LA EXPERIENCIA LECTORA DE LAS CORPOGRAFÍAS MIGRANTES EN THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS Y AMARÁS A DIOS SOBRE TODAS LAS COSAS

This article compares the reading experiences of the migrant protagonists in Alejandro Hernández's Mexican novel Amarás a Dios sobre todas las cosas (2013) and Dinaw Mengestu's North American-Ethiopian novel The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2007). Precarious transit, illegality, and separation from their families blur the identity of the protagonists, who are rendered invisible in a social context that emphasizes their foreign status. This invisibility is transformed thanks to the effects of the reading experience, which mobilizes forces, mediates realities, and inscribes meaning on bodies. In the intimacy that language provides (Pardo, 2004), migrant protagonists can recognize, physically and symbolically, their individuality in order to project both a personal narrative that enables them to open themselves up to otherness in foreign spaces and to construct a collective and intergenerational narrative. Thus, the work of the word, both in reading and writing, offers a framework of symbolic references that manifest themselves in migrant corpographies (Paveau and Zoberman, 2009).