Transitional Space: Reading Contemporary Border Literature Through Historical Representations of Baja California

While eighteenth century accounts of the Baja Californian peninsula described its geography as either an insurmountable challenge to the colonial project, or as a place of “wasted” resources which had yet to be extracted, the Jesuit missionaries serving as the vanguard for the colonization of Baja California faced the threat of psychological breakdown. Ivonne del Valle identifies the conflicted and “delirious” register of their writing as occupying “Un lugar intermedio entre el orden letrado y las fronteras” (15). The distance between the “lettered city,” or the epistemological ordering that it represented for literary theorist Ángel Rama, and the “real city,” or the oral and extra-textual liveliness the former seeks to incorporate or represent and thereby dominate, is exacerbated in the case of Baja California⁶. While the “lettered city” that Rama describes as an epistemological tool of colonization seeks to incorporate the “real city,” the “real city” itself always exceeds its practices of ordering. This figure of incommensurability, or of the un-representable excess of the “real” city and its connection with oral and pre-colonial culture, is a residue of continued and unresolved colonial anxiety about where reality is anchored. This figure continues to structure debates about border literature which seek to situate a critical position that resists the fetishizing gaze of either North American literary theorists or of the Mexico City-dominated publishing industry by stabilizing the diverse “quotidian reality” of border life as external to and the proper referent of literary texts (Castillo and Tabuenca 68).

A kind of historical parallel to the “obsessive” discursive positioning of border culture in Tijuana, the Jesuit missionaries’ chronicles of their experiences in the peninsula before and after the order’s expulsion demonstrates how Baja California has historically served as a place where this difference, or excess, can be deposited or recuperated. At the same time, the peninsula’s geography has opened the question of how cultural and political programs can be exported and applied to the margins of an empire, a nation, and an economy. In this sense, Baja California has functioned in theory and in cultural representations as shorthand for the distance between signifier and referent that pries open the ordering logic that accounts of political economic and national historical reality seek to impose. In a similar way, I argue, Regina Swain’s stories see Baja California, and Tijuana specifically, as perpetually on their way to being incorporated into someone else’s map of the world. It is in this sense that California has served as a limit to the symbolic regimes of the letrado order, of the Jesuit project of verifying Catholic universality, and as the defining limit of two national cultures. Only by reading contemporary writers through this longer history of representation, can we situate questions about the pressure put on representations of daily life at the border, especially as this pressure arises in relation to theorizations about national and economic reality. This framing also allows for analysis of contemporary deployments of colonial-era myths as the Californian inheritance of border literature. Reading this way shows how the constructedness of border identity might have less to do with postmodernity than with a longer history of strategic deployments and representations of Californian marginality, both geographically and in relation to projects of imperial expansion and, later, national culture.

As Ivonne Del Valle argues in her account of the occupation and evangelization of the peninsula in Escribiendo desde los márgenes, northern territories such as Baja California and Sonora constituted “extreme geographical spaces” (19; unless otherwise indicated all translations of quotations are mine) whose landscapes and Indigenous populations challenged the textual and epistemological expansion of the colonial project. Geographic extremity also appears in Ángel Rama’s distillation of the kind of Western reason that underpinned the practice of colonization, disrupting an idea of harmony between this form of rationality and the world that it traces⁷. His paraphrasing of the colonizers’ definition of their crucial term “order” suggests that producing or making things would have been equivalent to putting them in their place, their proper place, “el lugar que les corresponde” (19). But if the Europeans were “producing things” in the New World, how would they know their proper places? That is, what rule would have guaranteed the correspondence between things and “el lugar que les corresponde”? Between putting things in their proper place, and producing them according to a rule intervenes that which Ángel Rama quickly summarizes as “Concierto, buena disposición de las cosas entre sí.” (19).

In describing the project of colonialism through the planning and construction of cities, however Rama hints at how geographical contingency threatened the colonial project of making the world uniform through the application of uniformity. Ventriloquizing the voice of the king, Rama explains, “con anterioridad a toda realización, se debe pensar la ciudad, lo que permitiría evitar las irrupciones circunstanciales ajenas a las normas establecidas.” Furthermore, “Una ciudad, previamente a su aparición en la realidad, debía existir en una representación simbólica” for, in the absence of drawn plans, the plans and directives of the founders “podían sufrir correcciones derivadas del lugar o de prácticas inexpertas” (21). The limits to the uniform symbolic world created by planning the city as physical manifestation of a projected social order lay in the capacity for either “local conditions” or “inexpert execution” to produce changes in this symbolic order. Later on, reproducing an idea behind Thomas More’s imagined rational Utopia, Rama quotes him as claiming: “He who knows one of the cities will know them all, so exactly alike are they, except where the nature of the ground prevents” (24). Again, here, geographic and topographic extremity is formulated as the limit to the general application of Western rational rule (of rule itself) which relies on an anticipated sense of harmony between imperial plans and the environments in which they were mean to be actualized. A sense of harmony like that often assumed to pertain between to written language and what it describes-an act both of tracing and of projection. Such “harmony” could only be troubled or disrupted by inexpert execution or the fault of the ground itself.

In practice, however, this harmony was not experienced. In the example of Baja California, there is a discrepancy between local practices of survival developed at the “margins” of the colonial project and the textual products later compiled by the very missionaries who developed them, or by others using their notes. Jesuit missionaries served as “metonymic” representatives of European epistemology who had to develop their own physical and emotional strategies for surviving life on the edge of an empire (Del Valle 20). Moreover, the re-publication and circulation of their narratives and observations came to serve an ideological function as evidence of the Spanish empire’s successful expansion. These missionaries directly experienced “la tension entre ciertos planes de dominio y la epistemología que los sostenía y el saber práctico y necesario para sobrevivir en entornos geográficos con grupos humanos particulares” (Del Valle 22). This tension had effects on the writings of Jesuits situated in Baja California, who developed “una duda respecto a las posibilidades de coherencia y transferencia de una epistemología y una cosmovisión a otros sitios, independientamente de las circunstancias” (Del Valle 19). Jacobo Baegert and Miguel del Barco are the primary examples Del Valle provides. Their physical experiences and textual production in and about the peninsula, serve as “palimpsestos,” where different layers and practices of signification and worldmaking coexist alongside each other (Del Valle 19). This coexistence might otherwise be described as the “desencuentro radical entre dos universos,” between the Western worldview brought with them by the Jesuits and the worldview of the Indigenous peoples for whom the peninsula would not have represented the margins of a foreign empire (Del Valle 220). Missionaries in what is now northwestern Mexico experienced a lack of harmony between colonial rule and local conditions. The tension that took its place suggested not just the unsuitability of local conditions, but a more profound doubt about the transference of European epistemologies to different locations.

The situation in the 18^th century in this region can be seen as an embodiment of “un profundo abismo entre esa ciudad presa del impulso ordenador de la letra y la ciudad real (popular y oral) que pujaba por mantener su propia diferencia” signaled by Rama’s thought, a contestation over reality whose violence was experienced not only by the Indigenous peoples whose worlds were disrupted by the missionary project, but also by the Jesuits themselves (Pistacchio). In one sense this chasm was larger in places like Baja California during the colonial period, where the geographic and social terrain was unpredictable and where the institutions with the power to resolve disputes were far away⁸. Del Valle also defines the extremity of sites like the Californian peninsula in terms of a logistical difficulty they introduce into a familiar dialectical construction, as “el viaje occidental -de lo mismo a lo mismo vía la mediación de otro- debido a sus circunstancias particulares no podía hacerse con la comodidad de poder girar el rostro y encontrar una lengua y una densidad histórico-cultural similar a la propia” (Del Valle 22). This metaphorization of the dialectical operation between self and other into a voyage suggests that these European subjects may have struggled to get back on course from their confrontations with otherness in California. This seems to have had lifelong consequences for the missionaries who in many cases had difficulty re-integrating themselves into European society.

Del Valle’s argument unfolds through a suggestion that cultural discourses and forms are primarily functional as long as they have their basis in a lived reality of “densidad histórico-cultural” (Del Valle 22). This argument uniquely reverses the priority of the terms of the “ciudad letrada” and the “ciudad real,” subjecting the former to the logic of the second. It implies that the letrado’s lettered city in practice actually functioned as a “real city,” defined by oral and popular transmission of shared cultural codes which would not have been able to operate or be projected elsewhere without this aspect of customary and non-textual shared reality. In this sense, Del Valle suggests that it might have been more possible for the Jesuits to retain their sense of epistemological stability in a European city, or even in a larger city in Mexico at that time, than in an extreme and marginal location like Baja California. In this sense, Del Valle herself relies on the geographical extremity in order to invert a traditional hierarchy. Paradoxically, this kind of argument about cultural density providing a center of “histórico-cultural” stability is the kind of argument against which Northern Mexican writers have had to fight in order to position “literatura del Norte” as more than either a fetishized simulacra generated by Mexico City writers and readers, or as defined solely by its marginality to national cultural production. The inversion this argument rests on leaves open the question of what lies between the lettered city and the real city, between the imposition of Western order and the geographical contingency articulated as its primary limit. In one sense, madness, or the loss of reality-sense is a guide for this in-between space⁹.

The fragmented writings of the “sujetos delirantes” among the Jesuit writers from whom later European authors borrowed information for the production of maps, encyclopedias, and natural scientific texts, represent, “una escritura que ocupa un lugar intermedio entre el orden letrado y las fronteras” (Del Valle 15, 19). The “intermediate” nature of their writing and experiences derives not only from the tension between the “order” they were meant to both find and impose on these “new” territories, and the unfamiliar environmental and interpersonal challenges which they came to face, but also from their positions as representatives of the colonial project. From this perspective it is easy to read accounts of missionaries expelled from California leaving their new adopted “homeland” as a sentimental narrative defense against this intermediate register and the traumatic epistemic violence experienced and expressed by these very missionaries to which it refers. They were confronted not only with the loss of sense of their pre-existing worldviews, but also with the limits of the applicability of these epistemological frameworks. In this scene, the practices of natural scientific and ethnographic description served as a defensive gesture or a last recourse. These methods provided a way of recuperating some value from the frontier and for the missionaries to imagine themselves not as having been unnecessarily isolated from their familiar cultural centers, but as working in service to an external European audience. In this sense, scientific production functions as “la práctica occidental de autopreservación en condiciones de absoluta desventaja, un mecanismo aislado que permitía establecer con el medio ambiente una relación en la que el sujeto occidental conservaba cierto control” (Del Valle 186). This “mechanism” of Western scientific production was not something arbitrarily deployed in and on newly encountered environments, but a tool to help establish a relation with the environment as a way to maintain sanity and a sense of control in the face of epistemological instability. Baegert’s and Del Barco’s texts are proof that the peninsula was neither fully uninhabitable nor fully habitable for them, and their “deliriousness” might be described as an effect of writing in a register and for an audience with no room for this experience of being between worlds.

At the beginning of her story, which reworks an urban legend, “El Diablo también baila en el Aloha,” Regina Swain writes, “La ciudad sigue siendo la misma, no importa cuánto llueva o cuánto se vaya en los deslaves. La Frontera sigue siendo la misma: Zona Libre desde que era sólo una pequeña isla llamada California” (23). Here there are multiple oversimplifications: that the city doesn’t change, no matter how much erosion the physical landscape undergoes; that the border continues being a free-trade zone, perhaps as it has always been; and that, despite having started out as “una pequeña isla llamada California,” the border region is really unchanged since this romantic mischaracterization was first projected onto the northern frontier of the Spanish empire in the Americas¹⁰. The first two of these comparisons are ironizing. The idea that changes to the city (even landslides which would affect its residents) don’t change its image or the underlying dynamics is cynical in a similar way that reducing the border city to the term Zona Libre is cynical, suggesting that the view from which the city is seen is always as abstracting as the perspective of transnational capital. The economic overdetermination of border culture makes it a wonderful critical object, but can have the effect of freezing a particular image of the border, one which emphasizes dynamics of economic inequality solidified by free trade agreements. This framing leaves two options for reading border writers, who are seen either as re-affirming or as subverting these neocolonial dynamics. Instead, Swain ironizes the frozen or ahistorical image of the border city in her 1992 collection Señorita Superman y otras danzas, in order to allude to the persistence of older problems of colonial-era representation of the region. Her last suggestion, which seems the most explicitly humorous-that the border grew up from a little island called California, and that this developmental process has not produced significant changes-is a suggestive and confusing conflation. What would it mean for the border to have its origins in the colonial-era myth of California as island? And would reckoning with these colonial-era representations reinforce the status of the territory as former colony? Reading Swain’s stories through a decolonial frame instead challenges the easy periodization of Californian peninsular history into discrete eras, such as the period of conquest, the period of colonization, and the period after independence. Instead the myths and ideologies prevalent in different areas are shown to exist together and overlap, with consequences that are both ironic and devastating.

Regina Swain begins her story “Carta al Conquistador Balboa” with a disorienting parody of the kind of introduction one might find to an explorer’s travelogue and the ease with which such a text would have thrown together disparate elements of a foreign culture. Here the mythical Amazonian queen Calafia begins by citing a date, “Año 6704 del Periodo Juliano, según lo marca el Calendario del Más Antiguo Galván,” which would correspond to the year 1991, two years before the collection was published, and a place, “Desde una isla llamada California” (Swain 57). Swain brings together an anachronistic collection of terminology-the Catholic Julian calendar, an almanac whose first edition was published in Mexico in 1826, and the name of an island which, by that point, was known to be a peninsula-under the ironic rubric of a situating epigraph to a letter written by the mythical queen of the Californian Amazons, to “mi buen Conquistador Balboa,” who never would have traveled as far north into the Pacific as Mexico. Calafia writes from this disoriented spatiotemporal location signaled by these jumbled referents which the letter’s writer summarizes as “este Imperio del Norte.” The purpose of her letter to the character Balboa attempts to seduce him back to her shores which she claims he did visit. Calafia’s letter has the tone of Dido writing to Aeneas, and includes accounts of her “buen imperio éste que usted conquistara,” “repleto de objetos que a usted alguna vez le parecieron mágicos: pieles de sirena virgen, cuernos de unicornio, telescopios para ver el alma…” (Swain 57). She describes the “island” to him as a place where “el reflejo de los sueños sigue siendo igual, no importan salidas o llegadas,” depicting it as a place frozen in time where “el conquistador sigue siendo conquistado por los ojos grandes de las de mi raza” (57). Here, in a different context than before, Swain describes the “island” as an unchanging place, while the imperfect subjunctive phrasing leaves its conquest a source of unrequited desire. Referencing Balboa’s failed career as a farmer, she asks, “¿Tedrá [sic] usted rebaños de olas en su imperio marino? La distancia lo acerca ahora, como a la A y la Z en esa tabla tan suya de hacer palabras.” (58). Calafia, the writer of the letter, wills her “empire of the North” and his “empire of the sea” to approach each other, as the letters A and Z, seemingly far from each other, are brought together as members of the same category, by the horizon of the alphabet and, by extension, a world of words. This gesture analogizes textual proximity to the closure of distance between empires and is characteristic of Swain’s stories and her inclination to trouble the borders of historical periods, as well as those between fiction and historical fact. Here the realities of historical time and geographical distance are made to seem mythical from the perspective of a textual world where the mythical, the fictional, and the factual coexist.

In the next story about Calafia, and the last in the collection, she grows up as a girl in a Tijuana neighborhood subject to flooding, where Swain again converts the mythic into the thinly fictionalized quotidian and viceversa. This Calafia is named for the city taxi-bus on which she was born and the passengers dub her a queen, “porque jamás llegaría a princesa” (Swain 61). In her daily world of mudcakes and lizards her grandmother tells her stories. One story is about Noah and the great flood, but Calafia doesn’t believe her grandmother’s affirmation that the dinosaurs and griffins drowned as a result of this flood, as “Calafia estaba segura de conocer a varios” (Swain 62). When the character named Homobono deserts this Calafia of the second story and their children, she begins to cry. As the story explains:

Lloró porque ya nadie le platicaría que la Tierra es redonda y que el Río Colorado no tiene vergüenza, que las misiones no son secretas y que los cirios no crecen en la iglesia, sino en el desierto. Lloró también porque se le dobló una uña y porque aprendió a querer a Homobono por zonas: la del norte, cabello sedoso y ojos de fruta; la del sur, piernas fuertes para atrapar las suyas; la del centro, ¡ay la zona Centro! (Swain 64)

Here Swain stages a conflict between two perspectives. Calafia responds to language literally-she thinks the Colorado, or red river, is blushing, while Homobono knows Colorado is just a name. Where her frames of reference for “missions” and “cirios” are spy movies and churches, his are the Baja Californian desert. And while the mapping activity she engages in is as a lover learning to admire different parts of his body, Homobono knows that the world is round. The narrator ridicules here the juxtaposition of different kinds of referents. Calafia seems petty, she wants to chat, doesn’t take things seriously, and cries because she’s bent a fingernail, among other things. But when Calafia cries, her tears become “un río impresionante que se llamó Ama-ZONAS, en honor al mapa fabuloso de la anatomía de Homobono” (Swain 64). In this character’s reality, personal stories connect names to places and mapping is an act of desire, not of knowledge production or the imposition of a scientific ordering logic. For her the world, like the body, is less of a globe than a collection of zones, and the experiences connected with them. Swain disarticulates the myth of Calafia, Amazonian queen, and puts its parts back together across two stories, connecting this myth with the woman who is resigned to a specific place while the conquistador, and even the “good” husband, both leave to explore the world they authorize through their narration. At the same time the worlds these men narrate naturalize their positions of authority and of knowledge as something separate from embodied experience and desire. Swain parodies the dialectic of local specificity and global knowledge and shows how its structure is gendered. The mythic story of the unrequited desire of the black Amazonian queen of California is the other side of a story about a woman who is resigned to be left behind, condemned to the bounds of her kingdom no matter how poor, limited, or fantastical it is.

Swain shows how the depiction of a place as mythical and full of underexploited resources is just another version of a story that sees the place as poor and worthless. In both cases its relative value and position in the world is projected and traced by an outsider. Given the gendered dynamics attributed to this frame in these stories, writing from a specific position is defined in opposition to universality. Whether it is the border of a country or the marginalized position of female experience, this attribution of specificity implies a relation of resignation and condemnation to a limited sphere. Nevertheless, this position is also one where a different relationship to language may be articulated, one that doesn’t have knowledge production and a global horizon as its aim. To phrase this suggestion as a question: What are the alternatives to viewing a writer’s production either as determined by or condemned to their regional environment, or in terms of their writing’s universality?¹¹

Regina Swain’s stories explore the feminine underside of practices of mapping and imposing external logics on a landscape that go hand in hand with ideas of discovery and conquest. The inhabitants of her stories live beyond the bounds of ordering logic represented by the alphabet, and the map; but their responses to being positioned as the limit or being just beyond the limit of the thinkable are irony in the face of isolation. The perspective of her Calafia figures suggests that what is lost in the abyss between order and the territory its names are imposed on are experiences of desire, negotiation, and intimacy. While Swain shows us how feminine desire can testify to the existence of this in-between space, poet Aglae Margalli’s articulation of the relationship between gender and landscape shows how a negotiation between one’s body and its surrounding environment might provide ways of resisting the “coloniality of gender” (Lugones 744). While Swain’s stories explore the way that female desire escapes and exceeds colonial modes of mapping and knowing a place, Margalli’s poetry explores the landscape of the peninsula as a resource for inhabiting and negotiating what Maria Lugones calls “the colonizing construction of the fractured locus,” (747) or the colonial imposition of gender as a constitutive horizon of being¹². They both are technically considered part of “la Generación de la Ruptura,” a national cohort of writers, although Margalli aligns herself less with this generation, and more with the aesthetic potential she sees in “la poesía del norte” (“Cuánta mudez”).

California has conjured an idea of literature as a natural product for writers in the United States and in Mexico. As an example, when referring to the poets of Baja California among which he counts himself, in Fronteras de Sal: mar y desierto en la poesía de Baja California, Jorge Ortega writes, “Somos extensión del terruño que habitamos” (11). At the same time, in a seemingly opposite direction, in his introduction to the poetry collection Across the Line/Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California, Mark Weiss notes that while “almost three quarters of the poets in this anthology were born in Baja California, very few of their parents were, and almost none of their grandparents” (12). If many of the poets of Baja California have not been long-term residents of the area, how are we to understand an assertion like Ortega’s, which affirms a close relationship between the land itself of the peninsula, and the cultural products of its inhabitants?

Ortega suggests that these writers bring the environment into their texts: “Cuando un poeta asume el entorno físico que habita como una toma de conciencia estética, se da lo que podría llamarse una poética del paisaje, fundada en los atributos de éste para gestar cápsulas literarias igualmente habitables: poemas” (185). Ortega clarifies here that this relationship between poet and environment is not just a question of relying on the local landscape to generate language. Instead, he suggests, “Un poética del paisaje” refers not to the content but to the form of poetry. Although he later describes the practice as, “hacer del paisaje referido vuelto ya cifra poética, metáfora” (185), implying that the environment is brought into the poem as a source of reference for the generation of a specific code of figures, the “gesture” in the previous quote describes a parallel formal structure. There he claims that the poem provides an experience of inhabitation not unlike that of the writer’s environment. Ortega describes Aglae Margalli’s poetry collection, Selvarena, as one written to annex the jungle landscape of Tabasco, her birthplace, to that of her adopted Mexicali, as a summary of her own identity. The title, and the collection, he suggests, perform a duality, but he asks “¿puede haber dualidad donde hay dialéctica, o viceversa?” (198). From the perspective of Margalli’s poetry, however, neither dialectic nor duality can fully account for the experience of frustrated and frustrating transition present in her poems. Rather than simply juxtaposing the two environments, she describes the effects of the environmental shift on her perception of her own body.

The identity staged in Selvarena is an identity which coheres through a narrative of movement, of migration, and of negotiation with environmental pressures, beginning with a series that focuses on the title’s first half, “selva.” In her poem “Selvática,” the river Grijalva parts the jungle, the poet’s vegetal soul. She writes “En lomos de madera/ mi alma vegetal galopa/ sobre esta herida abierta/ esta desgarradura que me ahonda en el barro/ en el origen.” The connection between embodiment and the forest is the figure of “esta herida abierta, esta desgarradura,” which sinks the poem’s narrator into the clay of the biblical origin. Both her wooden legs and her “vegetal spirit” are anchored to the “barro” of her sexed origin, which slows their gallop. In this sense Margalli shows that the question of a duality between body and mind or body and spirit is tripped up by the opaque and malleable problem of her gender and, specifically, its connection to biological sex, which is associated with “el origen,” or the specter of original sin, as is made explicit in another poem from this first section, titled “Eva.” In his analysis, Ortega devotes more attention to the third section of the book, “Tolvaneras de sombras y chamizos,” which contains poems about the desert heat of Mexicali. In this section, the poem “Desértica” describes how “esta tarde de agosto/ mi cuerpo es una queja/ interminable.” Here, again, the body surfaces as an obstacle, and this obstacle refuses to be encapsulated neatly into a dialectical self-narration.

There seems to be a clear dualism in the relationship between physical sensuality experienced in and through the jungle environment versus the mysticism of the desert in Selvarena, where the body is only a source of complaint and discomfort, weighing down the soul. Ortega writes, “El desierto de Aglae Margalli es una mística en cuanto a que se lleva a cuestas como una cruz (el desierto calorífero es la cruz de quien habita Mexicali. De los tijuanos la violencia)” (199). In an interview, Margalli characterizes this difference in straightforward terms. She describes “La selva como metáfora de la sexualidad, de mi lado apasionado, de la mujer que soy y el desierto como la parte mística, como la parte espiritual; es, dos mujeres que dialogan a través de esa geografía, eso es Selvarena” (“Cuánta mudez”). While the poemario may stage a dialogue, it is not symmetrical, Margalli stresses in the interview, “Pertenezco al desierto.” Instead of resolving this dualism, however, by emphasizing one over the other, however, or incorporating the story of her origins into a dialectic of self-development, Margalli literalizes the break. There are two women, not one, and they speak to each other through the geography of both places. This dialogue, I suggest, invokes Maria Lugones’ description of what it means to live with the coloniality of gender, in what she calls “a fractured locus constructed double, who perceives double, relates double, where the ‘sides’ of the locus are in tension” (748). Instead of choosing one side over the other, or resolving the difference into a narrative, Margalli’s poem articulates this fracture.

In the poem “Metamorfosis” from the first section, the narrator sees herself in the mirror: “En el espejo/ una mujer me observa/ en su pupila cabe/ la arena del desierto.” The poem performs a metamorphosis in the narrator’s self-perception. She changes, in her own estimation, from a being of the jungle, “en ella soy la selva prodigiosa/ un follaje de minúsculas serpientes/ corazón vegetal de venas sabias,” into a being of the desert, but both sides develop. In the poem the body identified with the jungle and its sensuality interacts with, exposing and complementing the dune underneath: “En el espejo/ vaho de tierra fertile/ devela mi duna/ erosionada.” This is not a rebirth, but nor is it a maturation. The body she describes as a “house that I inhabit” is shown not to correspond to the narrator’s inner nature, “her dune,” which is neither idealized nor pristine, but as caught up in its own environmental processes. While the descriptor “erosionada” might seem to signify damage or deterioration, in a later poem the poet describes this capacity for erosion as a positive characteristic.

In “Éxtasis,” from the section concerned with Mexicali, she writes:

• Miro la vastedad
• y mis ojos serpean
• como cachoras [sic] perseguidas
• por esta piel de ámbar que se expande
• detrás del horizonte de mis cejas
• atrás del filo de mis pies desnudos
• hay momentos en que quisiera ser arena
• y tumbarme a la deriva del verano
• yacer completamente abandonada
• como se tienden los algodonales
• en vitrales de luz bajo el crepúsculo
• he visto cómo avanza el desierto
• en culebras de polvo
• reptando enloquecido
• por las venas de asfalto
• he sentido su aliento calcinante
• y me han entrado ganas de ser duna
• pero soy esta arcilla
• que se disuelve en llanto de sudor
• comprometida con su origen. ( Selvarena 52)

In this poem, the possibility of becoming sand is desirable, because the body puts up too much resistance to the summer heat. The urge to “ser duna” comes from outside, it enters in the form of a wish to be as well adapted to the environmental conditions of pressing heat as the sand and dust, which are blown about so easily that they could hardly constitute a body, at least not one as solid as the clay of her origin, which she cannot abandon or leave behind. “Committed to her origin,” [“Comprometida con su origen”] the narrator is bound by the clay from which Eva was formed, and whose response to the heat of her surroundings is to sweat and dissolve.

For the poems’ narrator, the relationship between dune and desert heat seems, on a first impression, to be a figure for the duality between body and spirit. Her body of clay is inadequate to the heat of Mexicali, and an impediment, it cries with sweat and cannot drift with the summer wind. This dissatisfaction through which the narrator experiences the split between physical sensuality and what Margalli calls “la parte espiritual,” Ortega decides, is resolved dialectically, in the movement from “lo físico panorámico (inspiración referente del poema) a lo estrictamente formal, zona de trabajo donde yace en continua efervescencia la formula sujeto (interior)-realidad (exterior), imprescindible para el proceso explícitamente escritúral” (198). Citing the final section of the book, whose poems open questions of identification and reality by turning to the topic of language itself, Ortega suggests that the poet overcomes the dissatisfying opposition between spirit and sensual body in the body of the poem, where the relationship between subjective interiority and objective exteriority can coexist in the continuous effervescence of poetic language. This reading suggests that the problem of the female sexual difference raised by Margalli’s poems can be solved by substituting it for the textual body of the poem. But what if we imagine this “zona de trabajo” of the poem not as the dialectical and gender-neutral resolution of the duality set up in Selvarena but as a space of transition and negotiation, where the female body can only make it into the poem in a state of ongoing degradation, but this degradation itself is something which allows the poet to respond to her environment. Disintegration and erosion are the figures for this negotiation, where being carried by the wind or pounded by the hot sun are not ways to disappear, but ways to survive. These provide a suggestion of how to account for experiences of overlapping transition, migration, and gendering through terms of neither resignation nor melancholy. As Lugones describes, “adaptation, rejection, adoption, ignoring, and integrating are […] always performed by an active subject thickly constructed by inhabiting the colonial difference with a fractured locus” (754). For Lugones, these processes are modes of resistance to seeing “either the coloniality of gender as accomplishment, or a freezing of memory, an ossified understanding of self in relation from a precolonial sense of the social” (754). Margalli’s poems suggest that the responsiveness between one’s body and specific environmental conditions (the jungle, the desert) hold open the space between this false choice. Eroding, melting, and dissolving provide ways of conceptualizing how one’s experience of self, including of one’s body and gender, can shift and move and be renegotiated depending on the local environment and the conditions of reception.

The question of these intermediate zones, which provide space for negotiating one’s identity, is one Margalli claims in an interview to explicitly address in her work. She says, “en Mexicali, por ser una ciudad joven, apenas cumple sus primeros cien años de fundación, empezamos […] a construir la identidad cultural, las propuestas artísticas como punto de partida, preguntándonos quiénes somos en esta tierra a la que llegamos, la que nos ha abrazado y en la cual nos asumimos” (Margalli, “Cuánta mudez”). The city and desert of Mexicali and, in her later poetry collection En las lumbrerías de la California , the environment of the peninsula, is at the same time a place of arrival, a subject who embraces, and a background for a community coming to terms with itself through representation. This ambiguous or transitional space opened up by responsiveness to the environment is something that Margalli’s poetry deals with explicitly, and which she marks as a consideration of “una ‘literatura de frontera’” (“Cuánta mudez”). She puts the epithet in quotation marks, warning that she does not mean to place a preformed stamp on border literature, but that the sense of “la frontera” that she refers to should be given more substantial weight. Specifically, she responds,

La literatura de frontera va mucho más allá de hablar de la frontera como espacio geográfico […] Es la frontera desdoblada, también, en las fronteras humanas, en ese aislamiento, en esa soledad, en esa suma que somos las diversas individualidades, cada quien está dando o dejando escuchar su propia voz. (“Cuánta mudez”)

Elsewhere she explains that the capacity for poetry from the north of Mexico to answer the aesthetic questions posed by the turn of the century, has to do with it being “una tierra de migrantes.”

In elaborating her own migration to the desert of Mexicali, Selvarena demonstrates that the significance of a place is established by renegotiating the boundaries between one’s body and new environmental conditions. The processes don’t end in the production of a pristine origin for identity, a place to speak from and for, but find a form in the unstable figure of the dune and its evocation of the mud which came before.