The present article will focus on a contested border space, namely the U.S.-Mexico border. It will highlight the themes of migration, social inequality, and globalisation in this particular area, as well as the cultural, social, and political implications of living along the border. In doing so, it will present the intersections of fiction, culture, and borders in the American context. This will be achieved by examining the novel Tropic of Orange (1997) by Karen Tei Yamashita, which challenges traditional notions of borders and identities and offers a complex and interconnected view of the U.S.-Mexico border and its impact on individuals and communities.

Karen Tei Yamashita's writing has been lauded for its capacity to transcend the conventional orientation of a world structured in a binary fashion (North and South, East and West, modern or not). Her literary production is notable for its representational strategies that eschew geographical delimitation. Yamashita herself has been described as "wildly imaginative and politically engaged, brilliant and human, Asian, American, and Latin American, a writer who seems to view our collective life from a position of unusually expansive vistas" (Rody 2009, 127). Her fiction moves beyond a nation-based frame of analysis, and is dominated by cultural hybridity, intersectionality, shifts in place, and alternative worldviews.

Her literary production is fully engaged with the phenomena of globalisation, including the significance of media, new technologies, high-speed information, transnational strategies of production and consumption, and the increasing movement of people. Yamashita's writing interests in migration and border-crossing reflect her biography, as she was born in California, spent almost ten years living in Brazil, one and a half years living in Japan as a student, and currently teaches Asian-American literature and creative writing at the University of Santa Cruz.

Transgression of boundaries and transformation of the existing order

Published in 1997, Tropic of Orange draws attention to undocumented border crossings, emphasises the cultural and economic ties between the United States and Latin America, analyses the shifting U.S.-Mexico border, and exposes the inequality of contemporary mobility. At the time of its publication, the novel portrayed a complicated and intertwined scenario that challenged conventional geographical distinctions. Published three years after the economic agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, her novel should be appreciated for its critique of the paradox of a borderless world reality, in which commodities can move freely while the militarization of the border complicates the crossing of people. Through her focus on mobility and displacement, her literary production reveals the relationship between ways of spatial control and forms of oppression, which are still evident now as they were in the late nineties.

In her narrative, Yamashita presents a world in which the Tropic of Cancer collides with Los Angeles, having been brought northward by an orange transported from Mazatlán, a city in the state of Sinaloa. Her concern with the interrelationship of the North and South is evident in her account of a continuous flow of people and goods that, despite the vigilant strategies of border security, move back and forth between Mexico and the United States. Tropic of Orange presents the consequences of this flow through a fusion of Latin American-inspired magical realism and Anglo-American hard-boiled detective fiction. This fusion of Anglo-American and Latin American literary forms is also evident in the narrative structure, which oscillates between the linear model of detective novels' plot and the cyclical conception of time typical of Latin American magical realist literary productions.

In portraying a post-NAFTA setting, Yamashita elects to focus on the shifting of an astronomical delimitation: the Tropic of Cancer. This choice is significant within the context of globality, which serves as the backdrop for the narrative. As an astronomical line that delineates the globe into two hemispheres, the Tropic of Cancer appears to be a neutral entity, unaffected by the nuances of culture, economics, and politics. Nevertheless, in the novel, this limit has become a thread which intersects not only an orange, but also cities in Mexico and the international geopolitical U.S.-Mexico border.

The narrative sequence follows the northward migration of the Tropic of Cancer, which is represented by a semitransparent and flexible wire running through an orange that is growing in the backyard of one of the characters. As the orange moves northward, the border between the United States and Mexico is transected, resulting in a remapping of the nation-state boundary. The orange itself does not cross the international border, nor does the border cross it; rather, the border transects the orange, whose continuous movement keeps remapping the nation-state limitation.

Disruption of borders: malleability, artificiality, and mutability of geopolitical lines of division

The subversion of geographic coordinates occurs with a change in time and space. As the characters realise, the landscape twists, stretches, moves, and contracts. The migrant orange functions as a symbol of the asymmetrical economic ties between the United States and Latin America. The device of an orange travelling from Mazatlán in Mexico to Los Angeles in the United States can be interpreted as a way of opposing high-income economies with the presence of low-income labour. The narrative challenges the concept of a rigid national boundary by moving the Tropic of Cancer towards the north, accompanied by Mexican clandestine workers. Conversely, the intersection of the Tropic of Cancer with Los Angeles implies a return to historical conditions prior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when Los Angeles was under the rule of Mexico. In this way, the dragging of the Tropic of Cancer alludes to the restoration of a utopian Mesoamerican myth.

The subversion of the dominant logic is made possible through the novel's magical realist representation of time and space as flexible entities. The author's depiction of space and time as elastic allows her to connect various locations and historical times in order to present the unequal experience of a globalised world for marginalised people. By relocating the Tropic of Cancer to Los Angeles, Yamashita not only re-contextualises the history of Latin America and Anglo-America but also juxtaposes colonial history and the contemporary era. In other words, she re-establishes contexts and historical moments that have been omitted from the dominant narrative, she gives voice to those people who have been historically silenced or marginalised, and finally, she represents U.S. society as a malleable and mutable entity which challenges the fixed international boundaries of the nation.

Furthermore, Yamashita subverts the conventional delimitations of geography. By extending the Tropic of Cancer, she challenges the traditional delineation of the southern and northern hemispheres, suggesting that the arbitrary nature of geographic limits and the inconsistency of geographical nomenclature are worthy of further examination. The novel's interrogation of the purposeful fiction of geographical and political borders that not only divide two nations but also regulate the division of labour prompts a re-examination of the meaning of pre-given denominations and categorisations, as well as the existing power relations between the United States and Latin America.

In Yamashita's attempt to rewrite the U.S. experience from a hemispheric perspective, the novel presents the horizontal axis of the Tropic of Cancer replaced by a vertical movement that brings the South to impinge on the North. As the novel challenges geopolitical boundaries, the consequent revisionist cartography reveals a U.S.-Mexico border which transgresses fixed classifications and appears as a matrix of juxtapositions and associations. The U.S.-Mexico border is recognised as being a geopolitical reality and simultaneously as a haphazard construction consisting of various implications“ [a] line—a slender, endless serpent of a line—one peering into a public place of politics and power. One peering into a magical world, the other peering into a virtual one” (Yamashita 1997, 254). Additionally, the border is a delimitation, a line, a wire, a tie, a zone “ as wide as an entire culture and as deep as the social and economic construct that nobody knew how to change” (ibidem).

The border represents a crucial element for Yamashita's narrative design. It symbolises both the most destructive elements of globalisation and the possibility of contact between people and cultures. The narrative oscillates between Mexico and the United States, reflecting on the post-NAFTA situation in which the international border is a crucial node in the economy, a concern about national security, and represents the fusion of Latin and Anglo-American cultures.

Reimagining space from a multi-focal perspective

Throughout her novel, Yamashita rearranges cities and borders, dismantles boundaries, and presents alternative visions. As the border is transgressed and reshaped, Los Angeles is transformed by social changes. Both the city and the U.S.-Mexico border lose their original sites and definitions. Although the spatial notion of border is challenged, its visual appearance becomes vague and blurred, and its entity is contested, it is evident that its presence is undoubtedly tangible and regulates the lives of entire communities and populations. In other words, Tropic of Orange depicts a reality in which borders are permeable and fluid, and simultaneously they are re-erected at other sites on a daily basis.

The process of reassertion and rearticulation of socially and culturally constructed boundaries implies that an existing boundary previously challenged is reestablished in a new guise in response to a contended set of interests. In this way, borders are never "concluded"; rather, they are intrinsically processual, which means that they are in a perpetual state of becoming. The U.S.-Mexico border is no longer solely defined by its geographical boundaries; it has become a metaphor for the myriad of political, social, cultural, and linguistic barriers that Mexicans, and not only them, confront.

The insistence on map-making in the novel reveals that space is not a static, stable, and unchanging entity; rather, it is a flexible construct that is entangled with power relations and social hierarchies. The creation of an alternative cartography, and the consequent intersection of spaces and storytelling, question the reliability of existing maps and draw attention to the new demography that transnational migration produces. The geographical and cultural remapping in Tropic of Orange alludes to the necessity to dismiss short-sighted paradigms, the single-mindedness of a border, and the multicultural perception of a unified and amalgamated culture, which is assumed to live placidly side by side.

References

1 Rody, Caroline. (2009) The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2 Yamashita, Karen Tei. (1997) Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House.