"Strange Heart Beating": By Any Other Name

On a debut novel that asks what our names and labels really tell us about people.

While we were living in Mexico, my partner attended a language school so that one of us could connect with the locals beyond the smallest of phrasebook small-talk. She began to notice the defiant and sometimes irritated way in which the Mexican teachers, hearing US students self-identify as “American”, would insist that they too were American. We wondered about this, because only a few months earlier, a man had won the US presidency in spite of (or because of) anti-Mexican rhetoric.

Perhaps this was an attempt to show that linguistic walls are as absurd as the actual wall Trump had proposed. Perhaps it was meant to reveal the inherent subjectivity in constructs such as American and Mexican, or us and them. Perhaps it was a rejection of the imperialistic way the US had commandeered the term “American” from people who’d occupied the continent long before the United States was born. Maybe it had something to do with how geography was taught in schools throughout Latin-America. Teachers de…