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Makina
Makina’s journey is motivated by her enigmatic brother, who initially leaves the Little Town on a quest to prove that his family rightfully owns a contested plot of land nearby, but gets swept up in his own travels and ends up staying north of the U.S.-Mexico border for years. During his long stay up north, he sends just two or three short messages home. Cora sends Makina to find him and deliver a message of her own—which is actually just her handwritten plea for him to return home. When she finally tracks him down, Makina is astonished to discover that her brother is an active-duty soldier in the United States Army, living on a military base under someone else’s identity. After he crossed the border, Makina’s brother explains, an anglo family recruited him to take their son’s place in the military, offering him a sum of money they never expected having to deliver, because they assumed Makina’s brother would die in the war. Instead, he returned alive, accepted the little renumeration the family could muster, and continued living as their son. He has no plans to return home to Mexico, but has by no means embraced his new identity—when Makina leaves him to set out on what is supposed to be her own return journey, he has “money and a new name, but no clue what to do.” Like his sister, he has a way with words—he is even helping fellow “homegrown” Mexicans perfect their English. Makina and her brother’s anticlimactic meeting underlines the way transborder migration transforms people’s sense of identity and relationships with their family. Literally inhabiting a new identity, Makina’s brother loses track of what he was initially doing in the United States, but also sheds his old attachment to his family and sense of duty to them.
Makina’s Brother Quotes in Signs Preceding the End of the World
The Signs Preceding the End of the World quotes below are all either spoken by Makina’s Brother or refer to Makina’s Brother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 7
Quotes
Neither one at first recognized the specter of the other. In fact, Makina stood up, greeted him and began to express her gratitude and ask a question before picking up on the soldier’s uncanny resemblance to her brother and the unmistakable way in which they differed; he had the same sloping forehead and stiff hair, but looked hardier, and more washed-out. In that fraction of a second she realized her mistake, and that this was her brother, but also that that didn’t undo the mistake.
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It’s not like in the movies, he said. I know that here everything seems like in the movies, but it’s not like that there. You spend days and days shut in and it’s like nothing’s going on at all and then one day you go out but you don’t know who you’re fighting or where you’re going to find them. And suddenly you hear your homie died that morning and no one saw where the bullet came from, or you come across a bomb nobody saw get thrown, but there it was, waiting for you. So you gotta go look for them. But when you find them they’re not doing jack and you just gotta believe it was them, they were the ones, otherwise you go nuts.
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He’s homegrown, he said. Joined up just like me, but still doesn’t speak the lingo. Whereas me, I learned it, so every time we see each other he wants to practice. He speaks all one day in past tense, all one day in present, all one day in future, so he can learn his verbs. Today was the future.
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1 guess that’s what happens to everybody who comes, he continued. We forget what we came for, but there’s this reflex to act like we still have some secret plan.
Why not leave, then?
Not now. Too late. I already fought for these people. There must be something they fight so hard for. So I’m staying in the army while I figure out what it is.
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Get the entire Signs Preceding the End of the World LitChart as a printable PDF.
Makina’s Brother Quotes in Signs Preceding the End of the World
The Signs Preceding the End of the World quotes below are all either spoken by Makina’s Brother or refer to Makina’s Brother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 7
Quotes
Neither one at first recognized the specter of the other. In fact, Makina stood up, greeted him and began to express her gratitude and ask a question before picking up on the soldier’s uncanny resemblance to her brother and the unmistakable way in which they differed; he had the same sloping forehead and stiff hair, but looked hardier, and more washed-out. In that fraction of a second she realized her mistake, and that this was her brother, but also that that didn’t undo the mistake.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
It’s not like in the movies, he said. I know that here everything seems like in the movies, but it’s not like that there. You spend days and days shut in and it’s like nothing’s going on at all and then one day you go out but you don’t know who you’re fighting or where you’re going to find them. And suddenly you hear your homie died that morning and no one saw where the bullet came from, or you come across a bomb nobody saw get thrown, but there it was, waiting for you. So you gotta go look for them. But when you find them they’re not doing jack and you just gotta believe it was them, they were the ones, otherwise you go nuts.
Related Characters:
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
He’s homegrown, he said. Joined up just like me, but still doesn’t speak the lingo. Whereas me, I learned it, so every time we see each other he wants to practice. He speaks all one day in past tense, all one day in present, all one day in future, so he can learn his verbs. Today was the future.
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1 guess that’s what happens to everybody who comes, he continued. We forget what we came for, but there’s this reflex to act like we still have some secret plan.
Why not leave, then?
Not now. Too late. I already fought for these people. There must be something they fight so hard for. So I’m staying in the army while I figure out what it is.
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