Border Memoirs and Border Aesthetics: The Figure of the Border in Jean Guerrero’s <i>Crux</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay situates border memoirs in the context of the growing field of border aesthetics and explains why memoirs and other forms of life writing constitute a particularly rich source for border poetics. After offering a brief overview of recent border memoirs from the US-Mexico border, the essay highlights a key paradox accompanying border memoirs. Border memoirs are often celebrated for their potential to fight stereotypical projections about nameless migrants. Challenging this view, the author argues that the most important potential of border memoirs lies not in “giving voice to migrants” but in questioning the very concept of the border as a line to cross. The essay therefore cautions against border memoirs reinforcing the very binaries they seek to critique. Using Jean Guerrero’s memoir Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir (2018) as a case study, the author argues that autobiographical narratives possess unique, creative tools to challenge border-related paradigms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".