The Guardians

"Unlike the other novels, this novel is narrated in a realistic fashion. But Castillo does a couple of things that are very unique. She focuses on a part of the border near El Paso, Texas, that is actually in New Mexico and historically has been inhabited by Mexican and Mexican American people. She’s showing us in this novel that culturally the border between Mexico and the United States is really not significant for people who live in this area. The majority of the people living there trace their background to Mexico, speak Spanish or a mixture of Spanish and English, have relatives in Mexico and there’s constant cross-border movement. Castillo also undermines our notions of strong distinctions among legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, residents and citizens of the United States by focusing on a character Regina and her brother Rafa, who both came to the United States undocumented. But Regina and her mother were able to legalise their status through marriage to an American citizen or under Ronald Reagan’s amnesty programme. So they are now citizens, whereas the brother never got around to legalising his status. Castillo shows what happens when Regina’s brother, who has been continuously crossing the border as an undocumented immigrant, at some point just disappears – the effect his disappearance has on her family and on the Mexican American community in this town. So it’s the absence of the brother that sets everything else in the novel in motion. That focuses our attention on the effects of people disappearing and dying in the act of border crossing. Interestingly enough, since the novel is set in an area that is dominantly Mexican and Mexican American, the characters do not experience negative feelings on a daily basis from other border residents. But their lives are shaped by anti-immigrant sentiments. These sentiments have manifested themselves in how the border has become reinforced since the 1990s. Rafa, Regina’s brother, used to move back and forth between Mexico and the United States for seasonal work, and it wasn’t a problem until the enforcement of the US-Mexico border made it increasingly hard for him to make this trek up north and then return home to Mexico. To make the trip across the border, he now has to hire smugglers, coyotes . The really important point of her novel is that she shows how these coyotes , who in the past were largely mom-and-pop operations that helped people cross the border, are now functioning like cartels. Cartels that have been involved in smuggling contraband across the border have more recently become involved in smuggling undocumented immigrants. So undocumented immigrants are now exposed to danger, not just from the act of crossing itself, but from these coyotes , from these cartels. And that’s exactly what happens to the brother. The cartel that he gets involved with is also involved in drug production and smuggling. What happens to the brother is significantly worse than what happened maybe 10 years ago to immigrants making this trip. On the one hand these authors are trying to show that borders are very important for their characters. In Castillo’s novel, the border endangers the life of one of the characters. But at the same time the authors are also trying to say that borders shouldn’t have this kind of power. There are characters kept separated from their families or extended families because of the border. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Rafa, who migrates across the border, has a family in Mexico. He just comes north, as a lot of people do, to make money and then return. His son, Gabo, who’s in the United States undocumented and lives with his aunt, can’t cross the border at all, otherwise he would put himself in danger of deportation. At the same time Gabo has all these relationships to Mexico. He also grew up in Mexico. These border writers have the very difficult task of showing that the border is extremely important in the lives of these characters. But at the same time they’re also trying to imagine how it could be different. So that’s why they use devices like magical realism or the trickster figure. Or, in Castillo’s case, she highlights redemption and forgiveness as moral values that she thinks can help people overcome the power borders have in negatively shaping the lives of her characters. That’s the power of fiction."