Featuring car chases, earthquakes, gunfights, interviews, reportage, translations, literary criticism, narrative history, political commentary, a phenomenology of the cantina, a theory of the postcolonial elite, meditations on whiteness, a loving parody of the creative writing program at Iowa, a taxonomy of the Mexican ruling classes, neobaroque paintings, situationist documentaries, French opera, Colombian cumbia, cops, conquistadors, immigrants, astrologers, fascists, drug lords, passages in nine languages, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a brief lecture on Hegel, a dying mother, a defeated father, and a love undone by the myth of national identity, América del Norte avails itself of the formal devices of five centuries of Mexican literature to insist that a novel can contain the world.