The Thirdspace of the Borderlands in Luis Alberto Urrea's The House of Broken Angels: A Geocritical Reading

In The House of Broken Angels (2018), Luis Alberto Urrea celebrates the life of his protagonist Big Angel who, close to his death, brings the family together for his last birthday party. The novel recapitulates the life and struggles of immigration and assimilation of this Mexican immigrant caught between two nations and two cultures. Drawing on David Harvey's and Edward Soja's geocritical theories, this essay examines the novel's spatial representations of the US-Mexico borderlands where two and more cultures confront each other. As border critics point out, the region is a powerful symbol of the nation with its ideologies concerning race and immigration, striving for the containment and marginalization of difference to ward off a perceived threat. As a multicultural space, however, the border region cannot easily be defined, contained, or secured; on the contrary, surveillance and control entail enormous human costs, Urrea shows, ripping families apart while also promoting clandestine activities that may lead to death. In short, rather than a static space, Urrea portrays the region as a place of contestations and negotiations, of alterity in the making. The novel's protagonist Big Angel exemplifies the evasion of the pressures of assimilation and homogenization so that cultural difference becomes empowering. Through the strategic evocation of cultural affinities and by embracing family and community as transcendent values, the novel's hero resists hegemony and subverts the dominant ideologies of the nation as inscribed onto space itself. The novel's cautiously optimistic perspective offers hope for overcoming the harmful dichotomies that reinforce cultural oppression and promises to redeem a region that has become a symbol of the nation-under-attack. © 2023 MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.