Mourning Migrants across Borders: ‘Mestiza’ Consciousness and Transmodernity in Tim Z. Hernández’s Novel

Abstract

In his latest documentary novel All They Will Call You (2017) Tim Z. Hernández merges factual evidence, testimony, fiction, poetry, and Western and Mesoamerican knowledge to pursue and convey the unknown truth of lives shaped by immigration and deportation referred to in Woody Guthrie’s song ‘Plane Crash at Los Gatos Canyon’ (1961). The novel establishes connections between identity, history, and memory in a specific spatio-temporal context by including and conversing with multiple ignored others, thus creating epistemological, phenomenological frameworks that may be related to Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘mestiza consciousness,’ Enrique Dussel’s ‘transmodernity,’ and Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking.’ Hernández’s poetics relies on listening to both subaltern and non-subaltern others, on intertwining multiple approaches to the truth, and on incorporating multidimensional memory. These poetics destabilize a ‘hierarchy of mourning’ grounded on ethnicity, race and legal status and construct a ‘pluriversal’ community beyond the political, emotional boundaries established by the nation state.