Epilogue

IN HIS SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL Orange County: A Personal History, Gustavo Arellano describes a surrealist dream of return migration to his ancestral village of El Cargadero, deep in the heart of north-central México. “A couple of months before finishing this book,” Arellano writes, “I experienced the most vivid dream: I won a contest in which the main prize was the ability to fly” (2008: 25). After crisscrossing disparate geographies, from South East Asia to Eastern Europe, Gustavo decided to descend on El Cargadero, arriving in the late afternoon, when “the sun bathes everything in a soft, radiant glow.” Gustavo’s dream depicts the village quite accurately, verging on the utopian before taking a surrealist turn: “El Cargadero sits on the slope of a mountain, so rays either enveloped houses or cast them in shadows.” Hovering above, Gustavo tried to eavesdrop on conversations, “but all I heard was the laughs of contentment,” he writes. Once he landed on terra firma, “Streetlights flickered on, lending a beautiful shine to the village,” and people greeted him warmly....