Hospitality and Borders in Oscar Cásares Where We Come from

Abstract

[EN] This article explores how Cásares’s novel illustrates different modalities of hospitality as the protagonist, Nina, administers a changing hospitable response in her encounter with the Other. When she faces an ethical dilema, the protagonist does not slam the door but lets the Other in. This is the beginning of a hospitable response where “someone, or ones, categorized as ‘outside’, as not necessarily by right or legal contract, part of the ‘inside’, is temporarily brought within” (Still 2010, 11). The question is what happens once ‘the guest’ is inside, and how the host is changed in the process.