The Power of Language Theme Analysis

The power of Yuri Herrera’s prose and the power of his narrator, Makina, are both intimately linked to a facility with language: they share a profound instinct for when to use and withhold words, how to communicate old ideas through new language (and vice versa), and how to navigate the multilingual landscape of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Herrera’s deliberately pared-down prose and Makina’s capacity to form connections through translation highlight language’s emotional weight, showing how transformed language can in turn transform the world.

Makina’s role as a translator, by both profession and temperament, illuminates language’s power to create relations where none existed before. In the village where she lives, she operates the local telephone switchboard, facilitating (and, when necessary, translating) calls in Spanish, English, and the local indigenous language among people in her area, their friends and families in the Big Chilango and other cities, and their relatives abroad in the United States. Without her, this web of communication would be impossible; she sustains and brings into being relationships across linguistic difference. Narratively, Makina also functions to unify disparate worlds and linguistic traditions: as a character adept in three languages and the three cultural contexts they signify (indigenous Mexico, Latinized Mexico, and the United States), her story itself becomes triple: a new incarnation of the traditional Mexica (Aztec) underworld tale, a story about migration and family in rural Mexico, and the narrative of a recent, embattled immigrant in the United States. The most important moment when Makina uses language to unify is when she writes a letter that convinces the “patriotic” policeman to leave her and the other  immigrants he is harassing in peace. By writing from the perspective of “we the barbarians,” who (in Makina’s portrayal of the policeman’s mindset) “don’t know how to keep quiet” and “deserve to be chained by neck and feet,” she forces the policeman to see her and her fellow migrants as full human beings with their own experiences, hardships, and emotional lives, rather than as subhuman invaders or a faceless pool of labor. Arguably, this is less because of what she says than the very fact that she is capable of speaking back to him in his language, which shows him that she understands the assumptions in his head and implores him to try and understand her experience in turn.

The novel also frequently treats language itself as an important object and plot device, highlighting its power to shape Makina’s experiences. The purpose of Makina’s journey is to deliver her mother Cora’s letter to her brother. This letter, Makina discovers, is merely one sentence: “Come on back now, we don’t expect anything from you.” In carrying this letter to the U.S., Makina again becomes a vessel for language. This short sentence, scribbled down by Cora herself, represents motherly love with an immediacy that Makina could never capture by merely reporting Cora’s earlier words. In a clear parallel, Makina’s brother gains a new identity by learning to copy the signature and life story of the boy he is supposed to impersonate in the U.S. Army. The identity he assumes on paper, through writing, transforms his own identity in real life. This process repeats in the final chapter, when mysterious bureaucrats in the underground world where the novel ends hand Makina new papers that signify her transformation into a new person. This is clearly a metaphor for gaining “papers” (residency or citizenship) in the United States and points to the way that written language can dominate people, to the point of determining and transforming their identities. This conclusion is announced in advance by a sign Makina sees above the door to the underground cavern. It reads, “Verse,” which translates to the invented Spanish word jarchar, Herrera’s principal neologism in this book. The sign “Verse” above the door announces to Makina that, in leaving the world from which she has come, through the very process of her journey across a threshold and into a new space, she will transform from something hybrid or liminal into something new. And yet, tellingly, she also muses that she has forgotten the word’s meaning in every language—which is itself evidence of her transformation.

Beyond the invention of jarchar, throughout his novel Hererra carefully deploys language in order to transform his readers’ understanding of the world he writes about. His prose is deliberately sparse and even otherworldly at times. He believes this use of language “open[s] some space for the reader to resignify the text in his or her own terms,” much like Makina uses language to create new life possibilities for those around her. Herrera also deliberately avoids using many terms like “the United States,” “Mexico,” “Mexico City,” “the Rio Grande,” “English,” “Spanish,” and “drug/narco-trafficking,” because these words’ meanings are already fixed and emotionally-charged. Similarly,  he also refuses to name the vast majority of his characters. Naming these places, people, and topics would allow the reader to cloud their thinking with connotations and preconceptions. By leaving them nameless, Herrera leaves this connotative baggage aside and forces readers to reconsider objects they already know, to transform their understanding of the world and create something new. Although Hererra has frequently explained this point in interviews, he also voices this directly in the novel, when Makina begins to understand how Mexicans in the United States create an interlanguage between English and Spanish, which offers them a new perspective on the world.  Herrera writes that their speech is “not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world is happening anew, Makina realizes; promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects.” This directly speaks to the transformative power of language, which is creative in life as well as on the page.

The delicateness of Herrera’s intentionally sparse language made translating his book, especially into the “anglo tongue,” a deceptively challenging task. Just as Makina both wields language to influence those around her and allows language to transform her own reality, Herrera’s writing translate the well-worn narrative territory of the U.S.-Mexico border into something ripe for new modes of understanding the immigrant experience.