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In recent years, Mexican writers and filmmakers have redefined the relationship of travel between Mexico and the United States by casting Mexican characters as the adventurous pleasure seekers who choose the United States as the object of their own "tourist gaze." Pablo Soler Frost's Yerba americana (2008) is one such work of recent Mexican fiction.2 The novel features three characters who travel north in an automobile from Mexico City to the United States. After a series of stops in the South, the trio eventually arrives in New York City where they spend time seeing attractions and socializing with friends, both old and new. The three eventually leave New York City and travel west intent on reaching California before returning to Mexico. The novel consists of over one hundred short chapters and vignettes that follow a chronological order. These often brief segments lend themselves well to the genre of the road novel by simulating the sequential, episodic nature of overland travel with its occasional bursts of activity that interrupt longer periods of tedious, uneventful driving. An omniscient narrator directly addresses one character in particular, Pato, and implies that the events of the novel occurred at some point in the past. These passages in the text represent Pato's conscience in the act of remembering the events of the trip.3
By engaging a variety of artistic disciplines and traditions, Yerba americana defies easy generic categorization. Although most readers would likely receive Yerba americana as a work of fiction, its heavy reliance on travel to real places and references to recent historical events simulate elements of the travelogue and travel writing. The novel's quite faithful relationship with the film, 40 días, could induce others to read the work in the subordinate role of movie script. Still others are likely to associate the novel with both Mexican and Euro-American road novels and films produced since the mid-twentieth century. It is precisely this bifurcated generic quality of Yerba americana that requires this analysis to draw comparisons with and distinctions between a variety of theoretical and discursive fields.
Prescriptive definitions of travel writing have often served only to underscore the genre's amorphous qualities. According to Paul Fussell, travel writing's penchant for claiming "literal validity by constant reference to actuality" sets these works...