The Walking Woman: Border Representation Beyond Hybridity in Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo

Abstract

In this article, I follow the footsteps of Makina, protagonist of Yuri Herrera’s 2009 Señales que precederán al fin del mundo. In line with existing criticism on the text, I frame her migratory voyage as a form of pilgrimage. Departing from other readings of the novel, I center the protagonist’s embodied experience through her journey, tracing her corporeal sensations in order to understand the border itself as a living geography traversed by vital bodies. Walking emerges as a dominant trope in Herrera’s text, as the narration returns repeatedly to the protagonist’s determined footsteps. By understanding Makina’s journey as a pilgrimage, I reconcile the ways in which she simultaneously occupies a material and a spiritual realm. As an inherent element of pilgrimage, Makina undergoes a painful loss of identity, but also demonstrates her capacity for change by rendering her subjectivity fluid. This constructs the border itself as a liminal zone, a space in flux. As a walking woman, Makina offers a framework of border representation that moves beyond and answers the limitations of existing conceptual models of the border that emphasize multiculturalism and hybridity. Reading the border through the trope of walking, I argue, points to the political potential of migrants to rewrite current border reality.