75 pages • 2 hours read
Yuri HerreraSigns Preceding the End of the World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaChapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Obsidian Mound”
It begins to snow as Makina crosses the mountain pass. She finds a truck waiting for her, just as Chucho promised, driven by one of Mr. Aitch’s men. As they drive, he seems to want to make conversation, but Makina is too preoccupied with the guilt of leaving her switchboard.
The driver refuses to take the package from Makina and instead drops her off on a deserted street. She moves warily through the city. She inspects signs and supermarkets, goaded to move on by the suspicious Northerners. The narrator says that she sees “her compatriots, her homegrown, armed with work: builders, florists, loaders, drivers; playing it sly so as not to let on to any shared objective, and instead just, just, just: just there to take orders” (57). She takes notice of her countrymen and women working in the many restaurants and jokes to herself, “All cooking is Mexican cooking” (58).
She meets an old man waiting at the shop the driver had indicated. He has her wash up; the wound on her side appears to be healing. The old man leads her down the street. They are followed for a while by undercover police. The old man tells her that her brother is alive and well, but he is changed. He slips her a piece of paper with an address where she can find him.
The man takes Makina to a baseball stadium. She is led inside by the first Black men she has ever seen in person. To her, the stadium looks like “an obsidian mound barbed with flint, sharp and gleaming” (60). The men lead Makina to Mr. P, a blonde man in mirrored sunglasses, “the fourth top-dog [who] had fled the Little Town after a turf war with Mr. Aitch” (61).
Makina is wary of Mr. P, worried he will harm her to get back at Mr. Aitch. However, Mr. P assures her she is in no danger. He pats the knife on his belt over and over. Makina hands over the package, and Mr. P’s associates inspect and approve it. Mr. P asks if Makina wants to work for him, but she declines, saying she needs to find her brother. Mr. P leaves, and his henchmen disperse, leaving her alone.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Place Where the Wind Cuts Like a Knife”
The Southerners living in the North are changing. Makina notices their language, an intermediary tongue somewhere between Latin and Anglo. She likes it; it reminds her of the potential of a new world being born.
Makina travels through several non-distinct cities, almost not realizing when she reaches the one where her brother lives. She asks for directions eight times, and “eight times the abject answer turned out to be some bleak tundra where they sent her to another bleak tundra” (67). Makina’s brother sent his family three messages. The first said he had not yet found their land, but he believed he would soon. He described the hollowness of Anglo culture and celebrations. In the second, he promised to bring things back for the family. The third and final message only said, “I’m fine, I have a job now” (69).
Makina continues through the bitter cold, exhausted by the strangeness of the North. When she reaches the address the old man gave her, she finds it is “sheer emptiness,” a construction zone where “whatever once was there had been pulled out by the roots, expelled from this world; it no longer existed” (69-70).
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Place Where Flags Wave”
After trying in vain to find her brother by asking any Latin speaker she encountered, Makina curls up against the cold in the shelter of an ATM booth. She is awakened by a red-headed Anglo man threatening her. She backs away from him, wary of being physically or sexually assaulted. Continuing, she hears a familiar voice from an alleyway: it is the boy from the bus, whose finger she had nearly broken, now working in a restaurant kitchen. He is happy to see her but saddens at seeing the rough state she is in. He invites her into the kitchen and introduces her to an old woman, to whom Makina immediately takes a liking because she reminds her of Cora.
The old woman knows who she is. A year ago, Makina’s brother had come to the restaurant, lost and sick. She sent him to work for an Anglo woman she knew. He never came back. Makina’s brother had told the old woman that he had a sister “who just by looking at her you could tell she was smart and schooled” (76). The old woman tells the young man to show Makina where the Anglo woman lives.
Makina reaches the house. When she rings the bell, she is greeted by an older Black man. She is disappointed, but the man cracks jokes and makes her feel welcome. He asks if she thinks this is a white person’s house and says “Well, right you are, this is a white person’s house, there’s not a thing I can do about it, except dress like a white person” (77). He tells her that the Anglo woman’s family sold the house and moved to another continent. The oldest son, a soldier, remained behind.
Disheartened, Makina heads to the military base. Along the way, she sees a homosexual couple celebrating their wedding, the building adorned with pride flags. She wishes that the LGBT communities in her country could experience the same freedom. She reaches the military base, adorned with its own flags.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Upon arrival in the North, Makina is confronted by Violence and Racism in the Borderlands that will characterize her time there. To Makina, Northern society is, at first, a confusing landscape whose cold is only matched by the frigid attitude of the people who live there. Herrera’s critique of Western society and American exceptionalism is evident in his depiction of the baseball stadium, figured as the “Obsidian Mound” of Aztec mythology, a mountain of flint and obsidian that the soul must traverse in Mictlān. Herrera does not refer directly to baseball but uses metonymy to make a game that is integral to American society seem foreign to his readers. The old man Makina meets explains the game this way: “Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are […] One of them whacks [a ball], then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know they have bases all around the world, right?” (60). Linking the bases in the game of baseball to military bases shows two conflicting views of Northern society: the self-perception embodied by the national pastime and the view of some others that the county is an imperialistic superpower. It also foreshadows the role of the military in Makina’s brother’s story.
Always attuned to Translation and Communication, Makina is quick to perceive changes in her compatriots living in the North. She identifies a new language developing, which is “malleable, erasable, permeable … something that serves as a link” (65). This language, akin to hybrid languages such as “Spanglish” and Chicano Spanish arises out of necessity. Most of “her compatriots, her homegrown” in the North are “builders, florists, loaders, drivers” but especially “cooks and helpers and dishwashers” (58). This is indicative of the mostly blue-collar jobs taken by migrants from Mexico in real life; it also gives some context to the source of the wealth of those who “strike it rich after going north” and return home to Makina’s village changed (44).
In addition to the new language being born in the borderlands, the new inscriptions on the palimpsest of the North are evident in the changing geography and demographics Makina encounters. The South is more culturally and ethnically homogenous. The Black men who work for Mr. P are some of the first Black people Makina has encountered. Mr. P tells her, “They’re not such tough sonsofbitches, just had to learn to look like it” (61). Because she is from the South, Makina has no cultural reference for the mistreatment of Black people in American history. When she encounters the Black man who bought the Anglo family’s house, he tells her: “The times are changing and this is a lovely place to stay put” (78). The man puts her at ease. Because she is foreign, Makina is treated as an other in the North, and she feels a sort of kinship with the man whose Blackness marks him as an other in his own country.
