Gibson recounts this forgotten epic, but one can also read her story as a reliable travel guide, a long ride along the path of an elusive but powerful history. And even if that history is new to most of us, it is a familiar tale for many nations moving beyond the walls into a territory of common goals. In most of the cities there have been people writing and protesting, forging from modest presses a regional demand for a possible public space, voices of a civilization and of a law against intolerance and violence. They are the forgotten heroes of the press, journalists and chroniclers, travelers and booksellers.

Some of the cases in “El Norte” are more tragic than others, like the painful history of Puerto Rico, where the Arawak people, or Tainos, the pacific society that Columbus encountered, had an easy laugh and were as curious as children. We now know, thanks to the Spanish historian Consuelo Varela, that Columbus stopped their baptism as Christians in order to sell them as slaves; he even managed to get a percentage from the first bordello in the Americas. The Tainos, of course, disappeared, but others in the Caribbean did not. They didn’t appreciate Columbus’s gifts of marbles, and they would have returned to Donald Trump the paper towels he threw to the victims of Hurricane Maria. History repeats itself, now as shame.

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What is particularly fascinating about this book is that its encyclopedic project is not a rewriting of history but a recitation of readings. Almost each historical event is retold through memory, recording, evaluation and discussion. This is history as dialogue. It leaves the mourning authority of archives and takes its place as a long conversation, presupposing that truth can be reached through an extended pilgrimage, a journey through violence, discrimination, racism, exploitation and the inferno created by occupation. The narrative becomes not a tribunal but a hospice to language, shelter to the loss of meaning imposed by violence. Mexico lost half its territory and many lives, but the voices of Thoreau and Lincoln are here to sound an alarm and to hope. The model of replacing a tribunal with a conversation is reminiscent of Montaigne: Lacking friends, he lamented that Plato was not around to talk about the wonders of the New World and its inhabitants, who ignored the distinction between “mine” and “yours.”

Gibson lets the facts speak. But one would also like to read the saga of memory, that is, the version of the epic of “El Norte” through literature and fiction. The writer and critic Domingo F. Sarmiento came to the United States to learn from the American example of progress, and as president of Argentina to replicate those monuments of civilization that he saw: schools, railroads, immigration. Each of them fell short of his expectations. The Cuban poet and activist José Martí loved New York, but found that the people were composed of the “yeast of tigers.” In “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” García Márquez retells the American arrival in the South through the town of Macondo — where they discover the banana, move the river, bring modern tools. But it all ends in a massacre. Fuentes relates the story of an old writer who moves to Mexico: “A gringo in Mexico, that is euthanasia.” Roberto Bolaño recounts the number of women killed around the maquiladoras. The border but also the migration, narcotics but also life in-between are elaborated in Yuri Herrera’s fiction. The displacement of women in the novels of Carmen Boullosa and Cristina Rivera Garza, as well as the chronicles of Heriberto Yépez on dying-daily in Tijuana, explore new discourses of sorrow.