Open Borders – Open Wounds: The Ambivalence of Pain and Narration in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper

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Abstract Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) tells the story of borderland characters moving between fictionalised versions of Guadalajara, Mexico, and the city of El Monte in the United States. This essay argues that the novel evades reductive readings within a simplistic framework of ‘Latinx fiction’ by rendering an aesthetic register of ambiguity and ambivalence, and a narrative politics of openness. The book is not only a metafictional comment on the nature of storytelling in general, but also on the dilemma of telling borderland stories within overdetermined political contexts. Plascencia uses allusive imagery from the political realities of the borderland (trauma, wounds, the border as dividing line) to highlight the symbolic indeterminacies of physical and abstract borders and their crossings, and about the political ambivalences that necessarily accompany such an endeavour. The essay focusses especially on how the novel navigates its speculative landscapes and the dissolution of geopolitical boundaries in a metafictional mode which self-consciously acknowledges the dangers inherent in the aestheticisation of historically situated suffering.