How does your first choice, Almanac of the Dead, illustrate the fragmentation indigenous peoples experience as the result of borders?

Even though native people do not recognise national borders, their lives have been impacted by nation states. National borders have made it harder for indigenous people in the United States to link their struggles to those of native people in other parts of the Americas or the world. Awareness of similarities has been emerging, and Leslie Silko is taking part in the movement towards the development of a consciousness of the global nature of indigenous struggles, and in her case in the hemispheric nature of those struggles. She’s one of the first ones to do this in fiction.

What is the allusion to an almanac in the title?

Silko is creating a fictionalised almanac that alludes to a pre-colonial artifact which was very important to Mayan tribes, the descendants of which live in present-day Mexico. Several of those almanacs have survived, and she is creating a fictionalised Mayan almanac that is actually the novel. Here she’s drawing on the idea of performative power that’s very central to native thought, where words are not just words but actually have power to create realities.

Silko’s modern-day almanac takes into account the long history of indigenous colonisation. She’s creating a vision of indigenous unity by describing a movement of landless refugees and indigenous peoples from the south that finds supporters in the United States. The main goal of the movement is the reclamation of lost indigenous land. But the movement is very inclusive. It’s not limited to indigenous peoples in the hemisphere.

Borders have been cemented in my reality from seeing maps as a schoolchild, with nations in different colours. How does Almanac of the Dead help readers develop a new interpretation of borders?

At the beginning of the book she gives you a map without national borders. On the map she locates the protagonists of her novel that are spread out all through the Americas. These characters move around a lot as well. The tricky thing is that Silko wants to present an indigenous world view that discounts national borders, but also show that borders matter and that they impact on the lives of indigenous peoples, mainly in a negative way.

Silko is drawing on myths that are central to the way indigenous people look at their history, the present and future – the way these times intermingle and transcend borders. So, for example, she develops a new view of Geronimo, a figure who symbolises resistance to the attempts of the US government and the army to put native people – Apache, in this case – on to reservations. She presents multiple versions of what may have happened to Geronimo. So she rewrites history in such a way that there is not just one version of Geronimo’s eventual surrender to the US army. Silko gives you multiple ways of interpreting what may have happened. She depicts Geronimo as a border-crossing trickster-like figure. He was trying to escape from the US army by going to Mexico, getting into skirmishes there and interacting with border tribes as well.

By putting the myth of a shape-shifting border-crossing figure in the place of the official version of what happened to Geronimo, Silko presents a different way of thinking about milestones in the interactions between indigenous people and colonial forces or, in this case, agents of the US nation state that were trying to delimit native people by putting them on reservations.

As you say, in Silko’s book we learn about Geronimo as a trickster figure. Why are tricksters so prevalent in border literature?

Mainly because these characters are able to transcend national borders. In our supposedly globalised world borders are no longer important obstacles for goods and ideas, but they are very important in preventing the free movement of people. And that’s the biggest contradiction in our global world. So to develop fictional characters that have the ability to play with these borders and that are not delimited by borders, that’s where the trickster figure is really attractive to several writers.

Your second choice is Carlos Fuentes’s novel The Crystal Frontier. He echoes the language of Gloria Anzaldúa in describing the Mexico-US border as “an enormous bloody wound”. How does Fuentes’s writing illuminate the metaphor?

He is one of the few authors from Mexico who places his writing in dialogue with Mexican American and Chicano or Chicana writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa. His novel echoes that metaphor. It’s not that he’s actually borrowing it from her because he has used it in his earlier work. Gloria Anzaldúa focuses mainly on the way the border has been a scar in the lives of Mexican Americans by keeping them separated from Mexico. But Carlos Fuentes shows how the border, as a symbol of the relationship between Mexico and the United States, affects people in Mexico. He’s very interested in what the border relationship has done to people in Mexico and how that then impacts on the relationship between Mexican citizens and Americans.

He develops a variety of characters. There are some immigrants from Mexico. There are also some characters visiting the United States – on lecture tours, or as students – or they live along the border. He focuses on the immense economic differences among Mexicans and the ways in which NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] and the changing US-Mexican relationship manifested at the border have deepened those differences. We think about Mexico as a poor country from which immigrants come. But we don’t actually see how people, like the main character in this novel, Don Barroso – who lives in the border area – actually profit from the way the relationship between Mexico and the United States is playing out right now.

Barroso profits from the way in which the majority of the Mexican population is becoming increasingly impoverished by sending cheap Mexican contract labour to the United States and by building maquiladoras [factories] in Mexico that produce cheap products for the United States.

Fuentes’s reference to “lands baptised by migration” suggests that the movement of peoples has ritual components transcending nation state borders. Do Fuentes and others explicitly address the suppression of this truth?

The last story in the novel brings everything that happened before together in interesting ways. Fuentes blends in poetry and he brings in history. He’s trying to develop a different version of history, one that highlights how the migration of people from Mexico to the United States has been cyclical. Mexican people have always immigrated, just under different legal conditions, and the conditions have been laid out by the United States government.

For example, in the 1940s to 1960s there was a guest-worker programme, the Bracero Program. Before, people came from Mexico for seasonal work and then returned across a relatively open border. So immigration has always occurred. It’s just that now we are defining it in different ways, and the ways we legally define it shapes the way that the movement occurs. As there are now fewer options to migrate legally, the movement mainly occurs undocumented.