Migrants and Other Others in 2020 by Javier Moreno

The aim of this chapter is to study the representation of different borders and its role in the portrayal of otherness in 2020 by Javier Moreno. 2020 is a novel built on the thoughts and voices of a series of characters. Amongst these, we can find Nabil, a young man of Saharawi origin; Jorge, a homeless man with Asperger’s; Josefina, a rich young anorexic woman; and her father, Gowan, a successful businessman of Scottish origin, who has disappeared and is involved in the creation of a mystic revolutionary movement. We explore the ways in which the novel builds a dystopic society through the representation of dysfunctional characters embodying different kinds of otherness and the way in which spatiality and the body are key to understanding how this otherness is created and reinforced.

With the help of the notions of limbo, non-places, hybridity, simulacrum and the dichotomy center-periphery we examine how borders are raised in the novel and how these affect the characters and the depiction of a society in decline. The notions of void and ruins recur as topics in the novel, and are an obsession for Gowan, who is both an observer and a creator of ruins through a series of actions that represent a wider economic reality where objects are bought, sold and trashed.

We study how the body, which in a way is the first barrier between the characters and the outside, plays a significant role in the novel as a marker of ethnicity, physical illness or, as with Josefina, as the recipient and target of an obsession for corporal void, latent in her eating disorder. Decay, in terms of both the character’s bodies and the spaces around them, functions in 2020 as a metaphor of a dysfunctional socio-economic system that is collapsing.