Down in Mexico, Transmigration and Storying at the Border

Abstract

New technologies on the Mexico-United States border involve an unprecedented collaboration between Silicon Valley and the United States Department of Defence. They bring with them a new form of narrating the border itself which, drawing on Science Fiction and Fantasy, is a means of justifying increasingly cruel ways of policing it. Crossing the border is often a transmigration, suggesting a change of racial states that involve moving from a darker to a whiter shade. In this article, I experiment with a transmigration of stories, moving across different traditions of imagining the future. My ficto-critical approach is inspired by Magical Realism as a way to enable a dual spatiality of the text. It allows for Western and Native understandings of the land to co-exist and is a strategy to explore the connections between the imaginary and the real. The fragmentation, and the splicing involved in bringing them together, is a methodology that makes visible the project of colonisation and violence that are made invisible by the new technologies of the border.