Decades ago, in the last days of the Carter administration, I spent a mean season living in Three Rivers, Texas. A hundred or so miles north of the border, between San Antonio and Corpus Christi, Three Rivers was a truck-stop town experiencing a boom of sorts, with a Valero refinery and an economy based in energy exploration. And yet, boom is not the right word, for even then, the town had a dusty, used-up quality, as if its better days—had they existed at all—were already in the past. For two months, I was part of a construction crew at a uranium mine three miles from town; it was the most alienating work and landscape that I had ever experienced. Thirty years later, while on a trip to Austin, I drove back to Three Rivers, where a new employer had established itself: a federal penitentiary. The mine where I’d once worked had been “abandoned,” according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“Abandoned” is an apt description of the Three Rivers that Fernando A. Flores portrays in Brother Brontë, his second novel, which takes place there in 2038. In spite of everything, the setting continues to compel me, as does the puzzle of Flores’s fiction, which frames the South Texas border region as a territory both physical and chimerical. On the one hand, it is a floodplain encompassing not only the Rio Grande, which divides the United States from Mexico, but also more than a dozen communities on either side of that boundary. On the other hand, it represents a kind of collective set of hallucinations. According to some contemporary political rhetoric, it’s a hellscape: lawless, a threat to national security, rife with drug and migrant trafficking. But Flores, who was born on the Mexican side and raised near McAllen, just across the river, sees it differently. His novel recalls what Valeria Luiselli wrote in Tell Me How It Ends, her 2017 book about the border: “While the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again … because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds.”

This notion of the border as liminal and inchoate sits at the center of Brother Brontë. An apocalyptic adventure story teeming with rock and rollers, samizdat books, worker rebellions, and underground societies, the novel envisions this land and its future not as utopian or dystopian, necessarily, but rather as a site of branching possibilities.

Flores’s fiction possesses the aspect of a dream. In the imaginative geography of the novel, the border region becomes not one but many overlapping environments, in which a variety of meanings accrue. One is the wasteland of Three Rivers: a community in which options—or good ones, at any rate—have been reduced to none, leaving everyone to get by with what they can. In that sense, the book recalls Flores’s 2019 debut novel, Tears of the Trufflepig, which also unfolds in the near future. There, those who live along the border, which is reinforced by not one but three walls, are pushed, after a food crisis, to reanimate and eat extinct species—a process later appropriated by the superrich, for more voyeuristic amusements.

In the world of Brother Brontë, the superrich—or, more precisely, the oligarchs—have already come and gone. At some point before the book begins, Three Rivers was transformed by “tech companies and big money” into a privatized metropolis. The goal was to exploit inexpensive labor, until “the investors pulled everything out at the last minute after they found a way to get even cheaper labor in another state.” What remains is a sprawl of abandoned buildings and toxic sites, where guerrilla groups of boys, working in the service of the mayor, enforce his autocratic crackdown on information by deploying mobile shredders to destroy every book they find. Brother Brontë begins with a raid on the home of an aging rock musician named Neftalí. The target is a library bequeathed by Neftalí’s late mother, an activist charged by the authorities with “organizing against the tech companies.” As Neftalí assesses the damage to her collection, she is comforted by her ex-bandmate Proserpina. “They took all my shit, ’mana,” Neftalí laments. “I don’t even care, really, because I’ve read them all. But some of those books are all I got left of my mother.”

[Read: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

You don’t have to read between the lines to get a sense of Flores’s social vision; the novel offers a bitter satire about the dangers of capitalism unbound by morality. Neftalí and Proserpina make their way through Brother Brontë mostly by their wits; a third bandmate, Alexei, gains wealth and power by popularizing a coin (not unlike crypto, but a physical commodity) that becomes Three Rivers’ common currency. Looming over them is the Big Tex Fish Cannery, where unemployed mothers are indentured to feed their children, who are allowed to visit in 20-minute increments. The record stores and movie houses are gone; the power grid is “pushed to its brink.”

And yet, for all these elements of breakdown, Flores has more in mind than a mere catalog of atrocities; his imagination is too capacious. For him, the border is vivid and meaningful on its own terms, a source to be mined not for financial or political gain, but for cultural and social inspiration. Flores makes this explicit from the first scene, in which Neftalí puts on a piece of music that provokes an out-of-body reverie. As she listens, she is removed from her ransacked home to “a bright, expansive beach,” where “a man walk[s] toward her along the shore.” The implication is not only that art can enlighten but also that it may, in fact, save us by allowing us to find ourselves. Art, Flores is telling us, is not gloss but substance—an idea that develops throughout the book.

As the novel progresses, Flores moves fluidly among narrative threads and points of view, orchestrating a chorus of characters and voices, who break apart and come together in all sorts of unexpected ways. In addition to Neftalí and her bandmates, there is her mother, who appears as a ghost, and her mother’s former lover Bettina, who helped instill Neftalí’s love of books. Perhaps most important is Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, the author of the novel-within-a-novel—about literature’s power to face down an array of exploitations—that gives Brother Brontë its name. These shifting perspectives reinforce the notion of the border as a landscape marked by many lives and stories, rather than a monolith.

This idea emerges most fully in Flores’s portrait of a nearby town, George West (there really is such a place). In the novel, it has been reimagined as a socialist utopia after the people there fought back against privatization, instituting a “rotating committee of diverse citizens [who] voted annually to distribute resources and land throughout the community.” As a result, “any disputes were settled democratically.” Among those drawn to the place is Neftalí, who arrives in the company of a Bengal tiger—a vivid symbol of the untamability of the region, in both the novel and the world.

For all the many ways that the border is commonly represented—as a political and geographic demarcation, a projection of fear and xenophobia—it is also, most essentially, a provocation to readers to widen their lens. Borders, by their nature, are elusive, a set of shifting lines on a map that tell us nothing about who lives on either side. In that sense, what else can this border be if not a laboratory for fusion: individual, collective, national, international? Brother Brontë is a novel that seeks to refashion it all.

[Read: The dreamers of the Rio Grande Valley]

Not surprisingly, a key element of this transformation involves reading; in George West, only 10 miles down the road from Three Rivers, Neftalí joins a communal property that houses a library where she, along with a young girl named Gia, can immerse herself in books. If the message is not exactly nuanced, some truths don’t have to be. “There will come a time, kid,” Neftalí tells the girl, “when you’re my age. And you’ll be very surprised nobody remembers those dark days. When we couldn’t see the sun. Never forget those days, kid … It’s you who will have to read to the future children. It’s you who will set the record straight for the generation after us.”

Reading and writing as a gesture of remembrance, remembrance as a tool of creativity and empathy—that, Flores insists, is not only the power but also the necessity of art: to reframe and reclaim this abandoned world.

The executive order rechristening the body of water known internationally as the “Gulf of Mexico” is not an easy document to take seriously. Portions of it read like a child’s research paper: “The Gulf is also home to vibrant American fisheries teeming with snapper, shrimp, grouper, stone crab, and other species.” The import of this and other facts is never quite explained. Perhaps the snapper will taste better now that it comes from the “Gulf of America.”

So, no, this is not a serious document. Is it an illegitimate one? The Associated Press, one of the world’s premier news-gathering organizations, appears to think so. Last month, a few days after Donald Trump issued the order, the AP announced that it would continue using the name “Gulf of Mexico.” This week, the Trump administration retaliated by barring the AP’s reporters from covering White House events, placing the agency in an unenviable bind. The AP argues, convincingly, that denying access to a media outlet because of its choice of words violates the First Amendment. To cave now would be to surrender on the constitutional issue. But this is a fight that Trump is clearly happy to have—especially to the extent that it draws attention away from his more egregious affronts to the public interest and the rule of law. And it’s a fight that the AP probably should never have picked in the first place.

A huge share of Trump’s actions over the past four weeks fall somewhere on the spectrum from “legally questionable” to “plainly unconstitutional.” The “Gulf of America” rebrand is not one of them. A federal law passed in 1890 and updated in 1947 empowers the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to “standardize” how the federal government refers to places. The board answers to the secretary of the interior, who answers to the president. That’s the same legal authority under which the Obama administration changed the name “Mt. McKinley” to “Denali.”

[David Frum: The ‘Gulf of America’ is an admission of defeat]

In fact, if Barack Obama hadn’t done that, we probably wouldn’t be talking about the body of water between Mexico and Florida today. In physics, every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. In the Trump era, every progressive action generates an opposite MAGA reaction—but not an equal one. Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” began by changing “Denali” back to “Mt. McKinley.” Then, like an infomercial pitchman—but wait, there’s more—Trump tossed in the “Gulf of America” change, almost as a bonus.

Substantively, the stunt has nothing in common with the Obama administration’s decision on Mt. McKinley. The state of Alaska formally requested the change back in 1975, hardly a time of rampant woke excess, on the basis that “Denali”—the mountain’s historic name, still widely used by Alaskans—was a much better fit than “Mt. McKinley,” after a president who had never set foot in the state. Still, at a certain level of abstraction, Trump’s campaign to rename (and re-rename) mountains, gulfs, and military bases follows the same logic as the progressive version. Renaming a base named for a Confederate general, or a school named for a racist ex-president, is a declaration that values have changed since the days when those names were seen as acceptable. But in a democracy, values are determined by majority rule, and they don’t shift in only one direction. They can shift back.

The more that politicians mess around with place names, the more important it becomes for avowedly apolitical institutions to respond according to consistent principles. This is not so easy to do. In its style-guide update, the AP said that it would continue using “Gulf of Mexico” because the Gulf is an international body of water that has been known by that name for 400 years. “As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world,” it said, “the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.” It would, however, honor the change back to “Mt. McKinley” because, it said, “the area lies solely in the United States and as president, Trump has the authority to change federal geographical names within the country.” (The Atlantic’s style guide matches the AP’s on this matter.)

But the federal law giving Trump the power to rename Denali applies explicitly “to both domestic and foreign geographic names.” If the AP is going to follow the federal government’s legally valid naming conventions, then it should go along with “Gulf of America” by default, no matter how stupid it sounds. Carving an exception because of the Gulf’s 400-year history is arbitrary—the same sort of appeal to tradition that reactionaries make to prevent progressive-coded changes. Why, indeed, should modern society continue to honor a name imposed by Spanish conquistadors? Nor is it uncommon for different countries to call a shared body of water by different names: What Americans call the “Rio Grande,” Mexicans call the “Rio Bravo.” This has not caused any kind of breakdown of the collective geographic imagination.

News organizations routinely change how they refer to places, and many of these decisions carry the whiff of politics. In 2019, the AP announced that the Ukrainian city of Kiev would henceforth be spelled “Kyiv.” (Chicken Kiev would remain untouched.) “To many Ukrainians,” the AP explained, “the former spelling Kiev appears outdated because it is associated with a time when Ukraine was part of the Russian and Soviet states, rather than an independent country.” That is a perfectly understandable reason for making the change, but it is also, on its face, a political one. By contrast, news organizations have resisted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s request to refer to his country as “Türkiye”—even after the U.S. State Department agreed to do so in 2023.

[Read: A Super Bowl spectacle over the gulf]

These sorts of principled judgments are, as I said, hard to make. Trump makes them harder still by blowing past all standards of reasonableness or good faith, leaving high-minded institutions struggling to adapt. Even the best-designed rules break down when one side starts playing a completely different game. What if our president had decided to call it the “Gulf of Trump”? What if he had tried to rename the Atlantic Ocean? The man forces us to contemplate the previously unthinkable, because there is no norm or tradition that he won’t abrogate. For 134 years, “follow the Board on geographic names” was a simple, commonsense rule to follow. Then Trump got his hands on the Board.

None of this means that the Gulf of Mexico is now actually the Gulf of America in any kind of objective or even linguistic sense. Trump controls the Department of the Interior but not the English language. More than 12 years after it was renamed for Governor Hugh L. Carey, New Yorkers still refer to the passage between Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn as the “Battery Tunnel.” Washington, D.C.’s airport was named for Ronald Reagan in 1998; many if not most residents still call it “National.” The American people can decide for themselves whether to go with the “Gulf of Mexico” or the “Gulf of America.” And if you ever find yourself at a loss, here’s a tip: You can always just call it the “Gulf.”