This essay—a blend of critical commentary with personal memoir—is a report on border crossing, on the ghosts that we carry, on the stories that we bear, and the promise that is handed on in telling them. Our material realities are made up of fragments of memories, echoes and traces that give shape and depth to a place. What happens, however, in the case of border crossers who find themselves suspended in-between the memory of what was left behind with the reality of a different cultural context? Through a reading of border crossings works, this paper examines the spectres/ghosts/echoes/ traces—the oftentimes traumatic residue— that remains when crossing borders. The works I discuss offer up a migratory aesthetics through what I have been calling an “unbearable lightness of being fronterizo.” As a response to narratives of control—hegemonic narratives that attempt to define or inscribe a space—a fronterizo practice can function to undermine reifying narratives, positing a contestatory strategy for emerging cultures
