Mexico's northern border is one of the most closely watched strips of land on the planet. By night, helicopter spotlights sweep the desert's barbed-wire fences; underground, the police shine flashlights over the sewage (the drainage pipes have been fitted with gratings but there are still a large number of Mexicans who manage to reach the United States along the rats' highway). A climate of segregation hangs over California. East L.A. is the second largest Mexican city, and guacamole is the second favorite snack for Superbowl Sunday, but undocumented workers are named for the terror-inspiring beast from outer space: they are aliens.

Governor Pete Wilson's Proposition 187, which takes away the rights of California residents who don't have their papers in order, reveals the function of border controls in the age of free trade and apartheid: contraband merchandise is no longer of interest, what is important is to hold back la raza.

For decades, the border was a land of freedom for the American imagination. In Raymond Chandler's novels and in road movies, fugitives with enough charisma to be able to save themselves went to Mexico, that refuge of orange sunsets and melancholy guitars.

Writers planning escapes tend to believe in a zone of salvation. For Adolfo Bioy Casares, the country where the boats go, the place where the escape tunnels lead, is Uruguay; across the river is the beach, that precarious paradise where heroes recover from their adventures. This is, without a doubt, the highest honor a neighboring country can receive. In the Mexican moviehouses of my childhood, I felt proud to belong to the country that offered the fugitives asylum. When the FBI or the county sheriff chased a protagonist who lived by his own code of honor--more human yet more severe than the laws he broke--the scriptwriters turned to their favorite solution: the border.

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe adapts this saga of escape to psychedelics: Timothy Leary runs away to found a kind of Club Med of the mind on the beaches of Zihuatanejo. From the far west to trips on LSD, Mexico was seen as a permissive duty-free zone. Vietnam War deserters arrived with the canonical peace sign around their necks and a button on their shirts saying "God is alive and well and living in Mexico."

Still, when the Chevy or the horse disappeared in a cloud of dust, a notice in Spanish appeared on the screen saying, "A few days later the criminals were captured by the Mexican police." The Ministry of the Interior never faltered in its task of vigilance: outlaws' dreams could not triumph, not even in the dark confines of the popcorn-eaters. Hollywood's last refuge looked to the citizens of the eagle and serpent like the dreams of Governor Pete Wilson: a desert with no exit.

If fugitives from the American Dream sought in Mexico a country that was genuine--a rustic utopia, a picturesque territory where, according to Kerouac, even the police are polite--fugitives from the Mexican Dream, in contrast, saw a gateway to liberation in the literature and the American counterculture. These reciprocal fantasies reveal the best temptations of the border: the desire to cross, to explore the other, to trespass.

From Quetzalcóatl to Pepsicóatl

It is not surprising that the Mexican end-of-the-century narrative favors the northern end of our territory for discussing both the influence of culture, which seems always to arrive late, and the construction of a new identity. Does the local spirit remain sound when it works twelve hours in a maquiladora and spends weekends at a shopping mall? To what degree does the frequenting of what is foreign erase historic wrongs and oblige one to exclaim in Spanglish, like a character from Luis Humberto Crosthwaite: "Do you recuerda Juan Escutia?"

In the episode "From Quetzalcóatl to Pepsicóatl" in Tiempo Méxicano (Mexican Time), Carlos Fuentes makes use of the legend of the Plumed Serpent to plumb Mexico's national identity. Quetzalcóatl, the wisest and most beneficent of the pre-Hispanic gods (known as Kukulkán in the Mayan territories) waged an intense struggle against his fellow gods in the Aztec sky. Tezcatlipoca, Lord of Destiny, found a mechanism to overcome the illustrious Quetzalcóatl: he forced him to look at himself in a mirror. Quetzalcóatl didn't recognize his image as a plumed serpent; horrified at himself, he decided to abandon his people. For Fuentes, this image is the basis of the challenge of our identity. As long as we don't accept our face in the mirror, we will have to continue our flight.

Quetzalcóatl promised that he would return from the east, and the bearded bald men wearing armor and slippers who disembarked in Veracruz in 1521 looked exotic enough to have been sent by the fugitive god. One of the great paradoxes of the Spanish Conquest is that it began with a battle of the indigenous Mexicans against a rejected part of their own culture. Octavio Paz has said that the isolation of the pre-Hispanic cultures was so extreme that they did not have the idea of the "other," of the foreigner with absolute social and religious otherness. It was simpler for them to assimilate the idea of an adverse part of their own culture: Quetzalcóatl in search of his second act.

From Martín Luis Guzmán's La Querella de México (Mexico's Dispute) to Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, the Mexican essay attempted to construct a national identity and studied the signs that were still fresh in the sagas of our origins (Independence from Spain, the Mexican Revolution). Like Turkish coffee, reading the dregs served an oracular purpose: what remained became prophecy. The past as an explanation of the future. The searches for atavistic symbols, for an Ur-Zeit, have a common denominator: beneath the successive masks of the Aztecs, the Spanish, and Modernity lies the true face. The premise of this exploration is that there is a univocal distinguishable identity that separates us from others, the equivalent of the "Russian soul" that transmigrates from Dostoyevsky's characters to Solzhenitsyn's. In Posdata (Postscript), Paz was one of the first to give nuance to the explorations of the national identity. There is no "one" national ontology, just as there is no Mexican ideal that can in itself be characteristic.

In contemporary Mexican literature there predominates a pulverized, dispersed, multiple, hybrid conception of identity. It is useless to look for the original and immutable countenance. Quite the contrary: the varied masks--from Tenochtitlán to Chiapas, from the Eagle Warriors' feathered masks to Subcomandante Marcos's ski mask--are identity.

At this century's end, Quetzalcóatl has ceased to be an archetype and now acts like the replicants in Blade Runner. He can be any one of us. His many faces no longer fit in the smoking mirror of Tezcatlipoca. They are reflected in the computer screens and holograms of virtual reality. Their aspect depends on the circumstances that inform it.

The god-replicant confronts a territory in which fifty-seven Indigenous languages are spoken, in which the Catholic Church is increasingly active (in its double expression through the repressive clergy and the rebel clergy), and where Mexican yuppies thought the Free Trade Agreement was a Frequent Flier plan to the First World. This multiplicity produces numerous identities, all of them Mexican and all of them provisional.

As demonstrated by any Mexican married couple in their dispute over custody of the television remote control, the foreign culture most present in Mexican homes comes from the United States. Luis Humberto Crosthwaite was able to see the true "meeting of two worlds" that took place in 1992. While dusty academics recorded five centuries of Conquest, Crosthwaite wrote a novel, La luna siempre ser un amor difícil (The Moon Will Always Be a Difficult Lover), in which a sixteenth-century Spaniard comes to Mexico during the North American Free Trade Agreement and ends up working in a Tijuana maquiladora. The metaphor is brilliant; the radical encounter of two worlds took place not only in distant history, but also yesterday, and the encounter takes place on a primordial stage: the border.

In 1995, Quetzalcóatl would find a country where North American ideas and passions dominate the electronic skies, the advertisements, and computer screens. Welcome to the Kingdom of Pepsicóatl!

What passports does literature issue to the split and disperse identities of the new Mexican nation, and what visas will it accept for those coming from across the border? In an unusual story, Marcela y el rey (Marcela and the King), Crosthwaite recycles an American myth and sends it back as contraband to the United States. The legend that Elvis Presley is alive has brought about all manner of excesses, from "King of Rock & Roll" doubles contests to radio station callers who believe they've seen Elvis in a 7-Eleven at three in the morning. In Crosthwaite's story, the King's ghost appears in Tijuana. Elvis is going through a melancholy period because, among other things, nobody recognizes him (though they tell him he does look something like the singer of "Love Me Tender"). When he meets Marcela, who sings rock 'n' roll with intense authenticity, he cheers up and decides to go back to the United States. But ghosts don't carry passports, and he has to cross the border illegally, like a wetback. In the story's spectacular ending, the King is pursued by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) helicopters, and under the spotlights, thinks he's in a Las Vegas concert. The tragic isolation of celebrities acquires an even more dramatic twist: a myth becomes an illegal alien.

As a zone for redefining signs of identity, the border is also the setting for a book of short stories entitled Embotellado de origin (Bottled at Point of Origin) by Rosina Condé. The title is an ironic interpretation of life beside the Rio Grande. In a region characterized by mixtures and the most baroque syncretism, Rosina Condé finds a rare proof of authenticity: "They called Tijuana the City of Perfumes, and many people came to Tijuana not just to party but to buy perfume. Because there were perfumes from all over the world, and they were cheaper, and, in addition, they were bottled at point of origin. Because they get them in San Diego but they're bottled in New York." The paradox of a place of transit, where all things come from far away, is that what you get there is genuine. Borders delimit the country they belong to, norms are exhausted before coming to this margin where there is always some other way to do things.

Ports have a common logic; they are constructed outward, facing what arrives and what disappears. Something similar happens with landlocked borders; stations of nomadism, they live by what passes along their streets. It would be grotesque to ask, "What is produced in Tijuana?" The perfumes there are better because they have found a route by which to arrive intact from their point of origin. The scenario -- a tangle of neon, dust, eternally transient locals -- may seem unauthentic, but what is traded is genuine, not subject to the conventions of "stationary" cities.

Border landscape is so mutable that it rarely determines the identity of its inhabitants. If Mexico City oppresses with its weight of centuries, imposing codes as intricate as the directionality of its one-way streets, Tijuana has the lightness of an encampment, a space where everything points to the transitory, and customs are improvised from one hour to the next. Nevertheless, the margin of freedom granted by a border can reach disturbing extremes: a loss of horizon. Federico Campbell explores this disorientation in a story entitled "Los Brothers" (included in Tijuanenses). Ever since his novel Everything about Seals, Campbell has been interested in amphibious animals who communicate two realities. In appearance, the plot of "Los Brothers" has nothing to do with the border; two people from Tijuana meet in Mexico City and visit the ruins at Tula. The story alludes to diverse methods of orientation (the "clock" method of Japanese pilots, a boat on its inevitable collision course, patrols on their change of route), and derives its internal tension from its many levels of movement. It begins with a tourist excursion, but the "interior" country suggests another journey; after buying a souvenir (a miniature caryatid), the narrator gets lost in a poverty-stricken town where he runs over a man who seems to come out of a cave. He then continues his behavior, which has not varied since the beginning of the story: he flees, he wants to conquer space through movement. In vain, the history he didn't reach in the bastion of the Toltecs, he reaches in the present. What does the plot have to do with the origin of the characters? Campbell's achievement is that the border ceases to be a geographic category; in every situation his narrator is in a border situation, he wanders through a Tijuana of the mind, without compass, condemned to never know which way is north.

Like Campbell, Daniel Sada knows that borders are portable. The amazement provoked by his scenarios is due, in good part, to the fact that the cultural hybrid occurs in the middle of nowhere. Far from any paeans to nature, Sada transforms the desert into an improbable scenario of modernity. Its vast reaches presume cities, trails coming from far away; radio signals are picked up in a hollow, lost voices of Mexican or American radio announcers. Heir to both the Spanish romance and the Mexican corrido, Sada writes in meter and doesn't skimp on octosyllabic lines in Spanglish: "Batazos everywhere you look . . . lines of heats and home runs . . . tricky flaibols against the sun." The cross of cultures appears in places where usually nobody is to be found; the story of "Cualquier altinajo" ("Any Good Times or Bad") from the book Registro de causantes (Taxpayers Registry), presents an original variety of baseball: the desert becomes a baseball diamond and the game is a curiously agrarian performance. The mythology of the American baseball player is manifested in players who "instead of spikes wore cowboy boots, for better slide." At the end of the story, the ball gets lost among the cacti, and the catcher decides just to keep going toward another field, the land of huzaches where his compadre is waiting with a bottle of sotol. Halfway between rural tale and pop culture, Daniel Sada transforms the desert into a symbolic reality, a territory of extreme narrative freedom.

But the border also moves through time. One of the most radical maps of the territory to come is Christopher Unborn by Carlos Fuentes. Once again the author of Tiempo Méxicano returns to the theme of identity, only in this case it is virtual identity. In 1992, the year of the Fifth Centenary is conceived as a distant future in which for the first time the opposition rules (the conservative National Action Party), and where the boundaries of the nation have been redefined. The unpayable foreign debt obliges the country to give away the Gulf to the Seven Sisters Oil Company and to give the Yucatán Peninsula to Club Med. And as if this weren't enough, the north of Mexico and the south of the United States have become an independent third country: Mexamérica. In the novel, Anglatl, Espanglish, and Angloñol are spoken; comedy signs a pact with the Apocalypse, the carnival with the tragedy. In this outlandish "future past" a contest is held; the first child to be born on October 12th, 1992, five hundred years after the discovery of America, will receive the keys to the city. The new Christopher rests in his mother's womb on his way to his historic birth, but he finds out about the world around him: the placenta is as well-informed a bubble as a CNN studio. In Christopher Unborn the fusion and confusion of cultures has a simultaneous hue of the birth and the end of the world. According to Adolfo Castañón, this is "a prophecy about the destruction of Mexican spirituality and its intrahistoric values. A desperate prophecy runs through this novel--nourished by a pulse of death, war, violence, subversion, threat, and catastrophe--where one of Carlos Fuentes's old obsessions is reiterated: 'Mexico's Americanization as the Vietnamization of Mexico'."

The narrative has offered multiple responses to the challenges of Mexico's northern border (our southern border seems to dissolve into similarity); aside from all documentary or anthropological claims, the narrative allows for the invention of lines that reach the farthest corners--and once the demarcations are drawn, the narrative finds ways to violate them. In the narrative, a fence also exists in order for a ball to fly over it.

As long as there is a fortress mentality in those territories that fear the barbarians, there can be few stimuli as evocative as the mixing of genres and cultures. The border has endowed literature with the same ambiguous identity that road movies conferred on Mexico: a place to escape to, the desert where the outlaws got their chance.

Translated from Spanish by Ellen Calmus

Rubén Ortiz Tórres, Made in Mexico, 1991; courtesy of Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles