The lost ones: Post-gatekeeper border fictions and the construction of cultural trauma

Abstract

In the wake of heightened border policing measures including Operation Gatekeeper (1994) and Operation Hold-the-Line (1993), and the subsequent escalating deaths of undocumented migrants crossing the border, writers including Ana Castillo, Reyna Grande, and Susan Straight have begun to narrate the deaths and disappearances of undocumented border crossers as a form of cultural trauma that fragments Latino and Mexican families and communities. Expanding the notion of the “disappeared” to take into account migrant disappearances at the border, these novels increasingly attend to the significance of absent bodies that interrupt narratives of belonging and identity. In assigning responsibility for cultural trauma, the novels condemn nativism, the demand for cheap and exploitable labor, and the institution of border enforcement initiatives that knowingly increase the possibility of migrant deaths, in an effort to bring attention to the human costs of inhumane border and immigration policies. But they also suggest the construction of collective identities based on a recognition and narration of the trauma caused by migration and disappearance.