Resumen de Border violence and broken dreams in 21st-century mexican literature

Oswaldo Estrada

• In this article I study several novels published between 2009 and 2019 by male and female writers that explicitly portray how the polemics of immigration migrate from various territories of subjective violence—that which can be easily perceived—to unknown plains of symbolic violence, which is almost imperceptible and nonetheless powerful, disruptive (Žižek 1-11). Literature, after all, situates us in ambivalent zones of conflictive emotions and affect, personal and collective memories, or justified and unjustified fears. Literature reminds us, especially now, in the midst of chaos and confusion, hate crimes, ethnic discrimination and fear of others and otherness, that there is always more than the official version of history that tends to divide the world into two categories, so that we may separate, with minimal intellectual effort, the “good ones” from the “bad ones,” or the “legal” from the “illegal.”