Now I Surrender
Now I Surrender
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Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, graphic violence, and death.
Names and Borders as Tools of Colonialism
In Now I Surrender, Álvaro Enrigue deconstructs the colonial project as an act of bureaucratic violence, arguing that the imposition of names and borders is one of the primary tools for erasing Indigenous history and legitimizing control. For colonizing powers and their successor states, Mexico and the United States, the act of naming is possessive, a way to overwrite existing realities with a new, European-centric order. This process transforms people and places into manageable, controllable entities on a map, even as it obliterates their true identities.
The novel’s narrator repeatedly critiques this “naming fever,” explaining how New Spain’s conquerors used it to swallow vast territories. Lands were called Nueva México, California, and Tejas, incorporating them into an imperial narrative while erasing the peoples who already lived there. This bureaucratic conquest is most powerfully illustrated in the renaming of the Ndeé people. The narrator explains that their historical enemies, the Zuñi, called them ‘a pacu (“the enemy”), a name the Spanish later adopted and hardened into “Apache.” Thus, the Ndeé were forced into written history under a hostile label assigned by others, their identity forever framed by conflict. This act of naming is an act of subjugation, defining a people in relation to the colonial power structure.
Just as names overwrite identity, borders overwrite geography and culture. The narrator portrays Apachería as “a country that still exists but was erased from the maps” (12), whose existence was denied by the artificial lines drawn between Mexico and the United States. These borders, the products of war and treaties between colonial powers, fractured a cohesive cultural and geographical space, turning its inhabitants into fugitives in their own land. The physical territory of Apachería remains, a “lonely spot” of “impenetrable ravines” and “scorching plains,” (20) but its political and cultural sovereignty has been bureaucratically eliminated. The nation-state, with its rigid borders, cannot accommodate a fluid, nomadic reality like that of the Apaches, and so it erases it from official history.
Enrigue connects this historical erasure to the modern experience through the narrator’s own identity crisis. As a Mexican living in New York and applying for Spanish and US documents, the narrator feels his singular identity dissolving. He feels he is becoming a citizen of “Atlantis,” an imagined, placeless nation, an experience that mirrors the fate of Apachería. This parallel suggests that the colonial project of naming and bordering continues to reverberate through time, creating a sense of displacement even for the descendants of the colonizers. The bureaucratic tools that erased Apachería from the map now threaten to erase his own sense of a stable, singular identity, revealing the ongoing power of these colonial constructs.
Violence as the Foundation of the Nation-State
The historical landscape of Now I Surrender is saturated with violence, which the novel presents as a foundational and often bureaucratic tool of nation-building. The narrative suggests that the fledgling republics of Mexico and the United States were built upon the systematic and state-sanctioned extermination of Indigenous populations. This violence is portrayed as a grim, shared project, a technology for territorial expansion and the enforcement of a singular national identity, with both nations participating in a brutal logic that perpetuates itself through cycles of retaliation.
The novel illustrates how state-sanctioned violence becomes normalized, even casual. Lieutenant Colonel José María Zuloaga leads expeditions of “irregulars,” ranchers who enlist to “punish Apaches” as if it were a sport, “like going hunting” (5). These men, dubbed nacionales by newspapers, serve the Mexican republic through freelance violence that becomes a form of patriotic recreation. This casual brutality demonstrates how the nation-state outsources its dirty work, integrating extermination into the cultural fabric of the borderlands. The violence is a grim pastime, a “great fun” that solidifies the settlers’ identity as defenders of the new nation.
Through the narrator’s metafictional commentary, Enrigue insists that this violence was a joint enterprise, critiquing the Mexican tendency to “fob off accusations of genocide on the gringos” (28). He asserts that both nations waged a “rational and systematic extermination campaign” (45) against the Apaches, where peace talks became obsolete. The book refutes any narrative that casts one nation as more virtuous than the other. Gringos may offer reservations and eventual humiliation, but the Mexican army is often crueler, aiming for total eradication. This shared culpability emphasizes the novel’s argument that the modern nation-state, regardless of its specific flag, is fundamentally built on the violent suppression of those who resist its borders and its claims to sovereignty.
The logic of this foundational violence is most directly seen in the brutal cycle of retaliation between the Yaqui twins, Guadalupe and Victoria, and a criollo rancher. After their cousin is tortured and killed, the twins enact a horrific, reciprocal revenge, mutilating the rancher’s son and torturing the rancher to death. Their actions are described as a “technical procedure” (124), an almost bureaucratic process of vengeance. This chilling episode reveals the savage justice that arises in a land defined by state violence. When the nation-state uses extermination as a tool of policy, it creates a world where torture becomes a form of communication and mutilation a righteous response, trapping all inhabitants in an inescapable cycle of brutality.
The Fluidity of Borderlands Identity
In the contested borderlands of Apachería, Now I Surrender dismantles rigid categories of race and nationality, revealing identity as fluid, situational, and often contradictory. The novel demonstrates that the rigid labels of “Mexican,” “gringo,” and “Indian” imposed by colonizing powers fail to capture the complex reality of a region defined by centuries of mixing, conflict, and adaptation. Characters in the novel are continually shaped by their choices, loyalties, and the harsh environment they inhabit, creating a world where identity is a journey rather than a fixed destination.
The town of Janos is a microcosm of this borderlands fluidity. It is a place where a strategic location and the scarcity of European women led to a society defined by mixed heritage. The narrator describes how Spanish settlers and other immigrants “married Indian women, and their children were something else again: Chihuahuans, Mexicans, God knows what” (3). This description establishes the setting as a space where neat ethnic lines have already blurred into a complex mestizo reality. The presence of indios de razón, Apaches who have integrated into the European-style economy, further complicates any simple binary between colonizer and colonized, showing that identity is also tied to economic and social choices.
Camila’s personal journey is the novel’s clearest exploration of this theme. She begins as a criollo woman, albeit one raised among Jicarilla and Concho children, giving her skills and knowledge that defy her official status. After being captured by the Apaches, she endures a brutal process of transformation, culminating in her choice to become one of them. Her decision is an active embrace of a new identity. When Zuloaga finds her, she asserts that her future child with the Apache chief Mangas Coloradas will be a warrior, whether a boy or a girl. Her final declaration that she would “rather take a bullet than return to Janos” (441) solidifies her transformation, demonstrating that identity in the borderlands is ultimately a matter of allegiance and personal will, rather than blood.
The narrator reinforces this idea through his direct critique of historical narratives that oversimplify the region’s conflicts. He dismisses the binary of “whites” and “Indians,” pointing out that both Mexican and US armies were multiracial forces that included Indigenous people, descendants of African enslaved people, and Chinese immigrants. The Apaches themselves saw their enemies as nakaiyé, “those who come and go” (61), or indad, “white-eyes,” terms that reflect behavior and appearance rather than a rigid racial category. This historical correction, combined with the narrator’s own contemporary struggle with his identity as a Mexican seeking other citizenships, emphasizes the novel’s central argument: In the borderlands, identity is a constant state of becoming, forever resisting the simplistic labels imposed by distant powers.
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