75 pages • 2 hours read
Yuri HerreraSigns Preceding the End of the World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaChapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Place Where People’s Hearts are Eaten”
A soldier at the military base tells Makina to wait as he summons the man she is looking for. A few moments later, he arrives. It is her brother, dressed in a military uniform. Her brother’s appearance has changed in some ways, but he is unmistakable. They walk together to a courtyard.
Makina’s brother tells his story. After finding that their father had no land, he wandered from place to place until he met the old woman who fed him and helped strengthen him until he met the Anglo woman who “had come offering the earth itself for his assistance” (87). She spoke Latin and introduced him to her family. His job was to take the place of their teenage son who had recklessly enlisted in the army to prove himself. He was to be deployed shortly. The deal was that if Makina’s brother made it back alive, they would pay him a large sum of money and he could keep the son’s identity. If he did not make it back alive, they would send the money to Makina’s family. Makina’s brother spent the days before his deployment practicing Anglo; the Anglo family took good care of him. He managed to fool the officers and successfully enlisted under the Anglo teen’s name.
Makina asks her brother about the war. He tells her she would not understand, but she persists; she wants to know him better. He tries to explain the incongruous combination of the boredom of waiting for action and the terror when battle suddenly breaks out. He lost friends, but he was not harmed. He reluctantly explains that when it came to killing, “some get a taste for it right away. Not me. Still, you know: if tears are gonna fall, better their house than mine” (90).
When Makina’s brother returned from his tour of duty, the Anglo family was surprised to find him alive. They were not able to raise the money they promised him. When the father offered to let Makina’s brother work for him, the wife interjected, wanting to uphold as much of their end of the bargain as possible. The family changes their identity and moves, leaving Makina’s brother with the son’s identity and citizenship.
Makina and her brother run into a soldier whom Makina’s brother is teaching Anglo. They have a brief conversation; the soldier speaks only in the future tense, which he is practicing today.
Makina asks her brother why he does not just return home, and he replies, “I already fought for these people. There must be something they fight so hard for. So I’m staying in the army while I figure out what it is” (93). He gives Makina some money to help her get back to the South and says he must go. He sends his love to Cora. He hugs her, but Makina feels “like it wasn’t his sister he was hugging, like it wasn’t his mother he was sending a kiss to, but just a polite platitude” (90). She feels as though “he was ripping out her heart, like he was cleanly extracting it and placing it in a plastic bag and storing it in the fridge to eat later” (94). When her brother leaves, Makina takes out the note Cora wrote for him. It reads, “Come on back now […] we don’t expect anything from you” (94).
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Snake That Lies in Wait”
After leaving the military base, Makina is pulled into a lineup of immigrants in an empty lot by a police officer. All the people he has detained are Latin; they wait on their knees as he paces in front of them, hand on the holster of his gun. The officer tells them that he is a patriot and that they should “get used to falling in line” and asking permission from people like him for everything they do (97).
The officer zeroes in on a man holding a book of poetry. He rips a page from the back of the book and demands: “Write why you think you’re up the creek, why you think your ass is in the hands of this patriotic officer. Or don’t you know what you did wrong?” (98). The man is frozen in fear, barely able to scribble. Makina snatches the pencil from him, despite the officer’s objection, and begins to write. She writes ten lines and then stops. The officer snatches it and begins to read it aloud.
Makina’s message explains the various ways her countrymen and women are used and exploited by Anglo culture, along with the negative stereotypes the Anglos associate with them. The officer seems to lose interest in his captives; he says something into his radio and leaves. Realizing they are free, the profiled migrants look at Makina, some with gratitude, some with mistrust. Makina leaves before they can say anything to her.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Obsidian Place With No Windows or Holes for the Smoke”
Makina does not know how she will get back home, but she cannot stop walking. She reaches a park where she plans to sleep when she is suddenly greeted by Chucho. The narrator says he looks “exactly like himself and also quite different—like varnished over, like meaner, or with a bigger nose” (104). Makina is confused; Chucho works for Mr. Aitch, but it is Mr. Q who was supposed to help her in the North. Chucho tells her he never stopped watching out for her; he knows how difficult she has had it after they separated. Makina tells him she does not understand the Northerners. He replies that they do not understand themselves; he says, “They want to live forever but still can’t see that for that to happen they need to change color and number. But it’s already happening” (104).
Chucho leads Makina out of the park and into a maze of narrow city streets. He takes her to a doorway where a staircase descends into darkness. He tells her, “Here’s where they’ll give you a hand,” blows her a kiss, and leaves (105). Makina descends a spiral staircase into darkness. At the bottom is a door with the word “Verse.” An old woman waiting by the door hands Makina a lit cigarette and bids her enter. The room is dark and full of people smoking cigarettes; though there is no ventilation, the air smells clear. Makina notices that she has no odor either, even though she has not bathed recently.
A tall, thin man steps out, handing her a file. The file contains papers documenting a new identity for Makina. She momentarily panics at the upheaval of her life; however, she comes to realize that “what was happening was not a cataclysm” and says to herself, “I’m ready” (107).
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
The revelation of Makina’s brother’s fate confirms her fear that going North has changed him. The Anglo family’s attitude, though friendly on the surface, indicates the Northern/Anglo attitude toward Southerners/Latin people. The family is unable to raise the money they promised to Makina’s brother; they never expected him to survive his tour of duty. The Anglo woman insists on letting Makina’s brother keep his new identity as compensation; the family will move far away and change their identity. While this shows she has a conscience, the fact that she sought out a Latin man to endanger himself for money demonstrates how vulnerable Latin people are in Northern society.
Makina addresses this vulnerability in her monologue that the police officer reads: “We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do?” (99). The Anglo family shows how Northern society takes advantage of the Southerners’ willingness to take on dangerous and undesirable jobs; substituting Makina’s brother for their son is an extreme example. Makina addresses the stereotype that migrants “came to take your jobs” by juxtaposing it with the sarcastic remark, “we who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours” (99). She concludes her speech by addressing her compatriots as “We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians” (100). The word “barbarians” draws on History as a Palimpsest of Western society. As barbarians, they are forever outside, excluded from the “empire” of the North; but, like the barbarians of antiquity, they pose the danger of destroying that empire.
Despite her reaction to her brother’s choice to remain in the North, Makina comes to a similar resolution in the end. There is something about the North, the potential for a new future, represented by the new languages and cultures coming into being, that draws her in. Makina has undergone the symbolic death foreshadowed in the opening scene of the novel and has been reincarnated in the North, with “another name, another birthplace […] new numbers, new trade, new home” (106). Because of her adaptability and resourcefulness, she can acclimate to these new things, realizing that “what was happening was not a cataclysm,” but an opportunity to see the world anew (107).
