Ballads without Borders: Transnational Identities and Voices of Latino/a Migrant Experiences in El Corrido de Dante by Eduardo González Viaña.

This article attends to the representation of contemporary Latin American migrant experiences in the U.S. in El Corrido de Dante by Eduardo González Viaña. It focuses on voice and identity in relation to migration, space, place, home and belonging. Paraphrasing Spivak’s question “Can the subaltern speak?” from her homonymous essay, I discuss if the undocumented migrant subject has a voice of his/her own. I claim that the text can help us understand the experiences of undocumented Latin American migrants and the identitarian “in-betweenness” of the new generations born on the other side of the border. Furthermore, I argue that it is a polyphonic novel populated by “new” and “traditional” Latino/as, whose heterogeneous voices are enunciated from liminal or marginal positions. I find that González Viaña conveys a rich portrayal of the idiosyncratic reality of the Latin Americans in the U.S. with an original intertextual play that situates the text in the literary borderlands between classical Western works and Latin American and Latino/a popular and mass culture. However, the voice of the undocumented migrant is mediated by the complex multi-layered narrative structure, which makes the “truth” behind the story dissipate into hearsays, myths and legends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]