Traces in Transit: Dehumanizing Borders, Citizen and Affective Wastelands

Abstract

The article addresses three different instances of types of immigration and how these displacements affect the protagonists of the selected narrative fictions. Notions of violence, citizen and affective vacant lots, internal and external borders and how borders dehumanize those who cross it in constant displacement are taken into account. To do this, I focus on the short stories
“Biography” (2021) by the Ecuadorian writer María Fernanda Ampuero, “Chronicle of a survivor of Ycuá Bolaños” (2009) by the Paraguayan writer Catalo Bogado Bordón, and “A Latino near you” (2015) by the Guatemalan Regina José Galindo. I propose then, for this article, to address nomadic corporalities linked to the wilderness when circulating through border territories regulated by the biopolitical norms that make up state institutions, and the national and political levels.