A migrant vibration: liquid borders and the sounds of resistant transduction in Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s Children of the Land

In Children of the Land (2020), Marcelo Hernandez Castillo ends his memoir by reflecting on the birth of his son as it elicits the sound of a fugitive energy embodied in multiple registers by the undocumented migrant experience, which is always coming into and out of worlds and breaking established Western norms around sensation and visibility. This sensation of the fugitive manifests in the interplay between water and sound that recurs as a part of Hernandez Castillo’s experience, through which he must constantly navigate the contradictions of the border through the process of migratory transduction. By reading Children of the Land as an ecocritical and decolonial narrative attuned to the sonic presence of water and its function as a “liquid border,” this article investigates the role that sound plays in the lives of fugitive beings, whose uncapturable movement ruptures the repressive structures limiting human and non-human relationality.