Going for Nothing: Migration and Translation in Cristina Rivera Garza

This chapter analyzes El mal de la taiga (The Taiga Syndrome), a 2012 novel by Cristina Rivera Garza. The novel stages a journey to the far north named in its title, and I read it as a transposition and translation of the northward journeys made by migrants traveling from Central America and the author’s native Mexico to the United States. I argue that these migrants hover over and sometimes haunt the novel’s pages, although they are pointedly absent from the text. I ask what's at stake in this displacement and in the novel’s turn to allegory. I read Rivera Garza alongside theorists of desire from Sigmund Freud to Gilles Deleuze to Rita Segato and bring The Taiga Syndrome into conversation with the surrealist fiction of Leonora Carrington. Attending to the centrality of desire in Rivera Garza’s work, I show how this work challenges data-driven, social scientific, and humanitarian frameworks for understanding contemporary migration, and I argue that desire, language, and translation—categories that may seem far removed from ongoing migrant struggles for subsistence—remain indispensable.