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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Translation and Communication
Translation is important to both the plot and text of Signs Preceding the End of the World. In the “Translator's Note,” Lisa Dillman comments on the complex task of translating Herrera's Spanish into English. Rather than trying to imitate the “colloquialisms, slang, expressions, [and] culturally-embedded references […] that could only take place in Mexico” or on the border, Dillman chose “an English that was geographically non-explicit” (111). This non-specific “dialect” helps decenter the novel from the familiarity of border issues between the US and Mexico. In addition, Herrera uses the neologism “jarchar,” to mean “to exit or to leave.” Dillman explains that the word “is derived from jarchas (from the Arabic kharja, meaning exit) which were short Mozarabic verses or couplets tacked on to the end of longer Arabic or Hebrew poems written in Al-Andalus, the region we now call Spain” (112). Because of this, “to verse” carries with it the connotation of transition; rather than meaning “to leave,” it instead highlights the connection between the two spaces being “versed” from. When Makina reaches the dark room in the final chapter of the novel where she is given a new identity, she sees that “over the door was a sign that said Verse” and she “tried to remember how to say verse in any of her tongues but couldn’t” (105). The door marked “verse” denotes a space of transition and translation, where Makina feels “skinned,” but soon realizes that the dissolution of her identity is merely “the turmoil of so many new things crowding in on the old ones” as she is translated into the context of her new life in the North (107).
In addition to “being” translated, Makina is the character who does most of the translation. Translation is an act of rendering the foreign familiar and therefore accessible. In her role as the village switchboard operator, Makina is respected for her ability to speak Latin, Anglo, and Native; she “spoke all three, and knew how to keep quiet in all three, too” (19). Makina’s name, a slang spelling of “machina,” Spanish for machine, may be a reference to her job, which places her in the position of being the village’s “answering machine.” Her role in facilitating communication extends to situations as well. She uses her fluency to help other Latin speakers in the border town understand the situations they might encounter in the North, and she even saves the boys from the bus from being taken advantage of by coyotes. She also serves as the linguistic conduit for criminal negotiations between the top-dogs, relaying messages “which she didn’t understand even if she understood” (19), and engaging in political subterfuge. She even makes space for gay couples who are denied the freedom of expressing their love in her hometown: “she’d conveyed secret messages, lent her home for the loving that could not speak its name and her clothes for liberation parades” (82).
History as a Palimpsest
A palimpsest is a document upon which many layers of writing are preserved. The oldest layers are written over by subsequent writers so that the older layers are obscured but always somewhat present. Scholars of colonialism use the term as a metaphor to describe the way the pre-colonial past bleeds into the colonial or postcolonial present. Signs Preceding the End of the World functions as a palimpsest because its language and structure evoke the precolonial past of Mesoamerica and Spain, while also suggesting the ways that cultural and linguistic hybridity will influence the future, adding further inscriptions to the palimpsest.
The presence of the ancient past is evident in the novel’s structure, which mirrors the progress of the deceased soul through the nine levels of Mictlān, the Aztec afterlife. Furthermore, Spanish is unique among Romance languages in that many of its words are derived from Arabic. The colonial past makes itself known through the sinkhole that nearly kills Makina in the novel’s opening passage; the sinkhole itself comes from “tunnels bored by five centuries of voracious silver lust” (11). The hole is a reminder of the Spanish colonization of Mexico in the 15th and 16th centuries, fueled by the desire for silver and gold.
Signs Preceding the End of the World also suggests how the present, which is always on its way to becoming the past, will add inscriptions to the palimpsest of culture. The title is suggestive of the Mayan calendar, which was infamously misread in popular culture as predicting the end of the world in 2012. However, the world did not end; the future is instead a “turmoil of so many new things crowding in on the old ones,” but it is “not a cataclysm” (107). The future cultural plurality, which Herrera argues is inevitable, is resisted by the Anglo characters in the North, such as the police officer; however, the influence of the Southerners and Black characters shows that the “world [is] happening anew […] promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects” (66).
Violence and Racism in the Borderlands
Border regions are places of continual contact and conflict between nations. This conflict is first anticipated in Signs Preceding the End of the World in the chapter “The Place Where the Hills Meet,” when Makina notes the terrain of the borderlands is dominated by “two mountains colliding in the back of nowhere,” which “insisted on crashing noisily against each other, though the oblivious might think they simply stood in silence” (43). The misconstrued silence of the mountains’ violent collision represents the conflict of the borderlands taking place through diplomatic relations but also expressed in violence, racism, and even death. Herrera’s body of work is concerned with the violence of the US-Mexico borderlands, where drug cartels, border officials, and other forms of sanctioned and unsanctioned violence are inflicted upon immigrants and refugees seeking a better life. While the novel’s metonymy disassociates the setting from the real-world context that produced it, many factors show that Signs Preceding the End of the World is an exploration of the violence and racism that Mexican immigrants—both documented and undocumented—face in during their journey across the border and in the United States.
The three main interactions Makina has with Anglos in the novel are violent (or at least carry the potential of violence) and demonstrate the way that American culture views Mexican migrants, particularly undocumented migrants. The first thing Makina is faced with upon crossing into the North is a vigilante rancher, a “patriot,” who Chucho explains, “got his own lil undercover business, like it’s not so much he’s bothered bout us not having papers as he is bout us muscling in on his act” (48). The rancher demonstrates the blatant hypocrisy of a culture that exploits and demonizes the Southerners.
The most blatant example of such hypocrisy is the police officer in the chapter “The Snake that Lies in Wait.” Rounding up random Latin people with no evidence that they have committed a crime is reminiscent of controversial profiling laws enacted in the United States. A 2010 Arizona law, for instance, allowed law enforcement to detain suspects to check their papers. Although the law did not specifically target people based on race, enforcement almost exclusively targeted people of Hispanic descent. Similarly, the police officer in Herrera’s novel detains a group of people who, Makina notes, “all were or looked homegrown” (97). The officer lectures the group of detainees on their place in Northern society. He expresses the common anti-immigrant view that they come North to exploit its society, or, as he phrases it, “You think you can just come here and put your feet up without earning it” (97). By contrast, Signs Preceding the End of the World exhibits the hard lives lived by migrants, from Makina’s countrymen and women working in blue-collar jobs, to her brother, who risked his life fighting for the North and his place in it.
