“Like a Great River Flowing Restless”: Fugitive Figures across (Central) American Borders in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

Over seventy characters meet, interact, collide, and/or collaborate with one another in Leslie Marmon Silko’s 763-page novel Almanac of the Dead. Radically shaking up Western conceptions of time, history, and space, Silko’s opus follows the criss-crossing trajectories of Indigenous fugitives, actively seeking to document and confront unresolved colonial conflicts throughout the Americas. Silko’s alternative archiving process is ambitious, purposeful, and yet necessarily selective, which results in some historical gaps. This article contends that, in her envisioning of a transborder, trans-Indigenous network of anticolonial resistance, Leslie Silko renders an idealized view of the unruly South as an embryonic and fugitive space of subaltern vindications and hope that is articulated predominantly around Mexico. This is a powerful vision but one which, nonetheless, barely mentions the ongoing Indigenous genocides taking place South of the Mexican border during the 1980s in Guatemala and El Salvador—the tumultuous decade Silko spent researching and writing her massive novel. To fill such an omission, this article takes account of Silko’s selective incorporation of Southern geographies and peoples. It engages the territories south of the U.S. border that are included in Silko’s Indigenous map of the Americas, and examines the novel’s representation of Guatemalan Mayas and Salvadoran refugees, who appear as anonymous, ghostly shadows in the Mexican chapters.