Beamed into the mothership

The abductions of Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel are the sudden deportations of Latin Americans by agents of the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, better known by its sinister acronym ICE. American Abductions is set in a near future in which the president, known simply as the “Racist in Chief”, has not only closed the nation’s borders to Latin Americans, but resolved to deport them all, as well as their descendants, and to “delete all files created on American soil by Latin American deportees” – a total erasure. It is a harrowing premiss, and depressingly plausible, predicated on an all-encompassing surveillance state that sounds rather like the one many of us are close to having already. “Enormous data centers in Utah” monitor every phone call, text and email for signs of one’s Latin American heritage. Any slip can “awaken the American algorithms” and trigger the deployment of ICE agents.

The key event is the abduction of Antonio Rodriguez, a novelist with a degree in economics from Yale, who works for a major financial institution. Cárdenas – an Ecuadorian based in the US who writes in English – stresses how the persecution has jumped the rails of class and become purely racialized, with even wealthy and successful Latin Americans subject to arbitrary deportation, futilely pleading: “please don’t abduct us we already paid for our yoga classes in advance”. On a typical morning in San Francisco, while driving his two young daughters to school, Antonio is snatched by ICE agents, the abduction captured on film by one of his daughters and circulated widely. (One motif is the way in which the virality of such videos ultimately does nothing to discourage the brutality.) Antonio is deported to Colombia, then undertakes to travel the world, interviewing others who have been forcibly exiled. One of his daughters, an artist named Eva, goes to Colombia with him, while Ada, an architect, remains in the US, where she lives under the spectre of surveillance, grasping at tricks, including a tincture for her car windows that pales her skin, to dissuade ICE patrols from targeting her.

To be abducted is to be beamed into the mothership of American terror. In the detention centres people are caged, dehydrated, diseased, the children injected with tranquillizers to obliterate memories of their parents. Cárdenas hardly needs his futuristic trappings: the separation of children from their families was a deliberate strategy employed by the Trump administration. In American Abductions the fear of deportation has become so ingrained that families are already spiritually separated. One of the most heartbreaking scenes involves a woman named Elsi, whose young nephew is snatched. Knowing that she’ll be taken too if she dares to try to collect him, Elsi tells an ICE agent: “I don’t have a nephew … you must have dialed the wrong number”.

The theme of separation affects the novel’s form, too. Characters are rarely present on the page with each other; they interact obliquely. Eva and Ada listen to their father’s recorded interviews, and only in this distanced, mediated way do we get to know them. Each short chapter comprises a single labyrinthine sentence, and the reader must stay alert to the subtle modifications that signal a shift from, say, one of Antonio’s recordings to an account of one of his daughters listening to that recording, then to snatches of the call-in show of a certain Dr Sueño, in which people ask for interpretations of their dreams. (This is a difficult novel, but it rewards re-reading.) The flattening effect gives American Abductions a dreamlike air: the ephemera of daily life, interspersed with the fast-forwarding or rewinding of a tape, mingle with the novel’s massive, grave themes. Images of lakes and pools recur, with Eva at one point picturing “a pond beneath a cave far away from here” and connecting this to “an image of electrodes on her brain”. The image invites endless meditation. Could it be that, in the collective unconscious of dreams, these exiles are pooled, united, inseparable? Or is even that space surveilled by the abductor, the reader implicated as yet another set of spying eyes?

Michael LaPointe has written for the Atlantic and the New Yorker. His debut novel, The Creep, was published in 2021

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

The post Beamed into the mothership appeared first on TLS.