamerican myths of the underworld, where the soul must move through several levels of challenges.

Makina has to cross a river "filled with invisible water monsters," and pass by the remains of those who didn't make it.

Which starts to blur the lines between myth and reality.

And like any hero, Makina is changed by her journey.

She starts out sure that she'll leave the U.S.

as soon as her mission's complete.

But then she's fascinated by the people she meets just beyond the border.

They're speaking an "intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it's like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls."

In this blend of cultures and languages, she finds "a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born."

In other words, there's something exciting and new happening here.

The borderlands draw her in - that space where people, languages, and cultures blend.

You might say it's the nepantla that she's enchanted by: that in-between where new meanings and possibilities meet.

Where we are affects who we are - but that "where" isn't always stable.

For many Latin American writers, crossing borders inspires new ways of telling stories.

And through their work, they challenge us to look at borders themselves, seeing them as more than just man-made lines.

They're also spaces of interaction, creativity, and possibility.

And they're more fluid than they seem.

Next time, we're talking about another kind of space: houses and homes.

So ponte a limpiar - get to cleaning!

'Cause you have visitors soon.

See you then.