Bordes líquidos, fronteras y espejismos: El dominicano y Ia migración intra-caribeña en <i>Boat People</i> de Mayra Santos Febres

Abstract

This essay examines the application of Gloria Anzaldua's concepts of the border and the frontier to the context of intra-Caribbean undocumented migration, based on Mayra Santos Febres's poetry collection Boat People (2005). The poems analyzed here reveal that patterns of Dominican-or Caribbean-migration do not fit squarely within the theoretical paradigms applied to the study of undocumented migration along the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, my study proposes a reconceptualization of the notions of the border and the frontier that responds to the specificity of the Caribbean context. On the one hand, the notion of a "border/frontier" emerges, which collapses these concepts to emphasize their simultaneity. On the other hand, the concept of a "double frontier" also surfaces to underscore the function that both the Caribbean Sea and Puerto Rico play as frontiers that must be crossed by undocumented migrants in the Caribbean.