Chronicle Logic and Human Rights Discourse in the Migration Nonfiction of Francisco Cantú and Óscar Martínez

Abstract

Abstract: The present article considers two recent works of nonfiction that treat migrations toward the US-Mexico border: Óscar Martínez's Los migrantes que no importan: En el camino con los centroamericanos indocumentados en México (2010) and Francisco Cantú's The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (2018). Reading these contemporary "pseudo-ethnographic narratives" alongside colonial-era crónicas de Indias , the article considers how both works ultimately succumb to a colonialist "chronicle logic" despite advancing a pro-migrant human rights discourse. Thus, the works of Cantú and Martínez are called into question not only for the ethics of their respective methodologies—Cantú became a US Border Patrol agent to better understand the borderlands whereas Martínez traveled the migrant trail as a journalist—but for the ways in which their discourses prove self-sabotaging. Moving beyond mere questions of positionality, the partial failure of Los migrantes que no importan and The Line Becomes a River is used to question the viability of the pseudo-ethnographic narrative and, more critically, the sustainability of human rights discourses that require the approximation of migrant experiences and traumas.