Studies in American Fiction

From its origins in the eighteenth century, gothic literature has deployed horror and the supernatural to manifest anxieties over a wide range of invisible threats, such as technological and scientific progress; past and present forms of colonialism; and, more recently, environmental crisis. As Kelly Hurley explains, the gothic is “a cyclical genre that reemerges in times of cultural stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its readership by working through them in displaced (sometimes supernaturalized) form.”² Monsters, specifically, are said to embody these fears, as they are designed, like their name suggests, to reveal and warn.³ Accordingly, monsters are “the ultimate incorporation of our anxieties—about history, about identity, about our very humanity.”⁴ Thus, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asserts, cultures and specific cultural moments can be read through the monsters they engender.⁵

Mexican and Chicanx writers and filmmakers have captured the anxieties around the militarized U.S.-Mexican border, along with the harmful social impact of neoliberalism and globalized capitalism in the borderlands, through what Micah K. Donohue has termed “borderlands gothic science fiction.”⁶ Films such as Sleep Dealer (2008), directed by Alex Rivera, and the novels Lunar Braceros 2125–2148 (2009) and Keep Me Posted: Logins from Tomorrow (2020), both jointly authored by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatriz Pita, are examples of this genre. In the intersection of borderlands science fiction and cybergothic literature and film, monsters emerge in the shape of robots, cyborgs, and digital phantoms to warn us of a dystopian future when migrant workers’ exploitation and dehumanization result from transnational capitalism.

This essay aims to expand the work on borderlands gothic science fiction into what I have termed borderlands ecogothic science fiction. While scholarship on borderlands [End Page 189] science fiction has prioritized how this genre depicts and problematizes human life and labor under transnational capitalism, my analytical framework is aimed at also exploring nonhuman beings and ecosystems as integral to the concerns addressed by this form of fiction. Drawing from critical studies on ecocriticism and gothic literature, specifically the “alimentary gothic” genre, I propose an examination of the environmental aspects of the novel Tears of the Trufflepig (2019) by Fernando A. Flores, and argue that through the alimentary gothic elements in this novel—and particularly through the figure of the zombie—Tears of the Trufflepig exposes anxieties around environmental degradation, neocolonialism, and human and nonhuman exploitation in the service of unbridled capitalism.⁷

The novel is set in the near future in southern Texas and northern Mexico. Drugs have been legalized, and the U.S. government is erecting a third border wall, heavily guarded by Border Protectors. In response to a world food shortage, scientists have found a new method to artificially grow animals and vegetables through a technology called “filtering.” Now that narcotics are legal, cartel syndicates traffic “filtered” extinct and mythical animals to be eaten at underground lavish dinners attended by the very wealthy. In addition to supplying the culinary black market, cartel syndicates also smuggle the shrunken heads of the fictional Aranaña Indians, which have become valuable collector’s items, and stolen Olmec heads, both signaling the fetishization of ancient Indigenous cultures in this new era. In the border town of MacArthur lives Esteban Bellacosa, the lonely protagonist, whose brother, Oswaldo, was kidnapped by the head-shrinking smugglers but managed to escape before his transformation was complete. When Paco Herbert, a journalist writing a story on the illicit dinners, invites Bellacosa to attend one of these underground feasts, he comes face to face with the titular Trufflepig, a deity of the Aranaña tribe believed to be a “mirror reflecting who we are as people beyond time and space” (255). From then on, Bellacosa gets entangled with the filtering cartels and begins a dangerous journey that will end with him crossing the Balí dessert, carrying the Trufflepig, to enter the world of dreams.

Critics have noted the novel’s critique of colonialism and imperialism,⁸ but the environmental aspect of Tears of the Trufflepig has not yet, as far as I know, received critical attention. This may be...