Toward a Borderlands Ethics

Abstract

By reading Helena María Viramontes’s “Cariboo Cafe” and Daniel Chacon’s “Godoy Lives,” this essay argues that Chicana/o fiction articulates what I call a “borderlands ethics.” Both Viramontes and Chacon give the undocumented migrant the power to merge the United States and Latin America, self and other, citizen and noncitizen. These mergers demonstrate how a borderlands ethical stance can produce new unauthorized truths and relations outside the law and beyond national borders. However, these stories of ghostly kinship also produce a political imperative: to resurrect borderlands relations and experiences in the public sphere. Through the trope of haunting and an engagement with a borderlands ethics, “The Cariboo Cafe” and “Godoy Lives” help us understand that maintaining a Latina/o ethnic identity is not a simple act of preservation; it is an ethico-political project that challenges the United States to form new visions of democracy and new relations with Latin America in order to maintain transborder communities and families.