The ends of America, the ends of postmodernism

Yamashita's concern with the interrelation of North and South is manifest at the level of style as well as content. Tropic of Orange depicts an unstoppable flow of people and goods moving back and forth between the US and Mexico despite the most vigilant forms of border security. The novel illustrates the affirmative consequences of these flows in its creative fusion of Latin American-inspired magical realism with allusions to such Anglo-American sources as hard-boiled detective fiction and Hollywood film. Of course, The Crying of Lot 49 is also a generic hybrid, but its references to physics, classical mythology, Renaissance drama, and Freudian psychoanalysis are largely European in orientation. Among the authors Yamashita cites as influences are Pablo Neruda, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as the "border brujo" performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, who is the inspiration for the fantastical character of Archangel (Gier and Tejada). The use of Spanish-language words and phrases, supernatural events such as the literal movement of the border, the battle between the jaguar and the serpent, and references to mythical figures like Limpiao and La Malinche all reflect the imprint of Latin American narrative traditions. The inspired melding of Northern and Southern cultural forms is further evident in the novel's structure, which vacillates between the linear, goal-oriented model of plot development of the Anglo-American detective novel and cyclical understandings of time indebted to Amerindian sources such as the Mayan codices. The nonlinear conception of history is most fully articulated by Archangel, who prophesies a pattern of violence and renewal "based on the ancient belief that doom comes in fifty-two-year cycles" (48). This view is anticipated by the opening "hypercontexts," many of which gesture to cyclical structures like times of day, days of the week, and seasons. Based on indigenous American understandings of temporality, the circular conception of history expressed by Archangel, in which the angry and dispossessed people of the South periodically rise up against their Northern oppressors, contrasts with the linearity of the Western calendar and the weakened sense of historicity posited by Jameson as a feature of the postmodern moment. Yamashita's engagement with multiple literary precursors points to a more historically engaged and geographically expansive American archive than that of the high postmodernists, whose preoccupation with the Cold War often leads them to conflate America with the United States.

The "hypercontexts" at the opening of Tropic of Orange also set the stage for a narrative written in many different voices and dialects, from Emi's fast-talking hipster vernacular to the streetwise cadences of Buzzworm and the immigrant Bobby Ngu to the earnest reflections of the Mexican housekeeper Rafaela and the political poetry of Archangel. This chorus of voices is another way of distinguishing Tropic of Orange from The Crying of Lot 49, which is told exclusively from Oedipa's point of view. Of course, polyvocality is a strategy employed by many high postmodernists. However, they tend to use it as a sign of authorial mastery, whereas Yamashita's technique, which is clearly inspired by her ambivalent experiences as an ethnographer, seems designed to channel the voices of those who have been silenced from the historical record. Within the novel itself, Archangel assumes this task when he appears in the guise of many different populist figures, each with a distinctive voice and point of view. In the climactic showdown he appears as a Mexican wrestler named EL GRAN MOJADO, who announces that "My struggle is for all of you" (133). Of his antagonist, the robotic SUPERNAFTA, who claims to represent progress, technology, and commerce, EL GRAN MOJADO tells his audience: