Crossings

Throughout the short story, the author uses Herminia, Koralia, and Milagros's repeated border crossings to explore the lines between youth and age, stability and fragility, and life and death. The author introduces this thematic notion in the opening paragraphs of the story. On the opening page alone, repeated references to, and images of crossings and borders appear in the following lines: "When they started making these trips, old Herminia stopped eating, fearful that her daughter and granddaughter might abandon her on a backroad near the border," "At first they made the crossing only once a month. Now they did so every week," and "They left before first light. They came back after nightfall" (1). In these lines, the narrator attends to the women's physical journeys from Venezuela into Colombia for food. However, the lines also address the boundaries between hunger and survival, and night and day. As...