This Train is Not Bound for Glory revolves around a single metaphor that of literary
trainscapes. Understood as the conjunction of the social and the mobile in the literary
representation of human and material capital put in motion by the railway system this book
focuses on narratives based at the Panama Canal Zone across the Central American banana
republics and on the human caravan traversing Mexico towards the U.S. border upon La Bestia.
Following the iron tracks of the inter-American world while focusing on the interstices created
by them This Train is Not Bound for Glory depicts the outcasts of modernity in their
inglorious journey across the Americas. Table of Contents Introduction
................................................................................... 1 Laying
the Tracks .......................................................................... 13A Man
a Plan A Canal ......................................................... 17Afro-Exile
.............................................................................. 23Tales of
Unarrival .................................................................. 29Black Panama
......................................................................... 33 All Aboard?
................................................................................... 41Kinetics
of Fruit Displacement .............................................. 45Reminiscing
........................................................................... 52Open Tombs
........................................................................... 57 Riding the Beast
............................................................................ 6172 Migrantes
.......................................................................... 61The Falling God
..................................................................... 66The Dark Side of
Migration ................................................... 81 Coda
..............................................................................................
85 Works Cited
.................................................................................. 89
