Humanities & Social Sciences
Tapachula, Chiapas: a small city on the southern border of Mexico bearing the weight of a continental migratory crisis. Migrants trapped between bureaucracy, misery, and violence. Tens of thousands of bodies halted in front of the invisible wall of the United States. This book seeks to explore migration from the inside out. Its field of exploration encompasses not only the physical border but also the narrator's personal experience as an immigrant in Mexico.
It is a hybrid work that weaves through chronicles, personal essays, autobiography, and travel writing, considering the migratory phenomenon not just as a collapse but as a space for profound subjective elaboration. The story of a religious leader expelled from Angola, the adventures of a former Colombian guerrilla threatened by the dissident factions of the FARC, and the nostalgia of an exiled Sandinista from Daniel Ortega's dictatorship blend in a common chorus with the narrator’s voice, son of a father killed by the Venezuelan state and a mother seeking asylum in Mexico.
More than a chronicle, "El espejo animal" seeks to be a spoken portrait of migration in Latin America. It is an artifact that enables and amplifies the voices of migrants where they cannot be heard.
