Migration Across Time and Space in Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World

A transhistorical reading of Signs Preceding the End of the World, situating the novel within longer histories of migration, border formation, and cultural displacement.

Through close readings of the language, imagery, and scenes of documentation and official scrutiny in Yuri Herrera's novel Signs Preceding the End of the World, Ana Isabel Montero reveals how migration is represented not simply as a border crossing but as an existential and symbolic process that transforms identity. Focusing on the contemporary U.S.–Mexico border, Montero examines how Herrera narrates the migrant experience through philosophical and literary traditions that precede the modern nation-state, particularly those rooted in Mexica cosmology and medieval Iberian traditions of passage, exile, and liminality. The protagonist’s journey is read alongside premodern narratives of afterlife and threshold-crossing, revealing how the border functions as a persistent condition carried by migrants rather than a line left behind. Montero places Signs in dialogue with colonial evangelization, early modern linguistic projects, and contemporary regimes of surveillance and documentation, revealing how power operates through language and law. By bridging medieval Iberian literature, Mexica cosmology, and classical European traditions, including Dante’s Inferno and other myths of descent, this book reimagines Signs Preceding the End of the World as a work that resists linear temporality and national containment.