Borderland Ethics, Migrant Personhood, and the Critique of State Sovereignty in Jairo Buitrago's Two White Rabbits and José Manuel Matéo's Migrant: The Journey of a Mexican Worker

Abstract

In “Toward a Borderland Ethics,” Pablo Ramirez argues that fiction that blends the United States and Latin America, self and other, and citizen and noncitizen demonstrates a “borderlands ethical stance” that produces “new unauthorized truths and relations outside the law and beyond national borders” (49). However, within those national borders and inside the jurisdiction of the law, the belief that only legal residents are rights-bearers means that to be “illegal” is to have no legitimate public voice or presence; imposing its own logic, the law’s rigid categories make some histories mute (50). Furthermore, because nationalism encourages us to situate ourselves in a determinate manner, the state makes people’s histories and relationships intelligible only through securing and bounding national space. Consequently, personhood can only happen through authorized attachment to nation. Although the nation-state thus reserves the right to police its boundaries and establish immigration policies, an ethical stance abolishes distinctions between documented and undocumented residents and asserts that all individuals possess, as Sara Radoff puts it, a “right to rights” regardless of citizenship (439). With this ethical approach, the polity of belonging is not attached to the classic nation state, but to moral personhood. And when fiction adopts this kind of ethical approach, it emphasizes the complexity of migrant experiences, reimagines the border, and disrupts political understandings of nationhood, proposing new ways to document practices of belonging.