This Train is Not Bound for Glory

This Train is Not Bound for Glory revolves around a single metaphor, that of literary trainscapes . Understood as the conjunction of the social and the mobile in the literary representation of human and material capital put in motion by the railway system, this book focuses on narratives based at the Panama Canal Zone, across the Central American banana republics, and on the human caravan traversing Mexico towards the U.S. border upon La Bestia. Following the iron tracks of the inter-American world while focusing on the interstices created by them, This Train is Not Bound for Glory depicts the outcasts of modernity in their inglorious journey across the Americas.


Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................... 1

Laying the Tracks .......................................................................... 13
A Man, a Plan, A Canal ......................................................... 17
Afro-Exile .............................................................................. 23
Tales of Unarrival .................................................................. 29
Black Panama ......................................................................... 33

All Aboard? ................................................................................... 41
Kinetics of Fruit Displacement .............................................. 45
Reminiscing ........................................................................... 52
Open Tombs ........................................................................... 57

Riding the Beast ............................................................................ 61
72 Migrantes .......................................................................... 61
The Falling God ..................................................................... 66
The Dark Side of Migration ................................................... 81

Coda .............................................................................................. 85

Works Cited .................................................................................. 89