In the summer of 1988, while Margaret Thatcher destroyed a society she insisted didn’t exist, Deng Xiaoping synthesized Mencius with Hayek, and Mikhail Gorbachev unmade the Soviet Union, the Mexican bourgeoisie partook of its third-favorite pastime after binge drinking and short selling: literary blood sport. The historian Enrique Krauze—a sycophantic surrogate of Octavio Paz, the poet-dictator who traded antifascism for anticommunism as he angled for the Nobel—had taken a hatchet to the novelist-caudillo Carlos Fuentes, arguing in a long essay that the writer who had become “everyone’s favorite Mexican” in the United States was “a foreigner in his own country.”
The takedown was vicious even by the standards of the Mexican Republic of Letters, where feuds reach levels of animosity unthinkable in countries where criticism is understood to be about writing, not writers. To his credit, Krauze admitted that his “discomfort with Fuentes” was no longer “intellectual or literary, but moral.” The novelist, he explained, was “a gringo child of Mexican origin.” Having grown up in a diplomatic family in Washington, D.C., Fuentes saw Mexico “refracted through a North American perspective.” That last phrase sounds odd in English but is only mildly retro in Spanish: norteamericano as a demonym for the United States was still common in the 1980s. But why not say una perspectiva estadounidense, angloamericana, yanqui, even gringa? Wasn’t Mexico also part of North America?
The Pazian-Fuentista Conflict was so overblown that even the Los Angeles Times felt compelled to cover it, noting some of the writers involved had “ceased speaking to each other.” That’s because Krauze’s essay was an unwitting expression of the political anxieties of the moment. While the idea of a free-trade agreement with the United States had yet to seduce the Harvard PhD who was about to become president of Mexico, the political unconscious of the Mexican Republic of Letters already sensed that it would confront an unsettling question: Can one still conceive of Mexican literature independently of the United States?
Krauze’s hatchet job was published simultaneously in Paz’s Vuelta and Leon Wieseltier’s New Republic. The English rendition was the work of Edith Grossman, the translator of Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Carlos Fuentes. Krauze’s broadside, in other words, was processed by the same machinery that transformed his bête noir’s dense Spanish prose into a delicacy fit for palates reared on Iowa corniness. Consider two telling deletions from this line, which quotes Fuentes:
México “el país imaginado e imaginario”, no era una nación tangible, histórica. Era sólo una víctima de los Estados Unidos y una lengua por conquistar.
A literal-minded translator might render the passage as follows:
Mexico, “the imaginary, imagined country,” was not a tangible, historical nation. It was only a victim of the United States and a language waiting to be conquered.
Yet the translation published in The New Republic reads:
Mexico, the “imaginary, imagined country,” was not a tangible, historical nation. It was only a victim of imperialism, an instrumental reality, a language.
Even though Krauze is describing Fuentes’s view, The New Republic wouldn’t print a sentence in which the United States is identified as Mexico’s oppressor, perplexingly replacing the nation’s name with the vague “imperialism.” Likewise with the deletion of “conquered,” which in the original figures Fuentes the gringo as a colonial adventurer, pillaging Mexico’s linguistic wealth. The process of being translated into English had refracted Krauze’s views through a U.S.-centric perspective, turning him into what he despised: a North American writer.
The irony was lost on Krauze, but his “discomfort” contemplating a Mexican writer’s turn toward the United States proved prophetic. Over the course of the 1990s, Mexicans would experience the traumatic metamorphosis known as the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the end of that decade, Carlos Salinas—president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994 and one of the architects of NAFTA—would title his memoirs México: un paso difícil a la modernidad. But the future into which this reader of Mao and Gramsci plunged his country looked strangely like the era before the Mexican Revolution. Peasants lost the communal lands their grandparents had clawed back from haciendas; workers discovered that labor rights were meaningless if industries went bankrupt. Nurses became nannies; artisans, gardeners; smugglers, kingpins. Salinas and his mandarins—the bureaucrat-intellectuals who had ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century—promised that NAFTA would mark the nation’s triumphant entrance into the first world. Instead, the Mexican economy’s sudden exposure to American capital, along with the financial meltdown that ensued from its leaders’ shortsighted attempt to hold onto power, drove millions of Mexicans to migrate to the United States.
Most went because they didn’t want to starve, but a small minority left of their own accord. Not all of the latter camp were wealthy, but none were destitute. They had sufficient English and cultural capital to secure admission to American universities. After graduation, many stayed. Four decades after the Pazian-Fuentista Conflict, some of the most accomplished contemporary Mexican novelists—among them Yuri Herrera, Valeria Luiselli, and Álvaro Enrigue—live and work in the United States. The experience of having their subjectivity decentered by a comfortable migration forced them to embrace a contradictory position that allowed them to face the United States and Mexico at the same time: the North American perspective.
A superstructural byproduct of Mexican neoliberalism, the fiction that resulted from this schizophrenic point of view was more stylistically interesting than the bulk of American literature produced alongside it—and, for that matter, of much Mexican writing as well. Consciously or not, these writers became interpreters, translators, and mediators who could explain Mexico to America and America to Mexico. The NAFTA Novel—how else to call it?—gives voice to an antineoliberal cosmopolitanism born from the historical forces set in motion by neoliberalism.
While the vision of a united North America that emerges from this paradoxical politics is beautiful, it is a utopia predicated on violence. Far from inaugurating a new era of transnational fraternity, NAFTA only heightened the hostility that has poisoned interactions between Americans and Mexicans since the U.S. Marines raised the Stars and Stripes over Mexico City in 1847. The postnational literature these writers produced was not a roadmap to a more just future; it was nothing but a dream, a fantasy—a fiction. Enrigue, Luiselli, and Herrera were among the first, and last, true North Americans: the organic intellectuals of an imagined community that never became real.
The North American Boys
The month after Krauze’s essay was published, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) declared that the Mexican people had chosen its candidate, Salinas, as the “Standard Bearer of the Mexican Revolution.” It was the conclusion to a fraudulent election. For decades, the PRI had managed to raise Mexicans’ standard of living, even if the party sometimes found it necessary to shoot at students and peasants. The bargain was simple: the Standard Bearers would make the people prosperous; in exchange, they asked the people to leave government to them.
Their brand of neoliberalism had little in common with that of Augusto Pinochet’s Chicago Boys.
Salinas’s ascension came at a delicate time for the party. The PRI’s program of state development depended upon oil exports—and thus on high prices for petroleum in the global commodities markets. In the 1970s, the Arab embargo in solidarity with Palestine had made crude oil expensive, allowing the PRI to borrow from international lenders and quell unrest with social spending. After peaking at $156 per barrel in April 1980, however, the U.S. oil benchmark plummeted to almost $34 in July 1986, triggering a series of economic crises and shattering the compromise that kept the party in power (both figures are adjusted for inflation).
The party’s apparatchiks panicked—until they remembered the cadres they’d sent to the United States to study economics. These young technocrats lifted their heads from reports on the urgent need to end milk subsidies for young mothers and said they could fix this mess. The model to follow, they explained, wasn’t Gorbachev but Deng: instead of trying to placate economic discontent with political reform, the party should placate political unrest with economic reform. After a power struggle that led the PRI’s left wing to quit the party, the older apparatchiks decided the next Standard Bearer would be one of these North American Boys, namely Salinas.
The North American Boys had three goals: renegotiate the national debt, reduce state involvement in the economy, and diversify exports. Their brand of neoliberalism had little in common with that of Augusto Pinochet’s Chicago Boys, but for our purposes we can reduce their ideas to a vulgar slogan: Free markets at home; free trade abroad! But trade with whom? The sister republics of Latin America were broke. Europe was uninterested. China was a competitor. The only option was the empire Mexicans regarded with the most mistrust: the United States.
The North American Boys had broken with the long tradition of bourgeois Mexicans getting their doctorates in Europe and had gone to graduate school at Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Going north to study neoclassical economics was for them a form of rebellion against older PRI apparatchiks, whose mishandling of the economy struck them as idiotic. Like rock music and psychedelics, the cult of the market was American and thus a forbidden fruit. They returned home ready to work through what Fuentes had christened as the Tremendous Texan Trauma, dreaming of an imagined community where Mexicans and Americans would at last be friends.
NAFTA was supposed to be the first step toward this utopia. But when formal negotiations began, Salinas stumbled on a problem: everyone hated the idea. The PRI’s nationalist old guard worried economic integration would entail sacrificing sovereignty; the internationalist left warned free trade without development aid guaranteed disaster; the petit bourgeois businessmen feared competition with Americans would bankrupt them; the unions feared wages would fall; the peasant organizations had nightmares about a flood of Iowa corn; and in the mountains of Chiapas, a group of philosophy students from Mexico City concluded they had to accelerate their plans to muster an insurgent army. To appease these concerns, the North American Boys secured protections for Mexico’s nationalized oil industry—a symbol of the revolution’s struggle against foreign extractivism. In exchange, they agreed to exclude provisions guaranteeing the free movement of people across the U.S.-Mexico border.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see how that bargain gave birth to contemporary American fascism. Between 1994 and 1998, the first four years when NAFTA was in effect, tens of thousands of Mexican small businesses went bankrupt, many of which were replaced by deregulated sweatshops. Farms located on communal lands redistributed in the wake of the revolution had been protected from predatory investors by the country’s constitution, but Salinas struck down those safeguards to get the Americans to negotiate. Then, between the early 1990s and 2006, corn imports from the United States grew by over 400 percent. The subsidies the United States paid American farmers meant that corn was sold in Mexico for an average of 19 percent less than its cost of production. The millions of Mexicans who lost their livelihoods were forced to take their labor to the United States. And as the number of Mexicans living in America nearly tripled over two decades, gringos who already hated them in the abstract found concrete reasons for their hatred: they now had to compete for ever-lower wages with undocumented Mexicans. Two decades later, these resentful Americans would cheer Donald Trump as he interned children in concentration camps.
Since most Mexicans were broke, nearly everything made or processed in Mexico—avocados, auto parts, cocaine—fetched higher prices north of the Rio Grande. (Today, exports to the United States account for around one-third of the Mexican GDP.) Crucially, Mexican art could cross the border as easily as avocados; under NAFTA, there was no difference between a film by Alejandro González Iñárritu and a case of Corona. Before long, successful Mexican artists and filmmakers discovered they had an easier time emigrating than most of their fellow nationals, even if they still faced more barriers than a car or a television set. Writers, however, could not count on the well-funded immigration lawyers retained by Hollywood studios and Manhattan museums. They flocked instead to the American institution that until recently had the legal prerogative to endow any foreigner with the right to live and work in the United States: the university.
The North American Novelists
In order to leave their home country to study or teach in America, the NAFTA Novelists needed to be proficient in English and to have undergraduate degrees—two forms of distinction that point to their common origins in Mexico’s middle and upper classes. But if these writers were born relatively comfortable, why did they uproot themselves to try their luck in the United States? To best answer the question, we’ll have to retrace the path that led one of the pioneers of the NAFTA Novel to emigrate.
The model to follow, they explained, wasn’t Gorbachev but Deng.
Álvaro Enrigue was born in 1969 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, but grew up in Mexico City. His father was a mid-level bureaucrat at the Secretariat for Finance; his mother was a Catalan chemist, one of tens of thousands of refugees who immigrated to Mexico after the fall of the Spanish Republic. These public-sector jobs afforded the family a middle-class lifestyle, but their long hours meant that Enrigue spent much of his time alone in his parent’s apartment, reading through their well-curated library.
Around the time the young Enrigue fell in love with literature in the early 1980s, the Mexican economy began coming apart. The Mexico of those years, Enrigue told me over email, looked more like “communist Poland” than what comes to mind when we think of the country today. Negotiations for NAFTA began while Enrigue was finishing his communications degree at Universidad Iberoamericana, and by the time the agreement was ratified, he and his partner were working as hard to get ready for their first child as his parents had worked to support four. The couple’s white-collar jobs, Enrigue told me, were demanding—he wrote copy for news, science, and arts-and-culture segments at ABC Radio; his partner did translation and media analysis for a public relations firm—yet so poorly paid that the new family felt as if they “were always treading water.”
When NAFTA finally went into effect on January 1, 1994, Salinas woke up with a pleasant hangover. He’d thrown a legendary party in the presidential palace the night before to celebrate the New Year—as well as his own entrance into history. But then the unthinkable happened, again and again and again. First, the Zapatista uprising. Months later, the PRI’s presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, was assassinated. Then, in December, the mandarins of Colosio’s substitute, Ernesto Zedillo, discovered that their predecessors had made a mistake by availing themselves of one of the oldest tricks in the party playbook: increasing social spending during election years to pacify the masses for a few months. To fund this vote-buying racket, they issued short-term Treasury bonds that sounded like a sweet deal: lend the Mexican government your pesos and the government would repay you in dollars. But the Zapatistas and Colosio’s killer had spooked the foreign investors that NAFTA was supposed to attract. This sudden capital flight threatened the fixed exchange rate between the peso and the dollar—which in turn posed an existential risk to an economy that had just opened its doors to American capital.
Faced with this oncoming catastrophe, Salinas’s mandarins reversed course: they borrowed dollars to buy pesos, making the Mexican currency artificially scarce and thus propping up its value in the foreign exchange. But the world’s financiers called their bluff and declared the peso overvalued, which accelerated capital flight. The mandarins were forced to buy their own dollar-denominated bonds, until the Mexican Treasury all but ran out of dollars. By then Zedillo was in office, but there was not much to be done. The new administration took a deep breath and pulled the plug, devaluing the peso, crashing the economy, and almost causing a global meltdown.
In the wake of the December Mistake, the radio station made dramatic cuts to Enrigue’s hours—and thus to his income. But there was an upside: he finally had time to write. While the broke publishing industry put out few new literary titles that year, Joaquín Mortiz, a press known for taking risks, announced a contest for first-time novelists. Enrigue finished his entry hours before the end of the submissions period. The farcical tale of an installation artist swept up in the orbit of a wealthy collector who fancies himself an artist but turns out to be a psychopath, the novel was bad, Enrigue thought. But he was desperate to bury his dreams with a good conscience before focusing on finding work.
The bad novel, however, won the prize and was released to instant acclaim, transforming the twenty-seven-year-old Enrigue into one of Mexico’s best-known writers. Its more consequential effect was creating the conditions for a new literature. Consider a passage from an interview that Enrigue granted to nexos in 2021:
La muerte de un instalador was critical of the transformation unleashed by Mexico’s opening to the world—but also overwhelmed by it. I think that novel was a direct consequence of the brute-force globalization that NAFTA came to represent. It reflects the fear and dazzlement of a kid who grew up in the deeply provincial world of Mexico’s post revolutionary nationalism.
By the time Enrigue’s novel became a success, his first child had been born. He and his partner concluded that raising their son in the midst of the crisis would be too difficult and decided to emigrate. “There were two possible destinations: Europe or the States,” Enrigue told me. The couple decided to go to the United States because two of their literary friends, the editor Marcelo Uribe and the poet Coral Bracho, had enrolled in the doctoral program in Spanish at the University of Maryland at College Park, where a number of well-known Mexican authors taught at the time. Besides, Enrigue’s partner was an American citizen, so he was able to apply for permanent residency. The family moved to Maryland in 1998. Enrigue returned to Mexico a few years later and wouldn’t receive his degree until 2012, but he had become an early adopter of the North American Perspective.
While Enrigue was not the first Mexican writer from his generation to pursue graduate studies in the United States—Cristina Rivera Garza completed her PhD at the University of Houston in 1995—he was far from the last. In 2003, the University of Texas at El Paso awarded Yuri Herrera an MFA in creative writing. By the time Valeria Luiselli’s cohort was graduating from college, New York had dethroned Paris as the dream destination for aspiring Mexican writers.
The North American Archive
After his MFA, Herrera went on to earn a doctorate in Spanish in 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research centered on the mining industry in Hidalgo, the landlocked state where he was born. When Herrera was young, his parents had relocated to the state capital of Pachuca, one of the most important mining hubs in Mexico. The experience of living among a bona fide industrial proletariat shaped Herrera’s radical politics and writing. His dissertation was unorthodox by the standards of literature departments; instead of focusing on literary texts, it drew on oral history to dismantle the “historical lie” told by court records related to the 1920 mining accident that killed eighty-seven workers in Pachuca. After a fire broke out in a mine owned by an American company, the administrators had collapsed all entrances and exits to the tunnels, hoping to choke out the fire by cutting off oxygen and claiming that the miners inside were long dead. That story was difficult to square with the fact that, when they finally opened the shafts days later, several workers were still alive. For Herrera, a critique of capitalism in Mexico is by definition incomplete without an account of its imperial relationship with the United States—hence his adoption of the North American Perspective, in both scholarship and fiction.
New York had dethroned Paris as the dream destination for aspiring Mexican writers.
Herrera’s most recent novel is set in New Orleans, where he has been a professor at Tulane since 2011. Season of the Swamp is about a minor episode in the biography of Benito Juárez, the Zapotec lawyer who became Mexico’s first Indigenous president. Historians, journalists, hagiographers, poets, and novelists have written about every aspect of his life, but there’s a small gap in the record. Long before he became president, Juárez’s Liberal Party was defeated by Conservative rivals; like so many Mexicans during hard times, he moved to the United States. Juárez and his liberal comrades arrived in New Orleans in 1853, eight years before the Civil War. That he returned home eighteen months later is about all we know for certain.
Herrera decided to fill the factual gap with fiction. In that sense, Season of the Swamp is a conventional Latin American historical novel, a close relative to Gabriel García Márquez’s book about Simón Bolívar, The General in His Labyrinth. As the Cuban literary theorist Roberto González Echevarría has argued, the literature of the Hispanic New World emerged from the tradition of legal and notarial writing of the Spanish Empire, whose lawyerly bureaucracy produced mountains of documents on nearly every aspect of life in the colonies. Authors were immersed in this archive from the start, which González Echevarría calls the “origin myth” of Latin American literature. This figurative archive grew to incorporate nineteenth-century naturalism and twentieth-century anthropology, culminating with the Latin American Boom. The novels it produced, such as García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, aspired to become archives themselves.
Herrera’s innovation consists in setting one of these Latin American novels in the United States and filling it with material drawn from an anglophone archive—specifically, newspapers published in antebellum Louisiana. The novel consists to a large extent of passages taken from the press, a gesture reminiscent of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: “That a fisherman grabbed his dagger and stabbed an officer in the chest after being fined for the fifth time for selling bad fish. That two engineers on a steamer got in a knife fight over a woman. That a powder keg was found on Canal, on neutral ground, as if anyone needed more fire.” New Orleans becomes so vivid that Juárez himself at times seems a perspective without a perceiver. If he is rather taciturn, however, his comrades in exile sound like Mexican revolutionaries, declaring that “the people should have the land, that’s fair and just.”
Here, Season of the Swamp’s status as a NAFTA Novel becomes clear. Mexican readers know enough about Juárez that the man need not say much to serve his narrative function as a familiar proxy exploring a place as unfamiliar to him as to the reader. An American readership, by contrast, knows enough about New Orleans that it can serve a reciprocal function as a familiar setting for characters as foreign to the reader as to the city. The novel is neither Mexican nor American, neither a Latin American archive fiction nor a U.S. documentary poem.
Nowhere is the aesthetic and political richness of the North American point of view clearer than in a passage where the man who will become first Indigenous leader of Mexico since 1521 is mistaken for an enslaved person. The exiles are walking in the street when they are approached by a cop. “Who’s this one belong to?” he asks. “You do know he can be here after eight only in the company of his owner or with written permission.” When the exiles don’t answer, the cop grows confused: “Wha . . . ? You ain’t . . . Wait, all dressed like that . . . What are you?” One of Juárez’s friends replies: “Mexican.”
This encounter proves transformative. Confronting the alienation of being mistaken for chattel, Juárez realizes that history has a task for him. Similarly, Mexican readers are invited to consider that most American history—slavery—is also their history; if Mexico as we know it would be unthinkable without Juárez, Juárez would be unthinkable without New Orleans. For their part, American readers are invited to consider the possibility that Mexico’s past might be the future they should aspire to reach. The two histories meet halfway, and suddenly we see that the border is a fiction, that neither side can exist without the other, that we share a past, present, and future—none of which can be contained by the concept of “nation.” In this way, we all become North Americans.
The North American Mediation
If one of the NAFTA Novel’s signature characteristics is to enact and thematize a mediation between Mexico and the United States, then Valeria Luiselli is an archetypal interpreter. Born in Mexico City in 1983 into a wealthy family, her father was an adviser to President José López Portillo and, later, the Mexican ambassador to South Korea and South Africa under Salinas. Her mother, however, was an activist for Indigenous rights; Luiselli credits her in an early essay with instilling in her “a certain class guilt.” In 1994, when the future novelist was ten years old, and NAFTA had just begun, her mother decided to leave the family to live and work with the Zapatistas.
The literature of the Hispanic New World emerged from the mountains of documents produced by the Spanish Empire on nearly every aspect of life in the colonies.
After graduating from an international boarding school in India, Luiselli moved to Mexico City and studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional. She began writing for Krauze’s magazine Letras Libres, where she met Enrigue. The two began dating, and they moved together to New York for her graduate studies in literature at Columbia in 2008 (they have since divorced). Luiselli’s first years in America were busy. After publishing a first book of accomplished, if bloodless, essays about subjects such as bicycles and maps, she had a child and wrote two novels in Spanish: Faces in the Crowd, a Borges-meets-Duras number about a Mexican literary translator living in New York who engages in forgery to please her American employer’s insatiable appetite for “the next Bolaño,” and The Story of My Teeth, an art-world routine that is neither about teeth nor much of a story. Both books were well received in New York and earned the author deserved accolades, including a teaching position at Bard College—and a green card awarded on literary merit. Luiselli’s early reception in Mexico, however, illustrates the risk of adopting the North American Perspective: to be called a foreigner in your own country. About the nicest thing the head critic at Letras Libres had to say about her first two novels was that “Luiselli . . . owes more to North American poetry [la poesía norteamericana] than to Spanish-language fiction.”
In 2019, after a transformative experience volunteering as an interpreter at an immigration court, Luiselli published Lost Children Archive. In a first for the author, who perhaps concluded that her fellow Mexicans would never forgive her for capitulating to the American gaze, it was written originally in English—and therefore addresses an American reader much more directly. As a result, the novel represents a radicalized approach to the North American Perspective: having previously written about a literary translator struggling with the expectation that she import her Mexicanness to New York, Luiselli has decided to translate herself.
The plot—a couple on the verge of divorce take their son and daughter on a road trip from their home in New York to a remote part of Arizona—is a framing device for the novel’s central concern: the large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border, hoping to reunite with family members. This decade-plus humanitarian crisis elicits Lost Children Archive’s central philosophical question: How could a writer like Luiselli hope to tell the stories of these children without becoming a “ventriloquist” of those “most silenced peoples,” the accusation she once levied against Toni Morrison in an unfortunate early essay for a Letras Libres issue devoted to undeserving Nobel laureates?
As with the NAFTA Novelists in general, moving to the United States shifted Luiselli’s perspective; the experience of being transformed into a subaltern, however privileged, raised her political consciousness. Suddenly Morrison’s novels made more sense (which perhaps explains why her essay has been scrubbed from the Letras Libres website). The novel is her attempt to work through the structural conditions that underwrote her earlier dismissal. The dilemma of ventriloquism is that of the unnamed Mexican mother narrating the novel’s first half. Like her husband, an American, she records soundscapes for a living. He’s a quasi-situationist who conducts “no direct interviews” and instead prefers “just walking around listening”; she comes from the world of “hard-core political journalism” and “pragmatic storytelling.” The couple joke that she is a “documentarist” and he a “documentarian.” They met while working on an NYU-sponsored project recording a sample of every language spoken in New York City—which could just as well be an approving representation of liberal diversity sentimentalism as a parody of the same.
Luiselli, however, writes from the North American Perspective, so she knows that the bien-pensant platitudes of Manhattan are not the whole story. As a child, she had a front-row seat to the historical cataclysm that brought the speakers of many of those languages to New York—including, unbelievably, herself. Toward the beginning of the novel, the narrator declares that “new families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time.” The suggestion is that the marriage between the Mexican documentarist and the American documentarian has given form not just to a new family but also to a young nation—or, more accurately, a supranational imagined community. But in acknowledging that the North America personified by the “little tribe” is the product of “violent wars” and “social revolutions”—words that are common enough in bourgeois Mexico but have no place in liberal America’s melting-pot fantasies—Luiselli proves that she is one of the greatest exponents of the NAFTA Novel. The narrator’s happiness, much like the sentimental diversity fantasy parodied in her and her husband’s work, has come at the price of the suffering that neoliberalism has unleashed on the continent.
When the couple finally finish the project that brought them together, they realize that their approaches, like their personalities, are less compatible than they thought. He begins plotting an “inventory of echoes” about the Apache; she develops an obsessive interest in the “children’s crisis at the border” after the mother of one of her daughter’s classmates, an Indigenous woman from Oaxaca, asks for her help translating legal documents to secure the release of her children from a Texas detention center. She applies for a grant to produce a “sound documentary” that, unlike most media, will “cover the situation from the perspective of the children.”
The narrator’s happiness has come at the price of the suffering that neoliberalism has unleashed on the continent.
Soon, however, her project presents her with a long list of impossible dilemmas. Politically, she wonders, “how can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum?” Ethically, she wrings her hands about why she would think that she “can or should make art with someone else’s suffering?” Her other anxieties sound like Bari Weiss in reverse: “cultural appropriation,” “micromanaging identity politics,” “the correct use of personal pronouns.” The list is funny but elides the most important problem: other than the cries, sobs, and testimonies she records while volunteering as an interpreter in a New York immigration court, she is unlikely to have a chance to record any of the “lost children.”
But then the documentarist’s husband drops an unexpected bomb: his project about the Apaches will require him to move to the Southwest, effectively ending their marriage. Yet the couple aren’t ready to give up, and so they agree on a compromise: the family will drive to Arizona together. Along the way, she and her husband will work on their respective projects. After that, she reflects, they will probably split up, and she will return to New York without her husband.
The bulk of the book is the story of this road trip: a long succession of descriptions of landscapes, motels, diners, gas stations; short vignettes that register the family’s interactions with strangers both friendly and hostile; conversations, arguments, and reconciliations; inventories of the audiobooks and music they play, the books they read, the Polaroids the boy takes with his stepmother’s camera. Interspersed throughout are bits and pieces of Apache history, fragments of radio dispatches about the “crisis at the border,” and chapters of a modernist prose poem about the medieval Children’s Crusade. Luiselli manages these modes by putting González Echevarría’s theories into practice and structuring the novel as an archive, a collection of documents that aren’t so much a single story as narrative building blocks for any number of stories. Since none of these narratives is definitive—because all exclude part of the collection—the archive becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of telling a story that isn’t partial.
And yet, the novel sometimes indulges in too-easy catharsis. After hearing from the radio that migrant children are set to be deported on a millionaire’s private jet, the family takes a detour to the airfield. By the time they get there, the children are being loaded onto the plane. After a breakdown worthy of a Hallmark movie, the mother asks the boy, watching the scene through his binoculars, to describe what he sees. He narrates the scene as if the lost children were astronauts in a starship out of the David Bowie record his parents have been playing in the car.
Critics have noted that this reassuring fantasy absolves Luiselli’s American readership of their guilty conscience. I would add that it does so by adopting their point of view, abandoning the North American Perspective. The children of these affluent, liberal readers will never be lost. But just as our narrator’s children can imagine that a flight carrying other kids back to hell is Ziggy Stardust’s spaceship, even Barack Obama, who included the novel in his annual list of recommendations despite personally approving the deportation of millions, can imagine what it would be like to lose his own daughters to a government as cruel as his own.
The North American Catastrophe
For all its utopianism, the NAFTA Novel remains the literary form of a diminutive bourgeois class: the lettered colonials tasked with mediating between the elites of Mexico and the United States. But the latter elite no longer has use for such cosmopolitan intermediaries. In the summer of 2025, as Luiselli prepared to teach her fall classes at Bard, Trump attempted to ban international students from attending Harvard, where she’d previously been a visiting professor. While a court soon issued a stay on that outrageous order, one wonders whether Luiselli’s successors will be able to convert their student visas into green cards.
The current phase of North American neoliberalism has given rise to situations whose moral ugliness exceeds the Obama-era identity liberalism that makes up the ideological substratum of Lost Children Archive. Every day, the Mexican American children of peasants displaced by NAFTA put on the U.S. Border Patrol’s green uniform—or the gray-and-white fatigues of the branch of the Mexican Army that enforces immigration policies imposed by the United States—and head into the desert to hunt children born on the wrong side of the southern Mexican border. History has its ways of reminding us that even those whom we’ve grown accustomed to seeing as the oppressed are capable of wielding imperial violence.
Perhaps that’s why Enrigue, that early adopter of the North American Perspective, came to terms with recent events by writing a book about the moral ambiguity that inevitably colors interactions between two imperial elites on the brink of an alliance that would benefit their ruling houses—thanks to postnational translators who are at once subaltern intermediaries and among the most privileged people in North America—while condemning the rest of the continent to even harsher oppression. Published in Spanish in 2022 and in English last year, You Dreamed of Empires is a NAFTA Novel about the death of the NAFTA Novel. Set largely over the course of November 8, 1519, with a few flashbacks and one wild flight of fancy that rushes through the following five centuries, the novel is a hallucinatory account of the day Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma Xocoyotzin met for the first time in the floating metropolis of Tenoxtitlan (Enrigue renders the capital of the Mexica Triple Alliance, inaccurately known as “the Aztec Empire,” as it appears in sixteenth-century documents) on the site that is now Mexico City.
Much like Herrera’s and Luiselli’s novels, You Dreamed of Empires features a North American Archive, the contents of which are partially enumerated in the epilogue. The collection includes colonial texts familiar to any cultured Mexican—Díaz del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain, Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain, Cortés’s own Letters of Relation—as well as canonical literary works ranging from the baroque dramas of Calderón de la Barca to the postmodern stories of Borges. It includes contemporary Mexican historiography, as well as scholarship produced in American universities: the groundbreaking work of anglophone authors such as Camilla Townsend and Matthew Restall. More compelling than the archive are the book’s gestures of mediation, the most complex and least hopeful of the genre. But for nearly two hundred pages, as we read the opening chapter of one of the best-known narratives in the world, we are able to believe that, thanks to translators, another world is possible.
In sharp contrast to recent American books about the period by authors so desperate to atone for their country’s imperial arrogance they wind up painting condescending portrayals of Indigenous people as innocent sheep awaiting slaughter, Enrigue depicts the Mexica as human beings with the capacity for both good and evil. The members of the Mexica court are presented not as victims but as imperial noblemen who wouldn’t be out of place in Rome. Indeed, the Spaniards are humbled by the beauty of Tenoxtitlan, a clean, bustling New World Venice, larger than any city they have seen. It isn’t clear which dream of empire—the Spaniards’ or the Mexicas’—is about to end and which to come true.
Nobody will stop the Mexica now: they have horses.
The most sympathetic Indigenous character in Enrigue’s narrative is the translator Malinche, whom Mexican nationalism has traditionally portrayed as a traitor to her people. A Nahuatl-speaking princess from the coast, she is enslaved and given in tribute to a Maya warlord, who in turn gifts her to Cortés. Suddenly transformed into the most powerful woman in the world by nature of being the only one who understands the languages of both sides, at first she pretends not to speak Spanish and communicates with Cortés through a second interpreter. But she eventually reveals her secret to Cortés, who has no idea that the Mexica refer to him as the consort of his translator. There is a moment between them that seems to echo the metaphor of the binational family as a new nation that we found in Lost Children Archive. Malinche, floating amid flowers in a palace pool, wonders why Cortés wants to give the empire to the distant king of Spain. “All she had to do was steer him right,” she thinks, “make him understand that if he played his pieces in the most practical way, they could take a city for themselves.” That capital would be neither Mexica nor Spanish, and yet both at once: a North American Rome.
In the final scene of the novel, however, the pure potentiality of Malinche’s imagined community meets a gruesome end. Moctezuma, very high on mushrooms, calls Cortés to the throne room. An elaborate ceremony follows. The emperor convinces Cortés to take mushrooms too, and the conquistador has a vision of the coming course of history: war breaks out; the Mexica are defeated; Spain gains an empire; Mexico becomes independent; and Enrigue writes his novel. But then Cortés wakes up, still in the throne room, and Moctezuma orders one of his men to break his neck. Nobody will stop the Mexica now: they have horses. Their imperial dream has come true.
Though the Mexica and the Spaniards are obvious stand-ins for Mexico and the United States, the allegory is ambiguous. The Spaniards of You Dreamed of Empires are foreigners at the mercy of an empire ruled by a cruel and frivolous despot, yet well positioned to destabilize the tenuous equilibrium that sustains the imperial ruling class—which suggests the Mexica could in fact represent the Americans. Likewise, Moctezuma talks in contemporary Mexican slang, but he dances to rock music in English. Cortés is a blond beast and a rapist—but he’s also an idiot, easily duped and murdered. The translator is the most powerful woman in the world but also enslaved: a fallen princess and an empress in the making, a victim of sexual violence and a Machiavellian opportunist.
Unlike Luiselli, Enrigue has no patience for diversity sentimentalism; unlike Herrera, he does not believe in historical heroes. Here, I think, is the heart of his critique of the neoliberal utopianism that animated the Mexican architects of NAFTA. Consider this quote from a nexos interview with Salinas for an oral history of the treaty:
We Mexicans are the product of so many different mixtures, aren’t we? Hernán Cortés recounts that, when he met Moctezuma for the first time, the Aztec ruler said to him: “You are welcome here, because in this land we’re all foreigners.” Why do I bring this up? Because that’s part of the reason why we decided to open things up. When we first took steps to negotiate the agreement, people who had valid concerns would say: “Hey, this is bringing us too close to the outside world.” But we came from outside. The great thing about Mexicans is that we’ve managed to assimilate the different currents that flowed into the origin of our country, those brought by the Spaniards, yes, but also the Jewish, Arab, and African currents, the currents of those who arrived here against their will, brought as slaves. That was what gave me enough confidence to take such a momentous step.
Perhaps this is the cipher that unlocks Enrigue’s allegorical critique of the North American Perspective: Moctezuma is Salinas, a man who, by dreaming of empires, opened the doors to the imperialists. But what are we to do with that? The NAFTA Novel has no answers. Running under the polished surface of Enrigue’s novel is a barely suppressed anxiety. For all of their class privileges, he, Luiselli, and Herrera remain Mexican nationals living in the United States under the second Trump presidency. The way things are going, the NAFTA Novelists—and younger generations of Mexican writers—may soon be obliged to follow the advice Jorge Luis Borges offered the other Jorge Luis Borges: leave behind the form that has served them so well and “imagine other things.”
Perhaps the Post-NAFTA Novel will abandon its predecessor’s sometimes neurotic insistence on transnational legibility and embrace the erudite obscurity that disappeared from North American letters when admiring Ezra Pound ceased to be acceptable. Perhaps it will reject as tiresomely sentimental all notions of writing as mediation between cultures and instead thematize the impossibility of translation, embracing formal devices that punish monolingual readers or telling bitterly pessimistic stories about transnational conflict at the level of interpersonal relations. Perhaps it will accept the challenge posed by Enrigue’s latest novel and repurpose the hallucinatory affect of late empire as the driving force of fiction in which history is so out of joint that even the wildest conspiracy theories seem coherent by comparison.
Speculation about the novel of the future is little comfort to the novelists of the present. But setting aside the woes of bourgeois Mexican immigrants, the current moment has revealed that, even at its most idealistic, the North American Perspective envisions a postnational region—not a borderless world. The two migrant children who haunt the background of Lost Children Archive are Indigenous girls from Mexico, but for years the migrants who have suffered most from the cruelty of the American government—and increasingly the Mexican government—have been citizens of nations such as Guatemala, Haiti, and Venezuela, where the sort of hardship brought about by the December Mistake has been the rule for decades rather than a transient exception. North America, it turns out, is not an island.