A Novel That Boldly Rethinks the Border

Decades ago, in the last days of the Carter administration, I spent a mean season living in Three Rivers, Texas. A hundred or so miles north of the border, between San Antonio and Corpus Christi, Three Rivers was a truck-stop town experiencing a boom of sorts, with a Valero refinery and an economy based in energy exploration. And yet, boom is not the right word, for even then, the town had a dusty, used-up quality, as if its better days—had they existed at all—were already in the past. For two months, I was part of a construction crew at a uranium mine three miles from town; it was the most alienating work and landscape that I had ever experienced. Thirty years later, while on a trip to Austin, I drove back to Three Rivers, where a new employer had established itself: a federal penitentiary. The mine where I’d once worked had been “abandoned,” according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“Abandoned” is an apt description of the Three Rivers that Fernando A. Flores portrays in Brother Brontë, his second novel, which takes place there in 2038. In spite of everything, the setting continues to compel me, as does the puzzle of Flores’s fiction, which frames the South Texas border region as a territory both physical and chimerical. On the one hand, it is a floodplain encompassing not only the Rio Grande, which divides the United States from Mexico, but also more than a dozen communities on either side of that boundary. On the other hand, it represents a kind of collective set of hallucinations. According to some contemporary political rhetoric, it’s a hellscape: lawless, a threat to national security, rife with drug and migrant trafficking. But Flores, who was born on the Mexican side and raised near McAllen, just across the river, sees it differently. His novel recalls what Valeria Luiselli wrote in Tell Me How It Ends, her 2017 book about the border: “While the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again … because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds.”

This notion of the border as liminal and inchoate sits at the center of Brother Brontë. An apocalyptic adventure story teeming with rock and rollers, samizdat books, worker rebellions, and underground societies, the novel envisions this land and its future not as utopian or dystopian, necessarily, but rather as a site of branching possibilities.

Flores’s fiction possesses the aspect of a dream. In the imaginative geography of the novel, the border region becomes not one but many overlapping environments, in which a variety of meanings accrue. One is the wasteland of Three Rivers: a community in which options—or good ones, at any rate—have been reduced to none, leaving everyone to get by with what they can. In that sense, the book recalls Flores’s 2019 debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, which also unfolds in the near future. There, those who live along the border, which is reinforced by not one but three walls, are pushed, after a food crisis, to reanimate and eat extinct species—a process later appropriated by the superrich, for more voyeuristic amusements.

In the world of Brother Brontë, the superrich—or, more precisely, the oligarchs—have already come and gone. At some point before the book begins, Three Rivers was transformed by “tech companies and big money” into a privatized metropolis. The goal was to exploit inexpensive labor, until “the investors pulled everything out at the last minute after they found a way to get even cheaper labor in another state.” What remains is a sprawl of abandoned buildings and toxic sites, where guerrilla groups of boys, working in the service of the mayor, enforce his autocratic crackdown on information by deploying mobile shredders to destroy every book they find. Brother Brontë begins with a raid on the home of an aging rock musician named Neftalí. The target is a library bequeathed by Neftalí’s late mother, an activist charged by the authorities with “organizing against the tech companies.” As Neftalí assesses the damage to her collection, she is comforted by her ex-bandmate Proserpina. “They took all my shit, ’mana,” Neftalí laments. “I don’t even care, really, because I’ve read them all. But some of those books are all I got left of my mother.”

[Read: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

You don’t have to read between the lines to get a sense of Flores’s social vision; the novel offers a bitter satire about the dangers of capitalism unbound by morality. Neftalí and Proserpina make their way through Brother Brontë mostly by their wits; a third bandmate, Alexei, gains wealth and power by popularizing a coin (not unlike crypto, but a physical commodity) that becomes Three Rivers’ common currency. Looming over them is the Big Tex Fish Cannery, where unemployed mothers are indentured to feed their children, who are allowed to visit in 20-minute increments. The record stores and movie houses are gone; the power grid is “pushed to its brink.”

And yet, for all these elements of breakdown, Flores has more in mind than a mere catalog of atrocities; his imagination is too capacious. For him, the border is vivid and meaningful on its own terms, a source to be mined not for financial or political gain, but for cultural and social inspiration. Flores makes this explicit from the first scene, in which Neftalí puts on a piece of music that provokes an out-of-body reverie. As she listens, she is removed from her ransacked home to “a bright, expansive beach,” where “a man walk[s] toward her along the shore.” The implication is not only that art can enlighten but also that it may, in fact, save us by allowing us to find ourselves. Art, Flores is telling us, is not gloss but substance—an idea that develops throughout the book.

As the novel progresses, Flores moves fluidly among narrative threads and points of view, orchestrating a chorus of characters and voices, who break apart and come together in all sorts of unexpected ways. In addition to Neftalí and her bandmates, there is her mother, who appears as a ghost, and her mother’s former lover Bettina, who helped instill Neftalí’s love of books. Perhaps most important is Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, the author of the novel-within-a-novel—about literature’s power to face down an array of exploitations—that gives Brother Brontë its name. These shifting perspectives reinforce the notion of the border as a landscape marked by many lives and stories, rather than a monolith.

This idea emerges most fully in Flores’s portrait of a nearby town, George West (there really is such a place). In the novel, it has been reimagined as a socialist utopia after the people there fought back against privatization, instituting a “rotating committee of diverse citizens [who] voted annually to distribute resources and land throughout the community.” As a result, “any disputes were settled democratically.” Among those drawn to the place is Neftalí, who arrives in the company of a Bengal tiger—a vivid symbol of the untamability of the region, in both the novel and the world.

For all the many ways that the border is commonly represented—as a political and geographic demarcation, a projection of fear and xenophobia—it is also, most essentially, a provocation to readers to widen their lens. Borders, by their nature, are elusive, a set of shifting lines on a map that tell us nothing about who lives on either side. In that sense, what else can this border be if not a laboratory for fusion: individual, collective, national, international? Brother Brontë is a novel that seeks to refashion it all.

[Read: The dreamers of the Rio Grande Valley]

Not surprisingly, a key element of this transformation involves reading; in George West, only 10 miles down the road from Three Rivers, Neftalí joins a communal property that houses a library where she, along with a young girl named Gia, can immerse herself in books. If the message is not exactly nuanced, some truths don’t have to be. “There will come a time, kid,” Neftalí tells the girl, “when you’re my age. And you’ll be very surprised nobody remembers those dark days. When we couldn’t see the sun. Never forget those days, kid … It’s you who will have to read to the future children. It’s you who will set the record straight for the generation after us.”

Reading and writing as a gesture of remembrance, remembrance as a tool of creativity and empathy—that, Flores insists, is not only the power but also the necessity of art: to reframe and reclaim this abandoned world.