Pesadillas de la noche, amanecer de silencio : Miguel Méndez and Margarita Oropeza

In many border-related discussions—whether philosophical, anthropological, critical, or fictional—there are typical themes or narrative tics: allusions to the flexible geography that makes the border region both an isolated territory and an analogue for the postmodern condition, the puzzlement over how to understand the role of the maquiladoras \u27assembly plants\u27 and the area\u27s industrial boom, the awareness of a vast movement of people both north and south, a persistent and nagging phobia about feminization, and about female sexuality. In this paper I will explore these concerns with reference to two novels: Arizonan Miguel Méndez\u27s well-known 1974 novel Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims in Aztlán), a fragmentary fiction set in Tijuana, and Sonoran Margarita Oropeza\u27s 1992 novel Después de la montaña (After the Mountain), which begins with a woman crossing the border at San Isidro and concerns itself with her life as a migrant in California. Méndez\u27s nightmare-wracked re-invention of the cacaphonous voices of the many migrant souls who define Tijuana by night finds its counterpart in Oropeza\u27s focus on a single migrant women whose meditations on her mostly domestically oriented dreams jostle against her literal and metaphorical silencing in both U.S. and Mexican communities. At the same time, each novel evokes a geopolitical and cultural space of multiple crossings, one that is far more heterogeneous than conventionally transnational