“I kept Gabo this time because I want him to finish high school. I don’t care what the authorities say about his legal status. We’ll work it out.”

Regina lives and works legally in the US, but her brother Rafa and nephew Gabo are Mexican citizens. The Guardians depicts the lives and experiences of families who cross the US-Mexico border for seasonal work, health care, and education. Regina reflects that the land that became Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas all once belonged to their ancestors and that the border is a recent invention. Through this depiction, Castillo demonstrates the multicultural, multinational nature of the Borderlands as a region, and her family’s mixed legal status is a microcosm of this dynamic.

“I’ve been fighting to keep my sobrino since then, but my brother gets terco about it and keeps insisting on taking him back to the other side. What for? I tell him. Because he’s Mexican, Rafa says. As if I’m not because I choose to live on this side.”

This novel is invested in exploring the complexities of identities in the Borderlands. Because families have complex identities rooted in American, Mexican, and even Indigenous communities, Regina does not think it is accurate to categorize anyone as solely Mexican or American. This is reflected in Castillo’s use of Spanish throughout the novel, which is not only integrated into English sentences but also eschews the common practice of italicizing foreign-language words. This depicts the two languages as part of a unified linguistic culture. Here, sobrino means “nephew,” and terco means “stubborn.”