Across countries, across oceans, across mountains, and across borders, despite differences in culture, history, and belief, there is at least one thing that all humanity shares: death.
All stories, as I have been told several times by a couple of professors, are about one of two things: sex or death. I am hard pressed to prove those professors wrong. Of course, some stories are more blatant than others. Some use death as a blatant metaphor, such as Yuri Herrara’s novel Signs Preceding the End of the World.
In the novel, the heroine Makina makes the journey to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. The novel is portrayed with a dreamlike tone, and the main character has a kind of invincibility that is common to heroes of myth and legend. Specifically, the
Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Underground
novel calls back to the myth of the Quetzalcoatl. In the ancient Mexican pantheon, the feathered serpent was a powerful and influential figure. In modern media, the Quetzalcoatl can be portrayed in a myriad of ways, such as a feathered dragon, as a colorful animal, or as the thing on the right of this paragraph that I’m sure no one wanted to see today.
Like many myths of gods and heroes descending into the underworld, Quetzalcoatl has a mission to resurrect humanity. As the story goes, he descends into Mictlan, the Aztec underworld, with his brother Xolotl. Together, they cross through the nine realms and ask Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the dead, to take the human bones back with them.
Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent and creator god of the Aztecs
Mictlantecuhtli begrudgingly agrees but attempts to trick and trap the two gods several times, before Quetzalcoatl escapes with the shards of bones that became humanity.
There was one condition for the gods to take the bones: that all of humanity must one day return to the underworld in death. This is something that Quetzalcoatl does not dispute, and humanity is doomed to his fate. Quetzalcoatl and his brother symbolize the cycle of life and death. While Xolotl can find the way into the underworld, it is Quetzalcoatl who finds the way back.
What does this have to do with Makina in the novel Signs?
Immediately, it is made clear that Makina must cross the border into another land with the mission of bringing someone home. Her brother has lost his way, and he has lost all contact with his family. Makina is aware that when people cross that border, they are permanently changed. Their language changes, their mannerisms change, and there is nothing to be done to restore the life that these people once had; “Sometimes, more and more these days, they called from the North; these were the ones who’d often already forgotten the local lingo” (19). She knows that she doesn’t want that to be her fate when she crosses, so she takes almost nothing with her.
Her journey is told through nine trials, much like the nine realms of the underworld. She only makes it into the US through the help of friends. One of these friends is Chucho. Chucho is introduced almost like the ferryman of ancient Greek myth, and he rows Makina across a deadly river and to this new land where the sky is already a different kind of blue. However, Chucho is also the man who introduces Makina to her final trial,
Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Underground
her final decision. After Makina has found her brother, and found that he could not be saved, she can also no longer return home to the life she used to have. She makes the choice to start the new cycle, where she can join her brother in a new life on the other side. Chucho is both Xolotl, the one who lead her into the underworld, and Quetzalcoatl, the one who leads her back out into a new era.