This project studies how the economic reconfiguration of the Mexico-US borderland in the immediate aftermath of the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement weighs upon the literary cartography of the Mexican and Latinx novel, particularly how the representation of desert and border as sites of socio-ecological devastation prefigures a new paradigm in the relationship between the environment, migration, and the global circulation of capital. Working at the intersection of literary formalism, critical geography, and the environmental humanities, I argue that the spatial composition of the Mexican and Latinx novel of the NAFTA era produces a countertopography to NAFTA’s ideal of globalization, opening speculative paths to imagine a different ‘world without borders.’