Growing up in Latin America: Child and Youth Agency in Contemporary Popular Culture (Children and Youth in Popular Culture) 1666916870, 9781666916874

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Growing up in Latin America

Children and Youth in Popular Culture Series Editor: Debbie Olson, Missouri Valley College Children and Youth in Popular Culture features works that interrogate the various representations of children and youth in popular culture, as well as the reception of these representations. The series is international in scope, recognizing the transnational discourses about children and youth that have helped shape modern and post-modern childhoods and adolescence. The scope of the series ranges from such subjects as gender, race, class, and economic conditions and their global intersections with issues relevant to children and youth and their representation in global popular culture: children and youth at play, geographies and spaces (including World Wide Web), material cultures, adultification, sexuality, children of/in war, religion, children of diaspora, youth and the law, and more.

Advisory Board LuElla D’Amico, Whitworth University; Markus P.J. Bohlmann, Seneca College; Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic, Rutgers University; Adrian Schober, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne

Titles in the Series Growing up in Latin America: Child and Youth Agency in Contemporary Popular Culture Edited by Marco Ramírez Rojas and Pilar Osorio Lora School Gun Violence in YA Literature: Representing Environments, Motives, and Impacts By Laura Brown Vigilante Feminists and Agents of Destiny: Violence, Empowerment, and the Teenage Super/heroine By Laura Mattoon D’Amore Childhood, Agency, and Fantasy: Walking in Other Worlds Edited by Ingrid E. Castro Children and Childhood in the Works of Stephen King Edited by Debbie Olson Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time Edited by Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity: Disciplining the Child Edited by Magdalena Zolkos and Joanna Faulkner Posthumanist Readings in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction: Negotiating the Nature/Culture Divide By Jennifer Harrison The Sidekick Comes of Age: How Young Adult Literature is Shifting the Sidekick Paradigm By Stephen M. Zimmerly Female Adolescent Sexuality in the United States, 1850-1965 By Ann Kordas Tweencom Girls: Gender and Adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms By Patrice A. Oppliger

Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In Between Edited by Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark The Feeling Child: Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film Edited by Philippa Page, Inela Selimović, and Camilla Sutherland The Rhetorical Power of Children’s Literature Edited by John H. Saunders Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg Edited by Debbie Olson and Adrian Schober The Child in World Cinema Edited by Debbie Olson Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture Edited by Luella D’Amico Indians in Victorian Children’s Narratives: Animalizing the Native, 1830-1930 By Shilpa Bhat Daithota The Rhetorical Power of Children’s Literature Edited by John Saunders Misfit Children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings Edited by Markus P. J. Bohlmann The Américas Award: Honoring Latino/a Children’s and Young Adult Literature of the Americas Edited by Laretta Henderson Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity: Disciplining the Child Edited by Magdalena Zolkos and Joanna Faulkner

Growing up in Latin America Child and Youth Agency in Contemporary Popular Culture

Edited by Marco Ramírez Rojas & Pilar Osorio Lora

LEXINGTON BOOKS LANHAM • BOULDER • NEW YORK • LONDON

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rojas, Marco Ramírez, editor. | Lora, Pilar Osorio, editor. Title: Growing up in Latin America : child and youth agency in contemporary popular culture / edited by Marco Ramírez Rojas and Pilar Osorio Lora. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Series: Children and youth in popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022024608 (print) | LCCN 2022024609 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666916874 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666916881 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Children in popular culture—Latin America. | Youth in popular culture—Latin America. | Agent (Philosophy) in popular culture—Latin America. | Youth—Latin America—Social conditions. | Children—Latin America—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HQ792.L3 G76 2022 (print) | LCC HQ792.L3 (ebook) | DDC 305.23098—dc23/eng/20220628 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024608 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024609 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

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Introduction: Relational Agency of Minors in Latin American Narratives Marco Ramírez Rojas

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1 Some Notes on Latin American Childhood Pilar Osorio Lora PART I: GROWING UP QUEER: NARRATIVE AND CONSTRUCTED MEMORIES

1

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2 Growing up Queer in Mexico City: Rebellious Identities in Tryno Maldonado, Antonio Alatorre, and Sara Levi Calderón 13 Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo 3 The Dark Night of Mexico: Picaresque, Sexuality, and Violence in El vampiro de la colonia Roma and Las púberes canéforas R. Hernández Rodríguez

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4 Between Places: Physical and Mnemonic Spaces in the Paraguayan Film 108 Cuchillo de palo 47 Rafaela Fiore Urízar PART II: COMING-OF-AGE IN BETWEEN PLACES: NARRATIVES OF MIGRATION

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5 The Child That Looks: Childhood, Migration, and Ecology in El camino Alicia V. Nuñez

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6 Feeling Good: “Affect Aliens” of the Colombian Diaspora in Fiebre Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera Astrid Lorena Ochoa Campo

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Contents

7 Childhood on the Back of La Bestia: Fictions about Adults and Migration to the United States Rodrigo Pardo Fernández PART III: IN THE SHADOW OF REVOLUTIONS: (UN)LEARNINGS OF RESISTANCE 8 Agency and Learning from the Edges: Everyone Leaves as a Female Novel of Formation in Post-Soviet Cuba Marco Ramírez Rojas

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9 School Bullying as a Metaphor for the Sociopolitical Situation in Castro’s Cuba: “A la vencida va la tercera” by Yomar González and Camionero by Sebastián Miló 137 Nicolás Balutet PART IV: THE SUBALTERNITIES OF MINORS: VIOLENCE, SEXUAL ABUSE, AND DISABILITIES 10 Children, Ghosts, and Masks in the Mexican Narco-Zone—A Mediated Agency: A Comparative Analysis of Four Fiction Films and Documentaries Sophie Dufays 11 She Takes Pleasure in the Sins of the Flesh: Child and Youth Abuse in the Narrative of Ecuadorian Female Writers of the Twenty-First Century Silvia Ruiz Tresgallo 12 In the Name of Darkness: Coloniality and Disability in Mariana Enriquez’s Nuestra parte de noche (2019) Carlos Ayram PART V: EMBODIED LEARNINGS: ETHICS, AFFECTS, AND TRANSCENDENCE 13 Embodied Ethics in Los ríos profundos and La Rue Cases-Nègres Jeffrey Diteman 14 Formation and Ontological Transcendence in Giovanna Rivero’s 98 segundos sin sombra and Magela Baudoin’s El sonido de la H Alexander Torres

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Index255 About the Editors

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List of Figures

Figure 4.1 Renate Costa Describes the City of Asunción from a Boat in the Paraguay River Figure 4.2 The Director Recalls the Day She Found Her Uncle’s Lifeless Body on the Floor Figure 4.3 Image of the Director’s Uncle as a Dancer Figure 4.4 Grandmother’s Birthday Party Figure 4.5 Rodolfo Costa’s Front Door with the Sign “Lavanderia” on the Top Figure 5.1 What Does Saslaya See through the Looking Glass Figure 5.2 Entrance to the Imagined Castle in Florencia de los Ríos Hondos y los Tiburones Grandes Figure 5.3 Saslaya, Mid-Journey Figure 5.4 Only Trash Is Discernable Figure 5.5 The Golden Road Figure 5.6 And so, Begins the Journey Figure 5.7 Saslaya Looks Figure 10.1 Huck with Her Mask at the Beginning of the Movie Figure 10.2 Huck during the Night Party Figure 10.3 Boys at School Figure 10.4 Boys Staring at the Camera Figure 10.5 Wall-Painted Tiger with Shine Figure 10.6 Cellphone’s Video of Estrella’s Mother Figure 10.7 Opening Shot of Los niños del éxodo Figure 10.8 Children Playing in the Corridor

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50 51 53 54 59 71 72 72 73 76 76 78 160 161 163 164 166 166 167 168

Introduction Relational Agency of Minors in Latin American Narratives Marco Ramírez Rojas

In the past two decades there has been an enormous surge of academic interest in the representation of children and youth in Latin American films and literature. This is due, in part, to the wave of films and literary publications with young characters taking the roles of protagonists, perceptive narrators, discerning witnesses, and transformative agents. Movies like El camino (2008) and Infancia clandestina (2011) and novels such as Everyone Leaves (2006) are representative of a trend in representing minors that challenges the hitherto conventional paradigm of relegating children and adolescents to secondary roles. This trend also echoes the shift that the seminal works of Philippe Ariès (1962), Alan Prout and Allison James (1997), and David Oswell (2013) trace in the study of minors as historical, social, and political agents. Respectively from the fields of history, childhood studies, and sociology, these scholars observe that during the twentieth century the social perception, legal discourses, and political institutions experienced significant changes that granted underage subjects an increasingly more participative space of action and recognition. An event that symbolically marked this historical transformation was the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations in 1986, which by 2021 has already been ratified by 196 countries.1 However, as Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall observe, this change in the legal status of children, aimed at protecting their rights and improving their quality of life, did not significantly ameliorate the reality of children and adolescents in situations of precarity and inequality. This is especially true in a continent with drastic economic and social disparities such as Latin America (12). Keeping this in mind, this edited volume joins the ongoing dialogues regarding the varied approaches and perspectives that xi

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examine the presence and significance of minors in contemporary novels, short stories, and films produced by Latinx and Latin American individuals in the past decades. We contribute to this conversation by drawing attention to two interconnected issues that, despite the abundance of critical materials available, have not yet received sufficient critical attention: (1) the political and historical agency of minors and (2) the conditions of violence, scarcity, political instability, and economic struggle that are at the backdrop of their growing up process. To define what we understand for “minors” we rely on the definition provided by the United Nation: “A child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child” (Convention on the Rights of the Child).2 Within this comprehensive category, however, we recognize a division between adolescents and children roughly under the age of twelve years old. This line is stablished only for pragmatic reasons as we recognize that the limits between stages are porous, fluctuating, and vary significantly from culture to culture and from one epoch to another. With the exception of one, all the chapters related to film studies in this book deal with child protagonists, while those examining literary representations include both adolescents and young boys and girls. As a whole, Growing up in Latin America brings together a selection of essays that look at the capacity of minors to take on active roles in the politics of everyday life, the reshaping of historical memories and official narratives, the questioning of societal and codes of conduct, the renegotiation of identities and processes of ethical and affective education, as well as their agency in migratory processes and other contexts of adversity. This publication intends to fill the gap of critical attention regarding the essential role of minors as aware, effective, and active participants in the complex historical processes of the Latin American continent, both as national citizens and transnational migrants. Five main lines of inquiry guide the organization of the volume: gender and sexuality, violence and politics of authority, migration, subalternity, and historical memory. They are reflected in the following parts: (1) “Growing Up Queer: Narrative and Constructed Memories”; (2) “Coming-of-Age in Between Places: Narratives of Migration”; (3) “In the Shadow of Revolutions: (Un)Learnings of Resistance”; (4) “The Subalternities of Minors: Violence, Sexual Abuse, and Disabilities”; and (5) “Embodied Learnings: Ethics, Affects, and Transcendence.” Despite the variety of topics, authors, narrative genres, and theoretical approaches of our chapters, there are two fundamental questions that bring them together. We ask, first: How do minors claim and perform agency—political and otherwise—within the constraints of the material and sociohistorical conditions of their lives? Second: What does the process of

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learning and growing up means and entails for underage individuals navigating different instances of authority, power, subalternity, and economic affordance? In an attempt to highlight child and youth agency in contemporary narratives, Growing Up in Latin America is situated at the intersection of three areas of academic interest: literary, film, and childhood studies. Bringing together concepts and tools from these complimentary disciplines, our chapters contribute to understanding the representations of the world-making capacities of children and adolescents. We include essays dealing with novels and short stories written by Bolivian, Chilean, Cuban, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Peruvian, and Latinx authors. The films analyzed by our contributors traverse the entire continent: from the US-Mexico border all the way to Paraguay, including productions from Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, Venezuela, and Argentina. Each one of the essays provides both a discussion of the sociohistorical conditions framing the growing up process of minors, as well as a conceptual analysis around the ideas of childhood and agency. In this manner, our transdisciplinary and continental approach hopes to move forward in innovative directions the debates about children social, political, and historical agency. Bildungsroman and Alternative Narratives of Formation Latin American literature has a long tradition of Bildungsroman novels that extends from the Venezuelan writer Teresa de la Parra’s Iphigenia (1924) and the Argentine author Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1926), all the way to recent publications such as Papi (2011) by Dominican author Rita Indiana and El sonido de la H (2019) by the Bolivian novelist Magela Baudoin. Read diachronically, the history of the Bildungsroman in the continent helps tracing the evolution of the types of “hero” portrayed in coming-of-age narratives. Additionally, it also makes possible to track the social, political, and economic shifts experienced by Latin American nations. Similarly, a historical approach to the genre offers insightful perspectives on the changes in how our nations have perceived notions and practices of gender, political agency, subalternity, economic dependency, and ideas of family. But, more importantly to us, it also allows to observe the changes around the very notion of childhood and youth. Maria Inés Lagos’s influential study En tono mayor (1996) is one of the first academic publications to focus on the study of the Latin American Bildungsroman and to offer a diachronic review of the genre. Lagos examined the narrative, political, and ideological strategies used by twentieth-century female writers to appropriate a male-centered European literary form and transform it into a device that allows them

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to elaborate their own coming-of-age stories. Her reading emphasized the productive reinterpretation of a literary form to challenge patriarchal social conventions and to propose alternative models of subjectivity and social participation. Following Lago’s seminal contribution, Julia Kushigian (2003) and Mary Beth Tierney-Tello (2017) published two important volumes on Latin American childhood narratives. They paid special attention to questions of subjectivity formation, gender performance, marginalization, identity, and historical memory. Kuishigan takes a continental perspective and examines a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts that she presents as narratives of bildung and self-realization. Following a different path, TierneyTello narrows her study to Peruvian literature and films where she examines processes of national identity formation and highlights the importance of collective memory in fictionalized constructions of childhood. While recognizing an intellectual debt to Lagos, Kuishigan, and TierneyTello, this volume takes distance from their academic approaches and proposes alternative perspectives. As a whole Growing Up in Latin America engages with childhood and youth as lived realities that require strategies of continual adaptation and response that are not teleologically driven. In other words, this volume aims to study children and minors in their active and immediate interactions with their sociopolitical contexts, rather than as a “future adults” who are not yet fully constituted citizens and valid historical agents.3 This collection also wants to contest the notion that equates “growing up” with “self-realization.” As will be evidenced in many of the following chapters, the conditions of poverty, lack of resources, and marginalization that characterize the lives of minors throughout the continent force many of them to prioritize survival, self-preservation, and care for their immediate community. Especially in contexts of highly violent environments, dangerous migratory journeys, or impoverished living conditions, the individual pursuit of self-realization is often relegated to the background. A third assumption we want to dispute is that of interpreting child and young protagonists as symbolic or metonymic signifiers of the nation. Notwithstanding the validity of Tierney-Mallo’s insightful reading of the fictional child “both in terms of individual subjectivity and national identity” that “functions as a site of memory and reinterpretation of the past” (xv), the chapters in this volume invite to reconsider minors in their individuality and in their role as active agents of discourse, political action, and historical change bounded by the possibilities and limitations of their specific circumstances. In short, we invite readers to reconsider the critical stance of interpreting children merely as symbolic objects that embody national pasts or utopian projects or futurity. Although issued from a dialogue with existing literary criticism works, this perspective of studies applies both to approaches on literature and film.

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It is important to mention that although the scope of this book is not limited to the study of the Latin American Bildungsroman, a significant portion of the chapters examine literary productions that engage, adapt, and challenge the conventional tropes of the genre. However, rather than conceiving the coming-of-age process in its most classical iteration of a linear progression of a central character in its becoming—or failure to become—a productive member of society, our contributors look at unorthodox, marginal, and even liminal processes of bildung.4 The titles of our first three parts offer a succinct idea of the routes we set explore: growing up queer, growing up as migrants, and growing up in conditions of abuse and subalternity. The chapters by Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, Rafael Hernández Rodríguez, Alexander Torres, and Astrid Lorena Ochoa touch on the first line of inquiry. Ochoa’s chapter overlaps questions of gender with an investigation of the formative process of a Colombian adolescent migrant living in Miami. Her chapter and Rodrigo Pardo’s are two valuable contributions that study the formative process and challenges faced by young female migrants. Pardo’s essay studies narratives portraying underage female migrants in their attempts to cross the US border. Silvia Ruiz’s essay focuses on Ecuadorian narratives that discuss and offer alternatives to children who are victims of sexual abuse. Nicolás Balutet and Marco Ramírez Rojas approach Cuban novels and short stories with child protagonists and narrators struggling with conditions of precarity and lack of emotional and material resources. The studies of Diteman and Carlos Ayram bring their attention to novels where conditions of subalternity are aggravated by the social and economic disadvantages of coloniality and postcoloniality. While the former compares novels from Peru and Haiti with young male protagonists, the latter approaches a contemporary dystopian Argentine novel depicting dynamics of exploitation and coloniality. The questions driving the approaches of this volume are as follows: What are the knowledges, skills, and abilities that characterize the formative paths of individuals in such situations? What do these learnings prepare young individuals for, especially those living in conditions of scarcity, victimization, and uncertainty? What are the desires and necessities driving their actions and struggles? What alternative models of citizenship can be shaped by and for minors located at the social, political, and economic margins? Seeing Children and Adolescents in Films Nearly half of the chapters of this volume investigate contemporary cinematic productions that interrogate the complexities of children’s and adolescents’ formative processes. These contributions dialogue with the abundant existing bibliography around this increasingly popular field of studies. Arguably due to the more restricted circulation of books and the comparatively smaller

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audience of literary works, the academic publications on literary representation of minors in Latin America remain scant compared to the number of publications dealing with films.5 According to Rocha and Seminet, the interest on cinematic productions was spurred by the significant number of movies with underage protagonists produced after the 1960s and 1970s. These scholars enumerate the following interconnected factors that explain this phenomenon: “Society’s increased preoccupation for the safety and well-being of children” and the emergence of young directors making films based on childhood memories and “eager to represent their own conceptions of the past and/or critique the present,” in addition to the material and socioeconomic conditions of globalization that simultaneously alter traditional ways of life and permit a wider distribution of films around the world (Representing 12–14). Reflecting on the technical possibilities and networks of distribution and reception of cinema, several critics have also problematized questions of focalization of the adult gaze (Rocha and Seminet 2012; Paz-Mackay and Rodriguez 2019; Martin 2019), the projection of adult anxieties onto the construction of children’s voice and subjectivities (Rocha and Seminet 2017; Paz-Mackay and Rodriguez 2019; Martin 2019), and the emotional/affective responses elicited from spectators (Podalski 2011; Page et al. 2018).6 Our contributors position themselves in the ongoing discussions by significantly expanding the corpus of studies with critical approaches to recent and/or understudied productions. They also open new perspectives highlighting the capacity of minors to take active roles in the politics of everyday life, to engage in unconventional processes of ethical and affective education, to renegotiate historical constructs of memory, and to reshape societal norms and codes of conduct. Alicia Nuñez addresses the problematic of Central American child migrants. Rafaela Fiore’s chapter approaches issues of gender and the reconstruction of personal/national memory in Paraguay. Sophie Dufays’s chapter also engages in a thorough review of recent fictional and documentary Mexican films where children are faced with conditions of violence and precarity. One of the most interesting contributions made by Latin American film scholars is the productive dialogue stablished with current research in the interdisciplinary area of childhood studies. A wave of recent publications has provided new perspectives of study that theorize the notions of childhood and adolescence seen as cultural constructs, analyze changes in the social perception of minors, and explore different practices of agency. One of the major transformations is that of challenging the perception of children as a passive member of their communities and contesting the “myth of the child” in literary and visual representations. Following the seminal publications of Prout and James, researchers have increasingly recognized that “children are not just the passive subjects of social structures and processes” because they

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“are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live” (Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood 8). One of the critics that follows this view in the field of Latin American studies is Deborah Martin, who observes that children have been progressively recognized as subjects of legal and human rights and afforded more agentic roles in cinema. She traces this shift in the representation of minors in the 1990s. While before this decade it was much more common to find that the child was used as a synecdoche or a symbolic representative of the nation, recent cinematic productions present nuanced models of identification and portray minors as individuals endowed with perspective, experience, and agency (24). The chapters included in Growing Up in Latin America engage, precisely, with filmic and literary representations that recognize the various modes in which minors are able to perform actions that effectively transform their immediate reality. Additionally, albeit coming from different theoretical perspectives, a majority of the authors in this volume also join the academic engagement with a perspective that aims to de-allegorize the child and to engage with them as active participants of society and not as mere symbolic objects. In their introduction to Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema, Rocha and Seminet mention that the goal of their book is “to analyze the representation of children’s subjectivity in Latin American film, and to explore their developing agency in diverse social contexts within the region” (Screening Minors xi). To my knowledge, this is the publication that, to date, addresses more directly the question of the minor’s agency in the field of Latin American film studies. Growing up in Latin America follows their lead and explores further into this area of investigation. The editors of Screening Minors stress the need to study the development of the subjectivity of children and adolescence always within a given frame of historical, social, cultural, and economic possibilities. They recognize, in this way, that agency is a capacity of action that is contextually bound and depends on the learning of specific cultural norms. Their observation is very useful in narrowing the understanding of a term that tends to be broad and ambiguous. The general lines drawn by Rocha and Seminet, however, do not account for a sufficiently clear conceptualization. I pick up from this point and, in what follows, will attempt to offer an approach and a definition that serves both as a general framing for the chapters included in this volume and a more general conceptual tool of analysis. The Relational Agency of Minors Childhood studies scholars have paid great attention and engaged in detailed discussions about the concept of agency and its implications for the social life

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and individual development of children and youth. However, as Ingrid Castro and Jessica Park remind us, “agency, despite its popularity, remains underexamined”7 (xi). I propose to conceive agency, first, as an ability to act upon and perform changes in given realms of society, environment, or history. However, going against the assumption that agency is an inherent human capability, I subscribe to a more contextualized and relational approach. Rather than conceiving agency as an individual struggle for autonomy, self-determination, and independence, I argue for a model that understands individual’s capacity for action as a process of learning, negotiation, and transformation that depends on constantly fluctuating networks of relations and conditions of possibility. Under this perspective, agency does not entail a confrontation of the child against the world of adults, nor of individual freedom and flourishing against normative systems of society. On the contrary, it presupposes the capacity of children to grasp a general sense of the explicit and non-explicit norms regulating their environment, evaluating available social and material resources, assessing their room for action, and finally projecting potential outcomes. As a result of this complex process, children are able to perform actions that assert their position as active participants and “commentators”—borrowing Paz-Mackay and Rodríguez’s term (xvi)—of their private and public networks. If “children often go unseen and unheard, and have relatively few visible opportunities to influence society,” according to Esser et al., it is not because “they lack the skills required for participation, but [because of] their systematic exclusion from opportunities for participation and active involvement” (22). Conceiving agency as a relational practice allows to question the reductive yet prevalent vision of the child as a vulnerable and dependent individual who has not fully acquired the status of a member of society. A relational model, instead, invites to recognize them as fundamental to all the different social, legal, political, and economic systems in which they take an active part. As family members, for instance, since their very infancy, they are an integral part of networks of emotional interdependence, relations of care, and the micro-politics of the household. From a very young age, they may assume the role of caretakers of parents who are in a weak emotional state, as it is the case of the protagonist of the Cuban novel Everyone Leaves. In this semi-autobiographic novel, the eight-year-old Nieve recognizes that she is “more of a grown up than her mother” (Guerra 17), and vows “I am going to take care of, her, I will defend her from my father” (Guerra 39). In other cases, children may act as siblings who take care of younger brothers or sisters, especially in conditions of orphanhood, as illustrated in Nuñez’s chapter about Nicaraguan movie El camino (2018). Minors also have the possibility to participate in important social and political transformations within their communities, such as those recognized and studied by Diteman

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in the Peruvian novel Los ríos profundos (1958) and Martinican novel La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950). In these two semi-autobiographic literary works, the young boy protagonists manage to question practices of racial and class inequality by performing acts of solidarity learned through ethical and emotional connections with female guiding figures and their communities. These brief examples and the chapters that discuss these topics at length evidence that “agency emerges in and through relationships” (Castro and Lark xiii). Children and adolescents inhabit a variety of spaces that facilitate the formation of different types of bonds, affiliations, and connections. At home, school, public parks, sport courts, markets, and streets, they have opportunities to create networks and to develop different skills of agency. Each particular setting requires them to acquire and adapt to specific conventions, norms, and social expectations. Thus, the type of agency they can perform in each situation is facilitated by the elements and social dynamics in place. Simultaneously, their agency is also constrained by the implicit and explicit rules specific to the context. Children do not negotiate or assert their needs and desires in the same manner when speaking to their parents, mentors, peers, their circle of intimate friends, adults who are perceived as a threat, or individuals who represent a legal authority. As they move between environments and networks, they also adapt and refine their agentic strategies. Sophie Dufay’s and Silvia Ruiz’s chapters exemplify how children fluctuate between different social spheres and adapt to complex environments while refining their abilities to protect and assert themselves. Dufays makes a comparative analysis of four Mexican films—fiction and documentary—depicting children living in a crime-ridden “Narco Zone” and focuses her study on the strategies of play and care developed by children to resist violence, shield themselves from harm, and guard their immediate circle of friends and family. Ruiz focuses on a selection of Ecuadorian contemporary writers who explore representations of minors as victims of sexual abuse, and she traces the strategies they invent to repel abusers and cope with the memory of the trauma. Of particular interest is the difference in social and economic status of the protagonists in the stories analyzed by Ruiz. While some of them belong to a semi-rural context marked with precarity and lack of resources, others portray middle- and upper-middle-class urban families. Her chapter is a pertinent contribution that exemplifies Esser’s observation that while minors act on the basis of their “possibilities, wishes, and cultural practices,” other elements such as “sex, age, social stratum or cultural background” also play an important role in the way they exercise agency (72, 87). Provided that the ability to act upon their environment relies on constantly fluctuating elements and networks of relations, the agency cannot be reduced to one single model or definition. It cannot be understood exclusively as actions or discourses that openly challenge structures of power, domination,

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or inequality. Similarly, it cannot be equated with a total rejection of norms and unbound independence. These types of approaches reify the division that conceives minors and adults as radical others inhabiting different spaces, rather as interdependent members of the same networks where power is distributed asymmetrically. Drawing from James Scott’s influential book Weapons of the Weak, I observe that the agency of children and minors often takes the shape of small actions and subtle acts of resistance. Although the American anthropologist’s observations are based on his ethnographic studies of Malaysian peasants, I consider that his concept can be of use to my purpose, as it describes modes of opposition devised by individuals and communities who occupy positions of subalternity and dependance. I borrow his concept and recontextualize it in the frame of the relations that children and minors stablish within systems where they are not recognized or endowed with authority for certain political, legal, or economic actions. Given the position minors occupy within families, educational institutions, legal systems, and other type of formal or informal organizations, Scott’s description can be adapted to describe their actions of resistance, which often “stop well short of collective outright defiance” and “avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority” (Scott xvi). Their acts of opposition may also include the strategies recognized by Scott, such as “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance” (xvi). In the case of children, they can also take the form of other oblique tactics of making their opposition and presence felt. The context of playing and inventing games can be one of them. Another one can be the use of drawings and similar non-verbal forms of affective expressivity. These subtle forms of agency of minors are observed and commented with particular attention in Dufays’s, Nuñez’s, Ramírez Rojas’s, and Ruiz’s chapters, given that they draw attention to the representation of young children. Conversely, the chapters that examine the agentic roles of teenagers tend to emphasize explicit ways of confrontation with family, institutions, and other social actors. Everyday subtle forms of resistance are, of course, still present but more evident claims of self-affirmation become prevalent as they approach adulthood. This volume pays special attention to contemporary coming-of-age narratives that emphasize gender and sexuality as a means and as spaces for the performance of agency. Acts of self-affirmation, claims for political and social recognition, and the search for non-heteronormative role models and alternative notions of citizenship are mediated by practices of gender performance that oftentimes are seen as rebellious and contestatory. Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo’s and Rafael Hernández’s studies of Mexican queer coming-of-age narratives address these issues and explore different literary representations of non-binary identities traversed by questions of class and social status. Astrid Lorena Ochoa touches on a similar subject, but

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from the perspective of a young queer Colombian-American woman whose struggle to affirm and build her gender identity is further complicated by cultural and socioeconomic challenges tied to her condition as a migrant. In her reading of the novel Fiebre Tropical (2020), Ochoa considers, additionally, the crossroads of agency, affects, and gender. On another front, Alexander Torres approaches non-heteronormative role models and agentic strategies of queer-self affirmation mediated by friendship in his study of the Bolivian novel El sonido de la H (2019). Despite the fact that the literary works studied in the aforementioned chapters belong to different geographical spaces, historical moments, and sociopolitical contexts, they share one central tenet that closely relates them to the relational approach to agency I propose. The characters portrayed in these queer narratives face a fundamental problem that determines their capacity to act upon reality: the construction of a community. For many of them, family and immediate social circles represent an oppressive environment they need to break with in order to (re)build alternative “families” and networks of support that will provide them with necessary tools and knowledge to claim more effective agentic roles within society. Other(’s) Politics or Politics by Other Means The works of Ariès have been key to understanding the notions of childhood and adolescence as cultural constructions that transform over time and adapt to specific sociocultural contexts. Following the French historian, Maguire and Randal observe that the representation of adolescence has suffered a series of transformations in Latin American cinematic productions (2). In agreement with Podalsky (2011), they observe that while the decades of 1960s and 1970s saw an increase in the active historical participation of young people in ideological and historical causes. Starting in the 1990s the impact of globalization, neoliberalism, and mass media marked a shift toward a depoliticization of youth (2–5). Although the chapters included in Growing Up in Latin America do not deal with the representation of adolescents in films but in literature, the waning interest in direct political interventions mentioned earlier can also be traced in the group of novels analyzed. However, taking into consideration the contributions of Quintana-Vallejo, Hernández, Ochoa, and Torres, I want to contest the interpretation of this phenomenon as a sign of depoliticization. The increasing interest in questions of gender, sexuality, non-binary identities, and alternative definitions of citizenship and community respond, on the contrary, to a desire to make visible and address other arenas of the political. Certainly, the characters portrayed in recent novels and films do not follow the same path as previous generations: they do not join revolutionary movements, do not ascribe to specific ideological movements, nor they embark on open confrontations with the state. They might even show

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their disenchantment with these models of participation. However, this does not make their attempts to act upon their pressing social realities any less political. It would be more accurate to say, instead, that through each one of their everyday actions of resistance and through their discursive productions, they intervene and transform the politics of family, friendship, identity, and community. The Agency of Memory There is one last instance of agency that I want to highlight in the chapters of this volume: the agency of memory. There is an important amount of work in the field of Latin American studies examining memory in visual and literary representations of children and adolescents. They focus on cultural memory as a site of national identity formation (Tierney-Mallo), as a space of competing historical narratives (Wright 2013; Philippa 2018), or as a repository for individual and collective historical traumas (Rocha). To complement the existing approaches, I propose to understand memory as an additional dimension of agency. I contend that intentional retrospections and reconstructions of past events and historical records—either private or public—should also be interpreted in their capacity to impact and transform reality. They are, in their more immediate form, ways to call upon the past to act on the present. Narrativized recollections of personal and social memories not only offer a reinterpretation of history but also mobilize new understandings of complex realities that ultimately catalyze possibilities of change. This is best illustrated in Rafaela Fiore’s study of the Paraguayan film 108 Cuchillo de palo. Fiore observes how Renate Costa’s reconstruction of her own childhood memories exposes a hidden family story of violence and marginalization during the Stroessner dictatorship. As the film reveals the persecution suffered by the film director’s uncle on the account of his sexual identity, the narrator is confronted with the necessity to actively edit and reorganize veiled aspects of her family/national past of which she was unaware during her childhood. Throughout the film, spectators are compelled, at their turn, to reinterpret their own archives of personal memories and to transform them into new forms of engagement in their present-day reality. A similar strategy of agentic memory is recognizable in Alexander Torres’s analysis of El sonido de la H, where an adult female narrator remembers the life of her high school best friend, a queer teenager from a small conservative town in Bolivia whose life is recounted after the narrator learns the news of her death. This intersection between questions of gender, coming-of-age, and an active remembrance of the past is also at the center of Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo’s reading of Antonio Alatorre’s La Migraña (2012). Here the narrator is an old man who goes back to the memories of his own fifteen-year-old self in

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a Catholic seminary. It is in the act of recollecting his past that the protagonist is able to recognize and affirm his sexual identity. The memory of his teenage experiences, thus, serves him as a mirror that validates and affirms the defining characteristics of his individuality that, as an adult, he comes to accept and celebrate. Recognizing Agency Paz-Mackay and Rodriguez affirm that “when a film makes a representation of children its focus,” not only it “brings out a political dimension” but, more importantly, it also “becomes a form of political action” (ix). The same is true in the realm of literature. When visual or literary narratives made by adults pay serious attention to minors, they recognize the centrality of the latter in the political life of society. Furthermore, the recognition of the different ways in which they constantly perform and manifest agency restores their position as active participants in the social networks of construction and transformation of reality. Although it is true that in the process of portraying minors in literature and films, they have often been used as narrative devices, vehicles of adult anxieties, and objects of the adult gaze, many recent productions offer much more attentive approaches that invite us to take children and adolescents seriously. The chapters in this volume engage with short stories, novels, and films that go in this direction but recognize, at the same time, that the narrativization of their experience from an adult perspective entails a problematic stance. In our aim to observe, understand, and highlight the agency of minors, we do not look for “authentic” nor “faithful” representations of their devices and strategies of action and negotiation. We do not intend to “capture” their thoughts and practices. Remaining aware of the problematics and limitations of literary and audiovisual discourses, we ask the following: How is the agency of minors noticed, recognized, and understood through different instances of adult gaze in these novels and movies? Under what light are different types of agentic strategies portrayed? What are the responses provoked by subtle and confrontational claims of agency performed by children and adolescents? As a whole, Growing up in Latin America lays the ground for a discussion on the capacity of cinematic and literary discourses to elicit an affective and effective response from their readers and spectators. Although not explicitly, the following chapters also open the door to a discussion that echoes Podalsky’s inquiry about “how films solicit particular emotional responses and/or stimulate more diffuse, affective reactions [and engagements] with contemporary sociopolitical discourses” (7). A fundamental question underlying Growing up in Latin America interrogates how cinematic and literary discourses invite readers and spectators to broaden the range of attention and elicit different modes

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of recognition and consideration of the agentic capacities of minors outside of the realms of literature and film. This path of investigation, nonetheless, is beyond the scope and objective of our book. Notwithstanding this, we do certainly expect that our contributions will entice future researchers interested in this final question we leave open, as well as for other future studies concerned with the agency of minors.

NOTES 1. Among the countries that are active members of the UN, only three have not ratified the CRC convention: Somalia, South Sudan, and the United States. 2. Rocha and Seminet also take the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a guide to define the category of children. They observe that while many “definitions intersect and integrate legal, social, and biological perspectives” (Representing History 3), it is hard to provide a concise description. For the sake of clarity, they follow the broader and more inclusive approach of UNICEF. 3. In their “Introduction” to Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood, Esser et al. note that most disciplinary approaches to the study of childhood prior to 1980s the predominant perspective was adult-centered: “Psychology, sociology and the academic disciplines of education and social work were accused of instrumentalizing children and childhood, and of only being interested in the process of growing up or in the state of adulthood [. . .] they were all (according to these criticisms) based on a developmental paradigm that regarded children purely as future adults and considered the successful transition to adulthood to be its goal. Childhood, according to the critics, was thus reduced to a phase in life and a transitory state on the way to adulthood, and children’s current thinking and acting receded into the background, while their learning and preparation for adulthood were treated as more important” (20-21). It would be possible to make a similar remark about the classic Bildungsroman novel and about the academic studies that traditionally have emphasized the formative process of children as a transitory state toward adulthood. 4. In this sense, we approach narratives that differ from the teleological model studied by critics such as Franco Moretti. For a comprehensive review of the idea of the Bildungsroman and its most contemporary iterations in Latin America, see Alexander Torres’s Bastardos de la modernidad: el Bildungsroman roquero en América Latina. 5. Maguire and Randall provide this account of some of the most important academic publications regarding the study of child and youth in Latin American films: “Within the context of Hispanic and Latin American cinema, Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet (2012, 2014), Sarah Wright (2013), Sophie Dufays (2014), Deborah Martin (2011, 2017a, b) and Rachel Randall (2017) have analysed various facets of child characters’ representation, including but not limited to: their roles in films that operate as national allegories (Dufays 2014) and that intercede in national ‘memory wars’ (Wright 2013), the cinematic techniques used to evoke their subjectivity and agency (Rocha and Seminet 2014; Randall 2017; Maguire 2017; Martin 2017a, b),

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and their potential to enact critiques of class and gender expectations (Martin 2011; Rocha and Seminet 2014; Randall 2017)” (5). 6. Given the scope of the volume to discuss children in cinema, this introductory chapter pays special attention to critical contributions within the field of Latin American studies. The seminal works of Karen Lury (2010), Vicky Lebeau (2008), Julie Barillet (2008), Christian Paigneau (2010), Patricia Holland (2004), and Jacqueline Rose (1984) have been deeply influential in the studies of the representation of minors in Latin America and the Hispanic world. These works provide a thorough historical review of the evolution of children in movies from different traditions as well as general conceptual reflections on the questions of adult versus child gaze, politics of subalternity, poetics of allegoric portrayal, and the different claims of childhood agency in different sociopolitical contexts and historical moments. 7. Eberhard Raithelhuber shares a similar opinion about the lack of a stable definition of the concept of agency. According to this scholar, “It is probably fair to say that the Sociology of Childhood is now at a stage at which the established, mainstream understandings of agency are scrambled. Not only has children’s agency become a ‘troubled idea’ (Oswell 2013, p. 7), but agency has also been accused of being one of the mantras in Childhood Studies (Tisdall and Punch 2012, p. 255)” (132).

WORKS CITED Alatorre, Antonio. La Migraña. México D.D.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012. Arguedas, José María. Los ríos profundos. Edited by Ricardo González Vigil. Madrid: Catedra, [1995] 2003. Ariès, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldick. New York: Knopf, 1962. Ávila, Benjamin. Dir. Infancia clandestina. Habitación 1520 Producciones, 2012. Barillet, Julie. L’enfant au cinéma. Arras: Artois Presses Université. 2008. Baudoin, Magela. El sonido de la H. La Paz: Santillana, 2019. Castañeda, Claudia. Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002 Castro, Ingrid, and Jessica Clark. “Zuzu’s Petals and Scout’s Mockinbirds: The Legacy of Children’s Agency in Popular Culture.” In Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen and in Between, edited by Ingrid E. Castro and Jessica Clark. Maryland: Lexington, 2019. Costa, Renate. Dir. 108: Cuchillo de Palo. Estudi Playtime, 2010. Delgado Lopera, Juliana. Fiebre Tropical. New York: The Feminist Press, 2020. Dufays, Sophie. El niño en el cine argentino de la postdictadura 1983–2008: alegoría y nostalgia. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014. Esser, Florian. “Neither “Thick” Nor “Thin” Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood Relationally.” In Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood, edited by Florian Esser, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, Beatrice Hungerland. New York: Routledge, 2016: 78–94.

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Esser, Florian, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, and Beatrice Hungerland. “An Introduction.” In Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood, edited by Florian Esser, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, Beatrice Hungerland. New York: Routledge, 2016: 19–39. Guerra, Wendy. Todos se van. Barcelona: Bruguera, 2006. Güiraldes, Ricardo. Don Segundo Sombra. Paris: UNESCO ALLCA, 1996. Gutierrez, Ishtar Yasin. Dir. El camino. Astarté Films, 2008. Holland, Patricia. Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery. London: Tauris, 2004. Indiana, Rita. Papi. Cáceres: Periférica, 2011. James, Allison, and Alan Prout. “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems.” In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout. New York: Routledge, 1997: 7–34. Kushigian Julia. Reconstructing Childhood: Strategies of Reading for Culture and Gender in the Spanish American Bildungsroman. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2003. Lagos, María Inés. En tono mayor: relatos de formación de protagonista femenina en Hispanoamérica. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 1996. Lebeau, Vicky. Childhood and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Lury, Karen. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Maguire, Geoffrey, and Rachel Randall. “Introduction.” In New Visions of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Martin, Deborah. The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 2000. Oswell, David. “Re-Aligning Children’s Agency and Resocialising Children in Childhood Studies.” In Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood, edited by Florian Esser, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, Beatrice Hungerland. New York: Routledge, 2016: 41–59. ———. The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Page, Philippa, Inela Selimovic, and Camilla Sutherland. “Introduction.” In The Feeling Child: Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film, edited by Philippa Page, Inela Selimovic, and Camilla Sutherland. Maryland: Lexington, 2018. Paigneau, Christian. L’odyssée de l’enfance. Enfance et narration au cinéma. Paris: Bazaar, 2010. Parra, Teresa de. Iphigenia. Trans. Bertie Acker. Austin: Texas University Press, 1993. Paz-Mackay, Maria Soledad, and Omar Rodríguez. “Introduction.” In Politics of Children in Latin American Cinema, edited by Paz-Mackay, Maria Soledad, and Omar Rodríguez. Maryland: Lexington, 2019: ix–xxi.

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Podalsky, Laura. The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Raithelhuber, Eberhard. “Extending Agency: The Merit of Relational Approaches for Childhood Studies.” In Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood, edited by Florian Esser, Meike S. Baader, Tanja Betz, Beatrice Hungerland. New York: Routledge, 2016: 131–147. Rocha, Carolina, and Georgia Seminet. Introduction: Representing History, Class and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescent in Film. Edited by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet. Cham Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 2014: 1–29. ———. “Introduction.” In Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema, edited by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet. Maryland: Lexington, 2014. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Londond: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. Scott, James. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Tierney-Tello, Mary Beth. Mining Memory: Reimagining Self and Nation Through Narratives of Childhood in Peru. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Torres, Alex. Bastardos de la modernidad: el Bildungsroman roquero en América Latina. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. UNICEF. Convention on the Rights of the Child. www​.unicef​.org​/child​-rights​-convention​/convention​-text. Accessed February 27, 2022. Wright, Sarah. The Child in Spanish Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Zobel, Joseph. La Rue Cases-Nègres. Paris: Froissart, 1950.

Chapter 1

Some Notes on Latin American Childhood Pilar Osorio Lora

Childhood has been the cause behind several relevant cultural and social movements ranging from the creation of exclusive spaces, such as schools, to public policies and specific areas of study such as pediatrics or child crime. Despite their central role in culture and history, children have traditionally been made invisible and, as Alejandro Zambra portrays in his book Ways of Going Home (2011), they have been treated as minor characters in both fictional and historical narratives. Historically, children not only have had others decide for them; they have also been represented from adult narrative logics. One of the few articles that mention attempts to get children to represent themselves is Omar Rodríguez’s “When Children Direct a Film, What do They Talk About?” In the experiment analyzed by Rodríguez, children portrayed their own story and worldview. Rodríguez points out how elements that are part of their daily lives such as family, school, and their countries’ social and economic problems take a central role in these narratives. However, although the topics are evident, the strategies and ways of handling communicative codes are confusing, and it seems that children-directors do not always manage to communicate what they intend (Rodríguez 115–135). It would seem, then, that the average child lacks the ability to self-represent. If we add to this a very long tradition of representations of children as either absolutely benevolent or absolutely diabolical subjects, the relevance of producing a compiled volume that would question this commonplace of the passive child in the face of their lack of agency, as well as their Manichean representation in the literary and film production of Latin America, becomes evident. One of the first questions that arises when talking about children’s representation in Latin American popular culture is what we understand by “childhood,” who is and who isn’t a child, what does it mean to grow up, and when 1

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do we stop growing. As the reader of this volume will notice, each of the authors has tried to formulate an answer to these questions in their chapters. Since, for the most part, the chapters delve directly or indirectly into the term Bildungsroman, I will make a brief account of the concept based on previous considerations (Osorio, 2019). This term was first used by Karl Morgenstern in 1819 (Germany, 1770–1852) to refer to literary works that focus on recounting the processes through which a child turns into an adult. It was assumed that this process was equivalent to the development of personality and was seen from a markedly teleological perspective. The popularization of the term, however, is due to Wilhelm Dilthey (Germany, 1833–1911) when he used it to analyze Hölderlin’s Hyperion. At first, Bildungsroman tended to follow a similar structure: they told the story of a young man who left his home, had a series of economic and romantic adventures, understood complex social dynamics, and returned home as a mature man to take the place of the father and—in some way—perpetuate the dynamics he received in his childhood, which he only understood after moving away from the paternal home. His transformation from boy into man is closely related to his ability to meet social expectations. However, the twentieth century—with its sexual and social revolutions—would challenge the genre and impose new conceptions on the process of maturity, thus breaking its close relationship with the idea of meeting expectations and becoming, as Jeffers puts it in his book The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana, “about freedom, and how that debate is resolved affects our approach to the more topical issues” (28). Now, the conception of freedom is culturally and historically variable and is related to the negotiation possibilities between opportunities and restrictions. The authors in this book invite us to think about how that challenge is carried out and how that process is built in Latin American narrative production. They invite us to think about how negotiations with savage capitalism, precariousness, and austerity take place; how to recognize oneself as queer in a patriarchal culture; how to fantasize about racial superiority; how to migrate; how to build an identity in a discriminatory context; how to denormalize sexual abuse; how to inherit political loyalties; how to feel like a melancholic other within family itself; and how to not only deform but also form a morality and a political awareness. In his chapter, Alexander Torres provides detailed information about gender, while problematizing it from the reality of the twenty-first-century Bolivian cosmogony, which strains the challenges of a changing and modern Latin America. A second focal point between the authors of this volume is the mention of the concept of agency, as well as the care and dependence relationships derived from it. At the heart of both issues lies the problem of vulnerability as a decisive factor in the history of childhood and care. Take, for example, infant mortality: it not only led to the creation of pediatrics as a science

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(Rodríguez, 65), but it is a source of infinite amounts of popular beliefs, as well as a reason for literary representation. As Piedad Bonnet says in her book That Which Has No Name, the death of the son stands as an unnamed pain. The visceral panic at the loss of the child is the engine behind one of the most emblematic Latin American novels in terms of children protagonists: Balún Canán (1957) by Mexican author Rosario Castellanos. This novel is narrated by a seven-year-old girl. It talks about the hardships of a wealthy family during the agrarian and educational reforms of Lázaro Cárdenas and the Mexican Revolution. The central axis of the novel is the premonition from an indigenous nanny who said that Mario, the girl’s younger brother, is going to die. Faced with this threat, the mother not only enforces in the girl her little social value, she also resorts to various forms of magical thought, trusting that this way she will reverse her son’s death. In this sense, children’s biologically evident vulnerability is exacerbated by the belief that they are easy targets of sorcerers and enchantments. In their respective studies on the weapons of the weak, both James Scott and Josefina Ludmer, remind us how the weak ones usually find strategies to use the oppressor’s weapon to oppress back. In this sense, witchcraft has also been used as a defense mechanism for children and adolescents. One of the most emblematic Latin American literary representations of this is Bárbara, in Doña Bárbara (1927) by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos. After being sexually abused, Bárbara builds herself a halo of being a witch. The community’s fear of her powers assures her that the abuse she endured won’t be repeated. Thus, the character flips the relationship between sorcery and childhood in order to protect herself. The way this relationship between child vulnerability, fear of death, and magical thought has produced a good number of beliefs and beings can’t be overlooked: there’s the guardian angel of the Catholics, and the Nahua gods for children—gods who take care of children while they sleep, gods for noble children, and a goddess whose only function is to take care of children (Rodríguez, 10). And let’s not forget the amulets and rituals present in almost every culture. Child vulnerability has also given rise to major technological, scientific, and cultural advances. In Latin America, the emergence of pediatrics and childcare took place in the mid-nineteenth century and involved an awareness regarding the education of these issues (Rodríguez 64–66.) As a result, the Popular Library of Hygiene was published at the beginning of the twentieth century in Brazil. It not only taught grooming habits as its title indicates but also, as Heloisa Helena Pimenta Rocha has studied, explored disgust. The historical parallel between the pedagogy of disgust (focused on children) and the discourse of civilization and barbarism is not coincidental: the uneducated child is compared with the barbarian who asks to be brought to light, to

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civilization, through a series of strategies that adapt (or clean up) his behavior. Much of this civilizing project is permeated by the idea of children’s moral formation: to be good is to satisfy the expectations of adults. However, and as Jeffrey Diteman mentions in his chapter, in a continent dominated by asymmetrical biculturalism dynamics, moral development comes to be closely related to awareness of inequality, racism, and injustice. This desire to impose oneself on the child is, precisely, the condition of possibility for the appearance of the rogue and rebellious child. In his chapter “The Dark Night of Mexico,” Rafael Hernández Rodríguez analyzes, among other topics, how non-heteronormative sexuality is used to challenge the imposed order and, in turn, as an opportunity to experience agency and freedom. As Hernández Rodríguez mentions in Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), he inevitably leads us to notice how one of the founding works of narrative in Spanish is, precisely, that of a rogue child who resists the adult expropriation of his body. The complaint about his body and his agency is built from the street, from what Carlos Ayram in his chapter would call the deformation processes. In his analysis, Ayram points out how this is a work that uses the intentional disability of individuals who consider themselves superior as a way of perpetuating colonial logics in which some lives have greater social value than others. If Lazarillo is deformation from precariousness, Ayram shows us how this work is deformation from supremacy. Finally, we find Sophie Dufays’s analysis, “Childhood Ghosts and Masks . . .” on deformation, but no longer from the perspectives of Lazarillo or supremacy, but from narcoculture and how it forms children in violence, dehumanizing them and removing their possibility of taking a moral stance. The quintessential institution that “civilizes” and prevents the rogue child is the school. It not only reproduces social conditions and ambitions but also instills criteria of social valuation, the rules of body management, and expression of emotions. In this space, the child incorporates knowledge that his society considers fundamental but, above all, integrates the existing social expectations about him. Despite schools being perceived as institutions that provide tools for the future, they are also the present of children, as well as the place in which they exert and suffer violence. Nicolás Balutet’s chapter analyzes Camionero and points out how the school is where national violence is experimented in all its dynamics (silence, scapegoating, vengeance) through bullying, and how this representation corresponds with that of the new man of the Cuban Revolution, which denies otherness and individual development. For its part, the institution that, ideally, “cares for” and prevents violence against the rogue child is the family. By way of excess or defect, family is one of the central issues not only in the child’s experience but also in his or her representation. Not surprisingly, for Jeffers, the Bildungsroman is a genre about the family (190). This community is the one that must deal with

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the vulnerability that is immanent to the child’s body, who cannot survive without care and demands a community that cares for it. Most of the works analyzed in this volume deal—directly or tangentially—with the dysfunctionality of most families. In her chapter “She Takes Pleasure in The Sins of The Flesh,” Silvia Ruiz Tresgallo analyzes three novels in which she talks about sexual abuse and the family dynamics of approval and denial around it. From this perspective, exposing secrecy is one of the strategies that the child has in order to claim his agency. One of the child-related phenomena that has mobilized policy and social change the most is abandonment. As Mannarelli states in her article “Abandono infantil, respuestas institucionales y hospitalidad,” this is a phenomenon that has been normalized at various times in history. In Latin America, this practice arises in close connection with the colonization process. According to Pablo Rodríguez’s research on childhood in pre-Hispanic cultures, these cultures conceived childhood not as a mere biological fact, but as a cultural fact. Indeed, children’s welfare was a priority for the community and the care of children exceeded the limits of the nuclear family (7–9). This community’s conception would change during the conquest. Along with miscegenation, there is also the problem of illegitimate children since, as its name indicates, it implies a conception of family determined by law, inherited from the Romans (Mannarelli 28–30), that excludes members who are not legally covered. This exclusion/abandonment dynamic would lead to the creation of unconventional care institutions and family structures in which an orphan would be adopted or a child would be engaged in domestic work. One of the works that has most clearly represented this subject is The Book of Emma Reyes (2012) by Emma Reyes. This book tells the story of a couple of girls who migrate with their mother while she tries to make a living in extremely miserable conditions. During this process, the narrator tells how she saw her mother abandon her brother and how she is later abandoned by “Mrs. Maria” whom she never calls mother. But miscegenation not only brought abandonments and reconfigurations regarding the idea of family. It also brought the bicultural child who moves between two cultures. This is another recurring theme in the Latin American narrative tradition. Although this issue appears in several cultures, in our continent it is determined by a highly hierarchical relationship between cultures, or what Diteman calls “asymmetric biculturalism,” based on a constant tension between alienation and resistance. Although Diteman uses the term to analyze José María Arguedas’s novel The Deep Rivers, it can also be used to understand cultural production from both artistic and academic perspectives about Latin American migrations to the United States. The representations of Latino children and youth in this country in novels such as The House on Mango Street (1983) by Sandra Cisneros or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar

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Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz are not only part of the literary canon but also highlight the asymmetry between Latino and American culture, as well as the strategies of resistance and agency claimed by Latin American children and youth. These novels question the power relations between cultures while highlighting the urgency for belonging and identity. If children have the vital need to belong to a community and require the care institutions we have already mentioned, they also have the vital need to differentiate themselves from others. This process is marked, in many circumstances, by the exploration of sexual identity. In fact, for Pin Chia Feng sexuality plays a fundamental role in the Bildungsroman, although expressed in different ways between men and women, since “sexuality in the female Bildungsroman is more often debasing and handicapping than exalting” (Feng 7). To a large extent, this is the focus of Silvia Ruiz-Tresgallos’s article on the representation of sexual abuse, the way in which children internalize and elaborate it and the family dynamics around it. If almost all the chapters in this volume show how children can effectively claim a certain agency over their bodies or rebel against certain impositions, this particular contribution provides less hope, as it points out how only one of the characters is able to oppose sexual violence. Sexuality is also central in queer Bildungsroman. In his chapter, Hernández Rodríguez analyzes two works on the experience of queer growth in Mexico. He denounces the violence endured by homosexuals while noting how these young people challenge all social regulations regarding family, gender, and religion. In the same line, we find Quintana Vallejo’s chapter, where he analyzes three queer Bildungsroman in Mexico, but from a different class, gender, and religious conditions. Rafaela Fiore’s “Between Places . . .” also underscores how the process of growing up serves, precisely, to uncover a family secret about homosexuality. In this sense, Fiore’s study comes to connect with analyses, such as Jeffrey Diteman’s, in which to grow is to understand. For a reader who wants to further research these issues, it is worth exploring works such as Bad Hair (2013) by Mariana Rendón or XXY (2007) by Lucía Puenzo, a pioneering film on this topic in Latin America that addresses not only the issue of intersexuality but also the processes of agency complaints about the bodies of children and adolescents. In a similar line, Anna Muylaert’s Don’t Call Me Son (2016) portrays the story of a young woman who claims her right to dress and identify as a woman while highlighting the problems behind the idea of family determined by the tensions between culture and biology. The history of almost every Latin American has been permeated by war and civil strife, and children have not been spared in the suffering brought by these events. In war, they have been soldiers, spies, informants, and, of course, victims. According to research by Elizabeth Acha Kutscherm, almost 13 percent of the Shining Path victims in Peru were children. Furthermore, in Colombia, paramilitary units are formed up to 50 percent by children, with the

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average age of recruitment being nine years old (95). In addition, according to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, at least 18,677 children were recruited by the FARC-EP (JEP). Although the numbers are scandalous, they do not account for the depth and complexity of those experiences. These numbers remove the identity of the conflict protagonists and, certainly, place the child solely and exclusively within a victim narrative. One of the most complicated problems of the continent in terms of culture is not only the constant conflict but, as Rodrigo Pardo Fernández mentions in his chapter, the normalization of violence. In some cases, violence reaches such levels that it is impossible to recognize it and, therefore, to name it. Meanwhile, Ayram makes an analysis about the dictatorship in Argentina and the aesthetics of terror. Among the points that stand out in this analysis, we find the idea that growing in Latin America is an experience of growing amid the distribution of precariousness. The ongoing civil conflict, combined with the precariousness prevailing in Latin America, has generated the phenomenon of mass emigration. Pardo Fernández, Nuñez, and Ochoa analyze this phenomenon from different perspectives. Pine says that migration is closely related to the hope for a better world. However, in Alicia Nuñez’s chapter “The Child that Looks,” she underscores how the movie El camino portrays the close relationship between the ecological crisis and the disappearance of hope. The girl who migrates (and bears the name of a national park) becomes a specter; her whole environment is dry and hostile, taking away the meaning of her action of her migration. Many Central Americans migrate to the United States through The Beast or The Train of Death. This trip has been the subject of multiple films such as The Golden Dream (2013) by Diego Quemada-Díez or Sin nombre (2009) by Cary Fukunaga, analyzed by Rodrigo Pardo in his chapter “Childhood on the Back of La Bestia.” Pardo explores two novels and a story about this experience, pointing out how these works share the idea that the border crossed in The Beast is much more than a physical border. The train becomes a transformative space, especially for young people who travel alone, since making decisions is, precisely, a claim on their agency that gives their bodies a particular centrality in its analysis. Finally, we find Ochoa’s contribution “Feeling Good” in which another experience of migration is analyzed: that of the class tensions of a family that already lives in the United States. Among the central aspects in Ochoa’s analysis, we find the problem of the emotional tension between a melancholic queer teenager and her family, a tension that is not only typical of adolescence but that displays how part of the education received from the family includes the negotiations and tensions with the emotional regime (in Reddy’s terms) that are inherent to family belonging. Finally, although it is not a topic covered by the chapters in this book, I would like to mention some aspects of child labor in the continent since there are currently more than eight million Latin American child workers

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(UNICEF, 22). Despite the fact that records of intentions from as early as 1907 have been found to determine how a child can or cannot work, it is only until 1990 that all Latin American countries synchronized not only in the idea that children should not work but also that they should be in school (Del Castillo 76). On the one hand, we meet children in the field of domestic work. This form of work is presented in two ways: when the child is the employee and when the child is the employee’s child. If within the former we find labor (and in many cases also sexual) exploitation, in the latter we find a situation in which the child is considered a sort of extension of their parents and ends up working for the homeowners too. In the novel Abeng (1984), Michelle Cliff depicts this dynamic through the friendship between two girls, a granddaughter of a farmer and a daughter of one of the workers. While the farmer’s granddaughter believes they are friends, Abeng’s readers know that this friendship is based on an extended service (through her daughter) carried out by the farmworker. Much of the novel’s tension lies in the awareness of one and the ignorance of the other regarding the nature of their relationship. Thus, if the twentieth century was marked by childhood sacralization, it was also marked by its exploitation, which is paradoxical because the child is placed as a central value in society, but it is a center that lacks voice and agency. This is a fairly convenient narrative because the values that the adult or the dominant culture wants can be bestowed on it. This is not a new strategy. The discourse of (in)humane treatment of children has been a way of discrediting some communities toward others for centuries. Just as colonizers believed that Native Americans were so savage that they ate children, so some indigenous communities claim that “gringos eat children” (Belaunde, 72). This volume aims not only to reinstate children as subjects but tends to support respect for their stage as a particular culture. This experienced child, this child who claims his space in the world through agency, cunning, and complexity, is, precisely, the child that is analyzed in these chapters. The learning process would therefore consist in the acquisition of negotiation tools to face the world and does not necessarily respond to adaptation to a preconceived model. It is a constant negotiation process with precarious and unfair conditions that do not seem to be conducive to growth, but amid which children find ways to recover their agency and demand their right to grow up.

WORKS CITED Anonymous. El Lazarillo de Tormes. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1935. Bedow, Michael. The Fiction of Humanity: Studies in the Bildungsroman From Wieland to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Bonnet, Piedad. That Which Has No Name. Bogotá: Alfaguara, 2013.

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Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungs Roman From Dickens to Golding. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2013. Castellanos, Rosario. Balún Canán. México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957. Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Cliff, Michel. Abeng. New York: Penguin, 1984. Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Poetry and Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Feng, Pin-Chia. The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston a Postmodern Reading. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Fukunaga, Cary. Sin nombre, 2009. [Film]. Gallegos, Romulo. Doña Barbara. Madrid: Cátedra, 2005. Jeffers, Thomas. Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman From Goethe to Santayana. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Kutscherm, Elizabeth Acha. “El informe de la comisión de la Verdad en Perú.” In Historia de lainfancia en América Latina. Universidad Externado de Colombia. publi​​cacio​​nes​.u​​exter​​nado.​​edu​.c​​o​/gpd​​-hist​​oria-​​de​-la​​-infa​​ncia-​​en​-am​​erica​​-lati​​na97​8​​ 95871​​02185​​.html​. Ludmer, Josefina. «Las tretas del débil.» La sartén por el mango. Río Piedras: Huracán, 1984. Manarelli. “Abandono infantil, respuestas institucionales y hospitalidad.” In Historia de la infancia en América Latina. Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia, EPUB. publi​​cacio​​nes​.u​​exter​​nado.​​edu​.c​​o​/gpd​​-hist​​oria-​​de​-la​​-infa​​ncia-​​en​-am​​erica​​ -lati​​na​-9​7​​89587​​10218​​5​.htm​​l. Muylaert, Anna. Don’t Call Me Son, 2016. [Film]. Osorio, Pilar. Y así les nació la conciencia. Las emociones políticas en Balún Canán de Rosario Castellanos y Abeng de Michelle Cliff. University of Massachusetts, 2019. Puenzo, Lucía. XXY, 1984. [Film]. Quemada-Díez, Diego. The Golden Dream, 2013. [Film]. Rendón, Mariana. Bad Hair, 2013. [Film]. Reyes, Emma. The Book of Emma Reyes. Translated by Daniel Alarcon. New York: Penguin, 2012. Rodríguez, Omar. “When Children Direct a Film, What Do They Talk About?” In Politics of Children in Latin American Films, edited by Paz-Mackay, María Soledad, and Omar Rodríguez. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019. Rodríguez, Pablo. “Los hijos del sol: un acercamiento a la infancia en la América Prehispánica” and “La Pediatría en Colombia. 1880–1960. Crónica de una alegría.” In Historia de la infancia en América Latina. Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia, EPUB. publi​​cacio​​nes​.u​​exter​​nado.​​edu​.c​​o​/gpd​​-hist​​oria-​​de​-la​​-infa​​ncia-​​en​ -am​​erica​​-lati​​na​-9​7​​89587​​10218​​5​.htm​​l. Scott, James. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Standford, Susan. “Women’s Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice.” In The Private Self. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1988.

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Swales, Martin. The German Bildungsroman From Wieland to Hesse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Tobin, Robert. “Bildung and Sexuality in the Age of Goethe.” In The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Zambra, Alejandro. Formas de volver a casa. Barcelona: Anagrama.

Part I

GROWING UP QUEER NARRATIVE AND CONSTRUCTED MEMORIES

Chapter 2

Growing up Queer in Mexico City Rebellious Identities in Tryno Maldonado, Antonio Alatorre, and Sara Levi Calderón Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

What is it like to grow up queer in Mexico City? Contemporary comingof-age novels unravel the question as they depict the maturation of young protagonists negotiating their adulthood and sense of belonging in a city that often meets antihegemonic sexual and gender identities with distrust and contempt. This chapter studies three contemporary novels that depict queer characters facing a scarcity of role models and heterosexist narratives of citizenship in their families, schools, and media. The formative processes of the three characters are intersected and obfuscated by interlocking practices of heteronormative oppression—ideologies which, at times, are deeply ingrained and result in internalized homophobia and self-harm. The queer protagonists’ marginalization in terms of education, gender identity, origin, religious background, and socioeconomic status complicates their difficult processes of becoming adults and citizens. The protagonists must decide, within their queer communities and in self-reflection, what it means for them to mature and belong, to be successful, and pursue meaning in the face of social adversity. The characters’ queerness is part and parcel of their rebellion against heteronormativity and patriarchal hegemony.1 To produce a wellrounded and relevant addition to the current landscape of queer studies in Latin America, this chapter examines the suitability of the term queer in the context of these three novels, in particular establishing a dialogue with Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba’s recent work on the cultural translation of “queer” for Latin American settings. The framework of contemporary Bildungsroman studies proves to be a useful tool to evaluate how these novels subvert the horizon of expectations of the genre while engaging with it to ponder how queer young people 13

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confront perplexing societal expectations. All three unconventional comingof-age processes are set in Mexico City—or at least hazy simulacrums of the city—at different points in history. Tryno Maldonado’s Temporada de caza para el león negro (Hunting Season for the Black Lion) (2009) is set in the late 1990s or early 2000s and, rather than linearly tracking a young boy becoming a successful artist, presents a fragmentary narrative that operates like a labyrinthine memory. The witness narrator playfully jumps back and forth and repeats himself (with chapters reappearing with minor alterations throughout). He narrates the story of Golo, a young uneducated artist who becomes an international sensation almost by accident in the midst of a tempestuous and violent drug-infused sexual relationship with the narrator, only to die shortly after. Antonio Alatorre—the influential author of The 1001 Years of the Spanish Language—surprises with his posthumous novel La Migraña (The Migraine) (2012), which opens with the narrator as an old man remembering his fifteen-year-old self in a Catholic minor seminary2 when, against the teachings of the priests, the intensity of his corporeal needs and desires drive him to discover his own body and, in doing so, his own self. In the cathartic sexual final scene of the novel, when he sees himself naked for the first time, young Guillermo comes into being in an act of masturbation of ontological proportions. Finally, Sara Levi Calderón’s Vida y peripecias de una buena hija de familia (Life and Exploits of a Good Family Daughter) (2015) enables the analysis of the queer formative process of a Jewish woman from a conservative background who, symbolically killing her father, breaks all expectations of what her social environment wants her to become. Since Sara begins her formative process well in her fifties, it would be overly permissive to call it a coming-of-age novel according to a traditional definition. However, I contend that her development through the novel should be thought of as a formative process where a “young” person experiences a form of metaphorical adolescence common to queer people who come out and wrestle with their divergent sexual identities later in life.3 After going through the motions of married life and motherhood expected by her family and Jewish community, Sara narrates a coming-of-age process where she redefines her identity, falls in love with a woman, stands up to her family, and pursues her calling of becoming an artist. All characters rebel against particular societal oppressions: Golo against class structures, Guillermo against the Catholic notion of sin, and Sara against the wealthy Jewish milieu of her younger years. Because of the protagonists’ fundamental differences in class, gender, and religious conviction, their narratives trace distinct personal maps of the city, thus creating varied-yet-overlapping portrayals of Mexico City. In order to understand how these coming-of-age narratives are disruptive to the expectations of the genre, it is vital to define what a Bildungsroman is in traditional terms and how recent developments bend and break those

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conventions. The new variations and terminology in Bildungsroman studies respond to new forms of adulthood represented in an increasingly interconnected global environment by marginalized voices who grow up influenced by both their local social environment and global discourses of morality and hegemony packaged and commodified in mass media. The novels studied here include marginalized voices and non-hegemonic experiences that yield rebellious adults who participate only partially in—or flat out reject—corporate capitalism and deviate from heteronormative standards. The traditionally defined hero of the classic Bildungsroman is far from contemporary and globalized adulthoods. In its most traditional iteration, the Bildungsroman follows a specific formula, Jerome Buckley argues, where the male, middle-class hero eventually emerges as a respectable adult, having correctly internalized his society’s values and mores, whom young readers ought to imitate: A sensitive child grows up in the provinces, where his lively imagination is frustrated by his neighbors’—and often by his family’s—social prejudices and intellectual obtuseness. School and private reading stimulate his hopes for a different life away from home, and so he goes to the metropolis, where his transformative education begins. He has at least two love affairs, one good and one bad, which help him revalue his values. He makes some accommodation, as citizen and worker, with the industrial urban world, and after a time he perhaps revisits his old home to show folks how much he has grown. (Buckley 18)

Franco Moretti further asserts that this hero concludes in a mandatory “perfect marriage” that works as “a metaphor for the social contract,” not contrary to celibacy but to “disgrace” (22–23). Susanne Howe’s definition coincides with Buckley’s archetypal plot, but she underscores the process of trial and error: The adolescent hero of the typical “apprentice” novel sets out on his way through the world, meets with reverses usually due to his own temperament, falls in with various guides and counsellors, makes many false starts in choosing his friends, his wife, and his life work, and finally adjusts himself in some way to the demands of his time and environment by finding a sphere of action in which he may work effectively. (4)

These “false starts,” engines of the plot, enable heroes to experiment with the options around them. Through a process of trial and error, heroes may adjust their paths. Karl Morgenstern, the first coiner of the term Bildungsroman in 1820, explains that at the end of these paths, the protagonist achieves a “stage of completeness” (13); Buckley asserts the protagonist

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finds an “accommodation” (18); Howe a “sphere of action” (4); and Miguel Salmerón a “degree of perfection” (46). Regardless of the discrepancy in terminology, these theorists concur that the classical plot of the Bildungsroman shows fully formed adult characters at the end, products of successful—albeit often sinuous—formative processes. In the Spanish language, the novela de formación underscores the process of becoming, especially as the suffix “-ción” implies the action of the verb to form.4 From these traditional definitions, it becomes clear that queer characters would not—and indeed cannot—be the subjects of archetypal Bildungsroman. How could they be? Queer people have only recently gained access to the institution of marriage and legally binding families and adoption (in Mexico City in 2010 and in the United States in 2015) and there are queer people (as well as heterosexual people) who continue to reject such institutions on the grounds of their heteronormative standards and a disregard for respectability politics. New studies of the Bildungsroman argue for wider definitions that acknowledge the variety of cultural and sexual identities represented in the contemporary genre.5 Meredith Miller’s recent work on “Lesbian, Gay and Trans Bildungsroman” proposes that to substitute a genealogy of the Bildungsroman that traces “the proper situation of individual emergence within historical time,” as Mikhail Bakhtin proposed in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, “there is another framework for tracing the history of the European Bildungsroman, and that framework is gendersex” (239, 240). This framework clarifies why traditional Bildungsroman focuses on heterosexual heroes and values: because the genre emerged in Europe precisely in the “historical period during which heterosexual gendering takes on an increasingly central importance in culture” (240). Given that “the centrality of sexual identity in modern culture arises from its very situation as the interface between individual desires and social structures,” it follows that the individual desires of the protagonists of the novels studied in this chapter clash with heteronormative social structures and thus subvert the expectations of the genre so that they do not yield decorous, heterosexually married, family-oriented adults. Golo, Guillermo, and Sara pose “an essential sexualized self against the social and familial structures of bourgeois modernity” (241). Golo, in his perpetually drug-infused sexual fog, never intends to marry, form a family, or indeed survive into adulthood; Guillermo’s burgeoning desires burst him out of the repressive institution of priesthood; and Sara is disowned by her wealthy family, preventing her participation in the social milieu she grew up in and, thus, cutting her off from bourgeois modernity by making her poor, and, by separating her from her children, a pariah. I have thus far used queer in a flexible way, an umbrella term to encompass different forms of sexual and gender variation that challenge, dis-identify with, divert from, and elude cisgender, heterosexual, and hegemonic social

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conventions and cultural-ideological systems. This queerness is what Eve Sedgwick defined as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (10). And while there are plentiful definitions of queerness that nuance or discard this flexible meaning, any use of the term queer in a Latin American setting proves problematic. None of the characters in the novels identifies as queer. Even when they are in direct contact with characters who identify as such, as is the case of Sara when she moves to San Francisco in the 1990s, they still use terms that feel closer to their language and more indicative of their experiences: “puta” (whore) and “gay” in the case of Golo and “lesbiana” (lesbian) in the case of Sara (Guillermo never refers to himself with any term that denotes sexuality).6 Héctor DomínguezRuvalcaba has written extensively on the topic, explaining that while queer has a positive effect in that it “transgresses the traditional gender structure, identified as Catholic and patriarchal, and advances toward the paradise of freedom, where nonhegemonic desires finally enjoy legitimacy,” it is notwithstanding imported from “metropolitan countries as a liberation movement [a] part of the paradoxes of the postcolonial condition” (13). There is a problem with the assumption of the universality of a “modern Western sexgender system” that can supposedly include all identities and experiences and the possibility this system could imply for the “global expansion of the neoliberal economic system” (14, 16).7 In this sense, queer could be considered an epistemic zero point, a “modern” term in Walter Mignolo’s recognition of epistemological hierarchies, where the knowledge produced in Europe and the United States has an enunciative privilege and “every way of knowing and sensing (feeling) that do not conform to the epistemology and aesthetics of zero point are cast behind in time and/or in the order of myth, legend folklore, local knowledge, and the like” (80). That the characters in these recent novels do not consider the possibility of identifying as queer, even though the concept is available both in their diegeses (except for Guillermo whose story takes place in the 1930s) and in the worlds of their authors, denotes a culturally specific practice of identification that escapes a monolithic-global conceptualization of gender and sex. If the characters do not identify as queer, why is the term still useful and the category of “queer Bildungsroman” relevant? Because, as Carlos Monsiváis expressed in 2001, imported terms are significantly not synonymous with the violence implied in the terms “maricón, puto, tortillera, invertido, sodomita” (sissy, fag, dyke, inverted, sodomite) (9). Although these terms have been reclaimed and resignified to assert a sense of pride by the people who knowingly use them to identify themselves (and each other) as such, they can—and indeed often do—carry violent homophobic

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intent. Monsiváis argues that to come out with a foreign term, rather than those available in Spanish, is no longer “an action tied to shamelessness and the cynicism of those who had nothing to lose, but is now an act which proclaims the legitimacy of difference” (Monsiváis). While queer might not be the most precise term for these novels, it enables “a methodology of critical thinking that by deconstructing the gender system questions the foundations of the nation and the state” which underscores pride (DominguezRuvalcaba 13). Queerness, in the divergent sense—per Sedgwick an open mesh of possibilities—is useful to destabilize the concept of idyllic adulthood-citizenship, central to the traditional Bildungsroman, largely irrelevant in contemporary queer stories where characters more commonly long for belonging within their communities (and not necessarily their nations) and construct their own definitions of maturity, bringing together diverse experiences. Queer identities and practices are forms of rebellion against the expectations of proper adulthood and no character is as defiant as Golo in Temporada de caza. Rebellion starts with the very style and construction of the tale. Ninety-nine short vignettes make up the text. Some are as short as one sentence, some as long as a few pages. They are mapped onto each other, some repeating verbatim and some with minor changes (i.e., vignette 1 is repeated as vignette 41, 2 is 72, 5 is almost like 38, 49, and 99). The partial repetition of vignettes makes for a playful reading experience that resembles the process of memory, governed by an apparent free association of ideas. It is not really “free” association because there is a self-awareness in the narrative and in the repetition with minor changes that is suggestive of a certain uncanniness and/ or explicit acknowledgment that opinions change through time. The narrator creates the effect of telling the story as if he were in the process of remembering it, that is, by going back and forth in time, discovering new causes and consequences, causally changing the narration of events and opinions each time they are remembered. For the sake of clarity, vignettes 38, 49, and 99 are illuminating examples. In vignette 38, the narrator expresses: “Si me lo preguntan, diré que sí. Quise a Golo con toda mi alma. Pero no me pregunten por qué” (If you ask me, I will say yes. I loved Golo with all my soul. But don’t ask me why) (49). In vignette 49, immediately after telling a story of Golo biting his penis and causing him great pain, he retells vignette 38 but adds an expletive, “Si me lo preguntan, diré que sí. Quise a Golo, ese hijo de la chingada, con toda mi alma. Pero no me pregunten por qué” (If you ask me, I will say yes. I loved Golo, that son of a bitch, with all my soul. But don’t ask me why) (my emphasis, 61). In the very last vignette, after Golo has died and the narrator’s feelings have cooled, he dispassionately restates the sentiment, removing the phrase about loving him with all his soul, “Quise a Golo. Pero no me pregunten por qué” (I loved Golo. But don’t ask me why) (123).

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In addition to playfulness and the artifice of memory, this device adds to the general sense of confusion and fog throughout. There is no exact sense of time or place. Readers know that Golo was born in the 1970s because he belongs to a generation of artists (the Atari generation) contrivedly created by Kessler, a German curator, to facilitate marketing and sales. Golo meets the narrator when he is twenty-three, but readers do not know if it is the 1990s or the early 2000s. The novel happens in a large metropolis that could be anywhere except for the minuscule sense of place given in vignette 42, when they go to a theme park and Golo rides a rollercoaster “que llaman el Boomerang” (called the Boomerang) (53). The only rollercoaster of that name in the country is in Six Flags Mexico City (“Reino Aventura” until 2000), where it opened in 1988 (PAC, n.p.). The geographic fogginess adds to the sense of confusion that the narrator uses to achieve the wild feeling of his relationship with Golo. The gaze of the narrator is inescapable. He never lets readers forget that he is of European descent, half German on his father’s side, highly educated, an avid reader of literature and journalism in English and French, and contemptuous of low-class individuals. As such, he tells us in at least three different occasions that Golo is uneducated, untraveled, and uncultured. The narrator explains that Golo would tell fake stories of having traveled abroad, that Golo would regard with suspicion people who “nunca habían tenido que trabajar con la fuerza de sus manos” (had never had to work with the strength of their hands), and would often accuse the narrator and his friends of being “pequeñoburgueses, unos esnobs con un mojón de mierda por cerebro” (petite bourgeoisie, snobs with a piece of shit for brains) (58). Having little in common, the cornerstones of their relationship are sex and drugs: “Desde que Golo llegó a vivir conmigo cogíamos como locos. Cogíamos de día. Cogíamos de noche. Cogíamos como dos desahuciados. Cogíamos como perros en celo” (From the moment that Golo came to live with me we fucked like crazy. We fucked during the day. We fucked at night. We fucked like hopeless patients. We fucked like dogs in heat) (23). On one occasion, when Golo comes into some money, he spends it all on a heroin bender that lasts for days and ends when a guest dies at their ongoing party. This queer relationship defies most expectations of decorous and patriarchal convention. There is mention of inexplicable love on the part of the narrator, but Golo never expresses such affection. There is also a tacit agreement that the relationship could end at any time and both partners have several sexual encounters with many other people. The bond that they share does not intend to teach readers anything about how they should aspire to love or relate to one another because the characters do not aim to embody the values and mores of their social setting, rebelling against them not in acts of political dissent but of indifference. Values and mores are merely irrelevant.

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In this mystifying setting, unreliably narrated, readers are tasked with piecing together Golo’s unusual formative process. The subversion of traditional time, clear space, and a linear telling of the plot are part and parcel of the queerness of this coming-of-age story. When the story begins, Golo is a poor and uneducated plastic artist whose good looks and voracious sexual appetite have afforded him some opportunities. This younger Golo has little interest in success or fame. By chance and not by a drive to self-forge, as is the case in most Bildungsroman, Golo attains increasing renown in the time (months? years?) that he lives with the narrator. However, rather than success being a source of joy in belonging and admiration in the social context, Golo becomes self-harming, sexually violent, and participates in increasingly dangerous behavior. Golo is not interested in becoming a voice for his community or to forge—as should be the highest objective of the artist per classic examples of the künstlerroman—“in the smithy of [his] soul, the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (Joyce 384). Golo’s objectives are entirely selfish. If he is successful it is for the furtherance of his wild life: “Ahora inhalaba cocaína diez, quice, veinte veces más que cuando lo conocí [. . .] A Golo le enloquecía gastar. El dinero le quemaba las manos. Quizás porque era la primera vez que lo tenía” (Now he inhaled cocaine ten, fifteen, twenty more times than when I met him [. . .] Golo was crazy about spending. Money burned his hands. Maybe because it was the first time he had any) (98). Instead of dreaming of becoming a citizen, family man, and worker merrily incorporated into a system of capitalist production, Golo rejects (consciously or not) accumulating wealth and becoming petite bourgeois like the narrator. The narrator observes Golo’s reckless spending with a tinge of condescension, but Golo is actively opting out of the capitalist artist’s dream: international fame and fortune do not dissuade Golo’s expectation of dying young, at the age of twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison: Golo estaba obsesionado con su muerte. Creía con toda su fe que no llegaría más allá de los veintisiete años. Ni él mismo sabía el porqué de esa certeza. No creía en Dios ni en ninguna otra de esas estupideces. Pero, en cambio, podía levantar un templo sobre la fecha exacta de su muerte. Si me lo preguntan, yo digo que Golo había escuchado demasiado heavy metal. Eso era todo. Entre sus cosas más preciadas estaba un horrible póster de Metallica que siempre le quise tirar a la basura. (Golo was obsessed with his death. He thought, with all his faith, that he would not reach further than twenty-seven. Not even he knew the reason for this certainty. He did not believe in God or any of those stupidities. But, instead, he could raise a temple on the exact date of his death. If you ask me, I think that Golo had listened to too much heavy metal. That was all. Among his most

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precious belongings was a horrible Metallica poster that I always wanted to throw in the garbage.) (31)

Golo’s formative process rebels against most expectations of the genre because there is a jarring lack of desire for belonging or self-improvement. Golo runs from introspection to intoxication. And the witness narrator helps little to understand the inner world of the protagonist. In his view, Golo seems more mythical than human, inaccessible because he does not behave as the narrator would expect from hegemonic middle-class conventions. Yet, Golo’s is, in his own twisted worldview, an effective coming-of-age. He manages to live a frenetic and short life. In one of the final vignettes of the novel, Golo is eager to pose shirtless next to his paintings for a US magazine and, although we do not know the exact circumstances of his death in Barcelona, we know that he dies partying in the context of a world tour of his paintings. In both form and content, it is an extremely queer—strange— Bildungsroman where the non-linearity of the narration underscores that the objective is never for the character to become an upstanding member of society whom the readers ought to imitate but to experience the untamed euphoria of art and sex. In La Migraña, Guillermo’s is a story of modest and understated rebellion. The novel begins with the older Guillermo, a convention of some Bildungsroman such as Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). Old Guillermo is experiencing a bout of migraine that suspends him in time and makes him feel like his own self at eight years of age, when he first experienced the migraine, “el vértigo (o el éxtasis)” (vertigo [or ecstasy]) that becomes a series of moments of escape and detachment throughout his life, somewhere between being awake and asleep, present and immersed in the past (31). The hallucination enabled by the migraine in his present moment transports Guillermo back to 1937 when he was fifteen years old: “no estoy ya aquí sino en aquella casa de Tlalpan y tengo quince años” (I am no longer here but rather in that house in Tlalpan and I am fifteen years old) (32). Fully present in his past, rather than writing a memoir, old narrator Guillermo is in a process of becoming his own self: “El memorialista es el escritor que menos se interesa en el pasado: es una madeja de antenas para el momento presente, y el pasado no es sino la materia sonora captada por las antenas, materia cambiante, infinitamente sustituible” (The memoir writer is the one least interested in the past: he is a ball of antennae for the present moment, and the past is but the sonorous matter captured by the antennae, changing matter, infinitely replaceable) (16). And although the novel begins with this framing of the narrator as a self-archiver, readers know little about his life in the present. His family is absent, but readers know that he has attained a level of bourgeois comfort shown by his neatly and recently trimmed garden and

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his library. The lack of focus of the narrator on his family is symptomatic of a lack of interest in the social convention, and indeed there is no mention of a desire for marriage or parenthood by his younger self, but rather an emphasis on the desires and discovery of his own body in the homosocial setting of the minor seminary—an institution that diverts from capitalist heterosexual hegemony in its own right and which eliminates all possibility of heterosexual sex. Guillermo does not identify with any queer identity. His sexuality is not ravenous or overwhelming, as Golo’s. However, the queerness of his understated desires and his rebellion against the teachings of the church, which eventually lead him to atheism, are palpable and feed off each other. David Huerta argues: El nacimiento de un hombre joven gracias al asalto refulgente de la migraña significa, en estas páginas, también el nacimiento de un ateo [. . .] el cuerpo de un homosexual; de nuevo: ese nacimiento no está explicitado en la novela de Alatorre pero en sus páginas ese tema está como grabado en filigrana para quien desee verlo. Las escenas del baño en el seminario, en la parte final del libro, son lo bastante diáfanas, me parece, para llegar a esta interpretación. (The birth of a young man thanks to the constant attack of migraine means, in these pages, also the birth of an atheist [. . .] the body of a homosexual; again: this birth is not explicit in Alatorre’s novel but in its pages this theme is like a filigree engraving for those who want to see it. The scenes in the seminar’s bathroom, in the final part of the book, are transparent enough, to arrive at this interpretation.) (n.p.)

Guillermo’s rebellious queerness is an essential cause of his eventual atheist conviction, thus confirming Domínguez-Ruvalcaba’s argument that queerness in Latin American settings is antagonistic with Catholic hegemony. And although Guillermo’s ambitions do not include smashing the patriarchy with his rebellious formative process, he certainly—albeit quietly—leaves the faith. Two scenes in Guillermo’s formative process denote his queerness and lead him to a sufficient discovery of his own self that enables him to adjust his lifepath away from the church. The first is the realization of puberty when he and Pepe Lara, his peer, play in cold water: “Y de pronto, durante una fracción de segundo, gracias a un salto que da Pepe y a una rotura de su traje de baño, le veo el sexo; sólo durante una fracción de segundo, entre chorros de agua fría, a la luz débil que llega a nosotros” (And suddenly, for a fraction of a second, thanks to a leap that Pepe takes and a tear in his bathing suit, I see his sex; just for a fraction of a second, among jets of cold water, under the weak light that reaches us) (64). Guillermo notices that Pepe’s genitals,

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unlike his own, are still boy-like and hairless. He wants to see Pepe again, but why? Guillermo does not know: “No lo sé, pero intensamente deseo verificarlo, deseo ver ese sexo una vez más, aunque sea durante una fracción de segundo [. . .] Estoy excitado y perturbado. Estoy trastornado. Estoy loco” (I don’t know, but I intensely desire to verify it, I desire to see that sex one more time, even if it is for a fraction of a second [. . .] I am aroused and perturbed. I am deranged. I am insane) (65). Guillermo does not have language to name or understand his desire, but the departure from his prescribed life of priesthood and faith is set into motion. His sensual desire to see the naked genitals of his friend is likewise conflated with his desire to remain a boy. Guillermo hates his nighttime erections, the sin of being flesh, and in the fascist institution where he lives (the priests are unashamed supporters of Francisco Franco), the religious, political, and sexual interact to push Guillermo toward his liberation. Guillermo’s freeing coming-into-being happens in the beautiful last scene of the novel. Guillermo is observing the flowers of the vines in bloom. The vines are most dense in the bathroom, and he is called within, locking the door behind him. “Mi cuerpo. A eso he venido [. . .] Quiero verme” (My body. That is why I have come [. . .] I want to see myself) (89). Naked, Guillermo sees himself for the very first time. The experience is so sensual, he describes his oncoming erection as a newfound freshness that invades his legs and thighs and covers him whole. He is like the flowers blooming, a metaphor that underscores the natural quality of desire and self-arousal, and the unnatural colonial, Catholic, drive to repress it. His erect penis is a flower in bloom that, like a sunflower, turns to the sunlight: “Y el tallo, cargado de savia, se levanta, se levanta más, a pequeños saltos, de abajo arriba, y apunta hacia el cielo, hacia la luz que entra a caudales por encima de la puerta atrancada” (And the stem, full of sap, rises, rises more, in small jumps, from bottom to top, and aims toward the sky, to the light that flows from above the locked door) (91). In this euphoric moment, Guillermo first knows and recognizes himself: “¡Soy yo! ¡Soy yo! Yo, entero, yo con todo lo que tengo. Me reconozco, me saludo. Mi desnudez me reviste de mí mismo” (I am me! I am me! Me, whole, me with everything I have. I recognize myself, I greet myself. My nudity clothes me with myself) (92).8 It is not the accommodation as citizen and worker or the “pact between the individual and the world” that marriage implies and that concludes Guillermo’s coming-of-age (Moretti 2000, 22). Rather, it is his powerful sensual rebellion against the erasure of his body and desires, the rejection of the ideology of sin in this ecstasy of recognition, which, like the migraine, suspends Guillermo in time. Unlike Guillermo’s singular and powerful coming-into-being, Sara’s formative process is characterized by her multiple metamorphoses throughout life. As Antonio Marquet indicates, “después de trabajar en las empresas de

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su padre, se vuelve escritora, luego corredora en la bolsa, posteriormente se asocia en una empresa de hierbas en Tepoztlán [. . .] se entrega a las predicciones de su carta astral que ella sabe actualizar.” (after working in her father’s enterprises, she becomes a writer, then a broker, then a partner in an herbal company in Tepoztlán [. . .] she surrenders to the predictions of her astral chart that she knows how to update.) (148).9 Instead of a single objective, prescribed by the notion of destiny implied in astrological charts, Sara molds herself, her career, and her stars, to the changings in setting, brought about by the cruelty and rejection of her family and community. Her formative process is one of constant self-reevaluation, a series of little rebellions that, while often painful, afford her the joys of love and affection in her long-breath relationship with Grecia, her success as a writer, the power of narrating her experience of sexuality for the world to see, and the strength to stand up to her family and claim her inheritance. However, Sara’s rebellion bends more than breaks heteronormativity, yielding a more traditional heroine, much more preoccupied with attaining bourgeois accommodations than Golo or Guillermo. Sara’s story begins in San Francisco, where she eventually arrives years after her father shuns her. While in San Francisco, her father’s death forces her to face her past, and from the very first reaction, her lukewarm rebelliousness is explained. Mixed with her feeling of anger toward her father, “él fue quien me echó a perder la vida a mí” (he was the one who ruined my life) (25), she feels guilt and apologizes for both her rebellion and sexuality: “¡Perdóname por haber sido tan rebelde, querido padre mío!”, dije para mis adentros. Nada como ver muerto a alguien para arrepentirse de haberle hecho cosas terribles. ¿Cómo iba a aceptar la homosexualidad un hombre de principios del siglo xx, nacido en Ucrania, en un ambiente absolutamente tradicional? (Forgive me for having been so rebellious, my father! I said to myself. Nothing like seeing someone dead to regret having done terrible things to him. How was a man from the beginning of the twentieth century, born in Ukraine in an absolutely traditional setting, going to accept homosexuality?) (25)10

Sara is neither unapologetic, like Golo, nor gearing toward a clear-cut resolution, like Guillermo. Instead, the tension of her feelings makes her brooding and adapting, and thus leads to a pondering of homosexuality in her social contexts that commiserates with the difficulty of understanding or accepting it in her traditional community. The deaths in her present transport her to the beginning of her queer adolescence when Sara has already been in a relationship with Grecia for years but has not come out to her family or community. Readers find that her

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coming out was also a source of conflicting feelings, since it is her adolescent children, already in college, who “decidieron revelarles a mis padres que ella y to teníamos una relación amorosa” (decided to reveal to my parents that she and I had a relationship of lovers) (37). Her children’s betrayal leads to her father declaring her dead, a hard break with her previous life that enables her new coming-of-age. Although her sons do not speak to her until her father’s death, she has no unkind words for them, explaining that “mis hijos eran sagrados” (my children were sacred) (38). Consistent with her conflict, Sara explains that “no sabía si era miedo o vergüenza lo que me impedía actuar con algo de determinación” (I didn’t know if it was fear or shame that prevented me from acting with some determination) (38). At the beginning of her formative process, Sara’s queerness is not any sort of antidote to shame, and even years later, upon her father’s death, she still sees her father’s cruelty as a reasonable reaction. Further into her formative process, and despite her shame, Sara begins asserting her identity and freedom. Months after her initial rejection, her family offers her a lifeline: they are willing to let her go back and live with her children as long as she accepts to never see Grecia in her house again. They would buy Grecia an apartment to keep as a mistress in an ironic inversion of the tradition of the casa chica. Sara asserts that it was impossible to accept. Her family seems to be able to accept homosexuality as long as it is hidden and based solely on clandestine sexual impulse rather than obvert affection. The offer enables Sara to realize that her lesbian relationship is not a series of sexual encounters, but rather a meaningful partnership (deeper and more caring than the one she had with her ex-husband) that she is willing to defend despite being characterized as “egoísta y una pervertida” (selfish and a pervert) by her own children (66).11 This comes at a time when Sara is dealing with scarcity for the first time. Her decision to remain in her committed relationship is thus, as Miller argues about queer Bildungsromane, a conscious opting-out from capitalist comfort, and, as Domínguez-Ruvalcaba would have it, a rejection of homophobic religious ideology. However, it is not the Catholic dogma that operates in her case, so her decision implies a double oppression: she is shunned from her Jewish community by the patriarch but could not then be incorporated into the larger predominately Catholic Mexican setting. Because Sara actively seeks a sense of belonging (unlike Golo or Guillermo), it is through her eventual move to San Francisco that she achieves a sense of peace, within her queer community comprised of both men and women, in a setting that she perceives as less sexist, homophobic, and antisemitic than Mexico: “Ser mujer en un mundo sin tanto machismo hace la vida más fácil . . . ser lesbiana en San Francisco no significaba gran cosa. Y ser judía tampoco le causaba impacto a nadie” (Being a woman in a world with less machismo makes life easier . . . being a lesbian in San

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Francisco was not a big deal. And being Jewish did not shock anyone either) (148). At the end of the novel, there is no shocking revelation, her family—now without its patriarch—does not overturn its belief system, nor does she return to settle in Mexico. She speaks again with her children, now adults, who accept her back into the family, but, as she explains, will never fully forgive her. Her relationship with her mother improves, but it is still at the end an open wound where failed promises abound. Sara becomes a successful writer, the very last line of the novel reaffirming this vocation, but there is no satisfying resolution with her family. Such is a possibility for queer coming-of-age stories: tensions unresolved, a queerness that recognizes “that managing stigma and disclosure is a life-long process that is never resolved” (Kaufman and Johnson 810). These three contemporary queer novels show different outcomes and ways to rebel against heterosexist expectations of adulthood in the context of Mexico City. The assertion of their divergent sexualities results in death (Golo), the discovery of sexuality and atheism (Guillermo), and a selfimposed but joyful exile (Sara). These outcomes reflect the great variety of life paths and experiences contained in the umbrella of queerness. Even within one geographic boundary, the formative processes of queer individuals cannot be thought of as a monolithic lifepath. Queer Bildungsromane can encompass the wildest of sexual voracity and the tranquility of a monogamic commitment. However, they all experience the key characteristic of comingof-age queer: the formation of rebellious identities.

NOTES 1. There has long been a debate in queer theory that pits normalization of queerness (and internalization of respectability politics) against queerness that enables opting out “of normative society—of defying the status quo, refusing to play along, and living by an alternative set of rules” (Ruti 4). Mari Ruti defines this opposition as queer positivity and negativity. Ruti explains that queer positivity aligns with neoliberal culture which “assures us that personal fulfillment is attainable through ambition, striving, and calculated risks [. . .] selling us the fantasy of eventual happiness” (6). Conversely, queer negativity “represents an antidote to the valorization of success, achievement, performance, and self-actualization that characterizes today’s neoliberal society” (5). As such, queer negativity is also an antidote to the ideal capitalist accommodations of traditional Bildungsroman. The characters in the novels studied in this chapter correspond more clearly to the rebellious stance of opting out, corresponding with queer negativity, although they do conform, internalize, and perform several aspects of the capitalist ideology that prizes individualistic financial success.

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2. A minor seminar is “a Roman Catholic seminary giving all or part of high school and junior college training with emphasis on preparing candidates for a major seminary” (Merriam-Webster, n.p.). 3. The foundational Cass Identity Model, developed in 1979 by Vivienne Cass, identifies six stages of linear (albeit flexible) development for queer individuals that begin with identity confusion and finish with pride and synthesis, where “personal and public sexual identities are synthesized into one image, and a sense of oneself as a gay male or lesbian fully develops [. . .] the gay male or lesbian identity is viewed as an important part of the individual, but it is not looked upon as the sole identity of the person” (Kenneady and Oswalt 232). Cass argued that this process of identity formation could happen at any age. The length of this process ensues the notion of a long (or later) adolescence, where queer people often do not achieve a synthetic identity until later in life. Although Cass’s model has been criticized in recent studies for not acknowledging “that managing stigma and disclosure is a life-long process that is never resolved” and for minimizing “the tremendous variation in experience brought about by context, race/ethnicity, gender, social class, and other characteristics,” it enables the assertion that Sara’s process of identification can be understood as a coming-of-age in which the character puzzles over who she is, her desires, and how her lesbian identity fits into her relationships, family, and society in her fifties (Kaufman and Johnson 810). 4. The Bildungsroman in the Mexican tradition often establishes a dialogue—that conforms to yet often subverts—the conventions of the sister-genre of the Picaresque novel, combining elements of the testimonio, and acute social critiques based on decolonial rhetoric. For example, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s 1816 El Periquillo Sarniento (The Mangy Parrot) and José Rubén Romero’s 1938 La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (The Useless Life of Pito Pérez) epitomize Mexican literature’s awareness of the Spanish picaresque tradition, yet subvert it in their Mexican settings thus bringing attention of colonial and postcolonial structures of ethnic, racial, and class inequalities. For a thorough reading of the picaresque and the Bildungsroman in Mexican and Latin American literary histories, see Julia Kushigian’s Reconstructing Childhood: Strategies of Reading for Culture and Gender in the Spanish American Bildungsroman. 5. In opening the genre to include the experiences of women, Pin-chia Feng goes as far as calling “any writing by an ethnic woman about the identity formation of an ethnic woman, whether fictional or autobiographical in form, chronologically or retrospectively in plot” a Bildungsroman (15). 6. Note that “puto” in the masculine is better translated to “fag” and “puta” in the feminine to whore. Golo and the narrator of Temporada de caza use it in the feminine to collapse both meanings into one subjectivity and use it to qualify just one person. 7. Mari Roti warns against the desexualization and erasure of queer subcultures that the mainstream, neoliberal, and wealthy gay movement can incur in its pursue of marriage and the normalization of a very specific kind of decorous, whitewashed queerness. Ruti explains that marriage, as the single goal of queer activism, “represents a narrow political agenda that merely reproduces the core values of normative society, including is privileging of one relational modality (marriage) over all others” (19).

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One of the dangers of “queer” is this global hegemonic standardization of the meaning of sexual and gender difference in the detriment of difference. 8. “Soy yo” could alternatively be translated as “It is me.” 9. For an insightful reading of the roles of astrology and mysticism in the novel, see Antonio Marquet, “Los tres frentes de Sara Levi Calderón . . .” 10. Soon before, Sara’s gay friend Tedi Matthews has died at the young age of forty of AIDS-related complications. Antonio Marquet argues that Tedi is her second father, despite being younger than her, the one who initiates her in the world of writing. The deaths of her fathers happen in quick succession, enabling Sara to evaluate her belonging and upbringing in both the Jewish community of Mexico and the queer community of San Francisco. 11. Sara describes her first marriage as an agreement that she did not opt into but was rather just part of the expectations of her community: “A los dieciocho estaba tristemente casada” (At eighteen I was unhappily married) (114).

WORKS CITED Alatorre, Antonio. La Migraña. México D.F. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: Texas University Press, 1986. Buckley, Jerome. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman From Dickens to Golding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Cass, V. “Homosexuality Identity Formation: A Theoretical Model.” Journal of Homosexuality, no. 4, 1979, pp. 219–235. Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor. Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. London: Zed Books, 2016. Feng, Pin-chia. The Female Bildungsroman. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Howe, Susanne. Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Huerta, David. “Sobre la tela blanca del silencio.” Revista de la Universidad de México, no. 104, octubre de 2012. Jeffers, Thomas L. Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman From Goethe to Santayana. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 1975. Kaufman, Joanne M., and Cathryn Johnson. “Stigmatized Individuals and the Process of Identity.” The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 4, 2004, pp. 807–833. JSTOR, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/4121211. Accessed 26 September 2020. Kenneady, Donna Ann, and Sara B. Oswalt. “Is Cass’s Model of Homosexual Identity Formation Relevant to Today’s Society?” American Journal of Sexuality Education, vol. 9, no. 2, 2014, pp. 229–246. Kushigian, Julia Alexis. Reconstructing Childhood: Strategies of Reading for Culture and Gender in the Spanish American Bildungsroman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003.

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Levi Calderón, Sara. Vida Y Peripecias De Una Buena Hija De Familia. Cauhtemoc D.F.: Voces en Tinta, 2015. Maldonado, Tryno. Temporada de caza para el león negro. Ciudad de México: Alfaguara, 2009. Marquet, Antonio. “Los tres frentes de Sara Levi Calderón en Vida y peripecias de una buena hija de familia.” Tema y Variaciones de Literatura, no. 46, semester I 2016. Mexico, pp. 147–163. Merriam-Webster. “Minor Seminary.” Merriam Webster Dictionary. https://www​ .merriam​-webster​.com​/dictionary​/minor​%20seminary. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Miller, Meredith. “Lesbian, Gay, and Trans Bildungsromane.” In A History of the Bildungsroman, edited by Sarah Graham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 239–266. Monsiváis, Carlos. “Una exposición, varias exposiciones, un tiempo de inauguraciones.” In Una exposición, varias exposiciones, un tiempo de inauguraciones. Difusión Cultural UNAM-Museo Universitario del Chopo, 2001, pp. 9–11. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 2000. PAC. “Boomerang en Six Flags Mexico” Pa-Community. https://www​.pa​-community​ .com​/parques​/six​-flags​-mexico​/atracciones​/boomerang. Ruti, Mari. The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: California University Press, 1990.

Chapter 3

The Dark Night of Mexico Picaresque, Sexuality, and Violence in El vampiro de la colonia Roma and Las púberes canéforas R. Hernández Rodríguez

The last three decades of the twentieth century were difficult for Mexico. The 1980s were particularly challenging for the economy: oil prices plummeted, the peso was devaluated, and Mexico was unable to pay its foreign debt, which resulted in austerity policies that dashed the dreams of prosperity of an entire generation. These decades saw also an increase in activism advocating for openness and acceptance of different sectors of society, particularly gay and lesbian, demanding inclusion, respect, and protection as well as economic opportunities. Increasing poverty and social changes is the context in which the two novels analyzed in this chapter—El vampiro de la Colonia Roma (1979), translated into English as Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel, and Las púberes canéforas (1983), “The Pubescent Canephorae”—appeared. These novels deal with the experiences of two queer young men exploring life and navigating the complexity of a socially divided Mexico while discovering their own sexuality amid violence and hardship. Even though they were written before queer studies was established as a discipline, both novels address some of the issues queer theory will later articulate. Namely, the foregrounding of sexual practices that do not conform to a traditional view and the ensuing challenge not only to the idea that heterosexuality was the norm but to all social, political, and economic institutions. Sexual otherness in these novels is depicted in its social context. The realization of being sexually different for these characters is also the realization of being poor. Not separating issues of personal identity from their social surroundings helps the authors avoid avant la lettre some of the issues queer theory will later face while offering alternatives to a conventional life. Queer 31

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theory has been criticized for betraying its principles by becoming part of the institutions that were supposed to resist, as Max Kirsch puts it, for simply reacting to labeling without proposing “a social alternative” (34). It has also been criticized for encouraging “political apathy as it relativizes all sexuality and gender” (Kirsch, 8) and for ignoring issues of class, race, and ethnicity by being “thoroughly grounded in the Eurocentric narratives of the coloniality of power” (42), as Michael Hames-García argues, or because it has “(re)produced the kinds of racial normalizations and exclusions demarcated by queer communities and political organizations” (Barnard, 5). It has been denounced as well for forcing on the world “the uniquely US trajectories of Stonewall, coming out, [and] identity-based civil rights” (Barnard, 7) as the only models to determine progress in the area of alternative sexualities. These novels center on the fluidity of sexual practices and identities, plus its social implications. El vampiro tells the story of Adonis García, a young gay man who narrates his life to a hypothetical interviewer from early childhood to his becoming a male prostitute. With great gusto and humor, Adonis relishes talking about his sexual encounters and life in Mexico City, despite all the challenges he faces due to his lacking a stable family and money. Las púberes, likewise, centers on the adventures of a young man, Felipe Ruiz, with a more fluid sexuality, who also experiences Mexico City with all its excitement and dangers. Unlike Adonis, Felipe’s take on sexuality is more open, since he is a male prostitute and has a girlfriend, despite having a long affair with Guillermo, one of his clients. Sexual experiences in both novels are presented matter-of-fact, without any moral judgment. By analyzing these two novels keeping in mind queer theory’s basic principles, as described by William Turner, that is “the proposition that many persons do not fit the available categories and that such failure of fits reflects a problem not with the persons but with the categories” (32) and society, we hope to illuminate the novelty of these works. Growing up in Mexico, and by extension in Latin America, is for a large sector of the population, growing up poor not only in the broad sense of having few economic resources as well as few opportunities to generate wealth but also in the sense of living in politically and socially marginal conditions, with little or no access to quality education or to cultural and recreational activities. It is also growing up without the power to participate in the political process, and therefore unable to decide one’s own future. Such is the case with Adonis and Felipe, who are forced to find alternative ways of exercising agency. Growing up for the purposes of this chapter is understood as the process of gradually becoming an-other. According to Nick Lee, there is a common assumption that if men and children are opposites, turning into an adult means turning into its opposite (8), or going from being unstable, immature, and incomplete to fully realized. Here, however, the emphasis is given

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to the process of becoming, similarly to the classical distinction of adult and child Jens Qvortrup observes in society, in which the former is defined as a “human being,” while the latter is considered a “human becoming” (639). Not so much because we consider children incomplete, but because the process of becoming and not completely committing to anything in particular (heterosexual, responsible, worker, mature enough to enter the world of politics or finance) is liberating, particularly for a queer youth. This also helps us to define the concept of agency, which we understand as the capacity or state of engaging with society and by individual action modifying one’s own situation, which could affect social change. As the characters of these novels discover their sexuality, there is an “educational” element in the process of learning about life, being different, and how to survive. Learning happens in the street for Adonis and from an adult gay lover who assumes the role of a teacher in the case of Felipe, stressing the fact that coming-of-age implies a “tension between neophyte and adult members of societies” (Cote and Anton, xi). The traditional idea of coming-of-age, however, does not apply entirely to these novels since there is no real passage from childhood to adulthood in them, but rather a process that is malleable and open and remains unresolved at the end. In this manner, El vampiro and Las púberes could be considered Bildungsroman only in as much as they show a process of becoming, even though “the expression ‘coming of age’ is used to mean ‘to reach full legal adult status,’ and it is commonly seen in studies of the Bildungsroman” (Millard, 4). The idea of becoming rather than being is liberating because it frees individuals from the demand of being anything in particular. In that way, it mirrors the very concept of queering, which according to Annamarie Jagose is constantly in a process of formation, since “it is not simply that queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile, but rather that its definitional intermediacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics” (1). A Vile Life, Devoted to Cheap Debauchery Adonis García is a young gay man growing up in challenging circumstances in Mexico during the 1970s. Becoming an orphan when he was still a child, and without any money or prospects as a young adult, he survives by any means possible, especially male prostitution. Without passing any moral judgment, the novel describes the experiences of this young man without sparing the reader some graphic details of his sexual encounters with multiple partners. The increasingly visible manifestations of a gay culture allowed literature to open up to represent these experiences with uncommon casualness and humor. So much so that José Joaquín Blanco, the other author analyzed in

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this chapter, wrote at the time that in the not too distant future “a new minority of radical lovers will be braver and happier, more revolutionary, than we, the homosexuals of intolerance, are now” (una nueva minoría de amantes radicales [que] será más valiente y dichosa, más revolucionaria, de lo que ahora somos los homosexuales de la intolerancia) (“Ojos” 190). A few years later, however, this optimism is virtually absent in Las púberes canéforas novel that, along with El vampiro, offers for the first time a complex view of urban life in Mexico City from the lenses of queer sexualities. What remains is the radical view that sex challenges society. From the first pages, Blanco makes it clear that his story is a mirror of life in the city, a life filled with violence and sex. The first chapter begins at night, with Felipe, one of the main characters, in a forest on the outskirts of the city where he had been forcibly taken by two men with the intention of disposing of the body of a murdered young prostitute. When his kidnappers abandon him, beaten and wounded, Felipe runs out of the forest and stops the car of a passing middle-class family; the frightened father agrees to take him to the city. Once in the city, the boy tries to contact Guillermo, a man he knows because of his profession. Felipe, a poor young man “with sturdy arms, in his flexible and tight body” (con brazos robustos, en su cuerpo flexible y apretado) (34), engages in male prostitution, and Guillermo is one of his clients and lover. This gloomy and desperate atmosphere is maintained throughout the text and corresponds to the violent atmosphere of the city. As Guillermo writes, at night Mexico City “has streets like corpses, especially in the old neighborhoods, such as downtown” (tiene calles como cadáveres, sobre todo en los barrios viejos, como el centro) (21). This dead city is inhabited by sad beings, like Guillermo himself, a man in his forties with aspirations of becoming a writer, who collects literary quotations for his future novel; or la Gorda, a friend of Guillermo, who is dedicated to bodybuilding with the same passion with which Guillermo wants to be a writer, and whose obsession with his physical appearance is an obsession with not aging. Between verses by Sor Juana, Quevedo, Salvador Novo, Scott Fitzgerald, or Gil de Biedma, the novel is built with a snobbish intertextuality that aims at mocking Guillermo’s intellectual pretensions. Another sad character, La Cacahuata, was “a bald, tall and excessively obese man” (un hombrón calvo, alto y excesivamente obeso) (70), whose nightclubs were linked to drug trafficking. This man submitted to sex with Felipe like an animal, “on his sumptuous bedspreads with dry patches of Coke and semen, he would let things be done do him” (sobre sus suntuosas colchas con lamparones secos de coca-cola y semen, y se dejaba hacer) (71). Equally sad was Claudia, the murdered prostitute who preferred to pick up drunken men on the dark streets, since it was better “to open her legs for a little while for two thousand pesos than to walk radiant like an empress all

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night long for five thousand” (abrirse un ratito de piernas por dos mil que andar radiante y emperatriz toda la exhaustiva noche por cinco mil) (71), and Analía, Felipe’s young lover, who dreamed of becoming a nurse and leaving prostitution, but in the meantime welcomed the life of luxury and freedom that the city offered her. She and Felipe enjoyed sex and the pleasures to which they had access because of their profession with the innocence of children eating chocolates. Both of them “marveled at the fact that sex was so important to people: so dramatic, so deforming” (se admiraban de que el sexo fuera tan importante para le gente: tan dramático, tan deformador) (73). For them, making love or not was the same as having a Coke or going out for a stroll in the city; because of their youth, inexperience, and beauty, they felt on top of the world since “before a humanity of dunces, how could Felipe and Analía not triumph? And how could they not soon make it all the way to the top?” (frente a esta humanidad de chuscos, ¿cómo no iban a triunfar Felipe y Analía? ¿Cómo no se iban a colar pronto hasta arriba?) (73). Although different in style, both novels complement each other in the vision they present of sexuality and economic and social marginality. Sexuality is the central theme of these novels not so much because it is the only thing that concerns the characters, but because it is what catalyzes their desires, dreams, and frustrations. And above all, sexuality reveals itself as a way of resistance by negating the demand of traditional heteronormativity, queering them in the process, since “queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender, and desire” (Jagose, 3). Both novels also look at their main characters’ childhood to shed light onto who they are. According to some critics, children are “vital to compulsory heterosexuality and normative sociality” (Kidd 183) in as much as children are often used to condemn unconventional sexualities with the excuse to protect their innocence. Others think that child, as the opposite of adult men, just like women, could be seen as “a term of contestation and debate, not unlike queer” (Kidd 182). In the case of Felipe and Adonis, although they are encouraged as children to behave according to their sex, they are not ambivalent about using their young bodies and their sexuality to achieve their ambitions for wealth and love wherever they can find it, with contempt for society because of a childhood of scarcity. El vampiro is particularly interesting in this sense, since the novel is the first-person narration of the life of the character, which allows us to look at his childhood in a more direct way, given that “an autobiography is a story of the self that is closely related to the Bildungsroman in many important formal and thematic ways” (Millard, 3), such as the naïveté of the character as a child, his overcoming a series of challenges, and his ending the story with a better understanding of himself; El vampiro differs from the Bildungsroman in that Adonis does not “mature,” becoming an adult in the traditional sense. Las púberes is less direct in this regard, but it also offers a brief window into

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Felipe’s impoverished childhood, albeit from a different narrator’s perspective. Already in the hospital where he is recovering from his wounds after being left in the woods, Felipe asks his father, Ismael, to contact Guillermo for help. When Guillermo meets Ismael, he imagines he possesses the “Mexican modesty of the humble towards decent people” (modestia mexicana de los humildes hacia la gente decente) (105). This “humble” (that is, poor) man lived off shady business deals and dreamed of building a house on the outskirts of the city, on a stolen piece of land: “Felipe had grown up there, imagining with his mother how the house being built, which would remain unfinished for months, like a ruin, would look like” (ahí había crecido Felipe, imaginándose con su mamá cómo sería la casa que se empezaba a construir, y que quedaba detenida por meses, como ruinas) (107). The poverty of Felipe’s childhood is shown from Guillermo’s perspective as otherness, and it is not presented as part of his growing-up process, but as a testimony of the social context he rejects. Guillermo’s voice reinforces this idea, especially when quoting Ismael’s misguided morals: “The national skill is theft, said Ismael, sincere, adding a little salt to a lime wedge to accompany the long glass of tequila” (La habilidad nacional es el robo, decía Ismael, sincerote, echándole salecita a su limón para acompañar la copa larga de tequila”] (107). But also, inadvertently, reveals a hint of social criticism: “the poorer one was, the less one could steal, and the more one ran the risk of being put in jail, not only for one’s own faults, but for the faults of everyone else once and for all” (conforme se era más pobre, menos se podía robar; y se corría más riesgo de que lo metieran a uno a la cárcel, no sólo por las culpas propias, sino por las de todo el mundo de una buena vez) (107). If this suggests that poverty generates crime, we soon realize it is not that simple: When Felipe was about twelve years old, his father got into trouble. He was kidnapped by some feds for half a week, they made him sign all kinds of papers, left him with almost nothing, and with blows from which he never recovered. (cuando Felipe tenía unos doce años el papá se metió en líos. Unos judiciales lo secuestraron media semana, le hicieron firmar todo tipo de papeles, lo dejaron casi sin nada, y con golpes de los que nunca volvió a reponerse”.] (109)

The chain of poverty and violence is an external force, yet the father lacks the morals and the skills to help his son escape it, even when he loves him. His love, based on Felipe being “so macho and so tough” (tan machito y tan entrón) (109), was less about the young man and more about the father’s expectations. Likewise, El vampiro rationalizes Adonis’s present situation in part based on the poverty of his childhood. But unlike Felipe, Adonis’s childhood

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memories are not filtered through the voice of a narrator, since he speaks directly to us. What we gain in sincerity, nevertheless, we lose in perspective, since there is no way of knowing if what Adonis tells us is true or not. He himself seems aware of it and offers veiled indications of the subjective nature of his narration: When i was born my dad and mom were already old both of them my dad was sixty i think and my mom forty-something almost at the change of life already right? ya probably think i was born a pervert [an idiot] because of that but that’s not true it was the hard knocks i got in the school of life that’ve made me that way anyway i’m not a pervert [an idiot] and life hasn’t knocked me so hard either. (16, emphasis added)1

Here, Adonis relates his birth to his later misfortunes, but immediately denies such assumption: “i’m not a pervert [an idiot] and life hasn’t knocked me so hard either.” He does something similar when he speaks of his mother and how much she suffered due to a chronic illness: “As long as i can think back i can see her laying in bed with an oxygen tank by her side of course sometimes she got up like to see that the maid did the housework properly” (16). The seriousness of the mother’s illness is questioned with the joking comment that she was always keeping an eye on the maid who was often just pretending to work. Adonis’s father, a hard-working man who does his best to prosper economically, like Felipe’s father, devotes more time to work than to his family: The phone rang all day long the mechanics’d be there checking their motorcycles and their tolls and my brother and me supposedly helping them or me helping my dad [. . .] i think that’s why i was my dad’s favorite and also because i was such a serious well-behaved kid. (18)

As in Felipe’s case, the hardship of childhood is cushioned with an affectionate relationship with the father, unfortunately is a love that reflects the father’s own values. This creates conflicts between the child and the adult who claims to want the best for the child but mainly seeks to validate his own view of the world even by force, as when Adonis’s father gives him “two rights to the jaw to make me understand and even then i didn’t understand” (23). This conflict is resolved with the loss of the father, real in the case of Adonis and symbolic in the case of Felipe. When Adonis’s father dies after an accident, the child confesses, “i was still just a kid i was about thirteen and this time i really cried a lot [. . .] now i really felt completely alone abandoned in life” (27). In Felipe’s case, the loss of the father happens symbolically when Ismael admits to Guillermo that Felipe refused his help and asked for

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his lover’s: “[I told him] as your father I’ll see how I can help you, but he insisted that since you and he had a sort of friendship . . .” ([le dije] yo como tu padre a ver en qué forma te puedo responder, pero el insistió que como tenían usted y él una como especie de amistad . . .) (110). The father becomes silent; his vanishing is metaphorically suggested by the ellipsis. Intertextuality and Picaresque Having the audacity to narrate homosexual experiences, including scenes of uninhibited sexuality, without apology, and daring to offer them as valid human experiences is one of the great achievements of the novels of Luis Zapata and José Joaquín Blanco. But it is not only the subject matter that distinguishes them; the brashness and originality of their structures are equally notable. This is important because the structure itself echoes the complexity of the subject matter. By working subject matter and structure as a single issue, Zapata and Blanco brilliantly manage to amalgamate them using two apparently simple techniques: orality, in the hypothetical presence of a tape recorder that registers Adonis García’s experiences in Zapata’s case; the pastiche in the insertion of literary fragments throughout the text and the mixture of genres, in Blanco’s case. Both techniques mediate between the reader and the narrator, moving the text from a category of “authentic” expression to one of questioned reality. To expose this transformation, Zapata and Blanco, rather than “write” their novels, put them together by transcribing the tapes and by creating a pastiche with fragments of other writers. Zapata remains faithful to the oral nature of Adonis’s narrative, organizing the text in tapes rather than chapters and substituting the traditional punctuation with blank spaces, avoiding the use of capital letters, because “the conversational form in which the novel is narrated demands a phonetic credibility that opposes the conventions of written language” (La forma conversada en que se narra la novela exige una credibilidad fonética que se opone a las convenciones del lenguaje escrito) (note that precedes the Spanish edition of the novel). This strategy is highly original, and successful, to the point that some critics have considered the novel testimonial or even a psychoanalysis session. It is evident in the text, however, that Adonis is talking to a curious impromptu interviewer, thus increasing the credibility of the narrative as a source of real experiences: “What the fuck! tell you my life story? why? who’d be interested in that?” (16), says the young narrator at the beginning of the novel and at the end he demands: “Now turn it off right?” (202). Blanco, even though apparently follows a more traditional structure, uses an equally innovative way of constructing the text. Las púberes is divided

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into ten chapters in which we follow a number of characters all interrelated. The point of convergence for all of them is Felipe. Felipe represents youth and sexuality and in one way or another, he is at the center of all the characters’ emotions and desires. Just like the transcriber of the tapes recorded by Adonis guides the narration in El vampiro, Guillermo is a “narrator” of sorts in Las púberes. Even though the novel is told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, there are clues that indicate that narrator may be Guillermo himself. The most evident is the fact that he dreams of writing a novel titled “Las Púberes Canéforas” and that he does so in a self-aggrandizing manner by choosing that title, taken from a poem by Rubén Darío, “Just so that all those ignorant queens would ask ‘The pubescent what?’” (nomás para que tanta loca ignorante preguntara ‘Las ¿qué?’) (77). Likewise, the literary quotes sprinkled all through the novel are either literary fragments that Guillermo collects or that occur to him when he sees a fountain, a building, an empty bar, and so on. A big part of the novel is made of these quotes and of sketches Guillermo writes about the people around him. Blanco’s interest in structure focuses on literary pastiche. Las púberes is pieced together with fragments; fragments of genres such as detective novels, metafiction, and chronicle; fragments of real and imagined stories; fragmented characters, sketched by Guillermo; and fragments of literary texts from all periods and traditions. Guillermo’s literary passion, however, is neither knowledge nor liberation. If on the one hand, it suggests a person who sees the world through the eyes of literature, on the other, it points to a pretentiousness intended to place oneself apart from the uneducated masses with whom one has to live. Guillermo makes that clear when he complains about the state of literature in Mexico, where “there are not so many people [. . .] to talk about books with, people that may even know who Paul Bowles is” (no hay tanta gente [. . .] con quien hablar de libros, que sepan siquiera quién es Paul Bowles) (134). His relationship with Felipe is as ambivalent as his literary passion, just like the double role the young man is forced to perform: lover and disciple. Guillermo, as an older, educated adult, initiates Felipe into a different type of relationship, one providing the young man with a more comfortable life, in addition to knowledge and culture, in exchange for sex. In Guillermo’s own words, it was “a mix of business, friendship, and love” (una mezcla de negocio, amistad y amor) (48). Guillermo, contemplating the young man’s plans for the future, which include money and rich lovers, supposes that thus far he is the best thing Felipe has been able to get, “and that, as he says, is because of ‘my culture’” (y eso, como dice él, por “mi cultura”) (51). Felipe assumes the role of pupil, which for him is a way of getting closer to his goals of success: “One day he asked me to make a list of the five hundred books that all Cultivated People should have read” (Un día me pidió que le hiciera

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la lista de los quinientos libros que toda Gente Culta debía haber leído) (51). And Guillermo willingly assumes his role as teacher when concludes that the “education” that Felipe is receiving from him now will be useful when he manages to ascend socially; then, “of course, it will be of some use to him to have heard of Stravinsky, Donatello, or Rodin at my house” (por supuesto, le será de alguna utilidad haber oído en mi casa de Stravinsky, Donatello o Rodin) (51). Assuming the responsibility of his education could be seen as a coming-of-age experience, but only in the tension between the inexperienced youth and the knowledgeable adult. Las púberes is not a Bildungsroman either since the traditional Bildungsroman implies the training of the intellect or character for a specific purpose—the individual’s functioning in mainstream society. Or, in the words of Bakhtin, the process “from youthful idealism and fantasies to mature sobriety and practicality” (22). The Bildungsroman can be seen as perpetuating the dominant order, even when it conflicts with society’s values since in the end it accepts its impositions. If there is preparing Felipe for a role in society in this novel, it is not that of a respectful heterosexual man: “It occurred to Guillermo that Felipe somehow understood that, however wellintentioned Guillermo’s advice to him was, there was in it an authoritarian and vindictive compulsion to transform Felipe” (Se le ocurrió a Guillermo que Felipe de algún modo entendía que, por bien intencionados que estuvieran los consejos que con respecto a él hacía Guillermo, había en todo ello una compulsión autoritaria y vengativa de transformar a Felipe) (38). Felipe is too ambivalent about sexuality and the lifestyle he wants—for him is all about money: “To have money as to have a good body or good health” (tener dinero como tener un buen cuerpo o buena salud) (49), but also about resisting heterosexual normativity: “‘Analía is my girlfriend, Guillermo is my boyfriend: they are the only ones, forever, forever and ever,’ said Felipe making out with both of them” (—Analía es mi novia, Guillermo es mi novio: son mis únicos novios, para siempre, para siempre—decía Felipe, fajando al mismo tiempo con los dos) (52). Unfortunately, he lacks the economic stability that would allow him, like middle-class Guillermo, independence and realization. As the child of inequality and want, he seems destined to dependency and unfulfillment, a state of perpetual infantilization, or paraphrasing Bakhtin, to never abandon “youthful idealism and fantasies.” Guillermo’s self-deprecatory awareness of this gives the text a dimension of social critique. As Paul Vek Lewis points out, “The text is thus a game of perceptions and perspectives [. . .] It so happens that no one has the absolute truth: everything is narrative” (el texto así es un juego de percepciones y perspectivas [. . .] Sucede que nadie tiene la verdad absoluta: todo es narración) (86). Ultimately, Felipe is the one that needs to assume agency, otherwise he could perpetually be doomed to see the world with the wondrous eye of

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a child. The novel does not resolve the issue, leaving open the possibility of Felipe gaining a more suitable identity. Either way, it is a better life than a blind submission to heteronormativity. Thus, chapter ten is the perfect ending for the novel; this chapter includes only two lines, a quote from Quevedo: “nothing disenchants me / the world has bewitched me” (nada me desengaña / el mundo me ha hechizado) (149). El vampiro, in contrast, is the narration of a life that is offered to us for no apparent reason, except that it represents a series of interesting human experiences. The model that Zapata chooses to follow is the picaresque tradition: as the epigraph taken from the second part of Lazarillo de Tormes at the beginning of the novel makes evident, this novel is picaresque. Here, the narrator claims that the only life worth living is the life of the pícaro, a life sought by those who wanted to enjoy their natural appetites, since “the picaresque life is more reposeful than that of kings, emperors and popes. In choosing it, I chose to travel by the freest and least dangerous of roads, and by no means a melancholy one” (10). This assertion is of course rhetorical since the life of Adonis cannot be described as less burdensome than that of kings and popes, but what it attempts to emphasize is, as the original in Spanish says, the not at all sad aspect of life. The direct and playful dialogue with the picaresque implies a vision of literary creation that transcends the limitations of periods and alters those of genre. It is not possible, obviously, to suppose that El vampiro is a picaresque novel in the same sense that Lazarillo de Tormes is, but it is, as the author himself points out, an updating of the genre: “Then it occurred to me to exploit that possibility, that is, to somehow update what could be the picaresque, or to contextualize it concretely in an urban environment, but with characteristics more typical of this period” (entonces se me ocurrió explotar esa posibilidad, es decir, de alguna manera actualizar lo que podría ser la picaresca, o de contextualizarla concretamente en un ambiente urbano, pero con características más propias de esta época) (Torres 204). This way, Zapata’s novel is inserted into a literary genre associated with the sixteenth century to describe the wanderings of a gay character of the twentieth century. By doing so, Zapata renews the genre, returning it to its original and subversive intention of narrating a life that is clearly contrary to the life considered exemplary by conventional society, not unlike what queer theory does today. In other words, Adonis is to the twentieth century what Lazarillo was to the sixteenth. Zapata uses the picaresque to celebrate the experiences of a man who has sex with men, which do not represent the experiences of the majority, and thereby establishes a critique of bourgeois society that values heterosexuality as the only valid form of sexual behavior. It is interesting in this sense the opinion of the critic Luis Mario Schneider, who considers that Adonis’s

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only interest “is an affirmation of the power of the body. In short, he is a modern pícaro who believes he is exploiting, but in reality, without realizing it—unless occasionally—he is enjoyed and exploited by another power: money” (es una afirmación del poder del cuerpo. En definitiva, es un pícaro moderno que cree explotar, pero, en realidad, sin darse cuenta—a no ser ocasionalmente—, es gozado y explotado por otro poder: el dinero) (80). This judgment is interesting for its evident disdain of Adonis’s sexuality, when it considers that his only interest is the reaffirmation of his body, clearly disapproving of this form of “exploitation.” For Schneider, the affirmation of the body is something negative or at least something less important since it reveals interest in the material in opposition to a more desirable intellectual or spiritual attitude. And yet, Zapata was emphatic about how important it was for this novel that Adonis, regardless of his sexuality, “was a free guy, who was not tormented, as it’s supposed to be the case with someone working as a whore” (fuese un cuate libre, que no anduviera atormentado, como tenía que ser en alguien que se dedicaba al talón) (Torres 212), consequently vindicating sexual experiences. According to George Shipley, in fact, it is surprising not to find more sexual descriptions in the El Lazarillo de Tormes; most likely this was intended to keep the text “clean” despite including all sorts of reprehensible behaviors, making it easier for the public to accept “the parable of a youngster whose embarrassment of earthy experiences hardened him at a tender age” (43). In that sense, El vampiro complements the genre initiated with the “partial” story of Lazaro de Tormes by exposing and making central the sexuality latent in the picaresque. The fact that sexuality—gay sexuality—is at the center of this novel written in the late 1970s reveals also that, as Angela Hauge argues of all picaresque novels, “the picaresque character is a reflection of a society undergoing profound social changes” (211). In this case, it reflects the changes of attitude toward homosexuality happening in Mexico at the time, the result of gay and lesbian activism and a profound discontent with economic challenges. The “excessive” amount of sex—particularly non-heterosexual sex—in the novel has caused, directly or indirectly, the calling into questioning the picaresque character of El vampiro. Timothy Compton, for example, argues that Adonis “does not belong among pícaros” (26), despite recognizing that the novel follows the autobiographical style and the episodic structure of the picaresque and that it centers on the adventures of a young man who is left without parents since childhood, suffers hunger, and has to survive by any means. The reason of his objection is that the “narrative lacked ironic and satiric tone” (26). It is interesting that this is the only aspect of the picaresque that according to Compton disqualifies the novel from being genuine picaresque, since it seems to fulfill all the other requirements at least as

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summarized by Garrido Ardilla: realism, fictitious autobiography, addressing a narratee, explaining of his situation by the protagonist, satirical tone that reveals political views, ironic discourse, and a pícaro as hero (14–15). This is surprising because the entire discourse of Adonis is full of irony and satire, not only in the way he talks about his sexual misadventures but also by the conscious use of clichés to describe his reality, demonstrating how in control of the narrative he is. Although critics do not say it, their objection seems to point to the precocious sexuality of Adonis as well as the unconventional nature of his sexual desire. Explicit magazines with naked women, for instance, would excite him as a child, but for a different reason: “So i’d look at the picture of the broad and i’d always imagine that some guy was fucking her y’understand? [. . .] and i thought more about him” (22). The suggestion that the enjoyment of sexuality could be related to childhood and that it could be queer, is for some, according to Joseph Tobin, problematic since “it is not just sexuality, but more generally pleasure that are under siege in early childhood education” (2). The picaresque is viewed traditionally as reinforcing dominant values, particularly heterosexuality, as Anne Cruz observes when notices that often in picaresque novels, men “are associated with women’s biological function in order to marginalize and humiliate them” (12). Portraying gay sexuality favorably, therefore, subverts that aspect of the traditional picaresque. We see in El vampiro the same subversive qualities Garrido Ardilla attributes to the genre: “The picaresque is hardly without a political message. It is a form of Bildungsroman that reflects on men’s place in society and how they come to understand and accept their status” (17). In this case, the multiplicity of sexual possibilities.

CONCLUSION As we saw in El vampiro de la colonia Roma and Las púberes canéforas, the courage of the authors, daring to write openly about sexual experiences considered marginalized, gave way to a formal audacity that sought the ideal structure to express the novelty of such experiences. Zapata found this structure in the picaresque and in a narrative that recreated the authenticity of a real conversation; Blanco did it by mixing genres and the use of metaliterature. In both cases, the structure offered the perfect vehicle to explore alternative sexualities as valid human experiences, as well as to underline the process of becoming in a hostile society. These novels center on the fluidity of sexual practices and identities, plus its social implications, and so they anticipate issues later articulated by queer theory. And although they focus on the process of becoming, rather than being, they negate the demand of

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coming-of-age—traditionally a mandate of heteronormativity. The idea of becoming rather than being is liberating, mostly for queer youth, because it frees individuals from the demand of being anything in particular. At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned that poverty could be seen as the lack not only of economic opportunities but also of political, social, or recreational prospects. Pleasure could be added to the list since talking about the denial of sexuality, particularly unorthodox sexualities, implies a denial of pleasure and fulfillment. Thus, the exploration of one’s sexuality is also the exploration of one’s place in society, and in that sense it is a political act. These novels, as Paul Vek Lewis has observed, show “the articulation of a subjugated knowledge” (la articulación de un conocimiento subyugado) (74), which is a form of resistance since it goes against mainstream society.

NOTE 1. All the quotes from the novel belong to the English translation by E. A. Lacey, unless otherwise indicated.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Towards a Historical Typology of the Novel).” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 10–59. Barnard, Ian. Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Radical Politics of Queer Theory. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Blanco, José Joaquín. Las púberes canéforas. Mexico D.F: Ediciones Océano, 1983. ———. “Ojos que da pánico soñar.” In Función de medianoche. Mexico D.F: Era, 1981, pp. 183–190. Compton, Timothy G. Mexican Picaresque Narratives: Periquillo and Kin. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Cote, James E., and Anton L. Allahar. Generation on Hold: Coming of Age in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Cruz, Anne J. “Figuring Gender in the Picaresque Novel: From Lazarillo to Zayas.” Romance Notes, vol. 50, no. 1, 2010, pp. 7–20. Garrido Ardilla, J. A. The Picaresque Novel in Western Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Hague, Angela. “Picaresque Structure and the Angry Young Novel.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 32, no. 2, 1986, pp. 209–220.

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Hames-García, Michael. “Queer Theory Revisited.” In Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 19–45. Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996. Kidd, Kenneth. “Queer Theory’s Child and Children’s Literature Studies.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 182–188. Kirsch, Max H. Queer Theory and Social Change. London: Routledge, 2000. Lee, Nick. Childhood and Society: Growing Up in an Age of Uncertainty. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001. Lewis, Paul Vek. “La noche delincuente: la representación del prostituto en El vampiro de la colonia Roma, Las púberes canéforas y La virgen de los sicarios.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2003, pp. 73–94. Millard, Kenneth. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Qvortrup, Jens. “Are Children Human Beings or Human Becoming? A Critical Assessment of Outcome Thinking.” Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali, vol. 117, no. 3/4, 2009, pp. 631–653. Schneider, Luis Mario. La novela mexicana entre el petróleo, la homosexualidad y la política. Mexico D.F: Editorial Patria, 1997. Shipley, George A. “‘Otras Cosillas que no Digo’: Lazarillo’s Dirty Sex.” In The Picaresque Tradition and Displacement, edited by Giancarlo Maiorino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 40–65. Tobin, Joseph, ed. Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Torres, Vicente Francisco. Esta narrativa mexicana. Ensayos y entrevistas. Mexico D.F: Leega Literaria/UAM, 1991. Turner, William B. A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Zapata, Luis. Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel, translated by E. A. Lacey. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1981. ———. Las aventuras, desventuras y sueños de Adonis García, el vampiro de la colonia Roma. Mexico D.F: Editorial Grijalbo, 1979.

Chapter 4

Between Places Physical and Mnemonic Spaces in the Paraguayan Film 108 Cuchillo de palo Rafaela Fiore Urízar

108 Cuchillo de palo (2010) was written and directed by a young Paraguayan filmmaker, Renate Costa (1981–2020). Through a series of interviews, childhood memories, and reflections on the country’s current social and political situation and its historical past, she exposes a hidden family history linked to violent acts performed under General Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship (1954–1989). The film slowly reveals the true identity of Rodolfo Costa as a man persecuted and silenced for his sexual identity. It also exposes the emotional journey Renate must undertake to heal old wounds and make personal amends. This study analyzes how past and present spaces/places are experienced and contested in 108 Cuchillo de palo becoming sources of empirical knowledge and perception subsumed in the political history of Paraguay. Place and space—as they are both related and conflated—shape our understanding of the present and play an important role on how we discursively recover and reconstruct growing-up experiences. Because of the film’s self-reflective and autobiographical perspectives, we look at childhood as a discursive re-construction with historical, social, and cultural interplays. The documentary begins with a personal investigation to find out more about the life and sudden death of the director’s uncle, Rodolfo Costa, which occurred in 1999. To uncover her uncle’s life, Renate, who was finishing her graduate studies in Spain in 2010, returns to her paternal home in Asunción, Paraguay. When Rodolfo passed away Renate’s family told her vague answers on why he died. Some believed “he died of sadness” (00:4:5800:05:04) but, in her father’s opinion, he “self-medicated a lot because he wanted to stay young [. . .] I think he took a lot of medication without a prescription and that ended up killing him” (00:05:00-00:05:22). Rodolfo’s 47

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death leads to many hypotheses, but no genuine interest by the family to uncover the truth. In an interview at the Berlinale Film Festival in 2010, Renate recalls that many relatives questioned her decision about producing the documentary, “‘are you sure you want to make a movie about Rodolfo? Wouldn’t it be better to take an actor and change his name so it won’t be Rodolfo?’ Anyway, they had qualms because, of course, I am exploring a family topic that affects not only me but all my relatives” (Bolivar Manaut).1

None of Renate’s relatives are seen in the documentary. Her mother, a dentist who left her husband when Renate was still a teenager, is shown at work for only a few seconds, and she is not interviewed. The only one who participated in it was her father, Pedro, who offers evasive answers to his daughter’s inquiries, reticent to dwell on his brother’s past. The documentary is not shy of tensions and fights between father and daughter, and the director constantly places Pedro in highly uncomfortable situations as it exposes his family secrets and personal ideology with naked intimacy. In the end, helping his daughter’s project was Pedro’s ultimate gesture of fatherly love. Renate Costa died of cancer in June 2020 at the age of thirty-nine. She was involved in other films like Cándido Lopez: los campos de batalla (2005) and the documentary short Resistente (2012) with the Finish director Salla Sorri, but none of them brought her the success of 108 Cuchillo de palo.2 Renate’s documentary shows how father and daughter’s ideas and behaviors are closely represented by the spaces they are in. Pedro is usually seen in enclosed and tight places, inside his house or at work. In the place he is in, Pedro’s stern gaze is outdated and unmovable. The father observes the world from an unwavering position, stuck in a space frozen in time. He still wears his wedding ring even though Renate’s mother left him for a dancer more than ten years ago. He constantly quotes the bible to condemn his brother’s sexuality and works in the inherited family’s blacksmith shop, an artisanal craft that just about disappeared in the modern world. He also doesn’t seem aware of Paraguay’s incipient social changes, like the LGBTQ marches occurring in downtown Asunción that show little, but essential, progress on gay rights activism in the country (00:26:28-00:26:37). On the other hand, Renate is constantly moving, meeting people, getting in and out of public and private spaces around the city and the world. She is young, her critical look is enriched by foreign experiences and her education abroad, and she didn’t live under the dictatorship as the older generation did.3 Also, her filmmaking career is profoundly interconnected with very liberal and diverse communities associated with the highly technological film industry. Though Pedro and Renate find common ground in their work, filmmaking and blacksmithing

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being two artistic expressions, father and daughter cannot have more distant experiences and perceptions of life. Renate’s first-person storytelling is the engine that moves the documentary. Its first scene opens at night on a vessel that slowly plows through the Paraguay River. The director’s voice-over is interwoven with the sound of the ship’s engine and in the background the lights of the country’s capital twinkle in the distance: Asunción, a city with its back to the river. I like looking at the city from here [. . .] It seems to be showing me how hard it is to look back. I come to the river often to turn my back on the city and look at what she doesn’t see. There is something there, between the light and the darkness. Something that I still haven’t manage to see.4 (00:00:32-00:01:32)

The director’s voice blends in with the landscape as space takes center stage in this intimate narrative of mnemonic rescue. The capital city of Asunción, with its streets and neighborhoods, provides the indispensable material medium for Renate’s mnemonic journey and personal search “for the sense of self, personal or collective, grows out of and reflects the places from which we come and where we have been” (Casey, Getting Back into Place 38). From the first scenes of the documentary, Renate lets the public know that her family secret expands to a national scale as the camera points to the capital’s skyline. Memories flow throughout the film like the waters of the river she is drifting in (Fig. 4.1). ​ Space/place appears as fundamental to our understanding of human identity. They expand beyond a mere notion of physical location, but as a complex and rich concept of interconnected spatiality, subjectivity, discourse, and cultural perception. In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard presents a topoanalysis of space and place and their influence on memories, feelings, and thoughts. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time offers a study of spatiality and place concerning human existence as creatures that engage with, in, and about the world. His dasein or existence translates from German as “therebeing” (Malpas 18). Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender studies the social nature of space and place in relation to gender and feminism. Edward S. Casey’s body of work explores place and body memory in Remembering: A Phenomenological Study; and how place relates to a better understanding of culture construction and identity building in Getting Back into Place: Towards a New Understanding of Place-World. Memory becomes a placeholder that provides us with perspective and awareness; it allows us to take into consideration the complexity of the situation in time and space, all reconstructed, and even molded, under a narrative discourse. Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is an excellent literary example of the close tie

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Figure 4.1  Renate Costa describes the city of Asunción from a boat in the Paraguay river. All images reprinted, by permission, from Marta Andreu-Estudi Playtime (Cuchillo de palo 00:00:52).

between place and memory as Marcel, the narrator, invokes several places from his past and, through them, recovers the people tied to those spaces. In her documentary, 108 Cuchillo de palo, Renate Costa recalls her childhood experiences into adulthood while searching for information on her uncle’s untimely passing. Her film provides a combination of biographical and autobiographical elements that places past and present, personal, and historical facts under the securing gaze of a camcorder. “I think I started to know my uncle the day he died. It was the only time I ever went to his house,” Renate reflects while climbing the stairs of “Trauma,” the nightclub Rodolfo used to attend and where a Miss Paraguay drag queen pageant was taking place (00:33:10-00:33:24). The club’s name reminds us of a community that continues to be socially disenfranchised, a moral wound for a profoundly conservative and religious country like Paraguay.5 Héctor Rodolfo Costa Torres was Rodolfo Costa during the day and for his family, and Héctor Torres for his closest friends and at night. He was a dancer and this was his artistic name. The day he died he was found naked on the living room floor of his house. Renate was ordered by her family to find a suit to cover his exposed anatomy; an attire aimed not only to conceal but to disguise his body with a socially appropriate garment. Speaking with Nancy, one of

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his old neighbors, the director learns that his corpse laid there for three days before it was found (00:10:15-00:10:17). In a way, Rodolfo died similarly to how he lived, his body the object of an eccentric curiosity by the snooping crowd, removed from family members. It is not clear if Rodolfo committed suicide, if it was an accident or if he was killed, but his death happened on a cold day, he was naked, and his wardrobe was empty. Trauma is also what the audience perceives in Renate’s recollection. Rodolfo was as much of a ghostly figure for her when he was alive as he was in death, and with his passing, the marginalized uncle became a haunting memory in the director’s past. When Renate recalls the day, her uncle’s lifeless body was found, a series of impressionistic short takes bring the audience to the family blacksmith shop (Fig. 4.2). We hear machinery working and the sparkles of cast metal being molded. The director’s voice-over remembers her role at the time and the chisel striking the hot metal highlights the visceral mark of that traumatic moment. The symbolic images are a confession of the painful truth she carries since that day: ​ It was winter. My dad told us to come quickly. A crowd had gathered at his corner. The police dispersed onlookers. My relatives were there. Somebody told me to go inside and choose the clothes he was to be buried. His body, lifeless,

Figure 4.2  The director recalls the day she found her uncle’s lifeless body on the floor. (Cuchillo de palo 00:02:25)

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was lying naked on the floor. I didn’t even look at it. I just walked up to his wardrobe, to his memories, but it was empty. (00:01:54-00:2:39)

Renate’s remorseful tone looks back at her past and blames herself for her coldhearted behavior. Her harsh words accuse her eighteen-year-old self for her indifference and unkindness toward her father’s brother. In Renate’s mind, she behaved like a child, scared and ashamed of Rodolfo’s suspiciously naked body. At the time of her uncle’s passing, Renate was at the intersection of childhood and adulthood. His death shattered these intersections as the young and naïve Renate was forced to put her emotions aside to perform a very practical, but at the same time symbolic task, to look for an outfit that fulfills all the necessary rules for a socially acceptable burial. In his book The Future of Childhood: Towards the Interdisciplinary Study of Children, Alan Prout suggests that “people and things that flow in and between the different settings all play a part in constructing what emerges as ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’” (82). Renate had to confront death in an unnatural way, with no time to mourn or process what was happening around her and no concrete explanations from her loved ones. Although it was her uncle’s house, she was in a space she had never been before, surrounded by police, onlookers, and nervous family members who are trying to shroud not only a body but a family secret. Since that day Renate started to look at what she was not able to see before. She went on to study Audiovisual Direction and Production at Paraguay’s Instituto Profesional de Artes y Ciencias de la Comunicación. After graduating, she received a scholarship to study film production in Cuba and traveled to Spain to start her graduate studies in documentary production at the Pompeu Fabra University. 108 Cuchillo de palo was Renate Costa’s final project for her master’s degree (Balutet 182). Her uncompromising gaze was now sharper than ever before. To find out more about her uncle during interviews, Renate uses an old photo of him dressed as a Latin dancer (Fig. 4.3). The black and white picture shows him with another male dancer on the opposite side. Both are wearing short bolero blouses tied in the front and shiny pants. Their knees are bent to the side and their arms are raised to the air. A feathered ballerina is standing on the knees of both men. She uses one of their hands for balance as she is on top of this human pyramid. In a momentary close-up of the picture, the audience can see Rodolfo’s wide smile. Although a glittering fantasy, his stage life is where he found happiness, where he felt proud and comfortable. His love for his profession surpasses time as it looks like he is looking at us, the audience, instead of at the camera that records his picture. ​ Rodolfo’s picture has no frame to secure and enhance its visual content, it is not exhibited next to another family member. His photograph

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Figure 4.3  Image of the director’s uncle as a dancer. (Cuchillo de palo 00:20:08)

was part of an intimate and secluded realm, hidden among other photographs whose relevancy didn’t deserve its place in a family album, or to be framed and displayed prominently in an essential location around the house. Placing pictures in their correct space relates to a sense of appropriateness of the particular photograph to specific sets of social expectations and personal desires within space and time (Edwards 226). The study of material culture has stressed the importance of the spatial dynamics of objects. Elizabeth Edwards sustains that “photographs cannot be understood through visual content alone but through an embodied engagement with an affective object world, which is both constitutive of and constitutive through social relations” (221). Renate repurposes Rodolfo’s photo from a private space to a public domain. It is true that Rodolfo’s photo becomes an erratic object being handled by many as a source for inquiry, exposed publicly as a reference source. Still, its underlying value is closely guarded in Renate’s hand and in her documentary where his picture is forever displayed, acquiring a relevant place within her masterpiece and in the minds of the audience. Also, this picture from Rodolfo Renate reframes the notion of an ID photo and its composition for one with a social role and an active biographical agenda of her uncle’s life. ID photographs are “instrumental visual forms associated with

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definition, registration, and control of the civil identity by the state,” they are usually neutral as they follow strict guidelines on form and composition. Also, they usually don’t connect you with your work or your identity and they are visually exposed globally as part of the social, economic, and commercial processes and networks through which images are obtained: passports, ID cards, mug shots, driver’s licenses, and so on.6 Contrary to photo ID’s, Rodolfo’s picture tells the story of his desires, his work, and his skills as a dancer. In her quest for information on her uncle, Renate finds a video recording of her grandmother’s eightieth birthday party. The whole Costa family was there, an orange happy birthday sign and multiple colorful balloons hung on the walls, and a giant cake was displayed on top of the main table. Adults and kids were all singing happy birthday to the family matriarch, positioned at the front center of the scene. Next to her was Pedro and most of the children, and Rodolfo was behind him. This structured fantasy of “family romance,” as described by Marianne Hirsh’s in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory where the family “becomes a locus for intersecting dreams of sexual fulfillment, prosperity and social status” (52). Hirsh explains how the image of a family in a photograph, or this case, a video, are fragments of stories and not stories themselves. They are inscribed in representational power systems that often reveal and uphold dominant social conventions where the individual subject is constructed “within a heterogeneous system of representation” (12). Often, family pictures, albums, and videos include images in which family members can agree about a shared story and the ones

Figure 4.4  Grandmother’s birthday party. (Cuchillo de palo 01:17:40)

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that diverge from that narrative are usually discarded as unrepresentative or undesirable. ​ In this case, while the video shows a significant and cheerful reunion celebrating the birthday of the family matriarch, a closer look unveils Rodolfo sliding away from the crowd toward the sidelines of the frame the moment the birthday song ends (Fig. 4.4). At that time, the camera was scripted to capture the family’s choreographed adhesion to traditional values such as their regard for the elders and the close family bond. Yet, Renate’s revisionist voice-over of the event, embedded with historical and personal knowledge of her uncle’s life and death, reveals a fractured group with conflicting ideological scripts: The dictatorship was over. It was grandma’s 80th birthday. Dad sang in the front row, and Rodolfo was behind him. He still had his mustache, but he seemed different. The list made him so visible that it had the opposite effect; it drove him to the shadows. He decided to hide what had happened to him, but what was the good of keeping quiet? (1:17:23-1:18:20)

As a filmmaker, Renate is both the creator and interpreter of her family representations. Her narrative gaze over old accounts offers a new reframing of family photographs, recordings, and historical events. Jo Spence and Patricia Holland suggested, in Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography, that visual family narratives are mediated representations of our past operating “at this junction between personal memory and social history, between public myth and personal unconscious” (Spence 13-14). What is more troublesome about this artificial system of representation in the photographs and videos Renate uncovers is that they are attached to her family’s conscious and unconscious involvement in a systematic construction of a counter-memory that promoted reframing, if not erasing, of one of their own. Renate’s voice-over intervention in this performative visual script illuminates the hegemonic artificial construction and the discontinuities in her family narrative. Also, it provides a revisionist approach to the director’s childhood by reclaiming the child’s repressed agency, at that time censored by relatives. By trying to uncover her uncle’s life, Renate is progressively more aware of the many collective discourses, contexts, and relationships that influenced and restrained her younger self. 108 Cuchillo de palo was filmed twenty-one years after the fall of Stroessner’s regime, and yet, many interviewees were afraid of the social and professional repercussions if they revealed their identities as attested by one of them who prefers to stay anonymous, his body hidden in the shadows, especially because of his work with young people:

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[Renate] Why you don’t want to show your face and tell your story? People brand you and my job is sensitive . . . I work with young people and . . . [Renate] Even now with the change? No! [. . .] people’s mentality doesn’t just change. (00:54:09-00:54:20)

At a later moment Renate remembers the overprotective family behavior each time they saw Rodolfo playing with them to what her father replies, “[t] hey were afraid of his tendency. . . . His homosexuality. They were scared of that” (00:41:02). In the minds of many Paraguayans, gay men were dangerous predators for the young generation. People’s confusion between homosexuality and pedophilia was not uncommon at that time of the dictatorship. General Alfredo Stroessner’s government suspended personal freedoms and people’s sexual liberties. They persecuted, punished, and tortured opponents and conducted a series of police and military raids against the LGBTQ community (Balutet 183). The regime created many lists containing the names of people they believed were conspiring against the stability of the government. These lists were publicly displayed in schools, universities, banks, and churches. The first of these lists contained 108 names and Rodolfo’s name was registered there as well as in the “Archives of Terror,” a title given to the seven hundred thousand documents discovered after the coup.7 These files contained a complete account of all the activities by the Paraguayan Secret Police during the three-and-a-half decades of Stroessner’s oppressive rule.8 Some of these documents revealed how the state firmly believed that any member of the LGBTQ community was a “potential danger for national security,” condemning them to three depraved categories: (1) Active Pedophile, (2)Passive Pedophile, and (3) Degenerate (Almada 129).9 By allowing these three alternatives alone, any person perceived or accused to be a member of this community was destined to be captured, humiliated, and tortured by the police.10 Even prominent newspapers, like El País, supplied more ammunition to the social stigma by publishing editorials such as this: Society, together with the press, must jointly face the problem with sufficient interest and strength to make the men of this lodge appear on the public scene so that the people can see the culprits. There must be a dose of moral force capable of overcoming the dangers of the moment in order to destroy and liquidate vicious circles like this one, whose members are criminals. (la sociedad junto con la prensa, deben afrontar conjuntamente el problema con suficiente interés y fuerza para hacer que los hombres de esta logia aparezcan en la escena pública, para que ese mismo pueblo conozca a los culpables. Tiene que haber una dosis de fuerza moral capaz de sobrellevar los peligros del momento

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para así destruir y liquidar a los círculos viciosos como éste, cuyos integrantes son delincuentes.)11 (Carbone 365)

Homophobia is still prevalent in many sectors of Paraguayan society and in most Latin American countries. In 2013, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey in Latin America based on more than 30,000 face-to-face interviews in 18 countries, including Puerto Rico. Most countries across the region said that homosexual behavior is morally wrong, with only 10 percent of Paraguay’s Catholics and 7 percent of Paraguayan Protestants believing that homosexuality is morally acceptable (Pew Research Center).12 In a heated discussion between Renate and her father about the lack of support Rodolfo received from his relatives, he retorts: “A homosexual is not a man. A homosexual is undefined! [. . .] [T]here is a mission in this life, he didn’t have any children, he didn’t get married” (00:42:27-00:41:35). Pedro firmly believed that Rodolfo could “turn the corner” of his life by adopting heterosexual behavioral norms. The more the director digs into her uncle’s life, the more unsettled she finds herself. Never a sense of the rocking boat floating aimlessly on a river— as seen at the beginning of the documentary—seemed more appropriate than at this time. Renate’s reflection on the homemade video happened after she interviewed Rodolfo’s old neighbor. Renate shows her a copy of a detainees’ dispatch, addressed to the Chief of Police, Francisco Brítez, with Rodolfo’s name in it. Rodolfo was thirty-two years old when he was detained and transferred from the Comisaría Tercera to the Tacumbú Penitentiary on April 5, 1982. This was one of many times he went to jail. The neighbor reported how he was tortured because of his sexual orientation: Sometimes it was one night, 24 hours, 48 hours, and then they let him go. [. . .] One of the last times they arrested him, I think it was in the ‘Third’ I think he was hailed at that time . . . they inserted a broken bottle into him. (01:14:03-01:16:38)13

Such overwhelming discovery deeply impacted the director who blames her family for their lack of empathy and support toward their own flesh and blood, “I think he should have left. He should have gone far away from [all of] you” (1:23:40-1:23:52). To stay in a place or to leave becomes an everpresent source of distress in the film as displacement “represents the loss of particular places in which their lives were formerly at home,” reflects Casey (Getting Back into Place 35). Even the allure of Renate’s homecoming to her childhood home and her country fades away as her discoveries affect a series of unique emotional alliances: with those who remain in the same place (Pedro, family); with those who were once there but are now dead or departed (Rodolfo); and with Renate’s memories of the homeplace she once left. The

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unintentional consequence of Renate’s film project is that, in the process of discovering her uncle’s life, she also finds herself recovering her own reality, and in this discovery, she is losing the nostalgic yearning one feels for a place or a time; what makes someone who lives away yearn to come back home.14 The documentary’s original title, 108 Cuchillo de palo, is a composition of a slur and a proverbial expression that refers to aspects deeply engraved in Paraguayan culture. Paraguayans used the number “108” until these days as a derogatory term toward gay men, an insult that has its roots in the first list of one hundred and eight gay men arrested by the dictatorship. “Cuchillo de palo” is a sarcastic reference to the proverbial expression “en casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo.”15 In Costa’s blacksmith shop, which has been the family business for generations, Rodolfo Costa was a “wooden knife,” a useless person. He refused to work in the family business because he wanted to be a dancer. Also, the double meaning of the wooden knife refers to the male sexual organ, a hint of how gay men become unsuccessful members of society due to the impossibility of reproduction. These aphorisms are available not only to name or characterize certain current social situations but as witty folk thoughts; they are devices of speech recognizable by an entire community carrying the force of appearing to embody social norms. Proverbial speeches provide testimony to the literal and symbolic values invested in the objects they refer to; they demonstrate cultural fixations on specific societal structures, merit, and worth particular to a community through time. They also encapsulate a perspective formulated by hate and prejudice that is repeated in everyday utterances. Costa’s decision to name her film with a combination of a slur and an aphorism provides a discursively constructed space of awareness and, above all, of normative defiance. 108 Cuchillo de palo is a narrative of place more than a narrative of events; instead of a sequenced account of Rodolfo’s life, the film offers scattered recollections of his time of earth always in relation to locality. The documentary starts in place; Renate is in a drifting boat gazing at the capital city’s skyline, and with a place, the discovery of Rodolfo’s body on the floor of his house. In the same way, Renate’s journey ends with a camera shot at what once was Rodolfo’s home. The wooden front doors are open, but there is still an enclosed iron fence restricting the entrance of what is now a laundry facility, an ironic twist on Rodolfo’s life (Fig. 4.5). ​ In colloquial terms, people will say “los trapos sucios se lavan en casa,” but Renate’s film does exactly the opposite. Renate “saca a ventilar los trapos sucios”—a literal translation to English would read “dirty rags are washed at home”—which in this case can poignantly be translated as she “took the skeletons out of the closet”; in this case, she took a closeted and diseased Rodolfo out of his closet. Secondly, Renate was never able to enter that house when her uncle was alive and now, his home reconfigured into a laundry facility

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Figure 4.5  Rodolfo Costa’s front door with the sign “Lavanderia” on the top. (Cuchillo de palo 01:27:34)

ponders to the fragility of memory-place appropriated by contemporary capitalism. Rodolfo’s once intimate, uniquely convoluted, and multifaceted corner has been transformed into a commercialized, public, transitional, and impersonal space. His house is now a commodity where people can drop off their clothes at any time and Rodolfo’s life and tragic death will slowly disappear from public memory, echoing another English expression “out of sight, out of mind.” “I bore with my uncle’s death for so long that I kept him alive. Now I leave him here, in his corner,” reflects Renate looking at his old house while she gets into her father’s truck on her way back to Barcelona (01:27:34-01:27: 36 my emphasis). We can see an inverted interplay between visual and thematic codes at the beginning and end of the film. On the one hand, while the documentary starts with a wide-angle shot of the capital city, Renate’s invocation of place shows how short-sided was her knowledge of the secret she tried to uncover which is equal to the film’s final scenes with a close shot of her uncle’s front door. Yet, the director leaves the country with a broader comprehension of her own past and Paraguay’s historical and social memory, an understanding that reaches universal resonances. Georges Gusdorf in his essay Conditions and Limits of Autobiography points out the biographer’s constant uncertainty about the hero’s intentions because the character they wrote about is far away or deceased, so every biographer “must be content to

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decipher signs, and his work is in certain ways always related to the detective story” (35). Renate never finds out if her uncle was murdered, if he decided to take his own life, or if his death was an overdose accident, but at the end of the documentary, that seems to be not as relevant anymore. The documentary publicly affirms through narrative, testimonial interviews, photographs, and archival documents that Rodolfo “has-been-there” removing doubts of the life he lived as a gay man and the multidimensional places he occupied. It recovers the lives of LGBTQ victims in Paraguay, expanding the social awareness of their continuous outcast status to current times.16 On the other hand, Renate’s journey provided her with the foundation she needed to move on, and the rocking boat experience is substituted now for a vehicle on solid ground. Renate’s use of the possessive adjective attached to locality, “I leave him here, in his corner,” is place-bound and place-reflective. It recognizes the loss of Rodolfo’s domestic space but, more importantly, offers her uncle a newfound place in her personal recollections and in the collective memory acquired through her documentary. “[N]o one can know better than I, what I have thought, what I have wished; I alone have the privilege of discovering myself from the other side of the mirror,” continues Gusdorf. This mirror goes back to the basis of the autobiographical genre as the encounter of men with its own image, “the physical and material appeal of the reflection in the mirror bolsters and strengthens the tradition of selfexamination” (33). In Renate’s case, actor and director in her documentary, she is in a dialogical space capable of editing her own reality and attaching it permanently to a mirror-like video camera, angled at the awakening of the depths of her own history. 108 cuchillo de palo is as much about Rodolfo as it is about the director’s need for closure, maybe even a personal apology for her old self. In order to move—from a once subordinate position (a remorseful child who didn’t want to offer even a final look at her uncle because of his naked body) to that of a self-determining subject who gained consciousness in analyzing and engaging the situations, she found herself in—Renate needed to reveal her silence and compliance, as a child, to family norms. Identifying her ever-present sense of shame from the vantage point of Renate’s adult present offered her agency and resistance. In her documentary, she creates, controls, develops, and arranges the content, pace, and editorial narrative. She exposes unconscious optics and reframes images to uncover historical and social fissures and absences. Moreover, Renate moves from behind the camera and becomes more than an active subject; she is one of the subject matters of her own quest. The camera gaze also takes advantage of the silences and fragmented realities, almost like the uncomfortable and hidden family picture or the homemade video, all of them unveiling concealed experiences of a highly contested past. The documentary, then, becomes a palimpsest to the family album the director found at her father’s home, one

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that publicly recognizes, reframes, and immortalizes the personal, historical, and social tensions and contradictions in Paraguay. Through its diverse perspectives, hidden and untold memories transcend personal boundaries to a national and transgenerational recognition of the suffering. NOTES 1. Interview with Renate Costa by Luna Bolívar Manaut in Berlinale 2010: “Y al principio me decían ‘pero, ¿estás segura de que querés hacer una película sobre Rodolfo? ¿No sería mejor coger a un actor y cambiarle el nombre, y que no sea totalmente Rodolfo?’. En fin, tenían un poco de reparo porque, claro, estoy tocando un tema familiar que no sólo me afecta a mí, sino a todos mis parientes” (In the original, my translation). 2. 108 Cuchillo de palo premiered in Paraguay on August 5, 2010. It was a national blockbuster. 3. By the time Renate finishes her master’s degree, Spain had already legalized gay unions since 2005. (Freedom to Marry) Also, born in 1981, she was eight years old when Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship ended on February 3, 1989. 4. All quotes from the film come from Costa Perdomo, 2010, and I am using the documentary’s subtitles in English. 5. Eighty-nine percent of Paraguayan population is Catholic. (Donoso, “5 facts for Pope Francis’ visit to South America”, Pew Research Center). 6. Photo ID’s composition include how to pose, what type of background, size of the picture, and content such as a close shot of the individual’s face and neck with minimal identifying traits. 7. The number “108” is a derogatory term used by Paraguayans towards gay men, an insult that has its roots in the first of several lists of imprisoned (and tortured) gay men created by Alfredo Stroessner’s government. Many of the victims lost their jobs and were stigmatized and rejected by friends and family. “Cuchillo de palo,” the second part of the title in Renate Costa’s documentary is a sarcastic reference to the saying “en casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo” (in the blacksmith’s house you can only find a wooden knife). The literal translation of the proverbial sentence will be “In the blacksmith house, a wooden knife” but a similar phrase in English would be “The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot.” 8. Three hundred thousand of these documents have been compiled and have free public access through George Washington University’s Archivo Nacional de Seguridad, a nonprofitt organization. 9. These documents were found on December 22, 1992 by lawyer and human rights activist Martín Almada and judge José Agustín Fernández in a police station in a suburb of the capital city. 10. In a medieval exhibition of authority, gay men were taken, their heads were shaved, and then paraded at the famously busy Palma Street in downtown Asunción. Their bodies were targets of penal repression in a spectacle for everyone to see and discourage such behavior.

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11. El País, September 22, 1959. My translation. 12. The survey was conducted between October 2013 and February 2014, in Spanish, Portuguese, and Guarani. 13. The “Third” refers to the Comisaría Tercera, one of the main torture centers in the capital city. 14. Nostalgia, algos means pain and nostos means return home. It is not accidental that “nostalgia” and “homesickness” are still regarded as synonymous in English dictionaries (Casey, Remembering 201). 15. See note 7. 16. Anabella Bustos’ intreview to Renate Costa in 2010: “Hay historias que no se cuentan, se olvidan en el tiempo. Con la represión durante la dictadura pasa eso y con el caso de las listas, con la gente que figuraba en las listas hubo además una fuerte censura social, la gente les daba la espalda, prefería no hablar de eso y en algunos casos no hablar con ellos, ni los abogados se animaron a apoyarles, por eso no podían denunciar lo que les pasaba. Por eso al filmar, incluso al hablar, uno les devuelve vida, dignidad, ayuda a que existan.” (There are stories that people don’t mention, so they are forgotten in time. It happens with the dictatorship and with the case of the lists. The ones who appeared on the lists suffered strong social censorship; people turned their backs on them, they preferred not to talk about it and, in some cases, not to talk to them. Even the lawyers didn’t dare to support them, so they could not report what was happening to them. This is why when filming, even when we can only hear them speak, we give them life again, dignity, now they exist) (Balutet 189, my translation).

WORKS CITED Abrahams, Roger D., and Barbara A. Babcock. “The Literary Use of Proverbs.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 90, no. 358, 1977, pp. 414–429. JSTOR. www​ .jstor​.org​/stable​/539608. Accessed February 25, 2021. Almada, Martín. Paraguay: la cárcel olvidada, el país exiliado, 8th ed. Asunción: Editora Intercontinental, 1993. Archivo Nacional de Seguridad. nsarchive​.gwu​.edu​/virtual​-reading​​-room. Accessed February 20, 2021. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. London: Orion Press, 1964. Balutet, Nicolas. “Cuestiones de género en dos films hispanoamericanos recientes.” 108 Cuchillo de palo de Renate Costa y Pelo malo de Mariana Rondón.” BEOIBERÍSTICA – Revista de Estudios Ibéricos, Latinoamericanos y Comparativos, no. 1, 2017, pp. 181–191. Bolívar Manaut, Luna. “Cuchillo de palo: “todos los hermanos eran herreros, pero Rodolfo quiso ser bailarín.” www​.dw​.com​/es​/cuchillo​-de​-palo​-todos​-los​-hermanos​ -eran​-herreros​-pero​-rodolfo​-quiso​-ser​-bailar​%C3​%ADn​/a​-5266490​-0. Accessed February 20, 2021. Carbone Rocco. “Ley genérica entre mujeres y putos: democracia, Stronato y Guerra Guasu.” Revista Digital de Cinema Documentario, no. 18, 2015, pp. 359–376.

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Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009. Casey, Edward S. “Keeping the Past in Mind.” The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 37, no. 1, 1983, pp. 77–95. Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009. Cinema Tropical. “Paraguayan Director Dies at 39.” www​.cinematropical​.com​/cinema​-tropical​/paraguayan​-director​-renate​-costa​-dies​-at​-39. Accessed February 20, 2021. Costa Perdomo, Renate. 108 Cuchillo de palo. Icarus Films, 2010. Donoso, Juan Carlos. “5 Facts for Pope Francis’ Visit to South America.” Pew Research Center. www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-tank​/2015​/07​/02​/5​-facts​-about​-pope​ -francis​-upcoming​-visit​-to​-south​-america/. Accessed June 18, 2021. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 41, 2012, pp. 221–234. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /23270708. Accessed June 18, 2021. Fiore Urízar, Rafaela, and Chloe Holt. “Salidas del armario: políticas de miedo y violencia estatal contra la comunidad gay en el documental paraguayo 108 Cuchillo de palo.” In Poner el cuerpo: Rescatar y visibilizar las marcas sexuales y de género de los archivos dictatoriales del Cono Sur, edited by Ksenija Bilbija, Ana Forcinito, and Bernardita Llanos. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2017, pp. 241–259. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Freedom to Marry. “Why It Matters.” February 2016. http://freedomtomarry​.org​/ pages​/why​-it​-matters. Accessed February 20, 2021. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 28–48. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997. Lakoff, Robin. “Language and Woman’s Place.” Language in Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 1973, pp. 45–80. Malpas, Jeff. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. New York: Routledge, 2018. Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Mieder, Wolfgang. “‘The Only Good Indian Is a Dead Indian’: History and Meaning of a Proverbial Stereotype.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 106, no. 419, 1993, pp. 38–60. JSTOR. www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/541345. Accessed February 25, 2021. Pew Research Center. “Religion and Morality in Latin America.” November 13, 2014. www​.pewforum​.org​/interactives​/latin​-america​-morality​-by​-religion. Accessed February 20, 2021. Polt, Richard F. H. Heidegger’s Being and Time: Critical Essays. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

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Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. Prout, Alan. The Future of Childhood: Towards the Interdisciplinary Study of Children. New York: Routledge, 2005. Spence, Jo, and Patricia Holland, eds. Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography. London: Virago, 1991. Stainton Rogers, Rex, and Wendy Stainton Rogers. Stories of Childhood: Shifting Agendas of Child Concern. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

Part II

COMING-OF-AGE IN BETWEEN PLACES NARRATIVES OF MIGRATION

Chapter 5

The Child That Looks Childhood, Migration, and Ecology in El camino Alicia V. Nuñez

The ongoing humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexican border has increased the Central American region’s visibility as well as that of its child migrants. It has also sparked recent debates about migration as an adult experience and who should migrate. While these reports exposed a general anxiety and disbelief that it was children risking their lives to migrate—not adults but children—Central American artists have long recognized increased patterns of childhood migration and continue to urge scholars to consider other migrant subjectivities beyond that of the adult male. In this chapter, I focus on Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez’s film El camino (2008), a cinematographic portrayal that follows a twelve-year-old Saslaya and her younger brother’s migration from Nicaragua to Costa Rica in efforts to find their mother. While El camino has been typically analyzed as an “historia de viaje” with ties to the road novel genre, I focus on the intersections between childhood, migration, and ecocriticism. I also pay attention to the child’s gaze, Saslaya’s act of looking, and use it to understand her spatial, social, and gendered displacements. Analyzing contemporary Central American films can thus be a promising means to theorize how childhood in the region is marked by a transfronterizo and ecological experience. These cinematic portrayals can also help question what the ethical considerations should be in representations of the Central American child migrant experience and what our roles as viewers are. The floor is on fire, a dense smoke covers the scene. Hills and mounds of discarded waste make up the horizon, shaped and reshaped by desert-like winds. A few animals wander, ignoring the grim-faced humans that seem to only be able to look down at the trash, yet never up to the sky. This is not a Sci-Fi movie clip depicting the near future. It is the very real conditions of 67

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La Chureca, what used to be Central America’s largest waste-disposal site located on the outskirts of Managua, Nicaragua. Since 1971, 90 percent of the city’s non-sewage waste became discarded here without any regulation, leading to the accumulation of around four million square meters of garbage and severe environmental contamination. La Chureca is where we meet Saslaya, the twelve-year-old protagonist of Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez’s movie, El camino (2008). El camino follows Saslaya and her younger brother Darío’s migration from Nicaragua to Costa Rica in efforts to find their mother. The movie has been analyzed as an “historia de viaje,” a road film with ties to the literary Bildungsroman genre that typically focuses on the main character(s) growth into adulthood. Over a decade after its release, El camino is still considered one of Central America’s most important films for its portrayal of the various intersecting elements that forced young Saslaya to migrate.1 As a US Central Americanist, I was drawn to El camino because of its depictions of migrants going South and not North. Particularly because representations of Central American migration are still very much tied to portrayals of the US-Mexican borderlands.2 As a childhood studies scholar deeply embedded in discussions surrounding “growing up,” I saw in El camino an implicit resistance to the more linear trajectories of growth and development expected in Western childhoods. Current notions of “growing up” continue to emphasize a type of vertical movement,3 where childhood should be left behind in pursuit of adult gains (agency and independence). As I urge us to consider throughout this chapter, just as Yasin Gutiérrez helps displace Central American South to North migratory movement (again, it is North to South in the movie), Saslaya defies clear categorizations of being a child or adult. It is not Saslaya’s “growing up” into adulthood that motivates her migration nor grants her access to agency. It is her own capabilities and knowledge as a child that I center in this work. In the end, I was also immensely moved by the expansive landscape shots that showed Saslaya traveling across desolate areas, murky rivers, and the dangerous jungle-like lushness in Costa Rica. Longan Phillips and Arguedas also comment on the film’s use of landscape: “The use of natural settings, on the one hand, the passage through the mountains or the desert on the other hand, become a backdrop: a romantic image, because nature has no borders” (el uso de escenarios naturales, por un lado, el paso por la montaña o el desierto se convierten en telón de fondo: una imagen romántica, pues la naturaleza no tiene fronteras; 7). In this chapter, I too place special attention to the terrain difference portrayed in El camino. I bring forth discussions about the intersections of childhood, cinema, and the meteorological impact of climate change, which has become one of the largest push factors in Central American migration. Piguet, Pécoud, and de Guchteneire explain that

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understanding the role of the environment in migration dynamics implies analysing how and why people are vulnerable to climate change, as well as an examination of the different strategies they develop to cope with (or adapt to) environmental stress—migration being one among other such strategies. (2)

More scholars are examining the junctions between childhood and migration, especially since the number of unaccompanied Central American children at the US-Mexican borderland has steadily increased since 2014. But as climate change continues to scatter and disperse Central Americans out of the region, what can the child’s gaze in films such as El camino tell us about displacement? The Child That Looks Cinema’s obsession with the child’s gaze has been part of the medium since its inception.4 The opening to Vicky Lebeau’s book Childhood and Cinema (2008) comments on how the desire to watch, see, and want the child was a “Victorian compulsion to represent the child” that was then translated over to film5 (8). Deborah Martin explains how for both Béla Balázs and André Bazin, this watching of the child was a “means of recapturing something: ‘paradise lost’ (Balázs) or ‘the innocence, awkwardness and naiveté we lost’ (Bazin)” (5). Balázs and Bazin’s suppositions demarcate a clear binary between the child and the adult, where innocence is indicative of childhood while the adult “looks” for the paradisaic past they no longer live in. But what about the child that experiences so much hardship every day? What does their look signify? We meet Saslaya as she walks unfazed around what viewers assume to be La Chureca, what used to be one of Central America’s largest dumpsites6 and where approximately 1,000 to 2,000 people lived. At the time of the film’s production in Managua, 50 percent of those living and working in La Chureca were children under the age of eighteen. This figure is important to forefront Central America’s relationship to labor and childhood. According to Marianela Corriols and Aurora Aragón (2010), Since 1995, Nicaragua has adopted several legal instruments to comply with children’s rights, including international conventions and a minimum working age of 14 years. However, records from the Ministry of Health’s Pesticide Program show continuing occupational acute pesticide poisonings (APPs) among children 5–14 years old from 1995 to 2006. (209)

The more recent findings of the 2019 Child Labor and Forced Labor Reports show that 47.7 percent of children, ages ten to fourteen, continue to work in Nicaragua (U.S. Department of Labor).

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Like La Chureca’s residents, Saslaya spends most of the day scavenging for scraps of plastic, cans, and glass to sell for recycling. Saslaya is the main breadwinner of her family, placing her role outside of more conventional notions of the Western childhood. Childhood studies scholar Kathryn Stockton would call Saslaya an “experienced child.” The “experienced child,” which I purposefully tie to the racialized child, is a childhood conceptualized without innocence because they have acquired knowledge (through various social, physical, emotional, and economic difficulties) that only an adult can supposedly understand and overcome. Stockton explains that experience is still hard to square with innocence, depictions of streetwise children, who are often neither white nor middle-class, hard to square with ‘children’. . . One solution to this problem, of children lacking the privilege of both weakness and innocence, is to endow these children with abuse. (32–33)

Thinking about Saslaya as an experienced child chips away at Balázs and Bazin’s contemplations about what the innocent child in film can provide adult viewers. There is no paradise to recuperate. This near-apocalyptic introduction to Saslaya’s life mixes what is more commonly portrayed in dystopian films (i.e., the drifting and scavenging child in hazardous conditions) with the more realist and neorealist traditions in cinema that emerged after World War I and II. This follows suit with what Mauricio Espinoza-Quesada describes as Yasin Gutiérrez’s documentary style of filming fictional stories. Espinoza-Quesada goes on to explain that the director follows the Latin American political documentary style of the 1960s, the often-referenced Latin American social cinema, and more broadly the New Latin American Cinema. Filmmakers of this New Latin American Cinema7 produced political and militant movies inspired by the widespread social and economic conditions of impoverishment suffered in Latin America (Martin).8 In El camino, the film’s portrayal of childhood constantly blurs the distinction between the child and the adult. This is made more prevalent by the constant shadow of the absentee parent and which follows what recent migration films like Voces Inocentes (2004) and La Jaula de Oro (2013) also depict: “The use of orphaned child and adolescent protagonists works to elicit the audience’s sympathy while criticizing the society or nation, more specifically the sociopolitical institutions that have abandoned and exposed the most vulnerable members of the population” (Senio Blair, 121). The figure of the child in Latin American migration films illustrates a more general abandonment of the child often portrayed in states of crisis produced by “broader system[s] of global capitalism” (Rodríguez Navas, 82). Back in La Chureca, we follow Saslaya closely as she pulls her makeshift cart, trekking through

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contaminated heaps, mask-less. The crisis presented here is social, economic, political, and ecological. ​ Through the Looking Glass Among the trash of La Chureca, Saslaya notices and picks up a glimmering shard. She places the broken glass close to her face and looks through it (Fig 5.1). I read this moment as more than a poignant break from her day’s labor. This moment is what I consider a childlike action, in that children use their creativity to reconfigure the use and meaning of everyday objects. In doing so, my expectation as a viewer prompted me to think that the looking glass would present an opportunity for us, the spectators, to enter Saslaya’s new and imagined reality. I also see an allusion to Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass, where a young Alice wonders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror’s reflection. Alice proceeds to climb up to the mantel to touch the mirror behind the fireplace. As she pokes and probes the mirror, she discovers that she can go into an alternate world. Nothing like that happens for Saslaya, there is no escape from her reality nor entrance to a fantastical wonderland. ​​ Saslaya’s moment with her looking glass is not the first time I recognize a literary parallel between Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez’s cinematic trajectory and Lewis Carrol’s young Alice (Fig. 5.2). One of Yasin Gutiérrez’s earlier short films, Florencia de los ríos hondos y los tiburones grandes (1999), follows the dreamlike escape of a young girl after witnessing her father throw a glass bottle at her mother. As the mother (played by Yasin Gutiterrez9) begins to pick up the shards from the floor—notice the director’s repeated use of broken glass in both films—she sits down with her daughter on the couch and begins

Figure 5.1  What does Saslaya see through the looking glass? She places the broken glass close to her face and looks through it. (El camino 00:05:08).”

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Figure 5.2  Entrance to the Imagined Castle (Florencia de los ríos hondos y los tiburones grandes 00:01:58)

Figure 5.3  Saslaya, Mid-Journey. (El camino 00:42:17)

to tell her a fairytale. The viewer is transported outside the girl’s imagined yet run-down castle. This younger girl, like Saslaya, also wears a pink dress and holds a white rabbit (Fig.5.3). The white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland is usually linked to the curiosity that ultimately drives Alice to begin her adventure. There is no white rabbit in El camino, but instead, it is Saslaya that sparks our curiosity and entices us with what we believe might be her wonderland. ​

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Figure 5.4  Only Trash Is Discernable. (El camino 00:03:07).

Instead, the scene presented through Saslaya’s looking glass in El camino is tinted a dusty pink which intensifies and further saturates the desert-like conditions of La Chureca, making her view, and thus ours as viewers, even more apocalyptic (Fig. 5.4). This metaphorical inaccessibility to the wonders of an alternate world separates, and thus, displaces Saslaya from a more idealized and privileged childhood like that of Alice’s. The viewer is grounded in Saslaya’s material reality, foreshadowing what will ultimately not be a magical journey to a more comfortable promised land, but instead another displacement. The cinematic instrumentalization of the looking glass used to access the child’s world illustrates the multiple displacements Saslaya, as a child migrant, embodies and experiences throughout the film. These scenes of ecological disaster get an added shock value when paired with the close-up shots of Saslaya alongside the more open and expansive shots of La Chureca. First, there is no sense of security for the child anchored in a private space10 (like the house or the school). Saslaya is exposed to an overwhelming and dangerous environment. Second, these juxtaposing shots further displace Saslaya’s childhood, again, away from Global North’s notions of an “appropriate” childhood, where children need to be protected and safe in sanitized spaces. The growing concern about early life exposure to air pollutants and its effects on children,11 alongside specialized products marketed at parents like “toxic-free” baby bottles, all indicate a growing concern middle- to upper-class parents in more industrialized countries have about health, safety, and contaminated public spaces (those outside the home). While the threats of climate change still feel as if they belong to a more distant future, El camino shakes this belief by, again, portraying and centering children that are already living this present.

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Why would this portrayal be so jarring? In these moments in La Chureca, I note that Saslaya as a child can also be read as landscape that represents a pending yet forced disappearance. Saslaya’s very name indicates a more implicit connection to land, the environment, and Nicaragua’s natural resources. The Saslaya National Park, a protected area within the world’s third-largest reserve in the world, the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve, is a powerful ecological center of convergence of fauna from North and South America and which has led to it being called Heart of the Mesoamerican Biocorridor. Unfortunately, according to LAC (Latin America & Caribbean Geographic), “Between 2006 and 2015, the rate of forest loss was between 6 and 11 percent across different areas of the Bosawas, with the highest rates within the buffer zone of Saslaya National Park” (LAC 2019). The very exploitation of Saslaya the girl, where her childhood innocence is at odds with her experiences—her sexual abuse and her migration—converges powerfully when considering the other Saslaya, the national park that is also being ravaged by urban to rural migration, deforestation, and poaching. Further, these scenes in La Chureca are impactful because children have been and continue being symbols of hope: not hope in the present but hope in the future. Nick Lee explains that “children are often understood to be special kinds of humans – ‘human futures’– at once bridging the gap between the present and the future and being the material from which the future will be made” (1). Lee goes on to explain that this adult-centered hope and consolation we feel in association with children are called “survival fantasies” (5) and raises additional questions about what to do ethically with children during impending climate disaster. If we consider Lee’s quote about children as prima materia of the future, what does the film’s intentional placing of Saslaya in a city of trash mean for our futures? Saslaya, as girl-woman-landscape, raises the often-discussed associations and metaphors of “la paisajización de la mujer” in Latin American and Latinx Studies. On one end, women have been conceived as spaces to be conquered in order to harness their “natural” unruliness, while on the other end, women were also seen as pure harbingers of life that need to be protected. Vanessa Fonseca González further describes these Romanticist ideals of the woman: “The woman, as path, is also present in the 19th century symbolism in search of universal truth. In that eagerness one tries to find in the senses, in the sensorial, the way to that interior spiritual revelation” (La mujer como camino se presenta también en el simbolismo del siglo XIX en busca de la verdad universal. En ese afán se intenta encontrar en los sentidos, en lo sensorial, el camino a esa revelación espiritual interior) (emphasis mine, 5). In Fonseca González’s quote, I first not only emphasize the more obvious connection to Yasin Gutiérrez’s film with the use of the word camino but also want to illustrate that children, like women, have too been associated as paths, roads toward inner discovery (for the adult).12

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Similarly to this “paisajización de la mujer,” I return to Balázs via Deborah Martin to ponder a bit further about the child as landscape. Deborah Martin writes that according to Balázs, the possibilities for close-ups that the medium [film] affords, which are so effective at allowing the sense of ‘eavesdropping on nature’ as close-up shots ‘bring their [children] facial expressions and gestures so close to us that we can delight in them as a natural phenomenon. (62)

In Balázs’s fragment, the connection between nature and child, like with Fonseca González’s quote mentioned earlier, returns us to Romanticist conceptions of childhood that also saw children in two opposing ways. On the one hand, children were imbued with purity and innocence. John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau have been credited for stipulating that children’s minds are “blank slates” and are morally unburdened by “perversity.” On the other hand, figurations of the “chaotic child” that is uncivilized, barbaric, and dangerous (Jenks 15) gained traction. I briefly note both iterations of childhood to problematize the greater theoretical distance both concepts delineate between the adult and the child. Yet, both sides of the innocent versus chaotic child figurations use the prevalent colonial practice of equating “lesser” beings to nature. I question the utilization of such phrases as “blank slates” and “uncivilized” because these early childhood theories are deeply foundational in the attempts to regulate, exploit, and conquer Black and Indigenous people’s bodies, land, and natural resources. Consequently, this paradoxical understanding of the figure of the child continues to be translated in contemporary political issues of the “state” and “nation.” Stanbridge argues that “children serve as symbols of the nation in particular because they are ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’, their state of development rather than finishedness embodying the developing nation (2012, 47).” Now, it is their state of development, of becoming, that feeds on this futurity and potentiality of change (Claudia Castañeda). In the following section, I continue to read Saslaya as landscape as she migrates through different terrains and environments. I look at her brother’s voicelessness as symbolic of the failed nation.​​ The Golden Road For a few seconds, we are suspended in time. Our attention moves with the powerful gushes of wind that rustle through a patch of dried and gilded stalks. Our perspective changes, we are now exposed to a wide shot depicting a golden dusted road (Fig. 5.5). The few trees that linger stand mostly barren, no humans, vegetation nor livestock in sight, except for the one bird that only makes its presence known sonically with a high-pitched whistle.

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Figure 5.5  The Golden Road. (El camino 00:11:12)

Figure 5.6  And so, Begins the Journey. (El camino 00:12:36)

The melancholic sounds of the marimbas sweep through the scene with the soft yet rolling tremolos, dissonant and sinister sounding. The marimba is the national instrument in both countries discussed in the movie: Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Marimba music is heard throughout Mesoamerica, particularly in the colorful and kitsch “tropical” sounds in more tourist locations.

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The marimbas in El camino are tinged with sorrow, serving not to portray the picturesque lushness often attributed to the Central American region for tourists, but to remind us that, even when Saslaya is not shown on the screen, her journey will always carry an air of the ominous. The same marimba-led melody is repeated throughout the film adding to the uncanny feeling that this migratory route will be traveled again and again, always under extreme conditions by children like Saslaya. As the marimbas announce Saslaya’s reemergence on screen, we first see her pink dress and then her brother Darío in the distance. They are two moving specks in the upper left corner of the frame, completely consumed by the openness of the landscape (Fig. 5.6). Saslaya runs forward ahead of Darío, as the camera switches to a medium close-up shot where we see Darío having difficulty keeping up with his sister. Saslaya calls for him to catch up, eventually taking his hand as they run down the dusty road, giving the appearance they are coming closer to us, the spectator. I linger on this commencing section of their journey because in a span of two minutes I see the same dynamic between Saslaya and her brother emerge cyclically throughout their migration. First, it is always Saslaya keeping Darío on track, on their path toward Costa Rica. Other scholars like Espinoza-Quesada have written that throughout the film, Darío frequently moves to the edge of the frame, always on the verge of disappearing and being out of Saslaya’s, and thus our sight. Espinoza-Quesada explains that “Darío (named after the Nicaraguan national poet Rubén Darío) is mute, in other words, has no voice;13 he also has very little agency as he’s dragged along by his sister, who easily convinces him to leave the grandfather” (101). In the movie, young Darío represents a different child-as-landscape than Saslaya. Rubén Darío is one of the most, if not the most famous Nicaraguan poet, known for his modernist and cosmopolitan gaze toward his native country: transnational even in his privileged status, yet always reminiscing from afar. The famous “Sonatina” from Poesías profanas (1896) rings in my ear throughout the film: “La princesa está triste . . . ¿qué tendrá la princesa? / Está presa en sus oros, está presa en sus tules/ en la jaula de mármol del palacio real . . .” (The princess is sad. What brings tears to her eyes? / In her gems she’s a captive, in her gowns of bright hue;/ A prison for her is the palace renowned; 354). Yasin Guttierez purposefully mutes Young Darío, and thus the voices of the male national heroes, like Rubén Darío, are often heard more loudly. Saslaya’s brother becomes a symbol of this lost nationalist and masculine voice. Now it is our princesa, the abused and impoverished Saslaya dressed in pink,14 that becomes the impetus for change and migration. We eventually follow the siblings from La Chureca through Lake Managua to the San Juan River, over to the militarized jungle terrain of the Caño Negro in Costa Rica. Seeing the children go from the intentionally spoiled

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drylands of La Chureca over to the vibrant and lush Caño Negro appears to indicate that Saslaya and Darío—as well as the other migrants they encounter on their journey—have succeeded in leaving what appears to be the lifeless by arriving at a promised land that will offer them resources, livelihood. Unfortunately, it is in this Costa Rican lushness that Saslaya loses Darío. The camera moves frantically as Saslaya panics and calls out Darío’s name. Although she never finds his body, it is presumed Darío’s death occurs offscreen. And so, her last tie to her motherland, Nicaragua, disappears with her brother. Saslaya is now alone. ​ And the Girl Looks . . . An unknown number of days pass after Darío’s disappearance. We reconnect with Saslaya in a neighboring plaza in Costa Rica that is bustling with people. It is in that town’s main square that Saslaya recognizes a woman named Luz, who she encountered on her journey back to Nicaragua. Saslaya’s new reality as an unaccompanied and undocumented minor follows the harsh actualities other child migrants encounter globally. Saslaya’s need for connection, for any inkling of protection, further draws her toward Luz and makes her a target. Saslaya follows Luz to her home, thinking she will provide her shelter too. We quickly find out that Saslaya will only be further abused in this new home and that Luz shares the space with other sexually exploited girls and women. In a tense yet tender scene, we see Luz, as a surrogate mother-like figure, bathing Saslaya and helping her out of her tattered and dirty pink dress into a more form-fitting red dress. After Saslaya is taken to the “man

Figure 5.7  Saslaya Looks. (El camino 01:24:09).”

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with the cane,” a French foreigner that runs the sex trafficking ring, Saslaya realizes her current situation. As Saslaya lays in bed with her red dress, the camera closes in on her stare. She looks directly at us, the witnesses to her abuse, maybe even seeing us as her abuser’s accomplices. The child’s stare is deflected back at us (Fig. 5.7). Are we forced to consider our own interiority? Or have we become Saslaya’s new looking glass, her attempt to escape through us? El camino does not provide a happy ending for our princesa. Ana Rodríguez Navas is cognizant of this pattern of open-ended conclusions in migration films in her article, “Global Markets, Hyperlocal Aesthetics: Framing Childhood Poverty in Contemporary Latin American Cinema” : It bears recalling that the protagonists’ new status as refugees and immigrants is no guarantee of a better life; it merely implies geographical displacement, into a space of undefined contours and realities of which the viewer is denied even the barest glimpse. (92)

While a fairytale ending is not depicted, this is not to say that Saslaya’s future is resolute and determined. In one of the final scenes of the movie, we return to one of the film’s lasting thematic anchors, landscape. Garðarsdóttir further describes the way Saslaya—from the inside of her new prison-like home—looks out one of the few accessible windows: Despite experiencing multiple forms of victimization, she is shown looking out of the window contemplating her options. The interior is gloomy while the filmic frame enhances lush, inviting tropical vegetation and sunlit rolling hills outside, hinting at a brighter future somewhere out there. (109–110)

The contrast Garðarsdóttir identifies between the house’s interior and the blossoming, almost gleaming outside, serves to resist Rodríguez Navas’s final remarks in her same article cited earlier: “In an era of global capitalism, these films suggest, vast sectors of the population remain impoverished, trapped in a childhood of sorts, without much hope of improving their situation, or any realistic possibility of escape” (93). While it is impossible to know what will ultimately happen to Saslaya, since the movie does not render us an explicit escape, I take us back to her looking as a child. Children are not passive watchers of their realities, even if the circumstances narrow their opportunity at agency and change. Saslaya’s gaze presents us with her landscapes of displacement: she is stateless, brotherless, not fully a girl nor woman. This haunting still frame of Saslaya looking resonates beyond the limits of the film and affirms her power as a displaced child migrant to keep looking. As adult spectators, we are urged to keep present, to continue watching, to look as children.

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NOTES 1. For example, in separate articles, Hólmfríður Garðarsdóttir and Mauricio Espinoza-Quesada discuss Saslaya’s gendered subjectivity, her sexual abuse in both Nicaragua and Costa Rica and her place within the nation as a woman. 2. Liz Harvey draws some further similarities between El camino and Central American migration to the U.S.: “Yasin’s film calls into question the intolerance many Costa Ricans harbour towards Nicaraguans, and the xenophobia levelled against them. While paralleling many stories of Central American immigrants who suffer terrible conditions in order to enter the U.S.” (336). 3. Here I am specifically referencing Kathryn B. Stockton (2009) and her questioning of the verticalness of “growing up.” Stockton explains that thinking about childhood as “sideways movement” can help oppose the vertical notion of “growing up.” Growing sideways represents a childhood that continues impacting the present and future yet also breaks with linear temporalities by indulging in delay. 4. Scholars such as Vicky Lebeau and Karen Lury have provided exceptional examinations of Western childhoods and their portrayal on the screen. 5. Lebeau orients readers to the fin-de-siècle in Europe with the rise of new markets in printed material for children, one of them being children’s books. One of the first attempts to adapt these new printed texts to the screen happens to be Cecil Hepsworth and Percy Stow’s Alice in Wonderland (1903). 6. In 2012, the Villa de Guadelupe horizontal urbanization project added a recycling plant and a total of 258 homes were built as low-cost housing in La Chureca. The project has also received harsh critiques from some Chureca community members stating they have lost access to their main income source. To read more about project: havan​​atime​​s​.org​​/feat​​ures/​​nicar​​agua-​​life-​​after​​-the-​​la​-ch​​ureca​​-​garb​​age​-d​​ump/ 7. Some well-known directors often referenced as part of the New Latin American Cinema include Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Fernando Birri. 8. Yasin Gutiérrez’s use of non-professional actors in El camino and other films connects her to the political commitment and aesthetic of the New Latin American Cinema (Espinoza-Quesada). 9. In an interview with Diane Pernet of ASVOF, Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez explains her strong connection to the dreamlike: “As a child I experienced my parents’ divorce, and at night, alone, I dreamed and created another reality. That dream world helped me breathe. Imagination saved me. To express what is inside and cannot be seen” (2020). To read the rest of the interview: ashad​​edvie​​wonfa​​shion​​.com/​​2020/​​07​ /05​​/a​-ch​​at​-wi​​th​-th​​e​-fil​​m​-dir​​ect​or​​-isht​​ar​-ya​​sin/. 10. Saslaya is rarely depicted indoors. The first time we see Saslaya in her grandfather’s home he sexually abuses her. By the end of the film, Saslaya has been lured into a sex trafficking ring in Costa Rica where she is held in a home with other exploited girls and women. For Saslaya, the space of the home and the protection and care that happen indoors does not exist. 11. This study found that exposure to total oxidants at birth increased the risk of developing asthma by 17% and eczema by 7%. Adverse impacts of exposure to air

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pollutants, particularly ozone and nitrogen dioxide, may have their origins in early life” (To et al.). To read more: erj​.ersjournals​.com​/content​/55​/2​/​1900913. 12. In La Pantalla Rota: Cien Años de Cine En Centroamerica (2005), María Lourdes Cortés signals the emergence of female directors in Central America in the following two quotes: “Sus trabajos se consideran ‘escritura femenina’, ya que privilegian en su puesta en pantalla lo inconsciente, lo impulsivo, lo reprimido, lo trasverbal y lo atemporal, elementos que, según la psicoanalista y semióloga Julia Kristeva, rompen con la lógica del orden patriarcal” (Their work is considered ‘feminine writing’, since it is the unconscious, the impulsive, the repressed, the transverbal, the atemporal that are privileged, elements that, according to Julia Kristeva, break with the logic of the patriarchal order”; 474–475). A la vez, tratan temáticas profundamente arraigadas en las necesidades y temores de lo femenino y, por lo general, los protagonistas son mujeres y niños” (At the same time, they deal with themes deeply rooted in the needs and fears of the feminine and, in general, the protagonists are women and children”; 475). 13. The Central American migration film, La jaula de oro (2013) also plays with this idea of the voiceless with one of the film’s main protagonist, the indigenous adolescent Chauk. In this case, Chauk is Tzotzil and does not know how to speak Spanish. His inability to communicate with the Spanish speaking mestizos he migrates with alludes to the historical voicelessness indigenous communities in Guatemala continue facing. 14. I read the literary examples of Sonatina and Alice in Wonderland to reiterate and make evident that Saslaya is displaced from a more idealized, if not imagined, childhood.

WORKS CITED “Bosawás Biosphere Reserve (Nicaragua).” Latin America & Caribbean Geographic, lacge​​o​.com​​/bosa​​was​-b​​iosph​​ere​-r​​eserv​​e​-​nic​​aragu​​a. Accessed 5 March 2021. Bruzzi, Stella. “From Innocence to Experience: The Representation of Children in Four Documentary Films.” Studies in Documentary Film, vol.12, no. 3, 2018, pp. 208–224. Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass. London: William Collins, 2010. Castañeda, Claudia. Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Corriols, Marianela, and Aurora Aragón. “Child Labor and Acute Pesticide Poisoning in Nicaragua: Failure to Comply With Children’s Rights.” International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, vol. 16, no. 2, 2010, pp. 175–182. Cortés Pacheco, María Lourdes. La Pantalla Rota. Cien Años De Cine en Centroamérica. México D.F: Taurus Aguilar, 2005. Darío, Rubén. Prosas profanas. Barcelona: Espasa-Calpe, 1979, p. 25. ———. Sonatina. Translated by G. W. Umphrey. Laura Forsberg, 1939. El camino. Ishtar Yasin Guittierez. Astarté Producciones, 2008. Film. Espinoza-Quesada, Mauricio. “From “Mother/Land” to “Woman/Nation”: Destabilizing Nation and Gender Structures in the Costa Rican Film El camino.” Polifonia Journal, 2011, pp. 93–104.

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Fonseca González, Vanessa. “La paisajización de la mujer en Agustín Lara.” Cuadernos Inter​.camb​io sobre Centroamérica y el Caribe, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019, pp. 120–140. Garðarsdóttir, Hólmfríður. “Subjectivities in the Making.” Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema. Ed. Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet. Maryland: Lexington. pp. 105–118. Gomez, Delmar Ulises Mendez. “Rompiendo muros: narrativas fílmicas sobre las migraciones «irregulares» centroamericanas.” Revista Reflexiones, vol. 99, no. 2, 2020, pp. 1–32. Harvey-Kattou, Liz. “Rendering the Invisible Visible: Reflections on the Costa Rican Film Industry in the Twenty-First Century” A Companion to Latin American Cinema. Edited by Delgado, M.M., Hart, S.M. and Johnson, R. London: Wiley, 2017, pp. 325–340. Jenks, Chris. Childhood. New York: Routledge, 1996. Lebeau, Vicky. Childhood and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Lee, Nick. Childhood and Biopolitics: Climate Change, Life Processes and Human Futures. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Longan Phillips, Shirley, and Abileny Soto Arguedas. “Dos historias de un viaje: El camino de Ishtar Yasin y La jaula de oro de Diego Quemada-Diez.” Estudios, vol. 30, 2019, pp. 1–13. Lury, Karen. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales. London: Tauris, 2010. Martin, Deborah. The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2019. Navas, Ana Rodríguez. “Global Markets, Hyperlocal Aesthetics: Framing Childhood Poverty in Contemporary Latin American Cinema.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 94, no. 1, 2017, pp. 77–96. Piguet, Etienne, Antoine Pécoud, and Paul De Guchteneire. “Migration and Climate Change: An Overview.” Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1–23. Salazar, Maynor. “Nicaragua: Life After the La Chureca Garbage Dump.” Havana Times. havan​​atime​​s​.org​​/feat​​ures/​​nicar​​agua-​​life-​​after​​-the-​​la​-ch​​ureca​​-g​arb​​age​-d​​ ump/.​Accessed 5 March 2021. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. To, Teresa, Jingqin Zhu, Dave Stieb, Natasha Gray, Ivy Fong, Lauren Pinault, Michael Jerrett, Alain Robichaud, Richard Ménard, Aaron van Donkelaar, Randall V. Martin, Perry Hystad, Jeffrey R. Brook, Sharon Dell. “Early Life Exposure to Air Pollution and Incidence of Childhood Asthma, Allergic Rhinitis and Eczema.” European Respiratory Journal, vol. 55, no. 2, 2020, pp. 1–12. United States, Department of Labor, Burau of International Labor Affairs. “ 2019 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.” 5 May 2016. www​.dol​.gov​/agencies​ /ilab​/resources​/reports​/child​-labor​/nicaragua. Vargas, Andrea Cabezas. “Memory and History of Central American Migration in the First Decades of the XXIst Century Through Its Regional Cinema.” Diálogos: Universidade Estadual de Maringá, vol. 42, no. 1, 2020, pp. 431–497. Yasin Gutiérrez, Ishtar. “Florencia De Los Ríos Hondos y Los Tiburones Grandes.” YouTube, 17 February 2013. www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=r9o1lllCtug.

Chapter 6

Feeling Good “Affect Aliens” of the Colombian Diaspora in Fiebre Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera Astrid Lorena Ochoa Campo

In Juliana Delgado Lopera’s latest novel, Fiebre Tropical (2020), from the beginning, the protagonist addresses the reader with familiarity as if she were in a radio show using a typical affectionate Colombian expression: “mi reina” (my queen). Melodic sentences combine words in English and Spanish that speak of the cultural hybridity of Miami, where most of the stories in the novel take place. Francisca, the protagonist, calls herself an “immigrant criolla” (creole) and lets us know the irony of her condition: she lives in “los Mayamis” (the Miami area), a dream for many people, but her place is an “ant-infested townhouse” (Delgado Lopera 1). Immediately after, she introduces her drunk grandmother, “La Tata,” as the director in her “holy radionovela brought to you by Female Sadness Incorporated” (Delgado Lopera 1). Thus, through this introduction, Francisca reveals that sadness is an emotion that permeates their immigrant experience in the United States. Not only sadness but loneliness and disappointment become part of their life as Francisca’s mother faces the loss of social standing by moving to Miami. Her daughter describes her as “pissed” because she has to cook and kill ants in the kitchen and wishes she could have brought her housekeeper with her. Therefore, in the first page of Fiebre Tropical we get a glimpse of the negative emotions that emerge in its characters as the “Migration Project” of this family goes wrong. In sum, nobody feels good, nobody is happy. Through the lens of affect theory, this chapter analyzes the novel Fiebre Tropical by Colombian and US-based writer Juliana Delgado Lopera and highlights the author’s contribution to literature about the Colombian diaspora in the United States. I employ Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of “affect 83

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aliens” in The Promise of Happiness (2010) to illuminate how Fiebre places aliens’ “unhappy” stories at the center to question the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream as the ultimate reward for migration to the United States. To this end, I concentrate on Francisca’s coming-of-age story because she is portrayed as the troublemaker, which is the cause of unhappiness in her family. She is at once a feminist killjoy, an unhappy queer, and a melancholic migrant; the three categories of aliens Ahmed describes as troublemakers for the happy family. Therefore, I argue that Francisca’s “unhappiness” about her family’s migration to Miami unmasks the conflicts of class, race, and sexuality that quickly permeate their lives in the new place. In this way, by exposing injustices in the experiences of Colombians and their descendants in the United States, the novel contributes to the growing body of literature that seeks to give more visibility to them.1 In what follows, I present biographical information of the author, give a brief summary of the novel’s plot and its reception, and situate it in the contemporary landscape of Latinx literature. Next, I explain Ahmed’s concept of affect aliens. Then I develop my analysis of the novel in dialogue with Ahmed’s work and scholars of US Colombian studies. Juliana Delgado Lopera is a Colombian-born author based in San Francisco, California. They have written two other books, Quiéreme (2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (2017).2 Their novel Fiebre Tropical was a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize.3 Their book tells the coming-of-age story of Francisca, a teenage Colombian girl who migrates from Bogota to Miami with her mother and sister to start a new life. There they join an evangelical church where the members are also Colombian migrants. Banking on the promise of happiness and wealth in the United States, the mother is obsessed with prestige and money but struggles financially; the grandmother is an alcoholic, the sister becomes a religious fanatic, and Francisca struggles to find friends and romantic love as a queer person in the new community. Fiebre Tropical has received positive appraisal from the media. The New York Times praises Delgado Lopera’s genius in the portrayal of Francisca: “She’s interesting because Lopera puts her to such good use as an observer. She’s wide-awake. She may be quiet and a girl of slender means but, internally, she’s a kibitzer. Inside, there’s a big mouth on her” (Garner). Florencia Orlandoni comments that “the narrative’s wit and humor gives readers life from beginning to end” and its voice attracts the reader to go back to re-read pages just for the pleasure of hearing that voice, which is “Delgado Lopera’s voice, leading a carnival of lush bilingual narrative, entering the reader’s imagination atop a flower-adorned bulldozer followed by a cast of characters de carne y hueso (of flesh and blood)” (LA RB). KIRKUS review recommends Fiebre Tropical on the basis that it is “a rich, deeply felt novel about

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family ties, immigration, sexual longing, faith, and desire. Simultaneously raw and luminous.” In all, the media has highlighted Delgado Lopera’s astute depiction of the migration of a Colombian family to the United States, their colorful language, and the variety of issues explored through the lives of their characters. Given that Fiebre Tropical was published only a year ago, there are no academic articles on the novel yet. Thus, the present chapter aims to engage in the conversation on this novel in academic circles by employing affect theory in its analysis. With Fiebre Tropical, Delgado Lopera joins a genealogy of Latinx authors who, as Juanita Heredia puts it, have “demonstrated a feminist perspective in their Bildungsroman narratives” because these “authors portrayed their female characters with more agency and autonomy” (168, emphasis in the original). The notion of agency is a contested one. “It is commonly understood as the capacity of a person (or other living and material entities) to intervene in the world in a manner that is deemed, according to some criterion or another, to be independent or relatively autonomous” (McNay 40). In Fiebre Tropical, the protagonist attempts to exercise some agency in her life, but her choices are constrained due to being a minor, a teenager under the tutelage of her mother and grandmother. Following Lauren Berlant’s conceptualization of “children,” one might consider Francisca a “child,” even though she is fifteen years old as a narrator because her story is “organized by intimacy with a parent with whom they live” (173). Although she is not precociously introduced to the working world like other children of low-socioeconomic families, she is nonetheless forced to act as an adult in suppressing her own (negative) emotions in order to provide emotional support to her bipolar mother and to serve as an enabler to her alcoholic grandmother. In this sense, her growth after migrating to Miami is a convoluted process that not only involves dealing with belonging in a diasporic Colombian community, economic and language barriers, and exploration with sexuality, but also the unearthing of the causes of the loneliness and sadness that plague the women in her family. In this way, she then becomes her family’s historian of emotions. For this reason, I subscribe to the idea that this feminist Bildungsroman or narrative of female development is “conflicted and plural [. . .] given that gender intersects with race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation” (Bolaki 14). Among the works that portray strong “women between cultures,” María Inés Lagos identifies Nilda (1973) by Nicholasa Mohr, The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros, How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991) by Julia Álvarez, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) by Cristina García, and When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) by Esmeralda Santiago (164–167).4 Not only Delgado Lopera follows in the steps of these renowned authors, but their contribution is important because it is one of “the few recent diasporic Colombian works—written in English—that grapple with how, whether, and

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in what ways to tether belonging to nationality” (Esguerra 346). Of these works, Catalina Esguerra highlights Vida (2010) by Patricia Engel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree (2018) by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and The Lucky Ones (2017) by Julianne Pachico (346). Moreover, Fiebre Tropical stands out as one of the few about the Colombian diaspora, in addition to A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014) by Daisy Hernández, which has a queer female protagonist. Lastly, Delgado Lopera’s novel inscribes itself in the US Latinx literature of the twenty-first century by its portrayal of “border crossings” and by “capturing a return to Latin America through physical journeys, memories, or maintaining cultural and social practices” (Heredia 167). While Francisca, the narrator, is unable to return physically to Bogota, she often evokes memories of her time there and provides accounts of her mother and grandmother’s pasts intertwined with crucial historical moments of Colombia. With these accounts, Francisca also traces the history of unhappiness for the women in her family. Sara Ahmed, in her book The Promise of Happiness, asserts that “happiness is often described as a path, as being what you get if you follow the right path” (9). Anchoring her study of happiness (and unhappiness) in feminist cultural studies of emotion and affect, Ahmed offers “an alternative history of happiness [. . .] by considering those who are banished from it, or who enter this history as troublemakers, dissenters, killers of joy” (17). In other words, she includes the voices of those who do not follow the “right path” to happiness as outlined by society. According to Ahmed, the recognition that happiness starts somewhere outside of a subject turns us toward objects, happy objects (21). These are defined as “those objects that affect us in the best way” (22). She continues: To be affected “in a good way” thus involves an orientation toward something as being good. Orientations register the proximity of objects, as well as shape what is proximate to the body. Happiness can be described as intentional in the phenomenological sense (directed toward objects), as well as being affective (having contact with objects). To bring these arguments together, we might say that happiness is an orientation toward the objects we come into contact with. (Ahmed 24, emphasis in the original)

This orientation toward happy objects, Ahmed asserts, holds the promise that happiness will follow “if you reach certain points” (26). However, certain orientations can be problematic as Laurent Berlant has pointed out: “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (24). It is cruel in that the person strives to reach “certain points” in life that are not really within reach. For example, in the case of

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families of lower socioeconomic status invested in the idea of the good life find instead “the bad life”—that is, a life dedicated to moving toward the good life’s normative/utopian zone but actually stuck in what we might call survival time, the time of struggling, drowning, holding onto the ledge, treading water—the time of not-stopping. (Berlant 169, emphasis in the original)

Thus, happiness or the “good life” by middle- and upper-class standards is only a fantasy. And this, Berlant asserts, is what some parents pass down onto their children: “The adults want to pass the promise of the promise on to their children. That may be the children’s only sure inheritance—fantasy as the only capital assuredly passable from one contingent space to another” (Berlant 174, emphasis added). Therefore, to aim to have a family for the sake of happiness is to perceive the family as a happy object that promises happiness once you obtain it, in the future, even if what you have is only a fantasy. In this sense, “happiness may be preserved as a social promise only through its postponement: so we imagine that the happiness we were promised will eventually come to us, or to those who follow us” (Ahmed 32). So, it follows that, in order for a family to be happy, its subjects have to share an orientation toward the right path: “If parenting is about orienting the children in the right way, then children must place their hopes for happiness in the same things. The family becomes a happy object if we share this orientation” (Ahmed 48, emphasis added). So, what happens when a child does not share this orientation? They become an affect alien, “the one who converts good feelings into bad, who as it were ‘kills’ the joy of the family” (Ahmed 49). Ahmed elaborates her argument by exploring happiness from the point of view of these aliens: feminist killjoys, unhappy queers, and melancholic migrants. Ahmed defines a feminist killjoy as a person who ‘“spoils’ the happiness of others” because “she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness” (65). What is more, Ahmed questions whether the feminist killjoy is perceived this way because she points out moments of sexism or because she exposes the negative feelings that get masked “under public signs of joy” (65). In this way, the “unhappiness” created by the feminist killjoy through the exposure of sexism is a necessary step to correct these wrongs in society. Likewise, the unhappy queer exposes the uneasiness of society with queer love: “It is because the world is unhappy with queer love that queers become unhappy, because queer love is an unhappiness-cause for the others whom they love, who share their place of residence” (98). As Ahmed points out, despite some progress in acceptance of queers, often “the queer life is already constructed as an unhappy life, as a life without the ‘things’ that make you

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happy, or as a life that is depressed as it lacks certain things: ‘a husband, children’” (93). Thus, an unhappy queer child becomes a source of unhappiness to the family that is already perceived as a happy object. For its part, the melancholic migrant holds on to customs and traditions of their native culture. They become affect aliens insofar as their failure to get over loss keeps them directing their attention to the wrong objects (from their native culture as opposed to those of the new place). “The melancholics are thus the ones who must be redirected, or turned around” (Ahmed 141). Thus, the melancholic migrant has to let go in order to assimilate, to become a well-adjusted and happy citizen in his/her new country. But, for Ahmed the unhappiness of the melancholic migrant is a powerful political tool that serves to “recognize the impossibility of putting certain histories behind us,” for example, the history of colonialism (159). In sum, these affect aliens’ unhappiness reveals what gets ignored or pushed aside in favor of maintaining the promise of happiness attached to certain objects such as the family. Through the lens of a fifteen-year-old queer Colombian girl, Fiebre Tropical tells a multigenerational story that traverses the Atlantic Coast (Barranquilla and Cartagena), Bogota, and the United States. As she unravels her own, her mother, and grandmother’s stories, we learn each one’s struggles as women in traditional patriarchal families in Colombia. While Francisca explores her sexuality through an intense friendship with a female youth leader in her church, she is portrayed as the “unhappy queer” that threatens the image of a happy family her mother wants to convey to the other members of the congregation. The romance the alcoholic grandmother has with a disabled Cuban is also an embarrassing aspect of the family the mother wants to hide. The microcosms conformed by “melancholic migrants” from Colombia expose several examples of classism, sexism, and racism. The move to the United States ultimately doesn’t deliver what Francisca’s mother hopes, which is to be wealthy. They move to a Miami’s poor neighborhood, struggle to pay rent, and the church’s pastors have to help her financially. As this community becomes a safe haven for the mother, it ends up being a place where Francisca ultimately cannot feel at home, hence she becomes an affect alien. Often Francisca’s relatives refer to her as an unhappy person that disturbs the family’s harmony. Her mother asks her, “When am I gonna see the day you’re going to stop being un dolor de culo (a pain in the ass) and actually join the family, ah?” (Delgado Lopera 78, emphasis added). Additionally, she narrates how she is not allowed to feel her sadness: I have countless teenage memories in which my sad emo adolescent body didn’t even get a chance to relish in its tears, to soak in the obliqueness of a dark life, because there was always a tía yelling from the couch as I stepped into the living

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room: Ay pero (but) here she comes with that face. Ay pero si acá no ha pasado nada (but nothing is going on here). (Delgado Lopera 17, emphasis added)

As Garner points out, she ticks the “boxes on the teenage-misfit checklist: a taste for Sylvia Plath; a love of the Velvet Underground; the wearing of a lot of black” (New York Times). But Francisca’s negative emotions reveal not only the discomfort that arises as a result of their move to Miami. Hers have a history. In this regard, Martha Nussbaum proposes that “the emotions of later life make their first appearances in infancy, as cognitive relations to objects important for one’s well-being, and also that this history informs the later experience of emotions in various specific ways” (179). Therefore, while Francisca’s family sees her attempt to express negative emotions to disturb their peace, her “dark life” is an expression of previous losses suffered in childhood such as the loss of her father due to divorce. However, as much as she might be a pain in the ass or a misfit, she does not see herself as a loser as the other kids in her neighborhood: “I didn’t want to admit it to myself or anyone but I was pure Soledad Realness, pure loneliness eating at my core” (Delgado Lopera 8). A quick look at the apartment complex where the family moves provides Francisca with information about other kids like her: “The loner kids included the weird sad maricón (faggot) from Argentina and they hung by the lake with all the mosquitoes and frogs” (Delgado Lopera 25). For this reason, she is not initially inclined to associate with them although she feels very much alone. It is as if by proximity with these kids, Francisca has to admit to the outside world the unhappiness of her life and this, of course, threatens the image the mother tries very hard to convey to their neighbors and church community. With respect to this avoidance, Ahmed observes that “you might refuse proximity to somebody out of fear that you will be infected by unhappiness, or you might seek proximity to somebody out of hope that you will be infected by happiness” (97). As a result, Francisca initially avoids being infected by the unhappiness of the loner kids and partly accepts to be infected by the happiness of the youth leader group, Carmen, who is the adopted daughter of a happy Christian Colombian family. As a newly arrived Colombian and melancholic migrant, Francisca tries to hold on to the perceived happiness she enjoyed back in Bogota: “All I wanted were my girlfriends back home, cigarettes, and a good black eyeliner” (Delgado Lopera 8). The solution to her problem, according to her mom, would be to have faith, first in Jesus and then in the improved life they will achieve with hard work in Miami. But as Francisca is forced into the “Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor (Christ Redeemer Christian Church). A stinky room in the Hyatt Hotel nobody cared to vacuum,” she becomes aware of the behavior expected of her as a “good” Colombian (Delgado Lopera 30). The

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Colombian churchgoers at Jesucristo Redentor, as many other Colombian immigrants, are invested in changing the association with double criminality that often follows them—as illegal immigrants and narcotraffickers—(Ochoa Camacho 170, “Living”). They create a sense of community by consuming Colombian food: The outskirts of Miami are dead land. . . . With almost nonexistent public transportation, no sidewalks, but a glorious Walmart and Publix Sabor where a heard of colombianos, who came all the way from their land, buy frozen arepas (corn cake) and microwavable Goya plantains. (Delgado Lopera 4)

They also share Colombian meals at church: Another table sold all sorts of Colombian goodies from arepas to Bon Bon Bums (Colombian lollipops) to panela (a block of raw cane sugar) to achiras (bread rolls), and at the end I saw flyers with pictures of ajiaco (potato and chicken stew), flyers for Colombian restaurants in the area: La Pequeña Colombia (Little Colombia), El Rincón Colombiano (The Colombian Corner), La Tiendita de Sumercé (Your Little Store). (Delgado Lopera 41)

These communal activities, as Gavin Brent Sullivan and Chris R. Day observe, are important in creating positive emotion, and shows how people can enjoy being part of a crowd or group in which there is a common interest or identity, and how this group allows them to enact an identity that might not be possible to experience in the same way in their everyday life (e.g., at home or work). (211)

However, Francisca does not fully share these positive emotions that most of the members of her church enjoy as a result of their Colombian Christian identity. As much as these Colombians seem welcoming, there is a clear distinction between those who keep some cultural values from their homeland but strive for assimilation, and those newly arrived, as Francisca notes: Every señora de Dios (godly woman) fixing our hair, squeezing our cheeks, commenting that we were either too skinny, too fat, too pale, or—my very favorite—too Colombian (Cómo se les nota que acaban de llegar, tan colombianas) (how obvious they just arrived, they are so Colombian). (Delgado Lopera 7, emphasis in original)

Thus, Francisca must strive to be Colombian enough to belong to this community but not too Colombian to threaten their perceived unity. That is to say,

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she has to “maintain the perfect balance of being assimilated Americans yet nostalgically Colombian” (Esguerra 359). As a result of her inconformity, what Francisca does, by pointing out instances of classism and racism, is to kill the joy of the fantasy of a unified diasporic Colombian community in Miami. For example, she criticizes how people pretend to be successful and ignore their different backgrounds because they now live in the United States: Here’s a little something for you, mi reina (my queen): all these colombianos migrated out of our País de Mierda (Shitty Country) to the Land of Freedom—in this case, Miami—to better themselves, to flee the Violence or whatever, to seek Peace, or, really, to brag that they’re living in the freaking U S of A, and hello credit card, hello car you can’t afford, hello hanging out in a room at the Hyatt with the same motherfuckers you ran from. Like they couldn’t have done that in Bogotá? Barranquilla? Or Valledupar? (Delgado Lopera 41)

This image of unity crumbles before the protagonist’s eyes as she not only sees how these colombianos’ realities are incongruent with the façade they put on, but also as she directly experiences the sting of classism within her family. Coming from a family “venida a menos” (a family who lost their high status), Francisca’s mother feels in Miami as if she were still a manager in an insurance company in Bogota: Mami sat folding Gap T-shirts for seven hours at a warehouse in Plantation after she’d made sure everyone in this shithole of a town knew she’d been the gerente general (a CEO) of a multinational insurance company and blah blah. (Delgado Lopera 244)

Even though they live in an ant-infested townhome in Miami, Myriam does not want to show up at her dead baby’s baptism by walking because “cómo se te ocurre (how could you think) that this family is going to show up like nobodies caminando bajo el solo como desplazados (walking under the sun like displaced people)” (Delgado Lopera 47). Thus, she does not want to be associated with the displaced in Colombia, a population composed mostly by peasants. In other instances, the mother of a young man Francisca dates briefly approaches her to tell her that she prefers her son to be with her rather than with Carmen: After it became known at Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor that I had converted, Xiomara pulled me aside many times whispering she’d rather see her son with a niña (young lady) from a good family than a Morena (brown girl) with unknown roots. (Delgado Lopera 188)

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Because of her light skin and reputation of “niña de bien,” Francisca’s relationship with Wilson is tolerated by Xiomara, who feels has ascended the social ladder by marrying a wealthy white man. Unlike Francisca, Myriam del Socorro Juan, her mother, made an effort to assimilate to the new diasporic Colombian culture. She moved with her two daughters to Miami after divorcing their father in Bogota because he cheated on her. As the protagonist tells us, “Mami is originally from Cartagena, she moved to La Capital when she was sixteen, losing her costeña (coastal) accent” (Delgado Lopera 9). When she was twenty-one, she had a miscarriage and lost her baby Sebastián. Once she moves to Miami and learns that her baby can get baptized using a baby doll as a substitute, she embarks on the preparation journey to make it happen. This serves as a diversion project that shields her from the negative feelings of migrating: I knew Mami to be obsessive, but Miami was sending her into another level loca obsesiva (crazy obsessive) that I hadn’t known was possible. . . . Was it the intense soledad (loneliness) that had her crying solita (alone) at night thinking nobody heard but of course I did because Soledad Eterna (eternal loneliness) was my middle name and obviamente (obviously) I wasn’t sleeping either? (Delgado Lopera 62)

She copes with these feelings by avoidance: “If Mami avoided talking about anything, it was, uno, dos, tres (one, two, three): Colombia. She did not touch The Subject, did not compare places; she cut Colombia off like a nurse cuts an umbilical cord with silver scissors” (Delgado Lopera 106–07). Although Myriam does not want to admit it, migration takes a toll on her already fragile mental health. Francisca describes her moods as oscillating but being fixed by pills: “Sometimes Depressed Mami lasted a bit longer than Electrified Mami but then she doubled her happy-pill dose y estuvo (and that was it)” (Delgado Lopera 256). These “Pastillas de la Felicidad” (happy pills) that her sister Milagros provided were prescribed by a Cuban doctor that saw undocumented patients (Delgado Lopera 251). This suggests that depression caused by loneliness is a common problem among undocumented migrants. And, as Berlant asserts, “the lower you are on economic scales, and the less formal your relation to the economy, the more alone you are in the project of maintaining and reproducing life” (167). Another cause of stress and sadness for Myriam is the constant struggle with her mother’s alcoholism. Unable to make her stop, she wishes her mother would be more discrete with her addiction and romance: If they could just not be visible. If they could both get drunk hidden from view. Because we’d come so far (so far!) for La Tata to ruin this Migration Project by

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lowering herself con un pobre (poor) Cubano, not only black, but in a wheelchair. Por Dios (My God). (Delgado Lopera 95)

By disapproving of her mother’s relationship with the Cuban man, Myriam exhibits her racism and ableism. These imperfect beings disrupt her fantasy of social mobility in the United States and produce shame. As Nussbaum notes, “It is only because one expects oneself to have worth or even perfection that one will shrink from or cover the evidence of one’s nonworth or imperfection” (196). It is because Myriam perceives herself as someone who is ascending the social and spiritual ladder by living in Miami and congregating in her church that she insists on covering up her mother’s alcoholism. Additionally, as a result of the incongruence between Myriam’s ideals and the reality of their lives, mother and daughter engage in frequent fights. Francisca tells us that she both hated and loved their fights. They were el pan de cada día (the bread and butter of everyday life), the viscous river of blood that kept that house pumping with life, Jesucristo, and the endless pursuit of a 50 percent discount. (Delgado Lopera 23)

In contrast to Myriam, the protagonist finds her grandmother amusing because she is obsessed with Sábado gigante (a popular TV show in Miami) and shares intimate moments with her watching television: “Above everything she wanted to be the winner. Of what? Of that moment of recognition, of that spotlight. Of Don Francisco landing a faint kiss on her cheek” (Delgado Lopera 19).5 Above all, La Tata wants to win in the middle of so much loss. According to Ariana Ochoa Camacho, More than simply an ephemeral individualized experience, soledad (loneliness) is a type of racial performance constructed through and from a Colombianx archive of melancholia—melancholia that marks the absence or loss of possibilities of communal belonging and citizenship. (422, “New York’s Lonely”)

In her study of Colombians in New York, she found that “Colombianx in Queens described soledad as part of everyday life in the US, despite being surrounded by the significant presence of other Colombianx” (Ochoa Camacho 423, “New York’s Lonely”). In the case of the South, Lina Rincón et al. explain that “33% of US Colombians now live in Florida, where their numbers are second only to those of US Cubans in terms of population size in major urban centers like Miami” (307). Hence, it is not surprising that Fiebre Tropical takes place in Miami. In a similar manner as Colombianx in NY,

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Francisca and the women in her family feel lonely in Miami despite being among other Colombian migrants in their church: Women in my family possessed a sixth sense, not necessarily from being mothers, but from the close policing of our sadness: your tristeza wasn’t yours, it was part of the larger collective Female Sadness jar to which we all contributed. (17)

Their lack of financial resources, language barriers, and possibly undocumented status amplify their isolation. The project of masking this loneliness and sadness then becomes a family matter. Loneliness and sadness are the two feelings Francisca expresses the most throughout the novel. She tries to cope with these feelings by reconnecting with people from Colombia but feels conflicted about it: I would call my dad, but as usual, he wouldn’t answer. I’d consider calling my friends back in Bogotá but couldn’t deal with the sadness, the embarrassment of this new life. How would I explain this to them? Coming to the USA is the dream! And I should be happy happy happy! (Delgado Lopera 59, emphasis added)

Although she berates herself for her negative feelings, she also questions the purpose of the family’s migration: “Where was the Miami life we all dreamed about from those Marc Anthony music videos?” (27). Under those circumstances, Francisca resorts to her imagination to envision a happy future: I daydreamed of a huge mansion with an immense library, a lover waking up next to me, tracing the lines of my hand. I was sad, I was horny. I wanted a real party and a real dick inside me. There was nothing happening in my life. (Delgado Lopera 75)

She dreams of a life of reading and creativity while lonely because of the example of one of her literary heroines: “With her emo ways Sylvia Plath was teaching me inglés, cachaco (from Bogota), teaching me that you can be brilliant and terribly alone” (Delgado Lopera 97). Consequently, it seems Francisca has come to accept soledad as an inevitable and constant feeling in her life, as part of her daily life as a Colombian immigrant in the United States. As we have seen, Francisca is a melancholic migrant that often feels isolated and whose unhappiness threatens the fantasy of a happy Colombian family living in Miami. Her isolation is compounded when she falls in love with Carmen, the leader of her youth group at church. This partially fulfilling

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relationship at first holds the promise of happiness for the troubled teenager. However, Carmen’s unwillingness to admit her sexual attraction to Francisca leaves her broken-hearted and alone again. Although the protagonist tries to fill the void Carmen leaves with a heterosexual relationship with a church boy, Wilson, she realizes she still loves her. Suffering mostly alone the “unrequited” queer love, Francisca is portrayed as an unhappy queer. This secret queer love and momentary happiness with the family is conditioned on Francisca’s conversion. Once she accepts Jesus into her heart, “the black curtain between her and me, between Mami and me, lifted. We were acting in the same play of life” (Delgado Lopera 159). Ahmed explains how this conditional happiness plays out: Conditional happiness would require that I take up what makes you happy as what makes me happy, which may involve compromising my own idea of happiness (so I will go along with x in order to make you happy even if x does not “really” make me happy). (57, emphasis in original)

In the case of Francisca, this means that she tries to become a born-again Christian to make Carmen and her mother happy because Jesus is what makes them happy, even though she does not share the same devotion as her loved ones. Nevertheless, Francisca’s grandmother notices quickly that the relationship between Francisca and Carmen goes beyond friendship: “It was La Tata who, after church one Sunday, told me she knew what was happening with Carmen” (Delgado Lopera 167). For this reason, La Tata warns her: “You know that’s gonna kill your mother” (Delgado Lopera 167). The unmentioned replaced with the word “that” refers to the platonic homosexual relationship that Francisca develops with Carmen. While there are a few instances of touch between the two, most of the feelings the protagonist develops are a result of the emotional closeness she shares with her friend. For example, on one occasion Francisca was changing shirts and her earring got stuck causing her ear to bleed. Carmen cleaned her ear by licking her earlobe causing excitement in her friend: Carmen did not freak out. That really did work, I said breaking the silence. Longing for my earlobe to stay inside her mouth a little longer. Although her cool dorky look was replaced with a greasy church-girl side-eye when I finally turned to her, the holy costeña wore that signature smile on her face. A smile that meant something—something I didn’t know. A sudden electricity in my head and crotch pulsing with excitement. (Delgado Lopera 155)

It is implied by Carmen’s smile that she may feel the same way, but what ultimately fractures their friendship is her refusal to admit it. In another

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moment of intimacy, Francisca gathers the courage to touch Carmen’s thigh while they are in her car. The costeña doesn’t say a word, but turns up the volume when a Christian song plays that says “Calm your desires. Calm your desires. We are growing seeds” (Delgado Lopera 175, emphasis in the original). After that, Francisca laments that she doesn’t “get a kiss but a low Dios te bendiga, pela’a (God bless you, girl)” (Delgado Lopera 175). While the protagonist has a moment of hope because Carmen doesn’t react negatively to her touch, in reality this action drives them apart. Afterward, Carmen flies to Colombia with her adoptive parents for unclear reasons, leaving Francisca confused and heartbroken. In the meantime, while Francisca waits for Carmen’s return in hopes of an explanation, she starts dating Wilson, another church boy who coincidently is also in love with Carmen. Their relationship serves to cover any suspicion in the church of her true feelings toward the youth group leader. It also helps alleviate her family’s anxiety about her sexual orientation. Her aunt Milagros thinks that she is being picky for a good cause: “You’re waiting for a nice gringo (someone from the US). Good, good, at least someone is thinking of bettering our family” (Delgado Lopera 89). They worry that if Francisca doesn’t comply with traditional gender norms, she will “end up como una cualquiera single y con malas mañas (as a slut, single, and with odd habits)” (Delgado Lopera 89). To put it another way, Francisca’s relationship with Wilson orients her toward the right path, the path of happiness promised to heterosexual couples. Catalina Esguerra, in her analysis of Patricia Engel’s Vida (2010), observes that when the protagonist rejects the perfect suitors, she “puts into question her normative femininity; after all, an implicitly desirable quality of a “good Colombiana is compulsory heterosexim” (359). In Fiebre Tropical, on the one hand, behaving as a good Colombiana allows Francisca to keep her membership in the church and the peace at home. On the other, resorting to compulsory heterosexism is a survival strategy to cope with loneliness: “I never wanted to be alone again” (Delgado Lopera 222). While she likes Wilson, she is also aware that they share the object of their true affection: “I held his hand while we both thought about Carmen” (Delgado Lopera 226). When Carmen finally returns visibly transformed into a beauty queen, Francisca comes to the painful realization that her love interest’s personality has been replaced by an ultra-feminine version of the “good Colombiana”: “She talked with so much ownership, like pretty Colombian girls do. It bored me. Aquí estás (here you are), I thought, toda una reina. Reinita de Dios (made into a queen, a godly queen)” (Delgado Lopera 279, emphasis in the original). Since “a queer lover might not be able to cause happiness for her beloved if her beloved cannot bear being rejected by the straight world,” it is important to note this transformation has the purpose to reorient Carmen

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toward the right path to happiness by making her appealing to a good man, a Colombian man (Ahmed 100). The change in physical appearance is also necessary for securing Carmen’s acceptability in society as the dutiful daughter of Christian pastors and for leaving behind the stigma of being an adopted girl with an unknown origin. As noted by María Elena Cepeda, “For Colombian women, a reliance on beauty as a pathway toward upward mobility and social prestige has long constituted part of the hustle and flow of everyday life” (127, “Putting”). Since Carmen fears the rejection of her adoptive family and church community, she chooses to conform by entering into a heterosexual relationship with a “rolito más lindo” (a cute Colombian boy from Bogota) (Delgado Lopera 279). In turn, Francisca’s reaction is still loving despite the pain this news causes her: “I gently caressed her hand, kissed the top of it, and told her I was glad. You look very happy, I said and left” (Delgado Lopera 279, emphasis added). While Francisca ends up crying in the arms of her new friend, Andrea, I suggest we resist the urge to classify this ending as hopeful and instead sit with the protagonist’s unhappiness. By doing this, one situates Francisca’s unhappiness not in herself but in society’s “failure to recognize the social viability of queer relationships, in its failure to recognize queer love” (Ahmed 93). After all, her and Carmen’s romance doesn’t fail for a lack of feelings but rather for the costeña’s fear of losing the only home she knows, her happy family. In conclusion, Fiebre Tropical narrates the story of a teenager from Colombia, Francisca, who grows up in Bogota but expresses her “unhappiness” about her family’s move from Colombia to the United States. She is an “affect alien” in that she does not share her family’s orientation toward the family as a happy object, as explained by Sara Ahmed. Francisca’s subtle rebellion and manifestations of unhappiness, mainly in the form of sadness, unmasks the conflicts of class, race, and sexuality that become part of their lives in the new place in Miami, Florida. She is at once at feminist killjoy that disrupts the fantasy of a happy Colombian diasporic community in Miami and a happy evangelical family. For example, Francisca points out how her friend Carmen is discriminated for her dark skin color while she enjoys a preferential treatment for her light skin color. In addition to skin color, Carmen is discriminated for her perceived lack of pedigree due to being adopted from a coastal region in Colombia. At church, Francisca observes, people pretend to ignore the heterogeneity of the diasporic community (in terms of class and race) by outwardly reinforcing communal activities like buying Colombian products and cooking traditional meals while at the same time engaging in discriminatory acts toward each other. She is also a melancholic migrant that is dissatisfied with the living conditions of her family in the United States and misses her life in Colombia. The young woman witnesses her mother

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and grandmother struggling to survive financially to the point of living of the church’s charity. Nonetheless, her mother continues to be invested in the plight of achieving the “good life,” that, as Berlant asserts, is more like a “bad life” of perpetual struggling. Moreover, Francisca is a lonely and unhappy queer that exposes her closed community’s lack of acceptability of queer love. When she falls in love with Carmen, the youth group leader at church, she becomes compliant with her and her mother’s wishes to become a born-again Christian in order to maintain emotional and physical closeness to them. Because her devotion is not really hers, she is unable to sustain that life. She and Carmen follow different paths. Francisca stays true to herself while Carmen becomes a hyper-feminine version of herself to secure a Christian suitor. As a result, their queer love has no place in their evangelical diasporic community in Miami. In this manner, by centering the coming-of-age story of a Colombian diasporic teenager who is an “affect alien,” the novel contributes to the growing body of literature about the experiences of Colombians and their descendants in the United States, their struggles with emotions such as loneliness, and their efforts to achieve the “good life,” which for some, as in the case of Myriam in the novel, is equivalent to achieving the American Dream. NOTES 1. Yamil Avivi highlights “the great need to document and center—as much as possible—queer Colombian (im)migrant life stories and subjectivities in an overwhelmingly heteronormative transnational (im)migrant network between the United States and Colombia” (457). By centering the story of a queer Colombian teenager, I see Fiebre Tropical as responding to this need for documentation through fiction. Other authors include Patricia Engel, Daisy Hernández, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Anika Fajardo. 2. I will use the author’s preferred pronouns: They, Their, Them. 3. For more information, visit their website www​.julianadlopera​.com/. 4. The dates shown here correspond to the original publication dates of these novels and memoirs. 5. María Elena Cepeda speaks of “moments of recognition” in her latest article about the female gaze in the music video of Bomba Estéreo’s “Soy Yo” song. In it she points out that “Latinas in general as quite literally symbolically starved for more media representation, while smaller Latina subpopulations such as US Colombians experience media invisibility even more acutely, as Colombian identity writ large is so frequently narrowly filtered through gendered representation in global media via the ubiquitous presence of hypersexualized female figures such as Sofía Vergara, Shakira and Kali Uchis, among others” (332, “Latina”). Given this context, one can read La Tata’s desire to appear in Sábado Gigante and be kissed by Don Francisco

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as cry for more diversity in the representation of Colombian women in the media. In this sense, older women’s desires must count too.

WORKS CITED Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Álvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019 [1991]. Avivi, Yamil. “¿Y qué de Andrés? On the Need for Queer-Centered Asylum Laws and Histories.” Latino Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, July 2020, pp. 457–465. Bolaki, Stella. Unsettling the Bildungsroman Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Cepeda, María Elena. “Latina Feminist Moments of Recognition: Contesting the Boundaries of Gendered US Colombianidad in Bomba Estéreo’s ‘Soy Yo.’” Latino Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, July 2020, pp. 326–342. ———. “Putting a ‘Good Face on the Nation’: Beauty, Memes, and the Gendered Rebranding of Global Colombianidad.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 46, nos. 1 and 2, Spring/Summer 2018, pp. 121–138. Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books, 1991 [1984]. Delgado Lopera, Juliana. Fiebre Tropical. New York: The Feminist Press, 2020. Engel, Patricia. Vida. New York: Black Cat, 2010. Esguerra, Catalina. “Diasporic Home: US Colombian Belonging and Becoming in Patricia Engel’s Vida.” Latino Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, July 2020, pp. 343–362. García, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Random House, 1992. Garner, Dwight. “In ‘Fiebre Tropical,’ a Colombian Teenager Moves to Miami and Comes of Age.” The New York Times, 2 March 2020. www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/03​ /02​/books​/review​-fiebre​-tropical​-juli​-delgado​-lopera​.html. Heredia, Juanita. “Transnational US Latino/a Literature: From the 1960s to the Twenty-First Century.” Hispania, vol. 100, no. 5, Centenary Issue 2017, pp. 167–172. Hernández, Daisy. A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Lagos, María Inés. “Women Between Cultures: Latina Writers of the United States.” In What Should I Read Next?: 70 University of Virginia Professors Recommend Readings in History, Politics, Literature, Math, Science, Technology, the Arts, and More, edited by Jessica R. Feldman and Robert Stilling. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 2008, pp. 164–167. McNay, Lois. “Agency.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 39–60. Mohr, Nicholasa. Nilda: A Novel. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Ochoa Camacho, Ariana. “Living With Drug Lords and Mules in New York: Contrasting Colombian Criminality and Transnational Belonging.” In The Immigrant Other: Lived Experiences in a Transnational World, edited by Rich Furman, Greg Lamphear, and Douglas Epps. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. 166–179. ————. “New York’s Lonely Streets: Constructions of Soledad in Colombianx Migrant Experiences.” Latino Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, August 2020, pp. 420–441. Orlandoni, Florencia. “This is Your Home Now: On Juliana Delgado Lopera’s “Fiebre Tropical.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 April 2020. larev​​iewof​​books​​ .org/​​artic​​le​/th​​is​-is​​-your​​-home​​-now-​​on​-ju​​liana​​-delg​​ado​-l​​opera​​s​​-fie​​bre​-t​​ropic​​al/. Pachico, Julianne. The Lucky Ones: A Novel. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2017. Review of Fiebre Tropical. KIRKUS, 23 December 2019. www​.kirkusreviews​.com​/ book​-reviews​/juliana​-delgado​-lopera​/fiebre​-tropical/. Rincón, Lina, Johana Londoño, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and María Elena Cepeda. “Reimagining US Colombianidades: Transnational Subjectivities, Cultural Expressions, and Political Contestations.” Latino Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, August 2020, pp. 301–325. Rojas Contreras, Ingrid. Fruit of the Drunken Tree: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2018. Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1993. Sullivan, Gavin Brent, and Chris R. Day. “Collective Emotions in Celebratory, Competitive, and Conflictual Contexts: Exploring the Dynamic Relations between Group-Based and Collective Pride and Shame.” Emotions: History, Culture, Society, vol 3, no. 2, November 2019, pp. 202–222.

Chapter 7

Childhood on the Back of La Bestia Fictions about Adults and Migration to the United States Rodrigo Pardo Fernández

The comparative analysis of fictional texts concerning the border and the migration of women and men permits the construction of critical discourses.1 In the ever-growing flows of migration from Central America to the United States, the presence of girls and boys has been increasingly more evident. Their process of migration, however, bears an additional burden: the vulnerability due to their condition as minors. In the extraneous journey they embark, violence against underage migrants is viewed as something almost unavoidable. Family separation, sexual exploitation—suffered primarily by migrant women2—as well as other human rights violations suffered by migrant boys and girls are supported and justified under the false pretense of their “illegal” condition.3 In this context, the reading of recent literary texts from Mexico and the United States, about what it means to grow up during the process of migration, or as a result of it, allows us to approach stories about childhood in a liminal context. Novels present situated problems from different perspectives: they engage with the question of how stories are told, how facts are represented and included, but they also open the space for a social critique of the repetition of stereotypes pertaining to the migrants. Similarly, novels also respond to the negative stereotype of migrants and question the motivations for leaving their countries and processes of integration in their places of arrival. The borders on the south and the north of Mexico are spaces of transit where violence against migrants has developed exponentially.4 This violence is linked to processes and social practices associated with uprooting, misery, legal uncertainty, corruption, and contraband. We understand the border as the conventional and symbolic boundary between territories.5 They are 101

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complex social institutions traversed by tensions between maintenance and crossing. Furthermore, those areas generate productive activities such as the maquila6 and other precarious conditions of employment that affect people’s bodies, such as trafficking and prostitution. As observed by Smith, Swanson, and Gökarıksel: “[the borderscape as a] territory becomes a versatile, but grounded and material, focal point, allowing for the embodied experiences of border-crossers, but also for other racialized, gendered and sexualized bodies” (259). The girls and boys who cross these borders in vulnerable conditions come from diverse places: Central America, Mexico, and even from other areas, and their ages range from newborn to young adults. In addition to the exacerbated violence associated with the transit, migration coincides for these underage individuals with their own process of development.7 The transit is, for them, also a time of transformation that marks the entry to a threatening reality from which they cannot escape and where their helplessness and vulnerability are more acute. Works of literary fiction that address this topic depict the complexity of this social phenomenon, but they do not provide a satisfactory solution to it. Novels describe historical issues from a metaphorical or hyperbolic configuration and offer the opportunity to see the complexity of a multi-faceted reality. This chapter proposes an analysis of narrative texts dealing with a problem that transcends the limits of fiction. Here, I focus on the short story “Querido subcomandante Marcos” (2010), written by the Cuban author Rodolfo Pérez Valero, and the novel Celestina montó a La Bestia (2019) by the Mexican writer Ociel Flores Flores. Both texts have been published in a period of ten years and correspond to different visions of child migration into the United States. In the first section, I highlight the connections and differences between the plots and characters of these texts, setting up the frame of my analysis. Second, I propose a comparative reading. I look at how these literary works depict the conditions of children migration. Third, I look at the normalization of these underlying problems as part of a new way of agency for Latin American migrant children. In the closing section, this chapter offers a reflection on how fictional narratives speak to the reality outside the texts. The Stories: Coincidences and Divergences Despite the differences in the conditions of production and their origin, the two selected texts have at least two meaningful elements in common. First, the main characters are children whose journey to the north is carried out to a large extent on the roof of the infamous train known as La Bestia. Second, on their path, these children are victims of different types of harm

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and abuse.8 To familiarize the reader with the authors and texts studied in the following pages, a brief introduction and comparative summary of texts is in order. The Cuban writer Rodolfo Pérez Valero has been recognized as one of the founders of the police drama in Cuba. His short story “Querido Subcomandante Marcos” won first prize in 2006 in Concurso de Relatos de la Semana Negra de Gijón, and was also included in the 2010 anthology Un hombre toca la puerta bajo la lluvia.9 Pérez Valero’s works recognize the difficult migratory phenomenon in Central América, which according to recent reports has had a growing tendency from 1995 to 2005.10 Valero highlights its connection to the figure of Subcomandante Marcos (referred to in the title of the story), representative of the Zapatista movement that manifested itself in Chiapas on January 1, 1994. The novel is narrated in first person by an intradiegetic character. The narrator is Adelina, a woman from Chiapas, who is imprisoned in the United States. The text follows an epistolary structure and provides a detailed account of the reasons that moved her to leave her hometown Huixtán, the incidents and harassment suffered during the trip on the back of La Bestia, the forced prostitution that she undergoes in Reynosa, and her life in Houston (Texas) after she crosses the border. The story concludes with the protagonist successfully adjusting to her new life in the United States. For her, the perilous travel was worth the trouble. When she remembers the last stretch of the journey crossing the border, she says: “[. . .] it was Ponciano, Mariíta and I, the pregnant Chapina, the little Chetumaleño boy who made friends with a little chocha girl as small as Mariíta, who was also alone looking for her sister”. ([. . .] íbamos Ponciano, Mariíta y yo, la chapina preñada, el niñito chetumaleño que se amigó con una niñita chocha tan chiquita como Mariíta, que igual iba solita a buscar a su hermana) (Pérez Valero 32). Her age becomes clear at the end of the story, and this revelation contrasts with the detailed account of the humiliations she has suffered. It is important to highlight that, although being underage, Adelina does not assume herself as a minor. The harshness of the story has an ironic tone that barely helps to cope with the reading: The beautiful guanaca [. . .] he told me [. . .] that he had arrived in Reynosa with what he earned by working in brothels and wanted to cross because in the north he earned a lot and he confessed to me that his greatest illusion was to be a whore, but on the other side. And they told us that the very truth was that they had been raped in every country that had passed since they left their lands. (La guanaca linda [. . .] me contó [. . .] que había llegado a Reynosa con lo que ganó chambeando en burdeles y quería cruzar porque en el norte se ganaba mucho y me confesó que su mayor ilusión era ser puta, pero del otro lado. Y nos

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dijeron que la mera verdad era que las habían violado en cada país que pasaron desde que salieron de sus tierras). (Pérez Valero 32)

Physical, sexual, and psychological acts of violence against migrants are also referred in Ociel Flores’ novel. In Pérez Valero’s story, however, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and gender violence are more prevalent, but there is also a component of transformation in the protagonist that, in the end, has a positive influence and helps break the cycle of abuse. Ociel Flores Flores published his novel Celestina montó a La Bestia in the collection Libros del Laberinto of Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, where he works as a professor. It is a piece on a relevant topic in the context of binational migration policies in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but it had minimal impact in the context of the literary scene in Mexico. This novel tells the story of a young woman of Guatemalan origin who migrates from the town of Los Encuentros to the “roof of the South” (techo del Sur) (14), leaving behind two little girls. Most of the journey is done by train, accompanied by other migrants from various origins, a majority from Central America. The border city where they arrive is not specified but its description responds to certain commonplaces of the border cities between Mexico and the United States, such as the chaos in urban development, the semi-desertic environment, and “a multitude of bars, night clubs and inns adorned with screeching ads and provocative lights” (multitud de bares, night clubs y fondas adornados con anuncios chillantes y luces provocadoras) (Flores Flores 55). Celestina starts working as a dancer in a bar, and soon after she becomes a prostitute. Just as in “Querido subcomandante” this novel explicitly describes some of the violence suffered by migrants on their journey: robberies, humiliation, rape, murder, and prostitution. However, these acts of violence appear as digressions to the main story—that of Celestina—and are indirectly inserted as fragmentary comments from other migrants, making it seem as if these terrible events happen only to others and not to the protagonist. In the first pages, Celestina is described as a determined young woman but throughout the trip and upon arrival at the border, this vision becomes skewed. The young woman accepts the insinuations of two men during the trip and initiates a de facto relationship with them in exchange of protection from any harm that could come from others and from the looming dangers of the trip. The first of these men is Julián, who seduces her with his vulnerability, as he is ill. The second is Cristóbal, “half troll, half yeti” (mitad troll, mitad yeti) (Flores Flores 41), who sexually imposes himself on her: “The girl barely breathed during the ritual that began suddenly, every time Cristóbal felt like it” (La muchacha apenas respiraba durante el ritual que comenzaba de improviso, cada vez que a Cristóbal le daban ganitas) (Flores Flores 46).

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Unlike the other narratives, Celestina montó a La Bestia does not include any elements of open criticism against the violence suffered by women. The story seems, at times, objective, while at other times validates a certain masculine perspective of the woman’s sexuality that shapes her only as an object. She begins to work in El Abrevadero de los Dinosaurios, a brothel at the border. Although Celestina declares that she will not have sexual relations with clients, two pages later she changes his mind: That thing about the mololongo came about naturally, it makes more money and there was no way to say no to so much cloying. In addition, because La Celes was at an age of getting some and in those years it is difficult to resist the touch of the skin. (Aquello del mololongo se dio naturalmente, dejaba más y no había cómo decirle que no a tanto empalagoso. Además, pues La Celes estaba en edad de merecer y en esos años es complicado resistir el contacto de una piel.) (Flores Flores 58)

Beyond the capacity for volition and desire of female characters, so to accept that only for being a woman and receiving attention from male characters is it acceptable to engage in prostitution is a simplistic perspective of a violent situation. From this perspective, fed from the omniscient narrative voice, the body becomes an object of desire and loses its ability to do, think, and decide.11 Thus, the story of Celestina’s migration construes her subject to the will of others, which is exacerbated by the poetic tone of the novel, which idealizes a sordid situation. Migration and Violence: The Wounded Body The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children must be guaranteed safety, health, education, and other rights in the various territories of the world. When these conditions are not met in their territories of origin, people have been forced to migrate in search of safety as well as looking for other economic opportunities that will guarantee that the basic rights for themselves and/or their offspring can be secured. Until 2013, these rights were not specifically recognized for migrant minors. Minors who have been displaced and become migrant subjects engage in an abrupt and, at times, violent process of assumption of responsibilities that are commonly assumed by adults. This remark does not minimize their capacity of agency, but rather observes the need to provide them with social conditions that guarantee the fulfillment of their rights. The two texts studied in this chapter explore different ways in which minors—specially women—exercising agency. I propose to understand this term following Lokot’s idea, according to which “children ought to make—or be actively involved in– decisions on

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issues concerning their lives” (2). In order to explain the “forced” process of development of the characters, the following factors will be taken into account: the reaching of sexual maturity—which for women usually coincides with menarche—engaging in sexual encounters; the direct encounter of violence—and the ensuing loss of innocence; the self-recognition as victims; and finally the recognition of the ability to engage in decision-making of their own. The capacity of agency acquired and practiced by the characters highlights the possibilities of action of minors in situations of liminality. Going against the grain of the idealization of childhood as a period of innocence, and in opposition to the idea that minors are unable of engaging in effective decision-making, I propose to observe that children are capable of agency in various circumstances. However, in situations of great vulnerability such as a migratory transit, this capacity tends to be overlooked or invisibilized. A careful reading of the narratives studied allows us to appreciate that there is a break in the character’s development process. Their stage of transit becomes a limiting situation, as it locates them in situations that are out of the ordinary. The dangerous journey that, usually undertaken by adults who consider its challenges and consequences, is increasingly involving more and more minors, such as the ones in the texts we study. In them, it is possible to observe that the protagonists are capable of making decisions, and this ability brings them closer to the world of adults and elicits a reaction of surprise from the part of the latter, as is the case in “Querido subcomandante”. Used to have no opposition from the part of children, adult characters admire the resistance—after, the violent reactions—of minors, as will be exemplified in this chapter. The seemingly vulnerable and defenseless Adelina transforms this condition into a catalyzer of her process of growth and although she does not become an adult, she manages to behave in a manner that brings her closer to this sphere. Migration requires a greater agency on the part of minors, from the moment they decide to leave until the moment they reach their destination. The reality is experienced in the transit in a concentrated way: in a few days, the migrant children have experiences that modify their own perception and possibilities of their bodies and are faced with decisions of the greatest importance. Both in their biological and their social processes, their process of development is dynamically accelerated. Their physicality ceases to be a mere material container and its material and symbolic transformations become much more dramatic, as explained by Lázaro-Castellanos y Jubany-Baucells: From a feminist perspective, the biological body exists on its own. But as a human body, it is also a symbolic construction that goes beyond its physical materiality. It has the capacity to experience emotions such as pleasure, pain or suffering.(Desde la perspectiva feminista el cuerpo biológico existe por sí

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mismo, pero, en tanto humano, también es una construcción simbólica que va más allá de su materialidad física, con capacidad para experimentar emociones, tales como, el placer, dolor o sufrimiento.) (171)

In this sense, the works of fiction discussed in the chapter describe different situations of characters in their journey on the roof of a train to the north of Mexico, the way in which this journey impacts their bodies, and how they assume these transformations. The differences are formulated, chiefly, from the point of view of the narrative voices and the transformations experienced by the migrant characters, mostly related to violence or precariousness. The circumstances faced by Adelina and Celes during their migratory journey force them to take responsibilities, make decisions, and assume the consequences of their actions as adults. For the former, this situation is triggered when Adelina, a worker on a ranch in the inner part of Chiapas, decides to flee to avoid the sexual abuse of her employer. She tells her father of the intentions and threats of the owner of the farm, and how she avoided the rape. The response she receives from her dad triggers the decision to migrate: I told him everything. And he slapped me and cut off my tears in fear and drew blood from my mouth. And he said, “Don’t you ever dare hurt the tecuhtli or speak ill of him again. And stop crying [. . .], think of your family and behave like a woman.” (le conté todo. Y me dio un bofetón que me cortó las lágrimas del susto y me sacó sangre de la boca. Y me dijo: “Nunca más se atreva a hacerle daño al tecuhtli ni a hablarme mal de él. Y déjese de llanto [. . .], piense en su familia y pórtese como una mujer.) (Pérez Valero 27)

In relation to female characters, a crucial moment of growth is associated with the moment they reach sexual maturity with their first menstruation. The menarche marks the moment when a girl becomes a woman in the context of a heteropatriarchal society. Adelina avoids the possibility of rape by the owner of the farm and the misery associated with that condition of vulnerability. In return, she faces forced displacement, sexual assaults on the way to the north, and other vexations. The girl realizes that the adults around her assume that she is a woman, from the moment she is able to procreate. But they lose sight of their ability to make decisions and eventually rebel against abuse. The violence suffered by Adelina is exacerbated when crossing the border. At this moment, Ponciano, her boyfriend and traveling companion, drowns and most of the girls and women are raped. As a consequence of losing her protective male figure, the girl is forced into prostitution in different brothels of the border strip. Added to this continuous vexation, there is another factor

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related to growth. After finding out her origin, her regular clientele becomes predominantly Mexican. Men from “Chiapas, conejos, turulos, culopintos, coletos y hasta guacaleros,”12 frequent her. Later, other Mexicans and Central Americans will also become regulars. The male characters hire Adelina’s services because her appearance, manner of speaking, and life story remind them of home: They said they missed everything; and as they cried, they were relieved. It was cute. They showed me pictures of their parents, their children, their wives. And some even forgot to do that to me, or almost, right? because in the end, despite the stories and the crying, everyone did it to me. [. . .] A few even asked me, while I was working on them, to speak to them as if I were the wife they had left in their little village. [. . .] They liked it better the less me and the other one. (Decían que extrañaban todo; y, mientras lloraban, se aliviaban. Era lindo. Me enseñaban fotos de sus padres, sus hijos, sus esposas. Y a algunos hasta se les olvidaba hacerme eso, o casi, ¿no?, porque al final, a pesar de los cuentos y del llanto, todos me lo hacían. [. . .] Unos cuantos hasta me pedían que, mientras los trabajaba, les hablara como si yo fuera la esposa que dejaron en su pueblito. [. . .] Les gustaba más mientras menos fuera yo y más la otra.) (Pérez Valero 47)

Here we can observe the complexity of a process of development that is rarefied by the uprooting and the violence. Minors, however, even in this context, are able to make decisions and subvert adverse conditions. The recognition of violence is the starting point for change. The second step is questioning the normalization of the sexual abuse suffered from. Finally, they overturn the temporary obligation to pretend to become a substitute for an adult. In the case of Adelina, this takes place when she plays the role of the partner or the wife of those who hire her services. While narrating these events, Adelina’s voice seems to be distant from what is happening, but a certain ironic tone and her actions at the end of the story show us her contained courage. The survival of the protagonist is possible only because of her ability to adapt to different adverse conditions, and her ability to change them. When Adelina or any other sex worker at the brothel intends to resist the demands from clients, these male characters react in a manner that corresponds to what very often happens in reality, where More expeditious procedures are used to punish or simply eliminate them, legitimized by the ideology of “blaming the victim” (for being tempting, inciteding, for cheating, for wanting to leave, for being inferior or simply. . . for being). It is the story of macho violence.

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(se acude a procedimientos más expeditivos para castigarlas o simplemente eliminarlas, legitimados por la ideología de “culpar a la víctima” (por ser tentadora, incitadora, por engañadora, por querer irse, por ser inferior o simplemente. . . por ser). Es la historia de la violencia machista.) (Molina Petit 80)

Male violence uses actions, words, and assumptions that are directly or indirectly addressed against women.13 And although there seems to be no way to stop this cycle, the end of the story “Querido subcomandante” gives an alternative exit. Adelina frees herself after empowering herself and claiming agency: she stops being an object and she becomes an active agent when her conditions become propitious. Not only does she admit and employ her strength but also changes her perspective radically. In the last pages of the narration, the male characters that exploited her are described with beast-like features, which modifies her relationship with them and facilitates her murdering those who prostituted and tortured her. In order to do so, she first strips them of their human character. In the novel Celestina montó a La Bestia, the migratory process is narrated differently. The decision to migrate is inferred in a more superficial manner. However, the description refers to misery as the central motivation and presents her decision-making process from another angle: Celestina dreamed of immersing herself in vats of fragrant bubbles [. . .] Leaving and returning being another, with suitcases full of wonders that deceived the insignificance of her life, until then equal to that of her mother, to that of her grandmother. To leave so that they would miss her; to realize that she was not there. [. . .] Aha, I am on my way, far from this stinking hole. (Celestina soñaba con sumergirse en tinas de burbujeos olorosos [. . .] Partir y volver siendo otra, con maletas llenas de maravillas que engañaran la insignificancia de su vida, hasta entonces igual a la de su madre, a la de su abuela. Irse para que la extrañaran; que se dieran cuenta de que no estaba allí. [. . .] Ajá, ya voy de camino, lejos de este agujero hediondo.) (Flores Flores 11–12)

La Bestia is metaphorically configured as a locus of character transformation. In contrast to Adelina, who traveled accompanied by Ponciano, Celestina establishes two partner relationships with fellow migrants. In both circumstances, Celestina acts passively, accepting the advances and protection that these men provide. She acts in the following manner that masculine fantasy of a quiet female body, a body to be contemplated, which is the object of the look and the will of the other because it is allowed to do; A

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vulnerable body, deprived of its defenses, a body that does not protest or react until he wishes and awakens her. (esa fantasía masculina de un cuerpo femenino quieto, un cuerpo para ser contemplado, que es objeto de la mirada y de la voluntad del otro porque se deja hacer; un cuerpo vulnerable, privado de sus defensas, un cuerpo que no protesta ni reacciona hasta que él lo desee y la despierte.) (Molina Petit 76)

After the journey, crossing the United States border is not achieved. The border is where her journey ends. Celestina “chooses” prostitution, which may seemingly appear to be a “free” decision over her body, it implies a plight of submission to the masculine condition of exploitation. The narrative voice does not provide options for the protagonist. Celestina makes decisions without support. It would seem that it only acts from certain heteropatriarchal parameters imposed on female characters. The body of Celestina is, thus, objectified. It seemingly appears as the only parameter by which to measure and understand her character. In the opening of the novel, a paragraph before boarding The Beast, she described in these terms: “Yes, Celes was skinny, had no butt, with musty eyebrows, wore a fringe that made her look like a school girl. But she was tough and reckless” (Sí, Celes era delgadita, desnalgada, de cejas mustias, peinada con un fleco que la pintaba como colegiala, pero arrecha y temeraria.) (Flores Flores 12). Her agency is presented through the eyes of the narrator, and thus we do not have a clear access to her inner motivations. The leading character resembles a school girl and the absence of development in her body is a reference to her youth. It stands out as something adverse but it describes the girl in terms of a sexuality and maturity that she still does not possess. The fundamental reasons for her to make the decision of migrating are founded on the fact she does not want to assume the responsibility of raising two young girls. Celestina is a flat character, and she systematically acts without explaining her reasons for doing so. In contrast to the other story addressed in this chapter, this novel proposes a biased and partial reading of violence and the empowerment of characters. Nevertheless, the narrative seems to grant her certain means from her body as an object of desire. In that sense, the male characters normalize prostitution, reducing it to a mere commercial exchange that parallels the objectification of the female body: —You are bad, Juan Soldado. —Quiet, skinny; I am neither bad nor holy. And you are already hanging me miracles. The one you have here is just a man with his faults and his good things. A man who wants to be with you today (a hand settles on the bony thigh of Celes), but do not grovel, it will not be of oquis

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(—Sos malo, Juan Soldado. —Tranquila, flaquita; no soy ni malo ni santo. Y tú ya me estás colgando milagritos. El que tienes aquí es sólo un hombre con sus defectos y sus cosas buenas. Un hombre que hoy quiere estar contigo (una mano se posa en el muslo huesudo de Celes), pero no te agüites, que no va a ser de oquis.) (Flores Flores 62)

It is significant that Celestina does not question this idea, proposed from the perspective of the male narrative voice. The female body is tailored only as an object of use whose value is assigned in the context of prostitution and survival. The objective would seem to be the crossing of the border, but the character isn’t clear about what will happen beyond that point. What matters is the crossing at all costs: Celes is naked in front of the mirror, she looks at herself and observes her breasts; she weighs them and stretches out a nipple. If, as they say, “two tits pull more than two horses”, you two will have to hold tight, girls . . . I don’t have as much as the others, but with you two little critters, it’s gonna have to do. Women scrupulously review their assets; in matters of business they are inflexible. What state the merchandise is in and how much it has yielded in recent weeks are matters that receive military supervision (Celes está desnuda frente al espejo, se mira y se remira los senos; los sopesa y les estira el pezón. Pos si jalan más dos tetas que dos carretas, como dicen por ahí, van a tener que aguantar harta carga mis niñas . . . No tengo tanto como las otras, pero con ustedes dos, criaturitas, me va a tocas hacerle. Las mujeres revisan meticulosamente a sus haberes, escrupulosamente; en materia de negocios ella es inflexible. En qué estado se encuentra la mercancía y cuánto ha dado de rendimiento en las últimas semanas son cuestiones que reciben una supervisión castrense.) (Flores Flores 69)

After a careful reading, it is not appreciated that the character of Celestina makes “decisions,” in terms of self-awareness and agency. The novel has no such purpose. From the omniscient perspective of the narrator, Celestina is an object that can be quantified and sold to render benefits. The character is unable to question her own condition, in the end it only comes from within her (at the beginning, only in an extraneous manner) when a male character, Ruperto, rescues her. The man dies later on and without his support, Celestina finds herself once again with nothing to hold on to: What should a woman like her expect from her remaining years? What will happen when she is no longer required at the bar? Rupert had brought her to life;

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she now had a beautiful house in her own way, in which the sea was heard [. . .] Yes, her residence was very different from the wooden hut she had shared with her mother and her daughters. That was true, but why was she deceiving herself? She had been condemned to live like a stuck woman, and she would carry that stigma to the last of her days. [. . .] The time and heat of the desert had finally dried up his body and soul. (¿Qué debía esperar una mujer como ella de los años que le restaban? ¿Qué sucedería cuando ya no fuera requerida en el bar? Ruperto la había sacado a vivir; poseía ahora una casa hermosa a su manera, en la que se escuchaba el mar [. . .] Sí, su residencia era muy distinta a la choza de madera y lámina que había compartido con su madre y sus hijas. Eso era cierto, mas ¿por qué se engañaba? Había sido condenada a vivir como una atorada, y llevaría ese estigma hasta el último de sus días. [. . .] El tiempo y el calor del desierto habían terminado por secarle el cuerpo y el alma.) (Flores Flores 157)

The character doesn’t suggest a way out. The only motivation, which is now frustrated, was to reach the other side. After losing the masculine support, she is left with no options. She goes on living unconscious, assuming “the stigma” associated with misery, a profession justified by a patriarchal society, and her acceptance associated with her being a woman that is emphasized by the narrative voice. The question about her job at the bar is linked to the reference of the deteriorated body caused by the desert. Despite some passages where it seems that Celestina makes decisions, in a systematic way this narrative proposes that the body is something that one has, not that one is. In this macho perspective, a woman is not a body but has a body that does not belong to her since it is the property of the male individual who uses it. When she no longer possesses a young and attractive body, it will lose all its value both to everyone else and to herself. In the last reference to Celestina, her return to the brothel is narrated as follows: “And he began to walk through the deserted streets with the desire to arrive soon at El Abrevadero, his Abrevadero” (Y echó a andar por las calles desiertas con el deseo de llegar pronto al Abrevadero, su Abrevadero) (Flores Flores 158). Migration seems to have only one possible destination. Celestina is a minor who seems to make decisions, but who lets herself be carried away or accepts the decisions others make for her. The journey, the sexual relations with male characters, the prostitution seem to be part of a fate that is not justified in the narrative. The narrative voice seems to assume that she cannot decide, or that her actions are just repetitions and bounded by heteropatriarchal social prejudices. In this way, the woman is presented as a minor without capacity as an agent. In contrast, the other narratives studied show the children’s capacity for change and decision-making. Issues relating to the body and its development

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as well as life decisions during the migration and the options in the location of the destination are raised in texts of study. The forced migration conditions and upsets his vision of the world as he is obligated to acknowledge the other facets of fictional, on the one hand, and objective Mexico, on the other: poverty, corruption, solidarity, uprooting. Reality and Fiction The stories that have been analyzed have a lot in common. Migration in these narratives is represented in its most sordid aspects: violence, abandonment, loss of roots, and fear. A clear coincidence is shown in the way underage children are forced to grow up and assume responsibilities and face the harsh experiences of the process. The harshness of the migration process implies other factors when it comes to young women without resources. The trafficking of people and sexual assaults as a result of forced prostitution are shown as one of the worst (and most common) scenarios at the end of the journey.14 The girls and young women must face the difficulties that migration in itself conjures (vulnerability, uncertainty, and aggression) not only from characters that surface along the way (police, criminals, and coyotes) but also other male subjects that are in the same path to the North. There is a difference in gender and other factors in processes that have been commented. In “Querido subcomandante”, Adelina’s apparent passiveness until the right time comes allows her to survive all the abuse. In Celestina montó, the inertia that dictates Celestina’s downfall drives her to her death. Despite the fact that there have been no diverse extraneous stories that acknowledge the crude reality of migration, it has been reliably proven that the connecting thread is the act of violence involving the body, accepted as a physical and symbolic entity. Exercising sexuality is one of the most evident indications of maturity but is only a sign of something much more complex. The standardization of aggression against female characters in fiction is in accordance with a common practice outside the texts. The objectification of women denies her the ability to decide, act, think, and refuse, which leads to normalizing prostitution in the narrative from Flores Flores, and in the text by Perez Valero the protagonist is unable to write a letter on her own because she can’t read. The body is what the characters are, but it must be deemed beyond its monetary cost. The fiction narratives point toward an undervaluation of women beyond their sexual function or economic worth. The male characters use or make them invisible which leads to making the violence against them seemingly not important. It is relevant that in the three novels, there are moments that the female characters themselves, references in first or third person, assume the loss of value as something given and that cannot be solved.

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Adelina, one way or the other, is able to learn and move forward by herself and reconstruct her story. On the other hand, Celestina continues her life in an unconscious manner, without making any decisions. The migratory condition makes minors particularly vulnerable, as they are driven to displacement, abandon their territory and culture, and venture to other places in an accelerated process of development. A careful reading of the narratives that touch on these subjects is a way to make the connection between fiction and reality problematic as well as to make evident the need to critically look at a live phenomenon that involves the most disfavored, the underaged, and that raises a clear gender bias that cannot be ignored.

NOTES 1. For a study of these issues, see Escalante (2015). 2. For an in-depth analysis of violence against migrant women in transit through Mexico, see Willers (2016) and Kuhner (2011). For a study on violence from a gender perspective, see Asakura and Torres Falcon (2019). 3. We do not agree with this commonplace. Immigrants are only undocumented persons, who suffer harassment based on stereotypes and prejudices. For an alternative approach to the term of “illegals,” contrary see Chomsky (2014). Scholars who have approached the question of border surveillance and the system regulating migration are Martin (2021) and Giorguli et al. (2021). 4. For a study on the depiction of extreme violence, see Pabón (2013). 5. Notable studies of the border from a political perspective have been made by Balibar et al. (2012). For the specific case of narrative identities on the US-Mexico frontier, see Vila (2000). 6. Maquila is an outsourcing factory located on the Mexican border. 7. Frühling, Tulchin, and Golding offer an overview of violence in Latin America. 8. For other critical perspectives on literature and its relation to the border, see Franco (2020), Johnson (2019), Rodríguez Ortiz (2008), and Manzanas (2007). 9. In 2018, he published a theatrical version, along with other texts. The monologue was titled La mano de Dios and was staged in 2019 by the Makinación Teatro company in the city of Toluca. 10. On Central American transit migration, see Chávez et al. (2011). 11. About the body and its discursive representation, see Butler (2011). 12. The term conejo refers to people from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas; turulo is used as a name for the people of Tonalá; culopinto is a person from Chiapa de Corzo; and coleto refers to a mestizo person from San Cristóbal de las Casas and who comes from Tapachula is called guacalero. 13. For a study of systemic aggression against women, see Segato (2016). 14. For a study on this situation in America, see Fernandez (2019).

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WORKS CITED Asakura, H., and M. W. Torres Falcón (coord.). Entre dos fuegos. Naturalización e invisibilidad de la violencia de género contra migrantes en territorio mexicano. CIESAS-UAM Azcapotzalco, 2019. Balibar, Étienne, Sandro Mezzadra, and Raṇabīra Samāddāra (eds.). The Borders of Justice. Temple University Press, 2012. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Taylor & Francis, 2011. Chomsky, Aviva. Indocumentados: cómo la inmigración se volvió ilegal. Planeta, 2014. Escalante, Fernando. El crimen como realidad y representación. El Colegio de México, 2015. Fernandez, Manny. “‘Tienes que pagar con tu cuerpo’: la violencia sexual en la frontera.” New York Times, March 4, 2019. www​.nytimes​.com​/es​/2019​/03​/04​/espanol​/ mujeres​-migrantes​-violencia​.html. Flores Flores, Ociel. Celestina montó a La Bestia. UAM Azcapotzalco, 2019. Franco, Dean J. The Border and the Line. Stanford University Press, 2020. Frühling, H., J. S. Tulchin, and H. A. Golding (eds.). Crimen y violencia en América Latina. FCE, 2018. Giorguli, S. E., C. Masferrer, and V. M. García-Guerrero. “3. How Did We Get to the Current Mexico-US Migration System, and How Might It Look in the Near Future?” The Trump Paradox. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021, pp. 49–62. Johnson, David E. Violence and Naming: On Mexico and the Promise of Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Kuhner, Gretchen. “La violencia contra las mujeres migrantes en tránsito por México.” In DFensor. Comisión de Derechos Humanos del Distrito Federal, junio, 2011, pp. 19–25. Lázaro-Castellanos, R., and O. Jubany-Baucells. “Mujeres de origen inmigrante: cuerpos y subjetividades en movimiento.” Ra Ximhai, vol. 8, no. 1, 2012, pp. 169–180. Redalyc, www​.redalyc​.org​/articulo​.oa​?id​=46123324011. Lokot, M., M. Sulaiman, A. Bhatia, N. Horanieh, and B. Cislaghi. “Conceptualizing “Agency” Within Child Marriage: Implications for Research and Practice.” Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 117, 2021, p. 105086. Manzanas, Ana María. Border Transits: Literature and Culture Across the Line, vol. 2. New York: Rodopi, 2007. Martin, Philip. “Migration Policy Making in the US.” In Handbook of Culture and Migration. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021, pp. 138–151. Molina Petit, Cristina. “La construcción del cuerpo femenino como victimizable y su necesaria reconstrucción frente a la violencia machista.” Investigaciones feministas, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 69–85. Pabón, C. “¿Se puede contar?” Historia, memoria y ficción en la representación de la violencia extrema.” In Memorias en tinta, Ensayos sobre la representación de la violencia política en Argentina, Chile y Perú. Edited by Lucero de Vivanco Roca Rey. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2013.

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Pérez Valero, Rodolfo. “Querido subcomandante Marcos.” In Un hombre toca la puerta bajo la lluvia. México D.F: Plaza y Janés, 2010. Rodríguez Chávez, Ernesto, Berumen Sandoval, Salvador y Ramos Martínez, and Luis Felipe. “Migración centroamericana de tránsito irregular por México. Estimaciones y características generales.” Apuntes sobre migración, Centro de Estudios Migratorios del INM, no. 1, julio, 2011, pp. 1–8. Rodríguez Ortiz, Roxana. “Disidencia literaria en la frontera México-Estados Unidos.” Andamios, vol. 5, no. 9, 2008, pp. 113–137. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Routledge, 2020. Segato, Rita Laura. La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2016. Smith, Sara, Nathan W. Swanson, and Banu Gökarıksel. “Territory, Bodies and Borders.” Area, vol. 48, no. 3, 2016, pp. 258–261. Vila, Pablo. Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the US-Mexico Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Willers, Susanne. “Migración y violencia: las experiencias de mujeres migrantes centroamericanas en tránsito por México.” Sociológica, vol. 31, no. 89, septiembre–diciembre 2016, pp. 163–195.

Part III

IN THE SHADOW OF REVOLUTIONS (UN)LEARNINGS OF RESISTANCE

Chapter 8

Agency and Learning from the Edges Everyone Leaves as a Female Novel of Formation in Post-Soviet Cuba Marco Ramírez Rojas

What does the recent history of Cuba look like in the eyes of an eight-yearold girl? It is not very common to find literary accounts that allow minors to be the narrators of the contemporary realities they observe and experience. And it is even more rare to stumble upon narratives where a child appears as an active protagonist and not merely as a witness or a secondary character in a world of adults. What is more, seen from its surface, the cultural and literary traditions of the island would seem to make it impervious to this sort of minor interferences. For the past half-century, the panorama of modern and contemporary literature in Cuba has been dominated by masculine voices that portray mainly adult heroes and antiheroes with critical visions of reality, such as the ones we find in Leonardo Padura’s famous detective stories, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s “realismo sucio” novels, and the fictional and autobiographical works of Reinaldo Arenas, just to mention three prominent figures of past decades. The Cuban literary sphere was portrayed, mainly, as a masculine world. After the 1990s, however, female novelists like Zoe Valdés, Ena Lucía Portela, Karla Suarez, and Wendy Guerra became prominent in the literary field and brought to the fore female characters that offered alternative representations of the life in the island. But, despite the opening of new discursive spaces and historical perspectives, the task of telling the story and voicing criticisms about the country always seems to fall on the hands of adults with a certain amount of experience and knowledge. Minors were, for the most part, relegated to the roles of passive observers or voiceless signifiers of futurity. Not even symbolically they were granted the space to narrate or authorized to act upon a reality owned exclusively by adults. Wendy Guerra’s debut novel Everyone Leaves (2006) is set against this restrictive sociocultural backdrop.1 119

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It tells the story of an eight-year-old named Nieve who narrates in the first person the events and self-reflections of her life, set in the context of the decades that followed the triumph of the Cuban revolution and the years that anticipated the debacle of the post-soviet era. Her name, “Snow” in English, ironically indicates from the very beginning her condition of being out of place: she is a girl in a country that has historically marginalized and relegated women to subaltern positions. Because the political project of the revolution is based on the objective of educating “The New Man”, as a woman, she seems not to have a clear place in it. But what is more striking is that with her writing she is performing a task that is not permitted to a person in her situation. Narrating the reality of the country is not the power of minors and, thus, should not be allowed, even if this is only done in private. Despite the difficulties, prohibitions, and obstacles in her way, Nieve never stops writing. Her diary is a testimony of resilience and her relentless claim of rights to include her own personal story as an integral part of the narrative of her country.2 In what follows, I propose to read Everyone Leaves as a novel that tracks the learning process of a subaltern individual who fights to claim instances of agency while navigating the complexities of the sociopolitical reality of her country. Appealing to elements of auto-fiction, Guerra’s narration follows the coming-of-age of a character whose goal is not that of adapting to societal conventions and becoming a productive citizen. Instead, her struggle is that of finding the strategies to survive in the tumultuous decades of the 1980s and the 1990s in Cuba. I argue that this novel can be interpreted as a non-teleological narrative of formation that contests the idealized figure of the Cuban revolutionary hero and explores an alternative learning process of learning geared toward the construction of what Desirée Díaz calls a “liminal citizenship.” To approach this novel and develop my arguments, I coin the term “edgency,” a conceptual tool that allows me to study the process of claiming aesthetic, social, and historical agency from marginal spaces located in the edges of restrictive literary, social, educational, and political practices. I consider Everyone Leaves as a post-Soviet novel because, despite recounting semi-biographic episodes prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the final text underwent a thorough process of rewriting and was first published in 2006 in Spain. It is also important to mention that, to this date, it remains banned in Cuba. The book is divided into two parts: “Diary of Childhood” and “Diary of Adolescence.” In the entries from 1978 to 1980, an eightyear-old girl recounts the events of her life in an intimate voice. Initially, she lives with her mother and her stepfather Fausto—a Swedish Nuclear Plant engineer—in an idyllic house in front of the sea in Cienfuegos. The occasional visits of her abusive biological dad—a play-writer and a member in good standing of the Communist Party—interrupt the calm of the household

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and, eventually, lead to its dissolution. Nieve’s mother is an artist working as a radio host. She is suspected to be a “contrarrevolucionaria,” for which she is sent to fight with a Cuban army contingent in Angola. During her absence, Nieve’s father pays a visit to the house and, scandalized by the fact that Fausto walks naked in the house, files a complaint for indecent behavior. Upon the mother’s return, they face a trial and lose custody of Nieve. She is, then, forced to live with her father in El Escambray. Unable to take proper care of his daughter, not only he neglects her basic needs of food, hygiene, and education but also abuses her physically and psychologically. To escape this situation, Nieve performs a clever learning-and-bending of the social and political norms of her environment that allows her to claim a role of agency in her own life. She devises a strategy of deception to be removed from her father’s custody and to return home. However, instead of being allowed to go back to her mother and stepfather immediately, she is sent temporarily to an orphanage. When they are finally reunited, Fausto is forced to leave the country never to return. In the meantime, her biological father has fallen in disgrace and decides to emigrate to Miami. Alone and abandoned, mother and daughter are expelled from their house in Cienfuegos and their relocation to La Habana marks the end of her “Diary of Childhood.” The “Diary of Adolescence,” spanning from 1986 to 1990, ends when Nieve is eighteen years old. The voice speaking in this second half corresponds to that of a teenager who narrates the process of building her own individual personality against the background of the Cold War and the repressive policies of the Cuban regime. Nieve enrolls in Art School and, like all young Cubans her age, is forced to participate in activities of public service. Nonetheless, granted that future artists “cannot ruin [their] hands working in the fields because [they] are the artistic future of the fatherland” (no podemos estropearnos las manos trabajando en el campo porque somos el future artístico de la patria3) (Guerra 133), instead of being sent to perform agricultural labor, she and her classmates are assigned to receive basic military training in a “Concentrado Militar.” The Art School and the military camp become the scenarios where she creates her social networks, builds friendships, and navigates her first romantic and sexual relations. Her diary allows the reader to follow the history of a sentimental education punctuated by three decisive male characters: Alan, a rebellious member of the group Arte Calle; Osvaldo, a celebrated and well-paid artist who introduces her to upper-class intellectuals; and Antonio, a politically engaged journalist who criticizes her lack of political commitment. Each one of them, at their turn, disappears leaving a strong imprint on the affective, ethical, and social education of Nieve.4

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Genre Agency and the Edges of Fiction First, I want to address how Wendy Guerra’s narrative choices and her blurring of literary boundaries position her novel on the edge of what literary scholars define as autobiographical fictions. Daniel Mesa Gancedo observes that Everyone Leaves not only is a “fiction in the form of a diary,” but a text that could be more properly named an “autofictive diary” (146). For him, the novel does not merely use the form of a diary as a narrative strategy. Rather, “It fictionalizes a private journal whose real existence is presupposed” (146). These observations evidence the amphibious nature of this work that intentionally oscillates between literary imagination and biographical referentiality. As readers, we are not able to interpret this text as if it actually included Wendy Guerra’s personal log. The paratexts of the book (the title, the dedication to the editor Ana Moix, Anne Frank’s epigraph, and the discrepancy between the names of the author and the narrator—note that despite sharing the last name “Guerra,” their names differ—) promptly debunk this assumption. Everyone Leaves does not adhere to the rules of what Philippe Lejeune understands as the “autobiographic pact.”5 However, this novel does not allow us to approach it as a completely independent fictional narration, provided that it is intimately imbricated with real events that are part of the life of the author. Wendy Guerra herself makes explicit this connection in several interviews, further underscoring the interdependent relation between her life and that of the protagonist.6 The autobiographic facts embedded in the construction of the protagonist/narrator allow the Cuban author to create a character who, just like herself, grows up in the island during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s and provides a disenchanted account of her coming-of-age in the midst of the looming Cold War threats, the ideological indoctrination of the first generation of Cubans born under the Revolutionary regime, the years leading to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent period of crisis and shortages known as the “Special Period.”7 Writing between the edges of the autobiography and the novel, Wendy Guerra creates a space of narrative liminality where she claims agency over formal conventions and breaks with traditional boundaries of literary genres. Her narration, a contact zone where the imperative of referentiality and the imaginative freedom of fiction are only divided by porous walls, becomes a dimension of freedom and possibility that cannot be subsumed by the rules of either of the genres she approaches. In this manner, Wendy Guerra stablishes a first claim of agency that I label as “literary edgency”: a capacity of performing a creative agency over literary forms and practices by locating oneself at the edge of literary codes, rules, and habits, in order to find alternative possibilities of invention, expression, and creation of meaning.

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“The tools they gave me are of no use” In the ambiguous literary space created in the novel, the character recognizes herself also as a liminal individual. The opening page, which serves as a foreword, includes these reflections: The tools they gave me are of no use. I take refuge in the Diary. Only in its pages I am normal and feel comfortable. There, I was always an adult. I pretended to be a girl, but it was not true. I was too adult for the Diary, and too young for real life (Las herramientas que me dieron no me sirven, vivo refugiada en el Diario y solo me comporto cómoda y normal entre sus páginas. Allí siempre fui un adulto; fingía ser una niña, pero no era cierto: demasiado adulta para el Diario, demasiado niña para la vida real.) (11).

This statement points, first, to the struggle with her immediate reality and the feeling of being out of place. But, more importantly, it highlights a generational clash. As part of the generation born in the 1970s, Nieve finds herself navigating a historical transition for which she does not possess the appropriate handbook. She perceives herself as doubly inadequate: the rules she knows are too old for the current reality, and she has not yet grasped the ways of the new times. In Mínima Cuba, Marta Hernández Salván studies the poetic representation of the cultural, political, and ideological transformations that marked Cuban history after the triumph of the revolution in the 1960s. She observes that one of the main changes over the following decades was the shift from “an allegorical and utopian representation of the Revolution” to a “dystopian antithesis in the eighties and nineties” (3–4). The revolution, she claims, “took form by bringing into play a new citizen with a new identity” which was modeled after the ethics and the epos of the heroic revolutionary hero (29). By the 1980s, this rhetoric of “Guevarian” heroism would become exhausted and, along with the economic difficulties brought by the fall of the socialist bloc, Cuba would be plunged in “a crisis of disavowal” (172). Nieve finds herself in the juncture of this transition: between the utopia of her parent’s generation and the disenchantment of the post-soviet years. Odette Casamayor’s remarks also help us understand the particularity of the situation lived by artists and writers born in the 1970s. Casamayor observes that despite receiving an education that was very much oriented by the “cosmology of the revolution,” this generation did not have a direct knowledge of its climactic moments of heroism. For them, the epic chapter of the nation was part of an imaginary mythology that they do not fully understand nor share. “The part of the revolutionary project they got to experience was,” she adds, “the most bureaucratic of it.” As a response, they learned to live with “skepticism and distrust” because they lack the moral and social tools to stay afloat in their current historical situation (37). Nieve’s

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diary, I propose, can be interpreted as a detailed chronicle of her attempts to procure herself an adequate set of tools to survive in the confusing, and often contradictory, political spaces of life in Cuba. In his studies on diaristic writing, Lejeune notes that personal journals are generally constructed based on a principle of selectivity and discontinuity. The seemingly disconnected stories, anecdotes, descriptions, and facts that are inserted in the pages of a diary compose the fantasy of the “narrative entity” of a writer (On Diary 179). Following Lejeune’s statements, I consider that the ensemble of Nieve’s entries is a carefully composite series of episodes selected and organized with a very specific purpose in mind: to offer the narrative of an underage, female, marginal individual in the process of learning how to adapt to an adverse reality. Wendy Guerra cleverly adopts the fragmentary and episodic nature of this genre to mark the most significant episodes of this coming-of-age that challenges traditional paths of learning, rejects the government-led educational models, and discovers alternative ways to respond and adapt to reality. (Un)learnings: An Alternative Bildungsroman Everyone Leaves has been interpreted as a coming-of-age novel by scholars Charlotte Michelle and Nathan Richardson. While the former considers it as a narrative of formation structured around a search for identity (n.p.), the latter observes that “we are better off reading it as a semi-fictitious diary that reads as a Bildungsroman that is also a Kustlerroman” (n.p.). In the first instance, I agree with both. I believe, nonetheless, that these readings remain at a surface level and fail to engage with what is ultimately at stake in the narration of Nieve’s formative process. Guerra’s book is not only “the story of a young artist who also happens to be a young woman who appears to enjoy certain aspects of what it traditionally means to be a woman,” as Richardson puts it. This interpretation seems too simplistic as it overlooks the active role performed by the female character in her process of becoming an artist and claiming ownership over her life choices and decisions within a patriarchal society that systematically denies women, minors, and other subaltern individuals the capacity of claiming social and historical agency. Nieve does not casually “happen to be” an artist and a woman; she fights to own and protect the space of freedom she finds in her writings. And to do so she repeatedly needs to come up with strategies that circumvent the restrictions and intrusions imposed by masculine figures who curtail her access to this dimension. In the novel, it is not only her father who forbids her access to her private journal, as she confesses in her “Diary of Childhood”: “I am only able to write when my father is not around. He has already told me that the diary is something not very discreet” (Sólo puedo escribir cuando mi padre no está.

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Ya me ha dicho que un Diario es una cosa muy poco discreta) (38). Her sentimental partners, at their turn, will also censor this practice. Osvaldo is the first one to do so, after reading in its pages how his friends were being criticized: Now Osvaldo, like my father before, forbids me the Diary [. . .] Machismo in Cuba is only disguised by a high education, but it is there, threatening you all the time [. . .] History repeats itself in cycles to remind me that I have never been my own master. (Ahora Osvaldo, como mi padre, me prohíbe el Diario [. . .] El machismo en Cuba está disimulado por la alta instrucción, pero ahí está, amenazándote todo el tiempo [. . .] La historia se repite en ciclos que regresan para recordarme que nunca he sido mi propia dueña) (207).

Antonio will incur in a similar practice of control, but under the veil of concern for her lack of political engagement. Before abandoning Nieve, he sends her a parting letter that is also an admonition: I worry, I know you will despise me for troubling you with such reproaches [. . .] what is lacking from your diary, which is also to say from your life, is to recognize the facts to which we must pay attention to. You cannot tell a life if you do not narrate the events that mark it. (Sé que me vas a desdeñar por inquietarte con semejantes regaños [. . .] lo que le falta a tu Diario, que es igual que a tu vida: reconocer hechos a los que les debemos atención. No se puede contar una vida si no se narran acontecimientos que la iban marcando) (245).

At each time her freedom to write is being threatened, Nieve devices new tactics of resistance such as writing when her father is away, or limiting to a minimum access to her diary, as she does when she is with Osvaldo: “It is clear to me that the Diary is forbidden in this relationship, but it is my only possibility for getting things off my chest [. . .] I have been writing very little for the past four months” (Tengo claro que el Diario está prohibido en esta relación, pero desahogarme en él es mi única posibilidad [. . .] Llevo casi cuatro meses escribiendo muy poco) (212). Throughout the narration, her persistence is a refusal to be silenced, a sign of self-affirmation, and a struggle to assert her place as a non-conforming individual. Moreover, the very act of consigning her formative experience in writing constitutes a symbolic claim of rights to discursive practices that in the patriarchal model of society promoted by the Cuban revolutionary system are almost exclusive to hegemonic male figures.8 Alongside novels such as Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia (1924), Rosario Castellano’s Balún Canán (1957), Alba Lucía Angel’s Estaba la pájara pinta (1975), and Carmen Boullosa’s Antes (1999), Everyone Leaves fits in a tradition of Latin American female narratives of formation that showcase young

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girls as central characters who, confronted with a hostile reality, develop strategies of survival and alternative learning. The Latin American female Bildungsroman differs from the novels of formation with male protagonist from the continent—as well as from its European predecessors—in several different aspects such as the characterization of the hero and its journey, the different stages of development, the resolution of the learning process in a symbiotic adaptation to society, and the politico-ideological connections to the construction of national projects.9 The specificity of the female Bildungsroman in the Spanish-speaking literatures of the continent has been studied by María Inés Lagos, who highlights the fact that the young women protagonists’ antagonism with their environment is not resolved in the same conciliatory manner as that of their male counterparts. The former, she claims, are more prone to engage in an active process of self-preservation and resistance to the limitations of their environment. The goal of these female characters is not that of assimilating the rules of society in order to become productive and well-adapted citizens but to develop and assert a strong sense of individuality.10 The reason why I want to emphasize the fact that Wendy Guerra’s novel checks all these boxes is not to place it into a category and mark it with a proper label. I underscore these aspects for the symbolic significance that the publication of her novel gains when read against the backdrop of the 1980s and 1990s post-Soviet Cuba. For Hernández Salván, as well as for several other scholars, “the revolution took form by bringing into play a new citizen with a new identity [. . .] The new revolutionary citizen was a hero whose sacrifices would help build the nation” (28). All the bureaucratic, propagandistic and educational apparatuses of the state were put to the work with the objective of bringing up the new generation of Guevarian heroes. During the 1970s and 1980s this epic rhetoric was an unavoidable part of the process of growing up in Cuba. The essential tropes of “sacrifice, war, and violence” (29), as well as the values of loyalty and unfaltering commitment, became the distinctive attributes that needed to be instilled into the new generation of Cuban citizens. These guiding lines, however, revolved around an ideal of patriotic masculinity.11 All other members of society—women, minors, dissidents, and homosexuals— were not contemplated in the plan for the future of the nation. Or not, at least, as protagonists. Against this background, Nieve’s formative process reveals itself as the antithesis of the educational model promulgated by the political regime. To start off, her gender already marks her as a subaltern individual and, consequently, she starts her social learning in a position of marginality. Second, her household rather than providing her with a coherent set of tools for life reflects the ideological tensions of the Cuban society of the times. Third, not only she fails to perform according to the official curriculum of studies, as it is evidenced by her poor results in school—“Yo soy lo que se

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llama una mala alumna” (I am what you can call a bad student) (33)—but also she proves herself incapable of acquiring the required political jargon to successfully take part in the rituals of patriotic celebration. When asked to write a “comunicado” for the 1980 January 1st festivity, she is provided with a list of “key words” to use in her composition: “José Martí Pioneers,” “Future,” “Despotic and brutal imperialism,” “Homeland or death, we will triumph” (“Pioneros José Martí,” “Porvenir,” “Imperialismo despótico y brutal,” “Patria o muerte, venceremos,” etc) (67). She follows the instructions and feels proud of the speech and poem she pens down. After reading them in front of the school, she realizes she is in trouble: “I read the speech but it seems they didn’t like it [. . .] It seems like what I said was not good, but I wrote what they asked me to” (“Leí el comunicado, pero parece que no les gusto [. . .] Parece que lo que dije no está bien, pero yo escribí lo que me pidieron”) (77). Her naive commentary makes her inability to adapt to her political environment all the more evident. But her unawareness does not exonerate her before the vigilant eyes of the institution and she is accused of having “ideological problems” (79). The punishment for “not-knowing” implies that any girl of her age—she is nine years old at this moment—is already supposed to know and follow the basic tenets of her Communist education. Performing “Edgency” To a certain extent, Nieve comes to embody the anti-hero of the Cuban Revolution: she is a disinformed, disinterested, disobedient, and politically disenchanted young woman who refuses to adapt to the prescribed political and ideological instructions of a “true revolutionary.”12 From an official perspective, Nieve’s educational process is a failed one. But there are alternative learning paths that run parallel and move in a continual progression throughout the novel. Erin Hogan keenly observes that Nieve undergoes an important process of affective education: “She experiences cognitive growth that allows her to identify her pain, code her emotions as fear, and tap into the subversive power of both” (147). In addition to this, I propose to consider another fruitful and successful formative process: the development of a capacity of agency performed from the edges. In each one of the spheres of her life—school, family, sentimental, and social relationships—she gets to have a direct access and a first-hand experience of both the tacit and explicit rules regulating the complex relations of control, power, and authority in Cuba. Despite not fully adhering to social scripts, she cleverly manages to derive a detailed and wellinternalized knowledge of their mechanisms. From her position of marginality, Nieve develops the tools that prepare her to strategically bend the norms for her own benefit. This capacity of remaining at the edge of norms and playing with the acceptable limits of conventions while trying to guarantee

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her survival and keeping her own interests in mind is what I understand as a claiming of “edgency.” A clear example of this ability can be underscored in the following episode. After the incident of the failed speech, the teacher pays a visit to Nieve’s father’s house to report her “ideological problems.” He is drunk and beats his daughter in front of the visitor. As a consequence of his fit of anger, he is put on a trial and receives a warning: if there is another episode of abuse, he will lose custody of his daughter. After witnessing this confrontation, Nieve starts devising a plan. Aware of the complicated situation her father has put himself into, and knowing how to manipulate the system and the structures of power in her favor, she comes up with a scheme of deceit, which she details in the entry of the following day: I do not care if my father is calm now. I went to the gym and hit myself against the bars. I threw myself from the water house tower and scraped my knees. One of those hits made me bleed like never before. For the first time I went to see the principal, a very tall and famous man. He saw me bleeding and was terrified. He prepared his car immediately to take me home with my mom. He says that he has to be the one to make justice, otherwise my father is going to kill me. (No me importa que mi padre esté tranquilo. Me fui al gimnasio y me di golpes y golpes contra los tubos, me tiré desde la torrecita de los tanques se agua, me raspé las rodillas. Uno de los golpes me ha sacado más sangre que nunca. Por primera vez fui a ver al director general, que es un hombre alto y muy famoso, el me vio sangrando y se horrorizó. Enseguida acondicionó su carro para llevarme con mi madre. Dice que la justicia la pone él porque si no mi padre me va a matar.) (79)

She has carefully calculated the consequences of her every move and has accurately predicted the outcome of her actions. Given her father’s record, it was only logical that her self-inflicted injuries would be blamed on him. As she has a clear understanding of the networks and hierarchies of power, she knows whom to go ask for help next: the highest figure of authority in her school. In her analysis of the same passage in the novel, Hogan notes how, by inscribing pain onto her own body, Nieve successfully manipulates the school principal “to do her bidding and remove her from El Escambray,” and thus perform a significant shift of roles “from inanimate puppet to animating puppeteer” (155). She knows that, ultimately, he is the only one with power to “make justice” and she devises a way to provoke in him an emotional and practical reaction that would help her attaining her objective. But, in order to successfully circumvent the rules, she must have first learned the ways by which the system works: assumptions, codes of conduct, affective reactions,

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structures of hierarchy, and so on. Her “edgency,” then, lays in the fact that, as a marginal individual, she finds the appropriate ways to contest authority while always playing by the rules. She is fully cognizant of having infringed a norm, but also of the fact that she can get away with it: “I am the biggest liar in the world, but it is the same to me. Nobody knows when something is a lie or when something is true” (Ahora soy la niña más mentirosa del mundo, pero me da igual. Nadie sabe ni cuándo es mentira ni cuándo es verdad) (79). In his studies around everyday forms of resistance, the American anthropologist James Scott remarks that there are numerous manifestations of struggle with power that “stop well short of collective outright defiance” and “often represent a form of individual self-help” (29) (29). They typically “avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms” and are usually accomplished through “subtle sabotage, evasion, and deception” (29–30). To describe these forms of “passive noncompliance” he uses the term “weapons of the weak,” which I find a very adequate critical concept to understand Nieve’s relation to the structures of power and the strategies of deceit she devises to guarantee claim agency in the circumstances of her own life. Claiming a “Liminal Citizenship” Nieve recognizes herself as a “bad student” at school, but she is a very astute learner of the ways of the world. By the same logic, she might as well be considered as a “failed” Cuban citizen, but she manages time and again to assert a capacity of agency in the immediate spaces of her reality. One of the most remarkable accomplishments of her formative process is that of having learned how to navigate between the dangerous edges of two sets of opposing codes of conduct: the official rules of the Communist institutions and the unofficial laws of everyday life; the performative practice of the public sphere and the allowed behaviors of the private spaces; and the official discourses of ideological compliance and the disaffected confessions of her intimate writings. One of the observations of her “Adolescence Diaries” summarizes this situation: “We live between what is forbidden and what is required” (Nosotros vivimos entre lo prohibido y lo obligado) (123). It is because of her necessity to adapt and function between two different manuals of conduct, that I consider Nieve’s formative process as a struggle to develop what Desirée Díaz terms as “liminal citizenship.” In Ciudadanías liminales (2021), she develops this concept to approach the ambivalences and contradictions present in post-soviet Cuba. According to Díaz, during the Special Period, “Cuban society enters a schizophrenic time marked by a profound disconnect between the discourse and practices of the state, on the one hand,

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and social reality and life conditions experience by its citizens, on the other.” ([L]a Sociedad cubana se adentra entonces en un periodo esquizofrénico dominado por una profunda desconexión entre el discurso y las prácticas del Estado y el gobierno, por un lado, y por otro, la realidad social, la experiencia vital de los ciudadanos) (14). Notwithstanding the lack of trust in the government and gravity of the schism with official rhetoric and Revolutionary ideology, observes Díaz, Cuban citizens are still required to participate actively and to perform the rituals of a “socialist identity” (15). As a response to this, people develop a new sense of “liminal citizenship,” which she defines as a set of practices and social structures that open alternatives for social transformation and participation in the res publica. Through these forms of minimal but significative agency, Cubans are somehow relearning how to become citizens. Reclaiming and reactivating from below a concept of citizenship—while also revealing unprecedented political subjectivities—they reactivate the public sphere and the criteria of belonging to the nation. (Un conjunto de prácticas y estructuras sociales que abren formas alternativas de transformación social y de participación en la ‘cosa pública’. A través de estas formas mínimas pero significativas los cubanos están, de alguna manera, reaprendiendo a ser ciudadanos, reclamando y reactivando, desde abajo, el concepto de ciudadanía, a la vez que revelan subjetividades políticas inéditas, reactivan la esfera pública y amplían los criterios de pertenencia al cuerpo de la nación.) (38)

In her claims of “edgency” and the performance of small actions of resistance, the main character of Everyone Leaves is actively redefining alternative possibilities of national belonging. One of the main questions Nieve struggles with is, precisely, how to interact with and how to be part of the social groups that symbolically (and in practice) constitute the national body: family, school, social and affective circles, artistic groups, and legal institutions. Nieve’s quotidianity is a constant fight to redefine her political subjectivity and to negotiate the terms of what Díaz perceives in Cuban society as “a double morality, a bifurcated behavior that publicly accepts the guidelines of participation in social revolutionary spheres, while scorning them in private” (una moralidad doble, de un comportamiento bifurcado que aceptaba públicamente los términos de participación en las esferas de socialización revolucionaria mientras los denostaba en el ámbito privado o íntimo) (205). One of the passages where the disconnect between obedience to official discourses and private criticism of obsolete rules appears with more evidence takes place while Nieve is receiving her military instruction:

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I read, write, march, sing the slogans, hand salute, and rest. Orders, orders, orders. Yes, my lieutenant, yes, my lieutenant, yes, my lieutenant. I do not know why we say ‘my’, but he requires us to do it that way. For the lieutenant everything we do has one only mission: kill ‘the enemy’. I do not know that famous enemy [. . .] I am trying to be just one among the others. If this lieutenant wants to single me out, I am lost.” (Leo, escribo, marcho, grito consignas, saludo con la mano en la frente y, en mi lugar, descanso. Órdenes, órdenes, órdenes. Sí, mi teniente, sí, mi teniente, sí mi teniente. No sé por qué ese ‘mi’, pero él nos lo exige de esa manera. Para el teniente todo lo que hagamos tiene una sola misión: matar ‘al enemigo’. No conozco a ese famoso contrincante [. . .] Estoy tratando de ser una más, si a ese teniente le da por cogerla conmigo estoy perdida.) (144)

The narrator is fully aware that there is no correspondence between the training received and reality, but nonetheless she is obligated to comply with the rules. The only way to look after her own interests is to pretend. As an adolescent, she has already acquired one of the basic abilities for social and political survival in Cuba: camouflage. “To be born in Cuba meant to blend in” (Nacer en Cuba ha sido mimetizarme) (12), she had asserted from the very first lines of the novel, foreshadowing the importance of this fundamental skill. To counterbalance this necessary hypocrisy, she resorts to her diary as the private space where she is free to voice her disagreements. The previous entry serves, thus, as an illustration of how for the “new political subjectivities” in Cuba “the ideological discourses of power become an obsolete model with which one lives, but does not allow to live” (el discurso ideológico del poder resulta un modelo obsoleto con el que se convive, pero no se vive) (Díaz 137). Learning to Say Goodbye After reading the novel as an alternative Bildungsroman, it is valid to ask: What are the central tenets of Nieve’s formative process? I consider that

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the two central aspects of her education revolve around the development of a capacity of “edgency” and the ability to perform a liminal citizenship. Unlike the classical Bildungsroman, where the task of the hero consists of acquiring a set knowledge and abilities geared toward the specific goal of becoming an exemplary citizen, I propose to read Guerra’s novel as a formative novel without a telos. Nieve, as a disenchanted individual, skeptic of any type of patriotic heroism, and without any clear perspectives of a personal life project, exemplifies the post-Soviet Cuban “weightless subject” (sujeto ingrávido) studied by Odette Casamayor. For these “weightless subjects,” she observes, History does not appear as the territory for utopia, there is no sense of futurity and therefore “all possibilities and projects” seem to be equally useless (29). Nieve shares this sense of indifference and engages in a learning process that ultimately lacks in objectives. The drive of her social, political, and sentimental education is the mere necessity of survival of staying afloat. As a marginal citizen constantly trying to circulate two opposite norms of conduct and constantly having to experience the grief of abandonment, her formative process is not projected onto the future and does not have a wide social scope. Growing up in Cuba for a young woman like Nieve is a task of daily adaptation, a continuous process of learning strategies of marginal agency, and inventing weapons of resistance and resilience. To close this chapter, let me turn to the last entry of Nieve’s diary, entitled “Recount and confession” (Recuento y confesión). Following the conventions of the Bildungsroman, the novel ends with Nieve’s reaching the age of eighteen, the year that marks the legal status of adulthood in Cuba. Looking back at her personal history, she reflects on her formative process: the knowledges passed on by her mother, the lessons taught by her teachers, the sentimental and artistic education acquired with her romantic partners, and all other fundamental survival tools. From the latter, she highlights, “the training in poverty” (adiestrarte en la pobreza) (259), “a training [in] shame and loyalty” (un entrenamiento [en] la vergüenza y la lealtad) (261), and, finally, the habit of losing and saying goodbye. “I should be used to this,” Nieve concludes, “I have spent my live dwelling with truncated trips, men who leave without saying goodbye, plans that are suffocated by permissions and laws drawn from the panic” (He pasado mi vida conviviendo con viajes truncos, hombres que se van sin despedirse, planes que se asfixian por permisos y leyes trazadas desde el pánico) (261). The final lines of the diary confirm that hers was an anti-heroic narrative that questions the Cuban revolutionary ideals and points to the absence of clear personal or historical projects. It can be read, thus, as an unorthodox Bildungsroman that prepares our protagonist for the continuous disappearance of her world.

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NOTES 1. Another coming-of-age novel with a female protagonist is Karla Suárez’s Silence (Silencios), published in 1999. Similar to Everyone Leaves, Suarez chooses a young girl as a first-person narrator. She also retells her childhood and adolescence during the post-revolutionary period and offers a critical outlook on family and social relationships in Cuba. Erin Hogan traces another series of contemporary cultural products that offer a retrospective of childhood in Cuba. She includes “Carlos Eire’s literary memoirs Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), [. . .] Learning to Die in Miami (2010); Viva Cuba (Cremata Malberti 2005); and La edad de la peseta (Giroud 2006)” (150). 2. Colombian director Sergio Cabrera adapted the novel to a film in 2014. Hogan offers an interpretation of this film and analyses the affective constructions of both the novel and the film. Since the purpose of my chapter is to discuss the novel and the literary narrative strategies, I refer readers interested in the film to Hogan’s insightful study. 3. All translations are from the author. 4. Daniel Mesa Gancedo offers a detailed account of the sentimental and emotional learning of Nieve. In his article “La imagen del yo en la novela-diario femenina del siglo xxi: Todos se van, de Wendy Guerra,” he examines case by case the defining lines of each romantic relationship stablished by Nieve and offers an interpretation of the “defective” portrayal of masculine figures in the novel. 5. Phillipe Lejeune recognizes very precise lines of division between the autobiography and the private journal. Both genres, however, operate based on a “pact” between the author and the reader, which stablishes a relationship of trust. This “autobiographic pact” is defined as a contract that binds the parts to respect and maintain a relation as close as possible to reality. The author is trusted with providing an account that remains faithful to the events as they happen, and the reader is trusted with an information that is received as true and verifiable (12). 6. Mesa Gancedo shares the same opinion. For him, Wendy Guerra’s diary are “germinal” to her fictional creations. To support his claim, he refers to the interviews Sigfredo Ariel and with González Uribe’s interviews with the author (147). Another two interview where she speaks on this subject are her conversations with Camila Cabrera Rodríguez and Álvaro Castillo Granada. 7. The “Special period” (Periodo especial) is a term that has been used to refer to the years of crisis that in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Cuba. The economic and social debacle caused by the loss of the critical support provided by the URSS marked a dramatic change in every aspect of life in Cuba. Scarcity, lack of resources, social unrest, political instability, and a deep ideological and economic turmoil characterized the decade of the 1990s. Marta Hernández Salván succinctly describes this era as period as “a period of profound economic crisis resulting in the partial and very slow economic reform of the last two decades. It is clear that both the symbolic death of socialism and the economic hardship initiated a new period of ideological and emotional convulsion, which is why most scholars rightly consider 1989 as the beginning of a new era” (11).

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8. In her study about gender violence and the hegemony of the masculine figures in the literary panorama of Cuba, Ana Martín Sevillano observes that “in Cuban literature after the 90’s, it was validated for the first time the experience of those who did not conform to the model of the New Man imagined by the revolution: the dissident, the homosexual, the santero, the rebel adolescent, the ill, the exiled and, also, the women” (Sobre la literatura cubana posterior a los años 90 “Por primera vez se validaba en la literatura la experiencia de quienes no se adaptaban al modelo del hombre nuevo imaginado por la revolución: el disidente, el homosexual, el santero, el adolescente rebelde, el enfermo, el exiliado y, también, la mujer”) (176). 9. In The Way of the World, Franco Moretti examines in detail the European Bildungsroman as a symbolic form of modernity and analyzes the stages of the young heroes’ formative process and adaptation to society. 10. María Inés Lagos’s En tono mayor: relatos de formación de protagonista femenina en Hispanoamérica remains one of the classic studies of female Bildungsroman in Hispanic literature. The elements identified by Lagos as characteristic of the female novel of formation are, broadly summarized, the following: (1) the female characters stands in opposition to societal rules, (2) the narration highlights the contrast between the private and public spheres, (3) the protagonists have an acute sense of social boundaries that force them to censor their own actions, (4) the presence and influence of family plays a crucial role in the life of the characters, and (5) the formative process is closely connected with the sociopolitical context of production of the novel. The work of Julia Kuishigian must also be mentioned here as a valuable contribution. In Reconstructing Childhood: Strategies of Reading for Culture and Gender in the Spanish American Bildungsroman, she analyzes different adaptations of this narrative form in the recent history of Latin America. 11. According to Martín Sevillano, there is a clear articulation of a model of masculine hegemony in the context of post-revolutionarly Cuban literature. The productions of this time promote “the image of a masculine state, in relation to which women maintained a subaltern position” (la imagen de un estado masculino en el que la mujer mantenía posiciones subalternas) (177). Her observation highlights how the mythology of the New Man and the ideal of the Revolutionary Hero envisioned by the state and supported by the cultural productions of the time was markedly and unequivocally gendered. 12. According to Odette Casamayor, Nieve’s relation to the sense of heroism, the foundation of the Revolutionary mythology, “is complicated not only because her views on ware are determined by the negative influence that the Cuban participation in the war in Angola had for her own life, but also because since childhood her generation has been forced to maintain an uneasy relationship with the revolutionary pantheon” (es complicada no solamente porque su visión de la guerra está determinada por las nocivas influencias que en su propia vida tuvo la contienda cubana en Angola sino porque desde la infancia los de su generación han sido conminados a mantener una extraña relación con el panteón heroico revolucionario) (285). The heroic logic for Nieve’s generation departs from a position of forced gratitude. “They are grateful for something they do not know directly, but only through an ideological rhetoric and the History books” (agradecimiento por algo que no se conoce sino es a través de la retórica ideológica y los libros de Historia.) (286).

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WORKS CITED Angel, Alba Lucía. Estaba la pájara pinta. Barcelona: Argos, 1984. Ariel, Sigfredo. “Wendy Guerra: Bajo el ala del sombrero. Entrevista.” Cubaliteraria, 2006. June 25, 2014. http://www​.cubaliteraria​.com​/articulo​.php. Boullosa, Carmen. Antes. México D.F: Punto de lectura, 1999. Cabrera, Sergio, Dir. Todos se van. A cuatro manos, 2014. Cabrera Rodríguez, Camila. “Wendy Guerra Naked in Havana.” Oncubanews, February 25, 2014. https://oncubanews​.com​/en​/styles​-trends​/technologies​-of​-communication​-and​-media​/wendy​-guerra​-naked​-in​-havana/. Accessed October 3, 2021. Casamayor Cisneros, Odette. Utopía, distopía e ingravidez. Reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Verbuet, 2013. Castellano, Rosario. Balún Canán. México D.F: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997. Castillo Granada, Álvaro. “Wendy Guerra y la literatura cubana.” Revista Universidad De Antioquia, November 2019. revis​​tas​.u​​dea​.e​​du​.co​​/inde​​x​.php​​/revi​​staud​​ea​/ar​​ticle​​​/ view​​/3404​​84. Accessed October 3, 2021. Cremata Malberti, Juan Carlos, Dir. Viva Cuba. Quad Productions, 2005. Díaz, Désirée. Ciudadanías liminales: Vida cotidiana y espacio urbano en la Cuba postsoviética. Leiden: Almenara, 2021. Eire, Carlos. Learning to Die in Miami. Philadelphia: Free Press, 2010. ———. Waiting for Snow in Havana. Philadelphia: Free Press, 2003. Giroud, Pavel, Dir. La edad de la peseta. ICAIC, Mediapro, 2006. González Uribe, Guillermo. “Un grito desde la Habana. Entrevista con Wendy Guerra.” Revista Número, no. 51, 2006. http://revistanumero​.net​/2006​/51​/wendy​ .html. Accessed June 25, 2014. Guerra, Wendy. Todos se van. Barcelona: Bruguera, 2006. Herández Salván, Martha. Mínima Cuba: Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015. Hogan, Erin. “The Diary of a Young Cuban Girl Nieve Guerra in Todos se van (Wendy Guerra 2006; Sergio Cabrera 2014).” In The Feeling Child: Affect and politics in Latin American literature and film. Edited by Philippa Page, Inela Selimovic, and Camilla Sutherland. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018, pp. 145–171. Kushigian, Julia. Reconstructing Childhood: Strategies of Reading for Culture and Gender in the Spanish American Bildungsroman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003. Lagos, María Inés. En tono mayor: relatos de formación de protagonista femenina en Hispanoamérica. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1996. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Editions DuSeuil, 2015. ———. On Diary. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak. Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2009. Michel, Charlotte. “El juego de los géneros en Wendy Guerra – Narrativa: Todos se van.” La Clé des Langues, 2011. cle​.e​​ns​-ly​​on​.fr​​/espa​​gnol/​​litte​​ratur​​e​/lit​​terat​​ure​-l​​ atino​​-amer​​icain​​e​/la-​​dicta​​ture-​​dans-​​la​-li​​ttera​​ture/​​el​-ju​​ego​-d​​e​-los​​-gene​​​ros​-e​​n​-wen​​dy​ -gu​​erra-​​narra​​tiva.​ Accessed June 25, 2014.

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Parra, Teresa de la. Ifigenia. Caracas: Monteávila Editores, 1976. Richardson, Nathan. “A Red Too Much: Intimate Politics in Wendy Guerra’s Todos Se Van.” In Novels for the End of a World. UTSA Libraries, 2021. Scott, James. The Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Sevillano, Ana Belén Martín. “Violencia de género en la narrativa cubana contemporánea: deseo femenino y masculinidad hegemónica.” Hispanic Review, vol. 82. no. 2, 2014, pp. 175–197. Suárez, Karla. Silencios. Madrid: Lengua de trapo, 1999.

Chapter 9

School Bullying as a Metaphor for the Sociopolitical Situation in Castro’s Cuba “A la vencida va la tercera” by Yomar González and Camionero by Sebastián Miló Nicolás Balutet

Although two eminent Peruvian writers, César Vallejo and Mario Vargas Llosa, have dealt with school bullying, the aggressive and hurtful behavior of students toward one another, which is repeated and endured (Catheline, Le harcèlement scolaire 5),1 few Spanish American novelists or filmmakers have made this theme the focus of their work. Cuba is no exception. Some recent films, very well analyzed by Hamlet Fernández,2 focus on childhood, its joys, and difficulties, but only two works—as far as I have been able to identify—address the issue of bullying directly. These two works are Yomar González’s short story “A la vencida va la tercera” and Sebastián Miló’s short film Camionero, inspired by González’s narrative. Nicole Catheline identifies three types of harassment: direct (teasing, derogatory nicknames, beatings, material damage), indirect (rumors, ostracism), and cyberbullying (on social media) (13). This chapter focuses on direct harassment, a strategy that, according to Catheline, is much more common among young males (15). In the short film, Randy (Antonio Alonso Ramírez) is harassed by Yerandy (Reinier Díaz) and three of his friends. For a long period, no one dares to speak up, until Raidel (Héctor Medina), fed up with the situation, responds in protest. The same situation occurs in Yomar González’s story in which Frandy and the anonymous narrator are harassed by several students. Both Camionero and “A la vencida va la tercera” reflect on the cruel strategies of mistreatment—underlined in the literary text by the numerous syntactic repetitions: thefts of quilt, food, and personal objects; 137

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throwing of shoes; blows to the buttocks, face, and belly; igniting small pieces of paper on the fingers; toothpaste on the butt; defecation in shoes or bed; imposed and humiliating singing. Perhaps the most shocking abuse, both in the film and in the story, is the spitting, which is described in the latter in these terms: many checking their lungs and spitting, getting the catarrh out of their bones; and the saliva goes into the open mouth that first swallows it and then fills with spit after spit, fills up, drips down the chin and neck. (muchos revisando en sus pulmones y escupiendo, sacando el catarro hasta de sus huesos; y la saliva va a la boca abierta que primero traga y después se va llenando de escupitajo tras escupitajo, se repleta, se desborda, chorrea hasta el mentón y el cuello.) (González 211–212)3

As observed by many scholars, the consequences of bullying are dramatic. Victims can suffer stress, discouragement,4 a permanent feeling of threat, anguish, insecurity, depression, and intense loneliness, which can lead to suicide (Bresson 315; Galand 21; Monneret 143). Signs of discouragement can be identified in the short movie when Randy wears his shirt out of his oversized pants, signaling an internalized bewilderment and despair (12:56). We can also recognize other of these symptoms in Frandy/Randy when, as a consequence of the cruel treatment suffered by his abusers, the victimized characters end up taking pills (González 212–213), trying to slit their wrists (González 212), and jumping from a school building (González 215).5 Supported by studies of psychologists like Nancy Bresson, Nicole Catheline, Claude Monneret and philosophers Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and René Girard, this chapter studies issues of difference, violence, scapegoating, silence, and revenge in the context of school bullying. This study demonstrates that the works by González and Miló go beyond the simple denunciation of the school’s inability to protect students from the excesses of violence. Both in the short story and film, bullying is treated as a metaphor of the sociopolitical situation in Castro’s Cuba and serves to deconstruct the Martí and Guevara myth of the “new man,” who attacks individual freedom and denies differences and otherness. José Martí expressed on numerous occasions the need to reconcile manual work and intellectual training. The book Escuela Secundaria Básica en el Campo: una innovación educativa en Cuba by Max Figueroa, Abel Prieto, and Raúl Gutiérrez includes some of Martí’s quotes on this topic (2–3). In his text “Educación científica” the apostle of Cuban independence considered, for example, that “to divorce the man from the land is a monstrous attack” (divorciar al hombre de la tierra, es un atentado monstruoso) and, in his idea of making “the new man emerge” (surgir al hombre nuevo), he was fighting

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for a new education that linked physical and intellectual work (86; vol. 11). A few years after its establishment, the Fidel Castro regime decided to apply Martí’s precepts. In 1966, it instituted the “School to the Countryside” program in the province of Camagüey (Figueroa, Prieto, and Gutiérrez 14), before expanding it from the 1968 to 1969 school year (Figueroa, Prieto, and Gutiérrez 17). Specifically, the entire campus of a high school moved to the countryside for forty-five days for the students to engage in agricultural work. In the early 1970s, without abandoning the school to the countryside, it also started to develop it in the countryside. Six hundred adolescents, mostly from the cities, spent the entire academic year in a boarding school in an educational center, an ESBEC (Escuela Secundaria Básica en el Campo—Basic High School in the Countryside), where they combined agricultural work and study (Carnoy and Werthein 16). The becados (grant-holders), as they were called, were divided into two mixed groups: some attended classes in the morning, while others were in the field doing agricultural work, and they alternated in the second half of the day. The students had two nights off per week and three nights of school study and could go home during the weekends (Torre; “This is the new school, this is the new home . . .”).6 It is in one of these schools in the countryside in the 1970s and 1980s where the story “A la vencida va la tercera” and the short film Camionero take place. The bullying is not exclusive to the school system in the countryside, since, as Antonio Enrique González Rojas rightly emphasizes, “The establishment of [. . .] relationships of tribalization, domination, and annihilation to its worst consequences” (el establecimiento de [. . .] relaciones de tribalización, dominio y aniquilación hasta sus peores consecuencias) (26) is found in many other human settings. Cuba, it must be noted, has a lower rate than other Latin American countries.7 However, contrary to what Magali Kabous believes, I contend that Yomar González’s story and Sebastián Miló’s short film go beyond the simple denunciation of the Cuban school’s inability to protect students from the excesses of violence. The school bullying appears in both works as a metaphor for the sociopolitical situation in the Caribbean country. According to Louis Althusser (96–97), each nation has numerous ideological state apparatuses that allow it to establish its control and protect its interests.8 The French philosopher alludes to the different churches, the family, the media, the culture, but also the school system. The school plays, in fact, an essential role in the reproduction of the social system and the legitimization of the dominant ideology. The Castro regime aspired for an integral training in boarding schools—that brought together life, intellectual, and manual work—aimed at developing “a great spirit of fraternity, a collectivist mentality” (un gran espíritu de confraternidad, una mentalidad colectivista) (Figueroa, Prieto, and Gutiérrez 18). Nonetheless, this enterprise concealed another project: taking adolescents away from the influence of the family in

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order to shape and reeducate them and create the “new man” so longed for by Ernesto Guevara.9 This hombre nuevo was supposed to be a revolutionary Cuban, defender of patriotic values and heroes. And, therefore, a person easily controlled by and dependent on the state. This project refers to the biopower that Michel Foucault theorized, which consists of the disciplinary techniques that allow for the production of homogeneous, docile, and obedient bodies (Genel). The prototype of the “new man” translates to a form of dogmatism and intolerance on many levels: sexual—since only the heterosexual man, supposedly manly, is praised; religious—atheism must be encouraged and Catholicism is seen as bourgeois; and artistic—because the works are directed toward specific and utilitarian ends. Thus, Cubans not only lose their individual freedom but are also punished if they deviate from this model of conduct. The characters of Frandy/Randy, like any victim of school bullying, differ from this model, especially when observed through the eyes of their abusers (Camuset, Zampirollo, Rivière, Wiart, Berdin and Média 56; Catheline, “Le chemin vers le bouc émissaire” 22; Monneret 141). In his case, the difference is no relative, as it would be the case of a related to a studious student in a dispersed class, for example. They do not only stand out in the conditions of their environment. Frandy/Randy faces a double, and even triple, absolute difference: it is part of his personality and physique (Catheline, Le harcèlement scolaire 32). In addition, both Frandy and Randy are calm and quiet boys, to whom a certain weakness is attributed and, therefore, a supposed homosexual condition. Both the novel and the film emphasize that the character does not have a girlfriend or talk about women (González 212).10 Another reason for his humiliation comes from the fact that Randy keeps a religious postcard from the Cuba of the 1970s.11 Because of his lean physique, he also receives the nickname of camellito (little camel) in the film. This is another point in common with the thin Frandy who, in “A la vencida va la tercera,” is said to have a long neck that gives him the appearance of a giraffe or a crustacean (jaiba) (González 212). Faced with the blindness or passivity of adults who are supposed to guarantee,12 Yerandy and his friends—as well as the anonymous group in the story—feel authorized to use violence against Frandy/Randy. The ultimate goal of these abusers is to expel those who deviate from the group and its ideals. The adolescent has all the characteristics of the scapegoat, the one who sacrifices himself in the Judeo-Christian tradition to keep a group together (Bresson 314; Catheline 22). The anonymous narrator of “A la vencida va la tercera” very clearly states that Frandy “represents” everyone else (González 212). If peace returns after the sacrifice, from a psychoanalytic point of view, such behavior translates into discomfort and fragility. Psychology studies demonstrate, in fact, that the use of a scapegoat, whether in the context of

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school bullying or elsewhere, puts a finger on the suffering that one tries to hide. Aggression is nothing more than a sign of self-loathing, a defense mechanism, and a narcissistic statement (Camuset, Zampirollo, Rivière, Wiart, Berdin, and Média 57–59; Monneret 141–142). Even if at first glance the popular and handsome Yerandy seems very different from Randy, they have many elements in common, starting with almost the same name, which symbolically points to the similarities in their identities. Therefore, by harassing Randy, it seems that Yerandy tries to remove from himself something that frightens him in his own personality. Nicole Catheline writes: In his victim, the bully recognizes a flaw that he does not want to see in himself. The two have much in common. However, they accommodate their weaknesses in radically different manners. The stalker often practices denial (“I’m not like that”), while the victim practices avoidance (“I don’t understand why I’m suffering from this”). Both the victim and the bully often have one element in common: they feel different. This reality, one denies it, the other avoids it. (Le harcèlement scolaire 27–28)13

But, what does Yerandy’s “failure” consist of? Like many young people of his age, it could be related to a question of his own sexuality. The scenes in the showers—one of the commonplaces for bullying—shot in a greenish and, therefore, negative color; the toilets; changing rooms; hallways; buses; queues; and school restaurants, have an obvious background of sexual abuse (Camuset, Zampirollo, Rivière, Wiart, Berdin, and Média 57; Catheline, “Le chemin vers le bouc émissaire” 23; Le harcèlement scolaire 72–73). This becomes much more evident when Yerandy urinates in Randy’s mouth (03:41–04:28.); asks him to take “the microphone,” that is, his penis (03:59); caresses his cheek in a loving gesture (02:29); and calls him “my love” (02:55). The behavior of Yerandy’s followers would support this sexual hypothesis.14 According to René Girard’s theory of “mimetic desire,” human desire is not fixed according to a linear trajectory (subject-object) but imitates the desire of another, following a triangular diagram of subject-model-object. The trio of bullies (subject), composed of dependent and impressionable persons (Monneret 144), would, therefore, start to violate Randy (object) since he had perceived the desire of Yerandy (model). Yerandy, as an incarnation of Castro’s power and ideals in the closed micro-society of the school—which, at its turn, symbolizes the isolated and withdrawn situation of the entire country—is in charge of punishing and expelling the other who is different.15 However, how ironical it would be if, behind this “exacerbated manhood,” there was something “suspicious” as Sebastián Miló himself stated in an interview (García Borrero 60)? This criticism of Castroism is also perceived through Yerandy’s father who is a

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state official who benefits from the advantages of his position. In the film, he appears in his white Lada, sporting a shining guayabera, and friendly conversing with the school director (11:55).16 One of the most striking aspects of the works is the silencing of Frandy/ Randy, who put up with their desperate situation without daring to open their mouths (González 211–212). They will suffer from alexithymia, a frequent disorder among bullied students (Catheline Le harcèlement scolaire 52). This condition is manifested as the inability to connect emotions and ideas, as a result of the physical and psychological destruction to which abused individuals are subjected. This process is perfectly indicated by the narrator of the story through syntactic anaphors: “Frandy’s mouth was sewn up [. . .]. Frandy’s hands were cut off [. . .]. Frandy’s legs were cut off [. . .]. Frandy’s eyes were closed [. . .]. Frandy’s sex was cut off” (A Frandy le cosieron la boca [. . .]. A Frandy le cortaron las manos [. . .]. A Frandy le cortaron las piernas [. . .]. A Frandy le cerraron los ojos [. . .]. A Frandy le cortaron el sexo) (González 212–213). At this point, Raidel and the anonymous narrator take over the narration. They both share a common fear and desire to protect themselves from the bullies. They also share the rage against the mistreatment suffered by Frandy/Randy and their own guilty silence. They do not dare to defend their friend in order to avoid becoming the new target of the gang. However, their fears come true, triggering a tragic outcome. If Raidel’s situation changes due to his opposition to Yerandy,17 the case of the anonymous narrator of the story is more reminiscent of what Frandy suffered. Like Frandy, he too has something that makes him different: a “light, deceptive, but detectable” hump (ligera, engañosa, pero detectable joroba) (González 211) for which he is mocked: Oh, Camellito, what a hump, what a hump, what a hump, and it seems that they will never finish, they do not get bored, they do not get tired, everyone comes to have fun, let’s throw some pasta at them. Let’s light papers in his fingers, let’s spit on him, let’s hit him with that clown hump, let’s make him vomit on his sheet, let’s force him to cry and ask for mercy before us, look at him here, ridiculous, shrinking and enduring, harder, make this board vibrate on his hump. (ay Camellito qué joroba, qué joroba, qué joroba y parece que nunca van a terminar, no se aburren, no se cansan, vengan todos a divertirse, echémosle pasta. Encendamos papeles en sus dedos, escupámoslo, golpeémosle esa giba payasa, hagámoslo vomitar sobre su sábana, forcémoslo a llorar a pedir piedad ante nosotros, mírenlo aquí, ridículo, encogido y soportando, más duro, hagan vibrar esta tabla en su joroba.) (González 214)

The murder of the bullies and the cruelty that Raidel and the anonymous narrator employs are a metaphor for the situation under Castroism. An example of this can be highlighted in the following passage:

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I cut, I bury, I penetrate, I spit, I cut again, and they wake up surprised, how is it possible to feel such a sharp pain in the abdomen and to see the blood coming out, how is it possible that my face is deformed with three deep marks if I only slept peacefully, dreamed of a woman and her humidity, how is it possible to wake up and find myself still asleep. (corto, entierro, penetro, escupo, vuelvo a cortar y ellos despiertan sorprendidos, cómo es posible sentir en el abdomen un dolor tan agudo y ver la sangre saliendo, cómo es posible que mi cara esté deformada con tres zanjas profundas si yo sólo dormía plácidamente, soñaba con una mujer y su humedad, cómo es posible despertar y encontrarme todavía dormido.) (González 214). (22:36–24:06)

Subjected to arbitrariness and violence, condemned to silence and blind obedience, the Cubans have nothing left but to act like their own executioners. Such seems to be the great lesson of the school where many symbols related to death can be seen: the number eight in one of the trees in front of a bust of José Martí (16:44–16:47) or the pointed shapes that emerge with the shadow of the truck on the way to the field (15:24-15:28). The criticism of Castroism that I find in Camionero also appears in Yomar Gonzalez’s story in another form. The anonymous narrator has two obsessions: to be a truck driver and to become independent. The truck would allow the character to be alone, away from his bullies,18 but it is also the weapon that, in his dreams of revenge, brings down his enemies: then I see the first bump and I ram it, the second and I ram it, the third, the fourth, it is an endless row of bumps. The truck’s fender is covered with a bloody crust, the rain cannot clean the clots, I do not try to avoid them, I defend myself, I only defend myself, or I curl up in a corner of the bed and wait for the arrival of the shadows, of the endless line over me. (entonces veo el primer bulto y lo embisto, el segundo y lo embisto, el tercero, el cuarto, es una fila interminable de bultos. La defensa del camión se va cubriendo de una costra sanguinolenta, la lluvia no puede limpiar los coágulos, no trato de esquivarlos, me defiendo, sólo me defiendo o me ovillo en una esquina de la cama y espero la llegada de las sombras, de la fila interminable sobre mí.) (González 213)

Thanks to the truck, he has access to freedom, and he imagines the future in a context other than Cuba: the repeated references to the American brand Mack, the female model embodied by “Jaqueline O’Donell, Miss Arizona 1983” (González 213), and the newly paved highway are elements that refer

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to the dream of another horizon, that of the United States (González 213–214). Contrary to Castro’s revolutionary project that advocates homogenizing the entire population to better control it, the narrator wants to be someone who takes charge of his own destiny, and does not adhere to a fate that is imposed on him and on everyone else (González 211). Likewise, the inversion of the saying “A la tercera va la vencida” in the title of the story could translate this desire into a fight against oppression to avoid being defeated by the system. In El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba, one of the teacher’s readings as seen in the short film (13:36), Ernesto Guevara regrets that the pre-revolutionary system is nothing but “a race of wolves: you can only get there with the failure of others” (una carrera de lobos: solamente se puede llegar sobre el fracaso de otros) (8). However, according to the works of Yomar González and Sebastián Miló, it seems that the Castro regime could not successfully alter the meaning of the famous Latin motto Lupus est homo homini (A man is a wolf to another man) or does not know the rest of the sentence: non homo quom qualis sit non novit (not a man when he does not know who the other one is).19 Even worse, he transforms peaceful sheep-like Raidel and the anonymous narrator of the story, who only dream of some happiness, into fierce wolves. NOTES 1. In Paco Yunque and La ciudad y los perros respectively. 2. Viva Cuba (Juan Carlos Cremata, 2005), La edad de la peseta (Pavel Giroud, 2006), Habanastation (Ian Padrón, 2011), Y, sin embargo (Rudy Mora, 2011), La piscina (Carlos M. Quintela, 2011), Conducta (Ernesto Daranas, 2014), Crepúsculo (Juan Pablo Daranas, 2015), Esteban (Jonal Cosculluela, 2016), and Club de Jazz (Esteban Insausti, 2018). 3. The translation is by the author. In the short film, 04:28; 17:20-18:09. 4. Randy wears his shirt out of his oversized pants, which could translate his bewilderment and despair. See in Camionero from 12:56. 5. In the short film, 24:16-24:30. 6. On the education and school system in Castro’s Cuba and the socialist ideals taught, see Álvarez Figueroa, Orrego Rodríguez, and Domínguez. 7. As noted by Rodney Rodríguez and García Leyva in “school abuse: invisible problem?” 8. It is necessary not to confuse them with the State apparatus (government, administration, army, police, courts, etc.). 9. If José Martí had already spoken of the “new man,” in the context of Castro’s Cuba, this expression refers to a famous essay by Ernesto Guevara entitled El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (Socialism and the Man in Cuba), first published in 1965 in the Uruguayan journal Marcha under the title “From Algiers to Marcha. The Cuban Revolution today” and, the same year, in Cuba, in the journal of the armed

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forces, Verde Olivo. As Michael Lowy well explains, Ernesto Guevara, following the example of many other great revolutionaries, wants to change the world but also men: “The revolution for them was not only a transformation of social structures, of institutions, of the regime, but also a profound, radical, and overwhelming transformation of men, of their conscience, of their customs, values, and uses, of their social relations” (27). 10. In the short film, Randy is nicknamed paja because “he never talks about women” [08:10]. 11. 08:19-08:27; and from 13:29. 12. In this regard, it is interesting to note the attitude of the head teacher of the shelter who, instead of watching over the sleep of the boys, has sex with a female student while Randy suffers a new abuse (15:02 and following). Both scenes are brought together by a pleasant melody, “La muchacha de la valija” by Fausto Papetti. Pilar Ayuso believes that this musical background “works as a resource of distancing in the face of the sordidness it shows” (funciona como recurso de distanciamiento ante la sordidez que muestra). 13. The translation from the original in French is by the author. 14. In Camionero, the group is composed of students who, according to the director Sebastián Miló himself, correspond to “three very specific archetypes: the mulatto, the fat man, and the individual with a supposedly sinister or flabby appearance” (tres arquetipos muy específicos: el mulato, el gordo y el individuo de aspecto supuestamente siniestro o patibulario) (Leyva Caballero 154). 15. On the connection between homo/lesbophobic bullying and pre-university education in Cuba, see Garcés-Marrero. 16. See Sierra Madero. 17. From 13:57. It should be noted that Raidel hides another difference that makes him similar to Randy: his religious beliefs [01:02-01:22; 19:26-19:48]. 18. In the short film, Randy also wants to be a truck driver to “be alone and far from everything here” (estar solo y lejos de todo aquí). See 09:03-09:33. 19. This motto is accurately remembered by González Rojas (29).

WORK CITED “Abuso escolar: ¿problema invisible?” Rouslyncuba​.wordpress​.co​m, 11 July 2014. rousl​​ y ncub​​ a ​ . wor​​ d pres​​ s ​ . com​​ / 2014​​ / 07 ​ / 1​​ 1 ​ / abu​​ s o​ - es​​ c olar​​ - prob​​​ l ema-​​ i nvis​​ i ble.​ Accessed 17 June 2020. Althusser, Louis. Positions. Paris: Éditions sociales, 1976. Álvarez Figueroa, Oneida. “El sistema educativo cubano en los noventa.” Papers, no. 52, 1997, pp. 115–137. Ayuso, Pilar. “Camionero: tragedia griega a la cubana.” El Nuevo Herald, 7 February 2014. www​.elnuevoherald​.com​/ultimas​-noticias​/article2030725​.html. Accessed 15 June 2020. Bresson, Nancy. “Le bouc émissaire : en élève en danger.” Les Collectifs du Cirp, no. 2, 2011, pp. 311–317.

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Camuset, Christine, Nathalie Zampirollo, Marie-Hélène Rivière, Carole Wiart, Sylvia Berdin, and Martin Média. “Harcèlement entre élèves.” Le Journal des psychologues, no. 283, 2010, pp. 56–61. Carnoy, Martín, and Jorge Werthein. “Cambio económico y reforma educativa en Cuba.” Revista del Centro de Estudios Educativos, vol. VII, no. 1, 1977, pp. 9–31. Catheline, Nicole. “Le chemin vers le bouc émissaire.” L’école des parents, no. 594, 2012, pp. 22–24. ———. Le harcèlement scolaire. Paris: Que sais-je?, 2018. Domínguez, María Isabel. “Educación superior en Cuba e inclusión social de las juventudes.” Nómadas, no. 44, 2016, pp. 83–103. “Ésta es la nueva escuela, ésta es la nueva casa...” Memorias de Cuba, 29 March 2020. memor​​iasde​​cuba.​​blog/​​esta-​​es​-la​​-nuev​​a​​-esc​​uela.​ Accessed 18 June 2020. Fernández, Hamlet. “Niñez, educación y sociedad en el cine cubano contemporáneo.” La Fuga, no. 24, 2020. 2016.​​lafug​​a​.cl/​​ninez​​-educ​​acion​​-y​-so​​cieda​​d​-en-​​el​-ci​​ne​-cu​​ bano-​​cont​e​​mpora​​neo​/1​​007. Accessed 19 March 2021. Figueroa, Max, Abel Prieto, and Raúl Gutiérrez. La Escuela Secundaria Básica en el Campo: una innovación educativa en Cuba. Paris: UNESCO, 1974. Galand, Benoît. “Le ‘harcèlement entre élves’, phénomène méconnu ?” Cahiers pédagogiques, no. 488, 2011, pp. 21–22. Garcés-Marrero, Roberto, “Acoso homo-lesbofóbico y educación preuniversitaria en Cuba: estudio de caso.” Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 1–20. García Borrero, Juan A. “A propósito del corto Camionero.” Espacio Laical, no. 4, 2012, pp. 58–60. Genel, Katia. “Le biopouvoir chez Foucault et Agamben.” Methodos, no. 4, 2004. journals​.openedition​.org​/methodos​​/131. Accessed 24 June 2020. Girard, René. Mensonge romantique et vérité Romanesque. Paris: Grasset, 1999. González, Yomar. “A la vencida va la tercera.” In Maneras de narrar. Cuentos del Premio La Gaceta de Cuba (1993–2005), edited by Haydée Arango. La Habana: Ediciones Unión, 2006, pp. 211–215. González Rojas, Antonio Enrique. “Camionero, una historia de violencia.” In Voces en la niebla. Un lustro de joven audiovisual cubano (2010–2015). La Habana: Ediciones Claustrofobias, 2016, pp. 25–29. Guevara, Ernesto. El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba. La Habana: Ocean Sur, 2007. Kabous, Magali. “Vivre sa révolution dans la Révolution.” Cinémas d’Amérique latine, no. 23, 2015. journ​​als​.o​​pened​​ition​​.org/​​cinel​​atino​​​/1931​. Accessed 15 June 2020. Leyva Caballero, Rolando. “Yo no tengo miedo. Abuso escolar y lucha de clases en Camionero, e Sebastián Miló.” Revista académica liLETRAd, no. 2, 2016, pp. 151–158. Lowy, Michael. La pensée de Che Guevara. Paris: Maspero, 1970. Martí, José. “Educación científica.” In Obras completas, Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1975. www​.josemarti​.cu​/publicacion​/educacion​-cientifica. Accessed 23 June 2020. ———. Obras completas. La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1965.

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Miló, Sebastián. Camionero, 2012. www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=J1YrItXHA2E. Accessed 20 May 2020. Monneret, Claude. “Le harcèlement scolaire, une haine narcissique.” Enfances & Psy, no. 82, 2019, pp. 139–147. Orrego Rodríguez, Mae Liz, Política educacional cubana. Repercusiones de sus métodos y contenido. Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 2008. Rodney Rodríguez, Yoanka, and Mirta Veneranda García Leyva. “Acoso escolar en Cuba. ¿Qué dicen las investigaciones?” Novedades en población, no. 31, 2020, pp. 200–213. Sierra Madero, Abel. “Camionero: violencia y pedagogía revolucionaria.” Diario de Cuba, 30 March 2013. diari​​odecu​​ba​.co​​m​/cul​​tura/​​13645​​97897​​_24​56​​.html​. Accessed 15 June 2020.

Part IV

THE SUBALTERNITIES OF MINORS VIOLENCE, SEXUAL ABUSE, AND DISABILITIES

Chapter 10

Children, Ghosts, and Masks in the Mexican Narco-Zone—A Mediated Agency A Comparative Analysis of Four Fiction Films and Documentaries Sophie Dufays

In this chapter I will focus on the question of agency of the child characters in four recent Mexican films that depict a dystopian world dominated by the organized crime—a generalized “Narco Zone.”1 In the following two fictions and two documentaries, I will analyze to which extent the agency of children, or the lack of it, is expressed through an embodied experience that takes into account their bodies, faces, and voices. I also study how the supraindividual notions of memory and suerte (at once “luck” and “destiny”) influence or predetermine their actions. To understand the hybrid, ambivalent quality of the children’s agency in the films and develop a comparison between fictions and documentaries, I examine the mediation performed by the masks and the ghostly elements. Children’s Agency in Latin American Films In the academic studies on the child in Latin American cinema, we can distinguish in broad outline two perspectives, related to two cinematic ways of approaching the child and framing his or her gaze, body and voice. They correspond to different conceptions of the child’s agency. From a traditional representational perspective, the child appears first and foremost as a figure (a symbol, a metaphor, an allegory) standing for general or abstract notions, such as nation, nature, innocence, authenticity, or humanity (Rocha and 151

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Seminet 2012; Dufays 2014; Donald et al. 2017).2 The Latin American child films3 using this perspective often offer a narrative based on the structure of a coming-of-age process that either follows or inverts the Western literary model of the Bildungsroman.4 According to this model, the child moves from a passive position to a more active and autonomous role (figuring a national emancipation or mourning process), or on the contrary, he or she has no possibility of growth or personal transformation and might even end up killed, revealing the inequalities of the modernization progresses.5 The possible “agency” of the child in these films is understood in a dualistic opposition to passive victimhood. Agency here is an adult-like ability to accomplish actions in the world and to master one’s destiny thanks to a certain amount of luck; something that children may learn and have but that their contexts of misery, marginality, and violence prevent them to exert.6 This conception corresponds to what Marah Gubar calls a “deficit model” of childhood, following which “adults have agency; children have less of it” (2016: 298). Recently, the Anglo-Saxon field of childhood studies has informed other perspectives that have been applied to the study of films, especially the ones produced from the mid-1990s. This was a period of renewal for Latin American cinema; a growing number of productions of the new millennium offered a different approach to the children’s embodied experience and subjectivity (Rocha and Seminet 2014; Randall 2017; Martin 2019), and understood their agency within these categories. In other words, agency was reclaimed as something that has to do with what children are in any situation, independently from their specific learning process. If “the figure of the child [. . .] oscillates between agency and allegory” (Donald et al. 2017: 2), this oscillation is frequently presented as a binary opposition, one between a representation that objectifies, essentializes, reifies, or idealizes the child, and an exploration of his/her embodied perception and affective presence.7 Mexican fictional film Cochochi (2009) or the documentary Los herederos (2008)8—as well as the “global child films” studied by Susan Ferguson— explore “children’s subjectivity in a non-essentialized manner, focusing not simply on what she does or doesn’t accomplish in the world, but also on how she exists in and interacts with and within the world” (Ferguson 2013). These films manifest a resistance against, or even a refusal of, the “development” paradigm that considers the child as a future adult who has to acquire adult characteristics.9 Instead, these cinematic productions are interested in capturing and revealing the children coming-into-being along a non-teleological, open-ended process. While the child characters in these movies may still be perceived as powerless victims, they are nevertheless able to appropriate, influence, and transform their environment through their imaginative and sensual engagement with its material dimension. This engagement is manifest in the context of playing. This is precisely what Ferguson analyzes

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in film sequences that portray child characters refashioning and recreating the world through their ludic practices. In such sequences, furthermore, the permanent uncertainty about the nature of their performance is particularly acute, as they lead us to wonder to which extent the children are acting (that they play) or simply being in front of the camera with which (degree of) self-consciousness.10 A large number of Latin American films of the new millennium manifest a strong neorealist, documentary-like perspective in their observation of children as natural phenomena—or their attempt to capture their naturalistic performance. However, they differ from the neorealist model in different ways. While neorealist cinema from the 1950s–1960s posited the child as a witness, highlighting his or her gaze within a predominantly visual paradigm of representation, the new child films recur to “sensory, haptic and affective cinematic techniques” (Randall 2017: 197) that invite to “tactile or embodied forms of spectatorship” evoking “immersive childhood relations to the world” (Martin 2019: 178–179). From this perspective, the child’s agency appears as the result of an experience of the body, conceived of as a site of unmediated affects, that is, a body less controlled and repressed by consciousness, culture, and language. For Rachel Randall the children’s experience expresses the “agency of nature” or the “agency of existence,” displaying “alternative forms of subjectivity in film, which are not tied to the use of language” (195).11 This perspective insists on the child’s alterity or otherness (cf. also Lury 2010; Rocha and Seminet 2014), following what Marah Gubar calls “a difference model theory of childhood’s agency” based on the idea that “adults have one kind of agency; children have a different kind” (Gubar 2016: 297). For my part, I contend that children’s agency, even when understood in function of body actions and affects, does not exclude consciousness and verbalization. My position is in agreement with that of other scholars, such as the sociologist Allison James, for whom “the concept of embodiment emphasizes [. . .] the situated agency of the body and a view of the body as not divorced from the conscious, thinking and intentional mind” (27). This precision is important since the films I will analyze give a significant place to children’s verbal language as well as to their body gestures and sensations. Inspired by Latour’s actor-network theory, Alan Prout states that children are hybrids of culture and nature. For him, children’s agency does not need to be conceived as a pure effect of their natural material presence, affects, and bodies in opposition to their cultural representations, but, rather, as an “interplay of representations and materialities” (12). It is “less [. . .] an essential attribute of children and more [. . .] an effect of the connections made between a heterogeneous array of materials, including bodies, representations and technologies” (2). This view highlights the way in which, in the films I will

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examine, children’s bodies are indeed connected to certain cultural objects and representations, in particular, to masks and ghosts. When understood as an adult-like ability to control one’s actions, or as an essential child’s mode of being, the notion of agency entails a separation between childhood and adulthood. But Prout and James’s conception emphasizes the commonality of experience and humanity shared by adults and children alike.12 What Gubar names a “kinship-model approach to children’s agency” also implies that children are “actors who are simultaneously scripted and scripting” (2016: 295), a metaphor specially fitting to study the role of children in cinema. Children’s Agency in Dystopian Mexican Narco-Zones In the contemporary panorama of organized criminality in Mexico, children are victims of all kinds of direct violence including murder, abduction, sexual exploitation, disappearance, forcible recruitment, and enforced displacement.13 These are also the treats faced by the child protagonists of the fictional films Vuelven (2017) and Cómprame un revolver (2018), as well as of the documentary Los niños del éxodo (2019). But, in this context, it is also important to consider other indirect forms of violence experienced by children. Eduardo González’s short documentary Niños en la narcozona (2018) considers this problematic since he looks at the children born and raised within criminal families.14 In such violent conditions, what kind of agency can children have? and how can cinema either capture or represent it? The aforementioned films offer different answers. However, all of them combine the two main cinematic approaches described in the previous section: a documentary-like purpose of picking up on the children’s embodied presence, and an interest in representing their (in)ability to react to the surrounding violence.15 These four films involve the two kinds of child’s agency we have defined: a creative and affective mode of existing in interaction with the material world, and an ability to act on the world. The latter is a capacity that child characters develop through mnemonic objects and thanks to a factor that we could call suerte (at once “luck” and “destiny”). In the four films, children’s bodies are recurrently framed as confined, imprisoned, or hidden. The three long-feature films, however, also show them playing, running, drawing, or even swimming—expressing freely their subjectivity and experience even in the most frightening conditions. This search for capturing the children’s spontaneous mode of being and playing is especially visible in Los niños del éxodo and Cómprame un revólver, where they are less performing roles than recorded in their improvised interactions.16 Both movies can be said to include these improvisations in their creative

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process, and, therefore, to give the children some agency in the film production itself, beyond the plot. Concurrently, in the fictions the use of symbolic objects, settings, and framings serve to introduce the link of children’s agency to the notion of suerte. Other plot elements, generic codes (especially from the fairy tale, but also from coming-of-age novels and horror films), and intertextual references further reinforce this association.17 The relationships and tensions between these modes of framing childhood (documentary/fairy tale) and these conceptions of agency (experience/action) can be observed in the different ways children’s voices, faces, and bodies are portrayed in the films. Two symbolic ingredients used in this portrayal are key to the analysis: masks and ghosts. When comparing these films, it is indeed very striking to notice the prominent presence of masks and ghosts; both in the fictional and the documentary productions, they are employed to express the children’s ambivalent agency and to reflect on how this latter is dependent on the adults’ gazes, discourses, and memories. Beyond their ritual history and traditional values, these representations are symbolically loaded in the context of the organized crime violence in Mexico, which is in the background of all the stories. On the one hand, the use of masks and balaclavas in the films evokes not only the hooded criminals (encapuchados and enmascarados) but counter-strategies of resistance that reminds the viewer of the image of EZLN guerrilla’s typical outfit. On the other hand, the concept of spectrality has been adopted as an analytical tool to explain the effects of the enforced disappearances on Mexican society from the beginning of the drug war,18 or on the production of artistic images themselves—what Diéguez calls “images-ghost” or “ghostly images” (2016). Children wear masks not only in Cómprame and Niños en la narcozona but also in some scenes of Vuelven. Ghosts are explicit characters in Vuelven but also recognizable as a visual haunting presence in the other movies, especially Los niños del éxodo. Their use contributes to give symbolic meanings to the documentaries, beyond their realist purpose. Here, I propose that the ghosts and the masks associated with the child characters may also serve as metaphors to qualify the action of their images on the spectator (i.e., the agency of images themselves). Additionally, they serve to propose a reflection on the actual extent of the agency of children in their historical situations. These films are perhaps not masterpieces, but they are thought-provoking and their comparison suggests inspiring crossings between fiction and documentary. Before addressing the role of masks and ghosts in the films, I will briefly present the plots focusing on the narrative articulation of the children’s reactions to surrounding violence, as well as the impact of their actions on the diegetic world and its possible symbolic meaning. This exploration will allow

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me to make some initial observations about the forms or modes of child agency. The Plots: Agency as Suerte, Memory, and Experience The protagonists of the two fictional films here analyzed are girls of around ten years old. They have lost their mothers and have to survive in a world dominated by drug traffickers. They are allied with a group of orphan boys and with the help of magical objects, the girls (re)act and become heroic agents of their own destiny, a destiny which involves killing the leader of a criminal band. Both films locate their actions in a dystopian context. Vuelven takes place in a ruined suburban area while Cómprame un revolver is set up in a windy desert. The films suggest that these locations are situated in Mexico and are areas dominated by the organized crime.19 The names of the protagonists are allegorical clues. Cómprame’s protagonist, Huck, hints at the picaresque anti-hero Huckleberry Finn. Estrella, in Vuelven, means “star,” and she indeed represents a light of hope in the darkness. A last similarity between these films is the fact that both make use of voice-over narration. In the opening scenes, we hear the girls’ voice recounting their stories. This technique manifests the adult intervention in the children’s performance and has a didactic function regarding the symbolic significance of the diegetic events. It also establishes the ability to use verbal language and to tell stories as crucial elements of resistance in a context of violence. But the plots of the movies develop in very different ways. In Cómprame, Huck lives in a caravan with her father, a drug addict who has to take care of an abandoned baseball camp were the dealers of the area occasionally come to play. The film shows how Huck moves from a passive condition in which she is not free to move and has to hide her gender (to protect her, her father chains her ankle and asks her to wear a mask), to an active role after most of the dealers are killed in a shoot-out at a night party and her father is made prisoner. In her coming-of-age process, Huck has to make a choice either drifting on a raft along the river—like Huckleberry Finn—with a protecting but dangerous man (the ex-leader of the traffickers) or returning to the desertic land with her friends, a group of lost boys experts in the art of camouflage. She kills the sleeping capo with his own gun and swims toward her friends, in what constitutes an ambivalent ending: the friendship and solidarity between these autonomous children appears as a hope, the utopia of a new society. At the same time, Huck’s facility to kill the man who was protecting her becomes potentially frightening (see Bittencourt 2019). The spectator might be led to fear that the children will simply reproduce the acts of violence committed by the adults. But Huck’s actions have to be understood in light of what her voice-over tells us. Early in the film, she states a sort of personal credo:

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Luck is [. . .] real, and so are lucky men. They pass it down to their daughters, who pass it down too, and so on. Sometimes luck is made up, but there’s no point in that. I’m sure that my dad is a lucky man. Otherwise, how could he survive in a place as violent as this? [. . .] My dad wants to pass down his luck to me. He has never said it, but I can see it in his eyes. (00:01:35-00:03:15)

It is important to signal that the Spanish word she uses, suerte, has a wider semantic range than the English word “luck.” “Suerte” may also be interpreted as “chance,” “fate,” or “destiny”. Precisely, we could say that Huck first inherits her father’s luck (the luck to survive among so many dangers) and that she finally takes in hands her own destiny, without any mask. Or perhaps, rather, the film follows a fairy tale logic in which, as observed by Karen Lury, “chance and fate are equivalent [. . .]; an effect that is both potentially liberating and terrifying” (143). As we will see, the mask has an important role in this logic. In Vuelven, Estrella who has received three broken pieces of chalk from her school teacher believes she has been granted three wishes and starts using them after her mother disappears from home. But she discovers that the wishes do not exactly work in the ways she expects. When she wishes for her mother to come back, she actually returns but in the form of a ghost who follows her everywhere and asks for revenge. Estrella joins a group of street orphans led by Shine who struggle against a drug gang, and she uses her other two wishes to try helping them. The consequences, however, are disastrous and two of the boys end up being killed. Nevertheless, she manages to lock up the drug leader with the ghosts of his victims and to open a magical door to a splendid virgin nature. This final door symbolizes a hope for a better future that, nonetheless, is projected as an imaginary dimension that belongs to the realm of the dreams or the spiritual. The spectators are free to interpret that Estrella has died and is entering to Paradise while the evil man is burning in hell. Here the central notions linked to children’s actions are those of memory and forgetting. Threatened to be forgotten by the whole society and to repress the traumatic memory of their disappeared mothers, the children—especially Estrella—gain agency when they allow the dead to be remembered and to act through them. Vuelven also starts with a voice-over monologue of the protagonist. In this case, however, it is one in the likeness of a fairy tale: There was once a prince who wanted to be a tiger. Tigers never forget. They are hunters. Their eyes see in the darkness. They have fangs to break bones. Tigers are not afraid. But the prince couldn’t be a tiger because he had forgotten how to be a prince. We forget that we are princes, warriors, tigers, when things from

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outside come to get us. We forget who we are when things from outside come to get us. (00:02:03-00:06:25)

The dead (the ghosts) may be understood as “the tigers”; they come to ask the children (the princes) to remember them and to resist the fear. The final voice-over monologue insists on the allegorical interpretation: “We have to remember: we are princes, we are warriors and tigers, and tigers are not afraid.” The documentaries propose different ways of presenting the children’s bodies and voices. They combine testimonies of children and/or accounts about them with dark images of their environment. Both films end with a detailed account of the numbers of victims of enforced displacement (Los niños del éxodo) or the homicides related to organized crime (Niños en la narcozona) during the last years in Mexico.20 Although both of them portray groups of children, the long-feature documentary highlights some individuals and focuses on a pre-teenage girl called Jass. Los niños del éxodo delves into the everyday life of displaced children through successive provisionary shelters. The first shelter shown in the film, ironically called “Calypso,” is a dark and dirty place similar to a prison. These children show their drawings to the camera and use them to talk about their memories of displacement and their dreams.21 Based on these sketches, the film presents animated sequences, creating a stark contrast between the murky urban environment of the cities in the State of Guerrero and the colorful imagined recollections of the children’s rural places of origin.22 Repeatedly the camera frames the children playing in somber corridors, making them appear as ghostly silhouettes. Their parents, who remain hidden from camera, express their nostalgia, their fear that their children could be kidnapped, and their anxieties for a life that “doesn’t feel like life” (1:09:001:09:10). At the end of the documentary, the families have to leave their second shelter and have no clear perspectives of receiving government help to be relocated or to safely return to their communities. The short film Niños en la narcozona presents first an elementary school teacher and secondly a young gang member commenting on the situation of the drug dealers’ own children, raised in a violent atmosphere. The teacher tells how a five-year-old child has threatened her with being killed by his father. When the director asks her, “What future do you see for him?”, she answers: The worst one, I’m afraid. Because he said that he wanted to be . . . a narco. [. . .] That he wanted to be like his parents. That that’s what he wanted. That he didn’t want to do be anything else. [. . .] I was terrified to see that the boy couldn’t aspire to something else, that he didn’t have a childhood . . . like a child. (00:05:21-00:06:05)

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In the documentary, these children do not speak but we watch them looking silently at the camera, from behind their masks. They wear the same flesh-colored mask as the two adults who are interviewed.23 The silence of the boys—whose words are mediated by adults’ voices—contrasts with the abundant testimonies and stories told by the children in Los niños del éxodo, as well as with the voice-over comments of the girl’s protagonists in the fiction films previously mentioned. In three of the films, there is a strong correlation between the two forms of agency we have discussed. In the two fictional movies, the children appear to be able to escape from the criminal adults and live in autonomy. This state of autonomy is precisely foregrounded in the scenes that show them playing within ruined and dark places (an old cistern of water in Cómprame, and an abandoned mansion in Vuelven). These images suggest that the children’s interaction with the material world—the remains of civilization—is the ground of their playful action that transforms the frightening “things from outside” into a magical field of open possibilities. Conversely, Niños en la narcozona exposes the risk that the children of criminals may have no autonomous will or power of action. These boys, who appear masked and uniformed, are obviously not playing—or the camera chooses not to show them playing. This directorial choice reflects the idea that they “do not have a childhood like a child” (00:06:00-00:06:05). In these three films, the children’s embodied experience of the world and ability to act upon the world are codependent. Los niños del éxodo, on the other hand, presents a contrast between the children’s perception of the world, their imaginative agency, and the reality in which they get no chance or luck to act without becoming victims of criminal actions. My interest in the use of masks and ghosts in these four films is based on the hypothesis that they express the multiple thresholds that children embody.24 These objects mark the divide and the bridge between nature and culture, between object and subject, between passive victimhood and accomplishment or perpetration of action, between traumatic memory and good luck or destiny. In the fictional movies, it would seem like, initially, the masks and the ghosts allow the faces, the voices, and the bodies of the children to manifest their peculiar agency and to realize their destiny. In Vuelven, they reveal a destiny of memory, and in Cómprame they allow to embrace a “chance” that appears to be a strike of luck. Conversely, in the documentaries the value of the mask and the ghost is inverted. These elements are not mediators of agency but visual signs of an objectification, of a lack of personal or subjective voice and body, and of an impossibility to be seen and heard. They are symbols of an infernal circle of violence. Commenting on films that portray children’s experience in war in a way that resonates within the fairy tale, Karen Lury finds that they “employ

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images that are full, images that tell more than the story, which hint at possibilities that are not quite spoken or written elsewhere in the film” (139). In these four films, I contend, the ghosts and the masks constitute such “telling,” “symbolically loaded images” (141) that, despite exceeding what is said, resonate with the children’s voices or silence.

Masks and Children’s Faces In Cómprame un revólver the girl protagonist receives a masculine name (Huck) and has to wear a gray, papier mâché mask made of old newspapers that reminds of comic character The Hulk (Fig. 10.1). The first obvious function of this mask—whatever it may represent—is to hide her gender and to protect her from being kidnapped, trafficked, and used as an object. But the choice of a Hulk mask is far from accidental, even less when we learn that in the initial script the girl was called Hulk instead of Huck (Fuentes and Zoller 2019). ​​ This Marvel Comics’ superhero—an iconic character in popular culture— is depicted as a hypermasculine muscled creature into which an emotionally repressed scientific genius is transformed against his will whenever he succumbs to a fit of anger. The Hulk is associated with an apocalyptic imaginary, as he originally emerged from an accidental exposure to gamma rays caused by an experimental bomb. He embodies a nuclear anxiety (Capitanio 2010) and seems equally able to destroy and to save the world. The female protagonist of Cómprame does not replicate Hulk’s magical metamorphosis into a superpowered man, but a transformation does occur in relation with the mask. In the Mexican futurist desert, the Hulk mask appears as a trace of a disappearing American popular culture and entertainment industry of superheroes; it is an allegorical vestige of a self-destroyed civilization. As such, it remains

Figure 10.1  Huck with Her Mask at the Beginning of the Movie. (Cómprame un revolver 00.07.30)

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Figure 10.2  Huck during the Night Party. (Cómprame un revolver 00.58.55)

as an object at once strange and familiar. The contrast between Huck’s fragile body with a seemingly innocent, childish face, and the masculinized grimacing Hulk face makes the mask all the more uncanny and produces a “Hulk girl,” with queer touch. In addition to this contrast, the white-gray color (instead of green) of the mask and its shape evoke the look of a skull, recalling the traditional death mask used in Mexican popular culture to celebrate the Day of the Dead. This connection further reinforces its frightening impact. During the sequence of the night party, the camera shows Huck sticking her Hulk’s head out of a car’s window, revealing her presence a ghostly and nightmarish vision that destabilizes the spectators (Fig. 10.2). But this effect does not come only from what the mask represents. From an anthropological perspective, the mask is “not simply representation, but more of a surrogate, a medium, a power” (Steimatsky112) investing its wearer with a transformative agency. Behind it “the person disappears and the mask, in its ritual role, takes up its place and claims its own agency” (112). When Huck wears her Hulk mask, she may be protected from abduction but she is also transformed into a Gorgon-like image whose gaze “assaults and petrifies the viewer—turning the viewer, too, into an image” (111). The reference to Gorgon or Medusa is not casual in the Mexican context of narco/necro-terror. According to Ileana Diéguez, “The Medusa mask, an icon that is mortal for it petrifying effect, is perhaps the most active metaphor in the theaters of fear that are spreading through the Mexican space these last years” (125, my translation). She argues that the Medusa-like image has become “an icon of terror but most of all an icon of absolute power” (125) and suggests the possibility to defeat the terror by representing its very image. Accordingly, the fact that Huck wears this type of mask may be understood as a way of reflecting the criminals’ strategy of terror, of turning the terrifying gaze against them. This defensive strategy does not work very well within the diegetic world: the mask does not seem

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to disturb the other characters and does not prevent Huck to be jailed. But the mask clearly fascinates Cordón’s camera, who addresses the gaze of the protagonist to its audience. Huck’s agency will reveal itself when she loses the mask—as the same time as she is separated from her father—after the dealers’ party is interrupted by a shoot-out. Significantly, as soon as the mask is left behind, she becomes physically related to two other symbolic objects: her disappeared mother’s “lucky tooth” and the arm of her friend Ángel—which from the beginning of the film the children try to get back from the drug dealers who chopped it off. The morning after the massacre, we see Huck lying in fetal position. When she wakes up—as if coming back to life—she takes from her pocket her mother’s dientecito de la suerte and places it symbolically in her mouth. It is as if, from the moment she is forced to act on her own in a world without masks, she needs to connect to her disappeared mother’s suerte, detaching herself from her father’s fate. Immediately after, Huck finds Ángel’s arm by chance in a cooler, among the corpses of the dealers. She meets the wounded leader who appears without his usual balaclava and reveals to be androgynous. On the raft, the capo covers his/her face with mud. In contrast, Huck’s face, equally dirty, will be washed and regenerated when she jumps into the river to join the half-naked lost boys on the shore and to give Ángel his arm back. These actions take place after killing the capo, in the next-to-last sequence. This ending corresponds to Lury’s analysis of fairy-tale-inspired films where mud is used to “demonstrate what is exposed, what is left, when the world is turned upside down” and where, more generally, “the contact with inanimate matter enhances the visceral, bodily sense in which the child has been ‘thrown’ into an encounter with the world. Nothing—no protective parent, no sense of civilisation—comes between the child and its experience of the earth” (133). In Cómprame, this “experience of the earth” includes a visceral contact with human remains. But in order for this to happen, Huck needs to have gotten rid of her Hulk’s mask. Only then she could experience a new birth and show her “true face.” However, we can also consider that, after the attack, she does not have to wear the mask anymore because, in a way, she has become her own “Hulk.” The ritual of the mask provided her with a kind of wild agency and connected her to her emotions, facilitating thus a free bodily interaction with the natural elements including the human remains. In any case, the mask serves as a mediation of agency; it means that her (child) agency is at once her own and the result of various legacies that predetermine her (the legacies of her father’s luck as well as Hulk’s rage). The uncanny effect of the mask in Cordón’s film provides us with an element that allows us to make a connection with the flesh-colored masks employed in Niños en la narcozona and to understand that their use goes beyond the obvious function of preserving the anonymity of children. In

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this documentary, the interview of an equally masked teacher is interspersed with shots of young boys wearing their uniforms at school. They are filmed in their classrooms, looking through microscopes, and in some other parts of the school building. In some shots, they stare straight at the camera in a way that I find both threatening and asking (00:04:54-00:05:20). On the one hand, the uniformization of their bodies and masks and their immobility make them appear as a kind of zombies or living ghosts (Fig. 10.3). Although they seem to be devoid of subjectivity or personal will, their sight—much like that of a Gorgon—conveys a power or agency that is both hypnotizing and paralyzing. In coincidence with the teacher’s comments, we see them as future killers, hopeless cases without a “chance” to escape a predetermined fate marked by their family and social circumstances. The mask holds in this sense a symbolic charge that reactivates its ritual value: it means its bearers are controlled by external forces and deprived of individual, subjective, or “personal” power of decision. Since “the mask unsettles individuation, recognition, and identification, under its power, one is both less and more than oneself, one is separated from oneself, or is no longer a self” (Steimatsky 111). ​​ Simultaneously, the fact that the students look at the camera compels us to react (Fig. 10.4). These shots ask the spectators to look at them as imprisoned victims who need to be rescued from their fate, to be released from their masks, and to “have a childhood like a child,” to quote again the teacher’s words (00:06:00-00:06:05). In this short movie depicting the situation of the criminals’ children, the line between innocence and guilt, between victimhood and criminal action, becomes blurry:25 these boys raised in narcofamilies appear as victims of the words and actions they are condemned to reproduce. The erasure of their faces and voices is indicative of their lack of both social agency and embodied experience.

Figure 10.3  Boys at School. (Niños en la narcozona 00:04:44).

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Figure 10.4  Boys Staring at the Camera.. (Niños en la narcozona 00:05:2).

Both in Cómprame and in Niños en la narcozona, the mask works as “a mediator of boundaries” and “is itself boundary between obverse worlds, visible and invisible, human and animal, the living and the dead” (Steimatsky 111). In both films, this element reveals the child’s face as a boundary in itself: it appears as a surface where the “personal” (let us recall that the Latin word for “mask” was persona) and the “impersonal” are indistinguishable, where the dead act through the living, transforming the children into ghosts. If, indeed, masks can be understood as boundaries, the ghost may be defined as “an in-between figure,” “the actualization of a void,” “a haunting intervallic form [that] brings disorder” (Rongier 145, my translation). This vision of the masks and the ghosts is especially revealing in Vuelven, where a tiger mask in a seemingly dream sequence precisely announces the approaching death of his bearer (Shine). But as we will see, in this film the child characters are more closely related to ghosts than to masks.

Ghosts and Children’s Bodies (Vuelven and Los Niños Del Éxodo) Vuelven is a story about ghosts, about dead people who return “seeking justice or acknowledgement from the living” (Lury 19). In López’s film, the ghosts are depicted through special effects following the codes of gothic horror movies. The topic of the privileged connection of children with ghosts is a recurrent theme of this type of films but goes beyond the genre of horror (Rongier 2008; Lury 2010). The other films analyzed in this chapter also draw a relationship between children and specters, especially Los niños del éxodo.

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However, they do so in another way, suggesting a haunting spectral presence that lurks in ruined and desert spaces and is associated with the children’s gazes and bodies. In other words, sometimes the children hold a gaze that reveals specters around them, but in other sequences, they appear themselves as possible ghosts. In Vuelven and in Los niños del éxodo, the fairy-tale’s typical space of the forest is transformed into a ruined city, which is depicted as a dangerous “jungle” where wild beasts roam. Both films manifest the imaginative agency of the children when they are portrayed in the action of creating images of their own. This imaginative process can be interpreted as a way to not only resist their dark reality but also transform it through an act of creative perception. The graffiti of a tiger in Vuelven and the drawings of the children’s abandoned homesteads and communities in Los niños del éxodo become animated, signifying the power of the children’s imaginative vision. But the articulation between the animation and the recorded images is different in each film. In Vuelven, the tiger is inserted within the photographic images, revealing the indistinction between reality and imagination. In Los niños del éxodo, the animated sequences are clearly separated from the recorded images, manifesting thus a break between two kinds of agency: the imaginative experience versus the direct action on the social world (or the lack of it). The relationship between the ghosts and the children’s drawings, and the role of the former in the agency of the latter, have different characteristics in each film. In Vuelven the ghosts—which represent the specters of the thousands of disappeared people in Mexico as a consequence of the drug war— may be understood as either real or the product of Estrella’s imagination. But what is sure is that they determine her social agency: they force her to react to the disappearance of her mother and to accomplish a series of actions ranging from liberating jailed boys to leading the evil man to his dead victims. It is unclear if she is an instrument of the dead women’s vengeance or if she is following her personal, subjective, will. In her case, both motivations are interwoven. In this regard, it is striking to observe that in this film the ghosts, in their quality as images, are situated between two other kinds of images linked to the children protagonists: the lost boys’ graffiti and the recorded images stored in the criminal leader’s cellphone that Shine has stolen. Although the man tries to get his phone back at all costs, Shine wants to keep it because he has discovered in it a photo of his disappeared mother. Later, he will also find a video of Estrella’s mother being tortured. While the drawing of the tiger symbolizes the wild imagination of the children, the digital footage of their mothers represents their trauma—not only the physical trauma of torture suffered by women but also the visual trauma inflicted on the children who witness it (Figs. 10.5 and 10.6). Oscillating between imaginary creatures and

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traumatic visions, the ghosts are finally visualized as alive corpses wrapped in plastic bags—without losing their indeterminacy. They push Estrella into the social world, which is presented through, and conceived of, as clash of images. If we understand the ghosts as “the apparition of an image [. . .], the returning of the dead in the guise of images” and “as the only possible coexistence of the dead and living” (Rongier 150), the child imaginative agency and the visual possibilities of cinema appear as two fitting mediums to reveal this coexistence. ​​

Figure 10.5  Wall-Painted Tiger with Shine. (Vuelven 00.21.00)

Figure 10.6  Cellphone’s Video of Estrella’s Mother. (Vuelven 00.50.52)

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A young boy who is a victim of forced displacement in Los niños del éxodo offers an interesting comment on the relationship between the ghosts and the camera: I’m scared of going into the room with cameras because they said on YouTube that you can’t see them in real life, but that cameras can film ghosts. There, in the corner. They film them! I’m scared that you’re recording us and something like that will show up, like a face, and I’ll be terrified for life. (00:32:32-00:32:56)

The boy believes in the existence of ghosts and in the fact that the camera is able to reveal or produce their presence. Precisely, in Los niños del éxodo the camera, which tries to adopt a child’s perspective,26 reveals specters. But ironically, the film will suggest that these specters are the children themselves. The first and last image of the movie is a still shot of the silhouette of Jass, a girl who is shown spreading out her arms against the backdrop of a sunrise, standing on the rooftop of terrace shelter. Significantly, this is the only outside place where the children can play without danger. This framing recalls the image of Christ on the cross, a symbol of the sacrifice of the innocent victim that also announces his resurrection (Fig. 10.7). But here, instead of a glorious comeback to life, the film shows the liminal status of the children, condemned to live in corridors, in passageways, and in dark places of transit that resemble prisons (Fig. 10.8). ​​

Figure 10.7  Opening Shot of Los niños del éxodo. (Los niños del éxodo 00.21.00)

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Figure 10.8  Children Playing in the Corridor. (Los niños del éxodo 00.39.50)

The edition and the settings chosen for the movie are aimed to generate visual associations between three significant elements: the dark shelters where children are confined, the material remains of rallies happened in the city such as famous marches in honor of the forty-three disappeared students from Ayotzinapa (Guerrero), and the ruins of the houses the children had to abandon in their rural communities. The associations of images in the film suggest to link together the disappeared, the abandoned villages, and the children playing between corridors: they all are ghostly either haunted places or haunting bodies. This suggestion is reinforced when we see and hear the children repeating in their games chants that they have heard in the streets. For instance, we hear them singing the slogan América Latina, por qué, por qué nos asesinan, si somos la esperanza de América Latina, por qué, por qué (Latin America, why do they kill us if we are the hope of Latin America, why, why . . . , 00:39:35-00:39:58). This act of repetition of the rallying cries inspired by conditions of injustice and violence can be understood as a re-creation. The aforementioned scene stresses the children’s resilience and adaptability, and shows their ability to playfully appropriate and make a new sense of their living conditions. At the same time, they seem to be engaging in the process of unconsciously learning and adopting their future role as social protesters and strugglers. Yet, for the spectators, this activists’ slogan turned into a child song might appear as an allegorical symptom of the condition of a childhood deprived of hope. They seem to inhabit a world of “ killed hope” for an impossible future, as they are trapped in the ghostly present of their country.

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These displaced children, who are already marked as “social disappeared” (Gatti 2020),27 may well be forcibly disappeared tomorrow. It is, thus, in this sense that the documentary confronts us with a haunting memory for a haunted future. To sum up, while Vuelven shows children’s connection to ghosts and their impact on the actions of the former, Los niños del éxodo contrasts the children’s ghostly condition with their resilience and their capacity to use their imagination as a creative force that allows them to play, sing, and draw even in the worst conditions. CONCLUSIONS My interest in the four contemporary Mexican films I have compared lies in the fact that they combine the two main approaches of child’s agency I mentioned in my opening section. They are able to show agency both as an embodied experience and as the result of a learning process with allegorical meaning; both as an improvised play and as a scripted, predetermined action. This uncanny combination is suggestive and reveals the difficulty as well as the necessity to represent and believe in the abilities children have to act and react in the world—even if their world is limited, precarious, and dominated by violence. Cómprame, Vuelven, and Los niños del éxodo propose that the children’s agency is to be found in their belief in the power of stories and in the existence of ghosts, which are embodied in the objects they have received or inherited (Huck’s mother tooth, Estrella’s pieces of chalks) or in the images they create (drawings). In other words, children’s agency is not independent from these objects and images, nor more than from the complex concept of suerte linked to them. Understood as destiny, the children’s suerte is connected to the naturalist idea that their action is predetermined by their context; whereas interpreted as luck, it means an openness to a future that is not predestined, but that can be magically manipulated. In relation to their drawings and objects and to this notion of suerte, what do masks and ghosts reveal us about children’s agency? The former show that children are constantly struggling against their objectification and their conversion into (still) images. The latter crystalize the idea that children’s experience is based on a process of assimilation of images and stories from the past, whether they be memories or traumas. The fictional movies analyzed narrativize this idea. On the contrary, in the documentaries, we find that the traumatic images carried by children as part of their personal and collective memories are just verbally evoked or visually suggested. But, ultimately, we see that both ghosts and masks express the thresholds on which the children are posited and their oscillation or, rather, indeterminacy between destiny and

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luck, fate, and chance. They express their agency within the diegetic worlds. But they also reveal other levels of agency in the relationships between children, films, and spectators.28 In this chapter I contend, first, that more than objects or subjects represented inside the frame, ghosts and masks work as qualifying metaphors of the filmic images and their impact on the spectators and their society—what we could call the agency of images themselves. In her comment on the various images of dismembered bodies circulating in Mexico, Diéguez employs the same metaphors: “the Medusa-like image” and the “image-ghost” (imagen medusina and imagen-fantasma). The first one applies to the images of terror strategically produced by the organized criminals; the second one refers to the iconographic latencies of haunting images, and the mnemonic visual and symbolic network they activate.29 In the films studied in this chapter, the image of masked children reflect a Medusa-like image of a still body deprived of its “own” face and of its personal will and voice. It is not meant to provoke terror but to invite spectators to think of—and feel—the crucial and invisible role of children in the criminal system. They are victims of terror, even when—and all the more when—they are transformed into agents of the terror itself. These images also are spectral in the sense that they recall other masks and strategies of camouflage connected to death in Mexican history, like the “death mask” in Cómprame or, in Niños en la narcozona, the balaclava used by the hooded criminals. Second, I proposed that the masks and ghosts in these films allow us to think of the agency of children in general, beyond cinema. These dramatic ingredients are used to reveal the child’s subjectivity and experience through the mediation of the camera. They tell us that such experience is not detached from other systems of representation, codes, and symbols. In other words, the fact that these films frame children’s agency using representational conventions and appeal to symbols linked to ancestral rituals and beliefs does not prevent them from revealing something about their “own” capacity to act and their experience of the world. As I have emphasized, this something is intimately connected with the power of playing, of storytelling, of creative imagination and the impact of these elements—that is, of fiction—to empower them to take real action in the world.

NOTES 1. The research on which this chapter is based has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (“Digital Memories,” Grant agreement no. 677955). Complete name of the project: “‘We Are All Ayotzinapa’: The Role of

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Digital Media in the Formation of Transnational Memories on Disappearances” (digitalmemories​.​be). I am thankful to directors Wilma Gómez Luengo and Julio Hernández Cordón for having kindly answered my questions about their movies. 2. This perspective can be applied to all kinds of films since, as synthesized by Paz-Mackay and Rodríguez, “a child on the screen never represents just a child” (2019: xiv); but certain films are more clearly than others using the child as an allegorical tool. 3. I name “child films” the films with child protagonists but made for an adult audience. 4. For example Un lugar en el mundo (Aristarain, Spain / Argentine / Uruguay, 1993), El silencio de Neto (Argueta, Guatemala, 1996), Central do Brasil (Salles, Brasil, 1998), Paloma de papel (Aguilar, Perú, 2003), Machuca (Wood, Chile, 2004), or Postales de Leningrado (Rondón, Venezuela, 2007). 5. On the frequent representation of children’s violent death in Latin American cinema (contrary to other cinematic traditions), see Martin’s chapter 2, “Child Death in Buenos Aires viceversa, La vendedora de rosas and La mujer sin cabeza” (2019: 37–70). 6. Similarly, Susan Ferguson (2013) observes that contemporary child films around the world portray two opposite “representative children”: the Romantic model of the child-as-an-idealized-victim (without agency) or a savvy, self-creating child consumer embodying the postmodern concept of liberal individualist action. Ferguson takes the example of Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle and Tandan 2008); in Mexican cinema La misma luna / Under the Same Moon (Riggen 2007) gives as a good illustration of this postmodern kind of agency. 7. For example, for Deborah Martin some films “make the child highly symbolic, emptying it of its own bodily experience or agency” while other “[tend] to refuse the child’s symbolic value, and instead to focus on his embodied experience” (2019: 101). Cf. also Randall (2017: xxxiii). 8. Both films were analyzed by Deborah Martin. 9. cf. also the Mexican novels that Zamora names “novels of deformation” (2019), among others José Emilio Pacheco’s Las batallas en el desierto (1981), Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963), María Luisa Puga’s Inventar ciudades (1998), or Julián Herbert’s Canción de tumba (2011). 10. About this crucial uncertainty—that contributes greatly to our interpretation of the children’s agency in films—see chapter 4 of Lury’s book, “The Impropriety of Performance: Children (and Animals) First.” 11. Randall follows Claudia Castañeda’s Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (2003). 12. This conception is shared by literary scholars like Marah Gubar and Richard Flynn, among many others. 13. Andrea Gremels and Susana Sosenki emphasize that “only during the last decade in Mexico, more than eleven thousand children have died violently and more than, four thousands have disappear. Each day three children are killed in this country” (2019: 7, my translation). See the 2019 report of the Comisión Nacional de los

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Derechos Humanos (CNDH) about Niñas, niños y adolescentes víctimas del crimen organizado en México, cndh.​​org​.m​​x​/sit​​es​/de​​fault​​/file​​s​/doc​​ument​​os​/20​​19​-11​​/Estu​​dio​ -n​​inas-​​ninos​​-adol​​escen​​tes​​-v​​ictim​​as​-cr​​imen.​​pdf. 14. This short film (a companion piece of González’ feature documentary La libertad del diablo, Devil’s Freedom, 2017) is available online (www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=jsOHr0aBIvU). 15. These approaches are grosso modo related to two ways of making the children perform their characters and, likewise, different modes of selection of the child “actors.” The difference between these modes is well reflected in the corpus: Vuelven’s child protagonists have been selected through a wide try-out process (out of 600 children, 20 were selected to receive acting courses and finally 5 were chosen), while Cómprame’s ones have been, rather, discovered in different places. For example, the armless child was found in a street in Hermosillo, Sonora; another one in a boxing gym (private message from Julio Hernández Cordón). However, from a spectatorial perspective this difference is not necessarily evident. In both films some scenes make us wonder to which extent the children are acting. 16. Cómprame’s director explained that “the children never read the script. They didn’t know the plot very well. All their dialogues in the movie are improvised, as well as the voice-over monologues. They used their own words to tell my ideas” (private message from Julio Hernández Cordón). 17. Among many others, there are clear references to Mark Twain’s novels and Miller’s Mad Max in Cómprame . . . ; to Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Buñuel’s Los olvidados, and Del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo in Vuelven; to Peter Pan’s Lost Boys from Barrie’s play and Golding’s Lord of the Flies in both cases. 18. Barriendos, for instance, characterizes “massive enforced disappearances in Mexico as a sort of spectral violence inflicted on the social body as a whole” and argues that “the legal indeterminacy of the disappeared and the biopolitical transposition of terror from absent bodies to the society can be properly characterized as the spectral condition of mass violence” (11). 19. Both films are introduced by explanatory screens. In Vuelven we read: “In the last 10 years violence in Mexico caused 160,000 deaths and more than 53,000 disappeared. Entire areas of some cities are being deserted” and in Cómprame: “Mexico. No precise date. Everything, absolutely everything is run by the cartels. The population has declined due to the lack of women.” All the quoted translations of the movies’ texts and dialogues come from the website: subslikescript​.com​/. 20. At the end of Niños en la narcozona, we read that “until 2017, 329 917 people have been forcibly displaced.” Niños en la narcozona informs us that “between 2006 and 2015, more than 11000 children and teenagers in Mexico were killed in homicides related to organized crime.” 21. Director Wilma Gómez Luengo has applied an art therapy technique to approach the children and make them speak from their drawings. Noteworthy to mention, another Mexican documentary released in 2019 and centered on the experience of children surrounded by violence uses their drawings as an example of resistance and resilience, from its very title: Dibujos contra las balas (Drawings Against Bullets, Alicia Calderón 2019).

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22. The aesthetic decision of offering animated sequences based on drawings and testimonies of displaced children recalls Colombian animated documentary Pequeñas voces (Little Voices, Andrade and Carrillo 2010), set in the context of Colombian war. For an analysis of this film, see Randall (2017). 23. It is the same face covering used by the victims and perpetrators in González’ long-feature documentary La libertad del diablo (2017). 24. I take the notion of threshold from Rachel Randall’s book (2017). For her, “child characters have taken on a critical representational role within contemporary Latin American cinema because of their position on the threshold between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’—and between the imaginary phase and Symbolic realm—which converts them into a focal point of, and yet a limit to, patriarchal, state or biopolitical power” (xii). 25. Noteworthily, in Gónzalez’ long-feature La libertad del diablo the same mask applied to victims and perpetrators reveals a blurred line between these categories. 26. The film repeatedly adjusts the camera to match a child’s height and offers shots from a child’s perspective. 27. Gabriel Gatti defines as “social disappeared” the ones who inhabit “ordinary social catastrophes,” invisible bodies associated with spectrality and absence, but still existing. 28. Another aspect that I have evoked in the general presentation of the corpus but have not developed is the agency of the child performers in the production process of the films. Suffice it here to suggest that this agency is as hybrid and ambivalent as the one that is revealed at the other levels of analysis. 29. With the notion of the “image-ghost” Diéguez explicitly refers to Aby Warburg’s notion of the surviving image (Nachleben), as it has been retaken and developed by Georges Didi-Huberman (Diéguez 2017: 220).

WORKS CITED Barriendos, Joaquin. “Spectral Violence: Art and Disappearance in Post-Ayotzinapa Mexico.” Porto Arte: Revista de Artes Visuais 24(42), 2019. www​.seer​.ufrgs​.br​/ PortoArte​/article​/view​/104676​/57310. Bittencourt, Ela. . “Fable of a Mutilated Childhood: Close-Up Julio Hernández Cordon’s Buy Me a Gun.” MUBI Notebook. mubi.​​com​/f​​r​/not​​ebook​​/post​​s​/fab​​le​-of​​ -a​-mu​​tilat​​ed​-ch​​ildho​​od​-cl​​ose​-u​​p​-jul​​io​-he​​rnand​​ez​​-co​​rdon-​​s​-buy​​-me​-a​​-gun,​ 2019. Capitanio, Adam. . “The Jekyll and Hyde of the Atomic Age: ‘The Incredible Hulk’ as the Ambiguous Embodiment of Nuclear Power.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43(2), 2010: 249–270. Diéguez, Ileana. Cuerpos sin Duelo. Iconografía y teatralidades del dolor. Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2016. Dufays, Sophie. El niño en el cine argentino de la postdictadura (1983–2008): alegoría y nostalgia. London: Boydell & Brewer: Tamesis, 2014.

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Ferguson, Susan. “Capitalist Childhood in Film: Modes of Critique.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 55, 2013. www​.ejumpcut​.org​/archive​/jc55​.2013​/ FergusonChildhood​/text​.html. Flynn, Richard. “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Agency?” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8(1), 2016: 254–255. Fuentes, Ivonne, and Adam Zoller. “Cómprame un revolver: ideas y más ideas.” 2019. FICUNAM. ficun​​am​.un​​am​.mx​​/comp​​rame-​​un​-re​​volve​​r​-ide​​as​-y-​​​mas​-i​​deas/​. Gatti, Gabriel. “The Social Disappeared: Genealogy, Global Circulations, and (Possible) Uses of a Category for the Bad Life.” Public Culture 32(1), 2020: 25–43. Gremels, Andrea, and Susana Sosenki, ed. . “Introducción.” In Violencias e infancias en el cine latinoamericano. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019. Gubar, Marah. “The Hermeneutics of Recuperation: What a Kinship-Model Approach to Children’s Agency Could Do for Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8(1), 2016: 291–310. Hemelryk Donald, Stephanie, Emma Wilson, and Sarah Wright. Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema: Borders And Encounters. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. James, Allison. “Embodied Being(s): Understanding the Self and the Body in Childhood.” In The Body, Childhood and Society, edited by Alan Prout. Houndsmills, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 2000: 19–37. Lury, Karen. The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Martin, Deborah. The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema Martin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Paz-Mackay, María Soledad, and Omar Rodríguez. Politics of Children in Latin American Cinema. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019. Prout, Alan. “Childhood Bodies: Construction, Agency and Hybridity.” In The Body, Childhood and Society, edited by Alan Prout. Houndsmills, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 2000, 1–18. Randall, Rachel. Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Nature, Gender, and Agency. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2017. Rocha, Carolina, and Georgia Seminet, eds. Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ———. Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014. Rongier, Sébastien. “Enfance et fantômes (Petite hantologie contemporaine : de Kubrick à Shyamalan).” In L’enfant au cinéma, edited by Julie Barillet, Françoise Heitz, Patrick Louguet, and Patrick Vienne. Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2008, 143–151. Steimatsky, Noa. The Face on Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Zamora, Alejandro. “Infancia, sujeto y deformación.” In Infancia, escritura y subjetividad: la novela mexicana de deformación (1963–2007). Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2019: 13–28.

Chapter 11

She Takes Pleasure in the Sins of the Flesh Child and Youth Abuse in the Narrative of Ecuadorian Female Writers of the Twenty-First Century Silvia Ruiz Tresgallo

In recent years, Ecuadorian female writers have dared to speak out about issues that, albeit being part of the reality of the Global South, have been left out of the scope of literature—because they are not in the interest of the patriarchal canon—or have been avoided—because they offend a moralist attitude that considers them of bad taste.1 The visibility of violence is a key theme in the work of these authors who have had the courage to delve into issues that affect the most vulnerable and precarious bodies (Butler) in South America: we are referring to children and teenagers. This chapter explores the works of María Fernanda Ampuero, Mónica Ojeda, and María Fernanda Heredia. Although these writers belong to different generations and/or social contexts, their works share a common theme: the taboo of sexual abuse as one of the axes of violence that affect minors in Ecuador. To deal with this topic, the perspective of contemporary women writers reveals itself as necessary because it brings forth a problematic that otherwise, within the limits of canonical literature, has been naturalized or made invisible. This is the case of the child abuse and sexual violence perpetrated by adults. The scenario in which children, especially young girls, are victims of sexual violence is already suggested in well-known fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, where the female protagonist falls prey to the hands of a hunter. However, there is a general tendency to cast the blame on the victim of the aggression. The latter is accused of breaking certain rules, for instance: talking to a stranger or taking a different path. In contradistinction, 175

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the actions of the perpetrator and its violent nature—the wolf on the fable— are not questioned. On this matter, Ana María Martorella comments: “Little Red Riding Hood in the children’s story is another victim of the many wolves disguised as lambs” (La Caperucita Roja del cuento infantil no es ni más ni menos que una víctima más de los tantos lobos disfrazados de corderos)2 (3). This chapter analyzes the literary representations of the different ways in which the characters of minors internalize sexual abuse. We want to highlight how in these narratives the aggressors put the weight of guilt on the girls’ bodies in such a way that they petrify a discourse that frees the perpetrator from his responsibility. We observe in these novels that sexual abuse does not always occur at the hands of strangers but, in many cases, takes place at home itself or is perpetrated by people who are close to the victim. Ultimately, we propose that in addition to denouncing the violence that besets the most vulnerable bodies, these narratives can be interpreted as literary artifacts that propose real solutions for young girls and boys, as well as other gender nonconforming identities, facing these situations. It is also significant to point out that the Ecuadorian female writers we discuss, although addressing growing up narratives, do not totally follow the characteristics of the Bildungsroman. Regarding form, most of them do not write novels, and when they do, they do not keep on a chapter sequence in which we can see the growth of a girl into a woman. Concerning content, they name unspeakable events that girls are not supposed to have or talk about. Therefore, these writers twist and turn this genre as the experiences of females do not conform to the stereotypes imposed by both the canon and a patriarchal society. In addition, our study follows an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw) since the minors are not always in the same precarious conditions (Butler) due to their gender. Elements such as their age and social class must be taken into consideration for a rigorous evaluation. Our analysis of the abuse of minors is not only informed by a feminist perspective (Segato). We also dialogue with the psychological approaches of Silvina Cohen Imach, Enrique Echeburúa, and Cristina Guerricaechevarría. María Fernanda Ampuero’s Pelea de gallos (Cockfight) (2019) offers a portrayal of childhood that does not conform to the wonderful and idealized experience commonly upheld in mainstream society. Ampuero’s short stories show how in infancy there are spaces of enormous cruelty. In the opinion of María Jesús Llarena Ascanio, Ampuero presents toxic traumas “where violence and abuse are part of the protagonist’s childhood memories” (124). Additionally, Martín Parra Olavide emphasizes that the monstrous in Ampuero’s work is found “rooted in the family, inside the house,” where takes place the experience of “sexual abuse [perpetrated] by the father or someone close to the boys and girls” (radicado en la familia, en el interior de

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la casa [. . .] abuso sexual por parte del padre o de algún cercano sobre los niños y las niñas). This is also the case of Mónica Ojeda’s novel Nefando (2016), about which Alicia Ortega Caicedo observes: It is precisely the imaginaries around the family and childhood that are the paradigm that the novel seeks to break. Far from being a space or a period of protection and shelter, they are the closest image to the idea of ​​abuse, fragility and helplessness. (precisamente son los imaginarios en torno a la familia y la infancia el paradigma que busca quebrar la novela. Lejos de ser un espacio o un período de protección y cobijo resultan la imagen más cercana a la idea de abuso, fragilidad y desamparo.) (44)

The real danger here lies in trying to hide this type of violence. As indicated by Ojeda in an interview: Sexual abuse is a taboo subject that bothers and that everyone prefers to avoid and that is why it happens under the noses of our society. The last ones that have been uncovered in Ecuador are overwhelming. To stop talking about it does not eliminate the problem. (el abuso sexual es un tema tabú que incomoda y que todo el mundo prefiere evitar y es por eso que ocurre en las narices de nuestra sociedad. Los últimos que se han destapado en Ecuador son abrumadores. Dejar de hablar de ello no elimina el problema.) (2017)

Making sexual violence visible and looking for real ways out seem to be the objective of María Fernanda Heredia in Los fantasmas tienen buena letra (Ghosts Have Good Handwriting) (2017). Graciela Bialet includes this novel in her list of children’s and youth literature around this issue. In this novel, for booklovers aged eight and over, the reader gradually sees how the character of Rogelio beats his cousin and abuses her sexually. In chapter fourteen the identifiable traits of the abuser appear: malicious laugh, come up, I’m alone, in my room I have toys that you will like a lot, you are my guest, you will do what I ask. (En el capítulo catorce aparecen ya los datos visibles del abusador: risa maliciosa, sube, estoy solo, en mi habitación tengo juguetes que te van a gustar mucho, eres mi invitada, harás lo que te pida.) (Bialet)

In an interview conducted during the Bogotá International Book Fair in 2019, Heredia states that she understands literature as reassurance and support: “in case it can serve to give a child the courage to scream and say: no more, I need help” (por si puede servir para en un momento darle coraje a un

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niño para gritar y decir: no más, necesito ayuda). In our search, we have come across reviews, blogs, interviews, and press releases, but it is evident that there is a lack of academic essays that support the visibility of the unnamable in the work of these Ecuadorian writers. Abjection and Sexual Violence in “Auction” and “Mourning” by María Fernanda Ampuero The writings of María Fernanda Ampuero have been described as brutal by Mariana Enriquez. In this section, we approach two stories from her collection Cockfight (Pelea de gallos) (2019) that cover these affairs. In “Auction” (Subasta) a girl faces the risk of sexual abuse. The story is narrated from the perspective of a child whose living conditions are marked by poverty, violence, and precarity. Her father is a cockfighter who, lacking a caretaker for the girl, brings her to all competitions. From her very early childhood, the girl witnesses the images of the animals’ shattered bodies, which make her cry and cause her terrible nightmares. In response to this, her father only says: “Come on, don’t be such a woman” (ya, no seas tan mujercita) (11). His response, oftentimes repeated, tells the child that she is not supposed to show a female behavior in that specific context. He does not intend to degrade her as a human being but to provide her with a strategy to adapt to the surrounding violence of a machista environment where gender asymmetry abounds. Michelle Roche Rodríguez’s interpretation also points in this direction: “Ampuero efficiently portrays female characters as blunt representations of vulnerability” (Ampuero hace un uso eficiente de los personajes femeninos como contundentes representaciones de la vulnerabilidad). As a matter of fact, the girl has already been abused as she, with a heartbreaking innocence, declares: “Some cockfighter would give me a piece of candy or a coin to touch me or kiss me or to touch him or kiss him” (algún señor gallero me daba un caramelo o una moneda por tocarme o besarme o tocarlo o besarlo) (Ampuero 11). The young girl protagonist discovers the power of the abject as a mechanism of self-protection against sexual harassment. One night, a rooster’s belly explodes in her arms and she discovers “that those gentlemen who were so macho, who shouted and prodded so that one rooster opened the carcass of another, were disgusted by the poop and the blood and the entrails of the dead rooster” (que a esos señores tan machos que gritaban y azuzaban para que un gallo abriera en canal a otro, les daba asco la caca y la sangre y las vísceras del gallo muerto) (12). From that moment on, she covers her face, her knees, and her hands with that mixture and realizes that the cockfighters no longer bother her asking for kisses.

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In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva examines the concept of the abject. She links this term with the improper and the unclean, specifically with wounds—blood and pus—disease, sweat, and bodily fluids that breach the socalled purity of the body. For Kristeva, urine, blood, or excrement become the emanations of a self that collapses and loses its integrity: a body that opens up and, by doing so, reveals the inability to remain clean. On this subject, Kristeva observes that “it is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents” (53). If we relate this concept of abjection to the model of the feminine created by the patriarchal discourse, we arrive at interesting conclusions. In spite of women being compelled to be fresh and neat so as to assure males’ sexual interest, the girl in Ampuero’s story resists conforming to the masculine expectations of the cleanness of the female body. By staying unclean she claims agency in a world that, otherwise, denies her any access to power. In this story, the narrator tells us that some men have peaked at her panties under her school uniform. In this particular macho environment, this action is interpreted as an anticipation of the risk of being raped. However, the protagonist avoids staying clean and decides to tuck a rooster head between her legs, and even gets to wear a belt of rooster heads under her skirt. Her plan is to prevent being sexually attacked by causing them disgust. Moreover, the girl alters her body by introducing phallic objects near her sexual organs. She turns herself into a hybrid that challenges binary gender constructions. As a result, men do not know how to classify a girl whose behavior exceeds the limits of the feminine, proper and correct in that world. The cockfighters tell her father: “Your daughter is a monster” (tu hija es una monstrua) (12). From their perspective, a girl who applies poop, blood, and guts to her skin, and places rooster heads near her vagina, cannot be perceived as anything other than an abnormal and terrible being. However, from the complicit gaze that Ampuero shares with the reader, the girl uses these “strategies of the weak” term used by scholars such as Josefina Ludmer and James C. Scott to claim agency through abjection. The discourse of the abject has been used for centuries to demonize the female body and make it susceptible to all types of violence, including that of sexual assault. As we have addressed in a paper already published entitled “The Dialectics of the Abject Body: Women and Devil in El Conde Lucanor and the Arcipreste de Talavera,” the devaluation of the humors and bodily fluids emanated by the female body such as blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile—already a subject of discussion for Aristotle and Odon de Cluny—reinforce the inferiority of women (Ruiz Tresgallo 73). Furthermore, according to the words of the fathers of the church, such as Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, young women belong to the dark side of divine creation as

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they are closer to the devil than to God. According to this logic, maidens are more prone to lust and, therefore, they have to remain locked up and guarded. In these narratives, unjustly, the blame falls over the bodies of young women, who appear to irradiate sin, while the aggressors, whose cruel actions are not accounted for, are released of any accusation. This is precisely the case in “Mourning” (Luto), a short story about a female teenager who is raped by her own brother, whose aggression is condoned by a patriarchal logic while she is accused of being a whore. The male character, incarnated in the body of a saint, enters his sister’s room and finds her “with her hand between her legs” (con la mano entre las piernas) (75). Although the age of the young woman is not specified, we assume that—due to the events related to sexual explorations typical of puberty as well as her virginity, which the author accounts for in the story—she is a teenager. In a predominantly Catholic society, the role of women is limited to one of two extremes: either Eve or Mary, a sinner or a saint. At once, the perfect male embraces the misogynistic image promoted by religious discourse; a young woman who enjoys her own sexuality can only be a whore and therefore must be punished and cast away from her family. As the narrator states: The whore deserved to sleep with rats, on a reeking pallet. The whore, the devil’s ally, touched herself between her legs and moaned. That’s what being a whore meant: taking pleasure in pleasure. (La puta merecía dormir entre ratas y sobre jergones hediondos. La puta, aliada del maligno, se tocaba entre las piernas y gemía. En eso consistía ser puta: en gustar del gusto.) (75)

The story exposes a tradition that denies women access to pleasure without the intermediation of a man. Sexual autonomy, as well as any other type of female agency, disobeys patriarchal norms and triggers a hate speech that entitles the male not only to hit and rape but also to kill women. Early in the short story, Ampuero warns the reader about the brother’s intentions: to gradually degrade Mary’s body in order to satisfy his own sexual desires. Under normal circumstances, the young man would not be able to sexually access his sister’s body since it would violate the taboo of incest. However, he designs a plan to progressively degrade her, ​​ and to turn her into a scapegoat susceptible to violence. First, he enters her room without permission, an action that reveals the surveillance over the female body as well as the desire to find her breaking a rule in order to have an excuse to punish her. Then, he calls her whore and takes her out of the house; an action that extracts her from the family unit and leaves her isolated and unprotected. The next step is to degrade the young woman by treating her like an animal; he ties her up to a water trough, he “kicks open her face” (le partió la cara a patadas) (75) and locks her down in the barn. The animalization of the female

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is achieved not only by placing her in a space meant for beasts but also by hitting her as it is accustomed with these properties. We witness a process of dehumanization and depersonalization since the aggressor tries to erase from the girl’s face those elements that allow us to recognize her for who she had been before, la niña Maria. But even when the brother marks the female body through brutal physical violence, that is still not enough to be able to access her sexually. It is necessary to transform this young virgin into a whore not only in words but also in deeds. For this reason, he encourages slaves and every male in town, “men, young and old” (los hombres, jóvenes y ancianos) (75), to rape his own sister. They feel no empathy for a young woman who only a few days ago was a dear and appreciated member of the community, rather they take advantage of the opportunity offered to them to assert their masculinity. Local men transform a healthy and clean body into one that is “rotten, unpleasant, stinking” (putrefacto, desagradable, pestilente) (76). These words serve Ampuero to exemplify the manipulation of the abject inside the patriarchal discourse. Contrary to the sexist narratives which consider females as the root of the abject, here it is men and male fluids which cause abjection. Furthermore, Ampuero makes visible to the reader that this girl, who is a victim of a brutal sexual abuse, is only a whore in the eyes of patriarchy. According to this misogynistic discourse, she is considered as a sinner who, therefore, deserves to be raped and punished. It is at this moment when, by means of his conspiratorial fraternity, the brother finally accesses the body that he had always wished to assault. Ampuero exposes the gender asymmetries in the Catholic discourse where those who defile, rape, and torture can remain holy and pure as long as they are men. It grants, undoubtedly, a carte blanche for rapists who continue to attack girls and teenagers even in the present. As the narrator tells us, the brother “abused her and penetrated her anus and her vagina, and he tortured her, he who called himself pure, who called himself a man of God, who was the dear friend of the most holy of holy men” (la había maltratado y penetrado por el ano y la vagina. Torturado él, que se hacía llamar puro, que se hacía llamar hombre de dios, que era querido amigo de aquel, el más santo de los santos) (76). The evident biblical reminiscences in the language that Ampuero employs, surreptitiously denounce the responsibility of the Church for the spreading of a misogynistic discourse. For centuries clergymen, directly or indirectly, have fostered aggressions to females when constructing them as sinful and guilty by nature. The rapist can perform his crimes with complete impunity by virtue of a tradition that not only justifies his actions but also exonerates him. Still, Ampuero blames another institution: “the brotherhood of masculinity” (la cofradía de la masculinidad) (Segato).

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None of the crimes depicted in the story would have taken place without the support and complicity of men in this town. The story denounces what Rita Segato calls the brotherhood of masculinity, “the male fratría” (la fratría masculina). Masculinity, for Segato, is an association similar to that of the army or the mafia whose “first loyalty is to the corporation” (la primera lealtad es a la corporación). It implies a silent pact established between males through a hierarchical system. Given that the young man who appears in the story is considered practically a saint, as well as a landowner with a privileged position, men place him in the status of a hegemonic masculinity and prefer to follow his orders. The raping of Maria fulfills a double function: it reinforces the brotherhood of masculinity and places the girl in the status of a non-person. On the one hand, the rape of the girl reinforces that pact between men since it is a way of proving that they all belong to the same corporation: they all penetrate the same body, a sacrificial victim that brings them together. On the other hand, sexual assault serves to place the young woman in her assigned role inside this system: she must learn that she is not a person. This is a category that only men can claim. Therefore, she must be feminized, which means violated and sent off where she belongs. As Segato indicates “aggression disciplines, it puts women in their place, it is feminizing them” (la agresión disciplina, está poniendo a la mujer en su lugar, la está feminizando). This is exactly what happens in the story when the aggressor justifies his reasons for mistreating la niña María: “She takes pleasure in the sins of the flesh [. . .] if I untie her, Father, then others will think that this can be done without consequences, that they can be this way and they cannot” (Goza del pecado carnal [. . .] si la suelto, señor, entonces las otras creerán que eso se puede sin consecuencias, que se puede ser así y no) (78). Ampuero’s short stories expose the cruelty suffered by the most vulnerable bodies, a cruelty she blames on the whole society. What the writer demands is, a profound change from the part of men, not only in the perpetrators but also in those who remain passive, as if they did not love their daughters, wives, sisters, or mothers. In an interview with Fabián V. Escalante, she states: “I have written this book howling and it makes me very sad that it is only women who are howling and that you men live with us and you are not howling too. That makes me very sad” (He escrito este libro aullando y me da mucha tristeza que seamos solo las mujeres las que aullamos y que ustedes, hombres, viven con nosotras y no están aullando también. Eso me da mucha pena). The writer deals with the subject of sexual abuse in other stories that due to the brevity of this chapter we cannot analyze in-depth but that need to be mentioned. In “Crías” (Pups), we are witness to the sex education of a twelve-year-old girl who learns, from her first experience, that love means domination; the adolescent never questions this discourse

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and chooses partners who disempower and devalue her throughout her life. Also, in “Persianas” (Blinds) the isolation and loneliness that the leading boy feels turns him into a vulnerable body who, after seeking affection, becomes a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of his own mother. The title “Blinds” is especially significant because it hints at the fact that these crimes against childhood are committed in private spaces, hidden behind the house doors and windows. In many cases, they are not committed by outsiders, but by parents and relatives. Family Terror in Mónica Ojeda’s Nefando and Mandíbula Family terror is a defining element of Nefando by Mónica Ojeda. The novel takes its title from the name of a video game that, according to the narrative, includes some pornographic films in which a pedophile father abuses his three children. It is important to clarify that this is not a factual cultural product but a fictional one; within the novel, this video game is created by three siblings who were molested. Nefando could be seen as a proof that these sorts of criminal acts occur within all social layers and are not exclusive to contexts of poverty and precarity. In the story, no one could have suspected that the famous documentary director Fabricio Terán, a wealthy, educated, and successful man with a privileged social position, could have filmed pornographic videos in which he brutalizes his own offspring. Ojeda approaches these traumatic events through the perspective of the three molested children: Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia. This narrative strategy allows those who usually do not have a voice to express themselves. In an interview conducted in 2020, Ojeda admits that her inspiration for the story was the case of a friend who had been abused by a relative. The entries dedicated to each girl or boy include their age when sharing their experience. This narrative choice is an indication of how they articulate their traumas at different stages of their childhood and adolescence. While her father films pornographic videos, the eight-year-old Irene feels puzzled. On the one hand, the girl idealizes the experience by feeling like “the actress in a romantic movie” (la actriz de una película romántica) (69). However, on the other hand, she does not quite understand why her father forces her to kiss her younger brother “with great affection” (con mucho cariño) (71). During this episode, although Irene does not have the maturity to verbalize that she is being abused, she is capable of expressing feelings of anguish as she identifies her father as the origin of evil. The child narrator states that “she felt stripped of her identity every time she was left alone with her father” (se sentía despojada de su identidad cada vez que se quedaba sola con su padre) (72), humiliated to such an extent that she prefers to drown in the pool that to continue living in this situation.

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Emilio communicates his story when he is already seventeen years old. At this moment he is able to tell in detail the violence received by his sisters and himself during their childhood. Butterfly, Teddy, and Piggy are the identities that girls and boys assume in the videos created by xxBigBossxx, the father’s nickname. In the films, he licks Irene’s vagina, penetrates Emilio anally, and forces Cecilia to eat his poop adopting the position of a dog. Emilio suffers an enormous psychological impact and at some moments he describes the experiences as if he was dissociated from his own body. This can be interpreted as a way of surviving trauma and pain. The abuse and cruelty he receives, make him feel small and deeply disempowered, as Emilio himself makes evident: “Dad walks over me because I am tiny” (papá me camina encima porque soy minúsculo) (122). For her part, the fourteen-year-old Cecilia is not able to fully verbalize her trauma with words, like other survivors, but she does so through her drawings. The latter, however, do not directly represent the abuser, but her own feelings of emptiness and darkness that constitute the emotional landscape of her childhood. To resist this traumatic experience, children stick together through sexual relations with each other. Ojeda suggests that the abuse to which they were subjected during childhood has broken them, twisting the affective practices typical of adolescence and adult life. As Emilio himself states, to save ourselves “we have decided to break us” (hemos decidido rompernos) (121). The Terán siblings have normalized the violence to which they were subjected because they share it with others as if it were an everyday event in the life of any family. According to Silvina Cohen Imach: when we are confronted with situations of sexual abuse, especially of the intrafamily type, beyond the horror produced by the transgression of the oldest taboo of humanity, we consider how to think the unthinkable. It is difficult to understand how what we would qualify from the outside as abject and infamous often appears naturalized in this type of families. (73) (cuando nos confrontamos a situaciones de abuso sexual, sobre todo de tipo intrafamiliar, más allá del horror que produce la transgresión del tabú más antiguo de la humanidad, nos planteamos cómo pensar lo impensable. Resulta difícil entender cómo aquello que calificaríamos desde afuera como abyecto e infame a menudo aparece naturalizado en este tipo de familias.)

This can be illustrated in a scene when the Terán siblings are together with a friend watching a film that shows the story of a kidnapper who abuses minors. They assert without emotion that their father did the same to them when they were little. They even go so far as to share with real enthusiasm the

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videos of the raping scenes that their father uploaded to the Internet. While for friends and authorities, this is an extremely serious criminal act, the Terán siblings describe it as one more event from their childhood. Marta Mendoza Navarro also discusses this issue and observes that they “defend memory over oblivion” (se defiende la memoria contra el olvido) (12) because she considers that it is healthier for them to share these videos rather than to leave these painful secrets covered. On the one hand, it seems that what is named and brought to light serves to reconcile with the traces left by the aggression. However, on the other hand, the reader is left with the feeling that these abused children have been deeply damaged by this experience. It is also important to point out that, according to the testimony of Irene and Emilio, their mother is an accomplice. She prefers to perpetuate the sweetened image of an idyllic and wonderful childhood enjoyed by the standards of her wealthy family. To prove her mother’s hypocrisy Irene states: “The mother spoke of the happiness of the children who had everything, who learned about the world through games, who were loved and protected, and then left them alone with the father” (La madre hablaba de la felicidad de los hijos que lo tenían todo, que aprendían del mundo a través de los juegos, que eran amados y protegidos, y luego los dejaba solos con el padre) (73). Emilio translates this attitude with the expression “Mom doesn’t love us either” (mamá tampoco nos ama) (117). Perhaps this feeling of love is what is lacking in the relationships between mothers and children within Ojeda’s narratives. This is also the case of Mandíbula (Mandible) (2018), a dazzling and disturbing novel, which action takes place in the elitist environment of an Opus Dei school in Guayaquil. The students of the Delta School for Girls, despite belonging to a privileged class, are not exempt from the patriarchal vigilance over the female body that, in this case, is exercised not only by men but especially by mothers. Although in Mandíbula (Mandible) we do not witness explicit sexual abuse, we do observe female figures who have internalized a patriarchal discourse. They place the burden of sexual desire on the bodies of girls and adolescents while they exonerate the males from their violent actions. The character of Annelise is a case in point. From a young age, her mother has instilled in her the idea that if she is the victim of an attack from a man, she will always be the one held responsible. While she bathes her as an infant, she tells her stories of girls kidnapped, murdered, and/or raped. Regardless of the young age and innocence of the female protagonists of these stories, they are always the ones to blame for the violence they receive. The mother warns her daughter: You don’t know what happened to a girl for talking to a stranger or for disobeying her mother and leaving home alone or for not knowing how to say no (in

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her stories, what happened was always the girl’s fault). (No sabes lo que le pasó a una niña por hablar con un extraño o por desobedecer a su mamá y salir de casa sola o por no saber decir que no (en sus relatos lo que pasaba era siempre culpa de la niña).) (220).

In this cruel pedagogy, Annelise learns that the little girl is punished whenever she breaks some rule, while the violent actions of the aggressor are not questioned. The mother encourages her daughter to discipline her body, asking her to close her legs and shut her mouth. If she keeps them open, she warns her, they can attract the attention of “a bad man” who can kidnap her to do “bad things” (cosas malas) (221). Proof of the internalization of this disempowering discourse is that Annelise decides not to wear dresses or skirts. When she has no choice but to wear a uniform at school, she forces herself to sit down in a way in which her panties are not visible. In order not to feel guilty under the gaze of a teacher, she applies a type of corporal torture to herself, since she maintains the same posture for hours, with the needle of a compass pricking her thigh if she changes position. The mother instills in her daughter the idea that the only right of the female body is to feel pain, caused by others or inflicted by girls themselves as this event exemplifies. However, there are exceptions to these rules, since the young woman, according to the maternal discourse, must expose her naked body to the men of the family. At a time when her father and brother enter the room where Annelise, now a teenager, is naked and covers her breasts, her mother removes her hands and exposes her. Her excuse is that they are all family, as if abuses could not take place at home. In any case, whether the male is an unknown predator, a teacher at school, or a member of the family, the mother authorizes a speech that gives the man the right to access the female body. It is becoming evident that the relationships between mothers and daughters do not seem to be based on love but are embedded in a violence that belongs to a patriarchal culture. In fact, the two protagonists of the narration, Annelise and Fernanda, perceive their mothers as evil beings, devouring jaws that only know how to bite. That is, ultimately, the behavior that the young female characters themselves intend to reproduce. Breaking the Silence in Los Fantasmas Tienen Buena Letra by María Fernanda Heredia In this chapter, we also want to advocate in favor of literature for children and teenagers dealing with these controversial issues. Our motivation is, chiefly, the fact that these are cultural products that young girls and boys have the easiest access to. In Los fantasmas tienen buena letra (Ghosts Have Good

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Handwriting) (2017), María Fernanda Heredia speaks with great sensitivity about abuse, providing children with clues on how to act when someone tries to sexually assault them. The novel is narrated in the first person by Manuela, a nine-year-old girl, who retells the harassment suffered by her friend Elvira, a child of the same age. The aggressor, Elvira’s cousin Rogelio, takes advantage of the fact that he is fifteen years old and physically stronger and bigger than Elvira. He intimidates her, beats her up, and forces her to do things that embarrass her. In this case—as it has become clear—the perpetrator of sexual violence is not an adult but a teenager, who from a very young age reproduces a system of domination. The attacker of the story uses techniques that resemble those observed in Ampuero’s short story “Mourning.” Rogelio gradually isolates the victim in order to sexually access her body. However, unlike what happens in Ampuero’s story, Elvira has built relationships that she can rely on to get out of this situation of abuse. We propose that Heredia dares to write about experiences that are usually dissociated from the narrative of childhood, or that children usually deny, with the purpose of helping them break this silence. By doing so, they can find ways to request help and escape the situations that keep them trapped as victims of abuse. Enrique Echeburúa and Cristina Guerricaechevarría also write about sexual abuse in childhood and propose that these types of narratives can have a therapeutic objective: “Breaking the secret and the feeling of isolation that accompanies it” (romper el secreto y el sentimiento de aislamiento que lo acompaña) (67). This intention is evident in Heredia’s novel, especially when the aunt tells Manuela “the only way to put an end to these painful secrets is by talking about them and preventing them from staying in our hearts” (la única manera de acabar con estos secretos dolorosos es hablando de ellos e impidiendo que se queden a vivir en nuestro corazón) (136). Throughout the novel, the reader finds several subtle clues indicating that Elvira is being sexually abused by her cousin. It culminates with a confession that verbalizes this unspeakable experience and frees her from this nightmare. Elvira’s testimony is presented through the words of Manuela, who chooses what to say and what to keep secret, in order to protect her friend’s privacy even from the reader’s gaze: Days later Elvira decided to tell me her secret. It was a secret like a monster, like a nightmare. I will only say that she used few words and many tears. I’ll just say that later she went home and told her mother what had happened... that Rogelio was getting close to her, that he was getting too close, much closer than she wanted to allow him, and that he was forcing her to do things. That’s why one day Elvira decided that she didn’t want to be there, alone with her cousin, and she ran, she ran with all her might, she went through the door and never

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allowed him to do those things that made her feel uncomfortable, sad and confused again. (135) (Días después Elvira decidió contarme su secreto. Era un secreto como un monstruo, como una pesadilla. Sólo diré que utilizó pocas palabras y muchas lágrimas. Solo diré que después fue a su casa y le dijo a su madre lo que había ocurrido…que Rogelio se acercaba a ella, que se acercaba demasiado, mucho más de lo que ella quería permitírselo, y que le obligaba a hacer cosas. Por eso un día Elvira decidió que no quería estar ahí, a solas con su primo, y corrió, corrió con todas sus fuerzas, cruzó la puerta y nunca permitió que él volviera a hacerse esas cosas que la hacían sentir incómoda, triste y confundida.)

Although Heredia avoids explicitly presenting sexual violence, her description is clear enough. By telling her friend the secret, Elvira overcomes fear and forms bonds of trust that encourage her to go to her mother, an adult with real agency to remove the aggressor from her daughter’s life. However, one of the most important merits of the novel is to show that minors also have agency. When Manuela reflects on the expression, “They will tell you not to tell anyone” (Te dirán que no se lo digas a nadie) (109), which replicates the threats received from Rogelio, she realizes that she does not have to obey. She can design a plan to free herself from his intimidation, speak out and defend her own freedom. The family can not only be a nucleus where cruelty spreads but also a place where tenderness serves to stop the harasser and protect the victim. Manuela’s mother in Heredia’s novel, unlike Annelise’s mother in Mandíbula (Mandible), does not put the blame on the girl’s body but rather teaches her that no one has the right to touch her without her consent. When she puts into practice her plan to confront Rogelio, the protagonist remembers her mother’s words: “That I should not allow anyone to touch me, that I should trust my heart, that whatever happens, she would always be with me” (que no permitiera que nadie me tocara, que confiara en mi corazón, que pasara lo que pasara ella siempre estaría conmigo) (131). Neither does the father appear as a physically or emotionally absent being. His presence is purposeful and recommends “that I should be careful, that I do not speak to strangers, that if I felt threatened, I should scream and ask for help” (que tuviera cuidado, que no hablara con desconocidos, que si me sentía amenazada gritara y pidiera ayuda) (131). The aunt also makes her realize that even if she is a girl, she is a subject with agency, who can decide what to do, what to think or feel. Although there is a tendency to see danger as something that can only happen outside the home, it is also true that the mother, father, and aunt of the protagonist tell her that she can always speak about her problems. Manuela never feels judged or blamed, all of which is essential for breaking the silence and denouncing violence.

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Thanks to the pedagogies generated by her own family, Manuela resists being a victim: she knows how to advise Elvira and where to turn when Rogelio, not content with raping his cousin, wants to do the same with her. However, the text also gives the protagonist clues about what to do when there is no adult around and the bully is in front of her. Remaining in the company of friends, screaming, running, or even basic self-defense techniques appear in this novel to provide real tools for girls and boys. As Echeburúa and Guerricaechevarría indicate, within the education of minors it is important that they understand: what is sexual abuse, who are the potentially perpetrators (not exclusively strangers) and how to act when someone tries to abuse them. It is important that they understand that, although they are not guilty of what happened and the responsibility falls entirely on the aggressor, they have effective strategies to avoid its new occurrence. (66–67) (qué son los abusos sexuales, quiénes son los que potencialmente pueden cometerlos (no exclusivamente los desconocidos) y cómo actuar cuando alguien pretende abusar de ellos. Es importante que entiendan que, aunque ellos no son culpables de lo sucedido y la responsabilidad recae enteramente sobre el agresor, disponen de estrategias eficaces para evitar su nueva ocurrencia)

In addition to family ties based on love and care, there are other important networks of affects that are those of friends. Heredia encourages minors to realize that they are not alone, that they must surround themselves with people who love and support them and whom they can also support. FINAL THOUGHTS This chapter has explored the works of three Ecuadorian writers of the twenty-first century who make visible the taboo of sexual abuse in girls, boys, and teenagers. In the case of Ampuero’s “Auction” and “Mourning,” the writer appropriates the abject discourse that she uses either to free the girls from the aggressors or to expose those responsible for the violence they exert on the female body. In general, men follow gender asymmetries to put the weight of sin on girls’ bodies and thus exonerate the attacker. The perpetrator invites other men to rape the bodies of teenagers, who serve as a tribute shared by the members of the brotherhood of masculinity (Segato). Ampuero points out the need for a change in the sexual attitudes of a toxic masculinity that must be abandoned. However, it is not only men who carry out violence, but women can also be accomplices in these crimes against children. On the one hand, as with

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the wife of the pedophile father in Nefando, some women prefer to look the other way rather than face the rapes that take place at home. On the other hand, as happens in Mandíbula (Mandible), mothers can assume the patriarchal discourse and promote this incriminating look on girls who learn, from their earliest childhood, that they will always be blamed for the violence they receive. It is becoming evident that the family and the home do not appear as reliable shelters but rather as centers that reproduce violence. However, there are also narratives that offer realistic outlets for those who suffer in silence from abuse, as is the case in Heredia’s novel. One of the main merits of the writer is to present the family not only as a place where abusers live but also as a space where pedagogies of tenderness can stop the aggressor and protect the victim. We propose that the Ecuadorian writers explored in this chapter show through their literary productions hitherto invisible violences, and by doing so they unlock the possibilities to promote changes in public policies. These policies, on the one side, should safeguard and instruct these vulnerable groups, and, on the other, they should hunt down and punish predators. The education of teachers and professionals, in the case of adults, in addition to the presence of classes on equity and sexual diversity throughout the educational cycle of children and teenagers, constitutes a necessary step to break the cycle of violence.

NOTES 1. Sofía Barajas, a student of the bachelor’s degree in English at the Faculty of Languages and Letters of the Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico) has participated in the editing of this chapter. This chapter is part of the research project entitled Growing Up in Latin America: Childhood and Maternity in the Works of 21st Century Latin American Women Writers directed by Silvia Ruiz Tresgallo (Autonomous University of Queretaro). 2. All translations are made by the author.

WORKS CITED Ampuero, Fernanda. “Escribí este libro aullando de dolor: María Fernanda Ampuero.” Interview by Fabián V. Escalante. + Cultura, Librerías Gandhi. mascu​​ltura​​.mx​/e​​ntrev​​ista-​​maria​​-fern​​anda-​​​ampue​​ro/. Accessed 10 November 2020. ———. Pelea de Gallos. Madrid: Páginas de espuma, 2019. Bialet, Graciela. “La letra invisible de un crimen: Abuso sexual y Literatura InfantoJuvenil.” Blog de lectura crítica y periodismo especializado en literatura infantil y juvenil, 23 January 2019. linte​​rnasy​​bosqu​​es​.wo​​rdpre​​ss​.co​​m​/201​​9​/01/​​23​/la​​-letr​​

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a​-inv​​isibl​​e​-de-​​un​-cr​​imen-​​abuso​​-sexu​​al​-y-​​liter​​atura​​-infa​​nto​-j​​​uveni​​l​-por​​-grac​​iela-​​ biale​​t/. Butler, Judith. Vida Precaria. Argentina: Paidós, 2006. Cohen Imach, Silvina. Abusos sexuales y traumas de la infancia. Argentina: Paidós, 2017. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1, 1989, pp. 139–167. Echeburúa, Enrique, and Cristina Guerricaechevarría Estanca. Abuso sexual en la infancia: víctimas y agresores: Un enfoque clínico. Barcelona: Ariel, 2000. Heredia, María Fernanda. “Ecuatoriana María Fernanda Heredia escribe para darle coraje a los niños.” El espectador, 3 May 2019. www​.elespectador​.com​/noticias​/cultura​/ecuatoriana​-maria​-fernanda​-heredia​-escribe​-para​-darle​-coraje​-a​-los​ -ninos/. ———. Los fantasmas tienen buena letra. Santiago de Chile: Loqueleo Santillana, 2019. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Llarena Ascanio, María Jesús. “Bodies Becoming Pain: Unusual Strategies of Dissent in Some Transnational Latin-American Women Writers.” Brumal, vol. 8, no. 1, 2020, pp. 113–134. RACO. doi: 10.5565/rev/brumal.67. Martorella, Ana María. “El abuso sexual infantil en la literatura».” XV Congreso Virtual de Psiquiatría Interpsiquis (2014), Compartir para crecer, 1–28 February 2014, pp. 1–22. Mendoza Navarro, Marta. El dolor y el sexo más abyectos: Tratamiento de la violencia en Nefando (2016) de Mónica Ojeda. 2019. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Trabajo final de Grado. ddd​.uab​.cat​/record​/21​1573. Ojeda, Mónica. Mandíbula. Barcelona: Candaya, 2019. ———. “Mónica Ojeda: Hay que llevar la escritura a la zona del tabú.” El comercio, 19 October 2017. www​.elcomercio​.com​/tendencias​/monicaojeda​-escritura​-tabu​ -literatura​-caninos​.html/. ———. Nefando. México D.F: Almadía, 2019. ———. “Nefando. Cuando la hostilidad del mundo empieza en casa.” Noticias 22 Digital, 4 September 2020. notic​​ias​.c​​anal2​​2​.org​​.mx​/2​​020​/0​​9​/04/​​nefan​​do​-cu​​ando-​​ la​-ho​​stili​​dad​-d​​el​-mu​​n​do​-e​​mpiez​​a​-en-​​casa/​. Ortega Caicedo, Alicia. “Nefando de Mónica Ojeda Franco. La infancia tiene una voz baja y un vocabulario impreciso: Escribir, perturbar, decir lo indecible.” Kipus, vol. 44, Jul–Dic 2018, pp. 175–184. Proquest, doi: 10.32719/13900102.2018.44.10. Parra Olave, Martín. “Narraciones monstruosas y hogareñas en las voces de dos escritoras ecuatorianas.” Cine y literatura, 31 July 2020. www​.cineyliteratura​.cl​/ narraciones​-monstruosas​-y​-violentas​-en​-las​-voces​-de​-dos​-escritoras​-ecuatorianas/. Roche Rodríguez, Michelle. Reseña de “Pelea de Gallos de María Fernanda Ampuero: La crueldad del patriarcado y de la precariedad en 13 asaltos.” Colofón. www​.col​ofon​revi​stal​iteraria​.com​/pelea​-gallos​-maria​-fernanda​-ampuero​-la​-crueldad​-del​-patriarcado​-la​-precariedad​-13​-asaltos/. Accessed 10 November 2020.

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Ruiz Tresgallo, Silvia. “La dialéctica de los cuerpos abyectos: mujer y demonio en El Conde Lucanor y el Arcipreste de Talavera.” Medievalia, vol. 23, no. 2, November 2020, pp. 65–101. Latindex, doi: 10.5565/rev/medievalia.462. Segato, Rita. “La cofradía de la masculinidad.” Agenda de Género(s), 17 May 2020. agend​​adege​​neros​​.com/​​2020/​​05​/la​​-cofr​​adia-​​de​-la​​-mas​c​​ulini​​dad.

Chapter 12

In the Name of Darkness Coloniality and Disability in Mariana Enriquez’s Nuestra parte de noche (2019) Carlos Ayram

Mariana Enriquez received the thirty-seventh Herralde Prize 2019 for Nuestra parte de Noche, a novel that excavates, through terror and Latin American tropical and urban gothic, the collective trauma left by the civicmilitary dictatorship in the Argentine national memory. While the work can be understood as an “allegorical machine” (Avelar 12) that unveils the ruin left by political-military violence in northern Argentina, it also examines, from an “aesthetic of fear and terror”1 (Amaro 806), the discomforts that are systematically inscribed in minority bodies. According to Fernanda Bustamante (2019), Mariana Enriquez’s narration “aims to denounce the violence of bodies and on bodies” (33). Hence, the presence of bodies stripped, sick, disturbed, mutilated, and erased by their eminent dissidence also unveils the geopolitics of violence in Enriquez’s narrative. Mariana Enriquez has declared that her gaze on the obscure has something political about it, and it is precisely this gaze that becomes a space for ethical interrogation and a powerful device for politicization. What is proper to politics is disagreement, a “determined and antagonistic” (45) activity, suggests Jacques Rancière, to a homogeneous and policed model of community and life. Nuestra parte de Noche is traversed by this political dimension which, far from constituting a terrifying and therefore perverse fable, dares to question and distort the recent Argentinean past with the firm intention of “undermining the concept of reality but, at the same time, inquire about it” (Leandro-Hernández 163). However, this politicization of the obscure that runs through Enriquez’s narrative may well be valued as an aesthetic-political action that repels the whiff of dictatorship, but also, as I suggest in this chapter, reveals the miasma of colonial reasoning. Through allegory, the novel 193

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suggests that the experience of growing can be read as a parallel to the distribution of precariousness in Latin America. The novel suggests that growth experience is similar to the distribution of precariousness in Latin America through allegory. On the one hand, there is a precarious condition: the existential status that life in society acquires, “a shared condition of human life” (Butler, Frames of War 13). On the other, precarization hierarchizes those lives that must be preserved or else disappeared and be weakened in the name of a joint project. Hence, being born or growing up in the Global South, as Enrique’s work allegorizes, makes us face a painful fact: there are lives programmed to suffer social, racial, and political injustice. As the product of a colonial matrix of power, they have no right to inscribe themselves in a narrative of the future. Therefore, the educational and corporeal control experienced by children is an issue at the novel’s heart. The portrait offered by Enriquez avoids the label of an educational novel, a genre inaugurated in modernity, and prefers to encourage a more complex discussion on the different pedagogical mechanisms—mainly installed in the wealthiest families—to legislate on the life of minors. Nuestra parte de noche is a horror novel that narrates the journey undertaken by the medium Juan Peterson and his son Gaspar through the North of Argentina during the military dictatorship. Both characters are searching for the house of The Order, commanded by the Bradford and Mathers Families. This lodge promises access to eternal life by worshiping a supernatural entity called “The Darkness.” Juan, who suffers from an abnormal heart condition, must take charge of protecting Gaspar, who has been designated as the next medium that The Order needs to protect its secret. In sinister and violent rituals where women, missing detainees, dissidents, and indigenous people are sacrificed, The Order feeds the pride of the dark god to access his wisdom and find his access to eternity. The novel is divided into six parts and spans through a long timeline. First, it tells the origins of The Order in England in the 1960s and its later expansion. Later, the novel focuses on the first generation of young people who guess the place where The Darkness resides, following the encounter of The Order with a young Juan Peterson in the 1970s in Argentina. Finally, the novel follows Gaspar’s childhood and adolescence in a neighborhood of Buenos Aires between 1985 and 1997, where he finally faces his unavoidable fate. In addition, two chapters are added: Dr. Bradford’s monologue and a fake journalistic chronicle written by Olga Gallardo, which expands and details the relationship of the protagonists with The Order and The Darkness. My chapter analyzes some of the most notable characters and moments of the story: the origin of The Order, its expansion as a pedagogical project involved in the formation and deformation of its members, the figures of the medium and the invunche, and the consolidation of a community of crippled and injured bodies.

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In this chapter, I intend to reflect on the relationship and complicity between dictatorship and coloniality in the novel. Additionally, I propose to draw a connection with the notion of disability within the context of the Global South. Here, I propose to understand the concept of disability from a geopolitical perspective specific to countries with a deep “colonial wound” (Mignolo La idea).2 Disability, a direct consequence of multiple acts of violence suffered by certain bodies in the name of The Order project, constitutes a device of biopolitical control. According to Gabriel Bizarri, the novel intercepts “allegorically the horrors of patriotic history, a disputed prey in the castle of the crossed horrors of colony and dictatorship” (215). This complicity between colony and dictatorship allows us to visualize, on the one hand, the borders where the exercise of dictatorial control was also present, and, on the other, a demonic and grotesque backlash that privileges the systematic exploitation of the bodies of women, children, young people, and racialized subjects. Additionally, the notion of disability and coloniality is intimately related to two interdependent concepts: growth and agency. Both are two different instances of subjectivation present in the novel. On the one hand, growth can no longer be understood as a developmentalist experience that certain subjects acquire to internalize the norms of the social world and, in this way, go through a formative process that successfully inserts them into a community. On the contrary, growing up implies suffering bodily mandates of a cruel and painful pedagogy that robs children—and other bodies considered as subaltern—of the ability to fully constitute themselves as political subjects. For the purpose of my analysis, the concept of “agency” is understood as a “transformative practice” (Villaplana Ruiz 19), which constructs repertoires of enunciation toward a collective subjectivity. As Deleuze stated, “Is precisely that increase of dimensions in a multiplicity that necessarily changes its nature as its connections increase” (14). Notwithstanding the latter ideas, achieving a power of agency seems impossible for the children we find in Enriquez’s fiction. In addition to being visibly marked with wounds, scars, and mutilations, their experience of childhood is also handicapped in a different sense. Both the processes of growth and agency are taken away from the child characters, who must obediently accept a scripted life of worship and torture that governs them even long before their birth. However, as we will see in this chapter, the ending of the novel will provide an alternative to this life of subjugation and will open the possibility for children to reclaim a sense of agency. In the novel, it is possible to find different ways of understanding the experience of growing up. I will point out two of them. First, growth is interfered with by a strategic program of biopolitical control that manages the way individual lives are allowed to live at the expense of others.

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Nevertheless, some subjects fail to be included in this project, as they are not seen as part of the official narrative. For them, the future has been denied. Subsequently, they are subjected to a slow death so that others can live better (Puar 55). As part of this narrative, The Order denies racialized children their possibility of agency. By denying this possibility, their political resistance disintegrates and has no place, as will be developed in the second part of this chapter. Under these conditions, their lives seem not to matter and have no mourning, no presence in the collective. It is as if they represented the “Fourth World” that Claudia Briones addresses, which appears as the world altered by colonization. The second experience of upbringing I want to highlight is that of a queer paternity exercised by the protagonist of the novel. Their relation shows unprecedented tenets of sociability, education, and protection, which do not strictly follow the heterodomestic and traditional models. In fact, the absence of the mother is a crucial point of the story. Although in a contradictory way, it ends up imposing itself on the life of a defenseless person. In this case, on the body of a girl. Accordingly, I interrelate the categories of coloniality and disability in Nuestra parte de noche through an interdisciplinary dialogue that brings together contributions from disability studies, contemporary feminist thought, and decolonial theory. My central hypothesis is that the novel stages the tensions and contradictions of a colonial project sustained by a biopolitical design that, on the one hand, educates and disciplines the members of The Order – who feed their fantasies and delusions of eternal life—while, on the other, produces disabilities in minority and racialized subjects through bodily debilitation. First, I show how the novel imagines perverse alternatives of education and sociability sustained by ontological and epistemological practices of coloniality. The novel fictionalizes an experience of (de)formation that reproduces the hegemony of The Order which, aiming to perpetuate itself and stablish dominance, institutes twisted and painful pedagogies. Children, young people, and women—as subaltern figures—are deformed and disciplined according to an educational project that admits no possibility of resistance. Second, I argue that The Order installs a “biopolitics of debilitation” that creates “monsters” racialized and uses medical-rehabilitative technologies to wear down and maintain—but not cure—the sick bodies of the mediums who operate as connections with Darkness. To conclude, I will observe that the processes of control and administration of disposable lives paradoxically become a community of “crippled” bodies in which disability is a desirable condition. The Darkness functions allegorically as a kind of colonial stubbornness that refuses to disappear and creates a new community of injured bodies necessary to maintain its functioning.

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A Tenebrous Pedagogy In Mariana Enríquez’s novel, the history of The Order is a history of colonial and imperial expansion. It was founded in England in the eighteenth century by a bookseller, William Bradford, and by a landowner, Thomas Mathers. The relationship between these characters must be considered both at the diegetical and the allegorical level. The brotherhood between the letter and capital makes possible the constitution of a secret lodge that aspires to find and decipher the messages sent by The Darkness, an entity that “dictates instructions on how to obtain the survival of consciousness” (380). Bradford and Mathers are the first to find the mediums with whom The Darkness communicates. These mediums are called “the dark children” (396). They are racialized subalterns—orphaned children, women, and ill and infirm people—The Order uses and preserves for its purposes. Sometimes they are sexually abused, under the pretense of performing “sex magic.” They are supposed to convey the messages that, in a ceremonial rite, The Darkness dictates in an unintelligible language that The Order then records in the “Book”: “But The Darkness is capricious. Sometimes it speaks and it is impossible to make sense of its words” (380). The written word brings together the knowledge provided by The Darkness and renders itself the authoritative instrument of The Order. According to Mary Louise Pratt, the empire was united through words, which created a world rich in meaning for its subjects. While Pratt argues how travel books served to give meaning to imperial experience and thus construct the “domestic subject of empire” (24), writing, as a record of experience and imagination, became central to constructing notions of entitlement, familiarity, and planetary property. Bradford and Mathers search for The Darkness through books: they locate its presence geographically, they travel like imperial subjects, and they never go in blind. Then, the inscriptions of the voice of The Darkness, or its inextricable messages, are assembled in the “Book” whose very nature would be that of montage: Tthere are passages of text that are dictated, in theory, by The Darkness identical to fragments of grimoires that exist in the library of The Order” (403). The “Book,” therefore, will constitute the unceasing archive of The Order, but it will also harbor a profound contradiction: the consciousness of The Darkness does not correspond to the signs that try to capture it in the book. Later, in 1962, The Darkness manifests itself on Argentinean soil. It is here where Juan Peterson, the sick, orphaned, and morally ambiguous protagonist, will serve as the next medium and radically change the course of The Order. More than a mere geographical displacement, the relocation of The Order to Argentina must be observed from the perspective of a “geopolitical imaginary” (Mignolo La idea 101). The novel reactivates and problematizes the

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colonial continent of the South as an empty, uncivilized, border space. The North-South transit should not go unnoticed: it should be understood allegorically as a confirmation of a colonial project that, to sustain itself, invents painful and corrective pedagogies. The project of The Order creates a web of relations based on the systematic exploitation of subaltern bodies. According to Anibal Quijano, “Corporeality is the decisive level of power relations” (124). This web of relations is twofold. In the first instance, it formulates a plan of learning and education that sustains the interests of The Order. Given that its members must participate in the ceremonial, they must learn to draw chalk circles to invoke demons or specters and show their worship and respect to the “Book” by accepting that being touched (mutilated) by The Darkness is a sign of prestige. The consolidation of an educational system inspired by mutilation, mainly, imbues the members of The Order with a desirable and therefore “worthy” condition to be lived, which in this case, we could name as a disability. Pedagogy is formalized in a constant and cruel practice that is always executed on the body of the defenseless. Rita Segato calls this type of practice that program subjects for suffering and slow death, “pedagogies of cruelty” which “teach to kill in a de-ritualised death, a death that leaves only residues in the place of the deceased” (11). This pedagogy installs the repetition of violence as a strategy that eliminates any demonstration of empathy with the pain of the other. The Order is nourished by systematic and intentional cruelty that privileges, in this case, mutilation as the central axis of the realization of its pedagogical project. The tenebrous pedagogy processes instances of subjectivation that, instead of providing a space for agency, inflict injuries and harmful damage on bodies. The knowledge that The Order develops must act directly on the bodies of its members. Pedagogy takes the form of a political fiction that “sutures the body and experience” (Sacchi 22). Hence, the knowledge accumulated by The Order must be reproduced on the body and contribute to technification and disciplining. Three examples taken from the novel are at hand: first, the case of the twins Genesis and Crimson who carry out their gender transformation to achieve the premise of the magical androgynous; second, Laura, who has had her left eye gouged out and refuses to wear a prosthetic eye; and third, Eddie, mutilated by his mother because she believes he could be a potential medium. Disability in the framework of this pedagogy begins to be a condition foreseen by The Order, only converted into a technology of bodily production and control. The body is the privileged place of knowledge and permanence of The Order. In Nuestra parte de noche, childhood has a double condition that, despite having subtle differences of race, gender, or class, is crossed by the terrifying ubiquity of dark power. On the one hand, children are racialized and

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biopolitically weakened by The Order, acquiring the status of sacrificial objects and representing the height of colonial violence on the body. Franz Fanon observed, for example, that the damné “has not descended into hell” (42) because it is already exposed to a physical and psychological attrition that forces him to remain in a state of perpetual annulment by the colonial experience. In this sense, the Guarani children in the Bradford family zoo are integrated into the pedagogical program of The Order. They are inscribed in what Agamben has called “the uses of the body” (42), whose function is to instrumentalize some bodies (especially those of slaves) as they can be used for practical purposes instead of productive ones. Hence, the children kidnapped by The Order are bodies available to hurt, wound, and turn into invunches, bearing the marks of precariousness and disability. This is an issue that Enriquez is interested in underlining as the novel reflects on the dangerous place inhabited by the indigenous communities, especially the Guarani, during the Argentine civil-military dictatorship. Therefore, the novel shows how racialized children are the most vulnerable subjects within a system of oppression. It is a scheme that assigns precariousness to those who are still profitable even if they have not acquired their political inscription as subjects. Parallel to these childhoods governed by The Order’s despotic apparatus of terror, death, and desolation, other children are not being racialized yet are considered vessels or sacrifices for The Darkness. The cases of Gaspar, son of John Peterson; Adela, daughter of Betty and cousin of Gaspar; or Eddie, Florence Matters’ son, represent a childhood programmed by what I call in this chapter a tenebrous pedagogy that leads its members to become desirable and voluntary disabled. In this sense, some characters are mutilated by The Darkness, like Adela. Others, however, are driven mad by their parents to force them as mediums or suffer ocular mutilations to discipline them. Thus, pedagogy acquires a deformative sense by marking bodies either by compulsion or will, taking away their agency and political decision. So, although the novel’s second part explores the alliances and conspiracies child characters must endure amid the most ineffable terror, children are nevertheless mutilated, feminized, torn apart, and used to feed the aggressive hunger of The Darkness. Childhood does not exist as an enabling condition of agency for The Order. The tenebrous pedagogy binds its members—all adults or bordering on old age and decrepitude—to the detriment of children unless they are programmed to perpetuate The Order’s power. The “educated” children of The Order submit to the dictates of The Darkness, which guarantees their class membership and, at the same time, assures the reproduction of an unquestionable knowledge anchored in books, esoteric studies, diaries, and travelogues. However, the “other” children are condemned to be speechless monsters who do not necessarily have an assigned place as recipients of the

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secrets of Darkness. Therefore, they only host (or fulfil) the sinister devotion of The Order. As Judith Butler expresses, these deplored and grieving lives leave evidence that the operations of power delimit the sphere of appearance of specific lives considered worthy of being seen and appreciated. In contrast, others are only left to disappear, even in their condition of liveable lives, because “there are ‘lives’ that are not at all—or never were—recognized as lives” (17). It is striking that this set of bodily relations does not operate on a level of equality. While there are bodies in The Order that are mutilated, there are other that are sacrificed as food offerings to The Darkness. These are subjects who must die so that others may live. In the novel, these practices of bodily domination reveal the deep colonial imprint that survives in the treatment of bodies that have been considered as sacrificial objects. This relationship between domination and bodily exploitation must be observed within the context of invasion and colonial control that the novel suggests. The Order moves geographically between North and South, maintaining, both, the idea of domination and expansion, and the capacity to establish itself as a ubiquitous institution. The North-South coordinates operate as an indicator of the experience, in this case, of the imperial subject who, through the journey, “discovers” the mediums. The latter, as I have pointed out, are subaltern subjects and have no political agency whatsoever. The Order’s presence in Africa, for example, when they encounter Olana, reveals a “logic of coloniality” (Mignolo Desobediencia) whose purpose is to privilege the disabling of the racialized body and its commodification: “We cannot meaningfully separate the racialised subaltern from the disabled subaltern in the process of colonisation” (Meekosha 673). The racialization of subjects coexists with their management as useful bodies for the exercise of invocation to the detriment of their health. The colonization of the body is not, in this case, of interest as mere docility, but as vital wear and tear: the greater the sign of weakness, the greater the prosperity of invocation. Bradford and Mathers buy Olana, and this transaction reveals that the racialized female body, in this case, is the desired object of possession, the primary locus of interest. Olana is violently transplanted from Africa to England, a further sign to think about the processes of colonization over “other” bodies consented by the project of modernity. The Order acted on Olana’s body and, after her death, desiccated her, turning her skull into a jeweled amulet that was “used by the women of The Order in secret meetings, dances and invocations” (Enriquez 379). This logic of coloniality “with its combination of genocide, permanent slavery, animalisation and sub-animalisation, together with the creation of worlds of death and worse than death” (Maldonado Torres El caribe 562), engenders concrete actions on bodies and their vital experiences. The Order operates as an institution with colonial legacies. That is, it interested in

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modeling educational experiences, becoming expansive, and sustaining a monotopic thought that, in turn, orders knowledge, affects, and habits. It is necessary to clarify that this “colonial” idea exceeds the historical period in which historical colonialism is disseminated and formalized, but it produces a pattern of power called “coloniality” that refers to “the way in which work, knowledge, authority and inter-subjective relations are articulated among themselves, through the world capitalist market and the idea of race” (131).3 The Order installs a tenebrous pedagogy inspired by pain, mutilation, and torture that proposes a particular scheme of sociability. First, it brings forth an epistemological program that regulates the interactions of the members of The Order, ensuring that there is blind faith in its purposes: “A cult that does not offer benefits forever, or at least for an unusually long time, does not build faith. And believing is unquestionable” (Enriquez 403). Second, this scheme of (de)formation of human life hints that the reproduction and control of thought that The Order institutes in the South is also endemic among its members: they are first to live for The Darkness, not for themselves. This complicity between knowledge and power represented in the novel can be read as a collaborative relationship between two forms of coloniality: of being and of knowledge. If coloniality survives colonialism, understood as the political and economic sovereignty that one people has over another, it is precisely because it has been installed as a form of power that has become natural and unquestionable. Its way of surviving is defined by its presence in “learning manuals [. . .] in culture, common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in the aspirations of subjects, and so many other aspects of our modern experience” (Maldonado Torres Sobre la colonialidad 131). The coloniality of knowledge would be linked “to the role of epistemology and the general tasks of knowledge production in the reproduction of colonial regimes of thought” (130). The “the coloniality of being refers, then, to the lived experience of colonisation and its impact on language” (130). These two forms of coloniality, which overlap and collaborate, are an irrefutable experience that ultimately constructs The Order’s educational project. Some subjects control knowledge; others learn it and reproduce it through their practices; and others, on the contrary, are the receptacle of The Order’s perverse praxis.4 Education must serve, however, rather than a project of successful formation as a blind integration to the dictates of Darkness. The impact of colonization on the experience of “other” subjects is also installed in Misiones, Argentina, when The Order decides to act without any ethical and legal oversight on the Guaraní frontier. For The Order to exist, it needs to control and ontologically disable the bodies of minorities. In this case, we are dealing with the bodies of indigenous children, women, and the detained or disappeared. These subjects lose all access to any possibility of agency or resistance: The Order’s disturbing methods of taking away their

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voice, mobility, and human dignity transform them into a sort of wretched of the tropical land. These “damned” introject the terror of “colonial aggression” (Fanon 10) and are left helpless in the face of a project that devours them and treats them as colonial goods. Puerto Reyes will play an important role in the novel: the manor house of the Reyes Bradford family will be the physical space of invocation, but it will also become the space of concretion of a curious biopolitical design that will mark the province of Misiones in a sinister way. The Invunche, the Medium, and the Pit The Darkness feeds on pain and exploitation, “a mad god” (Enriquez 156) that cannot proceed on its own: it is sustained by The Order; indulging it in its whims is the main task of the congregation. For this it needs bodies to sacrifice and sick bodies to invoke it. The constant aggressions suffered by minority bodies in the novel unveils a biopolitical design that considers weakness as central to its action and, thus, uncovers a management of the body that must be examined as part of what the novel fictionalizes and allegorizes. Why are there lives that are invested with a future and can be more profitable and better than others? Which bodies must suffer weakening so that others can live better? Michael Foucault (1984) states that in the constitution of biopower: “The old right to make die or to let live was replaced by the power to make live or to refuse to die” (167), and that sentence, “to make live,” not only justified the absolute control of life and the livable but also recognized, with an unfortunate bias, lives more livable than others. The “making alive” is a central concern in the work of Jasbir Puar, who introduces the concept of the biopolitics of debilitation, understood as a primary activity within the agendas of capitalism, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Debilitation is not a product of social inequity or unequal distribution of precarity but is constituted as a politically intentional action charged with “making alive” (not letting die) certain communities so that others may live better. A tactic and, consequently, a practice that controls certain populations that are available to be injured: “Certain bodies are employed in production processes precisely because they are deemed available for injury—they are, in other words, objects of disposability, bodies whose debilitation is required to sustain capitalist narratives of progress” (Puar 81). These target populations, almost all located in the Global South, are constantly subjected to a process of slow death through the ordinary labor of living. There are two figures that The Order considers in order to act through its biopolitics of debilitation: the invunche and the medium. The invuches, from the veliche: Invun=small being and che=man (small man), is a monstrous

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figure in Chiloé or Mapuche mythology. According to Edward Bello, the sorcerers transform “healthy and beautiful children into hideous monsters” (43) and “they also obstruct all the orifices of the body, except the mouth” (Montecino 245). The Bradford’s family house in Puerto Reyes, whose location privileges the gaze over the border, may well be the most horrifying image of a nation narcotized by the rotting breath of colonial reason: “The family is a country within the country” (Enriquez 512). The house contains a network of tunnels containing a sort of “human zoo” in which the majority of Guaraní children are held hostage: The first boy was in a rusty and dirty cage [. . .] His left leg was tied behind his back in a position that had forced him to break his hip [. . .] his neck was already twisted [. . .] his tongue had been cut in two and was now forked. (Enriquez 157)

Children’s bodies represent those lives that must suffer so that others may live better. The children acquire the status of invunche. The Order breaks their bones, sews their mouths shut, and cages them. The landscape of death, desolation, and pain that The Order establishes with these practices. The invunches cease to be children: their childhood is annulled by torture. They are voiceless, broken bodies, but necessary to give operation to the demands of Darkness. The invunches cannot defend themselves, they do not have the weapons of defense. However, it should not be overlooked that their racialization contributes as a colonial mark in this infamous process of transformation: racialized bodies carry, in addition to disability, a process of feminization, pain, and dispossession. Second, the figure of the medium becomes crucial to the purposes of The Order. He or she can open “The Other Side,” the chamber where Darkness dwells. Juan is the last medium of The Order and the one who manages to evade the mandate of succession that rightfully belongs to his son Gaspar. Juan has suffered from childhood from Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart disease that affects the normal flow of blood through the heart. Juan Peterson’s hypertrophic heart, coupled with his status as a subordinate, yet white and blond, makes him a perfect candidate for The Darkness. The Order will not care for Juan as a subject and will not assist him in his recovery process. On the contrary, rehabilitation is a dangerous means of maintaining a life of pain and fatigue. Juan will be subjected to intense periods of surgery that bind him to the ordinary work of invocation as a bridge between the material world and the world of shadows. The invuche is a broken body transformed into a human monster and given as food to The Darkness. The medium is the defective body that must host it. Both bodies bear the marks of disability, albeit unequally. While the racialized is a monstrified subject, the other is a priviledged white medicalized

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body. Both types of corporeality are gripped by that biopolitics of weakness that privileges suffering, grief, and horror for those who lose their political agency. Nonetheless, it must be noted that the invasion of medical-rehabilitative technologies is intended only to make the lives of the mediums livable, not to restore them a sense of dignity. Both bodies, of course, with their racial, gender, and sexual differences, are programmed as disposable and expendable lives. This biopolitical action, centered mainly on the weakening of the dying and the defenseless, produces a type of violence that we could categorize as “horrorism.” According to Adriana Cavavero, “Horrorism, although it often has to do with death or, if you like, with the murder of unarmed victims, is characterised by a particular form of violence that transcends death itself” (61). Death is not, in the end, the terminal goal of violence, but, on the contrary, the last resort of the oppressor. This particular form of violence, according to Cavarero, is dramatized in the practice of torture which, on the one hand, marks and leaves visible signs of its action and, on the other, wins by imposition, in this case, not only on the body of the unarmed but also the dissected body of Juan. If torture is the usual practice of the dictatorship, The Order “perfects” it with perversity. As Wolfgang Sofsky reminds us “torture is not content with physical death” (89), because its aim “is to transform man into a dying creature. It makes the horrors of hell begin long before death” (89). The Order depends on the sick body of Juan Peterson. The Darkness possesses and marks with a scar, “The Left Hand of Darkness” (Enriquez 174), the bodies of the mediums. Illness, as the critical interruption of a state of well-being, is the only way to summon The Darkness, of containing it and releasing it. It is only when Juan’s arrhythmic heart is paralyzed that The Darkness manifests itself. Juan has a privilege that the invunches will never have: “He constantly renegotiates health privileges” (Bizarri 216) to fulfil his role as a medium. Nevertheless, his condition as a sick person underlines the state of vulnerability and precariousness that inevitably constitute his ethos. The fifth part of the novel is a fake journalistic chronicle entitled “El pozo de Zañartú,” written by Olga Gallardo.5 This chapter is a logbook of horror. It narrates the discovery and exhumation of a mass grave in Misiones, which reveals to the journalist the silent complicity between the Videla dictatorship and the Reyes Bradford family. This complicity becomes fundamental to understand that the dictatorship did not only occupy urban spaces to promote the systematic disappearance of detainees and dissidents but also moved between provinces sowing terror, like The Darkness itself. As I have already pointed out in this chapter, The Order’s powerful spiritual and economic presence and, of course, its sympathy with the dictatorship, allowed it to spread terror throughout Misiones and act without any oversight: “They are also

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terrible sons of bitches, accomplices of the dictatorship, they used their means and their influence to help disappear bodies” (Enriquez 502). The fact that Gallardo’s chronicle functions as a double exhumation is not coincidental. It takes place in the 1990s and there is an urgent need to search for the bodies that are still missing. The bones of the disappeared and the secrets about The Order and The Darkness are exhumed. Olga’s writing fixes the itinerary of horror in the “tropical land,” but it also becomes the privileged space for the interrogation of memory. As Lucía Leandro reckons, Enriquez’s texts “problematise who are the spokespersons of that memory and who are the victims of that past” (160). It is significant, therefore, that the pit contains remains, pieces, and nameless corpses that refuse to disappear and carry the indelible traces of violence. According to Ileana Diéguez, these absent bodies make it possible to form a communitas “based on pain and where, despite everything, the imagination does not cease to seek strategies to bet on life” (15). These communitas, like the group of Mothers of the Disappeared of Corrientes Capital, await the DNA identifications of the disappeared, of those souls that are still waiting to be veiled and symbolically restored “El pozo de Zañartú” reveals the absence of a “complete” body, since it is only possible to find its vestiges and remains. However, those residues which, as an expression of the abject, disturb the identity and order of common life, turn the exhumed corpses into “the most repugnant of wastes, it is a limit that has invaded everything” (Kristeva 10). These remains are the height of violence and invade Gallardo’s writing, but they also point to an eerie dimension, a “metaphysical scandal” (Fisher 13), which disturbs memory. The unmourned bodies appear and reappear as the unrepresentable. But, from these bodies, emanates a profound question about what their lives were. Like the invunches, these bodies have no right to enjoy a future. So, if “the perfect future of «a life that has been lived» is presupposed at the beginning of a life that has only begun to be lived” (Butler 32), we ask: What happens to those lives that are denied precisely their condition of existence?

A COMMUNITY OF CRIPPLES: CONCLUSIONS Throughout the novel, The Darkness has different descriptions: it is a mad god, a god with claws, a sun at night, a mouth, a black light, a god without a body, a powerful and suggestive image of disability. Hence, it seeks a host who can summon it, to set it free so that it can devour the offerings that The Order delivers while leaving visible marks on the bodies of the initiates.6 Now, if The Order weakens bodies and makes the sick profitable, The Darkness marks the members of The Order. Throughout the story, different types of images of bodies appear, suggesting how disability is not an accident,

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but a device of biopolitical control. All the bodies exhibit marks, scars, injuries, mutilations, and illnesses that have been inflicted by The Darkness. All the characters in the novel, especially the children and young people, have in some way been touched by The Darkness or wounded by The Order. The character of Adela, who appears in the second part of the novel,7 is striking in this respect. Adela has a stump on her arm and was always inventing a story about a dog that, driven mad, had torn it off. She remembered only the “sound of jaws chewing. Blood staining the grass” (Enriquez 187). In reality, Adela was mutilated by The Darkness when she was just a baby. However, on this mutilated body, doubly minority, being a child and having a disability will be inscribed with even greater violence than that suffered by Juan. Although touched by The Darkness, she will be an offering to the filthy mouth that is on the ‘Other Side’ to save Gaspar. The predatory occupation of The Darkness is then replaced by that of Juan, turning Adela into a body object to be marketed and upon which all the arrogance of patriarchal power is inscribed. Adela’s sacrifice confirms that upon the female body—a body with a visible disability, in this case—there is always a cruel power that imposes itself at will and deepens its vulnerable condition. Rita Segato (2013) argues that women’s vulnerability to violence “has increased, especially the predatory occupation of female or feminised bodies in the context of the new wars” (17). The novel complexifies disability as a desirable and privileged state for The Order. In this case, mutilated and wounded bodies exhibit the physical marks left by The Darkness as a sign of belonging and prestige. While Robert McRuer (2006)8 has theorized processes of alliance and interdependence between historically pathologized and medicalized communities, which reclaim the category of “crip” as a mark of pride and identity in neoliberal contexts, crip identity is blurred as a vindictive stake in the novel. The “cripples,” in this case, appear as bodies marked by The Darkness, not as a political community. While these bodies do not identify with a more conventional image of the disabled subject because of their boredom and economic privilege, they reverse any negative meaning usually associated with an incomplete body, but in this case, in the gear of a colonial reproduction. Disability should be understood here in its close relation to the logic of coloniality. I propose not to lose sight of the fact that, at least for the context of the Global South, disability is a colonial mark on body and space. The Order disseminates the horror of Darkness throughout Misiones. The recurring idea of the South appears in the novel as a space to be conquered and where, ultimately, the machinery of death and torture is entrenched. But also, as a machine for the production of new corporealities which, in this case, will be strategically “crippled.” The Order stratifies bodies according to their privilege: here is another colonial mark that the novel suggests and that

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complicates the notion of disability. The Order injures its members because, in reality, the body is nothing more than an interchangeable material: its real interest is the displacement of consciousness. However, being mutilated by The Darkness, in this case, is not the same as being turned into an invunche or negotiating the fate of a boy as that of a one-armed girl. The bodies of The Order matter more than the bodies of the disappeared, even if the latter resist disappearing in the communitas of pain that still claims and mourns them. The counterpart to a communitas of pain is a community of cripples that operate not out of political resistance but out of its desire to maintain and preserve the sinister logic of Darkness. The communitas is contaminated by an experiential density that is activated by the strong presence of artistic and aesthetic practices that elaborate forms of collective mourning where those lives considered disposable are, in any case, worthy of being mourned. In its counterpart, the community of cripples lets us glimpse that the body is a canvas that The Darkness tattoos at its whim: its cohesion is not politically resistant. On the contrary, it is in charge of biopolitically managing the ordinary life and sentencing with a thanato-political gesture to those designated as disposable bodies. However, this community of disabled people is threatened by the one gesture of resistance and, thus, agency, emanating from a young Gaspar Peterson. He decides to halt The Order’s sinister expansion and interrupt the cycle of violence and torture that the Mathers and Bradford families have disseminated for centuries. While child agency is a right stripped from “invunches,” women, and missing detainees, John’s constant negotiations throughout his long-suffering life succeed not only in saving his son but in bringing The Order to deserved closure. The following is problematic because Gaspar does not necessarily represent the struggles of minority bodies. Although he was part of a group of children persecuted by The Order, he never knew. Yet, he acts on behalf of the truth revealed to him at the end of the story, the ultimate termination of dark power. This may be the most visible indication of a political and vindictive possibility that advocates absolute detachment from the orders of The Darkness and its mysterious designs. It should be made clear that agency fails to be grounded in childhood because The Order’s pedagogical program controls it. Children, primarily, appear more as subjects upon whom violence and the accumulated knowledge of The Order, are constantly inscribed and re-inscribed. If they had any kind of political agency would represent a dangerous threat of insubordination. Their agency is tamed so that it is not carried out as a feral response to The Order’s repression. The children disabled by The Order, like Gaspar and Adela, despite being equally subject to a fate in which they take no part, follow different paths and have very different endings. While Gaspar oversteps his obligation as a medium, Adela is given as food to The Darkness in

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order to save him. The apparent gender differences and imbalance reveals whose agency has more weight. The denied agency produces a process of de-subjectification that prevents the defenseless from fully constituting themselves as law subjects. Therefore, the agency has very different trajectories. For an invunche, it means slow death. But for Gaspar, it becomes a privilege to which he gains access through paternal inheritance. Their capacities of agency follow unequal processes and depend greatly on the conditions of precarity to which their lives are subjected. Racial and gender hierarchy is also visible in the scheme of sociability that The Order promotes and must only serve the futile purpose of pleasing The Darkness. Finally, the novel’s intimate collaboration between disability and coloniality suggests that bodies have been available as canvases on which biopolitical acts control everything designated as liveable. Coloniality must be considered as a cultural logic. At the same time, disability is a desirable model of bodily production, which is intimidating in a pedagogical project that ponders pain and systematic torture for community cohesion. Nonetheless, the situation of these bodies must be understood within the framework of geolocation, which conditions the experience of growth and education as events inscribed within a hierarchy of precarization and slow death that denies the future.

NOTES 1. The translations from Spanish are by the author. 2. For Walter Mignolo, the “colonial heritage” is a product of the colonial racial pyramid that served to establish a taxing social differentiation and that Latin America has not yet healed because “it has not yet freed itself from ‘internal colonialism’ and ‘imperial dependence’” (La idea 97). In this sense my analysis frames the idea of disability beyond its metropolitan debates, which have served as a frame of reference for multiplying processes of agency and political struggle among minority communities in the northern hemisphere. 3. It is useful to think of the category of race yet another technology for selecting bodies that can be injured and thus become objects of the pleasure of The Order, bodies that are “disabled” and ontologically erased as subjects. 4. The coloniality of being, according to Mignolo, operates by conversion or by adaptation and assimilation, which numbs “the colonial heritability” and annuls “its pain with all kinds of analgesics” (La idea 100). 5. This is a fictional authorship that could be constructed in a presumed homage to the Argentinian writer Sara Gallardo. I am grateful for this tip to my colleague Lucía Leandro-Hernández, who read this text in its preliminary version. 6. Juan is the first medium to find the door to the “Other Side.” The enclosure where The Darkness dwells is filled with bones, bulls and a whole forest full of “dead

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hands” trunks. Toward the end of the novel, it is confirmed that, in reality, the “Other Side” is a grimy, breathing mouth. 7. Adela appears for the first time as a character in “La casa de Adela.” This shortstory is included in the book Los peligros de fumar en la cama (2009). 8. According to McRuer: “Crip theory can function—like the term ‘queer’ itself - in an oppositional and relational but not necessarily substantive way, not as a positivity but as a positionality, not as a thing but as a resistance to the norm” (Crip Theory 31).

WORKS CITED Agambem, Giorgio. Los usos del cuerpo. Homo Sacer, IV, 2. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editores, 2017. Amaro, Lorena. “La dificultad de llamarse ‘autora’: Mariana Enriquez o la autora Weird.” Revista Iberoamericana, no. 268, 2019, 795–812. Avelar, Idelver. Alegorías de la derrota. La ficción posdictatorial y el trabajo del duelo. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2000. Bizarri, Gabriel. “Introducción. Modernidades otras y ‘afectadas’: la enfermedad como nuestra parte de noche.” Altre Modernità, no. 24, 2020, 211–221. Briones, Claudia. La alteridad del “cuarto mundo.” Una construcción antropológica de la diferencia. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol, 1998. Bustamante, Fernanda. “Cuerpos que aparecen, ‘cuerpos-escrache’: de la posmemoria al trauma y el horror en relatos de Mariana Enriquez.” Taller de Letras, no. 64, 2019, 31–45. Butler, Judith. Frames of War. New York: Verso, 2009. ———. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrismo. Nombrando la violencia contemporánea. Barcelona: Antropos, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mil mesestas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Valencia: Pretextos, 2002. Diéguez, Ileana. Cuerpos sin duelo. Iconografías y tetralidades del dolor. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Documenta/Escénicas, 2013. Edwards Bello, Joaquín. Mitópolis. Santiago de Chile: Nascimento, 1973. Enriquez, Mariana. Nuesta parte de Noche. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011. Fanon, Franz. Los condenados de la tierra. Mexico D.F: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1963. ———. Piel negra, máscaras blancas. Madrid: Akal, 2009. Fisher, Mark. Lo raro y lo espeluznante. Barcelona: Alpha Decay, 2018. Foucault, Michael. Historia de la sexualidad. La voluntad de saber. Mexico D.F: Siglo XXI, 1984. Kristeva, Julia. Poderes de la perversión. Mexico D.F: Siglo XXI, 1988. Leandro-Hernández, Lucía. “Escribir la realidad a través de la ficción: el papel del fantasma y la memoria en «cuando hablábamos con los muertos», de Mariana

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Enríquez.” Brumal. Revista de investigación sobre lo fantástico, vol. VI, no. 2, 2018, 145–164. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “El Caribe, la colonialidad, y el giro decolonial.” Latin American Research Review, vol. 55, no. 3, 2020, 560–573. ———. “Sobre la colonialidad del ser: contribuciones al desarrollo de un concepto.” In El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez y Ramón Grosfoguel. Siglo del hombre editores, 2007, 127–168. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: NYU University Press, 2006. Meekosha, Helen. “Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally.” Disability & Society, vol. 26, no. 6, 2011, 667–682. Mignolo, Walter. Desobediencia epistémica. Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2001. ———. La idea de América Latina. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2007. Montecino, Sonia. Mitos de Chile. Diccionario de seres, magias y encantos. Santiago de Chile: Sudamericana, 2003. Pratt, Mary Louise. Ojos imperiales. Literatura de viajes y transculturación. México D.F: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010. Puar, Jasbir. The Right to Maim, Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Quijano, Anibal. “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social.” In El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, edited by Santiago Castro-Gómez y Ramón Grosfoguel. Siglo del hombre editores, 2007, 93–116. Rancière, Jacques. El desacuerdo. Política y filosofía. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1999. Sacchi, Duen. Ficciones patógenas. Buenos Aires: Rara Avis, 2019. Segato, Laura. Contra-pedagogias de la crueldad. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2018. ———. Las nuevas formas de la guerra y el cuerpo de las mujeres. México D.F: Tinta de limón, 2013. Sofsky, Wolfgang. Tratado sobre la violencia. Barcelona: Abad Editores, 2006. Villaplana Ruiz, Virigina. “Agencia.” In Barbarismos queer y otras esdrújulas, edited by Lucas Platero and María Rosóny Esther Ortgea. Egales, 2017.

Part V

EMBODIED LEARNINGS ETHICS, AFFECTS, AND TRANSCENDENCE

Chapter 13

Embodied Ethics in Los ríos profundos and La Rue Cases-Nègres Jeffrey Diteman

In two major mid-twentieth-century novels from apparently disparate cultures, there are significant parallels in the roles of matriarchal figures as ethical mentors: Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers, 1958) by the Peruvian author José María Arguedas and La Rue Cases-Nègres (Black Shack Alley, 1950) by the Martinican Joseph Zobel. Arguedas is extremely well known in Latin American studies, primarily as a writer of fiction but also as a translator and ethnographer; he is sometimes referred to as “the Hemingway of the Andes” for his lucid, visceral depictions of hardscrabble life in the Peruvian highlands. Beginning with his debut novel Yawar Fiesta in 1941, Arguedas was both an heir to and an outlier from the established Andean indigenista tradition of writers such as Ciro Alegria, Jorge Icaza Coronel, and Enrique López Albújar, whose social realist novels of the 1920s and 1930s had aimed to bring literary visibility to the exploitation of indigenous peasants by wealthy landowners. Unlike many preceding white indigenista authors, Arguedas spent much of his childhood in indigenous households and was fluent in Quechua; his portrayals of indigenous characters possess a unique richness reflecting both his direct participant knowledge of the culture and his passion for Andean ethnography, particularly in the form of stories and songs. His novel Los ríos profundos is widely considered his masterpiece, and its publication in 1958 represents a high point in his career, which came to a tragic end ten years later by suicide brought about by massive depression. Like Arguedas, Joseph Zobel is a bit of an outlier from his native literary tradition. Based on his temporal, ethnic, and geographic origins, he is associated with the Negritude movement, but Zobel’s writing is notably less polemical and rhetorical than that of the movement’s leaders Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Frantz Fanon. As Hal Wylie observes, “[a] lthough Zobel is about the same age as the Negritude pioneers, he arrived 213

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in Paris a decade later and moved into the status of second generation, both literarily and politically” (1982, 61). In his 1975 essay “Joseph Zobel: The Mechanics of Liberation,” Randolph Hezekiah describes Zobel’s approach to racial politics as follows: “Zobel is an unmistakable advocate of the black man’s cause, but he pleads in subtle and quiet tones, without excessive ranting and raving, without hurling too many accusations” (4). Despite this subtlety, La Rue Cases-Nègres was banned in Martinique for twenty years (Ebrahim 146). The text was adapted for cinema by Euzhan Palcy in 1983, but despite the film’s success, Sylvie Kandé laments in a 1994 article that the novel nevertheless “remains neglected in literary histories and anthologies” (33). In this chapter, I claim that the ethical principles embodied by substitute mother figures in these novels constitute destabilizing forces that threaten the dominant social order by eroding the very foundations of Western subjectivity. Despite their lack of access to education, and despite having their bodies gradually impaired by the constant aggressions of hard labor, these female figures are able to serve as polestars in the protagonists’ moral development, laying the groundwork for an ethics of resistance to cultural hegemony by promoting solidarity through their examples of courage. In both texts, socially relevant ethical principles are enacted in a non-discursive, corporeal space. In both novels, the protagonist’s coming-of-age is associated with the acquisition of class consciousness, defined by the circumstances in racialized terms. Both texts possess multiple features of the Bildungsroman genre: narrative centered on the initial innocence and developing experience of an adolescent protagonist, placing the protagonist in an interpretive role, charting the complex course of the protagonist’s integration into a social structure and into humanity more broadly. Joseph R. Slaughter equates the Bildungsroman with the acquisition of citizen-subjectivity, writing: “The genre’s proliferation [. . .] corresponds to periods of social crisis over the terms and mechanics of enfranchisement, the meaning and scope of citizenship” (1411). According to Slaughter, the genre is inherently reformist rather than revolutionary, as it aims to assimilate the marginalized to preclude violent disorder; all the same, the genre “has the dual capacity to articulate claims of inclusion in the rights regime and to criticize those norms and their inegalitarian implementation” (1411). In the anticolonial narratives of Arguedas and Zobel, the protagonist encounters a variety of opponents, peers, and mentors along the path to adult consciousness, and these interlocutors each represent a different component of experience. The protagonist learns through struggle against antagonists, through love and compassion, through connection to a people, through the establishment of a set of moral principles, and through the acquisition of knowledge. In Los ríos profundos as in La Rue Cases-Nègres, the matriarchal

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figure is primarily associated with ethical mentorship, playing an integral role in the protagonists’ moral development. The ethical principles embodied in these older female figures facilitate revelations in the areas of cultural knowledge and belonging, lending the protagonist the courage to pursue expanded visions of life and self, to integrate his experiential truth into the spheres of society and culture while maintaining allegiance to the racially oppressed community that is a fundamental component of his identity. The societal-level struggles in Arguedas’s Andean villages and in Zobel’s Martinique present parallels to the microcosm of the lives of the adolescents depicted in the texts. Both novels portray societies in flux, with the dominant class struggling to maintain the social order as the subordinate classes subvert power through sudden acts of rebellion and the steady perseverance of particular cultural memory, through stories and songs that offer an alternative to the assimilationist tendencies of formal education. These novels offer unexpected answers to the question of what it means to grow up in Latin America. First, the similarities between the moral messages of these two books constitute an argument in favor of considering French Caribbean literature alongside Spanish American literature. Over the history of the term, “Latin America” has sometimes been applied to IberoAmerica only, and at other times to all American territories colonized by countries speaking Latinate languages (Meade 31–32). Reserving the term for Ibero-America runs the risk of obscuring relevant similarities in patterns of colonization and postcolonial struggle. The idea that places as distant and disparate as Cuba and Argentina should be lumped together under a single category, while that category excludes places such as Martinique, Haiti, and Guadeloupe, says more about the provincialism inherent in everyday speech and the siloing effect of academic disciplines than it does about the reality of existence in these places, where the history of colonization and plantocracy established a significantly similar pattern of domination regardless of the language in which the master gave his orders. These texts also offer surprising revelations about what it means to grow up in a context of asymmetrical biculturalism wherein a minority of white landowners rule over a majority of nonwhite workers and peasants. Like many postcolonial works depicting orphaned or semi-orphaned children (such as Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves Sin Nido [1889], Rosario Castellanos’ Balún Canán [1957], or Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle [1972]) they present cultural domination as a factor in coming-of-age such that the protagonist’s moral development hinges on his or her capacity to see the humanity of the dispossessed (and this is true whether the child protagonist belongs to the group of the dispossessed or not). In this sense, children’s agency is a component of an adult moral compass, as the child’s personal connections to the culture and camaraderie of the

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racialized underclass are tested by the seductions of power associated with dominant white culture. These are coming-of-age stories not in the sense that the protagonist acquires adult-like agency along the way, but that he or she must cling to his innocent compassion with childlike stubbornness to supplement his or her burgeoning maturity with class consciousness. Both books are semiautobiographical stories written in the 1950s about events that took place in the 1930s. In the depicted time of narration in the Andes as in Martinique, class domination continues to be exerted along racial lines through the mechanism of inherited wealth in the form of large landholdings.1 These haciendas and plantations form the setting for the perpetuation of social advantages through proximity to white heritage despite longstanding practices of race-mixing, producing a racial dynamic that is more complex than a black-white or indigenous-white binary. Although the two scenarios differ in the sense that Arguedas’ Ernesto, who is white, maintains an allegiance to an indigenous community to which he does not belong in the ethnic or biological sense, and José’s allegiance is to the plantation workers who comprise the ethnic community of his roots, these relationships share the common feature of tension between community interest and perceived individual self-interest. For both Ernesto and José, social mobility is tacitly associated with alienation from the underclass, so to maintain ties of respect and admiration to the underclass is an act of insurgency against the structures of social domination. In both novels, the legitimacy of landed patriarchal authority is called into question, and in both cases, the actions of the obstinate matriarchal figure serve as a moral compass to orient the protagonist in the context of this destabilization. What would it mean to interpret these figures according to a framework that resists the universalist and assimilationist tendencies of the Bildungsroman form? An ethics of embodiment offers an alternative to Western universalist ethics, an alternative based on experiential criteria rather than abstraction, and grounded in a unified view of the subject. In her book Bodyminds Reimagined (2018), Sami Schalk uses the term “bodymind” to refer to the indissociable entity which both breathes and thinks, contrary to the dualist conception of mind as distinct from body. As Schalk puts it, bodymind is a concept that “refers to the enmeshment of the mind and body, which are typically understood as interacting and connected, yet distinct entities due to the Cartesian dualism of Western philosophy” (5). Schalk has borrowed the term from disability theorist Margaret Price, whose 2015 article “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain” applies the concept of bodymind to an analysis of how pain complicates desire in the context of disability. This view of the subject is consistent with that described by the cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, which asserts that all abstract conceptualization is fundamentally grounded in bodily

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understanding. In the context of the decolonizing projects of Arguedas and Zobel, embodied ethics serves to establish the importance of community solidarity in a manner that prevents the youth from being seduced by bourgeois individualism. In what follows, I discuss the embodied aspects of the ethical mentoring and leadership roles played by two substitute mother figures: the grandmother M’man Tine in La Rue Cases-Nègres and the rebellious tavern proprietress Doña Felipa in Los ríos profundos. These women are not only their respective narratives’ most prominent maternal figures, they are also the texts’ closest approximation of hero figures. Unlike traditional heroes, they do not vanquish their enemies or go on great journeys. However, in their resilience and courage, they symbolize the possibility of agency and leadership for marginalized, uneducated women of color, and the role that such figures can play in the ongoing project of cultural decolonization. La Rue Cases-Nègres La Rue Cases-Nègres by Joseph Zobel is an autobiographical novel first published in 1950 and set in Martinique in the 1930s. It follows the child protagonist José from age seven to eighteen, culminating in his passing the baccalaureate and preparing to go on to university. From his childhood in the plantation village of Petit Morne to his adolescence on bustling Rue de Didier in the capital Fort-de-France, José gradually develops a sense of his place in the world, based on his rare position as a child with origins among plantation workers who manage to receive a full, formal education. As in Los ríos profundos, the protagonist’s experience is characterized by scenes of profound tragedy, remarkable courage, and powerful feelings of solidarity with exploited workers. The text opens with a description of adult cane workers returning from a routine workday in the fields, rejoining their children who have been left to their own devices all day. The narrator José reports that his grandmother always returns with some sort of a treat for him, a mango or a piece of bread. After returning home, Tine has the habit of sitting and smoking her pipe while gazing at the sky; there is an implied repetitiveness to this sequence.2 However, the routine is interrupted one day when one of the younger children purchases a bottle of rum and a box of matches from the company store. The children all become intoxicated, and one of them sets a fire that threatens to consume the whole neighborhood. After the fire leads to more restrictions in the children’s interaction, José continues to find companionship in the elderly Monsieur Médouze, who offers wisdom in the form of riddles about life and nature, and stories about the glory of Guinea where black men are

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kings. Médouze’s tutelage through storytelling contrasts both with the material auspices of M’man Tine and with the assimilationist authority of the schoolmaster Monsieur Roc. Compelled by the necessity of earning her own living in the city, José’s mother has consigned him to the care of M’man Tine, who constitutes the defining influence in his moral development, and whose ethical engagement mostly takes place in the non-discursive space of tireless drudgery. The necessity to which M’man Tine responds is a survival that transcends her own life, the survival of her descendant José, and the strain and punishment associated with this sacrifice falls perpetually on her physical body. Despite being tied to daily toil in a manner that occupies her physical and mental energy, Tine uses what agency she has to subvert the system from which she cannot personally escape. The Western construct of the “intellect” or “consciousness” capable of transcending the circumstances of the body proves to be meaningless in this context; Tine’s choice is inexorably circumscribed by the material circumstances of her bodymind, but it is a choice nonetheless. By working the cane while disallowing José to work, and by moving to the capital to allow him to continue his studies, she manages to influence the course of events by ensuring the education of her grandson and his escape from the plantation. She is at once agentive and nevertheless materially and physically subjugated; her intellectual subjugation takes the form of the very low wages paid for manual labor, which have locked her into a cycle that precludes leisure time and social mobility. By and large, José’s experience with authorities besides M’man Tine and Médouze is characterized by antagonism, an adversity that is paralleled in the lives of his young peers. After he begins attending school, his grandmother arranges for him to spend time before and after school in the home of the supposedly generous Madame Léonce, who overburdens the boy with chores. He appreciates and admires the schoolmaster M. Roc, but this respect is balanced by a heavy dose of fear which is all the more salient because the primary object of Roc’s disciplinary wrath is the protagonist’s good friend and literary foil, Jojo. Born into wealth as the son of a béké,3 Jojo ends up renouncing his cruel father and abusive stepmother and going to live with his biological mother, who is poor and black. In doing so, Jojo loses access to the privilege of wealth and must spend his life doing manual labor. Later, his rebellious streak shows up again when he accuses a corrupt supervisor of grafting plantation workers’ wages, for which he is punished with physical violence and exclusion. Jojo is a pathetic figure, and after Tine, one of the major influences on the moral character of the protagonist. Indeed, Jojo and Tine both act as examples of moral courage and resistance, the former directly and the latter indirectly, and these two modes of resistance inform one another.

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Whenever school is not in session, José must accompany Tine to the cane fields, although he himself is not allowed to work. This experience gives him an eyewitness view of the backbreaking toil sugarcane workers endure: So, the next morning, I followed M’man Tine to work. I had imagined that all the people would be working in the same place and that we, the children, would be able to meet up and play together. But M’man Tine and I were immersed in the sugarcane leaves rattling in the wind, all day long; all day, we were alone there, not a thing in sight but the cane field, and I had no idea where I was. (Donc, le lendemain matin, je suivis m’man Tine à son travail. Je me figurais que tous les gens travaillaient au même endroit et que nous, les enfants, nous allions pouvoir nous retrouver et jouer ensemble. Mais m’man Tine et moi nous étions immergés dans les feuilles de canne à sucre que le vent faisait bruire, toute la journée ; toute la journée, nous étions seuls là, ne découvrant rien hors du champ, et je n’avais même pas une idée de l’endroit où je me trouvais.) (Zobel 76)

This sense of disorientation upon immersion in the field of work constitutes an allegory of moral dumbfounding, a rite of passage in which the protagonist temporarily loses his sense of direction and location, his sense of being and belonging in the world. As his visual field is confounded by the cane, his spirit lays bare and ready for a revelation. What he finds there is M’man Tine, the burning principle of persistent life driving her ever onward: M’man Tine raked the ground with her hoe, gathering the weeds and fine dust at the base of each tuft of canes. But it seemed difficult to cut the weeds with the hoe. My grandmother struck hard with the blade of her tool, groaning, ‘Egh! Egh!” and, every now and again, she straightened up, holding her hand to her back as if to support her kidneys. Her face was twisted into an awful grimace. (M’man Tine raclait le sol, avec sa houe, assemblait les mauvaises herbes et la terre fine au pied de chaque touffe de cannes. Mais les herbes paraissaient difficiles à couper avec la houe. Ma grand-mère frappait fort du tranchat de l’outil en faisant : « hin ! hin ! » et, de temps en temps, elle se redressait en portant une main derrière elle, comme pour aider ses reins. Et elle faisait une grimace atroce.) (76)

With the world shrunken down to the insurmountable, all-encompassing sugarcane field, the only human vision is this image of toil, persistent before

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the indignation of her drudgery. Later, the long-term consequences of this toil become apparent to José: I felt for M’man Tine the same pity, the same regret that tormented her on my account [. . .] But she just worked her hoe with ever more determination. My unhappiness grew so focused that ultimately the cane fields began to seem dangerous to me. This danger had killed Mr. Médouze4 without anyone knowing how, and it could, at any time, especially on a stormy day, also kill my grandmother right before my eyes. (J’éprouvais pour m’man Tine la même pitié, la même desolation qui la tourmentait pour moi [. . .] Mais elle ne s’échinait que davantage à tirer la houe. Mon chagrin se concentrait tellement qu’à la fin les champs de cannes à sucre m’apparaissaient comme un danger. Ce danger qui avait tué M. Médouze sans que personne n’eût vu comment, et qui pouvait d’un moment à l’autre, surtout un jour d’orage, tuer aussi ma grand-mère sous mes yeux.) (133)

So through the parallels between Médouze and Tine, the risks inherent in the life of a cane worker become clear to José. This consciousness of the dangers of the cane contrasts with the innocence of José’s childhood experiences: looking for fruit, catching dragonflies and crayfish, sucking on sugarcane, playing with snails and worms, and reading as Tine works. Thus, José’s passage from innocence to experience corresponds to the revelation of the seriousness of Tine’s sacrifice; this process culminates when Tine falls gravely ill. M’man Tine’s illness represents a significant turning point in José’s moral development. This is the first rite of passage that requires José to behave like an adult, taking care of another person in her hour of need. After this point, José acts more like a man and less like a boy: he serves as a confidant to his friend Carmen, who suffers sexual exploitation from his employer, offers encouragement to Jojo in the latter’s pursuit of a better life, and finally passes his baccalaureate, making the transition from his peasant origins to membership in the educated class. At the moment of Tine’s illness, José acquires some of the wisdom that Tine has demonstrated through her own commitment to raising him. Although she recuperates from the illness sufficiently to live on for a few years, she never recovers entirely, so the acute illness initiates the onset of her slow decline. When José must accompany her to the cane fields but is not allowed to work, it contributes to his inferiority complex, as he wishes to achieve the status of the children in the petites-bandes,5 who are paid, however meagerly, for their work. He feels simultaneously deprived and privileged: deprived of

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the opportunity to control money, yet privileged to spend his hours idly catching crayfish or picking fruit rather than engaged in manual labor. Later in the text, as he approaches adult consciousness in his teenage years, José feels a more pronounced sympathy for M’man Tine, as she continues cutting cane despite her declining health. In her dogged determination and persistence, M’man Tine has much to teach José, despite her own lack of education. M’man Tine gives everything she has—her body, her health, her home, her time—to allow José to study. In the early chapters, this sacrifice is overshadowed by the fear of her authority, such as in a scene when she is enraged because he and his friends have broken her bowl: “This awful silence isolates me in my confusion, clearing everything around me, just as when M’man Tine goes looking for a broomstick, a spoon, or a bit of rope to beat me with” (41) However, this fear gradually transforms into respectful pity; this interpellation of ethos and pathos provides a framework for José’s moral comingof-age. When José accedes to the ranks of the educated class by passing his baccalaureate, he will not forget the lessons of Médouze or of life on the Rue Cases-Nègres, but above all he will never forget the perseverance and sacrifice of M’man Tine, nor the manner in which the plantation system continued to exploit her body to the point of depletion. As Haseenah Ebrahim points out, both the novel and its film adaptation end “by emphasizing how the basic economic relationship in which black labor produced profits for white owners remained the same after emancipation” (147). Tine’s example of courage inspires José to remain a humble community member even as his academic opportunities take him further and further from the plantation. There is a parallel between his early anxiety at being excluded from working in the petites-bandes and his later discomfiture when he returns to Petit Morne after years in the city. In the earlier instance, his envy of the working children has to do with the modicum of agency that a bit of money confers; he does not seem to appreciate the long-term advantage he is receiving until after Tine’s illness. This new sense of gravitas is evident in his timidity as he revisits Petit Morne to pick up Tine’s pay: a character of different moral fiber would have felt smug superiority upon returning from the city to visit the illiterate throng of his upbringing. The care he has received from M’man Tine, along with the guidance of Médouze, has kept José open to community connection, a partial check to the process of alienation associated with assimilationist education. The ethical significance of M’man Tine deserves to be scrutinized in light of the critical position of black feminists who decry the limited possibilities of female characters in writing by male Caribbean authors. In her 1993 essay “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer,” Maryse Condé cites a series of structuring points that comprise the template for masculinist

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works by writers such as Aimé Césaire and Jacques Roumain, which tend to be highly oriented toward the ideal of community, often at the expense of individual difference. Condé claims that Roumain’s 1946 novel Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew) established a model for subsequent writing, with the following principles: 1. The framework should be the native land. 2. The hero should be male, of peasant origin. 3. The brave and hardworking woman should be the auxiliary in his struggle for his community. 4. Although they produce children, no reference should be made to sex. If any, it will be to male sexuality. (Condé 156) According to Condé, this model has produced a Caribbean canon that has by and large excluded female characters or relegated them to auxiliary roles. In her 2021 book A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, Kaiama L. Glover reprises Condé’s critique, asserting that allocated the role of auxiliary or sister, advocate or mother, martyr or lover, Caribbean women have been configured in regional fiction as infinitely willing and expected to orient themselves in service to communities that are little attentive to their individual needs and desires. (16–17)

Viewed from this perspective, M’man Tine appears to be another iteration of the stereotype of the self-sacrificing matriarch, who exists only to support the male protagonist. However, Zobel’s text allows for a more nuanced reading. Tine does not passively accept her situation; when she is angry at José, she expresses her chagrin: And it’s me who starts over with you. You get sick, I deal with it. You get worms, I deal with it. Washing you, wiping you, dressing you, while all day long you invent all sorts of trouble for me, as if I didn’t already have enough with my sunstroke, the storms, the thunderclaps, the shock of the hoe I have to use to scratch the béké’s hard soil. And then, instead of behaving yourself so I can save my energy, so I can endure, instead of finding you a safe place, like I did for your mama, you make me want to send you off in the little gangs, like all the negroes do. Really, I just can’t take it anymore. (Et c’est moi qui recommence avec toi. Tes maladies, c’est pour moi. Tes crises de vers, c’est pour moi. Et te laver, t’essuyer, t’habiller, pendant que toute la journée tu inventes toutes sortes de tracas pour moi, comme si j’en avais pas

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assez de mes coups de soleil, des averses, des coups de tonnerre et de la houe avec laquelle il me faut gratter la terre coriace du béké. Et, au lieu de te bien comporter pour ménager mes forces, pour que je puisse durer, afin de te mettre à l’abri, comme j’ai fait de ta maman, tu me pousses à l’envie de te fiche dans les petites bandes, comme font tous les nègres. Décidément j’en peux plus.) (Zobel 44)

In this passage, Tine shows that she is not simply the willing martyr for José’s benefit. The ethical significance of her character is complicated by her rancor. She may be “expected to orient [herself] in service” to the boy, and by extension to the community, but she is not “infinitely willing” to do so. The fact that she continues to support José despite continually threatening to send him to live with his mother demonstrates that what she really resents is the exploitative economic system from which she cannot personally escape. In her study of five nonconformist female protagonists in Caribbean literature, Glover describes these women’s behaviors of disobedience, dissent, and refusal as a form of “defensive self-regard” as a struggle against the “constitutive dispossession” that would “render them opaque to themselves” (29). While the image of M’man Tine sitting in silence and smoking her pipe renders her opaque to the reader, she is not opaque to herself. Perhaps Zobel did contribute another female character to a canon replete with female auxiliaries, but M’man Tine is far from one-dimensional. She shares a spirit of defiance with the characters Glover describes in The Regarded Self, a spirit that is also present in the character Doña Felipa in Los ríos profundos by José María Arguedas. Los ríos profundos Los ríos profundos, first published in 1958, recounts the experiences of the fourteen-year-old Ernesto, an avatar of the author’s younger self, in various locations in the Peruvian Andes, with most of the action located in the village of Abancay. Ernesto feels drawn to the indigenous Quechua culture, particularly its language and music, and as a displaced child he generally appears to be severed from the white culture of his familial roots, feeling, for example, a stronger affinity for a debased indigenous servant boy (a character referred to as el pongo) than for his own wealthy uncle. Following the visit to the uncle’s house in Cuzco, Ernesto’s father places him in a boarding school in Abancay. In the chapters that follow, Ernesto witnesses a series of dramatic events, including bullying and rape in the school courtyard, an uprising led by mestiza women to demand rations of salt for their communities, an outbreak of typhoid fever, and a generalized rebellion of indigenous plantation workers. Through these incidents, Ernesto gradually comes to the realization that

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the Quechua people, although they may appear to be downtrodden in their current condition, possess the potential to seize their own fate and overwhelm their masters through force of will and numbers.6 Chapter 7, “El motín” / “The Riot,” represents one of the most significant scenes in the novel. A group of chicheras7 arrives in the middle of the village, shouting in Quechua: “No! Only until today do they steal salt! Today we are going to kick all the thieves out of Abancay. Shout, women; shout loud; let the whole world hear! The thieves will die!”8 The schoolboys are drawn to the ruckus, and Ernesto finds himself clamoring right along with the rioters. His companion, Antero, aka “El Markask’a,” asks him who he hates, and one of the women replies for him, “The thieving salt sellers, of course” (272). The priest Padre Linares arrives to try to convince the women to desist, threatening their leader Doña Felipa with damnation, to which she replies “Damned no, padrecito! Damnation for the thieves!” (273) The reader learns that all the salt has been sold for the hacienda’s cattle, leaving none for the villagers. After this, the women proceed to the salt warehouse, where they seize the salt and begin distributing it to the villagers. Then the women say that they will go to the hacienda Patibamba to distribute the salt to the colonos, which is to say the indigenous workers who are tied to the hacienda. Ernesto later argues with his schoolmate Antero about the meaning of the rebellion, which the army soon arrives to suppress, bringing in its wake a typhoid epidemic. Doña Felipa flees for her life, becoming a martyr to the people. Finally, there is a general revolt among the indigenous population of the valley, as they demand to hold a mass in defiance of quarantine. One of the central political messages of Los ríos profundos is that the Andean indigenous proletariat possesses the power to transcend their subjugated status and that this can happen through collective action in a wave of mass disinhibition. Two significant factors precede the generalized insubordination of the final chapter: the natural, impersonal factor of the typhoid epidemic, and the human factor of the rebellion of the chicheras which serves as an example and precedent. 9 Over the course of the novel, the theme of subjugation through economic and cultural domination plays out on multiple levels. On the level of the schoolyard, the bullies Lleras and Añuco reproduce the societal principle of “might makes right” through senseless cruelty; at the bottom of this hierarchy is the most indio of the boys, Palacitos. The culture of abuse permeates down through the ranks of the boys, several of whom reenact the ritualized violence of adult society by repeatedly raping the mentally disabled Marcelina. On the level of the institution, the director Padre Linares represents ecclesiastical authority; although he is generally perceived as a benevolent mediator, by the end of the novel his condemnation of the chicheras reveals him to be an

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agent of cultural domination. Finally, the soldiers who invade the village to put down the chichera rebellion and search for Doña Felipa not only enact the blunt force of state violence on behalf of the landed ruling class but also embody the power of psychological domination as demonstrated by the behavior of peasant women who voluntarily engage in sexual relations with them. These antagonistic figures give young Ernesto the opportunity to grow through conflict and negative examples. The central question pertaining to the protagonist’s personal development is one of group belonging: Who are Ernesto’s people? Will he identify himself with the criollo10 order of power represented by El Viejo and Padre Linares, or will he place his allegiance with the indigenous and mestizo proletariat? This choice of ethnos pivots on a question of ethos: Does Ernesto possess the moral courage to side with the oppressed? A decisive moment in determining the outcome of this question comes in the form of the salt riot. The example that Doña Felipa sets is fundamentally an ethical one: like Ernesto, she stands to benefit from an affiliation with the established power of white dominance. Soldiers and other figures of authority represent a significant source of revenue for her chichería, and she has much to lose from instigating a rebellion amongst the peasantry. That she does so anyway is testament to her courage and moral obstinacy in the face of intimidating forces of order that would perpetuate an unacceptable status quo. One of the utopian messages of Los ríos profundos is that the indigenous masses are capable of launching into movement like swelling rivers, hence the titles of the book Deep Rivers and of the chapter “Yawar Mayu” (River of Blood). Multiple factors contribute to launching this movement: unacceptably low wages, violent abuse, limited rations of staple goods, the plague. All of these build together toward the eventual outburst of collective rage. This rage is expressed in the form of a demand for the right to hold a church mass in the midst of a typhoid epidemic. The repressive conditions of the plague quarantine are the proximate cause of the outburst, but its inspiration is found in the actions of Doña Felipa, who has become a martyr in the wake of her minor rebellion and exile. The culminating rebellion of Los ríos profundos is therefore similar to that of Arguedas’s earlier novel Yawar fiesta: the natives’ revolt to claim their right to self-harm, which is a form of self-determination.11 In Los ríos profundos, their protest may seem to be self-defeating in that they are fighting for the right to expose themselves to harm. However, the right to self-harm is also the right to self-sacrifice; to extinguish a people’s right to self-harm would be to arrogate their bodies to the state, to limit their political imagination to a perpetual childhood. The adult’s right to risk life and limb is indissociable from the right to resistance, and that is why increasingly rigorous productive controls must be implemented ceaselessly on the bodies of the

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peasantry. Against the paternalistic approach of church and state power, the apparently self-defeating rebellion has meaning. The right to self-harm is also related to the right to learn from one’s own actions. Ernesto has the ability to learn from negative as well as positive examples: just as he never touches Marcelina, he does not attend the religious mass, but rather runs away from the accursed village of Abancay. He is spared both official punishment and illness through accidents of fortune. He departs with the lessons learned from observing multiple conflicts and witnessing the collective strength of the oppressed as well as the vulnerabilities of the oppressors. The most impressive positive human action in the plot is the rebellion led by Doña Felipa. Her rebellion has purpose but lacks numbers, while the culminating rebellion has numbers but no purpose. This suggests a third and final rebellion, outside the text, that will possess both. The salt rebellion constitutes an inflection point in the plot. As Ariel Dorfman puts it in his article “Puentes y padres en el infierno” (1980), The riot has broken out in the exact middle of the novel. And starting with this shock in the external world, the world which (de)generates the School and his misery and guilt, Ernesto leaps to another dynamic in his development.12

Henceforth, Ernesto will exert a critical assessment of certain characters, including Antero and Padre Linares, and will find allegiance and true human values in others, particularly those of the oppressed underclasses. The role of Doña Felipa can be likened to that of the warrior saint, a sort of Joan of Arc for the twentieth-century Andes. Inspired by Felipa’s leadership, the other chicheras overcome their fear of authority, mocking the salt workers and the soldiers with insulting songs. After Felipa flees the village, her reputation continues to grow, and she turns into a legend. Dorfman claims that Felipa’s example is what provokes the transformation of Marcelina from a passive victim to a moral agent. There is important symbolism in Marcelina’s retrieval of Felipa’s shawl: it is not merely taking up the mantle of rebellion but also reconciliation with the inevitability of death, as symbolized by the shawl’s orange color—“Orange like the contaminated twilight”13 (Dorfman 116). The symbolic power of death and its association with liberty is a recurrent theme in Arguedas’s narrative work; the emancipatory force of reconciliation with death and the ensuing disinhibition can be found in the blood ritual depicted in Yawar fiesta. The actions of Felipa demonstrate the power of one fearless individual in the face of a fearsome world. In the absence of Felipa’s insurrection and ensuing legend, the plague would surely have come and gone without provoking an uprising. Also in the absence of Felipa, Ernesto may have been seduced by the criollo perspectives of Antero (who is Ernesto’s

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closest friend until they come to a disagreement about the meaning of the riot; Antero comes from a hacendado family, and his allegiance is revealed to be with the ruling class) or of Padre Linares (equivalent to an embrace of the traditional Catholic authoritarianism that has so often served as the ideological enforcement of the colonial and capitalist world order). Ernesto needs to see evidence of the plantation workers’ self-determination in order to maintain hope for the survival of the broader Quechua culture under the threat of extermination. The paramount symbolic threshold in this text is the bridge over the River Pachachaca, which serves as the point of passage by which death enters the village of Abancay, but also the threshold for Ernesto’s departure from Abancay and his return to himself. The bridge is rendered vulgar through the tying of mule entrails across it but strangely sanctified by being decorated with Doña Felipa’s shawl. As a symbol of death but also transcendence, the bridge gives occasion for reflection on the inherent revolutionary potential of the indigenous people when they are delivered from a fear of death, albeit through the catastrophe of the plague which renders death a certainty. Ernesto’s ultimate epiphany involves the identification of Doña Felipa as a spirit akin to the natural potency of the river: “You are like the river, Señora” (Tú eres como el río, señora) (Los ríos profundos 353) In order to understand Doña Felipa’s symbolic power as a threshold figure, it is important to consider the Andean cosmovision at the heart of Arguedas’s storytelling. Vincent Spina (2012) offers an insightful analysis of symbolism in Los ríos profundos, explaining the key concepts illu and illa, and deciphering the meaning of the Pachachaca River and the bridge that crosses it. The Quechua concept of yllu refers to the daylight, the masculine principle; it is associated with the sounds of buzzing insects and with the scissor dancers of the highlands. The sound of the zumbayllu spinning top is thus allegorically linked to positive and masculine values, which is consistent with the way in which the top serves as a locus of reconciliation among the boys of the boarding school. The illa, on the other hand, is associated with reflected light, with the female and the night, and also with the bulls said to dwell at the bottom of the lakes. Spina suggests that Pachachaca is basically synonymous with Chacana, the Andean cross, associated with the constellation the Southern Cross, and depicting the three levels of the universe: the urku pacha or underworld, kay pacha or this world, and hunan pacha or the heavens. The Chacana is sometimes depicted with a diagonal line running from the upper left to the lower right, a line of transcendence called the Qhapaq Ñan, which also refers to the Camino de los Justos or Inca highway running from northwest to southeast and linking the cities of Cajamarca, Cuzco, Pukara, Taiwakako, Orozco, and Potosí.

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As Spina notes (28), Ernesto’s crisis of faith corresponds to the disruption of his connection to the Andean cosmovision, with nothing but a corrupt and demoralizing Western system to replace it. This rupture can be interpreted as a breach in the Chacana, the connecting principle.14 The central axis of the Chacana is the cosmic bridge, and the Pachachaca bridge will go on acquiring more and more symbolic value over the course of the ensuing action: it is the site of crossing over from Abancay to the rest of Peru; in order to reach Abancay, the plague must first cross the bridge, as it does with the return of Marcelina and Padre Augusto. But the bridge is also the site of departure, and Doña Felipa’s flight over the bridge will inspire Ernesto’s ultimate escape. Through her association with the bridge and her role in the turning point of the plot, Felipa serves as a figure of bridging and transcendence. She crosses over the sexual divide by employing the masculine symbol of the rifle, threatens gender hierarchy by having two husbands, and destabilizes the balance of power by inspiring native rebellion. To relate Felipa to the folk tale of the Amaru, she is similar to the shepherd who is pure of heart, who throws himself into the lake, incurring the wrath of the Amaru, and ultimately unleashing the cleansing, life-sustaining rain.15 This is the rain that will cause the rivers to swell, to grow deep with the destructive force necessary to overcome the established order. In her flight, Felipa becomes a symbol of overcoming, later inspiring Ernesto’s own departure. Her transgression marks the transition from long, fast time to short, slow time in the narration. Ultimately, the circumstances that unfold from Felipa’s actions are integral to Ernesto’s developing sense of self and relation to Peruvian national character, and the renewed sense of hope that Quechua culture will survive. In her transcendence of gender, Felipa may be associated with Viracocha, the sometimes-androgynous divinity at the top of the Quechuan cosmology. In her transcendence of her own circumstances, she may be associated with the Qhapaq Ñan, the transverse line that connects disparate elements and symbolizes the movement from one pacha (world) to another. All these considerations and affinities help to illuminate the two striking images at the climax of the novel: Felipa’s shawl hanging from the bridge, and the makeshift gate made of mule entrails that the fleeing chicheras have strung across the bridge. On the one hand, Felipa’s shawl can be interpreted as an offering, a bequeathal to the people she is leaving behind, an invitation to follow her example and insist on the right to self-determination. On the other hand, the entrails represent a closure and an implicit threat, a gesture of senseless brutality to demonstrate that she and her congeners are capable of violence and will use it if necessary. The closure of the bridge in this way may represent a charm to prevent the military troops or plague from entering the village, an emblem of protection against human reprisal

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and natural disaster. By embodying this duality as a force of both creation and destruction, Felipa displays a sovereignty of spirit which will not be contained by moral or physical domination. In her obstinacy, the figure of Doña Felipa preserves the regional cultural specificity of the Andes—cyclical time, humanity as a part of nature, and balance between male and female, destructive and productive forces—while arrogating to indigenous subjectivity the claim to self-determination which is theoretically the basis of modern Western society. CONCLUSION The characters Doña Felipa and M’man Tine bear a number of relevant similarities: Both are self-sufficient older women who risk their own physical well-being for the sake of others. Both are crude in language, bold and defiant in spirit. Both are pivotal figures in the moral development of the young protagonist, and both possess great moral courage expressed by risking their bodily safety. In both of these texts, the matriarch’s strength comes from her lack of attachment to her own life: Felipa’s desire for dignity outweighs her fear of death, and Tine resigns herself to a life of drudgery in the name of José’s education. The heroism of these characters does not diminish their victimhood—clearly, both Felipa and Tine live with bodies ravaged by the work they do, and both must sacrifice those bodies in order to achieve their goals. And yet, even in this state of subjugation, both of these women, through their stubborn commitment to the well-being of others, have a decisive influence on the course of events. M’man Tine is able to inspire in José a sense of the ethical imperative of courage, which is a fundamental component of his process of disalienation. Similarly, Felipa’s actions demonstrate what is possible when a people ceases to fear death. Later, inspired by her example, when the plague arrives and imposes the risk of death on the whole valley, the people seize the opportunity to manifest a general uprising. The differences between the two modes of resistance captured by these martyred maternal figures are as instructive as the similarities. While Felipa is a warrior, Tine is a more passive martyr. In La rue cases-nègres, one must look to the character of Jojo for an example of open insubordination; the matriarch is not a warrior, but a laborer. These two different tropes—the warrior saint and the worker saint—point to two different approaches to revolutionary politics: the active, violent principle of direct resistance and the nonviolent principle of passive resistance, which can culminate in a form of transcendence. When ethos leads to a sense of ethnos, there is a direct confrontation with the forces of antagonism; when ethos leads to gnosis, there is a possibility of transcending these forces. In the former case, the

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underclass acquires class consciousness and sets out to assert its right to selfdetermination in a mass movement. In the latter case, a gradualist mechanism of societal reform is engaged. Both of these modes of resistance gain power through cultural memory. The literary theory of Martinican author Edouard Glissant offers an ethical framework based on the realities of colonized existence in the Global South. In his influential book Poétique de la Relation, looking back at the modern history of French literature, Glissant asserts that there is a dominant strain, preoccupied with form, craft, and language—a structural aesthetics, which arises with the advent of the French Empire, that is, just at the moment when historical reality called for a reckoning with the cultural Other. Contrary to this dominant mode, Glissant posits another mode, practiced by authors ranging from Victor Segalen to Cheik Anta Diop, a Poetics of Relation, which embraces the question of the Other. From this poetics, it is possible to deduce an ethics of relation, a moral system founded on an encounter with difference, which values curiosity over certainty, movement over stasis, performance over structure, and multilingualism and polyvocality over linguistic hegemony and monologic authority. As Glissant puts it, “The thought of the Other is sterile without the Other of thought” (Aussi bien la pensée de l’Autre est-elle sterile, sans l’Autre de la pensée”) (Poétique de la Relation, 169) which is to say that in relational writing, consciousness itself metamorphoses through contact with difference. According to Glissant, the thought of the Other is a form of moral generosity, a willingness to change, just as we see in Ernesto’s confrontation with alterity as represented by Doña Felipa. In La Rue Cases-Nègres and Los ríos profundos, the protagonist’s moral coming-of-age involves a necessary reckoning with the racialized injustice that serves as the economic foundation of his society. This racialized injustice is inseparable from the concept of possession, particularly the convention of private land ownership through inheritance, based on legitimacy through ancestry. This brings up a possible paradox because ancestry is also at the heart of some of the major movements of Caribbean anti-colonial thinking. As Stuart Hall observes, the strain of thinking in Afro-Caribbean letters associated with “oneness” was an important component of Negritude and the Pan-African political project and has been useful in spurring the pursuit of “hidden histories” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” [1990] 2021, 258–259). Nevertheless, Hall contends, this conception of culture inevitably encounters the reality of difference, of the fractured existence of the self in forced diaspora. In response to this necessity, a second mode of cultural identity arises: “We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about ‘one experience, one identity,’ without acknowledging its other side—the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute, precisely, the Caribbean’s ‘uniqueness’” (260).

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Sensitive to this idea of difference, Glissant shifts his emphasis away from roots and toward relations. Glissant describes the Western obsession with filiation as a composite of multiple factors: the dominance of monotheism, the worldview of linearity, and regimes of identity and exclusion. In Western epic mythology from the Iliad to the Chanson de Roland, filiation serves as a justification for claims to territory and is thus associated with the legitimacy of the state. This notion of legitimacy emphasizes root origins; it manifests in the Americas as the “arrowlike nomadism” of conquest and the universalistic aspirations of the Christianizing and civilizing missions. Glissant’s framework of relation borrows and repurposes the idea of rhizomatic connections from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The atomistic model foundational to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “desiring machines” harkens back to Spinoza, who sought to ground ethics in bodily concerns—pain, pleasure, and desire. Ethical leadership in these novels derives not from authority, but from connection. Doña Felipa’s bodymind registers a response of reflexive empathy with the villagers and colonos; the principle of mutual survival outweighs the rule of law and reveals its arbitrary nature. Similarly, M’man Tine’s bodymind navigates the extremely constrained range of possibilities available to her, as a person who was orphaned, hired out to the petites bandes at a young age, raped, and impregnated by a certain Commandeur Valbrun (RCN 43). Tine cared for her daughter “up to the age of twelve, as if I’d been a rich woman”; for both Delia and José, Tine has broken the cycle that has tied her to the plantation. The study of these narratives of adolescence, coupled with an appreciation of the theoretical insights of relational thinkers such as Glissant and embodiment thinkers such as Schalk, shows how Arguedas and Zobel participate in a shift in greater Latin American literature away from Eurocentric frameworks of dualism, linear progress, and hegemonic discourses of filiation. From a critical, non-dualistic perspective, what frequently passes in Western discourse for intellectual transcendence appears rather to be a mystification of bourgeois privilege. In this sense, postcolonial literature of substitute motherhood challenges the notion of objective, universalist ethics with an ontological ethics of bodyminds in constrained relation.

NOTES 1. In Poétique de la Relation (first published in 1990), Edouard Glissant has observed how the plantation (and its demise) acts as a common theme tying the various cultures of the Americas together: “La Plantation détruite a touché alentour aux cultures des Amériques” (86).

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2. “She turned in the direction where there were beautiful colors in the sky, stretched and crossed her muddy legs, and seemed to give herself over entirely to the pleasure of puffing on her pipe” (Elle se tournait du côté où il y avait de belles couleurs dans le ciel, allongeait et croisait ses jambes terreuses, et semblait s’adonner toute à son plaisir de tirer sur sa pipe) (Zobel 10). In order to focus on the literal wording of the original texts, the English translation and all further translations are my own. 3. The term béké refers to the landed gentry of Martinique, the descendants of French colonists. 4. Médouze has died from no apparent cause other than advanced age following a life of backbreaking labor and exposure to the elements. 5. These “little gangs” of children are hired at a wage even lower than that of their parents to do the lighter work of clearing leaves from the cane fields after the workers pass through with machetes. 6. In his thorough introduction to the Catedra edition [1995] (2003), Ricardo González Vigil writes, “The awakening of the colonos was, for Arguedas, the most important part of the message of Los ríos profundos [. . .] But it was not obvious for the commentators charged with the immediate reception of the novel, as the revolutionary message was implied (rather than explicitly stated)” (El despertar de los colonos era, para Arguedas, lo más importante del mensaje de Los ríos profundos. [. . .] Pero no fue evidente para los comentaristas encargados de la recepción inmediata de la novella, en tanto el mensaje revolucionaria se hallaba connatodo (más que denotado explícitamente) (Los ríos profundos 105). 7. Chicheras are women who brew and sell chicha, or Andean corn beer, a beverage which has been enjoyed in the Andes for millennia, and which is consumed both ceremonially and recreationally. 8. “¡No! ¡Sólo hasta hoy robaron la sal! Hoy vamos a expulsar de Abancay a todos los ladrones. ¡Gritad, mujeres; gritad fuerte; que lo oiga el mundo entero! ¡Morirán los ladrones!” (LRP 272). 9. According to González Vigil, the sequence of events proceeding from Felipa’s disappearance to her mythologization, followed by the plague and then finally by the general uprising, proves “two things: the revolutionary capacity of all the Indians, including pongos and colonos; and the revolutionary impact of the mythical worldview” (Prueba dos cosas: la capacidad revolucionaria de todos los indios, pongos y colonos incluidos; y la repercusión revolucionaria de la óptica mítica) (Los ríos profundos 105). 10. According to Luis Gómez Acuña (2007), the term “criollo” was used in the colonial era to denote that which originated in the Americas (including, for a time, referring to the descendants of Africans born in the Americas, as well as to Peruvianborn indigenous and mestizo people), but in twentieth-century Peru it began to refer to the Europeanized culture of the coastal cities in contradistinction to the “indígena” (116). It is in this sense that I employ this contested term, which I take to denote a social concept applicable to the specific context of twentieth-century Peru. 11. Arguedas’ debut novel Yawar Fiesta is a linguistically complex text written partially in standard Spanish and partially in a Quechua-inflected artificial

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Spanish which the author uses to evoke the speech patterns of Quechua; the novel is also peppered with Quechua words. In Yawar fiesta, the indigenous villagers of Puquio struggle against the national government for the right to hold a bullfight in the Andean tradition, which involves a high risk of injury and death for the participants. 12. “El motín ha irrumpido en la mitad exacta de la novela. Y a partir de esa conmoción en ese mundo exterior que es el (de) generador del Colegio y de su miseria y culpa, Ernesto salta a otra dinámica en su desarrollo” (Dorfman 113). 13. “Tan anaranjado como el crepúsculo contaminado que anochecía desde las violaciones” (Dorfman 116). 14. “The Chacana is the Andean symbol of the relatedness of all things” (La chakana es el símbolo andino de la relacionalidad del todo) (Pueblos Originarios). 15. See Arguedas’s Spanish translation of this Quechua folk tale, found in Mitos Leyendas y Cuentos Peruanos, pp. 67-69.

WORKS CITED Acuña, Luis Gómez. “Lo Criollo En El Perú Republicano: Breve Aproximación a Un Término Elusivo.” Histórica (02528894), vol. 31, no. 2, December 2007: 115–166. Arguedas, José María. Los ríos profundos. Edited by Ricardo González Vigil. Madrid: Catedra, [1995] 2003. Arguedas, José María. Yawar Fiesta. Lima: J. Mejía Baca, 1958. Arguedas, José María, and Francisco Izquierdo Ríos, eds. Mitos, leyendas y cuentos peruanos. Lima: Punto de Lectura, 2009. Condé, Maryse. “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer.” Yale French Studies, no. 97, January 2000: 151–165. Dorfman, Ariel. “Puentes y Padres En El Infierno: Los Ríos Profundos.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, vol. 6, no. 12, 1980: 91–137. Ebrahim, Haseenah. “‘Sugar Cane Alley’: Re-Reading Race, Class and Identity in Zobel’s ‘La Rue Cases Nègres.’” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2, 2002: 146–152. Glissant, Edouard. Poétique de la Relation. Plessis-Trévisse. Gallimard, 2014. Glover, Kaiama. The Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Selected Writings on Race and Difference. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021 [1990]. Hezekiah, Randolph. “Joseph Zobel: The Mechanics of Liberation.” Black Images, vol. 4, nos. 3–4, 1975: 44–45. Kandé, Sylvie. “Renunciation and Victory in Black Shack Alley.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 25, no. 2, Special Issue: Caribbean Literature (Summer, 1994): 33–50. Meade, Teresa A. A History of Modern Latin America: 1800 to the Present. Malden: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009.

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Price, Margaret. “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 1, Winter 2015: 268–284. Pueblos Originarios: Cosmogonía Inca: La Chakana. puebl​​osori​​ginar​​ios​.c​​om​/su​​r​/ and​​ina​/i​​nca​/c​​​hakan​​a​.htm​​l. Schalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Spina, Vincent. “An Understanding of Deep Rivers Through an Analysis of Three of its Main Symbols.” Journal of Global Initiatives, vol. 7, no. 2, 2012: 23–38. Spinoza, Baruch. The Ethics of Spinoza. Seacaucus: Citadel Press, 1995. Wylie, Hal. “Joseph Zobel’s Use of Negritude and Social Realism.” World Literature Today, vol. 56, no. 1, Varia Issue (Winter, 1982): 61–64.

Chapter 14

Formation and Ontological Transcendence in Giovanna Rivero’s 98 segundos sin sombra and Magela Baudoin’s El sonido de la H Alexander Torres

The Bildungsroman or novel of formation has come to be commonly understood as one that narrativizes a deep personal transformation, a passage from immaturity to maturity, a rite of passage. The novel of formation is associated specifically with late eighteenth-century German literary production, but other prominent versions of this narrative model soon appear in France and England in the following century, fixing the development of this genre of these three European countries. However, the Bildungsroman is not reducible to Northwestern Europe. The Spanish-speaking world, for example, tends to be excluded (or to exclude itself) from the discourse of the novel of formation, but this is both misguided and unnecessary. The Bildungsroman—a literary genre identified ex post facto—comes to fruition in a certain region and in a specific historical moment, but it neither emerges in a vacuum nor is so outstandingly unique and structurally restrictive in the sense that one cannot talk about a Latin American novel of formation, a category that will be analyzed here by way of recent Bolivian literary production. As I argue in “New World Modernity, the Hispanophone Literary Tradition, Werther, and the Sacred in the Bildungsroman” (2021), the novel of formation is the product of historical contingency, of the ontological impact of capitalist modernity. At the heart of this modern genre is a narrative archetype that can be found the world over: the hero’s journey, which is an adventure in which the protagonist (re)attains something outside the bounds of his or her ontic immediacy, something belonging to the realm of the sacred. And the fact that the novel of formation is generally circumscribed in a secular universe does not necessarily erase the sacred element. Two of 235

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Goethe’s novels—The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774/1787) and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796)—demonstrate how the individual human spirit negotiates its “ontological thirst,” to use Mircea Eliade’s term, or tries to slake it within a profane universe. While Wilhelm Meister is a novel of negotiation, one that accepts self-cultivation in accordance with a bourgeoisified, secular reality, Werther’s title character aims to transcend the materialist ethos of this kind of existence. Though the formative aspirations within many Bildungsromane may not be characterized by a transcendental thirst, there are those that are or that lend themselves to this longing. Nevertheless, despite being a genre framed within secular realism, there is an ontological thirst (or what Nietzsche would call a “mythical drive”) that propels all Bildung processes. In the context of Bolivian literature, we can find Bildungsromane as we would in the narrative production of many other modern nations. Though it is not a developed field within Bolivian literary studies (the body of academic work on the Bildungsromane in Latin America in general lacks systematicity),1 a good number of novels of formation can be identified dating back to the nineteenth century. And while it should not be understood as exhaustive, the following offers a panoramic list of Bolivian Bildungsromane to date: Juan de la Rosa (1885) by Nataniel Aguirre, La niña de sus ojos (1948) by Antonio Díaz Villamil, Tirinea (1969) by Jesús Urzagasti,2 Felipe Delgado (1979) by Jaime Sáenz, Jonás y la ballena rosada (1987) by Wolfango Montes, Río fugitivo (1998) by Edmundo Paz Soldán, 98 segundos sin sombra (2014) by Giovanna Rivero, El sonido de la H (2014) by Magela Baudoin, and Los años invisibles (2020) by Rodrigo Hasbún. I have chosen to examine here the novels by Giovanna Rivero and Magela Baudoin as they demonstrate, albeit to different degrees, what is not uncommon to Bildung narratives: the taking advantage of experiential possibilities opened up by capitalist modernity to achieve individuation and the desire to attain an ontological status outside of the lifeworld configurations of world capitalism that permeate not only the “center” but the “periphery” as well. 98 segundos sin sombra and El sonido de la H portray the drive to transcend the pathologizing seductions of modern (capitalist) life. In both narratives, the main characters must confront a society in which the ideological utopias of the twentieth century—in this case, those that revolutionized Bolivia and Latin America in general—have lost relevance and legitimacy. They each must create meaning and constitute a world within the complex, violent, and racist confines of a Bolivia whose social composition René Zavaleta Mercado (1937–1984), the country’s most important theorist, characterized as a motley (disjointed) society (sociedad abigarrada). In the context of world capitalism, this meant that the ultimate sociopolitical objective for Bolivia should be to “overcome its disjointed social form and transform itself from an apparent

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state”—one where political society domineers over and excludes its civil society—“to a national (integral) state through a national popular seizure of state power” (Augsburger 1572), such as the one represented (not uncontentiously) in this century by the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party and the new constitution (2009) that officially renamed the country the “Plurinational State of Bolivia.” Chronologically framed within the second half of the 1980s in Bolivia, Rivero’s and Baudoin’s characters use the liberties ironically bestowed on them by an inherently decadent modernity to cultivate a self and a world. And as I have delineated in Bastardos de la modernidad (2020), a phenomenological reading of the novel of formation (in general) allows us to see that Bildung protagonists do more than try to find a place in the world. They construct an alternative lifeworld (Lebenswelt), one that, even if only imaginarily, lays a wager on a world that has the potential to eclipse symbolically and qualitatively the “really existing” one that is bound to the insomnious movement of capital. 98 segundos sin sombra The novel 98 segundos sin sombra by Giovanna Rivero, published for the first time in 2014 by Caballo de Troya, tells the story of Genoveva Bravo Genovés, or rather Genoveva narrates her experience in a small town named Therox, also referred to by her as “Culo del Mundo” (Asshole of the World) (my translation; Rivero 40). As the main character reveals, the name “Therox” is really a deformation of its real name: Montero (40), located in the department of Santa Cruz in the eastern part of Bolivia. The Montero that Genoveva describes is one beleaguered by drug trafficking, specifically cocaine trafficking. The Bolivia of the 1980s was one of extreme economic instability, and because of that, reveals Herbert S. Klein, “coca paste and cocaine exports were extremely important for the Bolivian economy, and the government did everything possible to encourage reinvestment of these clandestine profits in the national economy” (249). According to Sandoval Arenas et al., “[e]n Bolivia, en Santa Cruz, y en particular en la ciudad de Montero, por ejemplo, las implicaciones de la economía ilegal fueron significativas en la economía y política” ([i]n Bolivia, in Santa Cruz, and particularly in the city of Montero, for example, the implications of the illegal economy were economically and politically significant) (my translation; 125). Genoveva is a victim of the “cocaine capitalism” that takes off in the 1980s and continues into “the final decades of the twentieth century” (Gootenberg 289). It is in small, tropical Montero that she must face the demons of the peripheral regions of a capitalist planet.

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Genoveva Bravo Genovés hates certain things about her life, most notably her father to whom she refers as Padre. The protagonist reveals: Siempre pienso en cuánto odio a mi padre y en cómo nuestras vidas, la de mamá y la mía, y claro, la de Nacho, podrían convertirse en algo fantástico, una fábula, tan solo si él tuviera la decencia de morirse. (I always think about how much I hate my father and how our lives, Mom’s and mine and, of course, Nacho’s, could become something fantastic, a fable, if he only had the decency to die.) (my translation; Rivero 7)

The family of which the main character has the fortune of being a part is comprised of her defeated leftist father, her disenchanted mother of Italian descent, her baby brother Nacho who was born with an intellectual developmental disorder, her dog Thor, and her paternal grandmother Clara Luz who recites prayers in Latin and practices voodoo. Genoveva is a high school student in the all-girls school María Auxiliadora (Mary Help of Christians). Her best friend, who suffers from an eating disorder, is Inés. Then there is a group of self-centered, sexually precocious, and bullying classmates known as the Madonnas (after the American pop singer), one of whose members, Lorena Vacaflor, is later ejected and develops an unlikely bond with Genoveva. Finally, there is the mysterious Gnostic Maestro (teacher) Hernán, a figure whose rapturous sessions Genoveva’s mother attends and who the protagonist later takes spiritual lessons from and frequents. Genoveva lives in a world besieged by cocaine trafficking. Despite this fact, the mores that historically characterize Therox persist amid the surrounding decadence. The main character, however, understands that the situation in her small city is far beyond euphemistic denial. One of the Genoveva’s teachers, Sister Nuri, says to her class as the focus of an assignment: “Cuando pasen quinientos años, ¿cuáles serán las ruinas de Therox?” (When five hundred years pass, what will be Therox’s ruins?) (my translation; Rivero 44). The protagonist’s initial response is: In Therox there are computers that make me think of alien brains, huge hydrocephalic brains. These smart gadgets include splendid games that involve eating and going from one level to the next; Pac Man is my favorite, and there are also new traffic lights because there are so many vehicles, the kinds that remove their top and the tall ones, King Kong size, with fat wheels; monster trucks they are called. “Paradox inhabits” Therox City, says Dad, and I write it here because maybe it means something, something like that there are many cars though not much asphalt (only the rich asphalt their neighborhoods), but above all there are motorcycles, many motorcycles imported from the United States. The trouble is that [. . .] the traffic lights do not have cameras like in other cities of this vast

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planet; that is why the reckonings go unpunished. In Therox there are numerous acts of vengeance, some with blood, some without blood. (En Therox hay computadoras que me hacen pensar en el cerebro de los extraterrestres, cerebros enormes hidrocefálicos. Estos aparatos inteligentes traen juegos espléndidos de comer y cruzar niveles, Pac Man es mi favorito, y también hay semáforos nuevos porque hay muchísimos vehículos, de esos que se quitan la capucha y de los altos, talla King Kong, con ruedas gordas, monster trucks que les llaman. En Therox City “vive la paradoja”, dice papá y lo pongo acá porque tal vez signifique algo, algo como que hay muchos autos y no tanto asfalto (solo los ricos hacen asfaltar sus barrios), pero sobre todo motos, muchas motos traídas de Estados Unidos. El lío es que [. . .] los semáforos no tienen cámara como en otras ciudades del vasto planeta, por eso los ajustes de cuentas quedan impunes. En Therox hay muchísimos ajustes de cuentas, algunos con sangre, otros sin sangre.) (44–45)3

Genoveva decides to erase the last part because she knows that Sister Nuri will not accept her honest acknowledgment of Therox’s reality. The main character narrates that according to Sister Nuri, [l]ife’s script needs more elegance, she says; stop being provincial, she says, because one thing is to be humble and another mediocre; you have to restrain yourself not only with the will of the body but also with that of the soul, she says, trembling, heroic. (el guión de la vida necesita más elegancia, dice, hay que dejar de ser provincianas, dice, porque una cosa es ser humilde y otra mediocre, hay que comedirse no solo con la voluntad del cuerpo, sino también con la del alma, dice, temblorosa, heroica.) (45)

Genoveva’s challenge, what drives her Bildung process, is to heroically confront capitalist modernity’s darkest manifestations, and this is ultimately what she sets out to do. Juan Duchesne Winter proposes that in her novel, Rivero presents us with “the young girl as writer” la (jovencita como escritora) (103). The literary figure of Genoveva is one of a group of “schizogamous young girls” (jovencitas esquizogámicas) identified by Duchesne Winter that “theorize about new civilizations that are poised to supplant modern agro-industrial societies” (teorizan en torno a nuevas civilizaciones que están prestas a suplantar las sociedades agroindustriales modernas) (108). Notwithstanding the different theoretical construct utilized by Duchesne Winter, his idea that Genoveva posits a new civilization capable of supplanting lifeworlds determined by expansionary capitalism coincides with my analysis. Rivero’s protagonist resolves to create a new civilization. The world she inhabits generates or amplifies in her what Eliade describes as

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an “ontological thirst,” that is, a craving for “being” or real existence (64). Despite its rogue appearance, the cocaine capitalism that regulates the social life of Therox “is tied to the global economy” (Wilson and Zambrano 310). As such, as part of the “devastating effect that capitalist subsumption has on human life,” to use Bolívar Echeverría’s words, it sentences her lifeworld to “death in life (if not to death itself)” (73). Desacralized—thus lacking in being or real existence as Eliade would observe—and exposed to physical death, Therox represents a lifeless inferno. In fact, the small tropical city can be understood in Gnostic terms, that is, as a source of “kakía [. . .]’what is bad’—what one desires to avoid, such as physical pain, sickness, suffering, misfortune, every kind of harm” (Pagels 143). The same as a Gnostic, for Genoveva “the only way out of suffering [is] to realize the truth about humanity’s place and destiny in the universe” (144). Therefore, the impulse that animates Genoveva’s Bildung process incites her “to ‘found the world’ and to live in a real sense” (Eliade 23). Like other teenagers of the late twentieth century, Genoveva is enamored by the dazzling energy of her decade’s pop music artists, yet she is drawn to the deeper messages that filter in from its larger-than-life dimension. While her peers obsess over and imitate the physical persona and perceived ethos of Madonna in her 1984 hit “Like a Virgin,” the protagonist expresses her contempt for their vacuous parroting and reflects on their inability to go past the cosmetic dimension of the pop universe (Rivero 102–103). As opposed to the Madonnas’s appropriation of their eponymous idol that is only fixated on the body, the site where kakía is located (Pagels 144), for Genoveva Freddie Mercury is not only more profound in terms of content, but his music also bears a value of divine transcendence. The theme and impulse of transcendence are constellated through the web of characters that make up Genoveva’s voluntary and involuntary bonds. From a symbolic perspective, the protagonist’s baby brother, Nacho, is the most important in this respect and in relation to his sister’s Bildung process. He is born in April, after Genoveva and her mother—to whom she refers in her narration as Madre (like she does with her father)—await the passing of Halley’s comet, which was seen for the last time in 1986. While the protagonist and her pregnant mother await the comet’s appearance, they see Mars in the night sky. The main character reveals that Madre does not like the planet nearest to Earth. This is because Mars is a malefic planet. Genoveva suggests that for her mother, the presence of the fourth planet from the Sun in the sky and that of a comet, as beautiful as Madre believed the latter to be, “did not seem like such a good blessing for being born; she would try to hold out until next week” (no le parecía la mejor de las bendiciones para nacer; trataría de aguantar hasta la próxima semana) (Rivero 32). Nacho, nevertheless, “was already a determined creature, even though everyone afterwards would think

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otherwise, and he decided that was the moment” (ya era una criatura determinada, aunque todo el mundo luego iba a opinar lo contrario, y decidió que ese era el momento) (33–34). Although Genoveva’s brother, born right after she and Madre witness the passing of Halley’s comet, comes into the world with a developmental disorder, “unfit” to live in the brute, profane, and disenchanted reality of Therox, he, nonetheless, is considered by his sister to be superior to the material existence of his family’s small city; Nacho is a figure destined to transcend it. The ambiguous cosmic symbolism connoted by Mars and Halley’s comet conveys a Manichaean conflict that takes root in a world marked by ideological, utopian, and theological ruins (represented by Padre and the nuns of Genoveva’s school) and replaced by the instant and ungraspable gratification of capitalist materialism. As was stated, Mars is a malefic planet, and comets have a history of being bad omens, though not always (Schechner Genuth 23). The Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone depicted in the Adoration of the Magi (painted in the first decade of the fourteenth century) Halley’s comet “as having been the Star of Bethlehem” (Kidger 84). It is noteworthy that the European Space Agency named a probe after Giotto that would be launched into space in 1985 for the purpose of studying Halley’s comet (84). This historical association and the one that can be made with the Florentine painter’s interpretation of the comet as the Star of Bethlehem adds a messianic quality to Nacho’s birth. He is an essential member of Genoveva’s new civilization. Other characters in the novel that demonstrate an ontological thirst for a real existence, one that goes beyond the limits of their Bolivian reality, are Padre, Madre, Clara Luz, and Inés. In reference to Genoveva’s parents, Antonio Cardentey Levin affirms that the father [. . .] forges a certain idealism by remaining stuck in a socialist utopia, while the mother tries to project her spirituality in terms of life itself, but she remains imprisoned in a vicious circle of immobility and bitterness. (el padre crea [. . .] cierto idealismo al permanecer estancado en la utopía socialista, mientras la madre trata de proyectar su espiritualidad en función de la vida misma, pero se mantiene presa en el círculo vicioso del inmovilismo y la amargura.) (n.p.)

Seeming to follow in the footsteps of his progenitor, a veteran of the Chaco War (1932–1935) and a participant in Bolivia’s 1952 “Agrarian Revolution,” Genoveva’s father appears to have been a member of the Communist Party of Bolivia as the protagonist narrates that he had gone to “Vallegrande with other young people from his party and then to La Paz, to study” (Vallegrande con otros jóvenes de su partido y luego a La Paz, a estudiar) (Rivero 121). The reference to Vallegrande, the small town where Che Guevara was buried, can

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be none other than the period where Guevara with the reluctant help of the Bolivian Communist Party tried to start a Latin American revolution but was quashed by the Bolivian army, which had the support of the United States; Guevara was executed on October 9, 1967, in the neighboring hamlet of La Higuera (James 72–73; Klein 225; Anderson 687, 999). From a symbolic viewpoint, it stands to reason that the reference to Vallegrande connotes the decadence of leftist utopianism in the twentieth century, which is a failure that Padre logically shares. It can be assumed that his subsequent melancholy originates in this defeat, which is also highlighted by the brazen, cocaine trafficking-fueled consumerism and materialism of Therox. Madre, in turn, makes an attempt to transcend spiritually, but as Maestro Hernán tells Genoveva, “she is bound to instinct” (ella está atada al instinto) (Rivero 164). Clara Luz, on the other hand, goes beyond the social and religious mores of her generation by doing things that would be unheard of within that sociohistorical context: not only is she unfaithful to her husband with a farmhand while he participates in the Agrarian Revolution, but the protagonist’s grandmother also casts voodoo spells for pay (in addition to the money she makes by reciting prayers in Latin at wakes) (125–127). Genoveva’s grandmother, however, who suffers from a deadly lung disease, cannot accompany her grandchild to Ganymede (Jupiter’s largest moon named after a beautiful youth kidnapped by Zeus), her destiny after achieving Gnostic initiation. In fact, Genoveva and Clara Luz silently cooperate to end the latter’s life, which the main character does by closing the handle of her oxygen tank (163). Finally, Inés’s eating disorder—a manifestation of kakía brought on by a profound body dissatisfaction rooted in an appearance ideal personified in the likes of the Madonnas—can also be interpreted as an ontological thirst for a real existence. Nevertheless, Inés, “obsessed with disappearing” (obsesionada con desaparecer) (94), opts for utterly slaking her desire for transcendence, namely by vaporizing “like a vampire in the morning light before the astonished eyes of her family” (como un vampiro a la luz de la mañana ante los ojos atónitos de su familia) (166), that is, by nurturing her own death. All these characters in one way or another resist the conditions of their ominous reality in Therox, but none of them take the bold steps Genoveva does to recreate the world as such. 98 segundos sin sombra is a long farewell to the bonds that tie Genoveva to Therox. The protagonist finally leaves her hometown in a ramshackle pickup truck with Nacho and Maestro Hernán. Genoveva describes how Nacho, asleep in her left arm, is like the lifeless body of Jesus held by the Virgin Mary in Michelangelo’s Pietà. Although she relates this briefly with a mixture of tender surprise and the anticipation of their ultimate destination, this consummates in the main character’s baby brother a messianic value of salvation and liberation. Genoveva ends her story by narrating that “‘[t]he sky, suddenly, is a thing of great depth, full of time: a black mirror of high

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reciprocity. Traveling like this, the three of us are a new civilization” ([e]l cielo, de pronto, es una cosa honda, llena de tiempo, un espejo negro de alta reciprocidad. Así, viajando, los tres somos una nueva civilización) (Rivero 174). Taking the resistance to capitalist homogeneity one step further, Genoveva’s Bildung journey opens a pathway from the profane to the sacred, that is, to real existence. And though the trajectory of the process of formation of Rivero’s protagonist includes elements of what is otherwise known as the classical Bildungsroman paradigm—Wilhelm Meister—the intensity of her craving for ontological fullness parallels that of Werther’s. El sonido de la H El sonido de la H by Magela Baudoin came to light in 2014 when it won the Bolivian Premio Nacional de Novela (González Almada), and it was published for the first time by Santillana in 2015 (Chávez). Virginia Ayllón highlights typological similarities between Baudoin’s novel and Rivero’s 98 segundos sin sombra: there are two adolescent female protagonists who “suffer” their fathers. Both are leftists historically rooted in the 1960s and whose limited revolutionary principles—which place men in heroic political roles, while women essentially bolster them—are considered vacuous or unrealizable by their daughters. Ayllón also states that both mothers, who are both relegated to submissive roles, though one has a successful profession, act as mediating figures between their daughters and husbands. Like the Venezuelan-born Bolivian author, the main character of Baudoin’s novel lives part of her life in Simón Bolívar’s native country and embarks on a new journey in the nation that carries his name: Bolivia. The primary chronological locus of El sonido de la H is the year 1989. This year has a manifold significance. In the context of Venezuelan political history, 1989 marks a time of intensifying political crisis (Ellner 404). It was a moment when Venezuelans reacted violently “against [President Carlos Andrés] Pérez’s neoliberal reforms” (405). The economic policies introduced at the end of the 1980s would undoubtedly set the stage for the Hugo Chávez-led Bolivarian Revolution that would take power a decade later. 1989 is also the year that Baudoin’s protagonist— Mar—would arrive to her father’s mother country: Bolivia. Mar, of course, reaches a specific destination: the Andean city of Cochabamba. Aside from the real-life cocaine-trafficking phenomenon of Montero reflected in Rivero’s novel, the 1980s in Bolivia is also characterized by its “return to democracy” (after years of authoritarian rule commencing in 1964) as well as “the [neoliberal] imposition of a stringent new economic program, the Nueva Política Económica” (Goldstein, The Spectacular City 22). The 1985 neoliberal measures that constituted the Nueva Política Económica

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“took a staggering social toll. Some twenty thousand miners lost their jobs as a result of the closure of state mines, with devastating effects on mining communities in Oruro, Potosí, and La Paz” (Perreault 139). Daniel Goldstein illustrates that with regard to the city of Cochabamba, “[b]y the 1980s [. . .] the majority of migrants were arriving from the Bolivian highlands,” and “[b]y the early 1990s, half of the city’s population consisted of migrants from the highland departments of the country: Oruro, La Paz, and Potosí” (Owners of the Sidewalk 113). The highland migration to Cochabamba city was “provoked largely by neoliberal political and economic reforms” (113). Although this reality is represented more subtly than explicitly, this is the Cochabamba that Mar arrives at in 1989. El sonido de la H is the story of sixteen-year-old Mar whose Bildung process involves both a physical and an existential journey. The protagonist narrates her last year of high school in Venezuela and her subsequent, firsttime acquaintance with Bolivia, her father’s country. Mar tells her story in the language of a secular universe, closer to Wilhelm Meister and the realism of French and English Bildungsromane of the nineteenth century than to the transcendentally homeless but thirsty Werther. There are elements in Baudoin’s novel, nevertheless, that contradict the worldly attributes of the plot and reveal another level of existential or ontological operation: that which Eliade designates homo religiosus. I will demonstrate this with the help of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Slavoj Žižek claims that “[i]t is only psychoanalysis that can disclose the full contours of the shattering impact of modernity” (In Defense 33). Though it is true that psychoanalysis provides a grammar for understanding the psychic phenomena that characterize subjective experience in (capitalist) modernity, it is chiefly from the perspective of transcendental homelessness (Lukács). But Eliade’s notion of homo religiosus challenges us to believe that there is a drive that pushes humanity toward transcendence, which is constitutive of humankind’s general behavior (15). In the monomyth that underlies the impulse of the main character of a novel of formation, one can observe in this genre elements of the hero’s journey that betray an ontological thirst aimed at going beyond the limits of mundane (modern) experience. For Mar 1989 is a year of convergence and bifurcations, of endings and beginnings. In this same year, which is her last year before expecting to enter university, the protagonist enrolls in what was formerly a Catholic all-boys school. Mar is the only female until she meets Rafaela, a trans adolescent who will become her closest friend before leaving Caracas, Venezuela for Cochabamba, Bolivia. Born Rafael, Rafaela defiantly transgresses the social norms of her priest-led school steeped in masculine heteronormativity. The main character, for instance, narrates that she was chosen as the Carnival queen because, being the “only” female, no one other than her could fill

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the role (Baudoin 13). On the day of the parade, however, as Mar and her male classmates dressed up as farcical queens promenade through the school grounds, Rafaela ultimately monopolizes the procession by unexpectedly appearing dressed up in a manner reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe (15). Rafaela would quickly become not only Mar’s close friend but her obsession as well. On one level, Rafaela becomes for Mar a model of femininity. In her review of Baudoin’s novel, Natalia Chávez utilizes Judith Butler’s theory not only to demonstrate that gender is a discursive construct but also to highlight sixteen-year-old Mar’s gender disorientation: “At that time she is, we perceive, disoriented primarily about two things: her pending future and her identity as a woman” (En ese entonces está, percibimos, desorientada en cuanto a dos principales cosas: su futuro próximo y su identidad como mujer). Chávez aptly applies Butler’s theory to underline the protagonist’s gender “disorientation” as well as Rafaela’s bold disregard for her assigned gender based on sex. Notwithstanding, I would like to add a Lacanian twist to this interpretation. According to Jacques Lacan, the hysteric is burdened by the question “Am I a man or am I a woman?” (The Psychoses 171). Mar’s disorientation seems to be precisely a consequence of this uncertainty. In other words, the protagonist’s discourse is that of the hysteric, which is illustrated in the following algorithm: $ (agent) →  a (truth)

S1 (the other) S2 (production)

“$” is the (barred or divided) subject, “a manifestation of the alienation that occurs as a result of the subject’s accession to language” (Bracher 66), “S1” is the master signifier, a “signifier that has no meaning” but that has an “identity-bearing function” (Lander 14; Bracher 25), “S2” is knowledge, and “a” is the objet petit a or object a, “an ‘impossible’ object that gives body to” and “occupies the place of the Real” (Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment 50n6). Bruce Fink explains that “in the hysteric’s discourse, object (a) appears in the position of truth. That means that the truth of the hysteric’s discourse, its hidden motor force, is the real” (134). Fink also details that the hysteric pushes the master—incarnated in a partner, teacher, or whomever— to the point where he or she can find the master’s knowledge lacking [. . .] In addressing the master [signifier], the hysteric demands that he or she produce knowledge and then goes on to disprove his or her theories. (134)

The master signifier that the hysteric addresses is also addressing the imaginary phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier of the law, and the

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signifier of the symbolic phallus (Lander 14). Therefore, Mar’s disorientation is tied to her father or rather what he represents: the paternal/symbolic law. But in her hysteric mode of being-in-the-world, the protagonist yields “to the law of the father, to the demands of Symbolic Law” (Eyers 103). Mar is drawn to Rafaela because she is “someone not marked by [. . .] lack,” which prompts the main character to “identify with [Rafaela’s] object of desire” (Lander 93). Mar’s friend becomes her temporary master, but Rafaela, to use the words of Alenka Zupančič, is like “a ‘full’ subject who knows exactly what [s]he wants” (104). And even though the adult Mar narrates that Rafaela only thought about her father, craving his affection (Baudoin 73), the reader has no way of knowing if this is a projection of the adolescent version of the protagonist’s own lack. If Rafaela, like Antigone, was “suicidal” in the sense that she utterly dismissed the law of the father (Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 46; Baudoin 12), then she must have “known” the answer to the hysteric’s question. Mar, always addressing Rafaela in her narration, relates that her sister Paz, three years her elder, always surer of herself and more independent-minded than the protagonist, is also “suicidal” (in this case iconoclastically resolute, yet not to the extreme of Antigone), but Mar herself seems to admit that she is making a false equivalence. The reasoning on which Mar’s description of Paz as “suicidal” is based stems from their childhood in which Paz received the affection and liberal education of her leftist and countercultural father whom she initially idolized, but Paz adopted a resentful attitude toward her father after he effectively left his family behind for eight years. Rafaela, nevertheless, is in another ontological category. Unlike “man,” Rafaela “does not exist, she insists, which is why she does not come to be through man only—there is something in her that escapes the relation to man, the reference to the phallic signifier” (Žižek 156). Žižek asserts that “Lacan attempted to capture this excess by the notion of a ‘not-all’ feminine jouissance” (156). For Lacan feminine jouissance is “beyond the phallus” (Encore 74). It should be made clear that there is a direct relationship between Lacan’s notion of feminine jouissance and the real and that “Lacan borrowed [Georges] Bataille’s ideas on the impossible and heterology, deriving from them a concept of the ‘real’ seen first as ‘residue’ and then as ‘impossible’” (Roudinesco 137). There is also a direct relationship between Bataille’s heterology and his notion of the sacred, particularly the left pole of the sacred—“the Dionysian dimension of the sacred” (Biles 221)—that is suppressed in capitalist modernity. And even with Lacan’s evasion of transcendence and Bataille’s rejection of it, it is possible to talk about feminine jouissance and the heterogeneous (Dionysian) sacred in transcendental terms. With this in mind, Rafaela, like Rivero’s Genoveva, can be said to be after an “absolute reality” that “transcends this world but manifests itself in this world” (Eliade 202), even if she is unconscious of this

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fact. And while the protagonist of El sonido de la H is Mar, the drive that propels Rafaela’s trajectory is clearly a model for the main character’s Bildung process, even though she does not achieve Rafaela’s—Mar’s friend and first love—status of being. Mar’s love for/obsession with Rafaela makes her suffer, but it begins to awaken in her a desire to transgress the phallic signifier. Nevertheless, the protagonist has no choice but to sever ties with Rafaela when she is sent off to “vacation” in Cochabamba with her grandparents. There, Mar frequently interacts with her paternal grandmother, Tita. She becomes an important interlocutor for the main character, a new “placeholder” for the master signifier (S1), a position occupied exclusively by Rafaela until Mar’s change of location. Though Tita is on the surface less free than the protagonist’s mother—who is a successful and well-educated architect—Mar’s grandmother does not reproduce the symbolic discourse of the phallic signifier like her mother does. For example, whenever the main character’s father is present, her mother’s feminism becomes nonexistent (Baudoin 51). And Tita, like Rafaela, has access to the form of jouissance ontologically proscribed by capitalist modernity. Mar’s grandmother, who was a great reader of literature until she became physically unable to engage in this activity but who nonetheless is still able to invoke the works she has read using her memory (30), has access, in Bataillean terms, to “the au-delà [beyond] of the sacred” (Taylor 143). Through literature, Tita has access to “the inaccessible” (quoted in Taylor 143; Bataille, “Hemingway à la lumière” 258), to that which is outside of the profane symbolic order. Mar’s grandmother, who uses literature to challenge her grandchild intellectually as well as to develop her inner culture, is instrumental in pushing forward her Bildung process. Another fundamental character that transcends the phallic signifier while at the same time tragically being a victim of domestic violence at the hands of Venancio, a man with whom she lives in “concubinage,” is Esther, who “nació en un pueblo arcaico, en algún lugar de Potosí al que no quiso regresar porque en ese lugar la gente nacía con un hambre de la que únicamente se podía huir” [was born in an archaic locality, somewhere in Potosí where she did not want to return because in that place people were born with a hunger from which one could only flee] (my translation; Baudoin 127). For Mar, Esther, a laundress in her early twenties who works in her grandparents’ home, “era una sierva de finales del siglo xx” [was a servant of the late twentieth century] (my translation; 127). Not unlike her relationship with Tita, the protagonist is able to enter an unexplored ontological territory with Esther. In fact, with Esther, Mar is afforded the opportunity to speak of Rafaela without inhibition (171). But as a chola relegated to second-class citizenship inside and outside of her ethnic group, Esther is a victim of intra-ethnic male chauvinist violence as well as of the multiple effects of racial discrimination,

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yet she practices an ambiguous but potent form of resistance that limits the totalizing logic of the (capitalist) nation-state. Not ignoring the alcohol-related violence that she is subjected to at the hands Venancio, the father of her second child, while consuming alcohol with her partner, Esther resists and transgresses the signifier of the law represented by Bolivia’s historically “racist and anti-popular [. . .] caste” (Zavaleta Mercado 188). In this way, Esther gains access to feminine jouissance, to an experience beyond the symbolic ordering of world capitalist domination. Her nights of consumption can be compared to the following transgression Bataille describes in his posthumous work Theory of Religion (1973): Now I place a large glass of alcohol on my table. I have been useful. I have bought a table, a glass, etc. But this table is not a means of labor: it helps me to drink alcohol. In setting my drinking glass on the table, to that extent I have destroyed the table, or at least I have destroyed the labor that was needed to make it. (102)

The festive outpouring fueled by inebriation not only disrupts the structure of modernity internalized by the Bolivian state but also leaves open a crack through which real existence can emerge. There is, nonetheless, a ruthlessly dark and completely unacceptable side to the abusive interaction Esther is subjected to when she drinks with her partner. Mar narrates how she, Tita, and her grandfather learn of Esther’s unanticipated death at the hands of Venancio from a radio news report (Baudoin 178). The protagonist is devastated by the news of her death. And by losing her, the main character loses an important source that helped to push along her Bildung process by sustaining her desire. Despite Mar’s expressions of disapproval toward Esther’s abusive relationship with Venancio, her story insinuates a path toward feminine jouissance. Right after finding out about her death, however, the main character is thrust back into ontological indecision: “‘Why didn’t you listen to me, Esther?’ I cried into my grandmother’s skirt. ‘Why can’t I speak louder? Why do I have to be a goddamn mute letter!” (¿Por qué no me escuchaste, Esther?’, lloré en las faldas de mi abuela. ‘¿Por qué no puedo hablar más alto? ¡Por qué tengo que ser una puta letra muda!) (180). The mute letter Mar refers to is “H,” which in Spanish is silent. It is important to note that when the protagonist was younger, her father dubbed her “the H girl” (la chica H) for neither being able to engage in the world the way he tried to teach her nor being capable of replying at all to his jests (126). After losing Esther, with whom she felt more like “herself,” the full weight of the phallic signifier seems to fall back again on Mar’s shoulders. She becomes once again la chica H.

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Following the loss of Esther, Mar’s mother reaches out to her by phone. She tries to console her daughter but is frustrated at Mar’s ambiguity and semi-hermeticism. During their conversation, Mar’s mother tells her that she and her sister Paz, who are still in Venezuela, saw Rafaela at the movies “in very good company. Although her face was still swollen, and she had a cast on her nose” (muy bien acompañada. Aunque todavía tenía la cara hinchada y el yeso en la nariz) (Baudoin 185). This news upsets the protagonist, so much so that her stomach starts to ache, and she tells her mother that she must hang up (185–186). Rafaela’s nose had been broken “in a raid on a seedy bar where a Miss Gay something-or-other was being celebrated” (en la redada de un bar de mala muerte, donde se celebraba un Miss no sé cuántos Gay) (169). After hearing about her presence in the movie theater and about her “very good company,” Mar calls Rafaela. The main character’s intention is fundamental to “finish breaking up” (terminar de romper) (196). The phone call constitutes a sacrificial act that will liberate the main character from Rafaela’s symbolic dominance over her. During the call Rafaela confirms that she is in a relationship with a married police officer (197). Despite being a difficult conversation for Mar, it nevertheless represents a turning point in her process of formation. Mar’s story finally concludes the way it starts: with the death of Rafaela. The adult protagonist narrates that her first love was forty-two years old when she passed away (Baudoin 193). Mar details that Rafaela’s funeral rites were “replete with photographers, journalists, and agitators (a diverse fauna of transvestites, prostitutes, gays, lesbians, and artists swarmed all over). There were even politicians (a senator here, a minister there) because—who can deny it, my dear—you made history.” (replet[as] de fotógrafos, de periodistas y de agitadores (una fauna variada de travestis, putas, gays, lesbianas y artistas pululaban por todas partes). Hasta políticos había (un senador aquí, un ministro más allá), porque —no hay nada que hacer, mi querida—, hiciste historia) (193). While describing Rafaela’s last rites, Mar recalls that she sent her friend part of the money (so that Rafaela could continue with the physical transformation she was saving up for before spending her money on repairing her broken nose) that her father (aware of his daughter’s existential turmoil) gave her after Esther’s death, which was meant for the main character to travel on her own and in the process resolve her personal crisis. Mar uses the money her father gave her to travel but not to the extent that was foreseen (Baudoin 194). In her narrative address to Rafaela, the protagonist discloses that she returned to Bolivia to devote herself to reading and writing (194). Not only can this be interpreted as Mar’s eventual acceptance of her father’s decision to relocate their family but also as her integration into Bolivia as a lifeworld. While attending Rafaela’s funeral rites, the main character recounts how her first love was found:

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naked in an antique earthenware tub, which faced the scene, as I imagined it: structural clarity and the predominance of the figure over the background. Almost like a painting that was familiar to me but whose name I could not remember. (desnuda, en una tina veterana, de loza, que le daba a la escena, así como yo la imaginaba, claridad estructural y predominio de la figura sobre el fondo. Casi como un cuadro que me era familiar, pero que no llegaba a recordar por su nombre.) (193)

Rafaela, narrates the protagonist, died of a heart attack. Mar further explains that Rafaela transformed her heart “into a war machine of humor, desire, and strength” (en una máquina bélica de humor, de ansias y de fuerza) (193). And though Rafaela experiences the transphobic rejection of her father and brother as well as physical violence at the hands of the latter and others, she lives out her identity with uncanny decisiveness, never once wavering. Likewise, although Rafaela is portrayed as needing the love and acceptance of her father and ultimately takes care of him aged and with dementia, her objective seems to have been to invert the order of things as her father comes to completely depend on her. After Mar returns to Bolivia from Venezuela, she recalls the name of the painting that Rafaela’s death scene reminded her of: The Death of Marat (1793) by Jacques-Louis David. The subject of this painting is Jean-Paul Marat, the Jacobin leader who was murdered by Charlotte Corday, a Girondist sympathizer. According to William Vaughan, “the picture appears to owe something to Michelangelo’s famous Pietà. David also had a great interest in the art of the Baroque, in which dramatic images of martyrs abound— frequently as part of Counter Reformation propaganda” (84). It is a curious coincidence how the divine aura of Michelangelo’s Pietà appears in both 98 segundos sin sombra and El sonido de la H. In David’s painting, despite the secular character of the subject, the status of Marat is elevated to the level of the sacred. Furthermore, Mar describes Marat’s “closed and lifeless eyes as a result of death; and in his mouth, the expression of something bigger than a smile, much deeper and freer” (ojos cerrados y abatidos por la muerte; y, en la boca, la expresión de algo más grande que una sonrisa, mucho más profundo y libre) (Baudoin 198). The expression of Marat’s mouth, much deeper and freer than a smile, recalls the jouissance of Bernini’s Saint Teresa described by Lacan in Seminar XX. And if this description also represents Rafaela at the “moment of death,” a moment in which “the unity of being is revealed” (Bataille, Erotism 275), then this would suggest her encounter(s) with the real, sacred dimension of life. From this one can deduce that upon Rafaela’s death, Mar, even after having undergone a Bildung process, is now ready for a real adventure.

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CONCLUSION Giovanna Rivero’s and Magela Baudoin’s Bolivian novels of formation analyzed here demonstrate that in spite of the secular character of the Bildungsroman, one finds and can still discover the representation of an underlying ontological impulse oriented toward transcendence. And even though the novel of formation is on one level a genre of “transcendental homelessness” that reflects the issues that are specific to capitalist modernity worldwide, the leitmotif of the hero’s adventure present in the existential journeys of modern Bildungshelden betrays an ontological thirst for real existence. In the case of Latin American Bildungsromane, even the most contemporary ones, the glimmers of precapitalist forms of (sacred) life—the natural form of the lifeworld—lay bare what the civilizational project epitomized by the capitalist ethos suppresses for the sake of self-valorizing value. With this in mind, the novel of formation is not only a genre that reflects the specific and complex paths to transformation and meaning for modern subjects rooted in a world determined by global capital but also a drive that is inherently incompatible with (and that should also be taken seriously as a means of resistance to) the ontological demands of modernity. NOTES 1. María Inés Lagos makes this point in En tono mayor: Relatos de formación de protagonista femenina en Hispanoamérica (1996). 2. In her role as academic, Bolivian writer Giovanna Rivero has proposed in “Tirinea de Jesús Urzagasti (1969): Una patria para la modernidad boliviana” (2014) that Urzagasti’s novel is a Bildungsroman as well as Antonio Díaz Villamil’s La niña de sus ojos in a conference paper entitled “La niña de sus ojos: el Bildungsroman boliviano de la adolescente chola” presented at the 117th Annual PAMLA Conference in November of 2019. 3. All translations from Spanish are by the author.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Jon Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press, 2010. Augsburger, Aaron. “The Plurinational State and Bolivia’s Formación Abigarrada.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 7, 2021: 1566–1582. Ayllón, Virginia. “Padres setenteros en dos novelas: 98 segundos sin sombra y El sonido dela H.” Página Siete, 22 September 2019, www​.paginasiete​.bo​/letrasiete​ /2019​/9​/22​/padres​-setenteros​-en​-dos​-novelas​-98​-segundos​-sin​-sombra​-el​-sonido​ -de​-la​-231511​.html.

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Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. ———. “Hemingway à la lumière de Hegel.” Œuvres complète, vol. 12. Articles 2: 1950–1961. Paris: Gallimard, 1988: 243–258. ———. Theory of Religion. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Baudoin, Magela. El sonido de la H. La Paz: Santillana, 2019. Biles, Jeremy. “Does the Acéphale Dream of Headless Sheep?” In Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion, edited by Biles and Kent L. Brintnall. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015: 217–238. Bracher, Mark. Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Cardentey Levin, Antonio. “Adiós a la cárcel de Alcatraz.” Letralia, Tierra de Letras, 12 September 2015, letra​​lia​.c​​om​/le​​ctura​​s​%20/​​2015/​​09​/12​​/adio​​s​-a​-l​​a​-car​​c​el​-d​​e​-alc​​ atraz​. Chávez, Natalia. “La (r)evolución del género en El Sonido de la H.” Ramona Cultural, 22 March 2020, www​.ramonacultural​.com​/contenido​-r​/la​-revolucion​-del​ -genero​-en​-el​-sonido​-de​-la​-h. Duchesne Winter, Juan R. “Giovanna Rivero, pensar con la Jovencita terrible y la esquizogamia en la nueva narrativa suramericana.” Kipus, no. 48, 2020: 91–109. Echeverría, Bolívar. “‘American’ Modernity: Keys to its Understanding.” In Modernity and “Whiteness,” translated by Rodrigo Ferreira. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019: 52–73. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Williard Trask. New York: Harcourt, 1987. Ellner, Steve. “Venezuela: The Challenge to a ‘Model Democracy.’” In Latin America: Its Problems and Its Promise, edited by Jan Knippers Black. Boulder: Westview Press, 2011: 399–412. Eyers, Tom. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Goldstein, Daniel M. Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and Survival in the Informal City. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. ———. The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. González Almada, Magdalena. “Cuando de la oposición de conceptos surge una idea.” Página Siete, 23 January 2016, pagin​​asiet​​e​.bo/​​letra​​siete​​/2016​​/1​/23​​/cuan​​do​ -op​​osici​​on​-co​​ncept​​os​-su​​rge​​-i​​dea​-8​​3932.​​html.​ Gootenberg, Paul. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008. James, Daniel. “Chronology of the Bolivian Campaign.” In The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Ché Guevara and Other Captured Documents. New York: Stein and Day, 1968: 71–78. Kidger, Mark. The Star of Bethlehem: An Astronomer’s View. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Klein, Herbert S. A Concise History of Bolivia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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Lacan, Jacques. Encore: 1972–1973. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1999. Vol. 20 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. ———. The Psychoses: 1955–1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Vol. 3. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: Norton, 1997. Lander, Rómulo. Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other. Translated by Judith Filc. New York: Other Press, 2006. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage, 1989. Perreault, Thomas. “Assessing the Limits of Neoliberal Environmental Governance in Bolivia.” In Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America? Societies and Politics at the Crossroads, edited by John Burdick, Philip Oxhorn, and Kenneth M. Roberts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009: 135–155. Rivero, Giovanna. 98 segundos sin sombra. Barcelona: Caballo de Troya, 2014. Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Sandoval Arenas, Carmen Dunia; Sandoval, Ada Vania; Del Rio, Marco Antonio; Sandoval Arenas, Franz; Mertens, Carlos; Parada, Claudia. Santa Cruz: economía y poder, 1952–1993. La Paz: Fundación PIEB, 2003. Schechner Genuth, Sara. Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Taylor, Mark C. Altarity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Vaughan, William. “Terror and the Tabula Rasa: David’s Marat in Its Pictorial Context.” In David’s The Death of Marat, edited by William Vaughan and Helen Weston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 77–101. Wilson, Suzanne, and Marta Zambrano. “Cocaine, Commodity Chains, and Drug Politics: A Transnational Approach.” In Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, edited by Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz. Westport: Praeger, 1994: 297–315. Zavaleta Mercado, René. Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia, 1879–1980. Translated by Anne Freeland. London: Seagull Books, 2018. Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008. ———. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London: Verso, 1994. Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso, 2000.

Index

Abancay, 223–28 Abeng, 8 abject, 178–81, 189 abjection, 178–81 abuse, xii, xiv, 70, 79, 103, 121, 128, 175, 176, 184, 186, 187, 224, 225; child, 175; sexual, xiv, xviii, xix, 6, 74, 80, 106, 108, 141, 175–76, 178, 181–85, 187–89, 197 abuser, 140, 177, 184, 189 adolescence, xvi, xxi, 14, 133, 183, 184, 194, 217, 231 adolescent, xi–xii, xvi–xviii, xxi–xxii, 6, 15, 25, 27, 88, 139–40, 182, 185, 214–15, 243–44 Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel, 31 adult, xvi, xviii, xix–xx, xxiii–xxiv, 1, 8, 15–16, 26, 32, 35, 37, 39, 52, 68, 70, 74, 79, 85, 101–2, 105–8, 119, 152, 156, 159, 184, 188–89, 214, 216, 224, 249; gaze, xvi, xxiii, 155 adulthood, xx, xxiv, 13, 15–16, 18, 26, 33, 50, 52, 68, 132, 154 affects, xxi, 83, 86, 153; alien, 87, 88, 98; education, xii, xvi; mode, 154; network of, 189; practices, 184; response, xvi, xxiii Africa, 200, 230 Agamben, Giorgio, 199

Agency, xii–xxv, 2–7, 32, 40, 55, 60, 68, 85, 105–6, 109–10, 119–22, 127–30, 151–66, 169–73, 178, 188, 195–201, 204, 207–8, 215–18, 221; children, xvii, 151, 169, 215; genre, 122; historical, xii, xiii, 124; of memory, xxii; of minors, xii, xiii, xvii; moral, 226; of nature, 153; political, xii, xiii, 200, 204, 207; relational, xvii, xviii; role, xvii, xx, 112; social, 165 Aguirre, Nataniel, 236 Ahmed, Sara, 83, 86–88, 97 Alatorre, Antonio, xxii, 22 Alegría, Ciro, 213 Alice in Wonderland, 72, 81 allegorical, 123, 156, 158, 160, 168–69, 171, 193, 195, 197–98, 227 allegory, 151–52, 193–94, 219 Althusser, Louis, 138, 139 Álvarez Julia, 85 Ampuero, María Fernanda, 175–82, 189 andean, 213, 224, 227–28 Andes, 216, 223, 226, 229 Ángel, Alba Lucia, 125 Angola, 121, 134 Los años invisibles, 236 Antes, 125 archives of terror, 56

255

256

Index

Ardilla, Garrido, 43 Arenas, Reinaldo, 119 Argentina, xiii, xiv, 7, 197, 199, 201, 215; dictatorship, 193, 194; national memory, 193 Arguedas, José María, 5, 213–17, 226– 27, 231–33 Ariès, Philippe, xi, xxi Asunción, 47–49 “Auction”, 178, 189 authority, xii, xiii, xix, xx, 128–29 autobiographical fiction, 122 autobiographic pact, 122, 133 Ave Sin Nido, 215 Avivi, Yamil, 98 Ayllón, Virginia, 243 Ayotzinapa, 168 Ayram, Carlos, xiv, 3, 7 Bachelard, Gaston, 49 Bad Hair, 6 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 16, 40 Balázs, Béla, 69, 70, 75 Balún Canán, 2, 125, 215 Balutet, Nicolás, xiv, 4, 56 Barcelona, 21, 59 Barillet, Julie, xxv Barranquilla, 88, 91 Bastardos de la modernidad, 237 Bataille, Georges, 246–48, 250 Las batallas en el desierto, 171 Baudoin, Magela, xiii, 235–37, 243–51 Bazin, André, 69, 70 becoming, 33, 43, 75 Berlant Lauren, 85, 86, 98 Berlin, 120, 122 Berlinale Film Festival, 48, 61 “la bestia” (train), 7, 101–3, 109 Bialet, Graciela, 177 Bildung, xiv, xv, 236–37, 239–40, 243– 44, 247–48, 250 Bildungshelden, 251 Bildungsroman, xiii–xxiv, 2–6, 13–16, 18–21, 26–27, 33, 35, 40, 68, 85, 126, 130–34, 152, 176, 214, 216,

235–36, 243–44, 251; alternative, 124, 130; gay, 16; Latin American female, 126; lesbian, 15; queer, 17, 26; trans, 16; unorthodox, 132 biopolitics, 195–96, 202, 204, 206–7 Bizarri, Gabriel, 195 Black Shack Alley. See La rue CasesNègres Blanco, Joaquin, 38 bodymind, 216–18 Bogota, 84, 86, 88–89, 91–92, 94, 97, 177; international Book Fair of, 177 Bolivia, xxi–xiii, 2, 235–37, 241–43, 248–49; Communist Party of, 241– 42; Premio Nacional de Novela, 243 Bondone, Giotto di, 241 Bonnet, Piedad, 2 The Book of Emma Reyes, 5 border, 101, 102, 104; US-Mexico, xiii, xiv, 67, 69, 101, 114 Boullosa, Carmen, 125 Bowles, Paul, 39 Brazil, 3 Bresson, Nancy, 138 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 5 Briones, Claudia, 196 Buckley, Jerome, 15 Buenos Aires, 194 Buenos Aires viceversa, 171 bully, 142, 189 bullying, 137–42, 238; cyber-, 137 Bustamante, Fernanda, 193 Butler, Judith, 175–76, 184, 200, 205, 245 Cabrera, Sergio, 133 Calderón, Sara Levi, 14 Camagüey, 139 El camino, xi, xviii, 7, 67, 68, 70, 72– 73, 76–77, 79–80 Camionero, 4, 137, 139, 143 Canción de tumba, 171 Cándido Lopez: los campos de batalla, 48 Caño Negro, 77, 78

Index

capitalism, 2, 15, 70, 79, 202, 236, 239–41 capitalist, 20, 22, 26, 227, 238, 248; ethos, 251; modernity, 235, 236, 239, 244, 246, 247, 251 Caracas, 244 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 2 Cardentey Levin, Antonio, 241 Caribbean, 220–23, 230; Afro-, 230 Carrol, Lewis, 71 Cartagena, 88, 92 Casamayor, Odette, 123, 132–34 Casey, Edward, 49 Cass, Viviene, 27 Castellanos, Rosario, 2, 125, 215 Castro, Fidel, 137–39, 141, 143–44 Castro, Ingrid, xviii Catheline, Nicole, 137–40 catholic, 13, 14, 17, 22–23, 61, 180–81, 227, 244 Celestina montó a La Bestia, 102, 103, 105, 109 Central America, xvi, 7, 67, 69, 77, 81, 101–4, 114; migrants, 68, 80–81, 101 Central do Brasil, 171 Cepeda, María Elena, 97, 98 Césaire, Aimé, 213, 222 Chávez, Hugo, 243 Chávez, Natalia, 245 Chia, Pin Feng, 6 Chiapas, 103 child (children), xi–xiv, xvi–xxv, 1–2, 5–8, 15, 25–26, 32–33, 35–37, 40–43, 52, 54, 60, 67–71, 74–75, 79, 85–86, 106, 112–13, 119, 151–60, 162–70, 172, 175, 183–84, 187, 194–97, 201–3, 206–7, 215–17, 219, 232, 248; child, 5; “chaoic”, 75; “the dark children”, 197; gaze, 67, 69, 151, 165; labor, 7; literature for, 186; myth of, xvi; racialized, 196, 199; rights of, xi, xii; subjectivity, xvii; working, 221 childhood, xiii–xvi, xxi–xxii, 1–2, 32– 37, 42–43, 47, 50, 52, 55–57, 67–70,

257

73, 75, 79, 89, 101, 133–34, 137, 153–55, 158, 163, 176–78, 183–87, 194, 198–99, 203, 217, 220, 246; “deficit model” of, 152; education, 43; memories, xvi, xxii; narratives, xiv; studies, xi, xiii, xvi, xvii, xxv, 68, 152 Chile, xiii Christian, 89–90, 95–98 La Chureca, 68–71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80 Cienfuegos, 120 cisgender, 16 Cisneros, Sandra, 5, 85 citizen, 15, 20, 23, 120, 126, 129–30; citizen-subjectivity, 214; marginal, 132 citizenship, xx–xxi, 13, 18, 88, 130, 247; liminal, 120, 129, 132; secondclass, 247 class, 32, 84, 91, 97, 198, 199, 214–15 Cliff, Michelle, 8 climate change, 68, 69, 73 Cochabamba, 243, 244, 246 Cochochi, 152 Cockfight, 176, 178 Cohen Imach, Silvina, 176, 184 cold war, 121–22 Colombia, xiv, 6, 83, 86, 90–93, 96–98, 173; diaspora, 85–86, 92; family, 85, 89; migrants, 84, 94, 98 Colombian-American, xxi Colombianx, 93 colonial, 27, 194, 197–202, 208, 227; anti- 214; reason, 193, 203; violence, 199; wound, 194 colonialism, 88 coloniality, xiv, 32, 193, 195, 196, 200–201, 208 colonization, 196, 200, 215 coming-of-age, xiii–xiv, xx, xxii, 13–14, 20–21, 23, 25–26, 33, 39, 44, 84, 120, 133, 152, 156, 214–15, 221, 230; queer, 26 Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH), 171

258

Index

Communist, 120, 127, 129; party of Bolivia, 241, 242 communitas, 205, 207 community, xxi, 6, 18, 20, 24, 50, 58, 84–85, 88, 90, 97, 158, 165, 193, 195, 206, 208, 215–16, 221–23; church, 89; of cripples, 194, 196, 205, 207; diasporic, 85, 91, 97, 98; indigenous, 199, 216; Jewish, 14, 25, 28; LGBTQ, 56; queer, 13, 32; rural, 168 Cómprame un revolver, 154–56, 159, 160, 162, 164, 170, 172 Condé, Maryse, 221 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), xi, xii, xxiv, 105 Costa, Renate, xxii, 47, 50–61 Costa, Rodolfo, 47–48, 51–61 Costa Rica, xiii, 67, 76–78, 80 “Crías”, 182 criollo, 225, 226 Cruz, Anne, 43 Cuba, xiii, xiv, xviii, 52, 92–93, 103, 119, 121–27, 130–34, 137–40, 143, 215; citizen of, 126, 129, 130; independence of, 138 Cuban revolution, 4, 120, 123, 127 Cuéntamelo, 84 A Cup of Water Under My Bed, 86 Cuzco, 223 Darío, Rubén, 39, 77 “The Darkness”, 194, 197–208 David, Jacques-Louis, 250 David Copperfield, 21 The Death of Marat, 250 decolonial, 196 The Deep Rivers. See Los ríos profundos dehumanization, 181 Deleuze, Gilles, 195, 231 Delgado, Felipe, 236 Delgado Lopera, Juliana, 83–85, 89, 91–92, 95–96 diaspora, 83, 230; community of, 85, 91, 97, 98

Díaz, Desirée, 120 Díaz, Junot, 6 Díaz Villamil, Antonio, 236 Dickens, Charles, 21 dictatorship, xxii, 7, 47–48, 55, 61, 193–95, 204; Argentine, 194, 199 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 173 Diéguez, Ileana, 161 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 2 Diop, Cheik Anta, 230 disability, xii, 193, 195–96, 199, 200, 205–8, 216 displacement, 69, 79, 91, 105, 158 Diteman, Jeffrey, xiv, xviii, 3, 5 documentary, xvi, xviii, 47–49, 52–53, 57–60, 151–52, 154–55, 158–59, 163, 169, 172; style, 70, 153 Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 13, 17, 22, 25 Dominican Republic, xiii Doña Bárbara, 3 Don Segundo Sombra, xiii Dorfman, Ariel, 226 Dreaming in Cuban, 85 Duchesne Winter, Juan, 239 Dufays, Sophie, xvi, xviii, xix–xx, xxiv, 3 Echeburúa, Enrique, 176, 187, 189 Echeverría, Bolívar, 240 ecocriticism, 67 ecological, 73–74 Ecuador, xiii–xiv, xviii, 175, 177; female writers of, 175–77, 189 edgency, 120, 127–30, 132; literary, 122 Edwards, Elizabeth, 53 Eliade, Mircea, 236, 239, 244 emotion, xviii, xxiii, 4, 7, 39, 85–86, 89–90, 95, 98, 184 Engel, Patricia, 86 England, 194, 197, 200, 235 Enríquez, Mariana, 178, 193–94, 199, 202–5 epistemology, 17 Escalante, Fabián V., 182

Index

Escambray, 121, 128 Escuela Secundaria Básica en el Campo (ESBEC), 139 Esguerra, Catalina, 86 Espinoza-Quesada, Mauricio, 70, 80 Esser, Florian, xviii, xxiv Estaba la pájara pinta, 125 ethics, xii, xvi, xviii, 213–16, 218, 221, 223, 231; embodied, 213, 216; mentor of, 213, 217; principles of, 214, 215 ethnicity, 32 ethos, 225, 236 eurocentric, 32, 231 Europe, 17, 80, 134, 235 European Research Council (ERC), 170 Everyone Leaves, xi, xviii, 119, 122, 124–25, 130, 133 exile, 26 exploitation, 8, 42, 110, 195; sexual, 78, 101, 103, 154, 220 EZLN, 155 family, xiii–xviii, xx–xxi, 4–5, 13–16, 24–27, 34, 37, 47–48, 50, 52–57, 60, 70, 85–86, 89, 94–97, 101, 130, 139, 176–77, 180, 184–86, 189, 194, 203, 223, 227, 238, 241, 246; adoptive, 97; alternative, xxi; criminal, 154; evangelical, 97; narco, 163; sexual abuse, 184; terror, 183 Fanon, Franz, 199, 202, 213 Los fantasmas tienen buena letra, 177, 186 FARC-EP, 7 father, 14, 24–25, 28, 37, 48, 141, 156–57, 162, 176, 178, 183, 185, 188–89, 218, 223, 238, 243, 245, 246, 248–50; Name-of-the, 245 feminism, 49, 196; killjoy, 86, 87; perspective of, 176 Feng Pin-Chia, 27 Ferguson, Susan, 152, 171 Fernández, Hamlet, 137

259

Fiebre Tropical, xxi, 83–85, 88, 93, 96–97 films, xi, xiv; distopian, 70; road, 68; studies, xiii Fink, Bruce, 245 Fiore, Rafaela, xvi, xxii, 6 Florencia de los ríos hondos y los tiburones grandes, 71, 72 Flores Flores, Ociel, 102–3, 112–13 Florida, 93, 97 Flynn, Richard, 171 Fonseca González, Vanessa, 74, 75 formation, 235, 249; novel of, 235–37, 244, 251; process of, 14, 16, 20–25, 127, 129–30, 195 Fort-de-France, 217 Foucault, Michel, 138–39, 202 fourth world, 196 France, 235 Franco, Francisco, 22 Frank, Anne, 122 friend, xxii, 15, 156, 185, 187, 227, 238, 244, 249 friendship, xxi, 37, 39, 88, 95 Fruit of the Drunken Tree, 86 Fukunaga, Cary, 7 Gallegos, Rómulo, 2 García, Cristina, 85 Gardarsdóttir, Hólmfrídur, 80 Garro, Elena, 171 gay, 16–17, 27, 31, 42, 48, 58, 61, 249 gender, xii–xiv, xvi, xx–xxii, 2, 6, 14, 16–18, 27, 32, 35, 49, 96, 102, 156, 160, 176, 179, 198, 204, 208, 245; hierarchy, 208; identity, xxi, 13; performance, xiv, xx; violence, 103 German, 235 ghosts, 151, 155, 157–59, 161, 164–67, 170 Girard, René, 138 Glissant, Edouard, 230, 231 globalization, xvi, xxi global south, 175, 194–95, 202, 206, 230

260

Index

Glover, Kaiama, 222, 223 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 236 The Golden Dream, 7 Gómez Acuña, Luis, 232 Gómez Luengo, Wilma, 172 González, Eduardo, 154 González, Yomar, 137, 139, 144 González Rojas, Antonio Enrique, 139 gothic, 164, 193 Gouverneurs de la rosée, 222 Gremels, Andrea, 171 growing up, xii–xv, xvii, xxi, xxiii– xxiv, 6, 13, 32–33, 36, 47, 68, 80, 126, 132, 176, 194–95, 215 Guadeloupe, 215 Guatemala, 81 Guattari, Félix, 231 Guayaquil, 185 Gubar, Marah, 152–54, 171 Guerra, Wendy, 119, 121–22, 124, 126, 132 Guerricaechevarría, Cristina, 176, 187, 189 Guevara, Ernesto, 138, 140, 144–45, 241–42 Guinea, 217 Güiraldes, Ricardo, xiii Gusdorf, Georges, 59 Gutiérrez, Ishtar Yasin, 67–68, 71, 74, 77 Gutiérrez, Pedro Juan, 119 La Habana, 121 hacienda, 216, 224 Haiti, xiv, 215 Halley (comet), 240, 241 Hames-García, Michael, 32 happiness, 86, 89, 95–96 harassment, 137 Harvey, Liz, 80 Hasbún, Rodrigo, 236 Hauge, Angela, 42 Heidegger, Martin, 49 Herbert, Julián, 171 Los herederos, 152

Heredia, Juanita, 85 Heredia, María Fernanda, 175, 177, 186, 189 Hernández, Daisy, 86 Hernández Rodríguez, Rafael, xiv, xxi, 2, 6 Hernández Salván, Marta, 123, 133 Herralde Prize, 193 heteronormative, 13, 15–16, 24, 35, 41, 44, 98, 244 heteropatriarchal, 110 heterosexual, 16, 22, 40, 57, 95–97, 140 heterosexuality, 35, 41, 43 Hezekiah, Randolph, 214 La Higuera, 242 Hirsche, Marianne, 54 history, xi, xiii, xviii, xxii, 5–6, 14, 16, 47, 55, 60, 86, 89, 121, 125, 132, 134, 155, 195, 197, 215, 230, 241; of colonialism, 88; of Cuba, 119, 123; of European Bildungsroman, 16; of Latin America, 134; of Mexico, 170; of Paraguay, 47; of Venezuela, 243 Hogan, Erin, 127–28, 133 Holland, Patricia, xxv, 55 homophobia, 13, 17, 25, 57 homo religiosus, 244 homosexual, 6, 34, 38, 126, 134, 140 homosexuality, 24, 42, 56 horrorism, 204 The House on Mango Street, 5, 85 Houston, 103 Howe, Susanne, 15, 16 How the García Girls Lost their Accents, 85 Huerta, David, 22 Huixtan, 103 Hunting Season for the Black Lion, 14, 18, 27 Icaza, Jorge, 213 identity, xiv, 2, 6, 7, 14, 17, 25, 27, 41, 43, 49, 54, 90, 123–24, 126, 141, 215; gender, 13; national, xiv; nonbinary, xx, xxi; non-conforming,

Index

261

176; queer, 22; sexual, xxii, 6, 14, 16, 27 illa, 227 illu, 227 immigrants, 79, 83, 84, 90; network, 98 Indiana, Rita, xiii indigenista, 213 indigenous, 213, 223–25, 227, 232–33 inequality, xviii Infancia clandestina, xi infancy, 89 Instituto Profesional de Artes y Ciencias de la Comunicación, 52 intertextuality, 38 Inventar ciudades, 171 invunche, 194, 202–5, 207–8 Iphigenia, xiii, 125

Leandro, Lucía, 205 Lebeau, Vicky, xxv, 69, 80 Lee, Nick, 32, 74 Lejeune, Philippe, 122, 124, 133 lesbian, 16, 27, 31, 42, 249; lesbiana, 17 LGBTQ, 48, 56, 60 La libertad del diablo, 173 Life and Exploits of a Good Family Daughter, 14 Lizardi, José Joaquín Fernández de, 27 Llarena Ascanio, María Jesús, 176 Locke, John, 75 López Albújar, Enrique, 213 Lourdes Cortés, María, 81 The Lucky Ones, 86 Ludmer, Josefina, 2, 179 Lury, Karen, xxv, 80, 157, 159

Jagose, Annamarie, 33, 35 James, Allison, xi, xvi, 153 La jaula de oro, 70, 81 Johnson, Mark, 216 Jonás y la ballena rosada, 236 jouissance, 245–48, 250

Machuca, 171 Madonna (pop star), 238, 240 Maguire, Geoffrey, xi, xxi, xxiv Maldonado, Trino, 14 Managua, 68–69, 77 Mandíbula, 183, 188 maquila, 102, 114 Marat, Jean-Paul, 250 marginal, 129, 132 marginality, 35, 126–27, 152 marginalization, xiv, xxii, 13 marginalized, 15, 51, 214, 217 Marquet, Antonio, 23, 28 Martí, José, 127, 138–39, 143, 144 Martin, Deborah, xvii, xxiv, 69, 75, 171 Martinique, 214–17, 232 Martín Sevillano, Ana, 134 Martorella, Ana María, 176 masculinity, 181, 189; brotherhood of, 181–82, 189; hegemonic, 182; heteronormativity, 244; values of, 227 mask, 155–64, 169–70 Massey, Doreen, 49 mass media, xxi, 13, 15, 139 matriarch, 213–14, 216, 222, 229 Matthews, Tedi, 28

Kabous, Magali, 139 Kandé, Sylvie, 214 Kirsch, Max, 32 Klein, Herbert S., 237 Kristeva, Julia, 81, 178, 205 Kuishigan, Julia, xiv, 27, 134 Kunstlerroman, 20, 124 Kutscherm, Elizabeth Acha, 6 Lacan, Jacques, 244, 246, 250 lacanian theory, 244, 245 Lagos, María Inés, xiii, 85, 251 Lakoff, George, 216 Latin America, xii-xvii, xxi-xxv, 1–3, 5–8, 13, 17, 22, 27, 32, 57, 70, 74, 79–80, 86, 102, 125–26, 134, 139, 151–53, 168, 171, 173, 193–94, 208, 213, 215, 231, 235–36, 242, 251 Latinx, xii, xiii, 84–86 El Lazarillo de Tormes, 4, 41, 42

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Index

McRuer, Robert, 206, 209 memory, xii, xvi, xxii, 14, 19, 37, 49, 51, 55, 60, 151, 155, 157–58, 169, 185, 205; agency of, xxii; body, 49; of childhood, xvi, 47, 176; collective, xiv, 60; constructed, xii; cultural, 215, 230; historical, xii, xiv, 59; national, xvi; personal, xvi, xxii; social, 59 Mercury, Freddie, 240 Mesa Gancedo, Daniel, 122, 133 Mexican Narco-Zone, 154 Mexico, 6, 25–26, 28, 31, 33, 39, 42, 101–2, 104, 106, 113–14, 151, 154– 56, 158, 171–72; films of, xvi, xix, 169; history of, 170; literature of, 27, 39; society of, 155 Mexico City, 13, 14, 16, 19, 26, 32, 34, 160 Miami, 83, 88–94, 97, 121 Michelle, Charlotte, 124 Mignolo, Walter, 17, 197, 200, 208 The Migraine, xxii, 14, 21 La migraña. See The Migraine migrant, xii, xiv, xxi, 68, 78, 84, 94, 101, 103, 106, 109; child, xvi, 67, 70, 78; female, xiv; melancholic, 87, 88, 97; underage (minors), 101, 105; undocumented, 92 migration, xii, xiv, 2, 7, 67, 69, 70, 74, 77, 79, 81, 92, 101, 106, 112–14; child, 102; policies, 104 Miller, Meredith, 16 Miló, Sebastian, 137, 139, 141, 144 minor, xi–xvii, xx, xxiii, xxv, 14, 78, 85, 103, 105–6, 108, 112, 119–20, 124, 126, 175–76, 184, 194 Misiones, 202, 204, 206 misogyny, 180–81 mnemonic, 47–49, 154, 170 modernity, 16–17, 152, 194, 200, 236– 37, 244, 248, 251; capitalist, 235, 236, 239, 244, 246, 247, 251 Mohr, Nicholasa, 85 Moix, Ana Monneret, Claude, 138

Monroe, Marilyn, 245 Monsivais, Carlos, 17, 18 Montero, 237 Montes, Wolfango, 236 moral, 3, 36, 50, 214, 215, 219, 221, 225, 229–30; agent, 226; coming-ofage, 221, 230; development, 214–15, 218, 220; formation of children, 3; judgement, 32–33 morality, 15, 130 Moretti, Franco, xxiv, 15, 23, 134 Morgenstern, Karl, 2, 15 mother, 37, 68, 71, 85, 88–89, 92–93, 95, 156–57, 162, 165, 182–83, 185–86, 188, 196, 214, 218, 222, 238, 240, 243, 247, 249; of the disappeared, 205; -like figure, 78, 229; substitute, 214, 217–18 motherhood, 14, 231 mourning, 178, 180, 189 Movement for Socialism (MAS), 237 La mujer sin cabeza, 171 narcoculture, 3 narcotraffickers, 90 narco-zone, xix, 151, 154 Nefando, 177, 183 Negritude Movement, 213, 230 neoliberal, 26–27, 206, 243, 244; economyc system, 17 neoliberalism, xxi, 202 neorealism, 153 New Latin American Cinema, 70 New York, 93 Nicaragua, xiii, xviii, 67–69, 74, 76–78, 80 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 236 Nilda, 85 La niña de sus ojos, 236, 251 Los niños del éxodo, 154, 155, 159, 165, 167, 169 Niños en la narcozona, 154–55, 158–59, 162, 164, 170, 172 novela de formación. See novel of formation

Index

novel of formation, 16, 119, 244, 251 Nuestra parte de noche, 193, 196 Nuñez, Alicia, xvi, xviii, xx, 7 Nussbaum, Martha, 89, 93 Ochoa, Astrid Lorena, xiv, xx–xxi, 7 Ojeda, Mónica, 175, 177, 183, 185 ontological thirst, 239, 241, 244, 251 “The Order”, 194–208 Orlandoni, Florencia, 84 Ortega Caicedo, Alicia, 177 Oruro, 244 Osorio, Pilar, 2 Oswell, David, xi Pachachaca River, 227–28 Pacheco, José Emilio, 171 Pachico, Julianne, 86 Padura, Leonardo, 119 Paigneau, Christian, xxv Palcy, Euzhan, 214 Paloma de papel, 171 Papi, xiii Paraguay, xiii, xvi, 50, 52, 57–61; dictatorship in, 47; films from, xxii, 47; secret police in, 56 Pardo, Rodrigo, xiv, 7 parent, 70, 158, 183 parenting, 86 Paris, 214 Park, Jessica, xviii Parra, Teresa de la, xiii, 125 Parra Olavide, Martín, 176 pastiche, 37–39 paternity, 196 patriarchy, 13, 17, 22, 25, 26, 81, 88, 112, 124, 175–76, 180, 185–86, 206, 216; conventions of, xiv, 19; discourse of, 179, 181, 185 La Paz, 241, 244 Paz-Mackay, Maria, xviii, xxiii, 171 Paz Soldán, Edmundo, 236 pedagogy, 186, 189, 194, 196–99, 207, 208; cruel, 186, 195, 198; tenebrous, 197, 199

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pediatrics, 1, 2 pedophile, 55–56, 183, 189 Pelea de gallos. See Cockfight Pequeñas voces, 173 Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 243 Pérez Valero, Rubén, 102, 103 El periquillo Sarniento, 27 “Persianas”, 183 Peru, xiv, 137, 213, 223, 228, 232 Petit Morne, 217, 221 Pew Research Center, 57, 61 photography, 52–55, 60 picaresque, 27, 38, 41–43 pícaro, 40, 42, 43 plantation, 216–18, 221, 223, 227 Plath, Sylvia, 89 Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, 215 Podalsky, Laura, xxi, xxiii political, xxi, 2, 43, 125, 193, 195, 198, 201–2; agency, 200, 204, 207; thanato-, 207 politics, xxi–xxiii, 47, 193; revolutionary, 229 Portela, Ena Lucía Postales de Leningrado, 171 postcolonial, xiv, 27, 215, 231; condition, 17 Potosí, 244, 247 poverty, xiv, 31, 36, 44, 79, 113, 132, 178, 183 power, xiii, xix, 2, 127–29, 161, 179, 198, 201, 206–7, 215–16, 224, 227, 230 Pratt, Mary Louise, 197 precarity, xi, xv, xvi, xix, 140, 183, 202, 208 Price, Margaret, 216 Proust, Marcel, 49 Prout, Alan, xi, xvi, 52, 153 psychoanalysis, 38, 140, 244 psychology, xxiv, 140, 184 Puar, Jasbir, 202 Las púberes canéforas, 31–33, 35, 39, 43 puberty, 22

264

Index

Puenzo, Lucía, 6 Puerto Rico, 57 Puga, María Luisa, 171 Quechua, 223, 224, 227, 228, 233 queer, xii, xiv, xx, xxii, 2, 6–7, 13, 16–19, 27, 31, 33–34, 44, 84, 86, 88, 161; Bildungsroman, 17; coming-ofage, 26; community, 32; formative process, 14; identity, 22; love, 87, 95, 96, 98; narratives, xxi; negativity, 26; paternity, 196; positivity, 26; self-affirmation, xxi; studies, 31; subcultures, 27; theory, 31, 32, 43; unhappy, 87, 88, 95, 98 queering, 33, 35 queerness, 17, 22, 26, 27 Quemada-Díez, Diego, 7 “Querido subcomandante Marcos”, 102–4, 106, 109, 113 Quiéreme, 84 Quijano, Anibal, 198 Quintana-Vallejo, Ricardo, xiv, xxi– xxii Qvortrup, Jens, 33 race, 32, 84, 97, 198, 208, 214; discrimination, 247; hierarchy, 208; -mixing, 216 racialization, 203 racialized: body, 102; children, 194; injustice, 230; subjects, 196 racism, 91, 93, 236 Raithelhuber, Eberhard, xxv Ramírez Rojas, Marco, xiv, xx Rancière, Jacques, 193 Randall, Rachel, xi, xxi, xxiv, 153 rebellion, 226, 228 Los recuerdos del porvenir, 171 religion, 6, 14, 140 Rendón, Mariana, 6 resistance, xii, xx, 35, 60, 125, 129, 132, 155, 196, 207, 229, 248; everyday forms of, xx Resistente, 48

revolution, xii, 123, 124; agrarian, 242; Bolivarian, 243; Cuban, 4, 122, 123; Mexican, 2 Revolutionary: citizen, 126; hero, 123; ideology, 130; movements, xxi; potential, 227; project, 144 Reyes, Emma, 5 Richardson, Nathan, 124 Río fugitivo, 236 Los ríos profundos, xviii, 5, 213–14, 217, 223, 225, 227, 230, 232 Rivero, Giovanna, 235–37, 239, 240, 243, 251 Rocha, Carolina, xiv, xvii, xxiv Roche Rodríguez, Michelle, 178 Rodríguez, Omar, xviii, xxiii, 1, 171 Rodríguez Navas, Ana, 79 Rojas Contreras, Ingrid, 86 Romero, José Rubén, 27 Rosa, Juan de la, 236 Rose, Jacqueline, xxv Roti, Mari, 26–27 Roumain, Jacques, 222 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 75 La rue Cases-Nègres, xviii, xix, 213–14, 217, 229–30 Ruiz Tresgallo, Silvia, xiv, xviii, xix, xx, 5–6, 179 Sáenz, Jaime, 236 Salmerón, Miguel, 16 Salván, Hernández, 126 San Francisco, 17, 24–25, 28, 84 Santiago, Esmeralda, 85 Saslaya National Park, 74 Schalk, Sami, 216, 231 School, 1, 3, 13, 15, 127, 130, 139, 141, 143, 158, 163, 179, 186, 218, 219, 223–24, 226–27, 238, 244, 245; bullying, 140, 141 Schwartz-Bart, Simone, 215 Scott, James, xx, 2, 129, 179 Sedwick, Eve, 17, 18 Segalen, Victor, 230 Segato, Rita, 176, 181–82, 198, 206

Index

self-affirmation, xx, 125 self-centered, 238 self-cultivation, 236 self-defense, 189 self-determination, 228, 230 self-harm, 225–26 self-protection, 178 self-realization, xiv self-sufficient, 229 Seminet, Georgia, xiv, xvii, xxiv Senghor, Léopold, 213 sex education, 182 sexual abuse, xii, xiv, xix, 6 sexual assault, 107, 113, 179, 182 sexual identity, xxii, 13, 14, 16 sexuality, xii, xx–xxi, 6, 17, 22, 24, 26–27, 31–33, 35, 38–44, 48, 56, 84, 88, 97, 105, 110, 113, 141, 180, 222; gay, 42–43; inter-, 6; nonheteronormative, 3; queer, 34 sexual violence, 6, 187, 188 Shining Path, 6 Shipley, George, 42 El silencio de Neto, 171 Sin nombre, 7 Slaughter, Joseph R., 214 Sociology, xi Solidarity, xviii Somalia, xxiv El sonido de la H, xiii, xxi–xxii, 235– 36, 243–44, 247, 250 Sorri, Salla, 48 The Sorrows of Young Werther, 236 Sosenki, Susana, 171 South Sudan, xxiv Soviet Union, 133 Spain, 47, 52, 61, 120 Special Period, 122, 129, 133 Spence, Jo, 55 Spina, Vincent, 227–28 Stockton, Katheryn, 70, 80 Stroessner, Alfredo, xxii, 47, 55–56, 61 Suarez, Karla, 119, 133 subaltern, 120, 126, 196, 198, 200; racialized subaltern, 197, 200

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subalternity, xii, xiii, xiv, xx suerte, 151, 154–55, 157, 162, 169 teenager, xx, 7, 48, 85, 95, 175, 180, 189, 221 Temporada de caza para el león negro. See Hunting Season for the Black Lion Tepoztlán, 24 terror, 161, 170, 172, 183, 193, 199, 204; narco/necro-terror, 161 testimonio, 27, 38 Through the Looking Glass, 71 Tierney-Tello, Mary Beth, xiv, xxii Tirinea, 236 Tobin, Joseph, 43 Todos se van. See Everyone Leaves Torres, Alexander, xiv, xxi–xxii, xxiv, 2 transcendence, xii Trascendental, 236 transfronterizo, 67 trauma, xix, xxii, 50–51, 165, 169, 176; collective, 193; event of, 183; experience of, 184; memory of, 157, 159 Turner, Clorinda Matto de, 215 Turner, William, 32 Uncanny, 18, 161–62, 250 UNICEF, xxiv, 8 United Nations (UN), xi–xii, xxiv United States, xxiv, 7, 16–17, 21, 32, 80, 83–84, 88, 91, 93–94, 97, 101–4, 110, 238, 242 Un lugar en el mundo, 171 URSS, 133 Urzagasti, Jesús, 236 Valdés, Zoé, 119 Vallegrande, 241 Vallejo, César, 137 El vampiro de la colonia Roma, 31, 33, 35, 39, 41, 43 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 137 Vek Lewis, Paul, 44

266

Index

“A la vencida va la tercera”, 137, 139–40, 144 La vendedora de rosas, 171 Venezuela, xiii, 243–44, 249–50 victim, xiv, xix, 7, 158, 165, 170, 176, 183, 185, 187, 205 victimhood, 152, 159 Vida, 86 La vida inútil de Pito Pérez, 27 Vida y peripecias de una buena hija de familia. See Life and Exploits of a Good Family Daughter Videla, Jorge Rafael, 204 Villa de Guadelupe, 80 violence, xii, xiv, xvi, xix, xxii, 3–4, 31, 34, 36, 47, 91, 101–10, 113–14, 138–39, 143, 152, 154–55, 159, 172, 175–78, 180–81, 184, 186, 188–89, 193–95, 198, 204–5, 207, 224–25, 228, 247–48, 250; against children, 154, 189; domestic, 247; psychological, 103; sexual, 6, 103, 175, 177, 178; against women, 109, 189 Viracocha, 228 Voces inocentes, 70 Vuelven, 154–57, 159, 164–65, 169, 172 Weapons of the Weak, xx, 2, 129

When I Was Puerto Rican, 85 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 236, 243–44 Woman (women), 74, 79–80, 85, 105, 113, 120, 124, 126–27, 134, 176, 178–81, 194, 196–97, 201, 206, 217, 222–24, 229, 245; violence against, 105, 109 Wylie, Hal, 213 XXY, 6 Yawar Fiesta, 213, 225–26, 233 young, xxi, 13–15, 31, 48, 52, 55, 71, 178, 196, 206 youth, xi, xiv, 6, 175 Zambra, Alejandro, 1 Zapata, Luis, 38, 41 Zapatista Movement, 103 Zavaleta Mercado, René, 236, 248 Žižek, Slavoj, 244–46 Zobel, Joseph, 213–15, 217, 222, 231 Zupančič, Alenka, 246 98 segundos sin sombra, 235–37, 242–43, 250 108 Cuchillo de palo, xxii, 47, 50, 52, 55, 58, 60–61

About the Editors

Marco Ramírez Rojas is associate professor at City University of New York, Lehman College. His current research focuses on Latin American cosmopolitanisms and global literary dialogues. In his book Cartografías cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria (2023), he studies the poetic works of the late modernista Colombian poet as an innovative redrawing of cosmopolitan cultural maps. He has coedited two volumes on the representations of sociopolitical fears in Latin America: Narrativas del miedo: terror en obras literarias, cinemáticas y televisivas en Latinoamérica (2018) and Violencia, poder y afectos: Narrativas del miedo de Latinoamérica (2022). His academic essays have been published in Hispanófila, Revista Canadiense De Estudios Hispánicos,  Chasqui Revista de Literatura, and Revista de Estudios de Literatura Colombiana. Currently he is the head editor of the academic journal Ciberletras. Pilar Osorio Lora received her PhD in Latin American and US Latin@ literatures and cultures with a graduate certificate in film studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds an MA degree in literature and culture from Instituto Caro y Cuervo (Colombia), and a bachelor’s in literary studies from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). Her current research focuses on affects theory and childhood representation in Latin American narratives. Currently, she is teaching at Colegio de Estudios Superiores de Administración (CESA) in Bogota. She has worked at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Oviedo (Spain), Universidad del Norte (Colombia), the Luis Angel Arango Library, and Colombia’s Ministry of Culture.

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About the Contributors

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Carlos Ayram is a PhD candidate in literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). Currently, he is an ANID scholarship holder in Chile. In 2020, he obtained a master’s in literature from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and in 2015 he obtained a master’s in literature from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. In 2011, he obtained a degree in linguistics and literature from Universidad del Tolima, Colombia. His works study the relations between contemporary Latin American novels and the field of disability studies. He has published articles about disability and literature in different journals. Nicolás Balutet is a full professor of Latin American studies at the Polytechnic University of Hauts-de-France, Valenciennes, France. His most significant books are Christophe Colomb et la Corse. La “possibilité d’une île” ? (2021), Figures de l’outsider en Amérique hispanique (2019), Civilisation hispano-américaine (2017), and Poética de la hibridez en la literatura mexicana posmodernista (2014). Astrid Lorena Ochoa Campo is originally from Barranquilla, Colombia. She holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of Virginia. Currently, she works as assistant professor of Spanish and world language education at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse. She has been a teacher for twenty years and has taught in K-12 both in her home country and the United States. Her research interests include contemporary Latin American and Latinx women authors, motherhood studies, Latinx studies, and pedagogy. She has published interviews with US Colombian authors, articles on trauma and disabilities in Colombian literature, and more recently a personal essay on her experience as an immigrant in the United States. Jeffrey Diteman is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His current research focuses on figures of substitute mothers (nannies, godmothers, stepmothers, and grandmothers) in Latin American and Caribbean literature of the twentieth century. He is also a literary translator working from French and Spanish to English. His translation of The Anarchist Who Shared My Name by Pablo Martín Sánchez was published in 2018 by Deep Vellum. Diteman has also translated poetry by Raymond Queneau and regularly translates children’s literature. His scholarly interests include translation studies, experimental poetics, feminist theory, existentialism, and postcolonial theory. Sophie Dufays is a researcher specialized in Latin American cinema. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in two projects: a personal

About the Contributors

269

project on Latin American melodrama (Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, at the UCLouvain, 2013–2016) and the collective project “We are all Ayotzinapa: the Role of Digital Media in the Shaping of Transnational Memories on Disappearance” (digitalmemories​.b​e, funded by the European Research Council, at the KU Leuven, 2019–2021). She has been a visiting lecturer at Ghent University (2013), the University of Liège (2017), the UCLouvain (2017–2019) and the KU Leuven (2021), and a visiting scholar at Stanford University (2014). She is the author of El niño en el cine argentino de la postdictadura (2014) and Infancia y melancolía en el cine argentino  (2016) and coeditor of two books about the uses of popular songs in Latin American and European Cinemas (published in Libraria 2018 and Peter Lang 2019). She is codirector of the series “Repenser le cinéma / Rethinking Cinema” published by Peter Lang. Rodrigo Pardo Fernández is currently a professor and researcher at Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia. He received his PhD in Teoría de la Literatura y del Arte y Literatura Comparada from Universidad de Granada, Spain. His main lines of research deal with twentieth century and contemporary authors, as well as with US-Mexico border narratives. His academic articles have been published in academic journals such as Ciberletras, En-Claves del Pensamiento, Revista de Estudios de Género, and Mitologías Hoy. Alicia V. Nuñez is a PhD student at Northwestern University. Her research examines the intersections of childhood with lived migratory experiences in literature, visual, and music culture. As a scholar of US Central American culture, she explores how immigration policy and detention procedures in the United States have historically depicted Central America as a “problem child.” More broadly, she is also in dialogue with global issues such as climate change, chronic world health problems, and mass displacement. Alicia’s previous research focused on punk rock in Los Angeles and youth movements in the Southwest. She has published in Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo and has a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume,  The Never-Ending Journey: Cultural Representations of Central American Migration in the 21st Century. R. Hernández Rodríguez is professor of Spanish at Southern Connecticut State University where he teaches literature, language, and film. He holds a master’s degree in Spanish and Portuguese from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a PhD from New York University. He has taught at universities in Mexico, Canada, and the United States and participated in numerous national and international conferences. He has published several essays

270

About the Contributors

in academic journals and collective volumes on Latin American literature and culture. He is coeditor of the book ¡Agítese Bien! A New Look at the Hispanic Avant-Gardes (2002) and author of Una poética de la despreocupación (2003), Splendors of Latin Cinema (2009), and Food Cultures of Mexico (2021). He is currently working on a book on food and the formation of a national identity in modern Mexico. Alexander Torres teaches in the Department of World Languages at the University of South Florida. He holds a PhD from The University of Florida. He is the author of Bastardos de la modernidad: el Bildungsroman roquero en América Latina (2020). In addition to specializing in the Bildungsroman and rock culture in the Latin American context, Torres’s research focuses on the contemporary literary production of different regions in Latin America, often with young characters who are faced with a disenchanted and hostile world. Torres is an editor for a special issue in Bolivian Studies Journal entitled Geopoéticas del abigarramiento en narrativas bolivianas actuales (Motley Geopoetics in Contemporary Bolivian Narratives). He has also contributed book chapters for different volumes concerning contemporary Latin American literature. Silvia Ruiz Tresgallo holds a bachelor’s degree in humanities obtained at the University of Cantabria and a PhD in Hispanic studies from Pennsylvania State University. She is currently associate professor in Hispanic literature and gender studies at the Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico), where she teaches courses on contemporary culture, literary criticism, and gender theory. Her lines of research include gender studies, cultural studies of the Hispanic world, postcolonial criticism, eco-criticism, and Latin American literature with a transatlantic focus. Her academic papers have appeared in Cuadernos de Literatura,  Dieciocho, ILCEA,  Hispanic Issues Online, Religación: Revista de ciencias sociales y humanidades de América Latina, Mitocrítica,  Medievalia,  ULUA,  Afro-Hispanic Review, Etudes Romanes de Brno,  and Romance Notes y Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios. In addition, she has also published a number of book chapters in University Presses in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. She is a member of the National Service of Researchers at the candidate level. Rafaela Fiore Urízar is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies. She is currently the chair of the Department of Languages and Cultures at California Lutheran University. A native of Paraguay, she received her PhD in contemporary Latin American literature from The University of Chicago and her MA in Spanish from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Some of her current research and teaching interests are dictatorship and

About the Contributors

271

post-dictatorship narratives from Latin America and spaces of memory in Latin American films. She has several publications in English, Spanish, and Catalan on Paraguayan film and Hispanic and Latin American literatures. In 2021, she received the President’s Award for Teaching Excellence from California Lutheran University. Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo received his PhD in comparative literature from Purdue University. He is the author of Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-Age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States (2021). A selection of his recent publications include “Mapping Queer Diasporas in Literary Second Cities: Benjamín Alire Sáenz, Gabby Rivera, and Ocean Vuong” in Literary Geographies vol. 7, no. 2; and “Young Undocumented Migrants in Contemporary Fiction Films: Guten Tag, Ramón and Ya no estoy aquí” in Norteamérica vol. 16, no. 1. He has been a Fulbright Fellow. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.