Photo by Greg Bulla, via Unsplash
by Brendan Lam
All existence is inexorably followed by dissolution. Death follows life, all things decay, and the universe itself will one day follow suit. Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World concerns itself with such endings, following Makina’s journey from Mexico to America to deliver a message to her lost brother, demonstrating the journey that many hopeful, undocumented Mexican immigrants take to cross the border. Herrera presents this as a type of death, with Makina’s physical travels mirroring the Aztec myth of the deceased’s journey through the underworld, named Mictlan. He makes no efforts to disguise this parallel, instead drawing attention to it through the story’s structure, characters, and symbols, even naming each of the novel’s nine chapters after Mictlan’s nine stages (Herrera). As a result, the crossing from Mexico to America becomes analogous to the transition from Earth to Mictlan, subverting Western literature’s trope of pitting American civilization against the Mexican wilderness. Signs presents the American ‘melting pot’ as a site of spiritual death for Mexicans, whose identities are severed from Mexico by the act of border crossing. Herrera shows the terminal marginalization faced by these Mexicans, as they exist within Signs as neither Mexicans nor Americans, unable to live up to an exclusionary American ideal that refuses to accept people of other cultures. In Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera conceptualizes the experience of the Mexican-American border crossing within the character of Makina, allegorizing her border crossing to the dead’s journey through the mythological Aztec underworld of Mictlan. Placing America within the mythical Mictlan allows Herrera to uncover the falsehoods surrounding American ideals, expounding upon the xenophobic foundations of ‘Americanness,’ and illustrating the spiritual death the Mexican faces in the American melting pot.
Mictlan is one of four afterlife locations in Aztec mythology. Where the other three – Chichihuacuauhco, Tonatiuh-Ilhuica, and Tlalocan – are heavenly paradises reserved for dead infants, fallen soldiers, women who die during childbirth, and those chosen by the rain god Tlaloc, Mictlan is the afterlife destination for everyone else, regardless of social status or cause of death (Aguilar-Moreno 163-166). The layers of Mictlan are described by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún in his ethnographic General History of the Things of New Spain, where he relays funeral rites spoken by Aztec elders who describe the dead’s journey through Mictlan:
“Here is wherewith thou wilt travel. / Here is wherewith thou wilt pass where the mountains come together. / and here is wherewith thou wilt pass by the road which the serpent watches. / and here is wherewith thou wilt pass by the blue lizard, the xochitonal. / and here is wherewith thou wilt travel the eight deserts. / and here is wherewith thou wilt cross the eight hills. / and here is wherewith thou wilt pass the obsidian-bladed winds…”
And also they caused him to take with him a little dog, a yellow one… it would take [the dead one] across the place of the nine rivers in the place of the dead…
and there in the nine places of the dead, in that place there was complete disappearance. (Sahagún fols. 25r – 26v)
Mictlan’s obstacles may represent a reversal of pregnancy and birthing, with nine regions of Mictlan corresponding to the nine months of pregnancy (Aguilar-Moreno 165). Where birth brings one into physical form and earthly connection, each obstacle in Mictlan represents a stripping away of the soul’s physical connections, ultimately concluding in the complete dissolution of the soul, returning to the nothingness from which it came into the world.
In Signs, Makina’s crossing from Mexico to America overtly mirrors the dead’s crossing through Mictlan. Neither America nor Mexico is ever named within the novel, grounding Makina’s travels in myth instead of reality. To replace the physical locations that Makinna inhabits, Herrera names each chapter after a location in Mictlan, where Makina faces challenges that parallel the location’s obstacle. One example is the second chapter, titled “The Water Crossing” (Herrera 23), where Makina crosses an unnamed river to enter America with the help of a Mexican border smuggler named Chucho, a Spanish slang word that means “dog” or “mutt”, all of this suggesting the rivers in Mictlan which the dead cross with the help of dogs. Herrera’s process of mythologizing the Mexican-American border crossing subverts typical tropes of border literature which present Mexico as a space of wilderness, savagery, and crime, seen in works such as Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Christoph Friedrich Nostitz believes that Herrera’s positioning of Mexico as the home of the living and America as Mictlan “ultimately counters US-centric discourses that view Mexico and its border as sites of moral decay” (Nostitz 16). America becomes the site of decay that Mexicans descend to when life loses hope, as Makina’s brother does in an attempt to escape poverty and as Makina herself does when her brother does not return.
Like death, this descent is final. On the river in “The Water Crossing,” the inner tube flips and sends Makina and Chucho into the churning waters, where she “intuited that it made no difference which way she headed or how fast she went, that in the end she’d wind up where she needed to be” (Herrera 39), finding herself being pulled up by Chucho on the American side of the river as the “inner tube was swirling away in the current” (39). The washing away of the inner tube signals the impossibility of return, much like the finality of death, and Makina’s assurance of her progress to the other side of the river is a product of this. The process of death only moves forward.
This progression through Mictlan inevitably continues as Makina travels deeper into America. In the next chapter, Makina changes from her clothes to American clothes: “a pair of pants, a t-shirt with an anglo print, and a denim jacket” (47). Instead of changing one article of clothing at a time, she chooses to strip completely naked, stating that “she could put on the t-shirt before taking off her pants but she didn’t” (47), symbolizing the totality of death and abandonment of the earthly body, then finally donning anglo cloth, marking her as a resident of Mictlan.
It is with this physical divestment that Makina’s connections to her Mexican life begin to be stripped away, allowing her Mexican identity to be subsumed by the American melting pot – a metaphor describing American society’s power to blend people of all cultures into one, unique, American culture. Israel Zangwill coined the term in his play The Melting Pot, where he describes and celebrates this process of assimilation: “These are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American” (Zangwill). Where this assimilation into American culture is glorified in Western spheres as an additive process, blending the unique properties of all cultures into one harmonious whole, Herrera instead views American homogeny as a subtractive one, stripping one of their culture and imposing their American ideals onto it. Nostitz posits that this ideal is that of “American exceptionalism” (Nostitz 25), perpetuated by media contrasting the Mexican savage with the American savior, painting America as a “utopian space of second chances” (22). However, Herrera’s subversion of the border genre exposes the utopic vision of America as myth, drawing further attention to the falsity of American exceptionalism by placing the country within the myth of Mictlan. The American ideal lacks room for the cultures that they purportedly accept, and to become “American” one’s culture of origin must die. The myth of the “space of second chances” is stripped away with Makina’s clothing, exposing the xenophobic, insular beliefs undergirding American exceptionalism.
Herrera describes the pull of American exceptionalism in the sixth chapter, titled “The Place Where Hearts are Eaten.” Here, Makina’s spiritual connections to Mexico are severed. Upon arriving at the address of the American land that Makina is told her father left to her family, and that her brother left to America to claim, she finds that there is only a pit in the earth with “excavators obstinately scratching the soil” (Herrera 70). When she finds her brother in the U.S. military, he has claimed the identity of a young American looking to escape military deployment, having literally become an American. Makina asks him why he does not leave, seeing as there is no land to claim, and he replies: “Too late. I already fought for these people. There must be something they fight so hard for” (93), referring to all Mexican immigrants who come to America, many of whom join the army to obtain citizenship. Nostitz states that this scene “reveals… the ‘myth of Americanness’—the popular mythical belief that there must be something inherently sublime that binds all American people into an imagined community” (Nostitz 25). In his journey into America, Makina’s brother has fallen victim to the twin myths of Mictlan and American exceptionalism, assimilated into the legions of dead Mexicans within the American melting pot, believing in the “myth of Americanness” even as he admits to a lack of knowledge of what exactly constitutes “Americanness”.
In the same scene, Makina’s brother mirrors Makina’s intuitive knowledge that the river’s current would take her into America, stating that “We forget what we came for, but there’s this reflex to act like we still have some secret plan” (Herrera 93). However, the conversation reveals that the assurance of progression does not equate to an assurance of safety, as it offers Makina a glimpse of what awaits her at the end of her journey. The pull of a perceived American exceptionalism draws Mexicans to America, though when it is revealed to be myth instead of fact they are already stuck, having crossed from the land of the living to Mictlan. Their connections to their past lives are severed, and their identities as Mexicans are burned away in the melting pot. All that remains is the reflex to continue onwards in the hopes of becoming an American.
With this realization, Makina opens the letter she was meant to deliver to her brother, failing her mission from her mother, reading: “Come on back now, we don’t expect anything from you” (94). Though addressed to her brother, her mother’s message reads just as well as a plea for Makina’ s return, suggesting to the reader that Makina has fallen to the same fate as him. Both came to America, ultimately leaving them alone in the underworld with fraying ties to the land they came from. It is this uncharacteristic betrayal of her previous principles that Nostitz views as “signaling a conversion of her character” (Nostitz 26). Nostitz argues that “Makina’s journey to the US can thus be viewed as a ‘rite of passage’ into this [American] identity… namely the phases of separation, margin, and aggregation” (26). Nostitz states that aggregation, the phase that mirrors “the katabatic return to the surface in that both mark the successful transformation of the individual identity” (26), never occurs in Signs, with Makina and the Mexican immigrants she represents stuck in a permanent state of margin. Mexican immigrants are systematically stripped of their Mexican identities in the American melting pot yet never truly considered American, as they are “branded as deviant felons who do not belong to an imagined American community.” (27)
Makina directly comments on this brand when writing a remonstration against the treatment of Mexican immigrants in America. Detained by an unnamed racist police officer, Makina finds herself arguing for the freedom of herself and a half dozen other Mexicans detained with her, using the pronoun “we” in her writing to represent both the Mexicans detained with her and Mexican immigrants as a whole:
We are guilty of this destruction, we who do not speak its language or know how to stay silent. We who do not arrive in boats, who dirty your gates with dust, who break your wire fences. We who came to take your jobs, who aspire to clean your shit, who long to work overtime. We who fill your clean streets with the smell of food, who bring violence you don’t know, who transport your remedies, who deserve to be tied by the neck and the feet; we, who don’t mind dying for you, how could it be any other way? We who know not who waits for us. We the dark, the short, the greasy, the withered, the obese, the anemic. We, the barbarians. (Herrera 99)
In this passage, Herrera directly addresses the stereotype of the Mexican as “deviant felons,” acknowledging the reality of the misrepresentation. Where Mexicans like Makina’s brother “who came to take your jobs, who aspire to clean your shit,” come to America for the second chance it ostensibly offers, they only find themselves completely effaced, used as interchangeable bodies to work undesirable jobs before being discarded. Hinted at by Makina’s brother’s inability to see what “[Americans] fight so hard for” (93), Herrera uncovers American exceptionalism as a myth built upon the unrecognized labor of those who have had their cultures melted away in pursuit of an “Americanness” made unattainable by xenophobia. When Makina dresses herself in American clothing after crossing the river, representing cultural death and America’s overlaying of the Mexican with the American ideal, she dresses herself with the clothes of the “barbarian,” as that is what the American ideal represents and necessitates – the marginalization and exploitation of entire cultures.
Herrera uses this same method of generalization in Signs to subvert American stereotypes of Mexicans. Like America’s representation of all Mexicans a single, archetypal “barbarian,” he portrays them through Makina. As a switchboard operator, she is described as “the door, not the one who walks through it” (Herrera 18). Makina’s job is supported by her knowledge of “native tongue,” “latin tongue,” and the “new tongue” of English (19). By facilitating communication between Mexicans in her village, the villages surrounding it, and Mexican immigrants living in America who have “forgotten the local lingo” (19), Makina plays a role as an integral part of wider Mexican society, not as an individual within the society. However, as a switchboard operator, Makina is required to maintain the confidentiality of the callers she serves, with Herrera stating that “she… knew how to keep quiet in all three [languages]” (19). Each caller, or Mexican, occupies a discrete, unique space within Makina, allowing her to represent a broad spectrum of unique Mexican individuals while still portraying their universal journey to America and subsequent spiritual death.
This death occurs in the final chapter of the novel, titled “The Obsidian Place With no Windows or Holes for the Smoke” (101). Descending a spiral staircase, Makina enters a room where she is handed a file containing a new, American identity, which accepts. She thinks of her past “as though recalling the contours of a lovely landscape that was now fading away… and when everything in the world fell silent finally said to herself, I’m ready” (107). It is here that Makina reaches the “complete disappearance” at the end of Mictlan (Sahagún fol. 26v). With Makina’s physical and interpersonal connections to life in Mexico stripped from her, she is left only with her sense of self as a Mexican. As she accepts her new identity, this, too, fades. Like her brother and the myriad Mexicans who have come before her, Makina has entered the melting pot. She has “another name, another birthplace… new numbers, new trade, new home” (Herrera 106). Nonetheless, the aggregation that Nostitz describes as a “successful transformation of the individual identity” (26) never occurs, as she is still not truly American. The new identity given to her is not erasure, not transformation. After accepting the file containing her new identity, she whispers that “I’ve been skinned” (106). There is no aspect of Makina in this new identity, as without any connection to Mexico, Makina cannot be herself. Mictlan only offers dissolution, not reconstitution, and even if Mexicans sacrifice their very lives for an American identity, America cannot abide by such second chances.
Signs Preceding the End of the World is a text that draws significantly from the Aztec myth of Mictlan, presenting the border crossings of Mexicans into America as a journey that strips Mexicans of their spiritual ties to Mexico, inevitably resulting in the complete dissolution of the Mexican’s identity. By placing America within this mythical framework, Herrera exposes the myths of America’s melting pot and American exceptionalism that belie American ideals. Makina’s identity is physically and spiritually effaced and overlaid by America’s symbols within the melting pot, which does not integrate her into a shared, multicultural American community but instead brands her as a “barbarian,” bringing her to inhabit a marginal space between Mexican and American. This title is one shared by all Mexican immigrants, who come to America in search of a “utopian space of second chances” (Nostitz 22) only to be shunned and exploited, seen as “deviant felons” (27) by Anglos. The benefits of American exceptionalism are restricted to these Anglos, built upon a foundation of exclusionism and marginalization. Through Makina’s journey, Herrera subverts the generalization of Mexican immigrants that these American systems are built upon, allowing the individual voices of Mexicans to exist within Makina as she represents their shared border struggles. It is only at the novel’s close that these voices are extinguished with the spiritual death of Makina, who has passed through the inverse birthing process of Mictlan into the emptiness that precedes the soul, where one’s identity is forever undefined, neither Mexican nor American.
Works Cited
Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. “Funerary Beliefs and Customs.” Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, Facts on File, New York City, New York, 2006, pp. 160–175.
Herrera, Yuri. Signs Preceding the End of the World. Translated by Lisa Dillman, & Other Stories, 2015.
Nostitz, Christoph. “The metalanguage of Border Crossing: The deconstruction of myth in Yuri Herrera’s signs preceding the end of the world.” Aspeers: Emerging Voices in American Studies, vol. 15, 2022, pp. 13–29, https://doi.org/10.54465/aspeers.15-03.
Sahagún, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: Book 3: The Origin of the Gods. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibbles, University of Utah Press, 1978. The Digital Florentine Codex, https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/book/3/folio/ir. Accessed 10 Mar. 2025.
Zangwill, Israel. “The Melting-Pot.” The Melting-Pot, Project Gutenberg, 2007, www.gutenberg.org/files/23893/23893-h/23893-h.htm.