Yuri Herrera's last novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World , is a lyrical Mexican migrants’ tale:  Makina, a young Mexican woman, who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world, leaves behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages - one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

Across the US border, the author casts a satirical eye on supermarkets (“It’s really lonely here, but there’s lots of stuff”) and baseball: “One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right?”. This satirical view responds to a unique intention, as reviewed in The Guardian: to reveal emotional truths about the estrangement from their families of those who leave their homeland, and how many Latinos without papers are induced to join the US army as the price of becoming “legal".

The mexican author, who now teaches at Tulane University (New Orleans), keeps the same critical view on immigration in his books than in real life. "I have experienced this first month under President Donald Trump with horror, but without surprise. The situation of migrants in the United States was already bad, and we must repeat it to the hordes of people who continue to celebrate Obama for his intentions, instead of evaluating him for his concrete actions, such as having bequeathed Trump a massive and well-oiled deportation machinery", he said in an interview with El País this week.

"Now the Hispanic community must face the hatreds and institutional persecution that have been legitimized with the rise of Trump. Illegal raids, harassment at checkpoints, invasion of homes. It is a fascist offensive, but it has already begun to be answered, migrants are not easily frightened, and I think we will see more actions similar to the "One Day without Migrants,", he added. 

Read the full interview with Yuri Herrera in El País.