Symbolism 17: Latina/o Literature: The Trans-Atlantic and the Trans-American in Dialogue 9783110532913, 9783110530414

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Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Editorial Board Heinz Antor ‧ Susan Bassnett ‧ Daniela Carpi ‧ Marc Chénetier ‧ Cristina Giorcelli Yasmine Gooneratne ‧ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ‧ María Herrera-Sobek Linda Hutcheon ‧ Eva-Marie Kroeller ‧ Francisco A. Lomelí ‧ Susana Onega Frédéric Regard ‧ Kiernan Ryan ‧ Ronald Shusterman ‧ Stefanos Stefanides Toshiyuki Takamiya ‧ Richard H. Weisberg ‧ Walther Chr. Zimmerli

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 17 Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Kläger and Klaus Stierstorfer Assistant editor Marlena Tronicke

ISBN 978-3-11-053041-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-053291-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-053131-2 ISSN 1528-3623 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors This volume’s special focus turns its attention towards symbolic forms in the cultural and literary practices of Latino/a Central and North America. The cultural traces to be discovered follow, in the main, two complementary directions – from East to West, i.e., from Europe to the Americas, and from South to North, i.e., from Central to North America. Their imaginaries are shown to be impacted by migration, transculturalism and competing concepts of national identity. As corresponding editors Patricia M. García and John M. González, both based at the University of Texas in Austin, announce in their introduction to this volume, their three-fold purpose in this collection of essays is – to highlight current methodological approaches to Latina/o literature, – to introduce established and emerging Latina/o writers to European audiences, and – to facilitate trans-American and trans-Atlantic discussion of migrations, transcultural and transnational. These goals are realized in the following three sections of the volume. In the first section, on the critical aesthetics of migration and trans-migration, Maritza Cárdenas, Jennifer Harford Vargas and David Vázquez examine fictional works for their representations of symbolic actions along the border between the US and Mexico. The following section shifts the focus to translation, transculturation and trans-Atlantic movement, as in the essay by Marion Rohrleitner, who discusses the function of stereotypes in texts ‘travelling’ from Latina/o culture into German. Elda María Román offers a detailed analysis of Junot Díaz’s short stories with a focus on their negotiation of social mobility and variations of the American Dream, whereas Julie Avril Minich considers social conflicts along the American-Mexican border in Oscar Casares’s short stories. Gendered identities in the fiction of Almudena Grandes and Roberta Fernández are scrutinized by Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico for strategies of othering. The third section breaks new ground for Symbolism in offering readers interviews with practitioners working in the field that constitutes the subject of the first two sections. In conversation with Daniel Schreiner, Alejandro Morales, whose impact on the development of magical realism as a literary form has been considerable, offers commentary on his use of narrative strategies. For Reyna Grande, the main concern in her interview with Patricia M. García is the narrative ‘I’; and Daniel José Older discusses, with Ylce Irizarry, the combination of writing, composition and musical performance. https://doi.org/9783110532913-001

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Foreword from the Editors

As always, the Special Focus section is complemented by a General Section offering interdisciplinary explorations of symbolic practices. In the first of this year’s three essays, Brett Shanley considers German typography before 1919 with an innovative take on the symbolic use of Fraktur. Inbar Kaminsky’s fruitful approach to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse takes inspiration from recent literary criticism on the body and posthumanism, whereas Barbara PuschmannNalenz convincingly analyzes forms and functions of space and time in recent fictional representations of British war memorials. The volume is rounded off by reviews of recent works of criticism offering new perspectives on symbolic practices in literature and theory. The editors express their gratitude to all contributors and to the editorial team at De Gruyter, above all to Stella Diedrich and Olena Gainulina. It is with great pleasure that we welcome Marlena Tronicke (University of Münster) as the new assistant editor of Symbolism, and we thank her for her meticulous work in bringing this volume to light. Further thanks go to Chris Wahlig for her competent handling of the formatting and indexing process as well as Laura Schmitz-Justen for formatting assistance. Rüdiger Ahrens University of Würzburg

Florian Kläger University of Bayreuth

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Münster

Table of Contents Foreword from the Editors

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Special Focus: Latina/o Literature at the Crossroads: The Trans-American and the Trans-Atlantic in Critical Dialogue Corresponding editors: Patricia M. García and John Morán González Patricia Marie García / John Morán González Introduction: Latina/o Literature at the Crossroads: The Trans-American and the Trans-Atlantic in Critical Dialogue 3

I Trans-American Subjectivities: The Critical Aesthetics of Migration and Trans-Migration Maritza Cárdenas A Central American Wound: Remapping the U.S. Borderlands in Oscar 13 Martinez’s The Beast Jennifer Harford Vargas The Undocumented Subjects of el Hueco: Theorizing a Colombian Metaphor 31 for Migration David J. Vázquez Toxicity and the Politics of Narration: Imagining Social and Environmental Justice in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper 55

II Intersticies: Translation, Transculturation, and the Trans-Atlantic Marion Rohrleitner Latina/o Literature Goes German

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Elda María Román Rerouting the Rise: Upward Mobility in Junot Díaz’s Fiction

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Julie Avril Minich “The Emotional Residue of an Unnatural Boundary”: Brownsville and the Borders of Mental Health 123 Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico Between Molds and Models: Female Identities in Almudena Grandes’s Models of Women and Roberta Fernández’s Intaglio 143

III Writing the Borderlands of Culture: Interviews with Latina/o Authors Daniel Schreiner The Once and Future Chicano – World Literatures Between Intra-History and 171 Utopian Vision: An Interview with Alejandro Morales Patricia M. García The “I” Before the Border: An Interview with Reyna Grande

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Ylce Irizarry “Where I Find Poetry and Tension”: An Interview with Daniel José Older 199

General Section Brett Shanley Typeface Teutonicus: The Socio-Semiotics of German Typography Before 1919 217 Inbar Kaminsky Parenthetical Embodiment and the Posthuman Body in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse 243 Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz Monument Narratives in Recent Anglophone Fiction

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Table of Contents

Book Reviews Index

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Special Focus: Latina/o Literature at the Crossroads: The Trans-American and the Trans-Atlantic in Critical Dialogue Corresponding editors: Patricia M. García and John Morán González

Patricia Marie García / John Morán González

Introduction: Latina/o Literature at the Crossroads: The Trans-American and the Trans-Atlantic in Critical Dialogue The first seedlings of thought for this special issue of Symbolism were planted in June 2015 while we were guest professors at the University of Augsburg in Germany. We had greatly looked forward to the experience of teaching in a new environment where neither of us knew the language or customs, much less had a sense of how what we taught – Latina/o literature – would resonate in a radically different context from our accustomed one at the University of Texas at Austin. Our predecessors there had worked to ensure that our field of study would be central to the field of U.S. literary studies, but we had no expectations of legibility within a European milieu. Wondering if we would have enough enrollment to conduct our courses, we asked ourselves, “Of what relevance might university students in Augsburg, or European-based scholars, deem Latina/o literature, with its roots that extended throughout the Americas but not so much across the Atlantic?” As experience has often demonstrated, initial assumptions do not survive intact very long. Our students in Augsburg may not have been familiar with the specific manifestations of Latina/o literature but were nevertheless intimately familiar with its underlying dynamics of migration, transculturation, and nationalism. The general question of the unequal relationship between the global North and the global South had also been playing out in a European context for the past half-century, just as it had in the Americas. Macroeconomic arrangements that privileged the North had caused intense economic insecurity in the South, prompting mass migrations of people northward in search of a better life. Political instabilities and crises compounded the situation as Southern governments continued policies that benefited local elites while cutting social safety nets in neoliberalist fashion. Northern governments faced mounting domestic pressure to curtail or stop the influx of migrant workers, increasingly viewed in nativist terms as parasitic drains upon the state and as inassimilable foreigners who threatened the linguistic and cultural integrity of the nation. While refusing the dangers of reductivism inherent in homology, the discussions that ensued in our classes productively examined Latina/o literature by drawing upon parallels with the literature produced by migrant communities in Europe, https://doi.org/9783110532913-002

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such as the Turkish or Syrian “Ausländer” in Germany, or the Algerian or Morrocan French in France. But even the successful outcome of the courses did not prepare us, or our students for that matter, for what occurred shortly after we returned to the United States in mid-July. Chaotic scenes of the refugee crisis of late summer 2015 that engulfed Europe suggested that the dynamics of displacement that we had examined were not simply operational, as they had been for decades, but had moved into a new and even more intense phase. In the Americas, such a crisis had occurred the year before, as over 132,000 people, a large percentage of them unaccompanied children, fleeing violence-wracked Central American nations had taxed the U.S. government’s ability to process and adjudicate refugee claims, leading to charges of human rights abuses in federal detention centers.¹ In Europe, over one million refugees arrived during 2015, straining European Union member relations and resources and sparking a nativist, anti-migrant backlash that is still playing itself out.² These events were neither isolated nor confined to the borderlands of the United States and Latin America, or to those of European Union member states, African nations, and Middle Eastern countries. Even as these events were unfolding, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced that the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had reached its highest level since records of this kind had been kept: 65.3 million, half of them children.³ Even as we write this introduction in early 2017, the hardline anti-immigrant and economic policies of U.S. President Donald Trump promise more turmoil domestically and internationally. For over five hundred years, Latina/o literature has been chronicling the displacement and migration of indigenous, Afro-descent, and mestizo (mixed indigenous and European descent) people within what social theorist Anibal Quijano has termed the coloniality of power in the Americas.⁴ While largely stemming from Hispanophone colonial contexts, the movement of people and ideas from South to North has also included Lusophone, Francophone, indigenous, and  David Nakamura, “Flow of Central Americans to U.S. surging, expected to exceed 2014 numbers,” Washington Post (September 22, 2016): [accessed February 1, 2017].  “Migrant crisis. Migration to Europe explained in seven charts,” BBC.com (March 4, 2016): [accessed February 1, 2017].  United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Global forced displacement hits record high,” (June 20, 2016): [accessed February 1, 2017].  For an outline of this concept, see Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South1.3 (2000): 533 – 580.

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other transculturated creole flows, especially since the late eighteenth century.⁵ While the trans-Atlantic aspect of these flows were explicit during the European colonial rule that raggedly stretched across the nineteenth century throughout the Americas, these became less prominent as the United States assumed hegemony over the Western Hemisphere by the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, the trans-Atlantic flow from South to North continues today as migrants from the Central American Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras increasingly turn to Spain and other European Union nations as crossing the U.S.-Mexican border has become ever-more expensive and dangerous. The following essays analyze this complex intersectionality of the transAmerican and the trans-Atlantic as it is not only enacted at the level of migration, but also in the ways that literary scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have examined how Latina/o literature bears its traces in shaping representational knowledge about its dynamics. In this vein, this special-focus issue of Symbolism has a three-fold purpose: to highlight current methodological approaches and thematic concerns of leading U.S.– and European-based scholars in Latina/o literary studies; to introduce established and emerging Latina/o writers to a European audience; and to suggest ways that Latina/o literature may facilitate a trans-American, yet also transAtlantic, discussion of migration, transculturation, and nationalism. The issue is presented in three sections. Section 1, “Trans-American Subjectivities: The Critical Aesthetics of Migration and Trans-Migration,” consists of three essays that explicitly examine the cultural dynamics of South to North migration. Maritza Cardenas’s “A Central American Wound: Remapping the U.S. Borderlands in Oscar Martinez’s The Beast” centers upon the Central American transmigrant experience of la Bestia – the name given to the perilous experience of riding the railroad from the southern border of Mexico to the southern border of the United States – as a key discursive site for the trans-American construction of a Central American collective identity. Rather than reaffirming a national identity either of the country of origin or the country of destination (the United States), Cardenas argues that the trauma of this South-North passage, and the memory of it, fundamentally structures the identifications mobilized by Central Americans in the United States in ways that not only prohibit a simple narrative of migrant assimilation but also complicate the borderlands theorizations of Chicana/o scholars.

 See the essays in the The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, eds. John Morán González and Laura Lomas, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2018.

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Likewise, Jennifer Hartford Vargas’s “The Undocumented Subjects of el Hueco: Theorizing a Colombian Metaphor for Migration” analyzes the trope of el hueco, or “hole,” as the dominant metaphor for unauthorized Colombian migration to the United States. Moving away from the borderlands theorization of the border as a singular geopolitically located experience, el hueco instead names the entire process of what Harford Vargas, following Mae Ngai, outlines as the process of becoming an “impossible subject” of nationalism, whether in Colombia or the United States. Casting el hueco as a conceptual hole, or gap, in nationalism that undocumented Colombians never exit, Harford Vargas, like Cardenas, provides useful correctives to Chicano/a borderlands theorizations that still take for granted the migrant subject’s inhabitation of at least one nationalism where the migrant is still a legitimate national subject. Rather, as Cardenas and Harford Vargas demonstrate, undocumented migrants from Latin America nations other than Mexico experience themselves as unauthorized in multiple nations, greatly changing the conceptual basis of subject formation. David Vasquez’s “Toxicity and the Politics of Narration: Imagining Social and Environmental Justice in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper” takes up the question of the relationship of Mexican migrants to the United States to issues of environmental racism and social justice. Plascencia’s high postmodernist aesthetics brings a treatment of South to North migration that allows the depict of Latinas/os as not simply victims of environmental racism (although that they are) but also a perpetrators of environmental harm. While the issue of scale remains relevant, as the migrants turned agricultural laborers could scarcely match the environmental destruction wrought by corporations, nonetheless Vasquez calls for a full accounting of responsibility by all parties in degrading the environment. The four essays of Section II, “Intersticies: Translation, Transculturation, and the Trans-Atlantic,” delve into the complexities of Latina/o life in the interstices of language and culture, particularly as these are manifested in processes of translation and transculturation. Marion Rohrleitner’s “Latina/o Literature Goes German” examines the former issue in the context of the translation of English-language Latina/o literature for the literary market in German-reading Europe. Using three recent translations of Latina/o novels, Rohrleitner revisits the long-standing questions of translation, such as how can meaning be conveyed across different linguistic and cultural contexts and what formal strategies can the translator employ to achieve a resemblance of fidelity to the original. Rohrleitner argues that Barbara Schaden’s translation Ana Menéndez’s Loving Che and Eva Kemper’s translation of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao replicates German stereotypes about Latin American exoticism and Cold War hypermasculinity in the former case and, in the latter, problematically

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domesticates the Dominican American experience for a German readership. Rather than acknowledge the complexities of these Latina/o novels, these translations perpetuate misconceptions that hinder a more nuanced understanding of these matters that the novels themselves conveys. For Rohrleitner, Friederike Meltendorf’s translation of Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio is successful as it captures the laconic sense of the original at the syntactical level rather than opting for the flowery language often used for the translation of Latin American boom novelists. Turning us to questions of transculturation, Elda María Román outlines how the fiction of Junot Díaz imaginatively rewrites the narrative of the “American Dream.” Tracing the economic and social rise of Yunior, Díaz’s main narrator in the short story collections Drown and This is How You Lose Her and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Román argues that his individual upward mobility is not predicated upon the loss of communal relationships, languages, and histories, as the dominant version of “Americanization” would have it. Rather, Díaz’s narrative strategies instead highlight precisely the otherwise invisible historical and structural conditions that do not allow immigrants, people of color, and other marginalized groups to fully occupy the position of individual economic actor central to the American Dream ideology. In this sense, Díaz’s decolonial imaginary acknowledges the allure of the American Dream for Latina/o immigrants while criticizing its individualist limitations. For Julie Minich, Latina/o literature provides an analytically useful window into experiential aspects of social life often only considered through public policy and sociological discourses, particularly that of inequalities of mental health care. In “‘The Emotional Residue of an Unnatural Boundary’: Brownsville and the Borders of Mental Health,” Minich examines three short stories from Oscar Casares’s debut collection Brownsville from within a disability studies framework. Set in the Texas-Mexico border town of the same name, the stories highlight the differently racialized and gendered aspects of mental health as experienced by Mexican Americans.⁶ In “Chango,” the question of how depression registers not only an individual health concerns but also as a sensitive register of structural disparities that disproportionately affects those marginalized from dominant discourses of social productivity. In “Charro,” Minich explores how border modernity manifests itself in the subjectivities of those so colonized through an everpresent daily stress. As the last story of the collection, “Mrs. Perez” changes the

 In addition to being Oscar Casares’s hometown, Brownsville, Texas, also happens to be mine. Our sincere thanks to Heide Ziegler and Hubert Zapf for making our stay in Augsburg possible. – JMG

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focus from the social conditions productive of mental illness among border residents to that of how mental well-being may be produced despite those structural limitations. Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico’s “Between Molds and Models: Female Identities in Almudena Grandes and Roberta Fernández” explicitly foregrounds a feminist trans-Atlantic methodology in its comparison of life writing texts published during the 1990s by the madrileña Grandes and the tejana Fernández. Both Grandes’s Modelos de Mujer [Models of Women] (1996) and Fernández’s Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories (1990) narrate, from multiple perspectives, the everyday lives of Spanish and Mexican American women, respectively, as they navigate the gendered expectations and restrictions placed upon them. Despite the differences in cultural contexts, both critically examine the social “molds” that shape female subjectivities and the “models” of female agency available to the women characters. Depicting women’s concerns as more collective than individualistic, Grandes and Fernández employ, according to Durán, a “strategy of the other” to explore the circumstances of a woman’s life relationally through the lives of other women. For Durán, the strategy of comparing the life writing of two otherwise disparate authors situated across the Atlantic from each other helps illuminate the commonalities that unite their experiences as women. Section III, “Writing the Borderlands of Culture: Interviews with Latina/o Authors,” is comprised of interviews with three Latina/o writers, one of long standing (Alejandro Morales) and two whose works have recently become more familiar in literary circles (Daniel José Older and Reyna Grande). This section provides literary introductions, as it were, to Symbolism’s readership of Latina/o writers whose work may be less known than that of luminaries such as Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Junot Díaz, María Irene Fornés, Cristina García, Juan Felipe Herrera, Oscar Hijuelos, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Tato Laviera, Cherríe Moraga, Pedro Peitri, Esmeralda Santiago, Carmen Tafolla, and Helena Maria Viramontes. Alejandro Morales is the veteran of this trio, with fiction extending back to the 1975 novel Caras viejas y vino nuevo (published 1981 in English translation as Old Faces and New Wine). While usually grouped with Latina/o authors of the 1960s and 1970s who wrote in a social realist mode, Morales’s novels span the range from realism to speculative fiction. While The Brick People (1988) is largely in the former mode, The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) moves decisively into the latter mode of science fiction that has become a hallmark of many emergent Latina/o writers. Reyna Grande’s emergence as a writer is emblematic of the Mexican and Central American migrations into the United States of recent decades, and particularly of undocumented migration and its emotional consequences. While the

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adjustment to life in the United States has always been difficult for migrants of any origin, Grande chronicles the consequences for undocumented Mexican migrants in her novel Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) and in her memoir The Distance Between Us (2012). Focusing upon the specific issues that Latinas face in the process of translation and transculturation in the making of their subjectivities, especially in her novel Dancing with Butterflies (2009), Grande provides a critical window into questions of relationships between parents and children, men and women, and friends across generations. While Reyna Grande works in the time-honored modes of memoir and realism, David José Older represents a significant trend with younger authors to work in the idiom of speculative fiction, or what literary scholar Ramón Saldívar has termed “speculative realism.”⁷ Perhaps best generally known as the mode of narration in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, speculative realism takes up the always-deferred U.S. idea of a “post-racial” society – a concept whose idealism was already exhausted by the end of President Barack Obama’s first term – and displaces the developmental temporality of realism with speculative fiction’s polytemporal, nonlinear refusal of a teleology of racial resolution. Even as post-realism fades as a historical possibility, the current ascendency of a renewed white supremacist nationalism in the United States ensures speculative realism will continue to flourish among the younger generations of Latina/o writers for whom this mode of narration better describes their social being. Older’s novels, such as those in The Shadowshaper series (2015 – 2017) and Bone Street Rumba series (2015 – 2017), as well as the short story collection Salsa Nocturna (2012) all fully embody this aesthetic. The works of Reyna Grande and Daniel José Older represent but a fraction of emergent Latina/o literary authors in the twenty-first century, whose ranks include novelists (Oscar Casares, Jennine Capó Crucet, Angie Cruz, Felicia Lemus, Miguel Muñoz, Achy Obejas, Salvador Plascencia, Ernesto Quiñonez, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Justin Torres), poets (Richard Blanco, Rafael Campo, Eduardo Corral, Willie Perdomo, Emmy Perez), and playwrights (Nilo Cruz, Lin-Manuel Miranda, José Rivera). Taken together, the essays and interviews in this special focus issue of Symbolism suggest that Latina/o literature has much to say to literary scholars across Europe and the Americas in terms of aesthetic responses and imaginative alternatives to the crisis of neoliberalism as it plays itself out across the global North and South. Increasingly desperate migrations, resurgent nativist nationalisms, and the heatedly disputed processes of transcul-

 See Ramón Saldívar, “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative,” Narrative 21.1 (2013): 1– 18.

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turation, already contentious even during the best of times, are symptomatic of this crisis. Trumpism in the United States, Le Pen in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Orbán in Hungary, and Brexit in the United Kingdom play upon fears of immigrant foreigners who threaten the very meaning of national identity, whether in terms of language, race, religion, economics, culture or “national security” writ large. Placing Latina/o trans-Americanity in conversation with the trans-Atlantic begins to illuminate the global dimensions of contemporary literary aesthetics in context while providing the utopian resources to imagine otherwise.

I Trans-American Subjectivities: The Critical Aesthetics of Migration and Trans-Migration

Maritza Cárdenas

A Central American Wound: Remapping the U.S. Borderlands in Oscar Martinez’s The Beast La Bestia/The Beast – the colloquial name given to cargo trains that run throughout Mexico which are utilized by migrants – has become an iconic image linked with Central American migration to the United States. This essay examines one of the most prominent texts to utilize The Beast as trope for Central American transmigration, Oscar Martinez’s non-fictional narrative The Beast: Riding The Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (2013). In it Martinez posits The Beast as instrumental in the formation of a Central American disembodied wound – the notion that individuals from the geopolitical space of the isthmus are viewed as sharing a similar collective traumatic experience as transmigrants in Mexico. In addition, by calling attention to the experience of Central American undocumented transmigrants, illuminating how they are victims of a migrant trail that encompasses multiple borders, The Beast also extends the physical and symbolic jurisdictions of the borderlands by focusing on how border violence and death are not geographically limited to the doorstep of the Global North. In viewing the border from a transnational framework – The Beast thus poignantly underscores the ways in which contemporary sociopolitical conditions such as U.S. and Mexican immigration initiatives require U.S. Latina/o studies to view texts produced beyond the U.S. political spaces as integral to its broader corpus. It also exposes limitations present within contemporary articulations of the border within this field, which often fail to account for the experiences and trauma that occur outside a southern U.S. and northern Mexico geopolitical terrain. Migrants from everywhere Entrenched among the rail ties. Far away from where they come, Farther away from where they go. Waiting for earth’s shaking And the wheels’ screeching. Behind the mountains The menacing snake appears, Her scales are made out of iron Her womb of iron as well, They call her The Beast from the South This wretched train of death, https://doi.org/9783110532913-003

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With the devil in the boiler Whistles, roars, twists and turns. – “La Bestia”¹

In the spring of 2014, radio stations throughout Central America were inundated with requests to play a catchy cumbia song, titled “La Bestia,” which references the colloquial name given to the freight trains migrants utilize to cross from southern to northern Mexico. This cumbia is the latest articulation of a broader discourse that renders La Bestia/The Beast as metonymic with Central American transmigrant experiences. Documentaries such as Rebecca Camissa’s Which Way Home (2009)²; Pedro Ulterera’s La Bestia/The Beast (2011)³; fictional films like Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre (2009)⁴; songs such as Kinto Sol’s “La Bestia” (2013),⁵ and creative works like Marissa Chibas’s dramatic play Shelter (2016),⁶ have all included the figure of The Beast in their accounts of Central American transmigration through Mexico. However, unlike these other texts, the Beast cumbia was produced and commissioned by none other than the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). As part of the CBP’s million-dollar “Dangers Awareness Campaign,”⁷ the song was specifically created and designed to deter Central American migration to the United States.⁸ Both in its content and context of production, the song “La Bestia” elucidates not only how this figure has become the symbol par excellence of Central American transmigration, but also how the U.S. government increasingly sees its own borders as extending beyond the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical divide. The aim of the song, after all, is to prevent Central Amer Eddie Ganz, “La Bestia,” U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (Elevation, 2014). CD.  Which Way Home, directed by Rebecca Camissa [2009] (USA: Reason Pictures, 2011). DVD.  La Bestia/The Beast, directed by Pedro Ultreras [2010] (USA: Venevision, 2011). DVD.  Sin Nombre, directed by Cary Fukunaga [2009] (USA: Universal Studios, 2009). DVD.  Kinto Sol, “La Bestia,” Tumba Del Alma (Virus Enterprises LLC, 2013). CD.  Shelter, by Marissa Chibas, directed by Martin Acosta (CalARTS Center for New Performance: Los Angeles, April 2016).  Caitlin Dickson, “The Government is Using Subliminal Songs to Scare Immigrants,” The Daily Beast (December 07, 2014): [accessed June 27, 2016]. This is not the first time the CBP has become involved in the music-making business. In 2004, they distributed a five-song cd of “migra corridos” to radio stations throughout Mexico in order to discourage Mexican immigration as part of their “No More Crosses” campaign. Such textual productions suggest that in this post-9/11 era, reinforcing the material border is insufficient as new tactics of deterrence are being wielded in the realm of the symbolic.  “CBP Addressed Humanitarian Challenges of Unaccompanied Child Migrants,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, [accessed June 27, 2016].

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ican immigrants not just from arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border but also from traversing Mexico (where The Beast resides), suggesting that the U.S. state views Mexican territory as part of its jurisdiction and central to its border surveillance, detention, and deportation regime.⁹ These two thematic concerns – The Beast as metaphor for Central American migration and The Beast as a site for remapping the U.S. borderlands – are pointedly illustrated in Oscar Martinez’s non-fictional narrative The Beast: Riding The Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (2013). In its literary structure (comprised of fourteen vignettes of other people’s memories) and as part of a larger discursive framework about Central American transmigration, The Beast is instrumental in constructing a Central American disembodied wound¹⁰ – the notion that individuals from the geopolitical space of the isthmus are viewed as sharing a similar collective traumatic experience as transmigrants in Mexico. Collective trauma and memory, as noted by the work of Central American scholars, has proven to be a vital source for the formation of a diasporic Central American identity.¹¹ By providing images and stories about shared experiences, cultural narratives by Central Americans can become sites of social practice that enable the development of a transnational imaginary – an “imaginary social space consisting in transnational communities of shared fates”¹² – which in turn provides the grounds for a collective identity. However, to date, most of

 See Todd Miller, “Mexico: The US Border Patrol’s Newest Hire,” America Aljazeera, [accessed June 27, 2016].  Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996): 189. Silverman uses the metaphor “disembodied wound” to discuss how certain narratives encourage their audiences to “remember, what might best be characterized as others people’s memories,” adding that “if to remember is to provide the disembodied wound with a psychic residence, then to remember other people’s memories is to be wounded by their wounds.”  Arturo Arias and Claudia Milian, “US Central Americans: Representations, Agency and Communities,” Latino Studies 11.2 (2013): 131– 149; Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (Austin: U of Texas P, 2009); Yajaira M Padilla, “The Central American Transnational Imaginary: Defining the Transnational and Gendered Contours of Central American Immigrant Experience,” Latino Studies 11.2 (2013): 150 – 166. These scholars have all explored how trauma resulting from the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s were formative in constructing a Central American identity in the diaspora.  Yajaira Padilla, “The Central American Transnational Imaginary: Defining the Transnational and Gendered Contours of Central American Immigrant Experience,” Latino Studies 11.2 (2013): 150 – 166, 153 – 154. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/lst.2013.2. [accessed September 18, 2013]. Padilla also notes how increasingly crossings through Mexico are becoming important social spaces for this “Central American Transnational Imaginary.”

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the discussion has focused on how the traumas derived from the Central American civil wars (1979 – 1992) or immigrant life in the United States have become the central vehicles for this assertion of shared fates among this group. In addition to these war related traumas, the trope of The Beast in contemporary cultural production signifies the ways in which the archive of Central American collective memory is expanding due to a very distinct form of transmigrant experience. Although one might want to locate Martinez’s The Beast as a Latin American rather than U.S. Latina/o text on account of its setting (Mexico) and topic (transmigration), confining this work to just one location forestalls a fuller analysis. U.S. Latina/o studies and contemporary transnational cultural productions like The Beast cannot be reduced to a monotopographical paradigm, especially when Mexico has always resisted traditional cartographies (belonging to the Global South but categorically located on the continent of North America).¹³ Indeed, as a pivotal metaphor for migration across multiple borders, the trope of The Beast exposes the limitations present within contemporary articulations of the border within U.S. Latina/o studies, which often fail to account for the experiences and trauma that occur outside a southern U.S. and northern Mexico geopolitical terrain. The Beast therefore signals a shift within the paradigm of U.S. Latina/o border studies and should be read as belonging to an emergent corpus of transnational texts that focus on the “border as the landscape of death.”¹⁴ This grouping includes fictional and nonfictional works such as John Annerino’s Dead in Their Tracks: Crossing America’s Dessert Borderlands (1999)¹⁵; Ruben Martinez’s Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001)¹⁶; Luis Urrea’s The Devils Highway (2004)¹⁷; Jorge Ramos and Kristina Cordero’s Dying to

 José David Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Durham: Duke UP, 2012): xv. Saldívar persuasively asserts this view stating, “US Latino/a studies cannot be reduced to a single, monotopical paradigm.”  Marta Caminero-Santangelo, “The Lost Ones: Post-gatekeeper border fictions and the construction of Cultural Trauma,” Latino Studies (2010): 304– 327; Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002). Both scholars have utilized the term “border as the landscape of death” to refer to a corpus of texts that narrate U.S. border crossings as a site of epistemic and physical violence.  John Annerino, Dead in Their Tracks: Crossing America’s Desert Borderlands (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999).  Rubén Martínez, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).  Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (New York: Little, Brown, 2004).

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Cross: The Worst Immigrant Tragedy in American History (2005)¹⁸; and Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite With his Mother (2007),¹⁹ to name a few. With some minor exceptions, these works mostly focus on the U.S.-Mexico Southwest borderlands of California, Arizona, and Texas and on undocumented Mexican immigrants. In contrast, The Beast calls attention to the experience of Central American undocumented transmigrants, and renders them as victims of not one border but of a migrant trail that encompasses multiple borders, beginning from the border separating Guatemala and Mexico and extending north to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, with most of its narrative content focusing on the central Mexican passage. Subsequently, The Beast is not only a discursive site that constructs a disembodied wound (cultural trauma) for Central Americans, but also a text that functions as a punctum, ²⁰ an optic displacement that enables one to look beyond the frame of the “given to-be-seen toward what lies outside.”²¹ Incorporating this critical hermeneutic of looking beyond the “given-to be seen,” Martinez’s depiction of Mexico is one that frames it as a heterotopia, a shadowy counterpart to the U.S.-Mexico border. As such, Martinez’s work provides an alternative cognitive mapping of what and who belongs within the material and symbolic space of the borderlands, as well as highlights the way the United States and Mexico, two nation-states often viewed as antagonists by dominant U.S. media representations, collude to force transmigrants into a state of indelible precarity along the migrant trail.

Constructing Central American cultural trauma Trauma, both at the personal level and as a collective phenomenon is not ontologically based, rather it is a discursive construction that requires critical representational strategies. For Jeffery Alexander, cultural trauma occurs via a signifying process that requires three features: (1) narrating a painful event or disclosing a horrible social condition; (2) linking this source of pain with a par-

 Jorge Ramos and Kristina Cordero. Dying to Cross: The Worst Immigrant Tragedy in American History (New York: Rayo, 2005).  Sonia Nazario, Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite With his Mother (New York: Random House, 2006).  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 42. Barthes describes the punctum as anything whose “mere presence changes my reading” and has a “power of expansion.”  Silverman, Thresholds, 182.

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ticular group; and (3) attributing responsibility to an antagonist.²² These representational elements abound in narratives that utilize the trope of The Beast as they depict the transmigrant experience as traumatic and violent, particularly for Central Americans. In Cary Fukunaga’s film Sin Nombre, for instance, all the main characters are from the isthmus, and they all experience violence such as murder, rape, or death.²³ Likewise, in songs devoted to The Beast, death is either looming (as evidenced in the one commissioned by the CBP), or in the case of the Latina/o hip-hop song “La Bestia” by Kinto Sol, the speaker witnesses death firsthand as he sees his friend fall off the train. Kinto Sol’s song, like Sin Nombre, also establishes the notion that transmigrants are synonymous with people from Central America, stating, “We are from El Salvador, others come from Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua.”²⁴ Indeed it is rare to find in these aforementioned texts examples of transmigrants who are not from the isthmus. In tandem with these cultural narratives, which position this trope as metonymic for Central American collective trauma, Martinez’s The Beast chronicles the never-ending violence sustained by Central American transmigrants throughout Mexico. Often this text underscores the ways in which these two categories – Central American and cultural trauma – are constitutive of one another and share overlapping features. The category of Central American, like trauma, is also not an ontologically grounded term; it therefore requires its own signifying practices to assert the notion that individuals from various parts of the isthmus share common attributes and/or experiences. To this end, The Beast, as specific narrative and generalized discourse, proves pivotal in cementing the belief that Central Americans literally and figuratively share the same sociocultural and traumatic conditions. When Martinez’s narrator canvasses the scene of the migrant trail and cargo trains, all he can see are Central Americans: “The roofs of the train cars are where the undocumented Central Americans ride.”²⁵ At other moments, the narrator describes how the transmigrant experience is delimited to peoples from the isthmus stating, “Eduardo and I pick our spot on top of the car with a group of Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans” (TB, 51). In fact, The Beast asserts that the transmigrant experience itself

 Jeffrey Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, eds. Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil Smelser and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004): 1– 30, 11, 13.  Fukunaga, Sin Nombre, DVD.  Kinto Sol, “La Bestia,” CD. Translation mine.  Oscar Martínez, The Beast: Riding the rails and dodging narcos on the migrant trail. (London: Verso, 2013): 49. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “TB.”

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enables the production of Central Americanness. In his descriptions, Martinez reveals how the train journey acts as a form of crucible – a baptism by fire – where individuals lose their identities and become unified by the experience of riding the rails: “The effect of riding the rails is always the same. On top of a train there aren’t journalists and migrants, there are only people hanging on […] The roof of the cars is the floor for all and those who fall, fall the same way” (TB, 20). The Beast is described as an egalitarian space where class distinctions dissipate, as there are no differences between privileged journalists and migrants, since the roof is the floor “for all,” and where everyone dies the same way. The experience of The Beast – one that renders all of its riders physically vulnerable to its dangers – acts as a binding force for transmigrants conjoined by the fact that they have to undergo the same perils. This notion that individuals from the isthmus are forged into “Central Americans” by the experience of crossing Mexico is constant throughout the narrative in which, despite their respective national backgrounds, individuals are constantly positioned as belonging to a larger Central American phenomenon. Multiple narrative techniques provide the reader quantitative information pertaining exclusively to Central American transmigrants, while Martinez repeatedly situates his interviewees as partaking in a broader Central American practice, as evidenced in his discussion about three Salvadoran brothers: “They packed their bags and started north, joining the pilgrimage of upchucked Central Americans. They dove into that stream of escapees. Those fleeing poverty, those fleeing death” (TB, 19). Here, this small family unit is framed as participating in a broader cultural process, a Central American “pilgrimage” initiated by poverty and violence, a point dramatized by the parallelism in the syntax: “Those fleeing poverty, those fleeing death.” At other moments, the narrative invokes these factors for migration (poverty and violence) to deconstruct gender, class, and political binaries. Martinez explains that “poverty and death touches them all: the young and the old, the men and the women, the gangsters and the cops” and further adds that he remembers “the nearly identical reactions of a Honduran policeman and a Guatemalan gangster: I had to escape. That’s what they both told me, both of them emphasizing the had” (TB, 20 original emphasis). Martinez’s syntax here accentuates the communal nature of this transmigrant experience. The parallelism in the phrases “young and old” and “men and women” illuminates how these subjects share the same level of precariousness despite their seemingly oppositional subjectivities. Similarly, the repetition and visual emphasis in the phrase “I had” accentuates the redundant nature and the inescapability of the situation, since subjects from all walks of life will be doomed to repeat and endure the same circumstances and shared fates along the migrant trail. In juxtaposing two social

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antagonists, a “Guatemalan gangster” and a “Honduran police officer,” who differ both in their national origins and occupations, the narrative also demonstrates how these tensions fade as these subjects become entwined by the same driving impetus to leave Central America (death threats and violence) as well as the dangers they experience along the migrant trail. If such examples evince how an individual from the isthmus becomes Central American via the transmigrant experience, it also persuasively asserts how the migrant trail does not simply produce personal trauma but a collective one. The trauma Central Americans as a collectivity endure is inherently connected with their journey on the Mexican migrant trail. In recounting testimonies and anecdotes from his interviewees, like Paola, who “saw firsthand that something bad happens to nearly every migrant here” (TB, 29), Martinez’s narrative stresses how trauma is endemic to crossing Mexico. This point is punctuated by the narrator who reveals how “For the past decade […] The stories of husbands, sons, and daughters watching women suffer abuses have been commonplace” (TB, 30). To emphasize this horrific normalcy, the narrator states “Few think about the trauma endured by thousands of Central American women who have been raped here” (TB, 43). In one of his more poignant reflections, Martinez makes an explicit connection to how the transmigrant experience is a form of cultural trauma for Central Americans, noting, “The suffering that migrants endure on the trail doesn’t heal quickly. Migrants don’t just die, they’re not just maimed or shot or hacked to death. The scars of their journey don’t only mark their bodies, they run deeper than that” (TB, 43). Martinez’s language indexes the way cultural trauma functions as a wound inscribed not only on the exterior of migrants’ flesh but also upon their psyches. The bodily wound in this context obtains a psychic permanence, one that he remarks is not reserved for an individual but should be viewed as a form of social suffering for these particular transmigrants who endure this journey through Mexico. Without question, trauma is a dominant thematic element in this work. It is not only operative in the aforementioned declarations about how migrants endure trauma, and anecdotes that describe traumatic events, but also in the narration itself, which suggests that the narrator has experienced “vicarious trauma,” a second hand trauma which occurs by watching others suffer traumatic events.²⁶ This structure of trauma is displayed in Martinez’s recounting of receiving news of the death of one of his interviewees:

 Ann Kaplan, “Trauma studies moving forward: Interdisciplinary perspectives,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 27.2 (2013): 53 – 65, 54.

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Just today I learned that a boy named José lost his head under that train. José was the youngest of three Salvadorans I traveled with two months ago. We skirted highways and ducked from authorities as we ventured through another of the high-traffic points along the migrant trail, La Arrocera. His decapitation, I’m told, was a clean cut (TB, 4).

This passage is noteworthy not for what it reveals, but more for what it cannot represent. There is clearly so much more to this anecdote of José’s untimely passing and yet Martinez provides us with such an abrupt and succinct description. For instance, the fact that the narrator describes the decapitation as “a clean cut” infers that the witness to this tragedy saw more than is being disclosed by the narrator; that she or he must have seen the accident, and must have been able to interpret the decapitation as a “clean cut.” This characterization conveys the sense that whoever inspected the severed head had some experience viewing other mutilated bodies to make this assessment, suggesting that the witness to this event has already been a victim of trauma. Moreover, it is particularly odd that this narration of bearing witness to the destruction of a child’s life, a “boy” as the narrator describes him is so devoid of emotions. Especially since Martinez makes it a point to inform readers that they spent some significant time together on the migrant trail, precisely the space that Martinez continuously asserts has become an important vehicle of fraternity among transmigrants. This lack of emotional resonance and details about José becomes magnified by the fact that, at other moments of representation in the text, the narrator has the capacity to describe and remember in vivid detail the most mundane features of his interviewees and traveling companions. He remembers the sounds of their voices, the colors of their skin and hair (TB, 70), their “cheap rubber soled sandals” (TB, 14), but as for José, readers are left with nothing. This overt textual manifestation of absence and silence at the level of representation embodies how the language of trauma functions, one that showcases how trauma enables the “impossibility to narrate the event itself.”²⁷ Narratives that are structured by trauma often exclude “language that might be considered literary” and are distinguished by the mark of absence, by the ways in which “language omits more than it reveals.”²⁸ We see these features in Martinez’s text and particularly in the retelling of José’s death, which is so void of details, depth, and emotional affect. Its narration is halted by this structure of trauma that illuminates the gaps and chasms that occur when confronted with trauma. The Beast, then, suggests that no one can evade the experience of trauma while

 Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, “Between Witness and Testimony: Survivor Narratives and the Shoah,” College Literature 27.2 (2000): 1– 20, 9.  Bernard-Donals and Glejzer, “Between Witness,” 3.

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on the migrant trail, not the narrator nor Martinez himself. Despite not having witnessed the traumatic event firsthand, the narrator shows signs of vicarious trauma in his representation that exposes how he is affected by the trauma of others. By depicting mostly Central Americans as those who traverse the migrant trail, and through its assertion that everyone who enters this particular space endures a form of trauma, The Beast persuasively constructs the notion that Central Americans undergo a form of cultural trauma via the transmigrant experience.

A wound in the borderlands: The Beast as heterotopia In the foreword of the translated English version of The Beast, author Francisco Goldman concludes by saying “it reads like a series of pilgrims’ tales about their journey through hell. (Even calling it hell feels like an understatement)” (TB, xviii). Goldman raises an important point, Martinez’s portraiture of the landscape and the physical and psychic trauma that occur on that soil leave the impression that the text’s setting is an other-worldly place. If it were set in the future, then The Beast might be labeled a dystopian narrative; since its backdrop is a “real” referent, and its time period is the contemporary moment, perhaps a more productive way of conceiving his literary cartographic rendering of Mexico is to view it as a heterotopia. Heterotopias are both real and imagined sites that are produced via displacement from other spaces. According to Michel Foucault, heterotopias are “counter sites” where other spaces that can be found within culture can be “contested and inverted.”²⁹ A critical function of heterotopias is that they operate like mirrors a place where “I discover my absence from the place where I am.”³⁰ A heterotopic site is therefore linked with sight; counter intuitively, one uses this space to see one’s absence from a “real” space. Described in this way, heterotopias make visible the invisible. They are also imbued with disruptive capabilities for their ability to destroy the syntax that forces “words and things” to “hold together.”³¹ Heterotopias are those moments in discourse that can stop the chain of signification, or the ability to hold “words and things” together. As a textual illustration of real physical landscapes, The Beast can be seen as a counter-site that functions as a mirror for non-Mexican undocumented immigrants, allowing them to see their absence from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.  Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22– 27, 24.  Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24.  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970): xviii.

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Martinez relates that “Once, riding on top of the train in the dark of night I heard someone say: ‘The Beast is the Rio Grande’s first cousin. They both flow with the same Central American blood’” (TB, 53). There are two important assertions declared in this passage. The first is that “Central American blood” is not only found in Mexico – on the cargo trains of The Beast – but also in the Rio Grande, on the U.S.-Mexico border. By invoking “blood” along the border, The Beast intertextually references perhaps the most influential recent book about the U.S.-Mexico border, the one that invested the term with all its theoretical possibilities: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa famously describes the U.S.-Mexico border as “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”³² Anzaldúa’s use of blood in this context reminds us of the potential kinship that can and does reside within these borderlands between Mexican Americans and Mexicans, as well as the fact that the border is both an imaginary space and a real space where violence and bloodshed occur. Noteworthy is that this symbolic and material blood is one that never seems to index non-Mexican communities, let alone specifically Central American communities. For example, in the section titled “El cruzar del mojado/Illegal crossing,” Anzaldúa describes “south of the border” as the space where “mexicanos congregate in the plazas to talk about the best way to cross.”³³ The “mojado” (or undocumented immigrant) becomes synonymous with Mexican, since this is the only group Anzaldúa sees as border crossers and the only national community that needs to cross just one national border, a point magnified by the title that renders the crossing as a singular event. Despite being written in a historical period (the 1980s) when the Southwest borderlands witnessed the arrival of more than a million displaced Central Americans from civil wars,³⁴ their presence in Anzaldúa’s text is strikingly absent. Debra Castillo and Maria Tabuenca have astutely noted the contradictions of this work, and specifically how Anzaldúa’s expansive imaginary relies on a privileged myopic location: a U.S.-based northern gaze looking south. However, their alternative for addressing some of the conceptual limitations of Anzaldúa’s discursive borderlands is to “take

 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987): 3.  Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 11. (Italics in original)  Sarah Mahler and Dusan Ugrina, “Central America: Crossroads of the Americas,” Migration Policy Institute (April 1, 2006) [accessed September 18, 2016].

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both sides – the United States and Mexico – into consideration,”³⁵ which again inadvertently reinforces the notion that the “blood” in the Rio Grande, and by extension the violence of this geopolitical space, is limited to Mexican Americans or Mexicans. Hence, one might read Martinez’s narrative as a way to (re)inscribe Central Americans into the U.S. borderlands, a reminder that Central American blood also runs in the Rio Grande. This, in turn, offers a way to refashion contemporary social groupings that transcends national identities as it enables a type of kinship between Mexicans and Central Americans as victims and survivors of border violence while also providing a way to mitigate Central Americans historical and discursive absence from this geopolitical space. The second assertion, one that sees The Beast and the Rio Grande as “first cousins” – sharing sanguinity and engendered by the same family – remaps the parameters of the U.S. borderlands. This familial and spatial metaphor symbolically uproots the Rio Grande, and by extension the borderlands, from the U.S.Mexico frontera to an alternative border region: the migrant trail of Mexico. Like its North American counterpart, the deadliest, most hostile space for migrants is in the southern area close to the Mexican-Guatemalan border. According to Martinez, La Arrocera begins in Tapuchula, a city in the Mexican state of Chiapas near the Guatemalan border, where migrants cross in order to reach The Beast. This South/South contact zone is described as “stained red by the blood of migrants, some say. The place makes you whimper like a dog” (TB, 28). This dehumanizing terrain is also the site where bones “aren’t a metaphor for what’s past, but for what’s coming,” and “Killing, dying, raping, or getting raped – the dimensions of these horrors are diminished to points of geography. Here on this rock, they rape. There by that bush, they kill” (TB, 37). There is a complete disorientation of how topos and chronos operate in La Arrocera. “Bones” are not evidence of what once transpired, but signs of portent to migrants; what functions as a symbol of the past elsewhere in this instance connotes a horrific future of “what’s coming.” Similarly, the description of nature – “on this rock, they rape” and “by that bush, they kill” – alters the old Englishlanguage adage “between a rock and a hard place,” or the dilemma of being between two equally undesirable conditions. Unlike in the adage, Martinez contrasts two objects – a soft “bush” and a hard “rock” – that theoretically offer an obvious choice. But given the graphic descriptions of violence that transpire along the entire migrant trail, the narrative undermines this possibility. The beacon of hope for another option (the bush) proves illusionary; at best it fails to

 Debra A. Castillo and María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba, Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002): 4.

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provide an alternative to the “rock” (where “they rape”), and at worst, is viewed as even dire than the “hard place” as the bush is where “they kill.” In his disorientation of the topos and chronos of the Mexican landscape, Martinez enables an important reorientation: of seeing how this site is an extension of other border spaces. The violent, vicious and harsh nature of the extended Mexican border zone, shares similar properties to those non-fictional works that represent the U.S.-Mexico border region as “a landscape of death.” These border narratives are characterized by the way they call attention to the hostile conditions of the landscape (usually the desert) as well as by their focus on migrant deaths and disappearances.³⁶ Functioning as a heterotopic mirror to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, The Beast allows one to see how the violence and brutalities typically attributed to this North/South contact zone are transplanted and manifested in a South/South contact zone constituting the entire Mexican territory. Martinez’s graphic rendering of this alternative other border not only then redirects the dominant border gaze from the North/South to the South/South, but also displaces and decenters this site by making it one border crossing among many. In doing so, The Beast enables the disruption of “words and things,” of the signifier “border” (within a U.S. Latina/o context) as always already signifying the U.S. Southwest borderlands.

Attributing responsibility: U.S.-Mexico transborder policies and the making of precarious lives As part of that broader U.S. Latina/o literary corpus of texts that construct the border as a “landscape of death,” The Beast also asserts that the brutalities of the environment are not simply natural but have a causal relationship to state policies.³⁷ Martinez’s text unequivocally links Central American transmigrant precarity with the policies enacted by the Mexican state. In describing “the most dangerous” zone in the migrant trail – La Arrocera – the narrator proclaims that Central Americans have “no protection” from the ceaseless horrors that await them and that “locals seem deaf to [their] screams” (TB, 27). Martinez further adds that, “Over the course of a year of walking these migrant trails, I’ve heard the stories of hundreds of attacks, of people beaten up to a pulp, of murder, of women screaming while they were raped in those hills, and just beyond

 Marta Caminero-Santangelo, “The Lost Ones: Post-gatekeeper border fictions and the construction of Cultural Trauma,” Latino Studies (2010): 304– 327, 307.  Caminero-Santangelo, “The Lost Ones,” 307.

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them, Mexico refused to listen” (TB, 27). As depicted, The Beast ties the physical vulnerability of the transmigrant body to the social and political conditions facilitated by the state of Mexico. The narrative views undocumented Central Americans as inhabitants of an indelible state of precarity due to the fact that “no protection” is granted by state officials, who at the local and national level seem “deaf” and blatantly “refuse to listen,” despite “hearing screams.” Central Americans are presented as physically and socially defenseless, destined to occupy a state of precariousness as a result of “certain socially facilitated modes of dying and death” where life can be “lost, destroyed or systematically neglected to the point of death.”³⁸ As a result, an elaboration of the trauma process occurs in this passage, since not only does it reinforce that Central Americans as a social group are victimized by “attacks,” “beatings,” “murders,” and “rapes” associated with this landscape, but also that the source of this trauma is the nation-state of Mexico (TB, 27). Throughout the narrative, there is an explicit connection between the horrors suffered in this territory, and the juridical and physical vulnerability by transmigrants within Mexican state policies. The narrator often remarks that “Migrants are the perfect prey because they’re invisible, always hiding from authorities,” making this invisibility both figurative and literal (TB, 14). Transmigrants find alternative routes like the deadly Arrocera in order to be literally invisible (unseen by migration authorities); as undocumented immigrants, Central Americans are figuratively invisible since they lack the same juridical protection given to Mexican citizens, leading Martinez to label large regions of Mexico as “lawless territory.” This lawless territory represents the double bind that undocumented Central Americans occupy. Mexican state policies regarding citizenship and migration force them to inhabit certain “lawless” zones that have become infested with transnational criminal organizations – the Zetas and Maras – where they become victims to these groups precisely because of the failure of Mexican law enforcement to provide these transmigrants with necessary protections. In The Beast, the narrator is quite adamant about advancing the idea that the nation-state of Mexico has produced the conditions of possibility for Central American transmigrant violence, stating, “every day Los Zeta and their allies kidnap tens of undocumented Central Americans, in the broad light of day, and the migrants are kept in safe houses which everybody, including the authorities, knows about,” adding, “these are the kidnappings that don’t matter” (TB, 92; 93). Invoking the notion that precariousness occurs via a systematic negligence that enables the loss of life for certain subjects, the text emphasizes that it is only

 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009): 14, 13.

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the kidnapping of these transmigrants that “don’t matter.” In this sense, the “lawlessness” within Mexican territory is ironically not outside the law but has instead become internalized as a way of life for dealing with undocumented Central Americans. Mexican authorities contribute to this “lawlessness” via their failure to intervene in this criminal activity. At other points in the narrative, Mexican officials engage in lawless behavior themselves: “[I]n Chiapas most denunciations by migrants are against the police” (TB, 35). Lest readers think that these are simply aberrations by rogue police officers or non-state actors like “narcos,” the text reminds readers via its citation of Mauricio Farah of the National Commission of Human Rights that “[t]he Mexican government is supposed to be responsible for the safety and lives of those who are in its territory” (TB, 93). In other words, Mexico is not absolved from protecting non-citizens, since it is viewed as being responsible for all “those who are in its territory.” But territory is not simply an unremarked physical setting, rather it is a byproduct of a regulatory regime of state power, and in the context of border zones, it returns us to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. While Foucault never directly implicates biopower as a constitutive force in his articulation of this type of space, he implies it in his declaration that, in the modern world, there are “heterotopias of deviation” in which subjects who do not fit “the required norm are placed.”³⁹ It is also present in his notion that heterotopias are both open and closed spaces, limited to certain subjects whose entry into such a space is predicated on “the very fact that we enter [as] excluded.”⁴⁰ This in turn suggests the possibilities that some spaces are material effects of the enforcement of state power that govern and regulate spaces. To this end, Martinez’s representation of the Mexican landscape can be read as a “heterotopia of deviance.” To enter the state of Mexico as an undocumented immigrant is to be circumscribed to a particular terrain – the migrant trail – where transmigrants are forced to find alternative routes, often the deadliest, due to the need to avoid migration checkpoints. Yet it is imperative that one look beyond the national frame and understand that the checkpoints themselves are the result of larger economic and political processes encompassing and transcending the nation-state of Mexico. In order to be in compliance with its membership in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) implemented in 1994, Mexico agreed to “expand control of the migratory flows from various countries to the south of Mexico and other

 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25.  Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 26.

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continents.”⁴¹ Since then, Mexico, at the behest of the United States, has enacted a flurry of policies to deter undocumented immigrants, including the Plan to Seal the Southern Border (1998), the Southern Plan/Frontera Sur (2001), the Safe and Orderly Repatriation Plan from Mexico to Guatemala (2001), the Agreement for the Safe and Orderly Repatriation of Central American Migrants at the MexicoGuatemala borders (2005), the Memorandum of Understanding between the Governments of Mexico and the United States, the Republic of El Salvador, The Republic of Guatemala, the Republic of Honduras, and the Republic of Nicaragua, for the Dignified, Orderly, Swift and Safe Repatriation of Central American migrants by Land (2006), and most recently the Southern Border Plan (2014). Both the Southern Plan of 2001 and 2014 are directly tied to U.S. transborder policies. After 9/11, the Southern Plan was introduced as a way to further restrict transmigrants entering Mexico from the south in order to “synchronize its approach with United States national security concerns.”⁴² This coordinated approach was further cemented in 2014, when Mexico became “[t]he US Border Patrol’s newest hire” in its enforcement of its amended Southern Plan.⁴³ Under this recent border strategy there was a 117 percent increase in deportations of mostly Central American children, as well as a rise in checkpoints and raids in spaces frequently inhabited by Central Americans.⁴⁴ The political and material effects of these policies has been to enforce a permanent state of precarity for transmigrants as they are forced to find alternative routes, often in remote locations, when traversing Mexico to avoid checkpoints. Such transborder policies not only also prohibit undocumented Central Americans from reporting crimes but also from using public forms of transportation for fear of being caught, detained, and deported by Mexican authorities. This in turn creates the need for The Beast, as transmigrants board the cargo trains because they allow them to cross Mexico much faster than walking, while also remaining unseen. In this sense, while the Beast may reside in Mexico, the conditions of possibility that enable its use and production are also directly tied to U.S. neoliberal and immigration policies.

 Tanya Basok, Danièle Bélanger, Martha Luz Rojas Wiesner, Guillermo Candiz, Rethinking transit migration: Precarity, mobility, and self-making in Mexico. (New York: Palgrave, 2015): 37.  Basok et al, Rethinking Transit, 37. Basok et al argue that “The techniques used by the US state to regulate non-citizens in the context of the United States biopolitics of citizenship have been externalized to Mexico.”  Todd Miller, “Mexico: The US Border Patrol’s Newest Hire,” America Aljazeera, [accessed June 27, 2016].  Miller, “Mexico: The US Border Patrol’s Newest Hire.”

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Thus, the illustrative power of Martinez’s The Beast is that it highlights this dynamic, bringing to the fore how the material Beast (the trains) and what this trope signifies (Central American transmigration), along with the construction of other spaces (the migrant trail), are effects of U.S. biopower whose transborder policies, as enacted by the Mexican state, produce cultural trauma for transmigrant Central Americans. Moreover, via its depiction of Mexico as a heterotopia, Martinez’s text effectively redirects our gaze away from the U.S.-Mexico border. In doing so, The Beast extends the physical and symbolic jurisdictions of the borderlands by focusing on how border violence and death are not geographically limited to the doorstep of the Global North. In viewing the border from a transnational framework – one that re-routes and remaps it from its predominant space – The Beast also poignantly underscores the ways in which contemporary sociopolitical conditions such as U.S. and Mexican immigration initiatives, require U.S. Latina/o studies to view texts produced beyond the U.S. political terrain as integral to its broader corpus.

Jennifer Harford Vargas

The Undocumented Subjects of el Hueco: Theorizing a Colombian Metaphor for Migration

This article theorizes the trope of el Hueco that Colombians use to describe crossing undocumented into the United States, colloquially referring to undocumented migration as entering “por el Hueco,” which translates as “through the Hole or Gap.” I posit that el Hueco provides a fruitful new metaphor for Latina/o studies that is directly rooted in the experience of undocumented migration and in an extended geography that connects South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. I analyze how Jorge Franco’s novel Paraíso Travel and Kofre’s CD ¡Por el hueco! figure crossing through el Hueco as a form of burial, thereby symbolically capturing the death of migrants’ legal subjectivity and of their national identities. I posit that Franco and Kofre simultaneously reconfigure restrictive notions of national affiliation by imagining affective citizenship and insurgent hemispheric belonging. Overall, the article opens up a space to consider the critical import of U.S. Colombian literary production within the field imaginary of Latina/o studies. Gloria Anzaldúa begins her landmark book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza with a poem situated at the U.S.-Mexico border: Wind tugging at my sleeve feet sinking into the sand I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean where the two overlap a gentle coming together at other times and places a violent clash. Across the border in Mexico stark silhouette of houses gutted by waves, cliffs crumbling into the sea silver waves marbled with spume gashing a hole under the border fence. […] I walk through the hole in the fence to the other side¹

 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza [1987] (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999): 23 – 24. https://doi.org/9783110532913-004

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While Anzaldúa goes on to proclaim, “This is my home / this thin edge of / barbwire,” using the trope of the U.S.-Mexico border to expound on the mestiza subjectivity and consciousness that can emerge from the borderlands, what would happen if we paused and lingered on the hole through which Anzaldúa walks?² The small but evocative gap in spacing between the words “walk” and “through” visually prefigures the hole in the fence, and her border crossing initiates the poem’s line break. The line break evokes the fracturing of identity that occurs in the migration across national borders, while the “to” in the succeeding line seems to float just below the gap and bridge the space in between. The gap and the line break function as absent presences on the surface of the page that simultaneously mark the moment when Anzaldúa crosses over the border or, more precisely, through the hole in the border. What conceptual work can this hole in the border fence and this gap in the visual topography of the poem perform? Colombians colloquially describe crossing undocumented into the United States as going “por el Hueco,” which translates as “through the Hole” or “through the Gap.”³ I posit that theorizing the Colombian metaphor of el Hueco provides a fruitful new trope for Latina/o studies, one that is directly rooted in the experience of undocumented migration and that complements “the guiding metaphor of Latino Studies: ‘la frontera,’ the border.”⁴ As the Colombian journalist Germán Castro Caycedo explains, many Colombians lack the resources to migrate to the United States through official channels, so they come “por ‘el hueco,’ es decir, en forma clandestina a tráves de la frontera con México, desde Bahamas en bote o en avión, e incluso algunos por Haití [through ‘el hueco,’ that is, clandestinely over the border with Mexico, from the Bahamas in boat or airplane, and even via Haiti].”⁵ María Elena Cepeda estimates that 4 million Colombians live in the United States and that 40 to 50 percent of this Colombian

 Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 25.  The term is more frequently written as “el hueco,” but some authors use “el Hueco” or “El Hueco.” I choose to capitalize el Hueco as a proper name in order to distinguish it from the common noun el hueco. Colombian newspapers use the term when they report on Colombian undocumented migration to the United States, and the prolific Colombian journalist Germán Castro Caycedo interviewed a number of Colombians who journeyed por el Hueco, publishing a non-fiction book entitled El hueco (Bogotá: Planeta, 1989). To my knowledge, there is no scholarship on el Hueco.  Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (New York: Columbia UP, 2000): 212.  Note that Castryo Caycedo chooses not to capitalize the article or the noun (i. e., “el hueco”). Castro Caycedo, El hueco, 20. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

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population is undocumented.⁶ To gain entry into the United States, Colombian undocumented migrants use varying modes of transportation and journey via multiple routes that extend throughout Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. In her theorization of the Gulf of Mexico as a “Latino-Anglo border system,” Kirsten Silva Gruesz has demonstrated how this Gulf region provides border studies and Latina/o studies a fresh perspective on “the reified map of the land border, la línea.”⁷ I contend that, like the Gulf, el Hueco, is a “distinctive kind of border zone,” but its distinctiveness does not lie in a specific topography, geographic location, or geo-political space.⁸ Rather, it lies in the border crossing sites and tactics that can be collected together under the expression por el Hueco, as well as the undocumented subjectivity that emerges from el Hueco. I am especially interested in theorizing el Hueco as a metaphor for undocumented migration rooted in this extended geography – one that connects South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean – and based on the dual signification in English of hueco as a hole and a gap. I argue that the term el Hueco captures both the time and place where migrants cross geo-political borders undetected as well as the entire complex process of entering into and subsequently navigating life as undocumented subjects in the United States. The border demarcating the territorial limits of the U.S. nation state is a geopolitical boundary, a national historical configuration, a rhetorical and ideological construct, and a legal entity upheld by a regulatory system of immigration quotas, visa documents, and the border enforcement apparatus. The routes migrants traverse por el Hueco to access the United States extend throughout Latin America, and these routes are desperate and resourceful responses to exclusionary policies.⁹ Huecos are chronotopes of crossing, tempo-

 María Elena Cepeda, Musical ImagiNation: U.S-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom (New York: New York UP, 2010): 32. Note that Cepeda’s estimates are over five years old, so these numbers are likely higher. Cepeda relies on various sources for her data because, as she and other researchers point out, errors in the 2000 U.S. Census resulted in a very inaccurate count of the U.S. Colombian population (Cepeda, Musical Imagination, 178). Unfortunately, the 2010 U.S. Census and more recent studies, such as those released by the PEW Research Center and the Migration Policy Institute, still appear to underestimate the number of Colombians in the United States.  Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “The Gulf of Mexico System and the ‘Latinness’ of New Orleans,” American Literary History 18.3 (2006): 468 – 495, 470.  Gruesz, “The Gulf of Mexico System,” 490.  When referring to the United States’ policy toward migrants, I use the term immigration because that is the term employed by the State. However, I prefer the terms migrant and migration to immigrant and immigration because they accommodate a number of different trajectories,

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ral-spatial gaps in border surveillance that are the result of the multi-layered clandestine tactics migrants and their guides use to gain entry. Holes are deliberately opened when authorized routes of entry are closed, and when one hole is closed by border security, holes are sought and created elsewhere. Going through a hueco in the border, then, entails exploiting a temporary gap that presents an opportunity as well as enacting shifting strategies to pass under the radar of the State. It necessitates exposing and strategically negotiating loopholes in the formal structures, institutional arrangements, and policing apparatuses that mediate and regulate national geopolitical boundaries. Maneuvering el Hueco involves not only agency and opportunity; it also entails being confined and limited in one’s spaces of movement and access to resources. The term el Hueco interrogates the nation state’s hegemonic border and its naturalized status. The United States imagines its borders to demarcate a sovereign, fixed, bounded territorial space. Shifting attention from the border as a site of exclusion to el Hueco as a site of fraught access enacts a critical shift in the discourse used to imagine the border. This is similar to the critical shift enacted by the trope of la frontera or the borderlands as both tropes expose the border’s unstable and constructed nature. By highlighting holes, gaps, breaks, and hidden sites of entry, the border from the perspective of el Hueco is a tension-filled geography of political, social, and legal space that subjects differentially navigate. The trope of el Hueco thus works in tandem with the trope of the borderlands in fashioning an alternative national cartography demarcated not by natural, static, and stable boundaries but by gap-filled, fissured, and porous margins. El Hueco, in differentiation from the borderlands, focuses exclusively on the process of undocumented migration by shedding conceptual light on the spaces entered clandestinely to escape border security apparatuses and on the daily under-the-cover negotiations essential to living and working undocumented within the nation state. Though the borderlands and el Hueco are doing similar conceptual work, el Hueco is a Colombian metaphor for undocumented migration that is not the product of the U.S.-Mexico contact zone nor is it generated out of or delimited to the spatial imaginary of Greater Mexico.¹⁰ This is crucial for multiple reasons. Given the dominant focus on the U.S.-Mexico border in the U.S. political imaginary and the stereotypical assumption that all undocumented migrants are impoverished Mexicans in the public sphere, it is pressing that Latina/o studies goals, and statuses, rather than the fixed destination with the eventual acquisition of citizenship implied by the term immigration.  Coined by Américo Paredes, “Greater Mexico” is the collection of Mexican culture and Mexican-origin people extending beyond the nation state boundaries of Mexico.

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contest these over-simplified views by considering Latin American migration from a comparative perspective that accounts for different national groups, modes of crossing, socioeconomic classes, and geographic sites of entry. U.S. Colombian cultural production is also just starting to be mapped in Latina/o studies, so attending to el Hueco helps contribute to this burgeoning subfield and thus to expanding Latina/o studies.¹¹ Moreover, el Hueco maps a relationship to countries in South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and North America that are involved as crucial sites of passage through el Hueco. Yet, like the borderlands, el Hueco is a both a “geographic and metaphorical space.”¹² Though subjectivity can be fashioned anew in the borderlands – as Anzaldúa and other Chicana/o scholars and cultural producers have so poignantly demonstrated – the subjectivity that emerges from el Hueco is not necessarily one that is multiple or mestiza. For, crossing through el Hueco produces a death of legal subjectivity and a burial of one’s social and national identity. As a trope for undocumented migration, el Hueco highlights the very painful and visceral effects that entering without authorization has on migrant subjects, even as it holds out the possibility of forging a new, transnational identity and of reconfiguring restrictive notions of citizenship. In this article, I unpack the theoretical salience of el Hueco by examining the spatial tropes and metaphorical associations linked to el Hueco in two texts that center on undocumented migration: Jorge Franco’s novel Paraíso Travel [Paradise Travel]¹³ and the musical group Kofre’s album ¡Por el hueco! ¹⁴. I explore

 To date, Cepeda’s book is the only full-length work on the cultural production of U.S. Colombians. Most work on U.S. Colombians has emerged in the social sciences. For exceptions to this, see: Michelle Rocío Nasser de la Torre, “Bellas por naturaleza: Mapping National Identity on U.S. Colombian Beauty Queens,” Latino Studies 11.3 (2013): 293 – 312; Juanita Heredia, “South American Latino/a Writers in the United States,” in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, eds. Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio (New York: Routledge, 2013): 436 – 444; Suzanne Oboler, “Introduction: Los que llegarón: 50 Years of South American Immigration (1950 – 2000) – An Overview,” Latino Studies 3.1 (2005): 42– 52; Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Pitfalls of Latino Chronologies: South and Central Americans,” Latino Studies 5.4 (2007): 489 – 502.  Monica Perales, “On Borderlands/La Frontera: Gloria Anzaldúa and Twenty-Five Years of Research on Gender in the Borderlands,” Journal of Women’s History 25.4 (2013): 163 – 173, 164.  Jorge Franco, Paraíso Travel (Bogotá: Editorial Planeta Colombia, 2001); Jorge Franco, Paradise Travel, trans. Katherine Silver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). I will be citing both Franco’s original Spanish-language novel and Katherine Silver’s English-language translation. For the most part, I quote from Silver’s translation; occasionally, I offer my own translation when I see fit. Further references in the text to Franco’s Spanish-language novel and Silver’s English-language translation will be abbreviated as “Franco, PT” and “Silver, PT.”  Kofre, ¡Por el hueco! (Kofre Studies, 2008).

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how the novel and the CD’s cover art represent undocumented border crossing as a process in which death is imminent.¹⁵ Migrants face bodily death, social death, and the death of their national identities. Yet, by figuring death as a process rather than a final state, the texts suggest that el Hueco can function as a transitory border zone and that in migrating via el Hueco undocumented subjects can arrive at alternative understandings of national belonging. Overall, my analysis attempts to fill a hueco or gap in Latina/o studies by sketching some of the contours of the Colombian undocumented migrant imaginary. In doing so, I ask us to consider what we might gain from studying the discourses developed by undocumented subjects from various Latin American national origin groups that document experiences of migrating to and of living in the United States.

Burying subjectivity The Colombian novelist Jorge Franco interviewed undocumented Colombian migrants in New York and on the U.S.-Mexico border as part of the research for his novel Paraíso Travel, which centers narrative attention on the fraught experiences of Colombian migrants and functions as a fictional form of testimonio or politically engaged testimony about those who traverse el Hueco. The novel details the experiences of the protagonist Marlon Cruz and his girlfriend Reina as they make their way clandestinely from Medellín, Colombia to the United States, their accidental physical separation in New York City, Marlon’s obsessive year-long search for Reina along with his coinciding integration into the local Colombian community in Queens, and the couple’s reencounter in Florida at the novel’s end.¹⁶ Paraíso Travel is narrated in an oral, colloquial mode. Seemingly a reflective, direct address to the reader, Marlon’s first-person perspective is intermittently broken by various characters who interrupt his narrative with questions, comments, and their own recollections, revealing that the reader is not, in fact, Marlon’s explicit audience. Instead, his friends Giovanny, Patricia, Pastor, Caleña, Roger, and Milagros are the addressees of his tale as well as his newfound kin. The novel is a series of fragments and episodes in Marlon’s personal life story, which he importantly pieces back together with the help of these different

 The two cultural products I examine in this article depict crossing por el Hueco at the U.S.Mexico border; see Castro Caycedo’s El hueco for narratives focused on crossing via the Caribbean.  Paraíso Travel was made into a Spanish language film with the same name in 2008. Jorge Franco co-wrote the script; the film was directed by the U.S. Colombian Simón Brand, and the U.S. Colombian Puerto Rican John Leguizamo acted in the film and was a co-producer.

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interlocutors. A communally constructed individual narrative thus emerges as Marlon reconstructs his story by incorporating his friends’ comments and memories, making his testimonio a tale of inter-dependence. The novel’s form is structurally built around this inter-dependence, which formally reflects how Marlon establishes new kinship ties in New York City that shift his sense of national belonging. Moreover, there are three temporal modes through which events unfold; as such, the novel is not strictly chronological in its temporality nor strictly South-to-North in its geographic spatiality. There is the near past in which the novel begins, with Marlon and Reina’s arrival in New York City and his yearlong search for her; there is the more distant past interspersed throughout the novel, with Marlon and Reina’s romance in Colombia and their treacherous journey north to the United States, and there is the present that ends the novel, with Marlon traveling south to Florida to find Reina. These various temporalities, interspersed throughout the novel, create a simultaneous and free-flowing movement between nation spaces in Marlon’s memory, which highlights the transnational subjectivity of undocumented migrants and challenges us to consider how and when migrants become Latina/os. John “Rio” Riofrio postulates that Latina/ o identities begin to develop in Latin America; using the writings of the Colombian Jorge Franco and the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, Riofrio argues that it doesn’t make sense to suppose that Latino identities ‘begin’ when one crosses the northern shore of the Rio Grande […]. Their [Franco’s and Fuguet’s] engagement with shifting hemispheric realities reveals immigrant identities are intimately structured by the dynamic relationship between the United States and their countries of origin.¹⁷

Paraíso Travel is an important novel to consider within Latina/o cultural production about undocumented migration because it is an engaged narrative that demands the reform of the socio-economic forces in Colombia that drive people to migrate, that testifies against the migration industry that exploits the undocumented migrant, and that criticizes the United States for its immigration policies, its hyper-militarization of the border, and its hierarchies of race and class. And it does so not just from the perspective of los de abajo but also those who come into the United States “por abajo,” as one character puts, meaning from below or clandestinely (Franco, PT, 105).¹⁸

 John D. “Rio” Riofrio, Continental Shifts: Migration, Representation, and the Struggle for Justice in Latin(o) America (Austin: U of Texas P, 2015): 36.  An undocumented Colombian migrant in Castro Caycedo’s testimonio collection also uses the term “por abajo” (Castro Caycedo, El hueco, 59). Los de abajo is a famous novel about the

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In order to migrate por el Hueco, Marlon and Reina must pay someone to guide them; what they encounter is an elaborate structure of exploitation. Scholars use the term migration industry to describe the whole apparatus that makes undocumented migration feasible; this extends from travel agents to labor recruiters and from coyotes or human smugglers to document forgers, etc. Marlon and Reina contract the travel agency Paraíso Travel that gives the book its ironic title. They use tourist visas to fly to Guatemala where they then move via bus through Guatemala and Mexico. All along the route they confront a “cadena de mentiras y abusos [string of abuse and lies]” (Franco, PT, 194; Silver, PT, 186) with agency employees, transportation workers, and smugglers bribing them into paying additional fees and threatening them with exposure, abandonment, and brute violence if they hesitate. Having heard multiple stories while in Colombia of those who died while going por el Hueco, Marlon and Reina see no option but to pay. Their experiences are not exceptional; in fact, many undocumented migrants crossing through Central America and Mexico fall victim to robbery, beatings, rape, and desertion at the hands of coyotes, gangs, Mexican police, and U.S. border patrol officials. To recount his experience of crossing, Marlon warns, “tendría que hablarte de muertos, de huecos, y de ataúdes [I’ll have to tell you about the dead, about holes, and coffins]” (Franco, PT, 201; Silver, PT, 194). By linking these three together, Marlon intuitively links el Hueco of Colombian migrant discourse with the literal deaths that occur and with the figurative death he and Reina undergo as they pass over nation state borders. The novel represents their migration por el Hueco by materializing it as a kind of burial. As they cross over the border between Guatemala and Mexico, the coyotes force them to throw all their identification documents into the river, which they do “como si arrojáramos flores sobre la fosa de un muerto dolido [as if we were throwing flowers on the grave of a dead loved one]” (Franco, PT, 179; Silver, PT, 171). Symbolically shedding their national identities and mourning the loss of their Colombian selves, they attempt to pass as Mexicans to avoid being harassed by Mexican authorities.¹⁹ Later, in order to cross over the U.S.Mexico border, they must hide in a long truck with huge wooden logs in the back that form coffin-like spaces. As Marlon describes it: [L]a madera iba extendida en el camión, pero desde atrás podías ver unos huecos. [….] Que por detrás del camion la madera parecía un queso, con agujeros profundos donde supuesta-

Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela that is translated as The Underdogs, though here I play on its literal translation as “those from below.”  See Castro Caycedo’s El hueco for stories of how Mexican authorities target, detain, torture, and sometimes even kill Colombian migrants.

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mente teníamos que meternos. Haz de cuenta que tenías que entrar en los nichos de un cementerio. Una fosa por persona donde quedaríamos tendimos y apretados, como si nos hubieran enterrado boca abajo. [….] [T]aparon el hueco como si pusieron una lápida. Allí solo faltaron flores y un pariente que nos llorara. (Franco, PT, 203 – 205) The logs were lying on the truck bed, and from where we were standing behind it, we could see some gaps between them. […] In the back of the truck, the stack of wood was kind of like Swiss cheese, with big deep holes where we were supposedly going to fit in. Just imagine if you had to go hide in holes dug in a graveyard. One grave per person, where we would be alone and squooshed in, as if we were being buried facedown. […] [T]hey covered up the holes as if they were setting gravestones. All we needed was some flowers and a relative to cry for us.] (Silver, PT, 195 – 197)

By wedging themselves in the gaps or holes between the wooden logs, they pass through el Hueco hidden within the fossae and buried within the wood in coffined positions. The confined space resembles the cavity dug in the earth for a coffin, making the crossing into a form of burial. When they throw their Colombian passports into the river at the border between Guatemala and Mexico, the novel describes this moment using a simile that positions them standing over the grave of a loved one whom they are mourning. In contrast, in order to pass over the border between Mexico and the United States, they do not stand above the grave of another; instead, they are inside their own graves, being buried alive alone, and though the loved ones who would mourn their deaths are invoked, they are absent from the scene, which symbolizes how kinship networks and social relations are fractured by undocumented migration. What is most striking about the scene is how it metaphorically enacts the kind of death that migrants undergo as they enter unauthorized into the United States. While Marlon and Reina are spared literal death (and many undocumented migrants are not so fortunate), what ensues from their successful border crossing is social death. Lisa Marie Cacho argues that undocumented migrants are subjected to what she and other scholars have termed “social death” because they are “permanently criminalized” as “illegal aliens” by immigration law; moreover and most problematically, immigration law creates a “permanently rightless status” that makes them “ineligible for personhood” because they are “subjected to laws but refused the legal means to contest those laws as well as denied both the political legitimacy and moral credibility necessary to question them.”²⁰ The novel spacializes this social death by placing them in a metaphoric wooden cemetery. The coffin-like experience of el Hueco signifies the bur-

 Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York UP, 2012): 6.

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ial of migrants’ previous national identities and social locations as subjects with the rights of citizenship. When they emerge from their graves, they are alive but socially dead as they are now “illegal aliens.” While the expression por el Hueco is traditionally used just to describe how one comes into the United States without authorization, I argue that migrants do not leave el Hueco once they are living here. In other words, they do not pass through el Hueco and then exit the other side when arriving in the United States; rather, they now must live in and forge a life out of el Hueco. As the character Orlando tells Marlon, “[N]i tú ni Reina existen en este país. Ustedes entraron por El Hueco y las computadores no saben nada de ustedes [Neither you nor Reina exists in this country. You entered through El Hueco and the computers do not know anything about you” (Franco, PT, 139). As Orlando puts it, they do not officially exist in the United States because they came through “El Hueco”²¹ and thus do not appear in any governmental databases because the computers – which symbolize State regulatory regimes of knowledge, political subjectivity, and legal documentation – do not know about or recognize their existence as subjects. Orlando’s phrasing highlights the contradiction that even though Marlon and Reina exist as living, breathing, laboring migrants, they do not exist according to State records. They are, to use Mai Ngai’s term, “impossible subjects.” Ngai writes, Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility – a subject barred from citizenship and without rights. [. . .] The illegal alien is thus an ‘impossible subject,’ a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.²²

El Hueco provides a Spanish-language term and image for this condition of being an impossible subject. As undocumented migrants, Marlon and Reina exist in a legal gap or hole that generates their nonexistence as rights-bearing subjects. Moreover, while social death and being an impossible subject technically begin when one enters the United States without proper authorization, this temporal construction ignores how the process of becoming undocumented begins in the home country. The fact that the trope of death runs throughout the

 Note that Franco chooses to capitalize the article and the noun (i.e., “El Hueco”). The English-language edition translates the term as “a black hole,” which captures how there is no official trace of them, but it misses the dual connotations of “hole” and “gap” on which I center my analysis of el Hueco (Silver, PT, 133).  Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004): 4.

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novel is important in this regard as it haunts not just Marlon’s and Reina’s experiences of undocumented migration but also their lives in Colombia. Overcome by despair because of her lack of options in Colombia, Reina is known for declaring that they should just kill themselves whenever she is frustrated, and at one point, she even tries to commit suicide. Marlon and Reina are part of the (lower) middle class, but they lack the economic and cultural capital to attain U.S. tourist visas. Marlon captures the situation thus: “La circumstancis era para sentir dolor y rabia con una patria que no ofrece nada que no sea sangre y muertos y un futuro de pobreza [The whole thing and all the circumstances around it made me feel hurt and angry about a country that offered nothing besides blood and death and a future of poverty]” (Franco, PT, 173; Silver, PT, 166). This suggests that migrating por el Hueco does not begin when they start their physical journey; rather, it begins with the decisions they make in Colombia that lead them to become undocumented migrants. In other words, the social death imposed by U.S. immigration law is inextricably intertwined with the death of socio-economic opportunities in Colombia, which are exacerbated by the five-decade long civil war in Colombia and the United States’ military and economic aid distributed to the country through Plan Colombia.²³ Living in el Hueco is a transnational experience marked by limited opportunities and mobility, but living in el Hueco can also produce alternative kinds of attachments.

Migrant mañas and affective citizenship Though social death overdetermines the lives of undocumented Colombian migrants, Paraíso Travel suggests that it can also provide the occasion to reimagine national belonging. The novel begins with Marlon relating how he could have died when he runs away from a policeman who approaches him after he throws a cigarette butt on the ground; Marlon, who does not speak English but knows he has been criminalized in the eyes of the State, flees in fear of deportation.

 See Cepeda for a useful and brief historical overview of the political crisis in Colombia and the United States’ involvement through Plan Colombia. Cepeda traces how these have influenced Colombian migration; at the same time, she points out that “[t]he international media’s longstanding focus on Colombia’s political struggles, while justified, has unwittingly led to a decreased emphasis on the other primary impetus driving mass migration to the United States. [….] In actuality, high unemployment rates provoked by neoliberal economic policies, the socioeconomic disconnects provoked by rising education rates, and an increased familiarity with North American styles of consumption constitute the key immigration ‘push’ factors for rural Colombians in particular” (Cepeda, Musical ImagiNation, 28).

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Marlon gets hopelessly lost and, as he wanders for an immeasurable amount of time, he loses touch with reality, causing him to experience another figurative death. Eventually he stumbles upon a restaurant aptly called Tierra Colombiana [Colombian Land]. When Marlon is barred from entering the restaurant because he appears to be “un loco eloquecido [a raving lunatic],” he sits immobile, half starving and utterly filthy, for days desperately staring at Tierra Colombiana from across the street (Franco, PT, 22; Silver, PT, 19). Marlon’s spatial separation from this symbolically nationalist space captures how he is a doubly nationally alienated subject who has experienced the death of his Colombianness and the social death of the undocumented migrant in the United States. It is not until Patricia, the wife of the owner, brings him into the restaurant to clean him up and offer him shelter as well as access to a community of fellow migrants that Marlon comes back to life. In another crossing of sorts, Marlon, who is described as a “dead man walking,” crosses over the threshold of the street into a new life (Silver, PT, 48).²⁴ Marlon thus undergoes his second rebirth of sorts. Earlier in order to cross over the border, Marlon slides through a “hueco [hole]” in the wooden logs into a “túnel oscuro [dark tunnel]” (Franco, PT, 205/ Silver, PT, 197), and upon arriving in the United States, he is pulled out “como si [él] estuviera naciendo de culo [as if [he] were being born backward]” (Franco, PT, 214; Silver, PT, 206). El Hueco thus functions as a migrant burial space and birth canal, suggesting that the death of one national and legal subjectivity can result in the birth of a new one. Moving away from the paradigm of the nation state that only offers social death, the novel figures Marlon’s reentry into Colombian land, so to speak, as a transnational space of belonging based on shared cultural affinities and affective kinship ties. Tierra Colombiana becomes Marlon’s new home and the base from which he learns to craft a new subjectivity and an affective sense of citizenship. While Marlon’s crossing por el Hueco turns him into an impossible subject, it is from precisely this social location that he learns, over the course of the novel, to forge a new sense of identity and enact shifting strategies to live under the radar of the State. Marlon learns to generate a critical reading of New York City and, implicitly, the United States from his perspective as an undocumented migrant. Jorge Franco reimagines José Martí’s infamous 1895 declaration, “I have lived in the monster, and I know its entrails – and my sling is that of David [Viví  Due to the grammatical construction of the original, I quote from the translation. The original reads “ver caminar a un muerto” (Franco, PT, 51). Marlon’s last name is Cruz, which means “cross” in Spanish. His name highlights his identity as a migrant who has crossed borders at the same time that it suggests that he has a cross to bear as a result of his status as an unauthorized migrant.

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en el monstruo y le conozco las entrañas – y mi honda es la de David].”²⁵ Giovanny, a fellow undocumented migrant from Colombia, teaches Marlon how to survive in the belly of the beast. Giovanny leads Marlon into the subway tunnels, telling him “Estas son las tripas del animal [These are the intestines of the beast]” (Franco, PT, 76; Silver, PT, 71) and then onto the roof of a building, saying as they gaze out at the cityscape, “Esta es la bestia que tenés que domar [That’s the beast you’ve got to tame]” (Franco, PT, 77; Silver, PT, 72). Giovanny explains that Marlon must do so not with “fuerza sino con maña,” that is, not with force or strength but with skills or tricks, and that he must remain vigilant because the apparatus of authority is always watching, ready to enforce the consequences of their undocumented status (Franco, PT, 81). Following Giovanny’s advice, Marlon later claims, “como un parasito aprendí a habitar en sus entrañas y a comer de ellas, siempre atento a no provocar la bestia;” that is, like a parasite he learns to live in the monster’s entrails and feed off of them, always careful not to provoke the beast (Franco, PT, 141).²⁶ There is an interesting gap between Giovanny’s choice of words – “taming” the beast with mañas – and Marlon’s choice of words – living as a “parasite” in the beast. Both necessitate tactical strategies for socio-economic survival, but Marlon’s use of “parasite” suggests that he has internalized the anti-immigrant discourse that constructs migrants as threats to the national body and as drains on the nation’s economy and its social services.²⁷ In reality, the relationship between undocumented migrants

 See Martí’s “Letter to Manuel Mercado” in José Martí: Selected Writings, trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002): 347. In reflecting on Martí’s metaphorization of the power relationship between Latin America and the United States as one between David and the giant Goliath, Laura Lomas notes, “Martí’s strategy for addressing this difference is to defeat brute force with ingenuity […]. Such a strategy authorizes the perspective of the dissenting minority deep within the monster’s gut, precisely the position that Martí claims he occupied while living in New York.” Laura Lomas, Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (Durham: Duke UP, 2009): 221.  I use “monster” and “beast” because Marlon uses “monstruo [monster]” at other points (Franco, PT, 122, 139) and that is the word that José Martí uses. The use of “bestia” is interesting given that Central American undocumented migrants call the freight trains that they ride to cross through Mexico to reach the U.S.-Mexico border “la Bestia.” Just as I argue that undocumented migrants do not leave el Hueco once in the United States, undocumented migrants have also not escaped the dangers of la Bestia when they arrive in the United States – they just face a different set of dangers.  For studies of the corporeal images, stigmatizing discourses, and hegemonic metaphors used to construct undocumented migrants in particular and Latina/os more generally, see Julie Avril Minich, Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2014), Leo R. Chávez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013) and Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Meta-

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and the United States as a host nation is not parasitic but symbiotic and, usually, undocumented migrants are the ones being exploited. Translating el Hueco as the Gap calls to mind this wealth gap. Though undocumented migrants have frequently been described as living in the “shadows,” el Hueco provides an alternative image that is not dependent on an absence of light but on a gap in the legal system and economic structure that those in power frequently exploit at the expense of migrants. For, while undocumented migrants are constructed as “illegals” and as threats to the welfare of the nation, the money their labor generates is legal and profitable, and the United States relies on, indeed thrives off of, lowwage undocumented workers. Like Martí’s writings, Franco’s novel highlights the tactics that are necessary to negotiate one’s position in the entrails of power. Martí’s metaphor for the prolonged physiological huecos in the cavernous space of the monster’s belly still has critical force. But, as Franco suggests, undocumented migrants who live in the belly of the beast have a different relationship to the structures of power than those who are here with documents. Being undocumented modifies Marlon’s habitus and forces him to acquire a different kind of cultural capital. For Marlon, there is a distinct danger in provoking the beast (the danger of being deported) and this threat modifies his approach to the beast. That is, Martí claims he is David ready to fight the Goliath of U.S. imperialism with the slingshot of his writing; Franco focuses more on the crushing, restricted living space of the entrails than on the active, assertive power of the slingshot. The novel suggests that being “indocumentado, jodido,” or undocumented, broke, and screwed, produces a different kind of knowledge about and critique of the United States (Franco, PT, 81). Though Martí, Giovanny, and Marlon are migrants who, to invoke the novel’s title, travel to the United States and come to see through the crafted myth of the United States as a paradise where everyone who works hard can achieve the American Dream, Martí resorts to the confrontational strength of his pen while Marlon must resort to his resourceful mañas. While Paraíso Travel usefully critiques the illusion of the American Dream that tantalizes many Latin American migrants, it accomplishes this, in part, through the problematic hypersexualization of Reina. Reina seduces Marlon into accompanying her to the United States by putting photos of New York City and the money she steals to pay for their journey through el Hueco down her pants, promising Marlon that they will consummate their relationship

phors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: U of Texas P, 2002). Their analyses of how the nation is imagined as a healthy body that is threatened by migrants, who are depicted as a disease or as parasites, are particularly apt here.

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once they are in the United States. Reina represents “the seductive power of the American Dream. She is its manifestation in Colombia: obsessed with the opportunity America promises, convinced of the hopelessness of life in Colombia, and deeply seductive in her narrative about the possibilities of life in the United States.”²⁸ Marlon quickly learns that the idealized image of the prosperous life Reina continually tells him they will have – a high rise apartment with a view of the Statue of Liberty and a small terrace from which they can view the sunset over the water – is an illusion. For, what they encounter as poor, undocumented migrants in New York City “nada tenía que ver con el sitio que ella me hizo soñar [had nothing to do with the place she made me dream about]” (Franco, PT, 9; Silver, PT, 5). The novel contains a double romance narrative in which Marlon is lured by his desire for Reina and by her desire for the American Dream, but both turn out to be failed romances. Marlon’s accidental physical separation from Reina is traumatic, but it serves as a catalyst for him to develop alternative forms of attachment and thereby, by the end of the novel, to no longer desire Reina or believe in the myth of the American Dream. Though the novel ultimately provides a productive reimagining of national affiliation, it is important to note that its plot development centers on the migration experience of its male protagonist and its narrative resolution is based on Marlon’s growth, which comes at the expense of Reina’s character development and which reinforces the wellworn tropes of the female seductress and the gendering of the nation as a female. As a result of his social location as an undocumented subject and the connections he establishes with a network of Colombian migrants in Queens, Marlon comes to imagine national belonging differently. Giovanny and Roger teach Marlon how to strategically and resourcefully use mañas to get by, Pastor and Patricia provide him with a job at the restaurant, and Milagros shows him how to have fun and some romance in New York City, and all of them serve as much needed interlocutors for Marlon to recount and process his experiences of el Hueco. These and other characters provide Marlon with the necessary financial, emotional, and narrative resources to begin his new life anew. The novel ends with Marlon coming to the realization that “la patria es cualquier lugar donde esté el afecto [a person’s country is wherever there is love and affection]” (Franco, PT, 237; Silver, PT, 228).²⁹ Marlon’s sense of belonging is no longer tethered to state-sanctioned citizenship or the geopolitical boundaries of the nation

 Riofrio, Continental Shifts, 51.  The English edition translates afecto as “love and affection,” which captures the dual signification of the word, but patria also has the dual signification of country and homeland.

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state; instead, it is based on the action of caring affectionately for others and creating intimate relationship ties. As he creates kinship through el Hueco, Marlon comes to espouse an affective sense of belonging that is not based on the singular nation state or on a single (heterosexual) relationship but rather on a more diffuse set of attachments. This affective citizenship is a feeling and a state of being. María Elena Cepeda’s spelling of “imagiNation” to highlight how it functions as “both noun and verb,” or as “a collective activity embedded in a definite sense of place(lessness),” aptly describes Marlon’s shifted sense of Colombian identity and cultural citizenship.³⁰ The novel reimagines national affiliation by positing that it need not be restricted to the nation state; rather, it can extend transnationally and inter-subjectively. Moreover, Marlon’s experiences of social death in the United States are counter balanced by his experiences of a tight-knit migrant community that functions as a community of sentiment, and this in turn gives rise to his alternative sense of citizenship.³¹ Marlon’s claim to affective citizenship is rooted in an expanded notion of kinship, and he produces this vision precisely because he entered into the critical space of el Hueco.

Insurgent images Since the establishment of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, the United States has built more elaborate barriers along portions of the U.S.-Mexico border and drastically increased its border policing, detention, and deportation apparatuses. Paraíso Travel is one text among a plethora of “post-Gatekeeper border fictions” and cultural productions that testify to the violence undocumented migrants face given this increasingly militarized border.³² The notion that the State could seal the border or completely control movement in the region – that it could close all the huecos in the nearly 2,000 mile stretch of territory – is a fiction but one that has had violent effects, creating a “landscape of death” along

 Cepeda, Musical ImagiNation, 8, 10. For more on cultural citizenship, see Renato Rosaldo, “Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism,” in Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, eds. William F. Flores and Rina Benmayor (Boston: Beacon P, 1997): 27– 38.  I take the phrase “community of sentiment” from Arjun Appadurai who defines it as “a group that begins to imagine and feel things together.” Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996): 8.  Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper. (Gainesville: U of Florida P: 2016): 56.

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the border.³³ Kofre, a New Jersey-based Latina/o Spanish-language band, released a CD entitled ¡Por el hueco! in 2008 that renders this landscape in visual and sonic terms. The album is framed through the titular Colombian expression, but the group is a pan- and trans- Latina/o band.³⁴ The cover art is a visual depiction of undocumented migration from Latin America and several titles songs index how the music is likewise steeped in this reality: “El Muerto [The Dead One]” “Papeles [Papers],” El Cruce [The Crossing].” The album cover strikingly depicts el Hueco using two very different aesthetic modes – the front cover [Figure 1] with a tableau of crudely drawn stick figure migrants and the back cover [Figure 2] with a palimpsest of different types of identity documents and photos of the band. Like Paraíso Travel, the album cover imagines the condition of social death as a burial of national identity, but, unlike Paraíso Travel, it suggests that migrating por el Hueco is a broadly Latin American, not exclusively Colombian, phenomenon. Joseph Nevins argues that since Operation Gatekeeper the divide between the United States and Mexico has evolved from a “border (or zone of interaction and transition between two separate political entities) to a boundary (or a line of strict demarcation).”³⁵ The front cover image renders this line of demarcation with a straight black line toped by barbed wire that divides the page in half. This symbolic territorial configuration separates the United States in the top half of the page from Latin America in the bottom half; yet, el Hueco appears in both spaces, a product of, as well as a response to, this division. Rather than depicting a hole in “the steel curtain – / chainlink fence crowned with rolled barbed wire –” like the one through which Gloria Anzaldúa walks or a hole in wooden logs like the ones in which Marlon and Reina hide, the cover image depicts huecos or holes in the ground both below and above the barbed wire fence.³⁶ The image thus literalizes the metaphor of migrating “¡POR EL

 Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on ‘Illegals’ and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge: 2010): 174.  Following Juan Flores usage of the terms, pan-Latina/o and trans-Latina/o highlight how the band is panethnic and transnational (From Bomba to Hip-Hop, 157). They have a U.S.-born Latino member and Latina/o members who migrated at varying ages from Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia.  Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond, 13. In addition, see Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), which theorizes how border walls are emblematic of the waning sovereignty of the nation state.  Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 24. I argued earlier that the gap in spacing in Anzaldúa’s poem evokes the hole in the border fence; here the black lines of the hyphens used as line breaks in the poem visually and typographically imitate the strict line of demarcation that the chain link fence represents.

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HUECO!” as the title on the cover prominently exclaims. The stick figure migrants disrupt and circumvent geopolitical boundaries by entering into huecos dug out of the ground in Latin America and emerging through other ones in the United States. The landscape of the page is structured around and dramatizes the enforcement of nation state boundaries. In the top half, one migrant looks longingly toward New York City in the background, but the threat of detention and violence looms large – represented by the squad cars of “la migra [border patrol]” and the guns wielded by both the border patrol officer and the border vigilante – as the undocumented migrants face socio-economic and legal precarity. In the bottom half, the stick figure migrants prepare to migrate from Latin America dressed in the colors of their national flags.³⁷ When they arrive in the United States, though, they are no longer clad in their national colors; this suggests that they, like Marlon and Reina who were forced to discard their passports, were stripped of their national identities as they came through el Hueco. The huecos function as tunnels to the United States, but they also double as graves, evidenced by the stick figure women dressed in black with crosses over their heads who could be mourning the migrants’ physical deaths or their social deaths. Unlike Jorge Franco’s Paraíso Travel, which focuses exclusively on Colombians, Kofre’s album reveals how el Hueco can serve as a productive metaphor for undocumented migration from Latin America more broadly. While the front cover visually renders the social death of undocumented Latin America migrants and the loss of their national identities, the back cover imagines a non-nation based Latin American identity forged through the shared condition of undocumented migration. With an array of identification cards that overlay a map of the New York CityNew Jersey area, the back cover engages a different kind of geospatial imagination that highlights forms of documentation more than forms of crossing. Playfully manipulating Spanish phonetics and English language names, the social security card is issued to “Joe Soy Falso.” “Soy falso” means “I am false,” but the deceptive slippage between “Joe” as a first name in English and “yo” as “I” in Spanish is humorous and exploits a gap between the seeming homophones. That is, when pronounced with a Spanish accent, “yo” sounds similar to “Joe” in a bilingual pun that turns the identifying Spanish-language pronoun for the subject (“yo”) into a nominal English-language name (“Joe”), in effect

 These include Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. The colors of the flags of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela are the same – yellow, blue, and red – so that shirt can represent any of these countries.

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turning “I” into a false subject. “Joe Soy Falso” not only declares that the document is falsified but that the subject it identifies is a false or impossible subject. Documenting the undocumented subject on a social security card entails humorously exploiting the linguistic gap or hueco that generates the bilingual pun. We can read the card’s social security number, which is “000 – 00 – 0000,” as a series of zeroes or as a series of huecos that visually recall the holes dug in the ground on the CD’s front cover image. Acquiring false documents is one of the many mañas undocumented migrants living in el Hueco use to access resources.

Figure 1. Front cover of Kofre’s album ¡Por el hueco!

Another fake document, the passport for the “REPUBLICA DEL PUEBLO,” imitates the names of Latin American countries such as La República de Colombia or La República de Perú but replaces the country name with el pueblo,³⁸

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Figure 2. Back cover of Kofre’s album ¡Por el hueco!

which evokes popular struggle slogans such as un pueblo unido jamás será vencido [a people united will never be defeated] and calls for the people to unite on behalf of the struggles of undocumented migrants. The anti-imperial and anticapitalist ethos symbolized by the iconic image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara that graces the cover of the passport is in dialogue with the call for liberation embedded in the song lyrics³⁹ at the same time that the passport calls into question the

 El pueblo translates as “the people,” “the nation,” and “the village.”  One song, for example, denounces the economic exploitation of Latina/os in the “máquina maldita [damn machine]” of New York City and declares that Latina/os have risen up in the

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regime of citizenship and immigration quotas that regulate national belonging and migrants’ (lack of) rights. In its place, the passport imagines a literal nation of the people: the Republic of the People. The passport thus materializes an imagined community for those who come through and live in el Hueco. The passport extends or even dissipates the borders of the nation given that el pueblo can signify the members of a nation state or a people linked by a shared sense of hemispheric belonging. This more utopian reading of the passport, though, needs to be tempered with an acknowledgement that the artwork’s visual landscape is masculinist and, like Paraíso Travel, centers on male protagonists and male agency. The “revolutionary masculinity” embodied by Che Guevara reminds us of the failure of Latin American revolutions and U.S. ethnic nationalisms to incorporate feminist and queer issues into their agendas.⁴⁰ In contrast to the front cover that portrays men and women migrating, all of the identification documents on the back cover are for males, literally and metaphorically foregrounding male migrants and masculinist dissent. The experiences of female and queer migrants are problematically disappeared from this collection of documents.⁴¹ The back cover of the CD thus reinforces the common but erroneous assumption in the United States that undocumented migrants are predominately male, and it reinscribes heteropatriarchial anti-imperialist struggles. Overall, the CD’s album cover functions as a “migrant cartography” that maps out the dire reality of undocumented migration and provides a vision of another possible future.⁴² The migrants go through el Hueco and are threatened with capture, deportation, and death on the front cover, but they emerge as citizens of the República del Pueblo on the back cover. The artwork thus moves from

streets, for “El pueblo latino jamás sera vencido [Latino people will never be defeated]” (“Makina”). Kofre’s musical imagination aligns with other Latina/s and Latin American musicians singing about undocumented migration such as La Santa Cecila, Calle 13, Los Tigres del Norte, Las Cafeteras, Willie Colón, Winsin & Yadel, Rebel Diaz, Molotov, Chicano Batman, and Ana Tijoux.  Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham: Duke UP, 2003): 77. For further analyses of how other Latina/o popular musicians frequently rely on masculinist icons of resistance and revolution, see María Elena Cepeda, “Media and the Musical Imagination: Comparative Discourses of Belonging in ‘Nuestro Himno’ and ‘Reggaetón Latino,’” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 16.5 (2009): 548 – 572 and Richard T. Rodríguez, Next of Kin: The Family in Chicana/o Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke UP, 2009).  In contrast, the “UndocQueer Movement” has helped center the experiences of queer undocumented migrants in the struggle for social justice.  Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York UP, 2008): 16.

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the condition of social death in which the migrants are stripped of legal rights and national belonging toward the condition of hemispheric citizenship. This future remains anticipatory given that the República del Pueblo does not currently exist, but the passport overlays a map, gesturing toward a different configuration that can emerge from el Hueco if we reimagine and redraw our maps of territorial affiliation. Franco’s novel depicts national belonging in terms of extended kinship relations and affective citizenship, whereas Kofre’s album art depicts an insurgent notion of citizenship in which shared solidarity around migrant social justice struggles generates transnational belonging. Given the current slew of anti-immigration laws, discriminatory policies, and xenophobic discourse surrounding undocumented migration in the United States and in Europe, it is ever more pressing that we be attune to the differing contours of undocumented migrant imaginaries. I employ “undocumented” here in two different ways. I use it to build on Alicia Schmidt Camacho’s term “migrant imaginaries,” which refers to “the world-making aspirations of Mexican border crossers,” in order to highlight the migrant imaginaries produced by and about undocumented Latin American migrants.⁴³ I also use it to refer to migrant imaginaries that have not been documented in scholarship or cultural production. It is urgent that we challenge the negative hegemonic metaphors associated with Latina/o migrants and citizens because that stigmatizing discourse only serves to reinforce their domination, racialization, and marginalization. The metaphor of el Hueco is part of a larger set of what Otto Santa Anna calls “insurgent metaphors,” which Latina/o migrants and citizens are constructing to contest the dominant negative construction of undocumented migration.⁴⁴ We can thus position Jorge Franco’s Paraíso Travel and Kofre’s ¡Por el hueco! alongside other cultural production that advocates for migrants rights such as the empowering images of butterflies by artists and activists like Favianna Rodriguez, Julio Salgado, Cesar Maxit, and the UndocuBus riders or the provocative images of superheroes by artists like Dulce Pinzón and Neil Rivas. The structural and ideological conditions that produce undocumented migration and its attendant social death necessitate radical transformation. In the meantime, the knowledge and metaphors that undocumented migrants (and their allies) use to describe and interpret their existence as impossible subjects contribute critical paradigms for documenting migrant lives in the Americas. Mobilizing a range of insurgent metaphors and alternative transnational imaginaries about undocumented migration not only contests but, ideally, will

 Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries, 5.  Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising, 295.

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also ultimately help dismantle anti-immigration policies and exclusionary nationalist discourses. As Kofre invokes us to chant: Inmigrantes, Sí! Criminales, No! Inocentes, no ilegales La justicia no comprende Que este sistema no nos defiende [….] Hay leyes que hay que romper Immigrants, Yes! Criminals, No! Innocent, not illegal The justice system does not understand That the system does not defend us [….] There are laws that have to be broken (“El Cruce”)

Crossing borders por el Hueco need not be criminalized. For true justice entails the right to migrate freely.

David J. Vázquez

Toxicity and the Politics of Narration: Imagining Social and Environmental Justice in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper Salvador Plascencia’s 2005 novel The People of Paper offers a case study for how Latina/o authors intertwine social, political, and economic resistance with environmental representations. These environmental representations challenge the traditional notion of environmentalism as a white, middle-class phenomenon. In order to unpack these complex environmental representations, this essay builds on conversations between Latina/o studies and environmental studies. By fostering and extending the ongoing conversation between the two fields, it is possible to better comprehend how The People of Paper represents environmental justice as integral to a larger discursive quest for social justice. As an aspect of this analysis, I consider Plascencia’s experimentation with the novel form in order to comprehend how The People of Paper posits alternative tropes of agency that combat the intractability of contemporary racism and environmental degradation. Yes, the Chicano and Chicana have always taken care of growing things and the land. – Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera ¹ In a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses. – Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor ²

Since its publication in 2005, Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper has been the subject of critical discussion in a number of fields, including Latina/o literary criticism,³ postmodernist and post-postmodernist studies,⁴ and

 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999): 113.  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 2011): 15.  Kevin Cooney, “Metafictional Geographies: Los Angeles in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper,” in On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture, ed. M. B. Hackler and Ari J. Adipurwawidjan (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009): 189 – 218; John Morán González, “Aztlán@ Fifty: Chican@ Literary Studies for the Next https://doi.org/9783110532913-005

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even – owing to the novel’s experimental formal qualitied – the digital humanities.⁵ Plascencia’s intertwining of themes of social, political, and economic resistance with critiques of agricultural exploitation and toxicity also offers opportunities to place Latina/o studies methodologies into dialog with environmental studies scholarship. In this essay I build on conversations between Latina/o studies and environmental studies to better comprehend how The People of Paper represents environmental justice as integral to a larger discursive quest for social justice. I unpack Plascencia’s experimentation with the novel form as an aspect of this analysis to consider how his innovative representations make visible ideologies of racism, environmental degradation, and toxicity that work in concert to oppress Latina/os in greater Los Angeles. Concomitantly, I consider how the novel posits alternative tropes of agency designed to combat the intractability of contemporary racism and environmental harm in what Ramón Saldívar describes as the “postrace” novel. The People of Paper is surreal and experimental, juxtaposing narrative modes, form, and graphical content to portray a series of fanciful characters, ranging from loosely based historical figures like Hollywood icon Rita Hayworth (a.k.a Margarita Cansino), to Merced de Papel, a woman literally made of paper. Lacking a central narrative voice, the novel alternates between a cacophony of characters’ perspectives that are linked through experiences of unrequited love. To the extent that there are linear narrative threads, the novel focuses on two main plotlines. The first of these centers upon Federico de la Fe and his daughter Little Merced, who migrate to the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte from a small town near Guadalajara, Mexico, after he loses his wife (also named Merced) as a result of his enuresis (bed wetting). Even before they reach El Monte, de la Fe perceives an oppressive force in the sky that he senses for years, but now feels “heavier than ever before.”⁶ Once in El Monte, de la Fe joins a gang (El Monte Flores or EMF) and rebels against this oppressive force in what they term “a war for volition and against the commodification of sadness” Decade,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 35.2 (2010): 173 – 176; Jennifer Harford Vargas, Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel (New York: Oxford UP, Forthcoming).  Ramón Saldívar, “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction,” American Literary History 23.2 (2011): 574– 599; Mitchum Huehls, “The Post-Theory Theory Novel,” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (2015): 280 – 310.  Katherine N. Hayles, “The Future of Literature: Complex Surfaces of Electronic Texts and Print Books,” in A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy, ed. James J. Bono, Tim Dean and Ziarek Ewa Plonowska (New York: Fordham UP, 2008): 180 – 209.  Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (Orlando: Mariner Books, 2006): 28. Further references in text, abbreviated as “PoP.”

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(PoP, 53). The oppressive force, initially known as Saturn, is later revealed to be the figure of the author himself, Salvador Plascencia (or Sal as he is known in the novel). EMF’s struggle with Saturn/Sal is about nothing less than a war on the concept of omniscient narration.⁷ The second plotline accentuates this metafictional turn, detailing Saturn/Sal’s loss of his girlfriend Liz to a white lover while he labors on a novel entitled The People of Paper. The implication is that the commodification of sadness partially assuages Saturn/Sal’s unrequited love through a voyeuristic (and at times sadistic) relationship with the novel’s characters. Rather than representing environmental harm as a digression from issues of racial and economic justice, Plascencia integrates environmental themes as central to his critiques of race and racism. In some cases, these representations supplant traditional issues of racial and economic justice in Latina/o literature, expanding and augmenting the Latina/o studies field imaginary to include more and more robust environmental considerations. At the same time, the novel’s meditations on authorial power complicates readings of race and racism within ecocriticism. The novel thus deploys environmental themes at key points, making visible entwined aspects of social, racial, and environmental degradation in Latina/o communities.

Extending conversations between Latina/o studies and environmental studies: facilitating social and political justice For readers unfamiliar with ecocriticism and environmental justice (EJ) scholarship, it is important to outline the fields. A subset of environmental studies, ecocriticism focuses on understanding literary representations of environmental ideas and themes. Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as: the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, Ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.⁸

 I refer to the metafictional author/narrator as Saturn/Sal. Where he appears as a character who narrates sections of the novel, I retain the singular designation Saturn. I use Plascencia to refer to the actual author (as opposed to the metafictional character).  Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996): xviii.

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The earth-centered approach Glotfelty outlines centers on studies of place/space, representations of landscape and nature, and phenomenology. During the past two decades, ecocriticism has expanded its critical reach to areas such as new materialism (which stresses the agency and significance of the material world), animal studies, cosmopolitics (a theory of being in the world that transcends human cultures to include animals and inorganic objects), and biosemiotics (the study of forms of communication and signification in and between living systems, including the non-human world).⁹ Another subfield of environmental studies and literary studies in ecocriticism, is environmental justice (EJ). Central tenets of EJ scholarship hold that “both class and race are integrally related to the distribution of environmental hazards.”¹⁰ Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein define environmental justice as “the right of all people to share equally in the benefits bestowed by a healthy environment.” For Adamson, Evans, and Stein, EJ scholarship illuminates “crucial intersections between ecological and social justice concerns.”¹¹ While the history of EJ movements are, as Sylvia Hood Washington and Susan A. Mann remind us, rooted in the abolitionist, suffragist, and anti-racist struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the modern environmental justice movement dates to the 1980s.¹² Inspired by grassroots activists in the developing world like Ken Saro-Wiwa and Vandana Shiva, spontaneous inner-city protests against toxicity and urban pollution within the United States, and pioneering scholarship by Robert D. Bullard, Ramachandra Guha, Laura Pulido, Pratap Chatterjee, Winona LaDuke, and others, EJ scholars integrate theory, activism and praxis. Like ecocriticism, EJ literary scholarship examines environ-

 For more on new materialism, see Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana UP, 2010). For more on cosmopolitics see Bruno Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?: Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck,” Common Knowledge 10.3 (2004): 450 – 461; Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010); Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm P, 2003); and Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford UP, 2008). For more on biosemiotics see Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006) and Marcello Barbieri, The Codes of Life: The Rules of Macroevolution (New York: Springer, 2008).  Susan Mann, “Pioneers of U. S. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice,” Feminist Formations 23.2 (2011): 1– 25, 2.  Joni Adamson, Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics & Pedagogy (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002): 4.  Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them in: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865-1954 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005).

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mental themes and perspectives, emphasizing materiality, social movements, and issues of inequality in literary texts. While pioneering scholarship by Latina/o studies critics like geographer and urban planner Laura Pulido, anthropologist Devon Peña, and literary critics Priscilla Ybarra, Sarah Wald, and Grisel Y. Acosta has considered environmental ideas, the field traditionally revolves around issues of social and political justice as distinct from environmental concerns. This emphasis on social and political justice owes in part to the fact that the emergence of Chicana/o¹³ and Puerto Rican Studies in relation to the insurgent politics of the 1960s and 1970s left progressive legacies, especially in relation to education, human and civil rights, immigration, border studies, and cultural affirmation.¹⁴ These legacies found natural extension in comparative Latina/o studies, where issues of social and political justice are primary foci.¹⁵ While these foci are understandable, given the fields’ foundations in insurgent social movements, it is crucial to consider how the long and robust tradition of environmental writing produced by Latina/o authors offers alternatives to mainstream environmental imaginaries. As Priscilla Ybarra shows, environmental concerns – especially environmental justice concerns – have been fundamen-

 Although the origins of the term are disputed, Chicana/o became a common designation for Mexican-origin populations in the United States during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It has come to signify both a shared Mexican American cultural heritage and a politically progressive identity. While the term is not universally accepted, it has become an important signifier of identity for many Mexican-origin people in the United States. For more on the Chicano Movement and the origin of the term Chicana/o, see Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, eighth ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2015).  For a small sample of recent literature on the Chicana/o and Puerto Rican Movements, see Lee Bebout, Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011); David Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966 – 1981 (Austin: U of Texas P, 2010); Maylei Blackwell, Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: U of Texas P, 2011); Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 2010); Darrel Enck-Wanzer, The Young Lords A Reader (New York: NYU P, 2010); and Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez, The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998).  See, for example, Marta Caminero-Santangelo, On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2007); Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez, The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); David J. Vázquez, Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011); John D. Riofrio, Continental Shifts: Migration, Representation, and the Struggle for Justice in Latin(o) America (Austin: U of Texas P, 2015); and Ylce Irizarry, Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2016).

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tal to Latina/o literature since at least the early twentieth century: “[w]hile the American project of environmentalism denotes an explicit quest to find alternatives to exploitative approaches to nature,” Latina/o culture and literature have represented “values and practices that include nature all along.”¹⁶ Ybarra’s point provides a literary historical account of how Latina/o authors have linked questions of racism and environmental injustice for more than a century. Importantly, Ybarra underscores that racism, homophobia, sexism and environmental degradation function as intertwined aspects of uneven power relations. Given these points and the undeniable and mounting impacts of climate change, sea level rise, and deforestation, it is curious that Latina/o literary criticism has not fully considered this robust body of environmental writing. As Ybarra notes in another context, glossing both W.E.B. DuBois and ecocritic Lawrence Buell, “the most pressing problem of the twenty-first century may be that racism, homophobia, and sexism continue alongside – and are exacerbated by – the shrinking sustainability of the natural environment.”¹⁷ The relative inattention to environmental ideas is more striking when one considers that authors like Helena María Viramontes, Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga have garnered attention from ecocritics and EJ scholars during recent years. A quick search of contemporary ecocritical literature and syllabi reveals frequent appearances from texts like Castillo’s So Far From God, Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La frontera. One way to understand the limited attention Latina/o studies has paid to environmental representations is due to the lingering (mis)perception that environmentalism is a white, middle-class phenomenon. As Christa Grewe-Volpp observes “environmental problems did not play a significant role” during the early formation of Latina/o studies in the 1960s and 1970s because “[e]nvironmental debates were then dominated by middle-class white environmentalists protecting the wilderness.”¹⁸ In their classic study Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez Alier attribute the association of environmentalism with privileged perspectives to the discourse of “green” development as an exclusively Western enterprise and the legacies of colonialism. Guha and Martínez Alier explain that the Western desire to

 Priscilla Ybarra, Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2016): 7.  Priscilla Ybarra, “Borderlands as Bioregion: Jovita González, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the Twentieth-Century Ecological Revolution in the Rio Grande Valley,” MELUS 34.2 (2009): 175 – 189, 176.  Christa Grewe-Volpp, “‘The Oil Was Made from Their Bones’: Environmental (In)Justice in Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 12.1 (2005): 61– 78, 63.

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preserve nature arises during the advent of modernism and the industrial revolution, a moment when nature is destroyed at an accelerating pace. A variety of this thought transforms into the idea of “kinship” with nature, a concept exclusive to developed Western nations. These strains of thinking hold that the poor¹⁹ have no sense of environmental consciousness; to the contrary, green thinking becomes a hallmark of development. The poor, racialized, and formerly colonized, thus learn to distrust first-world environmentalism as yet another exploitation strategy.²⁰ Guha and Martínez Alier counter this discourse by asserting that the poor evidence sophisticated relationships with the environment: There are, of course, many varieties of environmentalism, […] One might broadly say […] the poor countries and poor individuals are not interested in the mere protection of wild species or natural habitats, but do respond to environmental destruction which directly affects their way of life and prospects for survival.²¹

Guha and Martínez Alier recode the environmentalism of the poor in terms of survival; the poor are not interested in preservation as a “lifestyle.” Instead, poor communities in the developing world have vested interests in responding to environmental harms that threaten their economic and cultural wellbeing. In this sense, the authors disrupt what “counts” as environmentalism, in part because the environmentalism of the poor has different features. For example, the environmentalism of the poor often emphasizes collective political action over removal from community (as in the case of Henry David Thoreau or Edward Abbey) and acts of preservation that include aspects of human land use (the Chipko Movement) over wilderness preservation and market-based reform.²²  Guha and Martínez Alier’s use the term “poor” to denote marginalized populations in the developing world. I retain their terminology to distinguish the disempowered subjects they document from elites in the developing world (e. g., Indian Government officials) and First World environmentalists.  Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan Publications, 1997): xii–xx.  Guha and Martínez Alier, Varieties, xx.  Originating in the Himalayan regions of India, the Chipko Movement was a series of actions undertaken by peasants – most of whom were women – to prevent deforestation. Women of local villages would enter the forests and (literally) hug the trees to prevent timber workers from cutting them down. The Chipko Movement was successful, leading to a 15-year ban on green logging. The derogatory term “treehugger” used to denote environmental activists comes from the Chipko protests. For more on the Chipko Movement, see Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000).

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While these forms are different from stereotypical notions of Western environmentalism, they are no less environmental. In a similar vein, Laura Pulido explores relationships between mainstream environmentalism and Latina/os in the Southwest. Pulido argues that mainstream environmentalism has fallen short of more powerful critiques because of its emphasis on symptoms rather than root causes. As a result, some environmental studies scholarship emphasizes individual acts of resistance over critically interrogating conditions that produce disproportionate environmental outcomes. Pulido asserts that unpacking subaltern environmentalism requires understanding how it is constituted by structured and institutionalized inequality: “the environmental struggles of the marginalized are very much about power. Only through gaining more power to change their conditions can oppressed people live in dignity and work toward social equality.”²³ Guha and Martínez Alier and Pulido employ historical and social science perspectives to make visible how subaltern environmentalisms in the developing world and in racialized populations in the United States evidence qualitative differences from mainstream environmental movements. Subaltern environmentalisms are about power, emphasizing that the poor, the racialized, and the formerly colonized share uneven experiences of environmental harm that are intertwined with other forms of marginalization. Their analysis underscores how racism, colonization, neoliberal discourses of development, and environmental degradation emerge from similar strategies of domination. Consequently, subaltern forms of environmentalism are often interwoven with decolonial and anti-racist struggles. As postcolonial ecocritic Rob Nixon puts it, impoverished resource rebels can seldom afford to be single-issue activists: their green commitments are seamed through with other economic and cultural causes as they experience environmental threat not as a planetary abstraction but as a set of inhabited risks.²⁴

I build on Guha and Martínez Alier’s and Pulido’s analysis – as well as the observations of ecocritics like Lawrence Buell, Rob Nixon, Janet Fiskio, Joni Adamson, Scott Slovic,²⁵ and others – to contend that some forms of mainstream en Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest, second edition (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1996): xvii–xviii.  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011): 4.  Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001); Nixon, Slow Violence; Janet Fiskio, “Unsettling Ecocriticism: Rethinking Agrarianism, Place, and Citizenship,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 84.2 (2012): 301– 325; Joni Adamson, American Indi-

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vironmentalism have facilitated capitalist development by emphasizing individual action (riding a bicycle or carpooling to work, recycling, etc.), market reforms (buying “green” products, boycotts, etc.), and collaboration with corporations and other powerful institutions vis-à-vis the stakeholder model as modes for environmental remedy.²⁶ Social justice concerns are thus limited by their imbrication within traditional economic and political power arrangements. By contrast, Latina/o authors often employ innovative representations that imagine economic, racial, and environmental marginalization as complex interrelated phenomena. Considering the environmental dimensions of Latina/o texts also holds the potential to expand the archive and open new lines of critical inquiry for Latina/o studies, especially as they relate to the innovative ways Latina/o authors respond to environmental issues such as climate change, toxicity, urban space, and food justice. As Grisel Y. Acosta points out “the original goals of ecocriticism need not be associated with a white or Western aesthetic.”²⁷ Acosta alerts us to the fact that authors like Junot Díaz, Cherríe Moraga, Ernesto Quiñonez, Sandra Cisneros, John Rechy, Josefina Niggli, Alejandro Morales, Jovita González, and Justin Torres – among others – explicitly represent and engage environmental ideas in their work. These authors’ environmental representations span rural, urban, and suburban settings and situations, holding the possibility of remaking the racial, social, and spatial ranges of both ecocriticism and Latina/o studies.²⁸ It is without question that people of color experience environmental harm at higher rates than whites. According to a report by Adrianna Quintero-Somaini and Mayra Quirindongo for the Natural Resources Defense Council, 1.5 million Latina/os live in unincorporated colonias along the U.S./Mexico border, without access to potable water and with increased exposure to water-borne illnesses like giardiasis, hepatitis, and cholera. Similarly, the report notes that 91 percent

an Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001); Scott Slovic, “The Third Wave of Ecocriticism: North American Reflections on the Current Phase of the Discipline,” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 1.1 (2010): n. pag [August 16, 2016].  Stakeholder theory holds that organizations share relationships with constituents and other interested parties (the stakeholders). The stakeholder model brings together interested parties to make collective decisions about an organization’s activities. While the stakeholder model emphasizes collaboration and mediating disparate perspectives, in environmental contexts it often brings to the table corporate and bureaucratic interests that foreclose the possibility of radical reform.  Grisel Y. Acosta, “Environmentalism,” in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, ed. Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio (London: Routledge, 2012): 195 – 203, 196.  Acosta, “Environmentalism,” 196.

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of Latina/os live in large cities where exposure to air pollution is higher than comparable Anglo communities.²⁹ In a recent issue of The Atlantic, journalist Matt Vasilogambros explores how sea level rise has caused a surge in gentrification in historically black and Haitian neighborhoods that occupy higher ground in Miami, displacing communities of color as the risks of salt water intrusion into affluent coastal areas becomes an increasing certainty.³⁰ These circumstances point to the fact that Latina/os and other people of color bear the brunt of environmental changes. They also serve as chilling reminders of dynamics that will only intensify as climate change escalates over the next century. Given these sobering facts, it is important to understand how some varieties of ecocriticism conceive of environmentalism in relation to discourses of race and racism, especially as they pertain to ethnic American literary texts. As Sarah Jaquette Ray points out, the roots of contemporary environmentalism incorporate such social control programs as eugenics and border security, masking how people of color are sometimes imagined in essentialist terms or posited as a “problem” that environmentalism seeks to remedy.³¹ Underscoring these points, ecocritics like Ursula Heise note that some aspects of contemporary environmental studies reproduce colonialist and racialist discourses: [the] crucial insights of the last twenty years of cultural theory into the ways local and national identities depend on excluded others, how they rely on but often deny their own hybrid mixtures with other places and cultures, and in what ways real and imagined travel to other places shapes self-definitions have not left any lasting marks on American environmentalist and ecocritical thought.³²

Environmental representations in Latina/o literature offer points of convergence for extending dialogs between ecocriticism and Latina/o studies. Although ecocritics like Buell, Slovic, and Adamson have long called for more inclusive forms of environmental criticism (what Slovic terms a “third wave” of ecocriticism), there is still room to consider how Latina/o literary representations of race

 Hidden Danger: Environmental Health Threats in the Latino Community, [accessed June 21, 2016].  Matt Vasilogambros, “Taking the High Ground—and Developing It,” [accessed March 6, 2016].  Sarah Jaquette Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2013).  Heise, Sense of Place, 42.

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and racism might extend conversations about environmental injustice.³³ At the same time, employing ecocritical methodologies allows Latina/o studies critics to extend the questions and methodologies the field employs, especially as they relate to what is arguably the most pressing issue of our time: the sustainability of our environment. Rather than thinking about environment as a departure from social justice, Latina/o studies might examine environmental representations as fundamental aspects of how Latina/os discursively contest marginalization of many kinds. Considering these environmental representations provides opportunities for both fields to engage how authors and texts imagine entwined aspects of racial, social, and environmental justice. As we will see, The People of Paper offers a case study in how combining ecocritical and EJ lenses with Latina/o literary methodologies reveals sophisticated representations that grapple with connections between environmental issues and other social justice concerns.

Postrace aesthetics, the politics of narration, and environmental justice Acknowledging points of convergence between Latina/o studies and environmental studies provides a helpful framework for understanding the stakes of narrative innovation as an integral aspect of Plascencia’s representation of environmental and social justice. The People of Paper is wildly experimental, ranging from its lack of a central narrative voice, to redactions, multiple column layouts, and (in the McSweeney’s first edition) physical cutouts of the text. Critics like Ramón Saldívar and Kate Marshall argue that these types of narrative experiments signal a change in the development of the novel form. Saldívar explores the evolution of the contemporary novel in a pair of recent essays. He claims this “second elevation of the novel” is related to a new moment in the history of race relations in the U.S.: the onset and cultural dominance of colorblind racism, or what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva terms “racism without racists.”³⁴ Although Saldívar acknowledges that “race and racism, ethnicity and difference are nowhere near extinct in contemporary America,” he suggests that contemporary ethnic American authors often connect postmodern form with old-

 Buell, Writing for an Endangered World; Slovic, “The Third Wave”; Adamson, American Indian Literature.  Eduardo Bonilla Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, third ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

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school claims for social justice.³⁵ Contemporary postrace texts couple postmodern narrative experimentation with “a concomitant and untrammeled persistence of the desire for the transcendence of race and racism.³⁶ While the idea of transcending race and racism has been anathema to twentieth century movements for social justice, Saldívar suggests that the term postrace is deployed “under erasure and with full ironic force.”³⁷ Postrace fiction is compelling because it foregrounds tensions between racism and the invisibility of racists, the continuing power of white supremacy, the ongoing hope for transcendent possibilities, and the likely impossibility of their attainment. For Marshall, formal innovation in contemporary fiction indicates the challenges posed by the accelerating pace of environmental degradation that she reads through the lens of the Anthropocene (the stratigraphic epoch during which the effects of human activity have reached a global geologic force).³⁸ Marshall asserts that, at this point in literary history, it is impossible to discuss temporality in contemporary fiction without taking into account the Anthropocene: “The Anthropocene […] is a way of marking time, or suggesting that there is a form of temporality that can be understood as a mediation of the surface of the globe by the human species.”³⁹ Part of the reason why the Anthropocene transforms the novel form owes to the way the concept changes our discursive relationship to the world. “Novels of the Anthropocene” engage in new forms of temporality that are as concerned with the future as they are with the past: “[a]n aspect of this debate that matters to the novel is the degree to which it requires thinking proleptically, or registering a future point of view.”⁴⁰  Saldívar, “Historical Fantasy,” 574.  Ramón Saldívar, “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative,” Narrative 21.1 (2013): 1– 18, 2. Saldívar’s use of the term “postrace” glosses African American novelist Colson Whitehead’s 2009 New York Times Op Ed, entitled simply “The Year of Living Postracially.” In the article, Whitehead satirizes the idea that President Obama’s election in 2008 erases the more than 500-year history of racism in the United States: “There have been more than 500,000 online mentions of postraciality this year, as opposed to absolutely zero in 1982. Some say that’s because the Internet didn’t really exist back then. I prefer to think it’s because we’ve come a long way as a country” (“The Year of Living Postracially.” The New York Times, November 3, 2009, NYTimes.com. [March 14, 2016].)  Saldívar, “Second Elevation,” 2.  For more on the Anthropocene, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197– 222.  Kate Marshall, “What Are the Novels of the Anthropocene? American Fiction in Geological Time,” American Literary History 27.3 (2015): 523 – 538, 523.  Marshall, “Novels of the Anthropocene,” 533. Marshall’s point centers on how authors imagine a “future point of view that by its very constitution must be nonhuman, or at least postterrestrial” (“NoA,” 523). While this aspect of Marshall’s argument is important for human relation-

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Part of what animates the formal innovation many contemporary Latina/o and Latina/o authors like Plascencia employ is a desire to discursively respond to the intractability of racism and the exigencies of environmental harm. One way to understand the prolepsis Marshall describes is in relation to Saldívar’s concept of “speculative realism,” or the deployment of multiple narrative modes (realism, fantasy, science fiction, etc.) to imagine alternative social orders. These speculative possibilities reorient such novels to different questions of social, political, and environmental justice. When considered from this standpoint, it is significant that Marshall offers a reading of an ethnic American literary text as her paradigmatic Anthropocene novel (Colson Whitehead’s 2011 novel Zone One), underscoring the relationship between postrace fiction, speculative realism, and formal changes associated with environmental degradation. Flowing from these observations, it is important to note how Plascencia uses environmental representations as signifiers of injustice, while also opening utopic possibilities for his characters. Plascencia’s environmental tropes become primary signifiers for how injustice – both environmental and racial – are perpetuated and resisted by the characters in his novel. Even as he deploys these tropes, Plascencia refuses the narrative closure we expect from the novel form: the People of Paper is replete with unresolvable tensions, including an uncertain ending that refuses the reader knowledge of the future. Central to my reading is Federico de la Fe’s and the other EMF members’ struggles against Saturn/Sal, or the war against the commodification of sadness. EMF, a group of cholos who pick carnations in the flower fields of El Monte, are not like “[t]he city gangs with their pressed zoot suits, Al Capone cars, and automatic guns,” either in style or activity. But while EMF is “the first street gang born of carnations,” there is “no softness in petals and no aroma in flowers.” Instead, they experience flower picking as “only the splinters and calluses from tilling the land and smell[ing] only the stench of fertilizer and horse shit” (PoP, 34). EMF’s work is portrayed in material terms that emphasize difficult aspects of farmworker lives. As Jennifer Harford Vargas observes, “for all its apparent formal differences, Plascencia’s novel fits into the corpus of Chicana/o novels about migrant farm labor such as Tomás Rivera’s … y no se lo tragó la tierra and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus.”⁴¹ Plascencia represents these difficult aspects (calluses, splinters, the smell of excrement) as endemic to this form of labor. The author’s depiction thus recuperates what often drops out ships to the non-human world, my interests in this essay are concerned with how she unpacks temporal narrative experiments and their concomitant implications for environmental representations in The People of Paper.  Harford Vargas, Forms of Dictatorship: 111.

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of romantic portrayals of agricultural labor and the pastoral by such canonical figures in environmental literature as Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold. Although these authors advocate responsible relationships with the land, they neglect the ways contemporary agriculture depends on the exploitation of Latina/os and other people of color. Moreover, EMF’s flowers are produced to make “bouquets and potpourri,” suggesting that what they produce serves no material need, but instead exists for the express purpose of capitalist excess. Of note is the fact that these agricultural laborers – many of them undocumented migrants from Mexico – work within the confines of greater Los Angeles, complicating images of farmwork as a purely rural endeavor. As a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) “Fact Sheet on Small Farmers and Urban Agriculture” outlines, roughly 15 percent of the world’s farms exist within city limits, underscoring the importance of agriculture as both a rural and urban phenomenon.⁴² Likewise, EMF’s labor complicates portrayals of gangs as either idle or violently illicit by the popular media and Latina/o authors like Yxta Maya Murray, Luis Rodríguez, and Piri Thomas. Although the city gangs know not to call them “sissy flower pickers” (PoP, 34), by all appearances EMF is not a violent or criminal bunch. By contrast, they are both productive (they don’t engage in gang activity until after they pick their daily flowers) and largely non-destructive. Beyond their discursive fight against Saturn/Sal (which is primarily oriented around non-violent strategies) their activities seem confined to tagging and resisting their exploitation: they work in the morning so that the dew and an occasional rock increase the weight of their yields. While images of farmwork are central in the novel, Plascencia’s environmental engagements encompass a number of other representations. In his portrayal of a fleet of mechanical tortoises that wreak havoc on the landscape, the ubiquity of toxic conditions, including the omnipresence of crop dusters and contaminated water, and a preoccupation with fruit and other food sources, Plascencia demonstrates deep and broad engagements with environmental themes and ideas. One environmental theme that runs through the novel is the persistence of images of decay. Early in their war against Saturn/Sal, the members of EMF are plagued by an attack of fungus that spreads from carnation stems onto Froggy (one of the leaders of EMF), eventually contaminating most of the gang. The contagion is so strong that it kills “twenty-three EMF cholos,” each of whom is found to have “toadstools growing between their ribs” during post-mortem ex-

 March 15, 2016].

[accessed

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aminations (PoP, 54). The image of fungal contamination replicates both EMF’s engagement in the war against the commodification of sadness (like fungus, they are persistent and omnipresent) and the ways omniscient narration parasitizes the lives of people of color. One way to read the plague of fungus is as a metaphor for the narrative dangers of representing Latina/os’ and other people of color’s lives. Omniscient narration functions as an uneasy mode through which processes of racism and colonization are replicated in the novel form: like fungus, it is hard to eradicate and signifies decay through the internalization of destructive forces. Fungus, however, is not the only trope related to decay in the novel. In fact, Plascencia offers an entire town that suffers from crumbling decay. The aptly named Mexican town of El Derramadero (which roughly translated means “the garbage dump”) suffers from an accretion of decomposition. Beginning when “Julieta crumbled a cube of chicken bouillon into a pot of boiling water,” the disintegration initiates a “landslide, then the collapse of stone fences, followed by the sudden decomposition of barbed wire and steel plows” (PoP, 42). In fact everything in El Derramadero begins to disintegrate, leading the town to materially break down. Although the town seems destined to turn to dust, the residents soon discover that not everything in El Derramadero is subject to decay: what remains are the plastics that “could survive the fate of El Derramadero” (PoP, 45). The ability of plastics to survive decomposition drives the men of the town, “shrouded in trash bags,” to “walk down from their native mountain” to return “three days later pulling a wagon filled with slabs of plastic.” The men melt the plastic to create “forks and spoons, letting them cool before sliding them into their utensil trays” (PoP, 45). Although the townspeople are proud of having “triumphed over the town’s name,” Julieta is dissatisfied with living in a town of “melted plastic,” leading her to migrate to El Monte where she eventually connects with EMF (PoP, 45). On one level the surreal representation of fungal decay and decomposition in El Derramadero signifies dangers agricultural workers and people in the developing world face. Industrial agriculture has increasingly relied on fungicides to increase yields, exposing farmworkers to high concentrations of dangerous chemicals. Although the long-term implications are unknown, prolonged fungicide exposure is linked to everything from throat and eye irritation to drug resistant pulmonary fungal infections. More disturbing, fungicides have been connected to genomic changes related to obesity that can be passed down for

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generations.⁴³ Likewise, local industries and agriculture in small towns in interior Mexico like El Derramadero have suffered as a result of neoliberal globalization policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The image of plastic that replaces organic materials in El Derramadero thus calls to mind both the manufacture of non-agricultural goods in maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border region and the disruption of local economies as a result of globalization. Importantly, towns like El Derramadero have suffered economic downturns that have spurred migration to the United States and other developed countries. When considered from these standpoints, Plascencia’s use of environmental signifiers of decay point to persistent and ongoing effects of neoliberalism in Latin America and racism in the United States. Among the novel’s other environmental tropes are the surreal mechanical tortoises that lay waste to the area along the United States/ Mexico border. We first encounter the mechanical tortoises early in the novel when de la Fe “noticed a vestige from his old home” (in Las Tortugas [The Tortoises], Mexico) in Tijuana. This vestige turns out to be the “dome of a tortoise moving along the side of the road” (PoP, 26). The tortoises are lured “into cages and then into scrap heaps” (PoP, 57) by a mechanic, who dedicates himself to systematically dismantling them. The mechanic uses the remnant lead shells to shelter himself from a “hovering entity that seemed to know everything about” him (PoP, 27). We later learn that the mechanic dismantles the tortoises in order to eliminate their harm to the environment. Ranging from their consumption of flesh-and-blood sea turtles, to their geological destruction of the land by (literally) shifting Tijuana north, the tortoises represent a number of environmental dangers. On one level, the mechanic represents the figure of an environmental activist. He not only destroys the tortoises, but also saves the remaining sea turtle eggs and raises the hatchlings in his “bedroom until they […] were old enough to return to the sea” (PoP, 57). This act of preservation recalls the actions of environmentalists who work to restore sea turtle and other marine species populations.⁴⁴ The mechanic’s actions correspondingly reverse the idea of environmental activism as a purely rural or pastoral endeavor, as his actions take place in urban Tijuana. Also worth considering is that the mechanic’s work will result in his disempowerment: once every tortoise is dismantled, he will be out of a job. This selfless action inverts the idea that people in the developing world

 [accessed May 23, 2016].  See, for example, the Sea Turtle Restoration Project organized by the Turtle Island Restoration Network (https://seaturtles.org/programs/sea-turtles-campaigns/).

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lack sophisticated environmental ethics and emphasizes the material sacrifices this type of activism requires. On another level, the mechanic’s activities suggest troubling dynamics around what environmentalists have termed “charismatic megafauna,” or an overemphasis on preserving “popular” species (pandas, elephants, or great white sharks), over holistic approaches. Critiques of charismatic megafauna preservation hold that overemphasizing popular species diverts resources from more mundane efforts (e. g., restoring rare plant or microbe populations), thereby undermining efforts to promote larger ecosystem restoration. Read through the lens of charismatic megafauna, the mechanic’s actions are arguably misguided. They focus on single-species preservation efforts, ignoring pressing issues of environmental justice in Tijuana like air and water pollution and the toxic waste created by maquiladoras. More troubling, the mechanic leaves the remnant lead shells in “scrap heaps” in his yard, where they are “charred and melted” and subject to leaching into ground water and soil (PoP, 57). The lead shells provide the raw materials that de la Fe and the other EMFs later use to construct the shelters that protect them from Saturn’s gaze, ultimately creating another environmental problem in El Monte. In fact, the lead shelters operate as a central aspect of the novel’s environmental engagements: the war against the commodification of sadness itself. Issues of toxicity and environmental harm are part-and-parcel of the characters’ struggles against Saturn/Sal’s power. As Saldívar notes, what is at stake in the war against the commodification of sadness is “the ethos of belief in the efficacy of realist protest fiction,” suggesting that the novel’s use of multiple narrative elements, including magical realism, fantasy, and environmental representations, disrupt the telos of the traditional protest novel in order to make tensions between utopic desire and the impossibility of its fulfillment visible.⁴⁵ When considered from this perspective, the war for volition and against the commodification of sadness amounts to a metaphorizing of the intractability of racism and inequality in the twenty-first century. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Tea Party and Donald Trump, and the resurgence of ultra-nationalism in the United States and Western Europe, vehement racism operates as a resilient dehumanization strategy. Questioning the realist novel by combining elements that include environmental representations makes sense given that Plascencia attempts to disrupt the traditional novel in order to allow different stories to emerge. As George Lipsitz’s gloss of Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, “people cannot enact new social relations unless they can envision

 Saldívar, “Historical Fantasy,” 581.

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them. But they cannot envision new social relations credibly unless they are enacted in embryonic form in their own lives. Often cultural creation bridges these needs.”⁴⁶ I extend Lipsitz’s point by suggesting that environmental justice themes and perspectives are among the tools Plascencia deploys to reconfigure the postrace novel. A frequent trope in Federico de la Fe’s war against the commodification of sadness is denying access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings. These denials take several forms, including psychic barriers erected by the Baby Nostradamus and Little Merced (represented in the text as redacted areas) and the characters’ meditations on meaningless thoughts. Perhaps the most striking action the characters take comes when de la Fe and Froggy erect lead walls and ceilings to create safe spaces in their homes that shield them from Saturn/Sal’s penetrating gaze. As Cameroon (Saturn/Sal’s rebound lover) notes, “ultimately Saturn is a tyrant, commanding the story where he wants it to go. That is why they fight against him, why they hide under lead and try to push him to the margins” (PoP, 228). Cutting lead slabs from the shells of mechanical tortoises they procure from Tijuana, EMF constructs lead rooms, installing elaborate retractable doors that ensure that “no one, not even Saturn, could see into the leaden room” (PoP, 88). When lead sanctuaries are installed in every EMF home, Little Merced observes “we were free to think and say whatever we wanted without fear of Saturn” (PoP, 89). In erecting lead walls, de la Fe and the other EMFs evoke historical aspects of Latina/o resistance. For example, EMF’s denial of Saturn/Sal’s gaze recalls another discursive resistance strategy among people of color: the simultaneous revelation and denial of knowledge in literary texts. This technique calls to mind Latina feminist authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Judith OrtizCofer and others who concurrently invite, obfuscate, and deny knowledge of their literary subjects. For a time, de la Fe and his army are able to use the lead shields to stymie the writing of Saturn/Sal. His lack of access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings causes him to lose interest in their stories. This lack of interest is replicated formally in the text: throughout much of chapter 15, Saturn’s narrative appears as a blank column and, as Little Merced explains, “there were [now] zero particles of Saturn in the atmosphere” (PoP, 147). But the characters’ victory over Saturn/Sal is fleeting, as the lead they erect to protect themselves poisons their water supply, rendering nearly all of EMF “vulnerable, sprawled out on their lawns, their throats and ribs sore, no longer

 George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001): 182.

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protected by lead” (PoP, 182). Recent events in Flint, Michigan remind us that a primary symptom of lead poisoning is persistent vomiting. Plascencia represents this symptom in graphic detail, with much of Chapter 20 devoted to an exposition of lead poisoning. Saturn observes that “[e]verybody in Monte, except for Smiley, who had never erected them [lead walls], was under the malady of lead” (PoP, 182). In a darkly comic turn, an entire column of de la Fe’s narrative simply reads “Blarghhh” (PoP, 183). Overcome by lead contamination, de la Fe and the other EMFs must leave their lead shelters, exposing them once again to Saturn/Sal’s penetrating gaze. One way to interpret the representation of lead poisoning in the novel is in literal terms. As Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner’s Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children shows, persistent lead exposure in U.S. cities is an ongoing public health failure that disproportionately affects low-income, inner-city residents.⁴⁷ A recent Los Angeles Times article corroborates Markowitz and Rosner’s findings. The article shows that 6,453 children in Los Angeles County tested positive for elevated lead levels in 2010, prompting the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to propose lowering acceptable lead exposure standards for the first time in over 20 years.⁴⁸ To be sure, the farmworkers, cholos, and migrants who populate The People of Paper are among the groups most likely to be affected by lead exposure in their homes, schools, and workplaces. If we consider the representation of lead in symbolic terms, however, it takes on a more sinister valence. Given the intractability of racism in the face of historical struggles against white supremacy, the representation of lead poisoning also points to self-inflicted wounds people of color have inadvertently perpetrated through internal struggles that fractured social movements. As I have argued previously, these issues were a persistent problem of cultural nationalisms, particularly in relation to how some groups mobilized misogyny and homophobia as empowerment strategies.⁴⁹ Also worth considering are the internal purges and government infiltration that disrupted many insurgent social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Plascencia notes these dynamics in an interview with blogger Daniel Olivas; when asked by Olivas about his decision not to publish with a Latino imprint, Plascencia says:

 Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children (Berkeley: U of California P, 2013).  Anna Gorman, “Unsafe Levels of Lead Still Found in California Youths,” Los Angeles Times, February 19, 2012 [March 16, 2016].  Vázquez, Triangulations. See especially chapters 3 – 4.

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Maybe I’m insensitive to the old school Chicanismo, but […] [i]dentity politics bore me, especially when its [sic] infighting within the group. A lot of it becomes about people sitting around a table arguing about who is more Chicano and who is a sellout. But who are these arbitrators that get to set the standards of what is Latino or not? It’s fair game to critique my book on an aesthetic level, or to call it unreadable, but when it gets knocked for not being Chicano enough or for not fulfilling my ethnic obligation to my group and roots it’s a retrograde argument that […] I’m not really interested in.⁵⁰

What then does the novel propose as a potential avenue for empowerment? Given that EMF’s struggle is destined for failure – after all this is a novel, which requires an author to relate the story – how are we to read the metaphorical function of the war against the commodification of sadness? How do the novel’s environmental engagements help to convey something about power and its functioning, beyond the internal dynamics of Latina/o social movements? One way to address these questions is to consider aspects of postrace fiction and the role of temporality. Part of what is at stake in postrace fiction is a renovated relationship to transcendence. Transcendence of racism and environmental harm have proven intractable. Despite the Civil Rights Movement and environmental reforms of the past four decades, the most vulnerable populations continue to be the objects of racism and environmental harm. Given this context, it is logical that the prolepsis Marshall points to offers possibilities for discursively grappling with the tension between the desire for transcendence and the impossibility of its fulfillment. Stated simply, authors like Plascencia deploy futureoriented perspectives in order to maintain a desire for fulfillment, while recognizing the realities of contemporary racism and environmental harm. In this regard, the novel’s ending provides context for understanding its formulation of environmental justice and its meditations on effective struggle. One way to read the ending (Saturn returns to full omniscient power and takes control of the narrative) is in terms of theorizing alternative historical trajectories and interrogative forms of resistance that maintain shifting and critical relationships with power. Narrated in a single, omniscient column, Saturn relays a speculative future about EMF, including Froggy’s regret over not having attacked Saturn/Sal “before lead leaked into the water and air” (PoP, 242) as well as that of Liz, the lover who rejects Saturn/Sal. Although these futures bear the hallmarks of closure, Plascencia denies the catharsis of an omniscient ending, noting that “Saturn thought about these things, preoccupied with a fu-

 [accessed April 17, 2016].

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ture that would never be no matter his strength” (PoP, 245, my emphasis). This denial suggests that not even the author has the power to fully shape the future. Further, in his preoccupation Saturn/Sal doesn’t seem to notice Little Merced and Federico de la Fe’s exit. They leave, shielded by the parasol that blocks Saturn/ Sal’s view, literally off the page.⁵¹ This final undermining of the narrative signals a recognition that, despite the exigencies of the novel form that require a level of omniscience to make sense of the story, one must continue to be suspicious of power. The lack of narrative closure also replicates the uncertainty of environmental harm. Given the dire forecasts of rising temperatures, unstable weather patterns, and mass extinction, the future of the human species is increasingly unknowable. Understanding The People of Paper in the context of the Anthropocene suggests that an awareness of environmental degradation is not the sole purview of white authors and dominant Western perspectives. Instead, the novel insists that we consider environmental degradation as more acutely experienced among people of color and the working classes, shifting discourses of contemporary environmentalism that imagine reform as lifestyle changes. It is crucial to note that the novel does not give up the possibility of hope. While Federico de la Fe and Little Merced leave the novel for an unknowable future, their exit also signals speculative possibilities. Unknowability, after all, is not the evacuation of hope: the instability of the future Saturn/Sal narrates at once forecloses the possibility of transcendence and maintains hope in its fulfillment. While we can’t know, we do see that the future of struggle as it is embodied in de la Fe and especially his progeny Little Merced remains open as an ongoing possibility. Shielded from Saturn/Sal’s gaze, the likelihood that they might author their own story, one that moves closer to a fulfillment of economic, racial, and environmental justice, remains a possibility.

 Little Merced and de la Fe’s exit off of the page is graphically represented as a large black circle, signifying both the denial of access to their story (the parasol Little Merced erects to shield them) and a large period that brings the novel to a close.

II Intersticies: Translation, Transculturation, and the Trans-Atlantic

Marion Rohrleitner

Latina/o Literature Goes German

Despite its intrinsically transnational character, the academic field of Latina/o Studies has thus far focused on the production (and consumption) of Latinidad in the continental United States and Puerto Rico. I therefore ask what happens to Latinidad when it travels beyond the national borders of the United States? Because Latina/o, along with Latin American, literature is a successful niche market in German-speaking Europe, I offer a critical analysis of German translations and the marketing of works by the Cuban American fiction writer and memoirist Ana Menéndez, by the Dominican American novelist and short fiction author Junot Diaz, and by the Peruvian American novelist and radio journalist Daniel Alarcón. I argue that successful translation need not strive for familiarity, but rather aim at preserving a sense of alienation in order to maintain the contrapuntal attitude many Latina/o authors bring to current debates on immigration, social justice, racial profiling, and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. Drawing on Emily Apter’s notion of “untranslatability,” Lawrence Venuti’s concept of “foreignization,” and Martha Cutter’s emphasis on “translation as transmigration,” I detail how translation can function as an aesthetics of cultural and political “contact zones” which simultaneously maintain and negotiate the permeability of national, cultural, and linguistic borderlands. In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful…The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating, which produces in it the echo of the original. - Walter Benjamin¹ Translation is the most intimate act of reading. - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak²

Despite its intrinsically transnational character, Latina/o Studies as a discipline has thus far focused primarily on the production and consumption of Latinidad

 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens,” trans. Harry Zohn, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York and London: Routledge, 2004): 79.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York and London: Routledge, 2004): 370. https://doi.org/9783110532913-006

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within the United States.³ While this focus was initially meaningful and necessary given the specific geopolitical forces and historical conditions that have led to the emergence of Latina/o literature in the United States, scholars are increasingly examining the international dimensions of Latinidad. In her recent essay “Latino/a Deracination and the New Latin American Novel,” Claudia Milian, for example, reminds critics, “We would do well to rethink the interpretive possibilities of global Latino literary modes and the sculpting of transnational discursive opportunities.”⁴ However, the focus on the transnational production of Latinidad continues to be largely limited to the Americas, specifically highlighting the oft-contested relationship between Latin American and Latina/o literature. I believe that the distribution, translation, and ever-growing popularity of Latina/o literature worldwide gives rise to important questions about what happens to Latina/o literature when it travels beyond the national boundaries of the United States: How is Latinidad conceptualized differently when produced outside of the Americas? Which insights into literary constructions of Latinidad can we gain when looking at Latina/o literature from the outside? How does Latina/o literature translate? To date, no study on a significant scale has appeared on the translation and reception of Latina/o literature in the European Union.⁵ This essay attempts to answer some of these questions and hopes to draw attention to this oft-neglected aspect of Latina/o Studies. Because Latina/o, along with Latin American, literature is an increasingly successful niche market in German-speaking Europe,⁶ and because there is a historically rich tradition of Latin American Studies, and Latina/o, especially Chica Kirsten Silva Gruesz, for example, has emphasized the hemispheric dimension of U.S. Latina/ o cultural production since its inception. See Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002).  Claudia Milian, “Latino/a Deracination and the New Latin American Novel,” in Junot Diaz and the Decolonial Imagination, eds. Monica Hamma, Jennifer Hartford Vargas, and José David Saldívar (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016): 175.  Luz Angelica Kirschner (University of Bielefeld, Germany) is among only a few scholars who address issues of comparative constructions of Latina/o and Turkish German ethnicity. Her most recent work, however, also focuses on inter-American constructions of Latinidad. See Luz Angelica Kirschner, ed. Expanding Latinidad: An Inter-American Perspective (Tampa, AZ: Bilingual Review P, 2012).  In the case of Latin American literature, particularly Chilean and Cuban literature, this is especially true in the former GDR. The reception of Latin American literature in the FRG was belated and did not reach significant dimensions until the 1980s. See Hans-Otto Dill, Die Lateinamerikanische Literatur in Deutschland: Bausteine zur Geschichte Ihrer Rezeption (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2009): 63, and Carina Welly, Literarische Begegnungen mit dem Fremden: Intranationale und Internationale Vermittlung Kultureller Alterität am Beispiel des Erzählwerks Miguel Angel Asturias’ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004): 112.

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na/o, Studies in the German and Austrian academy,⁷ I offer a critical analysis of German translations and the marketing of works by the Cuban American fiction writer, memoirist, and journalist Ana Menéndez,⁸ the Dominican American novelist and all-around Latino wunderkind Junot Diaz,⁹ and the Peruvian American novelist, short fiction writer, and radio journalist Daniel Alarcón.¹⁰ The German translations of these authors’ works show that productive translation need not strive for familiarity, but rather aim at preserving a sense of alienation in order to maintain the contrapuntal attitude many Latina/o authors bring to current debates on immigration, social justice, racial profiling, and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. Drawing on Emily Apter’s controversial emphasis upon “untranslatability,”¹¹ on Lawrence Venuti’s equally contested concept of “foreignization,”¹² and on Martha J. Cutter’s notion of “translation as transmigration,”¹³ I detail how the translation of U.S. Latina/o literature into German can function as an aesthetics of a cultural and political “contact zone,”¹⁴ which simultaneously maintains and negotiates the permeability of national, cultural, and linguistic borderlands. The successful translator’s role needs to be that of an active interpreter of cultural difference rather than of a “domesticator” of the “foreign” text, especially if the critical voice and embedded historical memory of Latina/o literature is to be maintained. If translators, on the other hand, are too invested in making the text comfortably accessible to a German-speaking audience, the translation becomes complicit in reproducing and reinforcing, rather than challenging and complicating, stereotypical narratives about Latina/o lives.

 As an exciting, recent example I am referring to Justin Torres’s appointment as the Picador Guest Professor in American Studies at the University of Leipzig in the summer term of 2016. On July 6, 2016, Torres also spoke about his work in a much publicized joint event with Daniel Kehlmann, one of the most prominent and bestselling young German authors, at the Gropius building in Berlin, an event sponsored by the U.S. embassy.  Ana Menéndez, Loving Che (New York: Grove P, 2003).  Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).  Daniel Alarcón, Lost City Radio (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).  Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995).  Martha J. Cutter, “Translation as Transmigration: Introduction,” in Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Literature and the Politics of Language Diversity (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2005): 1.  Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33 – 40.

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Emily Apter describes “untranslatability” as one key strategy in avoiding too keen a focus on familiarity and domestication,¹⁵ and Martha J. Cutter draws attention to the intrinsically translated nature of ethnic American literature, suggesting that “translation as trope also concerns a struggle to transcode the meaning of ethnicity itself so that one can be both ethnic and ‘American.’”¹⁶ The attempt to preserve a “kernel of the foreign” and to engage in a “comparatism” that aims for “geopolitical specificity” is relevant especially when reading German translations of Latina/o fiction, given the crucial importance of the specific geopolitical and historical setting of each narrative, and the significance of the classed, raced, and gendered implications of the protagonists’ linguistic practices which reflect and embody social conflicts and hierarchies. Latina/o literature, therefore, offers a particularly rich and complex arena for translation studies, as it always already negotiates multiple languages, cultural affiliations, and national identities. These multiple acts of translation begin with the European conquest, genocide, and colonization of the Americas, continue with U.S. military invasions, imperialist expansion, and economic investment in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and result in migration and immigration of a culturally and linguistically diverse people into the United States. Since a complex politics of translation is a foundational part of the emergence of Latina/o literature in the United States, it is a literature uniquely poised to help us understand “how to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language.”¹⁷ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes the astute observation that translation is the “most intimate form of reading.”¹⁸ Spivaks’s theory of the reader, any reader, as translator offers a productive lens through which to read Latina/o literature in German. Given the already hybrid, multilingual nature of Latina/o fiction, read-

 Apter specifically claims, “Untranslatability is not unlike Walter Benjamin’s notion of translatability; qualified as something that cannot be communicated in language, a kernel of “the foreign” that remains, an ineffable textual essence only realizable in the translational afterlife… I would mobilize … (un) translatability for theoretical and curricular ventures in literary comparatism that aim for geopolitical specificity and theoretical reach against the fine grain of aesthetic comparison,” in Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History 39.3 (2008): 584.  Martha J. Cutter, “Translation as Transmigration: Introduction,” in Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Literature and the Politics of Language Diversity Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2005): 5.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986): 19.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York and London: Routledge, 2004): 370.

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ers are required to confront their own foreignization without romanticizing the text, but rather by engaging in an active form of reading that requires the readers’ awareness of their own politics of location as consumers of a translated text. Spivak’s focus on intimacy is equally important; reading Latina/o literature is an intimate, rather than a pornographic, act, since German readers cannot simply consume a foreign text by safely exoticizing it and maintaining an emotional and intellectual distance. Instead, they are invited to engage with the translated text on several levels, including facing the challenges of code-switching, working through incomplete and dissatisfying glossaries, and experiencing the productive tension between acts of domestication and foreignization. I begin with the German translation and reception of Ana Menéndez’s 2003 debut novel Loving Che ¹⁹ and Junot Diaz’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ²⁰ among a wealth of other options for three reasons. First, each novel made the Der Spiegel bestseller lists in Germany within a few months of the publication of its German translation²¹ and therefore offers rich materials for studying marketing, literary criticism, and reader responses. Second, both novels engage with male icons – Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Rafael Leónidas Trujillo y Molina, respectively – larger than life historical figures who have played a central role in shaping German notions of Latin American masculinity.²² Finally, these novels lend themselves to a comparative study because of the partial setting of the novels in Cuba and in the Dominican Republic, two Caribbean island nations that are among Germans’ favorite tourist destinations, and therefore are central to German perceptions of Latin American and Latina/o cultures. In addition, Cuba holds a unique position in the German national imaginary given the close economic, educational, and cultural ties between Cuba and

 Ana Menéndez, Geliebter Che, trans. Barbara Schaden (Munich: Heyne 2008).  Junot Díaz, Das Kurze, Wundersame Leben des Oscar Wao, trans. Eva Kemper (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag, 2009).  The German translation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was first published in March 2009, and reached number 48 of the bestseller lists within three months. [accessed June 10, 2016].  Trujillo frequently expressed his admiration for the racist policies of the Third Reich, and welcomed a delegation of Nazi officials in late September 1937, when he was presented a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Shortly thereafter, Trujillo gave orders for El Corte, the notorious massacre of thousands of Haitian Dominicans and Haitian migrant farmworkers. See Michelle Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

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the former German Democratic Republic prior to the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989.²³ Ana Menéndez’s debut novel Loving Che is an effective example of a contemporary work of fiction by a Latina author whose representations of Latino masculinity are often translated in problematic ways that unfortunately resonate with stereotypical expectations of a German-speaking audience. In Loving Che, Menéndez offers a critical attitude to Cuban exilic nostalgia for an island that never was, and thematizes and complicates the eroticized revolutionary iconography surrounding Che Guevara, a central inspirational figure for the 1968 German Student Movement. While much of the novel’s allusive and erotically charged language is effectively and beautifully conveyed in German, some of the author’s critique gets lost in translation due to an overly zealous attempt at domesticating the source text to make it palpable for a German speaking audience. Loving Che was first published in 2003 by Grove Press, following the favorable reception of Menéndez’s collection of short fiction, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. A Pushcart-prize winner, Menéndez made The New York Times notable book of the year list with her debut collection in 2001. A second-generation Cuban American writer who has lived in Istanbul for two years,²⁴ served as a Fulbright scholar at the American University in Cairo during the academic year 2008 – 2009, lived in Amsterdam from 2009 to 2011, and was instrumental in establishing a Creative Writing program at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands from 2011 to 2014, Menéndez writes about Cuba from a transnational perspective that already differs radically from the bi-national focus of most Cuban American writers. Loving Che was translated into German by Barbara Schaden, a prominent translator perhaps best known for her translations of the work of Kazuo Ishiguro and Nadine Gordimer into German. Schaden’s German title now reads Geliebter Che, which literally translates as Beloved Che. The translation of the very title of

 The ongoing, strong interest or Germans in Cuban culture is, for example, displayed in the outstanding success of Wim Wenders’ documentary film The Buena Vista Social Club (1999). A renowned German filmmaker, Wenders directed and wrote the screenplay for the documentary, which traces Ry Cooder’s journey to Cuba to record an album with the surviving members of the Buena Vista Social Club, a band that had performed to much international acclaim in the 1950s. The film won best documentary in the European Film awards, was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2000, and was an enormous critical and financial success at the German box office.  Menéndez began working on her second novel while living in Istanbul. The Last War (New York: Harper Collins, 2009) is an autobiographically inspired account of the complex relationship between fact and fiction, the ethical imperative of conflict journalism and war photography, and the toll such a line of work tends to take on personal relationships.

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the novel is, thus, already an interpretive departure from Menéndez’s original, which puts emphasis not so much on the revolutionary icon, but rather on those who are engaged in the act of loving Che. As Elena Machado Sáez has pointed out, the postcolonial romances of Menéndez […] are less concerned about “what happened” and more interested in the language used to chronicle anticolonial thought and the postcolonial vacuum of vocabulary left when revolutionary movements did not fully deliver their promise.²⁵

Menéndez herself has explicitly stated that Loving Che is “not a novel about Che Guevara” in a 2004 interview with Robert Birnbaum.²⁶ At the center of the narrative are the unnamed narrator of the novel, her mother Teresa de la Landre, whose alleged affair with Che Guevara may have resulted in the narrator’s conception, and a whole generation of Cuban Americans and non-Cubans who have been romanticizing or vilifying the controversial, and arguably most famous, revolutionary of the second half of the twentieth century. The novel is self-reflexive commentary about the way our creative imagination fills in the gaps of memory, and how nostalgia tends to make us change the past to make it fit our innermost desires. Even though Barbara Schaden’s German translation often beautifully reproduces the tone and cadences of the original, especially the melancholy, detached voice of the narrator in search of her mother’s story, the manipulation of the German-language reader, which began with the problematic translation of the novel’s title, continues throughout the text, and is prominently displayed in the respective covers of the novel. The American hardcover and paperback editions of the novel feature a small iconic image of a cigar-smoking Che Guevara surrounded by a heavily gilded frame; the photograph is held by a woman’s delicate hands who keeps the representative image close to her body which is clad in a bright red fabric. The very framing of Guevara’s diminutive image by the larger hands of an anonymous woman insinuates effectively that the center of the story is, in fact, not Che Guevara, but the women who literally and figuratively “uphold” his image. In stark contrast, the cover of the German translation features a

 Elena Machado Sáez, Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (Charlottesville and London: The U of Virginia P, 2013): 120.  Birnbaum v Ana Menéndez, “Interview with Robert Birnbaum,” Morning News (18 Feb 2004), quoted in Elena Machado Sáez Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (Charlottesville & London: U of Virginia P, 2013): 120.

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mural-like image of one of Alberto Korda’s most famous photographs of the revolutionary icon. A long-legged, preadolescent Afro-Cuban girl plays with a ball in front of Che’s larger-than-life face, which somberly looks into the revolutionary distance. The young girl actively shapes the title of the translation, as the “i” in Geliebter Che is dotted by the ball the girl is throwing at the wall. This image does not only radically distort the racialized discourse in the novel – both Teresa de la Landre and her narrator-daughter privilege and are privileged by their whiteness – it also focuses on a preadolescent girl instead of on the accomplished, adult voices of the women we hear in the novel. I fear it fair to suggest that the German Heyne Verlag, one of the largest publishers in Germanspeaking Europe, is catering to the desires and expectations of the many Germans who flock to tourist resorts on Cuban shores for an all-inclusive Caribbean vacation, which frequently includes escort services by often-underage Cuban girls.²⁷ Sexualized distortion is not limited to the depiction of a young girl on the cover of the German translation, but extends to the representation of Che Guevara himself by the main narrator’s mother, an image of the Latin lover that meets the expectations of many German readers who hope for, as the blurb suggests, “her one true love.” The eroticized iconography surrounding Che Guevara as an idealized Latin lover is legend, and was fed by photographers of the Magnum generation. One of the most popular images of Che includes René Burri’s iconic image of the cigar-smoking Che Guevara and Alberto Korda’s depictions of a stoic revolutionary. Given this particular brand of Latin American revolutionary masculinity promoted by the Magnum photographs, the book covers and feature films about Che Guevara, such as The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), are very successful on the European market. The reductive and distorted reception of a complex, postmodern Latina narrative such as Loving Che as simply “another great love story” is largely the result of an uncritical and often romanticizing attitude towards the revolutionary in German-speaking Europe, as Che Guevara continues to occupy a central place in idealized revolutionary iconography in Germany and Austria, even almost thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.²⁸ Sexual prowess and promiscuity thus become popular markers of Latino

 In her incisive critique of literary representations of sex tourism in the Caribbean, Donette Francis offers a close reading of an advertisement for vacationing in the Dominican Republic that is oddly reminiscent of the book cover of the German translation of Loving Che. See Donette Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 116.  In the alpine Austrian province of Tyrol, the only local revolutionary icon comparable to Che Guevara is Andreas Hofer, the leader of a peasant rebellion against the overpowering Bavarian

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and Latin American male identity that resonate with and sell well on the German-speaking market. One of the most revealing German (mis)interpretations is the following passage discussing the sentiment at the heart of most Cuban and Cuban American fiction, namely nostalgia, or saudade, for the lost island. Menéndez’s English original reads: “This eternal longing for the past,” a passage Barbara Schaden translates as “Dieses endlose Schmachten nach der Vergangenheit” (9). While it is true that the German term “schmachten” can be potentially translated as “longing,” the verb has significant connotations that are entirely absent in the English original, connotations that in effect ridicule the very sentiment they describe. A person who is longing for the past, or a place, or a person, is experiencing an intense emotion that is sublime, both beautiful and painful. A person who “schmachtet,” on the other hand, is reminiscent of a teenager infatuated with the actor who plays the most recent heartthrob on the big screen and whose sentiments are as fleeting as they are immature, a layer of meaning that is certainly not implied in the original. The use of the lighthearted and satirical “schmachten” here goes way beyond the slight critique embedded in Menéndez’s original version and in effect distorts one of the key components of the novel: the very nature of longing, whether in the shape of romantic desire, or desire for a place that feels like home, or desire for a safe haven, in shaping who we, as individuals, are. The German term turns this powerful emotion into something rather ludicrous. Another fascinating layer of studying the translation of Latina/o literature into German manifests in the decisions, often inconsistent, translators have made when faced with Spanish or Spanglish sections in an otherwise Englishdominant text. In Loving Che, the actual narrative does not begin until after the narrator’s framing device – a preface that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction – concludes and leads into the very title page of the novel. In the English original, the page quotes three lines from a fragment of a poem by Pablo Neruda in Spanish: “Falsos me parecieron mis primeros esfuerzos. / Y ahora solo quedan estas rajas de memoria / escritas sobre banderas de vien-

and French forces during the Napoleonic wars, who managed to hold off the invading forces for seven months until his capture and eventual execution at Mantua on February 20, 1810. The commodified conflation of Andreas Hofer and Che Guevara is visible most prominently in a popular T-shirt image favored by college students: Andreas Hofer enters the space of Guevaran masculinity by asking the provocative question, “Weiber habts Zeit?”, which roughly translates as “Ladies, you got time?” a word play on Hofer’s actual invitation to join the rebellion against the French in 1809, when he allegedly stated, “Mander, s’isch Zeit.”

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to…”²⁹ These lines serve as a mantra for the unreliability and fractured nature of memory, which impact the narrative from the very beginning. In Geliebter Che, these lines by Neruda are surprisingly not maintained in the Spanish original, but rendered in German translation: “Meine ersten Bemühungen erschienen mir falsch. / Und jetzt sind nur noch diese Erinnerungssplitter übrig, auf Windfahnen geschrieben.”³⁰ The translation of Neruda’s Spanish verse into German creates an entirely different mood for the reader as she enters the main body of the novel, and sacrifices what Venuti has called productive “foreignization” to easy access via direct translation into the mother tongue. In doing so, the translation falsifies the polyphonic discourse that is an integral part of this and many other Latina/o novels by replacing a multilingual with a monolingual narrative.³¹ As mentioned earlier, these decisions to translate all Spanish passages into German are, however, not made consistently. For example, some culturally specific Cuban terms such as danzón ³² are preserved in the original Spanish. And yet, there is another act of mistranslation that occurs. In Loving Che, the term danzón is not italicized;³³ by preserving the Spanish original and by adding italics in the German translation to boot, the term’s alleged “foreignness” is heightened, a notion that is completed absent in the original. At the same time other culturally specific terms such as “El Prado”³⁴ are neither fully preserved in the Spanish original nor italicized, but translated halfway into German as “der Prado,”³⁵ the German equivalent of “the Prado” instead of “El Prado.” These inconsistencies are cause for concern about the translator’s awareness of the cultural import of code-switching in Cuban American fiction, and are, in effect, misleading German readers to assume that such decisions are random and without repercussions. One of the most complex and exciting aspects of Menéndez’s novel consists in her strategic insertion of photography into the novel. Reminiscent of Norma Elia Cantú’s autobioethnography, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Fron-

 Menéndez, Loving Che, 13.  Menéndez, Geliebter Che, 23.  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995): 3.  Menéndez, Geliebter Che, 10.  Menéndez, Loving Che, 3.  Menéndez, Loving Che, 25.  Menéndez, Geliebter Che, 33.

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tera,³⁶ the photographs in Loving Che do not always match their caption-like descriptions. As a result, the photographs destabilize readers’ faith in images as more reliable conveyors of historical truth than other forms of literary witnessing. The images inserted throughout the novel are actual photographs, we are led to believe, which the narrator has received in a mysterious package sent to her Miami home. The package was allegedly sent from Spain by her mother, the Cuban painter Teresa de la Landre,³⁷ who left the narrator in the care of her exiled father in Miami when the narrator was just an infant in order to return to Cuba and join the revolutionary effort and, apparently, to continue her affair with Che Guevara. The German translation, published only in paperback, does its best to approximate the attractive hardcover version of the English original; it fails because of a diminutive format, which is more common for dime and romance novels than Latina/o fiction, and because of a strange disarray in which the photographs, which are so carefully placed in the English original, are presented in the German translation. In the English original, all photographs are placed strategically either before or after a key paragraph. In the German translation, in part due to the unfortunately smallish format of the paperback, the images often appear in between paragraphs, and are frequently smaller (or larger) in size, and are printed in a higher, much lighter resolution. All of these visual phenomena impact and alter the reader’s perception of the significance of the photographs. For example, after the daughter narrator’s self-reflexive preface, just before the narrative voice is taken over by her mother Teresa de la Landre, the English original features a black and white photograph of an art exhibition that features a whole wall of Warholesque multiplications of one of Alberto Korda’s most iconic photograph of Che Guevara. The photograph, which was taken on March 5, 1960, at a funeral service for victims of the La Coubre explosion in Cuba, offers a frame that gives readers the impression that we, too, are viewing the exhibition simply looking over the shoulders of other visitors. The multiplied reproduction of Che’s portrait further serves as a meaningful entrance point into a narrative that fractures the one official image of the revolutionary, and asks us to consider the multiple and often contradictory “faces” of el Che. In the German translation, the photograph is larger in proportion to the  Norma Elia Cantú, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1997).  In the context of translation it is significant to consider the profession of Teresa de la Landre’s husband Calixto, a linguist. I explore this facet of the novel in Transnational Latinidades, my monograph in progress.

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page and printer in a much lighter resolution. While Che’s face is obscured in the original, it is highlighted in the German translation, a telling visual refocusing on the revolutionary icon rather than the women telling their stories. As a result of the ill-conceived small format of the German edition, some of the images are misplaced, because they would not fit in the location where the author had strategically placed it within the narrative. One stark example of such a displacement is the inclusion of an Corbis Sygma image of a smiling Che Guevara in revolutionary garb, his hands on his holster, and wearing, himself, a camera around his neck. In the English original, the first person narrator introduces the image and states, “I held up my hand and dug through the pile again before finding it. I held it under the light.”³⁸ Readers are thus invited to mimic the narrator’s actions, and examine the photograph in detail. In the German translation there is not enough space on one page to include this introduction and the photograph, and therefore the photograph is placed in the middle of the next paragraph, interrupting not only the integrity of the paragraph, but also losing the crucial postmodern moment in which readers engage in an act of reading the image the same way the narrator would. What is lost in the German translation in this novel thus applies not only to the words, but also to the images. Another misplacement that stands out concerns the daughter narrator’s memories about Havana’s fashionable past in the 1940s and 1950s, when she imagines her mother standing in front of the windows of the sophisticated department store El Encanto.³⁹ In the English original, the photograph is placed at the very center of the page and dominates the text, inviting the reader to scrutinize the image in great detail. The image represents, in many ways, the nostalgia felt by many second generation Cuban Americans for a Cuba that never was, or only existed for a few privileged members of the Cuban elite. To the narrator, imagining her mother Teresa as a customer of El Encanto is central to her attempts at locating Teresa, the privileged wife of a prominent physician and herself an academically-trained painter, at the center of the Cuban upper class who, nonetheless, began to embrace revolutionary ideas as a result of her romantic involvement with Che Guevara. In the German translation, the image is placed at the bottom, rather than at the center of the page, and the message about gendered nostalgia, so central to the original, is thus entirely lost.

 Menéndez, Loving Che, 226.  The name of Havana’s most famous pre-revolutionary department store is curiously not italicized, neither in the English original nor in the German translation.

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These instances of careless, or pragmatic, reproduction of photographic images in the German translation reveal a lack of awareness on behalf of the translator and/or the German publishing house Heyne with regard to the crucial importance of the images and their sequence to the narrative itself. The novel, while offering a straightforward coming-of-age narrative cum detective fiction plot, embedded in nostalgia for a Cuba that never was, is also a complex postmodern text that features multiple narrative perspectives and a visual component that complicates and challenges such simplistic narratives about an allegedly lost Cuba full of passion and romance, prior and after the Cuban Revolution. These complex critiques, which are key to the English original of the novel, are all but absent in the German translation, and thus offer a distorted image of the complicated relationship of second and third generation Cuban Americans with the Cuba that has been created for them in their exilic narratives memories of a largely imagined, enchanted or vilified island. As a result, the German translation of the novel tends to perpetuate, rather than call into question, existing German stereotypes about Cuba, Cubans, and Cuban Americans. Confronting, engaging, provoking, dismantling, and at times reinforcing Latina/o stereotypes is also one characteristic facet of the Junot Díaz’s prose. Since the publication of his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) caused a literary sensation, Díaz is arguably the most prominent Latina/o fiction writer working today. Born in the Dominican Republic’s capital of Santo Domingo, Diaz immigrated to New Jersey at the age of five. Díaz’s immigrant experience is mirrored in the two main characters of his novel: the overweight ghetto nerd Oscar de Leon, and his tigre cousin Yunior, through whose rather biased perspective Oscar’s life unfolds. Readers have met Yunior before, in Díaz’s debut collection of short stories Drown (1996) and then again in his most recent collection of short fiction, This is How You Lose Her (2012). Due to the overwhelming critical and commercial success of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008, and Díaz receiving the MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, all of Díaz’s works have now been translated into dozens of languages, including German. The translation and reception of his work into German offers rich material for several reasons: Díaz’s use of various Dominican American sociolects and genre-specific language from the world of science fiction, fantasy, and gaming, his overt exposure of distorted U.S. perceptions of the Dominican Republic and its historical relationship to the United States, and his conscious, provocative engagement with sexism and machismo in Dominican society on the island and in the diaspora. Given the great significance of a particular, gendered and raced, “Dominican Yol” sociolect for the characterization of Yunior, any translator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao faces a difficult dilemma. How to

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translate Yunior’s highly specific voice into another language with a completely different cultural, historical, and linguistic context? In other words, how to solve a problem like Yunior? Eva Kemper, one of the most successful German translators of a wide range of genres of contemporary North American literature, especially detective fiction, into German, answered this question by opting for two understandable, but unequally successful strategies. First, Kemper engages in a selective translation of Spanish and Spanglish terms, similar to Barbara Schaden’s translation in Geliebter Che. The main difference consists in the frequency with which Kemper leaves the Spanish or Spanglish original, often even without italicization, in an effort to maintain the original cadence, and in order to pay respect to what Apter has called “untranslatability”: “Sie war sehr guapa, sagte ich beiläufig. Abuela schnaubte. Guapa soy yo. Deine Mutter war eine diosa. Aber so cabeza dura… und exigente.”⁴⁰ In these moments, Kemper’s translation manages, indeed, to do justice to the original and to maintain the unique voice of Yunior’s Dominican English. At times this selectiveness works well, given the phonic proximity of German to English: “Scham. Sharam. Vergüenza.”⁴¹ In another passage, the German speaking Yunior engages in frequent code-switching: Nach und nach erkannte Beli hinter den Pfiffen und Sprüchen, dem Dios mío asesina und y ese tetatorío und dem que pechonalidad die verborgenen Mechanismen die zu diesen Reaktionen führten.⁴²

It is worth noting that the vast majority of the untranslated terms and phrases are explicitly sexual in nature, and that the Spanish/German glossary at the end of the novel provides an often chaste and rather unimaginative translation.⁴³ Kemper’s second strategy is to have Dominican Yol voice become at times, though not consistently, akin to the voice of a second or third generation urban Turkish-German youth, and at other times seem to mimic the brash

 Díaz, Kurze, Wundersame Leben, 93.  Díaz, Kurze, Wundersame Leben, 112.  Díaz, Kurze, Wundersame Leben, 113.  For example, the Dominican “beba” is translated into German as “attractive, erotische Frau,” which in turn translates back as the rather tame “attractive, erotic woman” (Kurze, Wundersame Leben, 373). “Pipa” is translated as “vulva” with the addition “vulgar” in parenthesis (Kurze, Wundersame Leben, 380), and great care is taken when explaining “que pechonalidad” as a “Wortspiel” (play on words) on “personalidad: Persönlichkeit” and “pecho: Brust” (Kurze, Wundersame Leben, 381), without making use of a commonly used phrase to describe a well-endowed woman in German: “Holz vor der Hütte,” which roughly translates as “stacks of wood in front of the mountain hut.”

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voice of a German man in his fifties. This act of domesticating Yunior’s voice into what is perceived as a more familiar, and, as Kemper would argue, comparable voice of an immigrant is problematic and potentially misleading for a number of reasons. The increasingly cosmopolitan and diverse demographics of many German cities notwithstanding, the Turkish immigrant community continues to form the largest and historically most continuous immigrant group in post-war Germany; given their initial status as temporary “guest workers” intended to facilitate and aid the West-German economic “miracle” of the 1960s, expected to return once said miracle vanishes, the Turkish community in Germany is, indeed, historically much closer to the bracero generation of Mexican migrant workers in California and the U.S. Southwest in the 1940s and 1950s than the more recent Dominican immigration to urban centers on the U.S. East Coast and Florida. This significant historical connection is thus effaced by using elements of Turkish German youth language to give voice to a second-generation Dominican American immigrant. The significant colonial relationship between the United States and the Dominican Republic, a key topic of the novel, becomes muddled given Turkey’s radically different historical relationship with what is now Germany and Austria, especially during the Ottoman Empire, as well as a result of the increasingly important strategic role of Turkey in NATO, and its aspirations to join the European Union. While citizenship as birthright applies to U.S.-born children of Dominican immigrants, the same right applies only to Germans of Turkish parentage who were born after 1990; the cultural and political capital of a Turkish German voice is thus very different from that of a Dominican American citizen, their shared marginalization notwithstanding. In spite of this troubling lack of attention to historical specificity, the translation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a very successful one on the German-speaking market, and has found many fans, especially among male cultural journalists in Germany, Austria, and even Switzerland. Christian Seiler, writing for the online version of the prestigious German newspaper Die Zeit, falls into the common trap of automatically associating all things Latina/o with Latin American Magical Realism and suggests Díaz’s novel is “magical realism of the third millennium, Gabriel García Márquez on speed.”⁴⁴ Hannes Stein, in Die Welt, begins his somewhat enamored and ill-researched review of the novel as follows: How does one translate the word “nerd” into German? LEO, the English/German Internet dictionary for desperate authors of newspaper articles, offers the following options: computer freak, boring person, stupid person, queer person, A-student, and finally, the some-

 . Translation mine [accessed June 3, 2016].

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what tedious description, “highly intelligent, but socially awkward and isolated person” […] Junot Díaz’s, who has rightfully been awarded the Booker Prize for this novel, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a gorgeous old house whose chaotic web of staircases is devilishly reminiscent of Harry Potter’s school of wizards.⁴⁵

Instead of giving in to the temptation of indulging the ostentatious misinformation – Diaz was awarded the Pulitzer, not the Booker Prize – and the obvious adolescent leanings of these comments, I would like to focus on the challenging task of translating the most central term in the novel – the aforementioned “nerd” – into German. Since none of the short translations capture the full meaning, including historical meaning, of “nerd,” a German translator needs to take refuge in an awkward and lengthy phrase that manages to only approximate the multiple contextual layers of the “nerd” in the novel. As a professional translator, Kemper resorted to the more elegant and transnational, if also less creative, incorporation of the English term into the German prose, aligning herself, at first sight, with Lawrence Venuti’s call for “foreignization.” In The Scandals of Translation, Venuti calls for the translator’s ethical obligation to privilege foreignization over domestication, and asserts that successful translation “releases the remainder by cultivating a heterogeneous discourse, opening up the standard dialect and literary canons to what is foreign to themselves, to the substandard and marginal.”⁴⁶ Upon further examination, however, the maintaining of “nerd” is less an act of foreignization than of a cosmopolitanism that embraces and incorporates selected foreign terms based on their cultural capitalist usevalue. In German youth sub-culture, comics and their language enjoy great popularity; using the term nerd, therefore, is exemplary of the global phenomenon of the Americanization of popular culture and youth language. The misreadings and problematic appropriations do not stop there. A radio show on the publicly funded Schweizer Rundfunk (Swiss Broadcasting) dedicated to contemporary literature, for example, features an interview with Michael Luisier, a Swiss critic who describes Yunior, the highly unreliable narrator in Díaz’s novel, and a frequent character in and/or narrator of Díaz’s short fiction, as a “fat nerd with glasses, not good looking, but smart.”⁴⁷ Since the feature focuses on This Is How You Lose Her, the journalist somewhat desper-

 . Translation mine [accessed June 4, 2016].  Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (New York: Routledge, 1998): 11.  . Translation mine [accessed June 8, 2016].

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ately asserts, “Here, Yunior is not a fat teenager anymore.” If a literary critic manages to either misread the novel so thoroughly as to mistake Yunior for Oscar de León, or read it so carelessly as to miss that central point, one wonders how the average German reader might misunderstand the novel. This misreading is particularly surprising given the publisher’s efforts at minimizing alienation by providing a glossary at the end of the novel. One reviewer on the German Amazon page, for example, offers the following enraged critique of Das Kurze Wundersame Leben des Oscar Wao, Eva Kemper’s resonant translation of the novel’s title: I have reached page 100 and put the book back on the shelf, unfinished. There is zero suspense in this novel, but it is probably enjoyable for someone who likes curse words. In the first chapter one comes across the “n-word” on every page, which really bothered me. Furthermore, the novel features all kinds of vulgar expressions in both German and in Spanish, and I think it’s really “cute” that the book contains a little dictionary in the end… seriously, who needs that? While reading this book I have been wondering what was wrong with the writer, and how he can be helped. The various footnotes on the history of Cuba are of zero interest to me. This book is a nuisance and not worth a cent.⁴⁸

The outraged reviewer’s conflation of the Dominican Republic with Cuba and her failure to understand the significance of the footnotes to Díaz’s narrative project as counter-history may be indicative of a careless, or perhaps even colonialist, reader. However, her negative reaction to foreignization on the one hand, manifested in the preservation of the offensive “n-word” in the German translation, and to domestication on the other hand, exemplified in the glossary provided at the end of the novel, highlights the difficult tension between efforts at preserving the authentic voice of the original and at placing the narrative in a specific historical and geo-cultural context. The translator’s choice to keep the “n” word in the German translation has yet another important impact highly specific to a German context that gets lost in maintaining the offensive English term. The pejorative, clearly racist equivalent of the U.S. term “nigger” in German would be the equally offensive “Neger,” which literally translates back to English as “Negro,” yet whose negative connotations are clearly closer to the “n” word than the merely outdated “Negro.” In this case, the failure to translate a term that does, in fact, have a comparable equivalent in German, creates a distorting effect.

 . Review by ballerina24, submitted on March 24, 2011. Translation mine [accessed June 10, 2016].

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There are several other examples where the Kemper curiously decided to maintain the English or Spanish,of the source text in an effort to stay true to the multilingual cadences of the original. In footnote six, for example, the German translator maintains two Dominican exclamations: “Pa’fuera!” and “carajo.”⁴⁹ The latter example is particularly revealing, as Kemper here mimics the code-switching present in the English original: “Was zum carajo ist nur los mit Dir?”⁵⁰ To any reader not familiar with Spanish expressions, a glossary may well be necessary in order to follow the plot. In a 2013 interview with Die Welt, Hannes Stein asks Díaz if he could ever envision a Turkish immigrant child in Germany identify with Yunior, a question I found highly relevant given the translator’s choices. Díaz’s delightful answer was: Oh it’s much crazier than that […] I’m gonna tell you something. I used to have a girlfriend from East Germany, and I hung around in the former GDR for a while. And I went to soccer fields there. And let me tell you, as far as machismo is concerned, the men there could still teach me a great deal.⁵¹

In Diaz’s response, machismo, then, is envisioned as a shared phenomenon capable of bridging cultural difference. The answer, although full of good humor, serves to reinforce mutual stereotyping rather than challenge bias of both Dominican and East German men. “The beauty! The beauty!”⁵² indeed! In contrast to these, at times troubling, translations of two important Latina/ o novels, the German translation of Daniel Alarcón’s debut novel Lost City Radio has proven to be a resounding success, precisely because of its reluctance to domesticate the “foreign” geography and conflicts and to adopt an ethics of untranslatability. Alarcón’s first collection of short fiction, War by Candlelight, was awarded the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and laid the groundwork for his ambitious debut novel Lost City Radio, which was published in in 2007. Lost City Radio is set in an unnamed Latin American country, in the aftermath of a ten-year civil war, from which a totalitarian regime emerges victorious. In this dictatorship all indigenous languages have been outlawed and almost eliminated. Villages no longer have names, but only carry numbers, and the radio has taken over the function of literacy in spreading news to its community.

 Kurze, Wundersame Leben, 34.  What, carajo, is wrong with you? Translation mine.  . Translation mine [accessed June 9, 2016].  Díaz, Oscar Wao, 335.

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The novel focuses on the crucial importance of the survival of indigenous languages to the complexity of experiencing and expressing human life, and its emphasis on the significance of such a rich linguistic archive to not only communicate, but to name and thus give value and a history to specific places and phenomena. The German translation of the novel by Friederike Meltendorf received the inaugural International Literature Award from the House of World Cultures in Berlin in 2009. An award created to celebrate first time translations of international prose into German, the International Literature award is one of the most lucrative literature awards in German-speaking Europe: authors receive 25.000 Euros and their translators are given 10.000 Euros in prize money.⁵³ The International Literature award made Alarcón a well-known author in Germany and even resulted in the production of an audiobook of Lost City Radio in German, a choice I find particularly rich in possibilities given the focus on listening to the radio in the original text.⁵⁴ Born in Lima in 1977, Alarcón grew up the son of two Peruvian physicians in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, a Latina/o childhood rather different from the dominant immigration narrative. The family returned to Lima every summer, and Alarcón grew up in a bilingual and bicultural environment that has made him a truly transnational writer. After earning a B.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University, Alarcón embarked to Peru on a Fulbright fellowship, where he worked with at-risk youth in the suburbs of Lima, continuing his experience as a middle-school teacher in New York City. Among the few Latino authors to write in both English and Spanish and to also translate his own work from English into Spanish and vice-versa, Alarcón is well-known as a writer, journalist, and publisher not only in his home state of California and beyond, but also in literary circles in Lima. In 2011, Alarcón cofounded, together with Carolina Guerrero, Martina Castro and Annie Correal, Radio Ambulante, a bilingual, Spanish dominant radio show out of Oakland, California, that features immigrant narratives, interviews, reports about immigrant rights activism, and art relating to the Latina/o community.⁵⁵ Alarcón is also associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a literary magazine housed in Lima, and his graphic novel, Ciudad de Payasos, was created in collaboration with the Peruvi-

 [accessed June 9, 2016].  I offer a detailed analysis of the German audiobook version, especially with regards to pronounciation and translation of sociolects, in my monograph-in-progress, Transnational Latinidades.  [accessed May 15, 2016].

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an visual artist Sheila Alvarado and was first published in Lima in 2011.⁵⁶ An English translation followed four years later.⁵⁷ In the context of translation, it is noteworthy that the origin of the graphic novel is found in his short story “City of Clowns,” which had first appeared in English in The New Yorker in 2003. Alarcón’s translation process thus does not only affect language, but also the translation from one genre to another. Alarcón first made a name as a short fiction writer with the publication of his short story collection War by Candlelight,⁵⁸ which also features an earlier English version of “City of Clowns.” After the great success of Lost City Radio in Germany, his first collection of short fiction was translated into German as well, under the title Stadt der Clowns ⁵⁹ – a curious choice given that his graphic novel carries the same title. Alarcón is an author who is keenly aware of the problem of translation in his daily work, an awareness that he readily discusses in essays and interviews.⁶⁰ Perhaps the German translation of his first novel was such a resounding success in part because of his insistence upon a close collaboration with his translator Friederike Meltendorf. In a 2013 interview with Natalia Sylvester for NBC Latino, Alarcón admitted to NBC’s Natalia Sylvester, It’s very hard for me to imagine writing a novel in Spanish. I tried my hand at writing this novella [Los Provincianos] in Spanish, and I liked the results quite a bit, but I sort of realized that I needed more time to work on that craft. It felt to me as if someone had pulled half the words out of a dictionary. And that is both exciting – because it makes you work hard with the words you have – and challenging, for that very same reason. It’s a fascinating process to work in a language that is both yours and not yours.⁶¹

Alarcón’s description of his creative process when writing in Spanish as “working in a language that is both yours and not yours” effectively captures the very process Lawrence Venuti describes as the beneficial experience of foreignization. In Alarcón’s case, this experience is particularly pronounced, since he himself has translated some of his work from English into Spanish, and vice versa.

 Daniel Alarcón and Sheila Alvarado, Ciudad de Payasos (Lima: Alfaguara, 2011).  Daniel Alarcón and Sheila Alvarado, City of Clowns (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015).  Daniel Alarcón, War By Candlelight (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).  Daniel Alarcón, Stadt der Clowns, trans. Friederike Meltendorf (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2012).  In January 2009 Alarcón published an essay entitled “Lost in Translation” in Granta, and in a 2005 interview with Salon, he mused about “What Kind of Latino Am I?” given his transnational upbringing in a suburb of Birmingham and in Lima, Peru.  [accessed June 4, 2016].

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One of Meltendorf’s most impactful decisions when translating Lost City Radio concerns the very title of the novel. Rather than translating the title verbatim into German, which Alarcón himself opted for when translating his novel into Spanish,⁶² Meltendorf deemed it best to leave the title as is. Since the vast majority of German and Austrian citizens under the age of 60 tend to have a working knowledge of English, the act of foreignization would not impact accessibility, but rather draw attention to the concise lyricism of the title in English. The jury of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which granted the International Literature Award, explained their decision to honor the translation as follows: “Friederike Meltendorf… is able to reproduce the clear, at times spare, precise and laconic language of the original without losing its wonderful rhythm and the tender, situational lyricism.”⁶³ Especially telling are two reasons for the success of the translation. According to the jury, Meltendorf’s skillful capturing of a “sensuality of orality” is particularly noteworthy in a text that is largely reliant on the main protagonist Norma’s voice on the radio. Second, Meltendorf’s translation differs from translations of earlier Latin American boom literature because she moves away from the overly flowery language German readers have stereotypically have come to associate with the Latin American “boom.” One example of such an effective rendition of Alarcón’s laconic and concise English in German translation can be found in the passage when Uncle Trini shares memories of the many years of violence in his city: And then, when he was thirteen, there was an explosion at the mayor’s office, and, on the same night: the windows, the stones, the school…The school. There were no watchmen, only a wrought-iron fence held together with an ancient padlock. Easy to climb over.⁶⁴ [Dann, als er dreizehn war, explodierte eine Bombe im Büro des Bürgermeisters, und in derselben Nacht: die Fenster, die Steine, die Schule… Die Schule, Es gab keinen Wachmann, nur einen alten schmiedeeisernen Zaun mit einem uralten Vorhängeschloss. Leicht zu überwinden. ⁶⁵]

Much of the effectiveness of Alarcón’s language relies on his use of syntax: he often privileges short sentences, connected and, at times, disrupted by phrases framed by semi-colons. Even though this concise syntax is unusual in German, Meltendorf has managed to convey the English effectiveness in German as well,

 Daniel Alarcón, Radio Ciudad Perdida/“Lost City Radio”(Lima: Alfaguara, 2007).  [accessed June 7, 2016].  Alarcón, Lost City Radio, 54– 55.  Daniel Alarcón, Lost City Radio (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2008): 72.

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without sacrificing the integrity of the German sentence melody. Another example of the sensitivity of Meltendorf’s translation to cultural specifics in both English and German consists in her translation of the last sentence in the opening paragraph. In the English original, the sentence reads, “A meeting was called.”⁶⁶ The German translation sounds more formal, but is idiomatically also much more accurate than a literal translation would be: “Eine Sitzung wurde anberaumt.”⁶⁷ Other times, Meltendorf simplifies the modality of an English verb to afford a more natural tense in German: While Alarcón’s original reads, “Later, when his mother died and he left 1797, Victor would remember this day as the beginning of the village’s dissolution,”⁶⁸ Meltendorf’s translation changes the conditional to a simple past tense in German: “Später, als seine Mutter starb und er 1797 verliess, erinnerte sich Victor an diesen Tag als den Anfang der Auflösung seines Dorfes.”⁶⁹ Nothing is lost in translation here, yet idiomatic fluency is gained. If Alarcón represents a new generation of transnational Latina/o, authors who “have found a literary home between Latin American Spanish and U.S. English,”⁷⁰ then Friederike Meltendorf represents a new generation of translators who can give this bicultural literature a home in another language. In an interview with Heike Gatzmaga of the Haus der Kulturen in Berlin, Alarcón responds to the question, “[h]ow a book about the search to recover a lost language and world … fit[s] into the scheme of an International Literature Award devoted to the subjects of exile, migration and multilingualism?” as follows: I presented the book in Spain and it was interpreted as a book about Franco. When I presented it in Colombia, it was about the Colombian war, when I presented it in Argentina, it was about the dictatorship in Argentina, when I presented it in Chile, it was about Pinochet. In the US, it was interpreted as a book about terrorism and 9/11 …⁷¹

In this telling comment, Alarcón reiterates one of Walter Benjamin’s main tenets of the task of the translator: it is not necessary or even desirable to translate with a specific audience in mind, and instead the audience will find its own way to

 Alarcón, Lost City Radio, 3.  Alarcón, Lost City Radio, German translation, 11.  Alarcón, Lost City Radio, 85  Alarcón, Lost City Radio, German translation, 110.  [accessed June 7, 2016].  [accessed June 7, 2016].

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the text in translation if it manages to, indeed, “produce in it the echo of the original.”⁷² Based on my readings of the German translations of Ana Menéndez’s Loving Che, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio, Latina/o fiction both invites and resists translation. An analysis of German translations, marketing, and reception of these three Latina/o novels highlights, with renewed force, the central role of fiction in the production of social and ethnic categories, such as Latinidad, in the United States and beyond. Some translations, such as Friederike Meltendorf’s Lost City Radio, echo the clarity and complexity of the South American narrator’s voice in the English original by reproducing the syntactical characteristics of Alarcón’s voice while successfully maintaining the integrity of idiomatic expression in German. In doing so, the translation encourages an engagement of readers with the roles of both the media and ideologues in the totalitarian aftermath of a civil war in an unnamed South American nation without a facile and false domestication or an overdone foreignization on the other hand. Neither tamed nor alienating, the German translation asks readers to participate and take responsibility in the construction of transnational Latinidad while reading the novel. Other translations, such as Eva Kemper’s Das Kurze Wundersame Leben des Oscar Wao, strive to bridge the cultural gap between a Dominican American protagonist and a German readership by appropriating another ethnic minority voice, thus leading to problematic comparisons between ethnic minorities with radically different histories and cultural capital in the United States and in Germany. At the same time, Kemper’s translation also highlights the international dimension of nerd culture, and mostly avoids a critical engagement with stereotypical representations of Latino masculinities. Barbara Schaden’s translation of Loving Che, and especially the marketing of the novel in German-speaking Europe, illustrates the dangers embedded in translations that eschew the critical distance most Latina/o authors bring to the construction of Latinidad. Where Menéndez complicates romanticizations of both pre-revolutionary Cuba and revolutionary icons such as Che Guevara, the German translation of the novel distorts the postmodern, critical message and reiterates stereotypes. As a result, a close reading and cultural analysis of (German) translations and marketing of Latina/o fiction highlight the role of fiction in shaping the public’s assumptions about ethnic identities, and invite us as readers, translators, and scholars to be ever vigilant about the pitfalls of perpetuating stereotypes and reproducing facile analogies via acts of domestication.

 Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” 79.

Elda María Román

Rerouting the Rise: Upward Mobility in Junot Díaz’s Fiction In this essay, I begin with the argument that Junot Díaz constructs an upward mobility narrative over his three published works, Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This is How you Lose Her. The reoccurring character in all three texts is Yunior, and he undergoes the following trajectory: introduced as a youth from a working-class immigrant family in Drown, he goes to college and becomes a creative writing professor in The Brief Life of Oscar Wao, and ends up teaching at an elite Cambridge institution in This is How You Lose Her. Upward mobility, however, is a fraught representation in Latina/o literature, since it is associated with assimilation, individualism, and materialism. By examining the formal features of Díaz’s texts, this essay demonstrates how they negotiate the portrayal of upward mobility with decolonial and anti-neoliberal aesthetic practices. To read Junot Díaz’s three published works (Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This is How You Lose Her) in conversation with each other, we could focus on portrayals of the Dominican diaspora, poverty and disenfranchisement, power and violence, and masculinity, topics that have produced fruitful analyses of Díaz’s writing.¹ There is an aspect to the three texts that has received little attention, however: the fact that Díaz’s reoccurring narratorcharacter Yunior starts off in Drown living in a “wood-frame house with three rooms” (D, 70) in Santo Domingo and ends This is How You Lose Her as a creative writing professor living in a fifth-story apartment with a view of the Harvard skyline (TH, 214). What do we make of the fact that Drown captures Yunior’s despair with “no promises elsewhere” (D, 92) and no hope of leaving his neighborhood, while Oscar Wao shows him attending Rutgers University, and This is How You Lose Her begins with a story featuring him as a middle-class professional vacationing in a Caribbean resort? As I will discuss in this essay, there is a structural rise occurring over the arc of these texts; among the other genres they incorporate and enact, together they constitute an upward mobility narrative, one of the most frequently occurring narratives in U.S. literature, and one that tends to get ignored or vilified in studies of Latina/o literature.

 Junot Díaz, Drown (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996); The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007); This is How You Lose Her (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “D,” “OW,” and “TH.” https://doi.org/9783110532913-007

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The framing of upward mobility or middle-class status as cultural betrayal and political threat has served a deliberate function in the formation of politicized Latina/o identities and in studies of Latina/o cultural production. Specifically, these associations arose as a response to histories of racialization, policing, and exclusion that have had long-lasting social and economic effects. In the United States, Latina/os have historically faced stigmatization and violence, have been seen as dispensable labor and scapegoated during times of national crisis, and have been denied equal education, employment, and housing opportunities. Since markers of difference can prevent mobility, there has been, and arguably still is, much incentive to distance or remove oneself from historically marginalized communities: the racialized, the poor, and immigrant. In this context, upward mobility and attaining middle-class status became associated with the potential for “selling out,” or for inauthenticity, betrayal, and assimilation. But the latter half of the twentieth century saw the employment of cultural strategies offering alternative ways to deal with social and economic disparities. The Chicano and Puerto Rican movements of the 1960s and 1970s affirmed markers of difference – racial identities, the working class, vernaculars, and folk cultures – as the basis of identities formed for collective social action. Maintaining a sense of community entails policing the boundaries of the community, and because people of color historically have benefited from working against other people of color, there is valid reason for rhetoric like sellout discourse and portrayals of middle-class ethnics as politically threatening and/or suffering from false consciousness. Rhetoric and narratives that demarcate insiders from outsiders help reinforce values important to the community. By not taking into account how heterogeneous the imagined community is in terms of class, however, we cannot not have an accurate understanding of how Latina/o literature has been produced, and how much of it has been driven by attempts to address intra-group as well as inter-group class dynamics. We also risk perpetuating an assessment of the middle class that is historically inaccurate, as evident by the many writers, educators, lawyers, health care professionals, etc. who work for social and economic justice. As cultural critic José Limón points out, the bias against and erasure of the middle-class in Chicana/o (and I would add Latina/o) studies is part of a “broader Western intellectual legacy of maligning the middle class” with origins in writings by Matthew Arnold and Karl Marx, who viewed the middle-class in culturally or politically negative terms.² Many ethnic texts grapple with this discursive legacy in representing de-

 José. E. Limón, “Transnational Triangulation: Mexico, the United States and the Emergence of

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sires to get out of poverty while remaining committed to collective, rather than individual gains.³ In this essay, I will discuss how Junot Díaz reflects Latina/o literature’s resistance to and engagement with upward mobility as a material and ideological phenomenon. There is a misconception that upward mobility narratives are solely about individualism, material accumulation, and assimilation. Upward mobility narratives derive from the European bildungsroman,⁴ and just as the bildungsroman is not a static tradition, upward mobility narratives have taken diverse forms. Many U.S. ethnic writers have actively tried to undermine ideas about self-reliance, incorporation into the status quo, and advancement in material terms. Bruce Robbins’s examination of upward mobility narratives demonstrates how they function allegorically to work out ways individuals can rise while contributing to the common good.⁵ Díaz’s writings represent this dynamic and come at a historical moment that makes his upward mobility narrative different from others in Latina/o and African American literature, a difference that is also influenced by the fact that Yunior’s development spans three texts rather than one. In contrast to previous generations of ethnic mobility narratives that revolved around characters coming to political awareness, wrestled with the ways individuals could enact politics and/or participate in institutions, or foregrounded the question of whether one could or should be an artist and what kind of artist to be, Díaz’s texts benefit from the institutionalization of Latina/ o literature and ethnic studies. His character-narrator Yunior does not have to remain in a hole in the ground like Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man (1952), pretend to be part of the establishment while secretly working for racial communities like Sam Greenlee’s protagonist in The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969), or declare that he will come back for those who “cannot out” like Sandra Cisneros’s narrator in The House on Mango Street (1984). Texts like these were greatly influential in conveying a need for collectivist politics, while working out ways an individual could participate.

a Mexican American Middle Class,” in Mexico and Mexicans in the Making of the United States, ed. John Tutino (Austin: U of Texas P, 2012): 238.  In analyzing Black and Chicana/o upward mobility narratives, I discuss these issues in more depth in Race and Upward Mobility: Seeking, Gatekeeping, and Other Class Strategies in Postwar America (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017).  Lawrence Buell. The Dream of the Great American Novel. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014).  Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007).

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Produced at the turn of the century, when there has been an established tradition of black and Latina/o authors writing about racial inequalities, Díaz’s texts consequently focus less directly on how individuals can engage politically in the public sphere, and more on the internal, emotional work that is necessary to decolonize the self. Yunior’s upward mobility narrative models the importance of this interior work; at the same time, the formal features of the texts themselves resist reinforcing a capitalistic impulse to remain focused on the self. Spanning outwards, Díaz’s writing imparts the necessity of reading socio-historically in different contexts, and of translating these insights to a cross-class readership.

Materialist desires The intergenerational father/son drama portrayed through Yunior’s fraught relationship with his authoritarian father foregrounds a critical interrogation of masculinity and exemplifies ways that mobility has been conceived and reinterpreted. The stories are not ordered chronologically in Drown, so by the time we get to the last story, “Negocios,” we know that Yunior’s father, Ramón de las Casas, left the Dominican Republic to immigrate to the United States when Yunior was around four years old. The longing, feelings of abandonment, and poverty the family endures while waiting for him are expressed in the stories “Ysrael” and “Aguatando.” It is five years before Ramón retrieves his family, although life with him in the United States is turbulent and temporary; the fear that Yunior feels around his father is captured in “Fiesta, 1980,” as are the effects of Ramón’s habitual philandering. By the time depicted in “Drown,” set during Yunior’s teenage years, Ramón has left the family again and Yunior exhibits the effects of growing up with violence, instability, and rigid ideas about masculinity. The final story, “Negocios” centralizes Ramón; Yunior recounts his father’s early years in the United States when the family heard little from him. He does so, however, through a compassionate reconstruction of events. Drown does not portray the writer that Yunior will go on to be, but his narration offers – through its form – a contrast to Ramón’s acquisitive and individualist values. The story portrays Ramón, the reoccurring oppressor in Drown, as the embodiment of capitalistic striving. When Ramón arrives in the United States, he works first in Miami, although his goal is “Nueva York,” which “was the city of jobs, the city that had first called the Cubanos and their cigar industry, then the Bootstrap Puerto Ricans and now him” (167). Díaz situates Ramon’s immigration story in the context of previous diasporic histories: the Cubans who immigrated in the early twentieth century and Puerto Ricans who migrated during the late 1940s and 1950s as a result of Operation Bootstrap, the initiatives on

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the Island to change the economy from an agricultural to an industrial one but which led many displaced agricultural workers to move to the mainland. “Bootstrap” also alludes to the colloquial phrase promoting self-reliance, and in this story, Ramón stands for independence that is self-serving: “He was twenty-four. He didn’t dream about familia and wouldn’t for many years. He dreamed instead of gold coins, like the ones that had been salvaged from the many wrecks about our island, stacked high as sugar cane” (D, 169). In the pursuit of material success, Ramón uses other peoples’ resources and affection to secure opportunities for himself, such as when he uses his father-in-law’s money to fund his travel to the United States and does not send regular money home to help his family, or when he uses Nilda to gain citizenship through a bigamous marriage, without concern for her feelings. Since the story spans about five years, it follows Ramón working a series of service sector jobs: washing dishes, cleaning offices, soldering in a radiator shop, and cooking in a Chinese restaurant. Ramón’s ultimate dream, however, is for a “negocio of his own” (D, 190). A friend offers to sell him one of his hotdog carts, but Ramón rejects the offer; instead he aims to “jump right into the lowest branches of the American establishment. That leap was what he envisioned for himself, not some slow upward crawl through the mud” (D, 191). Ramón functions as a consolidation of the worst of capitalistic and hierarchial thinking; he sees himself as distinct, believes his goals and needs are more important than those of others, and puts money above people. Setting up Ramón as a repository of values to critique, the narrative endorses a counter-value system. Ramón stands for acquisitive individualism, but Díaz, focalizing through Yunior, depicts how much Ramón benefits from immigrant social networks. When Ramón arrives in Miami, a black Spanish-speaking taxi driver takes him on a tour of the city and then to an inexpensive place he can stay. After Ramón has married for his citizenship papers, his friend Chuito offers him a way to set up a home so that he can bring his family to the United States. His other friend Jo Jo lends him money so he can move and buy furniture. What helps Ramón survive and move into new circumstances is his social capital, gained through an immigrant network that helps out other immigrants. Moreover, Ramón, as an oppressive and unreliable father and husband, could have been portrayed one-dimensionally, but Yunior does not regard Ramón solely in reaction to just his own pain. Instead, he prompts readers to understand Ramón in relation to socioeconomic conditions. The story’s title “Negocios” translates to “business” but also plays on the word “negotiations;” indeed, the story negotiates how to be critical of Ramon’s pursuit of economic rewards, but at the same time compassionate in narrating his struggles. Ramón does not end up owning a business of his own, and, in many ways, the story shows how he is not in a position to negotiate, either as

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an undocumented immigrant in his early years or in later years as a worker at Reynolds Aluminum, where he has a better-paying union job, but one in which he will be penalized if he speaks up about racism, and later demoted when he gets injured. Throughout those years, he endures loneliness, fears of being deported, the “nineteen-, twenty-hour days,” (D, 177) chronic sickness, getting robbed, and limited employment opportunities. Yunior models collectivistic and compassionate reconstruction by situating his father in a broader context: generations of diasporic mobility, immigrant social networks, and the labor hardships and racialization that immigrants face. Díaz’s aesthetic practice of modeling ways of seeing the world beyond one’s individual emotional and social investments returns to Ramón in his second collection of short stories. There are actually two versions of Ramón’s early migrant years, the short story, “Negocios” in Drown and the story “Otravida, Otravez,” in the more recent This is How You Lose Her. “Otravida, Otravez” translates to “Another Life, Another Time.” Given Díaz’s fondness for science fiction, it is not a stretch to see these Ramón stories as exercises in depicting alternate realities, as distinct possibilities for how Ramón could have spent his early years in the United States. This begs the question: why provide an alternate account of those years? In this version, instead of marrying a woman named Nilda for his citizenship papers, Ramón is dating a woman named Yasmin, has had a cleaning business that failed, and had a son who died in the Dominican Republic. The main formal difference between the two stories is narrative perspective: Yunior narrates “Negocios,” while Yasmin narrates “Otravida, Otravez.” The effect is another engagement in compassionate narration to express what it feels like to be waiting for Ramón, not as a son or wife in the Dominican Republic, as is captured in Drown, but from the perspective of his romantic partner in the United States who conveys her own fears and insecurities about her uncertain relationship with a man who himself is in an indeterminate state. Yasmin shares feelings Nilda could not vocalize as his second wife in “Negocios,” because that story did not delve into her interiority. Engaging in collectivistic and compassion reconstruction necessitates more perspectives than Yunior’s. This version of Ramón returns to his acquisitive pursuits, but specifically around his desire to buy a house. Yasmin relates at the beginning of the story: “He’s been talking about the house he wants to buy, how hard it is to find one when you’re Latino” (TH, 53). She joins him on his housing search excursions and shares that, “It’s been his dream since he first set foot in the States” (TH, 59) and that every time they go out and look “[h]e makes an event of it, dressing like he’s interviewing for a visa” (TH, 59). In “Negocios,” Ramon received citizenship through marriage; in this telling of his tale he is seeking enfranchisement through property ownership. He tells Yasmin “to own a house

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in this country is to begin to live” (TH, 71). When he is able to purchase a home, it is a highly emotional experience, as Yasmin reveals: “We did it, he says quietly. Now we can begin. Then he puts his head down on the table and cries” (TH, 74). Yunior does not make an appearance in this story at all; instead, the story centralizes Yasmin’s emotions, and indirectly, Ramón’s. While neither version of the Ramón stories offers his first-person account, this story gestures to a deeper emotional life. It revolves less around avidity towards material accumulation, the “gold coins” he dreams about in “Negocios” than a yearning to concretize attainment of all that is symbolized by a house in the United States: national belonging, social inclusion, stability, and worth. Returning to and offering a different Ramón story reveals another way in which Díaz depicts the material realities immigrants and racialized people face in the United States while extending the endeavor to portray Ramón beyond Yunior’s own pain.

Rerouting desires We get a picture of the materialist desires that drive Ramón, but he has different hardships than his son; in contrast, we get narratives about how romantic desires drive Yunior. In Oscar Wao, Yunior longs for what could have been with Lola, and This is How You Lose Her features story after story of transient failed relationships. Since we do not get a first-person narrative from Ramón, but we do from Yunior, we also get Yunior’s struggles narrated in psychological terms, particular in the last story “The Cheaters Guide to Love,” which revolves around his struggles to get over his ex-fiancé. In attempts to stop thinking about her and lose his post-breakup depression weight, he starts running, only to be stopped when he develops plantar fasciitis, which is why he turns to yoga. In comparison to what his father went through as an undocumented immigrant, these can be easily seen as personal middle-class problems, but one day Yunior injures his back while trying to do a yoga move. His back problems worsen and he is diagnosed with spinal stenosis; it is suggested that his earlier experiences working as a pool table deliveryman⁶ are the cause of his current pain. In “Negocios,” Ramón injured his back while moving a crate at the aluminum factory. Both father and son have debilitating injuries from their experiences as manual laborers, rendering them physically vulnerable and countering the image they promote of themselves as strong and virile. By creating this parallel, Díaz cuts the experiential distance between them, even though the son has had

 A portrayal of which is given in the story, “Edison, New Jersey” in Drown.

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economic and social mobility. At the same time, Yunior ties his physical vulnerability to his emotional vulnerability, telling himself that his list of ailments includes “your feet, your back, and your heart” (TH, 195). If, in his father’s story, a back injury prevented Ramón from working and threatened his class mobility, then, in this Yunior story, the back injury threatens to prevent him from getting over his failed romantic relationship. The main difference between father and son is that the father’s trajectory is narrated as forward propulsion, motivated by desires for economic success in the United States. The son’s trajectory is constantly figured as a movement back in time, recounting failed loves or brief wondrous lives. There is in fact a deliberate avoidance of emphasizing aspects of Yunior’s life that would put him in the traditional upward mobility narrative, which entails highlighting material acquisition and markers of status. For example, Oscar Wao indicates briefly that he has achieved middle-class status. At the end of the novel, Yunior reveals that he lives in New Jersey and I […] teach composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College, and even own a house at the top of Elm Street, not far from the steel mill. Not one of the big ones that the bodega owners buy with the earnings, but not too shabby either. (OW, 326)

Monica Hanna convincingly observes a class anxiety in how Yunior describes home ownership, in that he reveals “pride in his achieved position” while also enacting a “demotion of that status” by mentioning that the house as still close to the steel mill, which Hanna argues suggests that “the writer of color seems to face a crisis in regard to the possibility of ever being able to represent his community, because, in becoming a professional writer, the writer seems to have forfeited the ‘authenticity’ associated with working-class realities often linked to the ‘true’ roots of ethnic identity, especially in U.S. Latino/a literature.”⁷ Thus, we could read this passage as revealing Yunior’s anxiety about losing authenticity and working-class credibility, though it is worth examining Yunior’s relationship to upward mobility even further. Significantly, Yunior both claims and downplays class mobility. Bruce Robbins gets at this point in surmising that

 Monica Hanna, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cannibalist: Reading Yunior (Writing) in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” in Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, eds. Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and José Davíd Saldívar (Durham: Duke UP, 2016): 100.

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the literary shape of Drown, which rejects chronological order so as to put the son’s bitter disillusionment-with-America story first, and the father’s triumphant coming-to-America story last, is a way of rewriting upward mobility so as both to refuse and embrace it.⁸

Ramón’s immigrant story is hardly triumphant, but I agree that Díaz’s texts do not completely reject upward mobility. Instead, Díaz, like Black writers such as Dorothy West, Paule Marshall, and Gloria Naylor,⁹ constructs narratives that acknowledge the foundation that previous generations have built in dealing with struggles such as poverty, racism, and xenophobia, even if the texts of said writers do not endorse the strategies used to deal with them, such as valuing material accumulation or upholding colorism and classism. It is this foundation – however shaky or viewed critically – that allows characters in their narratives to express and adopt alternate value systems and strategies. For example, Díaz, through Yunior, decenters attainment in order to focus on loss figured through relationships, most often romantic. In the story “Miss Lora,” found in This is How You Lose Her, his journey to higher education is mentioned as an afterthought. Miss Lora, the older neighbor and substitute teacher with whom he has an affair, encourages him to apply to colleges. But, after his high school graduation, he works at a steel mill and there is no mention of what motivates him to attend college, or about his journey getting there; we are just told on the next page: “At Rutgers, where you’ve finally landed, you date like crazy” (TH, 172). The focus on romantic relationships makes more poignant the loss that Yunior feels when they end, such as the end of his relationship to Miss Lora, just one of several short-lived relationships depicted in the collection, and the end of his relationship with Lola in Oscar Wao. The emphasis is on Yunior’s psychological, rather than economic, mobility. In an interview, Díaz has described that what Yunior does not have but needs is to move towards decolonial love. In order to have real intimacy, Diaz argues that Yunior must first express “vulnerability, forgiveness, [and] acceptance,”¹⁰ particularly around his own colonized mind and body. It would enable him to see how his experiences of racial and gender oppression are ones shared by women and how his own masculine privilege helps feed this dynamic. Further, what Yunior does not have, but which is reflected in the form of all three texts, is what Hanna,

 Robbins, Upward Mobility, xvii.  See for examples, Wests’s The Living Is Easy (1948), Marshall’s Browngirl, Brownstones (1959), and Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985).  Paula M. L. Moya, “The Search for Decolonial Love: An Interview with Junot Díaz.” Boston Review (June 26, 2012). [accessed July 3, 2016].

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Saldívar, and Harford Vargas have articulated as Díaz’s decolonial imagination, an “act of social and cultural criticism, since it is through [Díaz’s] imagination as a creative writer that he is able to envision and articulate alternatives to the logics of coloniality.”¹¹ To comprehend the interdisciplinary nature of Díaz’s aesthetic vision and practice, it would be beneficial to recall C. Wright Mill’s conceptualization of the “sociological imagination,” which he defined as the ability “to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society.”¹² In other words, we cannot understand an individual’s actions without contextualizing them in relation to the historical and social forces that shaped her. One of the examples Mills offers concerns unemployment. When someone is unemployed, that person might be read as unemployed because of individual traits, such as a lack of ambition or work ethic. But if we look at a broader picture and see that there are millions unemployed, we can start to see patterns and structural causes. Similarly, people may read Yunior and get fed up with him, wondering: why can he not get his act together? Why does he keep cheating on women? In Oscar Wao, he cannot see how his own behavior is linked to a broader history of hierarchical exploitation and how he is complicit by privileging masculinity. But Díaz’s transhistorical and transnational narrative framing, particularly evident in Oscar Wao, depicts characters as indices of gender, racial, and capitalistic histories. Díaz’s texts encourage interdisciplinary reading practices as part of what Elena Saéz Machado calls a “pedagogical ethical imperative.”¹³ They invite us to read sociologically (patterns in society), historically (changes and continuities over time) and literarily (patterns and time rendered figuratively). Díaz’s writing posits that such reading can come from reinterpreting disasters, historical and personal. In a 2011 essay for the Boston Review, titled “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal,” Diaz argues that disastrous events force us into deeper social reading.¹⁴ Citing one of the meanings of apocalypse – “a disruptive event that provokes revelation” – he reads the 2010 Haitian earthquake as an apocalyptic event that revealed long-standing economic and social inequities that were having devastating effects on the Republic of Haiti even before the earthquake struck, making the aftermath even more catastrophic. He sees the Haitian earthquake not as a natural disaster but as a “social disaster” because

 Hanna, et. al., Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, 8.  C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination [1959] (New York: Oxford UP, 2000): 6.  Elena Machado Sáez, Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015): 2.  Junot Díaz, “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal,” Boston Review (May 1, 2011). [accessed July 3, 2016].

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social disasters “are always made possible by a series of often-invisible societal choices that implicate more than just those being drowned or buried in rubble.” It is through reading the ruins of the aftermath of disastrous events that there is a possibility of seeing the relationship between people, structures, and history. He has dramatized this type of reading on an individual scale several times in his work. In Oscar Wao, he shows that only when Oscar experienced horrific violence, a disaster of his own, that he was able to start the process of seeing himself as connected to others. Prior to the beating he received in the cane fields, all he wanted was to experience romantic love. However, six weeks after his beating, he has a dream about the cane, “but instead of bolting when the cries began, when the bones started breaking, he summoned all the courage he ever had, would ever have, and forced himself to do the one thing he did not want to do, that he could not bear to do. He listened” (OW, 307). As a character associated with escapist, futuristic, and fantastical narratives, Oscar is tasked to ground himself and to read historically; he finally starts listening to how the violence he received is connected to other histories of violence. Yunior experiences two similar calls to read and respond. In Oscar Wao, he has dreams of Oscar holding up a book and calling out to him. The implication is that he listens and has created the “zafa” – the counternarrative to the curse of the “fukú” – that is the novel (OW, 325). In “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” the Doomsday Book that his ex-fiancé has sent him serves the same function when he finally reads it. “The Doomsday Book” contains “copies of all the emails and fotos from the cheating days” that his ex compiled into a book and sent to him (TH, 216). The Doomsday Book refers to the land and livestock survey conducted under William the Conquerer in 1066 after the Norman Conquest of England, carried out to assess tax payments. The findings could not be appealed, hence the reference to “Doomsday.” Fittingly, when Yunior reads the survey of his own behavior and finally stops appealing his ex’s decision, when he acknowledges that she was right to break up with him, he is able to experience something like “hope, like grace” and is able to move forward with his writing (TH, 217). In Diaz’s aesthetic vision, mobility is not material gain, but a trajectory about learning how to read more ethically and how to respond. Díaz’s texts might not center the process of upward mobility, but they reveal and value the skills of reading, writing, and educating associated with his, and Yunior’s, professions, professions that enable and mark class mobility. Diaz’s socially conscious vision shares similarities with the group of writers and intellectuals Stephen Schryer examines in his book Fantasies of the New Class. Analyzing writers and sociologists from the 1940s to the 1980s, Schryer argues that, with the rise of a professional-managerial class (the “new class”) during the postwar period, intellectuals saw themselves as “cultural educators and national

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therapists” who, as a result of their education and cultural capital, could serve as models for society at large, disseminating cultural values that “would mitigate the self-interest and acquisitiveness of American society.”¹⁵ In its pedagogical orientation, Díaz’s writing positions him as a cultural educator and a kind of transnational therapist in diagnosing the state of race, gender, and economic relations in the Americas. But, unlike the writers and intellectuals Schryer discusses who saw themselves as cultural influencers rather than policy reformers, Diaz is a very vocal activist, for example, taking public stances on U.S. immigration policy and the Dominican Republic’s discrimination against Haitians. He resists being a “discursive Latino” (in Arlene Dávila’s terms) by engaging in politics that counter the way “Latino/a authors surface as ‘discursive’ objects to be discussed, sold, referenced, or analyzed as embodiments of Latinidad, rather than active agents that have involvements with particular communities and political positions of their own.”¹⁶ In his politics and in his writing, Díaz actively models a different orientation for class and social mobility.

Slipping in new contexts Díaz could have kept Yunior in the same social and economic position he is in Drown, but Yunior’s structural rise enables Díaz to take his social and historical commentary to other contexts. For instance, there are few college campus novels in Latina/o literature, but setting part of Oscar Wao at Rutgers University facilitates an examination of the kind of cultural policing and oppression that can occur even in academic institutions. Yunior narrates that when Oscar de León, the misfit, overweight, dark-skinned nerd he comes to share a dorm room with, started college: There was the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college […] and with it an optimism that here among these thousands of young people he would find someone like him. That alas, didn’t happen. The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican. (OW, 49).

 Stephen Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (New York: Columbia UP, 2011): 2, 65.  Arlene Dávila, “Against the ‘Discursive Latino’: On the Politics and Praxis of Junot Díaz’s Latinidad,” in Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and José David Saldívar, eds., Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Durham: Duke UP, 2015): 40.

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Doubly stigmatized, Oscar never gains social inclusion, neither in college nor afterwards. When he becomes a math teacher at his former high school, he is even ostracized by the nerds. His class might have changed, but his social standing never does, exemplifying the Weberian distinction between one’s position in an economic hierarchy (class), versus one’s position in a social hierarchy (status). What is fascinating to Yunior is that Oscar never seeks social inclusion or an elevated status. His fascination comes through in the novel’s instrumentalization of the “observer-hero” pairing that Lawrence Buell has theorized,¹⁷ in that Yunior functions as an observer who narrates the story of Oscar, an unconventional hero. As Buell has defined, the observer-hero narrative is part autobiography and part biography, with the observer being a “thinker” and “seeker” while the hero is a “doer” and “be-er.” Famous examples include Ishmael and Ahab in Moby Dick and Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. The hero can also manifest desires that the observer has kept hidden, and we can see this in how Oscar embraces his identity as a writer, nerd, and sensitive male, while Yunior is depicted as having hidden those characteristics in order to fit in. As someone who boasts he could “bench 340 pounds,” who used to call their college dorm “Homo Hall like it was nothing,” and who “never met a little white artist freak he didn’t want to smack around,” Yunior reveals how much his identity was contingent on upholding boundaries of social inclusion and exclusion (OW, 170). Internalizing ideas about acceptable masculinity (physical strength as opposed to emotional vulnerability or queer sexuality) and ideas about who gets to be an artist (whites), Yunior reveals how identities are policed in response to dominant social narratives. Oscar, meanwhile, resists such boundaries. Driven by unrequited romantic desires like Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s novel and Willie Bodega in Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams, a rewriting of The Great Gatsby that also features an observer-hero pair. But unlike Gatsby or Bodega, Oscar does not try to gain his object of desire through economic and social elevation; he always remains an outsider. In his rejection of conformity, Oscar reveals the standards of acceptance and inclusion, but stands as an alternate model of being. Yunior’s upward mobility also enables Díaz to take his character-narrator back to the Dominican Republic as an observer of socioeconomic inequalities from the perspective of a returning middle-class professional. Diáz sets the story “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” which opens up This is How You Lose Her, partly in the Dominican Republic. While the premise is a failing relation-

 Lawrence Buell, “Observer-Hero Narrative,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21.1 (1979): 93 – 111.

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ship, it is also, I argue, about coding the underbelly of transnational capital in forms accessible to a cross-class readership. In this story, Yunior’s relationship with his girlfriend Magda is falling apart after she finds out he has cheated on her. To try to save the relationship, Yunior persuades Magda to continue with plans to take an anniversary trip to the Dominican Republic. No trip can save them at this point, however, and by the end of the story, it is clear they will break up. This story exemplifies how Díaz employs relationship conflict as a way to get readers attention, and in the process, represents a scenario they might not otherwise read. To better understand this maneuver, we can turn to Díaz’s discussion of this technique in reference to his short story “Monstro,” published in the New Yorker in 2012. The story follows a college student vacationing in the Dominican Republic who becomes infatuated with a girl named Mysty. Meanwhile, a viral infection is spreading into a worldwide epidemic. In regards to the story, Díaz commented: I just loved the idea of these over-privileged doofuses pursuing what we would call a ‘mainstream’or ‘literary fiction’ narrative, while in the background, just out of their range – though they could see it if they wished to see it – there’s a much more extreme, horrifying narrative unfolding. And I think that there’s a part of me that feels this way sometimes, where I’m in the Dominican Republic and I’ll go to the border of Haiti, and then I’ll fly and I’m back in New York City, and there’s a part of me that thinks, wow, people are living these ‘mainstream’ lives, and they’re arguing about why the cafe is closed or that their pizza didn’t have enough anchovies, and then there’s this other, almost ‘generic’ world where frightening things are happening, not far away.¹⁸

Díaz expresses a transnational perspective in his awareness of inequalities occurring between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and between the Caribbean and the United States. We can understand the mainstream literary fiction narrative as the romance narrative, drawing readers in because of its familiarity. “Generic” could refer to narratives that are not understood as mainstream and also to Díaz’s use of genre fiction (in this case sci-fi) to narrate the “frightening things.” The Mexican American film director Robert Rodriguez has discussed using a similar tactic. In an interview, he mentioned that, in raising awareness about social issues, his aim is to “try to trick people by getting them to watch something entertaining and show them something else at the same time. Slip

 Junot Díaz, Interview, Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (October 3, 2012). [accessed July 3, 2016].

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it in the genre.”¹⁹ Likewise, Díaz gets readers hooked through romantic and heartbreak stories and slips in social and political commentary. While “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” centralizes the romantic relationship, the other relationship Yunior slips in is the one he has with the Dominican Republic. Yunior frames it as a disclosure: “Let me confess: I love Santo Domingo” (TH, 9). He proceeds to express what he loves about “coming home,” including the emotional aspects and the rituals associated with homecoming, using the word “love” six times in the passage. Setting up his love for his country of origin as a confessional, he continues by narrating as if he cannot fully elaborate: If this was another kind of story, I’d tell you about the sea. What it looks like after it’s been forced into the sky through a blowhole […] I’d tell you how many poor motherfuckers there are […] And I’d tell you about the traffic: the entire history of late-twentieth-century automobiles swarming across every flat stretch of ground, a cosmology of battered cars, battered motorcycles, battered trucks, and battered buses, and an equal number of repair shops, run by any fool with a wrench. I’d tell you about the shanties and our no-running-water faucets and the sambos on the billboards and the fact that my family house comes equipped with an ever-reliable latrine […] and I’d tell you about the street where I was born Calle XXI, how it hasn’t decided yet if it wants to be a slum or not and how it’s been in this state of indecision for years. But that would make it another kind of story, and I’m having enough trouble with this one as it is. You’ll have to take my word for it. Santo Domingo is Santo Domingo. Let’s pretend we all know what goes on there. (TH, 11)

Yunior slips in social contextualization for the story, while posturing as if he cannot. He alludes to pressures to keep the story on track – which we can read as the mainstream relationship narrative – yet he also wants to talk about the socioeconomic inequalities on the island. This constraint was undermined in Oscar Wao through footnotes, which offered historical info and social commentary while keeping the narrative centered on the primary characters. In this collection of short stories, there are no footnotes; consequently, the sociological and historical perspectives cannot be as fully expressed. As much as Yunior is pulled toward spanning outside of Yunior and Magda, he will keep that pull in check. Magda parallels the narrative pressure to keep the attention on the couple and away from the rest of the island by catalyzing their separation from the rest of the population. She does not want to “travel around like a hobo,” staying at budget hotels and with Yunior’s family (TH, 12). She wants to be on the beach,

 Charles Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (Austin: U of Texas P, 2002): 255.

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so they check into Casa de Campo, an actual resort in the Dominican Republic, which Yunior describes: I Don’t Even want to tell you where we’re at. We’re at Casa de Campo. The Resort That Shame Forgot. The average asshole would love this place. It’s the largest, wealthiest resort on the Island, which means it’s a goddam fortress, walled away from everybody else. […] Advertises itself in the States as its own country, and it might as well be. Has its own airport, thirty-six holes of golf, beaches so white they ache to be trampled, and the only Island Dominicans you’re guaranteed to see are either caked up or changing your sheets. Let’s just say my abuelo has never been here and neither has yours. This is where the Garcías and the Colóns come to relax, where the tutumpotes can trade tips with their colleagues from abroad. Chill here too long and you’ll be sure to have your ghetto pass revoked, no questions asked. (TH, 14)

Metonymic for resort culture, Casa de Campo is economically and socially segregated, and stands for wealth and racial disparities reinforced through economic imperialism. Beginning with Rafael Trujillo’s successor Joaquín Balaguer in the 1970s, tourism arose as a dominant industry in the Dominican Republic.²⁰ Foreign investors and multinational corporations are huge beneficiaries,²¹ and the Fanjul brothers, proprietors of a sugar and real estate conglomerate in the United States and the Dominican Republic, own Casa de Campo.²² Foreigners also benefit from the exclusion of the local labor force, with resorts hiring workers from Europe and the United States to work in management and more advanced positions.²³ The “all-inclusive” model also contributes to inequality, allowing visitors to pay for food and services upfront and discouraging them from spending money locally, keeping the money in the global North.²⁴ Resorts like Casa de Campo also insulate people from ever having to see the poverty outside of the fortress: “Casa de Campo has got beaches the way the rest of the Island has

 Frances Boylston, “The Dominican Republic: Venturing Past the Tourist Gate,” Inroads 13 (2007): 115.  See Amalia L. Cabezas, “Tropical Blues: Social Exclusion in the Dominican Republic,” Latin American Perspectives 35.3 (2008) 21– 36 and Lauren N. Duffy et al, “Tourism development in the Dominican Republic: An examination of the economic impact to coastal households,” Tourism and Hospitality Research 16.1 (2016): 35 – 49.  Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “Sweet Deal: Why are these men smiling? The reason is in your sugar bowl,” Time (November 23, 1998) [accessed July 13, 2016]; Marie Brenner recounts the rise of Alfy and Pepe Fanjul’s sugar empire in “In the Kingdom of Big Sugar,” Vanity Fair (February 2001). [accessed July 13, 2016].  Cabezas, “Tropical Blues,” 29 – 30; Duffy, “Tourism development,” 37.  Cabezas, “Tropical Blues,” 5.

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got problems. These, though, have no merengue, no little kids, nobody trying to sell you chicharrones, and there’s a massive melanin deficit in evidence” (TH, 15). Yunior notes the blatant racism in the “cheerful women in Aunt Jemima costumes” (TH, 14) who work at the breakfast buffet, as well as the exploitive sexual economy between visitors and local young and dark-skinned women (TH, 15). At the resort, Magda tells him she wants time to herself. Yunior is clearly hurt, but rather than tell her how he feels rejected, he declares: “I feel like you rejected my whole country, Magda” (TH, 15). It is part avoidance, but it also forges two correlations: Magda with an elite and exclusive tourism industry and Yunior with the rejected and excluded parts of the country. One of the reoccurring issues that Yunior has throughout the three texts is his inability to directly confront and express his feelings, which Díaz gestures to while also underscoring the purposeful seclusion of the resort. Recall that Yunior himself indicated that he had to exclude aspects of the country in order to keep the story focused and staged a moment of narrative distraction to slip in information about the Dominican Republic. The end of the story stages another scene of distraction; this time the relationship narrative distracts Yunior and prevents him and the reader from getting a fuller account of what’s going on outside of the resort. As his interactions with Magda get more strained, Yunior spends time with “two rich older dudes” he meets at the resort bar, tellingly named “Club Cacique,” cacique meaning a local political boss (TH, 17). One introduces himself as the “Vice-President” and the other is his bodyguard Bárbaro. Part of their function in this story is to engage with Yunior in fraternal commiseration. They also take him on an impromptu excursion to see the Cave of the Jagua, the “birthplace of the Taínos,” the indigenous people originally inhabiting the island (TH, 24). During their car ride there, Yunior’s inability to pay full attention to his fellow passengers reinforces the dominance of the relationship narrative: He’s talking – about his time in upstate New York – but so is Bárbaro. The bodyguard’s suit’s rumpled and his hand shakes as he smokes his cigarettes. Some fucking bodyguard. He’s telling me about his childhood in San Juan, near the border of Haiti. Liborio’s country. I wanted to be an engineer, he tells me. I wanted to build schools and hospitals for the pueblo. I’m not really listening to him; I’m thinking about Magda, how I’ll probably never taste her chocha again. (TH, 23)

It is unclear whose backstory we are getting here, since both the Vice-President and Bárbaro are talking at the same time. Yunior does not clarify because he is too distracted by his thoughts of Magda. We also do not find out what thwarted the speaker’s desires to build for the “pueblo,” meaning the town, community, or people, because Yunior is only half-listening. Yunior briefly connects the speak-

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er’s place of upbringing to the historical figure, Liborio, whose real name was Olivorio Mateo, a faith healer and leader of a commune who was killed by U.S. marines in 1922. The historical connection momentarily interrupts Yunior’s preoccupation, but the reader is steered back towards following Yunior’s focus on Magda (specifically his sexualization of her) over any details competing for Yunior’s attention. The banter ends once they arrive at the cave, prompting a consideration of what “insight” might mean in the context of this story. The cave is “the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better,” Yunior muses (TH, 24). He speculates “The Vice-President probably saw his future self hanging in this darkness, bulldozing the poor out of their shanties” (TH, 24). Yunior seeks awareness about his relationship, but first gives some insight into the significance of the Vice-President. The man remains unnamed, and the company he works for is never revealed, although Yunior found out earlier that his mother told him “what this brother was the vice-president of” (TH, 18). Presumably, the Vice-President works for a company involved in real estate development, possibly in the tourism industry. Moreover, he has ties to the government since he drives a “diplomat’s black BMW” and has long been in office (TH, 22; 23). There is a critique here of the entanglement of the government with business; however, it surfaces only briefly. The attention returns to Yunior’s relationship, satisfying readerly expectations for closure on that story. It is in the cave that Yunior remembers the first time he saw Magda and attributes the flashback as a sign: “[T]hat’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end” (TH, 24). Significantly, Yunior gains this realization only by going outside of the resort. Since the story comes at the beginning of the collection, the kind of insight he gains is still partial. While he realizes the relationship is over, he does not admit culpability for his actions, even in retrospect. He attributes the affair he had to the other woman’s advances and blames Magda’s friends for her emotional distance. He does not interrogate what made him cheat in the first place, a pattern apparent throughout Oscar Wao and this collection. The story is part of Díaz’s exploration of fraught masculinity and the factors inhibiting Yunior from gaining personal insight. It can also be understood as a story about the factors preventing readerly and social insight: the appeal of the mainstream narrative and appeal of the gilded resort, both buffering from the unfamiliar or uncomfortable. By slipping in these contexts, Díaz conveys that, despite Yunior’s upward mobility, his trajectory is not a move away from the margins; rather, it is a move toward making the margins visible to the center and forcing the center to engage with it.

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Díaz’s decolonial and class-conscious formal strategies make apparent Yunior’s attention to unseen communities and the imperative to see beyond the self. At the same time, he communicates the necessity of learning how to re-read the self as a necessary step to countering oppressive ideologies. These issues are especially pertinent since Latina/o literature and literary criticism are made possible by education, as well as the time and resources to write. While acknowledging this material reality, Díaz’s texts do not frame mobility as just financial or uni-directional, and they refute discourse that collapses class mobility with assimilation and individualism. Díaz is an author who has been appreciated for writing across transnational geographies, languages, and genres. To understand his narrative projects, and how Latina/o literature portrays contemporary forms of political engagement, we should also appreciate him as an author who writes across class.

Julie Avril Minich

“The Emotional Residue of an Unnatural Boundary”: Brownsville and the Borders of Mental Health This essay examines the depiction of mental health on the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2003 short story collection Brownsville by south Texas writer Oscar Casares. Arguing that Casares presents emotional wellbeing not only as a personal, medical concern but also as a sociopolitical one, it proposes the literary text as an apparatus for understanding racialized mental health disparities. The primary themes of Brownsville are the intersection of race and masculinity and the emotional effects of living on a rigidly policed border, both of which have important mental health implications. Furthermore, Casares’s trademark use of subjective narration prevents the use of diagnostic language, enables characters to explain their actions and feelings on their own terms, and prompts readers to scrutinize the social circumstances that give rise to characters’ mental distress or wellbeing. Through close readings of the stories “Chango,” “Charro,” and “Mrs. Perez,” attending simultaneously to the intimate details of lives lived under intense emotional duress and to the larger sociopolitical structures that shape characters’ personal conflicts, this essay reveals how the health of individuals is tied to the structural formation of their society. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. […] Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there. – Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

Gloria Anzaldúa’s description of the United States-Mexico border as “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” has powerfully influenced subsequent representations of the border by artists and scholars alike.¹ The metaphor of border-as-physical-wound resonates poignantly in an

Acknowledgements are due to C.J. Alvarez, Dominic Gonzales, John Morán González, and Alison Kafer for comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and to Annyston Pennington for research assistance.  Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987): 3; further references in the text, abbreviated as “B/LF.” https://doi.org/9783110532913-008

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era of border militarization and the proliferation of anti-immigrant laws. Yet considerably less attention is given to Anzaldúa’s portrayal of emotional (rather than physical) injury, a theme that also recurs in borderlands literary and cultural expression. For instance, fiction writer Oscar Casares – whose straightforwardly narrative prose and emphasis on masculinity seem to have little in common with Anzaldúa’s feminist, multi-genre oeuvre – offers an arresting meditation on the affective dimensions of border life. Casares’s 2003 short story collection Brownsville is richly attentive to characters’ inner lives (the thoughts and feelings that result in inexplicable behaviors) as well as to their social environments (the ideologies of race, gender and class that structure life in contemporary south Texas). The book’s characters are often inexplicably stressed out, despondent, frightened, and overwhelmed: One is tormented by “the need to find peace in his heart,” another confesses that “I felt like was at a funeral for somebody who died young and unexpectedly,” and still another chooses to hold his “words in his chest, refusing to let them come to the surface” rather than expressing his feelings to his wife.² In other words, Casares, like Anzaldúa, treats the border not solely as a political institution but also as a collective, traumatic psychosomatic experience. This essay examines the significance of Casares’s depiction of mental health on the US-Mexico border as not only a personal, medical concern but also a sociopolitical one. There are major racial disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in the United States. For instance, only 36 % of Latinas/os with depression receive treatment, compared with 60 % of whites; Mexican Americans (along with African Americans) are among those least likely to receive depression care.³ Such statistics are often seen as evidence of Latina/o cultural bias against treatment rather than of access inequity or bias in medicine. Reporter Sheila Dichoso writes for the web edition of the glossy magazine Health that among Latinas/os “a deeply rooted mix of cultural and socioeconomic factors have conspired to stigmatize people with mental illness, in many cases causing them –

 Oscar Casares, Brownsville: Stories (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003): 77, 149, 121; further references in the text, abbreviated as “B.”  Alejandro Interian, Alfonso Ang, Michael Gara, Michael Rodríguez, and William Vega, “The long-term trajectory of depression among Latinos in primary care and its relationship to depression care disparities,” General Hospital Psychiatry 33 (2011): 94– m 101; Héctor M. González, William A. Vega, David R. Williams, Wassim Tarraf, Brady T. West, and Harold W. Neighbors, “Depression Care in the United States: Too Little for Too Few,” Archives of General Psychiatry 67.1 (2010): 37– 46.

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and their families – to delay or avoid seeking professional help.”⁴ Although she mentions “socioeconomic factors,” phrases like “deeply rooted” reinforce a cultural explanation, as do the people she quotes: “When Latinos think of mental illness, they just think one thing: loco,” says one interviewee.⁵ Dichoso rehearses a popular understanding of health disparities as the result of (implicitly pathologized) cultural practices and beliefs. Such explanations prevail not only in popular media but also in medical training; medical anthropologist Seth Holmes notes that physicians are “taught to see risk behaviors in health – such as diet, sexual behaviors, and substance abuse” and to ignore “the political economic structures and institutional prejudices that shape much of sickness and health.”⁶ In a volume on Latino men’s health, Marilyn Aguirre-Molina, Luisa N. Borrell, Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, and William Vega similarly urge “a more comprehensive approach” that accounts for factors like “poverty, low socioeconomic status, unemployment, racial characteristics, urban contexts, migration, etc.”⁷ In this essay, I argue not only that Casares models this broader approach but also that literature – which allows for the simultaneous examination of individual behaviors, social ideologies, and structural inequalities – constitutes an important but under-acknowledged site for researching health inequity. My approach is that of a disability scholar skeptical of the impulse to medicalize human variation; like Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland, I understand health (including mental health) as an “ideological position” that is too often “used to make moral judgments, convey prejudice, sell products, or even to exclude whole groups of persons from health care.”⁸ In prioritizing the social and ideological aspects of mental health, I do not see the biochemical as irrelevant; rather, following Lennard Davis, I acknowledge that “no disease exists outside its cultural context.”⁹ Humanists and social scientists alike have recently argued for an understanding of mental health that incorporates the sociopolitical along-

 Sheila Dichoso, “Stigma Haunts Mentally Ill Latinos,” Health.com (November 15, 2010). [accessed June 21, 2016].  Dichoso, “Stigma Haunts.”  Seth Holmes, “The Clinical Gaze in the Practice of Migrant Health: Mexican Migrants in the United States,” Social Science & Medicine 74 (2012): 873 – 881, 879.  Marilyn Aguirre-Molina, Luisa N. Borrell, Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, and William Vega, “Introduction: A Social and Structural Framework for the Analysis of Latino Males’ Health” in Health Issues in Latino Males, eds. Marilyn Aguirre-Molina, Luisa N. Borrell, Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, and William Vega (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010): 1– 13, 6.  Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland, “Introduction: Why ‘Against Health’?” in Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, eds. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York: New York UP, 2010): 1– 11, 2.  Lennard Davis, Obsession: A History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008): 12.

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side the biomedical. Cultural critic Ann Cvetkovich, for instance, views depression as “another manifestation of forms of biopower that produce life and death not only by targeting populations for overt destruction, whether through incarceration, war, or poverty, but also more insidiously by making people feel small, worthless, hopeless.”¹⁰ Meanwhile, anthropologist Emily Martin critiques available cures for bipolar disorder: Healing would have to address the strong but not invincible barriers to our ability to flourish, as individuals and as part of collectivities. […] Unless these barriers are removed, no amount of psychotropic drugs, however soothing, will heal ‘mental illness.’“¹¹

Finally, disability rhetorician Margaret Price, who critiques psychiatry’s “ever-increasing emphasis on a biological and positivist definition of mental illness,” proposes a post-psychiatrist approach that involves centering the agency of mad people, […] replacing the conventional separation of body and mind with an emphasis on social context, ethical as well as technical (chemical) modes of care, and an end to the claim that coercive ‘treatments’ are applied for ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ reasons.¹²

This essay proposes the literary text as one apparatus for reconceptualizing mental health, as well as for challenging the ideologies of white supremacy, ableism, and heteropatriarchy that threaten the emotional wellbeing of marginalized people. Metzl and Dorothy Roberts have called upon health professionals to look to the humanities and social sciences, but while they name sociology, anthropology, history and critical race theory as disciplines that contribute to knowledge about structural health inequity, they do not mention literature.¹³ Arguing for the relevance of literary analysis to the study of social issues, Paula M.L. Moya defines literature as “a trans-historical and trans-individual social institution” that simultaneously disseminates and informs “the manifold ideologies

 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke UP, 2012): 13; further references in the text, abbreviated as “D.”  Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007): 279.  Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011): 15.  Jonathan M. Metzl, and Dorothy E. Roberts, “Structural Competency Meets Structural Racism: Race, Politics, and the Structure of Medical Knowledge,” Virtual Mentor 16.9 (2014): 674– 690, 683.

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that shape and motivate humans’ diverse cultural practices.”¹⁴ In other words, Moya contends that the social and behavioral sciences are not the only fields to offer insights about social relations; rather, a close reading of a literary text can offer “an excavation of, and a meditation on, the pervasive sociocultural ideas – such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality – of the social worlds […] within which both authors and readers live.”¹⁵ This essay extends Moya’s argument to present literature as a site for health research, since the health of individuals is so directly tied to the structural formation of their societies.

Literature and health in the lower Rio Grande valley Casares’s Brownsville is a volume of nine short stories all set in a lower-middleclass neighborhood in Brownsville, Texas. The county seat of Cameron County, Brownsville is located in the lower Rio Grande valley, across the border from the Mexican city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Known colloquially as “the Valley,” the lower Rio Grande valley is a region marked by stark divides of race and class.¹⁶ While its economy has benefited from tourism, manufacturing, and the narcotics trade, these profits are unevenly distributed. As National Public Radio’s John Burnett and Marisa Peñaloza recently put it in a (sensationalistic) feature: “In the tip of Texas, there’s a Maserati and a Jaguar dealership. Yet a third of the population lives below the poverty line.”¹⁷ These contradictions also surface in cultural life; the area is important to Mexican American literary history as the birthplace of writers like Casares, Anzaldúa, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, and Américo Paredes, as well as of many renowned literary scholars.¹⁸ Yet, as Casares re-

 Paula Moya, The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2016): 6, 8.  Moya, The Social Imperative, 9.  Since the lower Rio Grande valley is an economic and cultural region, not a bounded political entity, its borders are somewhat imprecise. In this article I use the definition offered by the Texas State Historical Association: a region of south Texas composed of Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy counties. See David M. Vigness, and Mark Odintz, “Rio Grande Valley” at Texas State Historical Association (June 15, 2010), Handbook of Texas Online. [accessed June 21, 2016].  John Burnett and Marisa Peñaloza, “Corruption on the Border: Dismantling Misconduct in The Rio Grande Valley,” on National Public Radio (July 6, 2015), Morning Edition. [accessed June 21, 2016].  For instance, important literary critics from Brownsville include John Morán González, José David Saldívar, Ramón Saldívar, and Sonia Saldívar-Hull.

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veals in a 2003 interview, the region’s lack of bookstores required him to distribute Brownsville through a grocery chain: I was talking to my publisher, trying to tell them that it was really important for me personally to have the book available in South Texas, Brownsville in particular. The problem was that there weren’t very many outlets. In fact, there’s only one bookstore, and there’s the college, and that’s about it. […] And so I started telling them about H-E-B, and at first they were kind of like, ‘H-E-B? What’s that?’ (They had) no concept of the store’s presence in Texas.¹⁹

These social tensions are acutely manifest in the area of health. The Valley is increasingly a center of medical research and profit. In the past two decades, it has seen the establishment of two medical and public health schools (Texas A&M Health Science Center – McAllen Campus, established in 2000, and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Medical School, established in 2016), out of a statewide total of ten. The region has long been a destination for health tourists, initially due to its warm climate and later due to the perceived availability of (comparatively) inexpensive pharmaceuticals in Mexico.²⁰ In 2009, public health researcher Atul Gawande brought to national attention the discrepancy between health care spending in the city of McAllen and local incomes: “In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars.”²¹ Published in The New Yorker, Gawande’s article became “required reading” in Barack Obama’s White House during the effort to draft what eventually became the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).²² Yet despite its role in the passage of

 Michael Schaub, “An Interview with Oscar Casares,” Bookslut (August 2003). [accessed May 18, 2016].  Historian Amy Hay has gathered extensive documentation of wealthy, white “medical migrants” to the Valley and is currently working on a comparative study of health care provided in the region to migrant workers and health tourists, recently presented in preliminary form at the biannual conference of the Latina/o Studies Association. Amy Hay, “Migrant Workers, Winter Texans: Migrant Agricultural Workers and Winter Medical Migrants.” Latina/o Studies Association Conference, Pasadena, CA, July 2016.  Atul Gawande, “The Cost Conundrum,” The New Yorker (June 1, 2009). [accessed August 28, 2017].  Robert Pear, “Health Care Spending Disparities Stir a Fight,” New York Times (June 8, 2009). [accessed August 28, 2017].

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the ACA, the Valley has one of the highest populations of people without health insurance in the nation – even after the ACA’s implementation.²³ These problems are particularly stark when it comes to mental health. The Brownsville Herald recently reported that the area receives only 2 % of state mental health funds, and the average expenditure per mental health patient there is the lowest in the state: $10,000 compared to a statewide average of $21,000.²⁴ Stephanie Contreras, a mental health activist from McAllen, has repeatedly recounted to Brownsville Herald reporters the “very humiliating” treatment her teenage son Ralph received after being diagnosed with schizophrenia; he was handcuffed by police at a clinic and taken alone in a squad car to the hospital.²⁵ The facility where this incident occurred two decades ago – Texas Tropical Behavioral Health in Edinburg, TX – remains underfunded and understaffed, conditions leading to the criminalization of mental illness that Ralph Contreras experienced, even as its executive director reports that the facility’s patient base has grown from 8,000 to 24,000 in the last decade.²⁶ While these facts and stories are drawn from recent sources, they are the culmination of long-term health inequities that have been a key theme of the region’s literature for at least a half-century. For instance, Anzaldúa is acclaimed by disability scholars for her representations of illness and bodily anomaly.²⁷ Paredes, who is largely unknown to disability scholars, also addresses health inequities; his most famous short story “The Hammon and the Beans” details the death of a young, impoverished girl from a quotidian, treatable illness (as her

 Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy counties were identified by the New York Times as among those that saw the most dramatic benefits from the 2010 Affordable Care Act. All had uninsured populations of more than 30 % in 2013 (with Willacy County reporting an uninsured population of 43 %), and all experienced a decline of more than ten percentage points in 2014, after the law had been fully implemented for one year. At the same time, even after this dramatic increase, all four counties still reported that approximately one quarter of their populations lacked insurance. Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz, “Obama’s Health Law: Who Was Helped Most,” New York Times (October 29, 2014). [accessed May 18, 2016].  Kristian Hernández, “Resources limited for mental health treatment in the Rio Grande Valley,” Brownsville Herald (October 20, 2015). [accessed May 9, 2016].  Steve Taylor, “Rally held to protect mentally ill from funding cuts,” Brownsville Herald (March 27, 2003). [accessed May 9, 2016]; Hernández, “Resources limited.”  Hernández, “Resources limited.”  See Suzanne Bost, Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature (New York: Fordham UP, 2009).

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doctor puts it: “Pneumonia, flu, malnutrition, worms, the evil eye […] What the hell difference does it make?”).²⁸ Neither writer ever identified with disability or disability studies. Nor has Casares: When I first met him, after publishing on the portrayal of physical disability in both Brownsville and his 2009 novel Amigoland, he told me that he was surprised by my interest since he didn’t consider disability a major theme of his work.²⁹ Yet all of these writers are deeply attuned to the nuances of place and setting, meticulously rendering the social dynamics of everyday life in the Valley, and their work therefore engages with its health disparities. The primary themes of the nine interconnected stories that make up Brownsville are the intersection of race and masculinity and the emotional effects of living on a rigidly policed border. These concerns are evident in the intertitles that separate the stories into three parts: “I Thought You and Me Were Friends;” “They Say He Was Lost;” and “Don’t Believe Anything He Tells You.” With their repetition of masculine pronouns and their evocation of loss, separation, confusion, and betrayal, these intertitles suggest that the policing of gender and national boundaries inflicts intense emotional damage. As a result, the book’s most salient themes have important mental health implications. My prior analyses of Casares’s work emphasize his use of subjective narration (sometimes a first-person narrator but most often a third-person limited narrator who focalizes one character) and revealed how this narrative style allows him to explore attitudes about aging and physical disability.³⁰ This article builds on that argument but focuses instead on how Casares offers an approach to Latina/o mental health that accounts for both individual circumstance and larger social structures. In particular, the absence of an omniscient narrator prevents the use of diagnostic language, enables characters to explain their actions and feelings on their own terms, and prompts readers to scrutinize social context. Through three close readings, I elucidate how Casares attends simultaneously to the intimate details of lives lived under intense emotional duress and to the larger sociopolitical structures that shape characters’ personal conflicts.

 Américo Paredes, The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories (Houston: Arte Público P, 1994): 7.  See also: Oscar Casares, Amigoland (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009).  Julie Avril Minich, Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2014); Julie Avril Minich, “Disabling La Frontera: Disability, Border Subjectivity and Masculinity in ‘Big Jesse, Little Jesse’ by Oscar Casares,” MELUS 35.1 (2010): 35 – 52.

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Depression and masculine intimacy in “Chango” Like many stories in Brownsville, “Chango” has a sparse plot, prioritizing character development over narrative action. Bony is a thirty-one-year-old man living with his parents; he spends his days drinking beer, installing car stereos, and making Avon deliveries for his mother. One day, he finds the severed head of a monkey in his yard, names it Chango, and decides to keep it. The story ends two days later when Bony, pressured by his parents, relinquishes Chango even though it is “the last thing in the world that he wanted to do” (B, 67). Casares states that he found this story necessary to write, because there are a lot of guys like that I’ve run across, and it’s really easy to project these images on them, to say, ‘They’re just wasting their lives.’ It’s more of a challenge to dig a bit and find out how they got there.³¹

Yet although Bony shows symptoms of depression, and although a formal diagnosis might seem to exonerate him, Casares leaves Bony’s condition unspecified. Instead, to quote Cvetkovich, he presents Bony’s affliction “as a cultural and social phenomenon rather than a medical disease” (D, 1). By complicating “biology as the endpoint for both explanations and solutions, causes and effects,” Casares not only emphasizes the structural elements of Bony’s circumstances but also raises questions about an appropriate “cure” (D, 16). Despite its straightforward plot, “Chango” poses two challenges to readers. The first is not explaining its most significant event: we do not know why the head appears in Bony’s yard. The second is inviting readers to invest emotionally in a character they may find unlikable. Living with his parents, Bony violates the norms of a society that treats financial self-sufficiency as a measure of successful adult masculinity; readers invested in patriarchy or individualism are unlikely to sympathize with him. Yet readers who might appreciate this nonnormative gender/economic practice may be troubled by his objectifying descriptions of women (a “gordita who weighs almost twice as much as Bony, but she wants it” [B, 47]; another who “let him do everything but go inside her” [B, 55]). Despite making the story challenging to read, these elements also push readers to examine Bony’s unusual behaviors in the context of his social world. Early on, Casares establishes Bony as someone who – despite disinterest in possessions or prestige – is concerned with social relationships. Upon seeing the monkey, he imagines it staring at him “like an old friend who couldn’t remember his name” (B, 41). Later, when he appears just to drink beer in the yard, he is  Schaub, “An Interview.”

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alert to passers-by: “The first ones to pass by were the chavalones walking home from school with their mommies. A few of the mommies were young and fine, but they never looked Bony’s way. Next were the older kids from the junior high who lived in the neighborhood and knew better than to walk by without saying hello” (B, 44). As people return from work, he meticulously notes who greets him and who doesn’t: “Mrs. Rivas, who lived at the other end of the street, waved only because she was friends with his mother” (B, 44– 45). One character who passes only occasionally is Ruben Ortiz, who grew up on the same street but now lives with “a good-looking wife” on the “other side of town,” where he drives a nice car and wears nice clothes: “Bony could tell the guy had changed since he left the neighborhood. He’d stay in his car and wave like he was passing by in a parade. Bony thought it looked like a good life, but it wasn’t for everybody, not for him anyway” (B, 45). These passages reveal Bony’s sensitivity to community dynamics, a sensitivity that seems at odds with his disregard of social norms. His response to Ruben helps to explain this contradiction: Bony does not see social class transition in aspirational terms but believes that nice cars, nice clothes, and nice lifestyles come at the price of social relationships. Ruben’s arrival prompts Bony to contemplate the value of work, setting up the next paragraph, which begins: “His friend Mando had big plans and look what happened to him” (B, 45 – 46). A few years ago, while attending college, working full-time as a chauffeur, and saving money to marry his pregnant girlfriend, Mando was killed in a car accident at work. Mando’s employer agreed “to pay for the funeral and set aside $5,000 to give Mando’s kid when he turned eighteen, but nothing more for the family. Nada más, the owner was nice enough to translate for Mando’s father” (B, 46). We learn that “Bony had an okay job around that time” (B, 46) but lost it soon after and hasn’t had steady work since. It is not only Mando that Bony grieves but his memory of their friendship: “Bony used to think he and Mando would be partying for the rest of their lives. […] It wasn’t until the accident that he realized Mando had a whole different life he was planning” (B, 53 – 54). The depth of Bony’s grief becomes apparent as he drives around with Chango, reminiscing about adventures with Mando and imagining a different life with Chango: He was sure that if Chango were a guy they’d be camaradas. Same thing would go if Bony were a monkey. They’d be hanging out in the jungle, swinging from trees, eating bananas. They’d be putting the moves on all the changuitas, doing it monkey-style. […] And if he were a monkey, nobody would be hassling him to be something else. He’d be a monkey. He wouldn’t have to go to school, or work, or file for unemployment. And something else: monkeys were always together. He and Chango would be friends until they were viejitos, all wrinkled and hunched over and walking from tree to tree because they were too old to be swinging. (B, 66)

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These passages about a man, his grief, and his bond with a dead monkey contain a stunning critique of racialized capitalism and heteropatriarchal masculinity. It is clear that part of Bony’s disinterest in finding a job stems from seeing his friend’s life so devalued by his employer: “Nada más ended up being all the family got” (B, 46) from Mando’s labor, despite the fact that Mando worked for extremely wealthy businessmen, driving them between their homes in Texas and their factories in Matamoros. Yet the injustice of Mando’s undercompensated death is only part of the story. Cvetkovich argues: [A] master narrative of depression as socially produced often provides little specific illumination and even less comfort because it’s an analysis that frequently admits of no solution. Saying that capitalism (or colonialism or racism) is the problem does not help me get up in the morning. (D, 15)

What has helped Bony get up in the morning is an intimacy with Mando that (as a heterosexual man in a culture that privileges romantic coupling) he cannot define. Bony’s dream of growing old with Mando has no social institution attached to it; with Mando gone and the dream unrequited, Bony has no way to soothe or even articulate his grief.³² He lives in “a culture whose violence takes the form of systematically making us feel bad” (D, 15). Or as the narrator describes it: There wasn’t anybody who understood him. […] People were always talking at him and telling him how he should live. Sometimes he listened, but most times he didn’t. He was just living. That’s the best explanation he could give. Living. (B, 67)

The end of the story is ambiguous and sad. Some readers may see Bony’s final act of dropping Chango into the canal as representing the relinquishment of grief. But Chango doesn’t represent grief; he represents Bony’s love for Mando. Giving up this love is difficult: the water into which Bony drops Chango is “browner and greener than he remembered” (B, 66) and filled with debris. As Anzaldúa might suggest, Bony must still live with the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary: the national boundary that is the site of Mando’s death as well as the boundary that defines his grief as insignificant because it lacks the social legitimacy of marriage or family. It may indeed benefit Bony to access formal treatment for depression, but it would benefit him as much to live in a  When I teach this story, students sometimes suggest that Bony is romantically in love with Mando. This interpretation is plausible, but I confess my own personal investment in a reading that emphasizes intimate friendship; I see the latter posing a more powerful alternative to hetero-and-homonormative kinship formations, which discount and exclude the affective bonds of those so often dismissed as “just” friends.

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world in which the lives of men like him and Mando are not devalued and in which love between friends received the same recognition as love between spouses or family members. The brilliance of the story is that it does not require readers to choose between these solutions. Bony may have a treatable medical condition, but it is a condition that is expressed socially, and the alleviation of his pain must account for the specificity of his social world as much as for the specificity of his brain chemistry. What “Chango” teaches us about depression, in other words, cannot be learned in a pharmaceutical lab or medical residency.

Border modernity in “Charro” While Bony is a frustrating protagonist, Marcelo Torres of “Charro” is more so. Marcelo is awakened nightly by his neighbor’s barking dog, Charro, and plots revenge. He first takes Charro to a remote beach on the Gulf of Mexico and releases him (Charro returns), then poisons him (Charro survives). After Marcelo resigns himself to the barking, his wife accidentally hits Charro in her car, and Marcelo must bury him so his neighbor does not suspect intentional harm. Unlike Bony, who exhibits symptoms of an illness (depression), Marcelo shows only vague signs of anxiety (difficulty sleeping and conflict with his boss), and his acts of animal cruelty are more extreme than Bony’s actions. Contributing to the unsympathetic presentation of his character is a narrative voice that employs an aggressively masculine tone and belligerent demeanor: the story repeatedly uses Marcelo’s full name (“Marcelo Torres” instead of “Marcelo”), underscoring his patriarchal worldview, and the disparaging descriptions of other characters reveal Marcelo’s contempt for them (for instance, he sees his neighbor’s son, contradictorily, as both “a fat kid with a crew cut” [B, 116] and a “little boy” [B, 116], showing scorn for physical traits he perceives as indicating weakness).³³ My reading of “Charro” draws from John Morán González’s analysis of border modernity in early twentieth-century Mexican American literature. González defines border modernity as “the full capitalist incorporation of south Texas into national and global economies as a consequence of colonial duress” and argues

 While there is not space in this article to discuss in depth the representation of fatness in Casares’s work, I do find it important to note that his references to fat bodies are nearly always used to provide commentary on the person reacting to fatness and not to disparage fat people themselves. I find this necessary to mention because the high rates of obesity and diabetes in the Valley are often used (especially in other parts of Texas) to stereotype its population and justify the poor health outcomes of its residents.

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that Mexican American writers from Texas portray it “as a communally traumatic experience” marked by “the erosion of civil rights, the loss of ancestral lands, and an explosion of violence, physical and symbolic.”³⁴ As revealed in the introductory sections of this essay, which describe ongoing inequality in the Valley, the effects of border modernity are not confined to the past. Reading “Charro” in the tradition of Mexican American literature critiquing the incorporation of south Texas into national and global economies, I argue that Marcelo Torres represents the mental health effects of border modernity. While the border in “Chango” is not insignificant – it is, after all, driving across the border that Mando dies – it is more salient in “Charro.” As a USDA inspector, Marcelo often rides along the border for work: He spent his days – whether it was 102 degrees outside or pouring rain – checking on ranches and farms in the county, answering calls about stray animals, spraying livestock for ticks and other diseases, and patrolling the river on horseback to stop animals from being smuggled into the U.S. He’d been shot at three different times when he accidentally rode into brushy areas where drugs were being crossed over. One of Marcelo’s good friends was chasing a stray calf when his horse fell into the river. Ed Zamora’s body was dragged out by the county the next morning. Some of the men complained about having to patrol the river, but Marcelo wasn’t one of them. He’d ridden practically every twisting mile from Santa Maria to the mouth of the river. He had never met the women who washed their clothes along the banks on the other side, but he waved to them every day. He could tell you where the currents weren’t as dangerous and people were most likely to cross and fight their way through the tall grass near the levee, half dressed with their dry clothes in hand. He didn’t bother them, and they didn’t bother him. But mainly, the long rides along the river gave Marcelo time to go over his life, how he’d been raised to live and work on a ranch, but now he had a job where he only visited ranches and always in a light green truck marked USDA. (B, 121)

This passage establishes both the masculine pride Marcelo takes in his physically demanding job and his yearning for ranch life. The contrast between the shots fired by drug smugglers and the greetings of the women washing clothes emphasizes the border, in Anzaldúa’s terms, as an unnatural boundary made violent by the effort to demarcate who and what belongs on each side. Marcelo’s discomfort with his role in policing the border is clear in his live-and-let-live attitude toward migrants and his distaste for the “light green truck” that evokes the famous green vans of the Border Patrol fleet, an iconic image in Mexican American literary and visual culture. The experiences that González describes as characteristic of border modernity – the taking of land and the surge of violence – are  John Morán González, Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (Austin: U of Texas P, 2009): 9 – 10.

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also captured in this passage, with Marcelo’s act of “going over his life” portrayed as an act of mourning life on the family ranch. Marcelo’s grief is heightened by having to patrol the very border that has destroyed his family’s transnational life. The fact that he patrols only livestock (rather than people) does not mitigate his conflict. The titles of the stories in Brownsville all consist of characters’ names, with “Chango” and “Charro” as the only two named for non-human characters. However, “Charro” has a double meaning, referring not only to the dog but also to Marcelo. A charro is a refined Mexican horseman; Marcelo’s preference for riding horses to driving trucks indicates his symbolic link to the dog Charro. The charro is furthermore the inspiration for the Charro Days festival, an annual bi-national celebration held in Brownsville since 1937. The official Charro Days website asserts that the event was created as the Great Depression ended, “as an antidote to the gloom that engulfed Brownsville and the rest of the country.”³⁵ Although it does not mention that mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during this period intensified Brownsville’s gloom, the website does reveal that in “years gone by” the international bridges between Matamoros and Brownsville were left open during Charro Days to facilitate visits between friends and relatives, a custom now replaced by a “ceremony of friendship” called Hands Across the Bridge.³⁶ Just as Marcelo’s visits to ranches in a truck are a hollow reminder of the ranch life that economic globalization has rendered unviable, the festival evokes cross-border exchanges that border enforcement policies have severely damaged. The title of “Charro,” then, evokes both an ideal of borderlands masculinity that Marcelo strives unsuccessfully to emulate and an ideal of borderlands cooperation replaced by boundary enforcement. González argues that the tensions of border modernity have not abated but “will only become more acute as the United States faces the world-historical transition from a ‘white’ democracy to a democracy of color in an increasingly, but unevenly, globalizing world;” in “Charro,” Casares reveals how this “world-historical transition” manifests affectively.³⁷ The border masculinity Marcelo mourns is not one many readers would idealize. Reflecting on how his father might have handled the situation with Charro, Marcelo recalls a dispute with a neighbor that his father settled by giving a gun

 “The History of Charro Days,” Charro Days Fiesta. [accessed June 17, 2016].  “The History of Charro Days,” Charro Days Fiesta. Between 1929 and 1936, historians estimate that approximately one million ethnic Mexicans living in the United States (including both Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens) were deported to Mexico without due process.  González, Border Renaissance, 201.

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to each of his sons: “The first one to see Norberto Valdez was to shoot him. Benito, the oldest, was the lucky son. He spent ten years in the Reynosa jail. Nobody ever questioned whether it had been the right thing to do” (B, 128). Unlike his father, Marcelo does not immediately resort to violence; he first talks to his neighbor about keeping the dog out of his yard, then calls the police (who refuse to intervene unless the dog physically threatens someone), then calls animal control (who will not remove the dog as long as it is in its own yard). It is only after failing to negotiate a solution with his neighbor, the police, and the city government that Marcelo takes matters into his own hands. In other words, Marcelo finds himself caught between conflicting masculine codes: that of his violent, vengeance-seeking father and that of the normative U.S. middle class, whose formal and informal institutions (neighborliness, the police, the government) fail him. At the end of the story, as he buries the dog, Marcelo is overwhelmed by guilt and shame: “Marcelo had tried to live his father’s life, but now it felt as if he were standing in the middle of a river trying to stretch his arms and touch both sides. No matter what he did, he’d never reach far enough” (B, 136). To argue that “Charro” depicts the emotional effects of border modernity, however, is not to argue that the story justifies Marcelo’s animal cruelty. By not naming a mental illness in his characterization of Marcelo, even as the character clearly lives with severe stress, Casares again asks his readers to look outward, at the social context that makes Marcelo’s actions feel so necessary to him. (After all, the dog does disrupt Marcelo’s sleep, which clearly affects his wellbeing, even if the fact that his wife and children have no trouble sleeping hints that the barking may not be as loud as Marcelo perceives it.) Marcelo represents a counterpoint to the “new mestiza” that Anzaldúa theorizes, a figure often idealized for representing “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (B/LF, 79). As the boundaries Marcelo must patrol proliferate – from nation to gender to mental health status to species – the ambiguities and contradictions that Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza” thrives on become sources of increasing tension and stress. Unable to tolerate contradiction or sustain ambiguity, positioned as both target and participant in the policing of borders, Marcelo represents not the feminist archetype of Anzaldúa’s utopian passages but the dystopian converse of that archetype. Where Anzaldúa offers a “mestiza consciousness” characterized by a “plural personality” in which “nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned” (B/LF, 79), Marcelo experiences a consciousness shaped by boundary demarcation and border policing, with disastrous consequences for his emotional health.

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Strike! Mental health in “Mrs. Perez” The collection’s final story, “Mrs. Perez” tells the story of Lola, a woman in her mid-sixties who takes up bowling after the death of her husband. One afternoon, she comes home to find a teenager breaking into her home; he escapes with her beloved cherry red bowling ball, temporarily disrupting her game as she readjusts to using an old ball. On the night she regains her form, scoring a personal best of 284 (out of a possible 300), she encounters the teenager in a convenience store and confronts him to seek restitution. Two elements distinguish this final story from others in the collection: “Mrs. Perez” is the only story in Brownsville focalized from the perspective of a woman, and, more importantly, is the only story to imagine mental wellbeing rather than illness or distress. While the preceding eight stories address the consequences of masculinity for men, “Mrs. Perez” offers the perspective of a woman who lives with masculinity’s effects while lacking its privileges. Lola’s life becomes richer and freer after the death of her husband, who impedes her efforts to develop a social and professional life. Although Lola does not dwell on this, even conceding that “in spite of his faults, Agustin had worked hard and had taken care of his family” (B, 177), it is clear that the support Agustin provided for her was purely financial and not emotional or social. In particular, she recalls quitting her job as a receptionist in a doctor’s office and deciding not to pursue nursing school because of her husband’s disapproval. When she hugs Vangie (a former colleague) at her husband’s funeral, she cries: “some for Agustin, but also because the scent of cigarette smoke on Vangie’s sweater reminded her of what she had walked away from” (B, 180). However, rather than continuing to mourn the life she could have had, as Marcelo does in “Charro,” Lola takes the opportunity to build a new life: she rekindles her friendship with Vangie by joining her bowling team. Because bowling represents her new life, Lola experiences the break-in and the loss of her bowling ball as a threat to her emotional wellbeing. Along with the ball, the teenager steals Agustin’s “busted watch” (B, 176) and the couple’s wedding rings, but when Lola files her police report she forgets about these, delineating only the expenses associated with the loss of her ball: She explained that it was a polyurethane ball that had cost $175, plus an extra $15 for the fitting, $10 for the engraving, and $30 for a black leather bag that had her full name embroidered on the outside. Her shoes were in the bag and they were worth another $35. Then she remembered her wrist brace, which was another $10. (B, 176)

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In addition, she is perturbed by the teenager’s disrespect for her home (leaving banana peels on the floor and the toilet unflushed) and preoccupied with the possibility that her daughter will use the break-in to pressure her into selling her house and moving to Houston: “Nobody told her what to do or how to live anymore, not a daughter who lived more than three hundred miles away and not some cabrón who left banana peels on the floor” (B, 174– 175). Finally, Lola is skeptical of the police officer who comes to investigate but offers little hope that her ball will be recovered. After asking to speak to her neighbor Sergeant Timo Hinojosa (Bony’s father) and learning of his impending retirement, her first thought is “that she’d been robbed by a teenage boy and now she was reporting the crime to his slightly older brother” (B, 175). Given these feelings of disempowerment after the break-in, Lola’s final encounter with the teenager is remarkable. First, it is significant that Lola recognizes the teenager while driving home after bowling her personal best, as she stops by the convenience store for a six-pack of Pearl Light beer. Where Bony’s drinking alone all day may indicate depression, Lola’s six-pack purchase is a sign of wellbeing: she occasionally enjoys a beer with friends after bowling, but this time chooses to celebrate alone. The encounter with the teenager temporarily shakes her self-assuredness; when she confronts him about her ball, he responds dismissively, calling her “crazy” and addressing her as “grandma” (B, 188). Nonetheless, Lola does not lose focus. Realizing that she does not have time to call the police, she walks to her car and pulls out her spare ball, which now feels like “part of her arm” (B, 188). She returns to the store hoping to convince the teenager to negotiate with her: She locked her gaze on the teenager. She concentrated as she took her one, two, three, four steps and released the black ball down the aisle. The rumble started low and grew louder with each second. The ball stayed centered as it shot past shelves of dishwashing liquid, detergent, oven cleaners, aluminum foil, diapers, pacifiers, formula mix, aspirin, cough syrup, cold and flu medicine, and then found its target: Strike! (B, 188 – 189)

The trajectory of the bowling ball becomes a microcosm of Lola’s character trajectory: starting low, growing louder, staying centered, and finding its target. The word “Strike!” ends the story (and the collection); Casares does not reveal what happens next. Yet while the endings of earlier stories, like “Chango,” are similarly ambiguous, this story’s ending is much more satisfying. Where Lola has for most of her life relied on men who failed to provide what she needed, here she takes charge of a situation and communicates her needs directly. The fact that she does not call the police is particularly significant, as the story makes clear that she wants restitution but not retribution: “All she wanted was her ball. If he gave it back, she wouldn’t even report him” (B, 188). Many

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of the stories in Brownsville – including “Chango” as well as others I have not discussed here (especially “Mr. Z” and “R.G.”) – depict their protagonists encountering unjust situations (like Mando’s undercompensated death) without hope of restitution. In “Mrs. Perez,” it is clear that calling the police will similarly curtail the possibility of restorative justice: not only have the police already failed Lola, but the teenager’s “glassy” eyes and the fact that he smells “like the solution they used to condition the lanes” (B, 187) suggest that he needs help managing an addiction, not punishment or prison time. The ambiguity of the story’s conclusion is crucial to the collection’s overall depiction of mental health. I posit that, although frustrating, it is important that readers do not know if the teenager is able to return her ball or name the pawn shop where she can find it, or whether a police intervention ultimately results. What the story emphasizes, instead, are the social conditions under which Lola stands the best chance of retaining her newfound emotional wellbeing: conditions in which she and the teenager are able to negotiate without police interference, in which Lola is able to recover her ball without resorting to state intervention.³⁸ In other words, where other stories in Brownsville reveal how the absence of justice fosters mental distress, “Mrs. Perez” explores the conditions (like freedom from gender scripts and access to restorative justice) that foster mental wellbeing. However, just as it is important to note that Lola’s new life is a recent development – after living for most of her life with the limits imposed by normative social roles – so too is it important to note that the glimpse of a social world that fosters emotional wellbeing in “Mrs. Perez” is fleeting and undefined. After all, as the rest of the collection makes clear, the world we live in now is not one in which mental health is equitably distributed or freely accessible. “In our very flesh,” writes Anzaldúa, “(r)evolution works out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly” (B/LF, 81). Many disability studies (and mad studies) scholars criticize casual use of the word crazy, which as Price points out brings “a host of stereotypical images […] immediately to mind.”³⁹ And yet, like Anzaldúa, such scholars also note that mental illness and neurodiversity are inevitable aspects of human variation; some, like Cvetkovich and Martin, have also demonstrated how cultural images of mental illness and health stand to reveal much about the configurations of power and privilege  As John Morán González has astutely pointed out to me, it is also significant that during this encounter Lola’s ball “shoots” past an aisle of over-the-counter medications, given the way Casares throughout the collection avoids using diagnostic or medicalizing language for his characters, prioritizing social solutions over medicinal ones.  Price, Mad at School, 1.

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that shape social relations. Anzaldúa’s use of the word crazy performs this work: alluding simultaneously to the mental health effects of experiencing a cultural collision in one’s “very flesh,” and also revealing how those who are targets of cultural devaluation are treated as less viable (“crazy”). Many mad studies scholars and mad pride activists are skeptical of the impetus to regulate and cure mental anomalies, even those that are painful to those who experience them. At the same time, activists like Stephanie Contreras – whose son was treated so brutally by police in a south Texas clinic nearly two decades ago – point out that respectful mental health treatment is also urgently needed. Brownsville supports a comprehensive struggle for mental health justice that includes both equitable access to treatment and acknowledgment of all sociopolitical circumstances that affect mental wellbeing.

Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico

Between Molds and Models: Female Identities in Almudena Grandes’s Models of Women and Roberta Fernández’s Intaglio “Mold” is a word that was used, in connection with life writing, as early as 1769, when the Geneva-born author Jean-Jacques Rousseau proclaimed in his Confessions that “I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with […], and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mold with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work” ¹ (my italics). My aim in this essay is to do a joint reading of two life writing variations of the 1990s, which are compilations of short stories, written by two women of the same generation, if coming from totally different personal, social, and literary backgrounds: Roberta Fernández’s Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories (1990), and Almudena Grandes’s Models of Women (1996). If Fernández uses the portraits in her stories as intaglios or moulds that represent the Mexican(‐American) borderlands women, Grandes paints “models of women” that, likewise, represent variations of Spanish women of different ages, social backgrounds, and personal circumstances. Through the analysis of various characters, and of other generic and thematic concerns shared by both writers, I try to prove how, ultimately, cultural memory and ancestry are the key ingredients in both the Spanish and the Chicana writer’s text. When I was asked to contribute with my Spanish perspective on Latina/o literature for a special issue of Symbolism I felt as thankful to the editors for propounding this idea from the United States as I felt determined to carry on with the transatlantic, comparativist perspective that I have always defended is the right one to apply when the critic is an “outsider.” I am a Spanish woman who happens to teach North American literature at the Complutense University of Madrid. And, needless to say, the minute I step into my classroom, I, with all my non-American colleagues, feel forced to adopt the position of the foreign observer, of the outsider who intrudes, of the detached analyst, regardless of

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in 12 books privately printed for the members of the Aldus Society (London, 1903). . https://doi.org/9783110532913-009

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whether I am teaching the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, the pioneer frontiersmen of Fenimore Cooper, the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass, the “slant” poetry of Emily Dickinson, the patrician heroines of a Henry James novel, the Chinese legends of Maxine Hong Kingston, or the mestiza/brown metaphors of Gloria Anzaldúa and Richard Rodriguez respectively. In my approach to the “female identities” of my title, I will be “transethnic.” I use this term in the manner in which my Spanish colleague Begoña Simal uses it in her 2011 volume Selves in Dialogue, speaking of approaching ethnic literature with a comparativist approach, and contributing with a revisionist agenda regarding essentialist notions of literary ethnicity.² In some ways, my essay also responds to some critical views that have argued for the need to transcend group-specific approaches to ethnic literatures, such as Paul Lauter’s (1991) defense of a comparativist model for the study of American literature,³ which has proved to be an inspirational drive for me in my previous scholarship on Latino/ a literature, and also in the present essay, where I will establish a dialogue between two women authors who, apparently, are totally disparate. In the lines that follow I will do a joint reading of two “novels” of the 1990s which are compilations of short stories, written by two women of the same generation, if coming from totally different personal, social, and literary backgrounds: Chicana writer and scholar Roberta Fernández and Spanish novelist Almudena Grandes. Roberta Fernández is a Texas novelist and scholar, known for her novel Intaglio and for her work editing the anthology In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States. ⁴ For her part, Madrid-born Almudena Grandes became widely known as a writer in 1989 with her novel Las edades de Lulú (The Ages of Lulu), which won the XI Sonrisa Vertical Prize. She is the author of ten novels (many of them award-winning) and two books of short stories that have established her as one of the most respected and internationallyknown authors in contemporary Spanish literature. Her last novel, Los besos en el pan (Kisses on Bread),⁵ was published in 2015, and it is the story of an un-

 Begoña Simal, ed., Selves in Dialogue: A Transethnic Approach to American Life Writing (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011).  Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford UP, 1991).  Roberta Férnandez, Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories (Houston, Texas: Arte Publico P, 1990); further references in text, abbreviated as “I.” In other words: Literature by Latinas of the United States (Houston, Texas: Arte Publico P, 1994).  Almudena Grandes, Modelos de Mujer (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1996); further references in the text, abbreviated as “MM.”; Las edades de Lulú (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1989); Los besos en el pan (Barecelona: Tusquets, 2015).

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named barrio of Madrid, her own, but it could be, symbolically, any neighborhood in Spain. The two volumes I will set in dialogue in this essay are Grandes’s Modelos de Mujer (Models of Women) (1996) and Fernández’s Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories (1990). Both volumes could be considered what Margot Kelley has called “composite novels,” even if the nature of that composition is very different.⁶ Whereas Grandes compiles seven independent narratives, using different narrators and points of view, Fernández writes about women belonging to three interconnected families (Andrea’s family, Los Luna, and Los Cárdenas), and using the young Nenita as narrator in all six stories. That is why my reading will not be applied to all thirteen stories – an in-depth analysis of thirteen narratives would be beyond the scope of a short essay – and will be restricted to some of the most revealing aspects in a few of them for the purpose of this parallel reading. My comparative reading aims at proving how, in spite of ethnic or national idiosyncrasies, literature often transcends “Chicana” or “Spanish” traits and modes for, in a global world, women authors’ thematic concerns and genre choices are also transatlantic and even more “universal” than ethnic-focused criticism may wish to admit. I wish to begin my analysis focusing on the titles of both works, something that has passed unnoticed by most critics. Both titles refer to pictorial issues or techniques, and thus my title “Between moulds and models.” The “moulds” refer to Fernandez’s title, “Intaglio” a word that comes from the Italian verb “tagliere.” It is a pictorial or engraving method that consists in carving with a chisel, or incising, a technique that belongs to the family of printing and printmaking skills in which the image is incised into a surface. Why call a novel “Intaglio”? When I first came across this book it immediately reminded me of another composite autobiographical volume, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973) by American playwright Lillian Hellman.⁷ “Pentimento,” again an Italian pictorial word, refers to those initial sketches or drafts that are hidden under the final version of a painting, and that only expert restorers can see or rescue using modern technology under the visible paint that covers them. The Italian word implies some degree of “repentance” on the part of the painter (that is what “pentimento” actually means), a regret of some sort, because the painter rejected the first outline, an initial draft, and covered it up with new images and new colors. Hellman used this pictorial metaphor in her book of (written) portraits to imply how our present lives and selves, always cover, conceal, or bury previous and imag-

 Margot Kelley, “A Minor Revolution: Chicano/a Composite Novels and the Limits of Genre,” in Ethnicity and the American Short Story, ed. Julia Brown (New York: Routledge, 1997): 63 – 84.  Lillian Hellman, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (New York: Little, Brown, 1973).

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inary selves, the secret mysteries of our past and those of the significant others that precede us in life. Exactly this meaning is, from my point of view, what Fernández also tries to transmit in her metaphoric title: the author wishes to carve on the surface of appearances and of stories as told by the older women of her Mexican community her own version of the events, as a younger, assimilated Mexican American. Using her pen as a chisel, and using Nenita as the fictional narrator of her own bildungsroman, Fernández wants to carve her own interpretation of a Mexican ancestry, one that is loaded with love and admiration for her ancestors and their legacy, but also charged with ambivalent feelings that sometimes have to be read between the lines. As the pictorial word “intaglio” is the same in English as in Spanish, only Fernández knows the reason why she changed the title in her own translation of the novel, from Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories to Fronterizas: Una novela en seis cuentos (2001). The decade separating the English and the Spanish editions (the 1990s) saw the emergence of Chicana literature and of borderlands theories, and it certainly witnessed the elevation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) to the category of a classic of Chicana feminism. Fernández’s decision to change the title could be attributed to her interest in inscribing her novel within those areas of critical interest. And it is a fact that most critics of Intaglio have focused their analysis on “la frontera” as depicted in Fernández’s stories, on the liminal space where the borderlands women (fronterizas) spanning two generations of three Mexican families live and experience the horrors and blessings of a zone of cross-cultures, contact, and interaction. If Fernández uses the portraits in her stories as intaglios or moulds that represent the Mexican(‐American) borderlands women, Almudena Grandes paints “models of women,” as her title indicates, that, likewise, represent variations of Spanish women of different ages and generations, social backgrounds, and personal circumstances. The meaning of “model” as a noun is “a schematic representation of something, especially a system or phenomenon,” with the additional connotation of “replica, copy, representation, imitation, reproduction.”⁸ Translation, again, has brought interesting variations to this pictorial metaphor. Although the volume has not been entirely translated into English,⁹ individual short stories have. Ashlyn Winkler, for example, presented as her B.A. thesis a partial translation of Modelos de Mujer, which she translated as Model Women  Oxford American Thesaurus, second ed. (OUP: Online Version, 2012).  Oddly enough, while other novels like Las edades de Lulú (1989), Los aires difíciles (2002), and El Corazón Helado (2007) have been translated into English (The Ages of Lulu, The Wind from the East, The Frozen Heart), Modelos de Mujer has been translated into Italian, Turkish, Portuguese, Dutch and German.

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(2010).¹⁰ By adjectivising the Spanish word “modelo,” the meaning of the title could appear to have been modified altogether, as “model women” could be interpreted to mean something like “ideal, perfect, exemplary, faultless women,” an idea which is absolutely contrary to Grandes’s intention, in so far as she introduces us to many female types, none of which is a “model woman” (in the sense of “fit to be imitated”). Moving on from the pictorial metaphors that links both works, the next common point pertains to the genre and the technique utilized by both authors. The genre is, of course, the short story, and all thirteen stories have female protagonists. This fact leads me to suggest that all of Fernández’s stories and some of those compiled in Grandes’s volume are instances of fictional autobiography, whose authors have chosen to utilize the “strategy of the other” to present their self-portraits, as will be further explained below. Intaglio is about the coming of age of the narrator Nenita, yet it spans three generations and has a different title character for each of the stories. “Andrea,” “Amanda,” “Filomena,” “Leonor,” “Esmeralda,” and “Zulema” are all women from Nenita’s extended family or community from whose life experiences Nenita learns life lessons that are arguably exemplary or, sometimes, held in contempt. Moreover, in one way or another, each of these women transmits a creative or artistic skill, and represents a model of womanhood, as in the case of Grandes’s protagonists. In my typological description of these characters, Andrea represents the Americanized dreamer; Amanda is the shaman/witch of the community; Filomena epitomizes the immigrant working woman; Leonor’s role is to be the keeper of ancestral traditions; Esmeralda acts as the suffering, silenced victim; and Zulema is the storyteller who precedes Nenita herself in the art of telling stories. In presenting this choir of role models or female “moulds,” Fernández creates a sense of collective identity and of the individual as part of a far-reaching community.¹¹ The resemblance with Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), another coming-of-age novel compiled of vignettes narrated by young Esmeralda, has been noted by critics such as Ellen McCracken, in so far as both Chicana authors root the individual self in the broader socio-political reality of the Latina/o community.¹² Almudena Grandes’s collection of seven stories about women is also populated with female characters who struggle for their existence in the midst of a  Ashlyn M. Winkler, Model Women: The Nourishing Words of Almudena Grandes, translated into English, Honors Thesis (2010). .  Kelley, “A Minor Revolution,” 79.  Ellen McCracken, New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Post-Modern Ethnicity (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999): 67.

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vital learning process, one that often points the way to freedom and the development of personal autonomy. Although Modelos de Mujer is composed of portraits that remain distinct dramas, many of these stories are also related, in one way or another, to childhood, to the coming-of-age protagonists’ desire to be the owners of their own lives, and to the efforts that the heroines must undertake in order to prevent other people from bullying them. In the first three stories – “Los ojos rotos” [Broken Eyes], “Malena, una vida hervida” [Malena: A Steamed Life] and “Bárbara contra la muerte” [Barbara Versus Death] – each of the female characters conquers death in her own way. In the last four stories – “El vocabulario de los balcones” [The Vocabulary of Balconies], “Amor de madre” [Motherly Love], “Modelos de mujer,” and “La buena hija” [The Good Daughter] – the female protagonists twist fate to their convenience, drawing from an unswerving determination to control their own lives. The fact that the book contains seven stories (introduced by a “Prologue” added in 1996, for the publication of the volume), lends itself to easily conclude that these “models of women” are, in fact, representations of the seven deadly sins or vices – wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony – used since early Christianity to educate and instruct Christians concerning humanity’s tendency to sin. María de la Paz Aguilera, for example, analyses the seven stories trying to fit one or more of the sins into the protagonists’ nature.¹³ Allowing that some of these vices are present in some of the protagonists’ behavior (since they represent models of womanhood, and vices are inherent to all humans), her thesis does not sound convincing to me, for the seven stories were written independently between 1989 and 1995, with no aim of transmitting a coherent exemplification of the seven sins for the education of the readers. On the contrary, Grandes’s aim seems to be the articulation of a somewhat sarcastic, humorous, and multi-layered portrait of womanhood with its weaknesses and strengths, its vices and virtues, its aims and frustrations. In fact, if there were an essence that permeates all seven tales, it would be what Kathleen Glenn has called ‘a poetics of excess,” for all women characters experience exaggerated love for a man, a child, a mother, a friend, or even food. As she puts it, “Grandes plays with stereotypical images of women […] and individualizes loquacious madwomen, insatiable matrons, and possessive mothers. On the other hand, she depicts love as the central, all-important element of women’s lives.”¹⁴

 María de la Paz Aguilera, “Los siete pecados capitales en Modelos de Mujer: la incitación de lo prohibido,” Annali Online di Lettere 1 (2010): 38 – 58.  Kathleen M. Glenn, “Almudena Grandes’s Modelos de Mujer: A Poetics of Excess,” in Writing Women, ed. Alastair Hurst (Victoria, Australia: Antípodas Monographs, 2002): 111.

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Modelos de Mujer opens with a prologue entitled “Memorias de una niña gitana” [“Memoirs of a Gipsy Girl”]. From the few pages that compose it, one can extract an accurate image of the author, a retrospective self-portrait that narrates the unsuspected ways by which the young Almudena entered the world of literature. We are facing a portrait, both physical and intellectual, and at the same time, a poetics of Grandes’s literary world until the moment of the volume’s publication that records the relationship between memory, identity, writing, and the world.¹⁵ In this prologue, Grandes reveals the genesis of the seven stories we are about to read, and states that, even if only one of them is allegedly autobiographical (“Malena, A Steamed Life” – subtitled “A partially autobiographical story”), all of them constitute a sort of portrait of her literary world: Although I never explicitly intended it, I think that this tale [“Memoirs of a Gipsy Girl”] and all of my short stories are in one way or another intimately linked to the themes and conflicts that have inspired my previous works, and I trust that this connection lends them an inevitable unity. I have never aspired to conquer an extremely vast literary universe. On the contrary, I prefer to stay in a small, personal world whose boundaries happen to coincide with the precise limits of my memory, and direct my gaze into corners so well-known that they’ll never stop surprising me. (MM, 14, my italics)¹⁶

Indeed, “Memoirs of a Gipsy Girl” transports us to the Madrid of the 1970s, and to a neighborhood that has reappeared in many other novels by Grandes. Moreover, she narrates how her interest in storytelling was born: his father and grandfather met every Sunday to watch soccer on television, and the women and children had to be quiet. So, her mother and her aunts would sit around a table to chat and gossip, while the children were banished to the dining room and forced to entertain themselves by drawing with paper and crayons: “In these circumstances began my literary career” (Almudena actually started writing because she never knew how to draw). Since then, every Sunday, she invested the 90 minutes of the soccer game in writing a story, and admits that “because I only had a story to tell, I always wrote the same story.” She continues, “My family still keeps some of the weekly versions of this story, which was always written in third person even though there I talked more about myself, and more explicitly, than in any other text that I have come to write since” (MM,11, my italics).

 See Miguel Ángel García’s discussion of this in “Imagen primera de Almudena Grandes. Memoria, escritura y mundo,” Revista Electrónica de Estudios Filológicos 7 (Junio 2004). .  All the translated quotes from the stories “Memorias de una niña Gitana” and “Modelos de Mujer” are Winkler’s.

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If this Oliver Twist-like story about a Gipsy girl who is lost and adopted by a Gipsy family and ten years later is reunited with her real family is retrospectively perceived by the adult writer as the one where “I talked more about myself, and more explicitly, than in any other text that I have come to write since,” we may infer that some of the not-so-autobiographical stories compiled in Modelos de Mujer draw from “the precise limits of [her] memory” and may also be variations of the Gipsy Girl story, and thus, indirectly “about herself.” Grandes adds, “Since then, I write in order to live, and passion keeps driving my hand” (MM, 13). And none of this is accidental, because Grandes’s novels also investigate further, though less explicitly, the relationship between autobiography and fiction. What these quotes demonstrate is that Modelos de Mujer, as Intaglio, can be considered cases of fictionalized autobiography (since no autobiographical pact exists in either case),¹⁷ for most of the stories compiled in them are closely related to their authors’ private, social, historical, and literary worlds. But, why should Fernández use Nenita as narrator, and the lives of fictional women as “intaglios,” and why should Grandes use various women’s portraits as “models” that in some cases are mirrors where she reflects her own image? A possible answer might be found in the use of “the strategy of the other” in women’s life-writing, as described by Billson and Smith in their analysis of Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento. ¹⁸ Let us explore this possibility. According to Margot Kelley, Latina writing often presents an “extended family of women” and Latina writers “often displace a central patriarchal figure, and replace it with a woman-populated household and even world.”¹⁹ Likewise, Ellen McCracken has argued that the new U.S. Latino fiction writes the lives of ordinary Latinos into the larger historical narrative.²⁰ Actually, I would argue that this is not a specific Latina approach to life-writing, but rather the traditional mode for women autobiographers, most of whom tend to narrate what John Paul Eakin

 Cf. Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography as “a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality”; he further defines the autobiographical pact as “a contract between author and reader in which the autobiographer explicitly commits himself or herself not to some impossible historical exactitude but rather to the sincere effort to come to terms with and to understand his or her own life.” (Philippe Lejeune, On autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 1989): 4.  Marcus K. Billson and Sidonie A. Smith, “Lillian Hellman and the Strategy of the ‘Other,’” in Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980): 163 – 179.  Kelley, “A Minor Revolution,” 79.  McCracken, New Latina Narrative, 41.

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has called “relational lives” rather than individualized self-portraits.²¹ “Intaglio” suggests a visual, painterly metaphor for the working of time. Fernández moves backwards and forward through the layers of time, uncovering those traces of meaning she finds in portraits of Nenita’s relatives and loved ones. Fernández captures her own life in these quiet yet intense dramas of other people’s lives, so that each portrait becomes a sort of self-portrait.²² Likewise, by eschewing conventional autobiography and focusing on the lives and particular circumstances of various Spanish women, Grandes invites the reader into a world of others who, as they come together in her memory and imagination, become significant in the articulation of the self. They are, after all, mirrors in front of which Grandes’s self tries to create its own reality. In the end, the “strategy of the other” allows Fernández and Grandes to explore the self from the distance of the “other”; it permits them to see the self, not as a confining ego, but as the sum of various people’s experiences and provides the means to create drama, for in the conflict between the self and the other is the stuff out of which all drama is made.²³ Having exposed some general similarities or common literary tendencies, I will now move on to the examination of some specific stories, characters, and rhetorical devices that also build a bridge across nationalities, languages and cultures, between Texas and Spain, and between these two women authors.

Antagonist molds and models My focus will now be narrowed to the analysis of two short stories that feature two women antagonists, or two antithetical models: those presented by Roberta Fernández in her story “Andrea,” and by Almudena Grandes in “Modelos de Mujer,” the tale that gives the name to the entire volume. In her analysis of Intaglio, John Sumanth Muthyala perceives three main themes that the book presents: the effects of the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 1920) on the U.S. Southwest; the importance of curanderismo and archetypal figures like La Llorona in shaping the worldviews of fronterizos who grow up torn between conflicting traditions and cultures; and the gradual but inevitable process of Americanization

 John Paul Eakin, How our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999).  Billison and Smith, “Lillian Herman,” 173 – 174.  Billison and Smith, “Lillian Herman,” 179.

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in border families and the attempt by borderlanders to cling to native cultural practices.²⁴ The story that opens the volume, “Andrea,” clearly focuses on the latter theme, the process of Americanization in border families. “Andrea” begins with the narrator Nenita, as a young girl and an aspiring dancer, browsing through a photo album containing pictures of her Tía Consuelo and her Tía Andrea as a dancer. Those two tías are the antagonistic models of women I wish to focus on. Andrea looks much more Americanized than Consuelo, who is ten years older that her. Consuelo was born in Mexico, while Andrea was born in Texas after the family’s migration, and “this fact of history seems to be the fault line between the sisters.”²⁵ Andrea soon becomes an accomplished dancer and begins travelling to various U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and New York, where she meets her future husband, an Italian-American named Tony Carducci. This move, away from the family’s tradition and from the working-class milieu in which Consuelo remains, translates into totally different worldviews: Consuelo lives in her Mexican past while Andrea lives in her U.S., professional present. As Andrea remarks, “I never had the home [Consuelo] missed. So, I’ve always managed to live pretty fully in the present” (I, 27). To Consuelo, home lay on the other side of the border; for Andrea, the United States was her home. I totally agree with Muthyala when he states that this story stresses that ethnicity is not the only identity marker: Andrea, like Consuelo, is Mexican by ancestry, but her sense of identity is much more worldly and multicultural than that of her sister, who remains totally Mexican. Andrea’s education, her access to a higher social class (artistry), her being a well-travelled woman, and her interethnic marriage, place more importance to her U.S. identity. In other words, this story presents three dominant myths related to the phenomena of immigration in the United States and to the borderland experience. On one hand, Andrea epitomizes the myth of reinvention, which involves a reworking of identity through a process of erasing the past and acquiring a new identity à la Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory. ²⁶ On the other hand, Consuelo embodies the myth of looking back towards home (Mexico) with a sense of nostalgia, and the evocation of an idealized original place of belonging frozen in time and space. Finally, the story itself depicts the myth that the loss of a native culture is inevitable, but is counterbalanced with significant gains through  John Sumanth Muthyala, “Roberta Fernández’s Intaglio: Border Crossings and Mestiza Feminism in the Border-Lands,” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines 1:30 (2000): 92– 110.  Muthyala, “Roberta Férnandez,” 94.  Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (Boston: Bantam, 1982).

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the acquisition of a new public persona.²⁷ Nenita, as a young girl, wanted to be a dancer too and, as an adult narrator, she bears the point of view of the only woman character in the book who has gone to a U.S. university and earned a university degree. That is why she immediately identifies with her aunt Andrea and finds it difficult to understand her aunt Consuelo’s rivalry and critical condemnation of her Americanized sister who, to Nenita’s younger and modern eyes, represents a “model woman,” insofar as she abandoned the traditional domestic role she was destined to perform as a Mexican woman in pursuit of her ambition to be a professional dancer. As the story progresses, Nenita narrates Andrea’s life as a married woman to an Italian-American man, and Consuelo’s move from her life-long family home to her sister’s mixed-family atmosphere. Ironically, Consuelo learns to feel totally at ease in this newly-discovered multicultural and trilingual U.S. environment. That experience of dislocation initiates a radical change in Consuelo; she learns to speak Italian and affiliates herself with Italian customs. According to Muthyala, this could be interpreted as a reconstruction of a stable home through a mode of translation that “both compels and enables the borderlanders to move in and out of different cultures and languages.”²⁸ The symbolic outcome of this change is sisterly reconciliation: one day, years later, Consuelo takes the photo album containing the two sisters’ “past,” rips up the pictures, and throws them in the river. This action on Consuelo’s part surprisingly leads to a ceasefire between the two sisters, as they are able to discuss Consuelo’s resentment of Andrea’s absences in her pursuit of an artistic career, and Andrea’s frustrations with Consuelo’s focus on the past (I, 40). While Ibis GómezVega thinks that by destroying the album, Consuelo destroys a lie (Andrea’s artistic life being interpreted by this critic as a “lie,” i. e., an invented and mythical history),²⁹ my reading of this symbolic destruction of the photographic repository is that the older sister’s action seeks reconciliation with the younger sister: dispossessed of a past that separated them as two antagonistic archetypes – “the Mexican ancestral” and “the American assimilated” – this symbolic tearing into pieces of a past brings them together as equal, transnational beings: as Mexican-Italian-American women. Does this mean that Andrea rejects her Mexican ancestry? I do not think so. What Fernández tries to express with the story that opens her volume is what Ilan Stavans proposes: “The imperative is to explain to ourselves not how far we’ve travelled in our journey of assimilation but  Muthyala, “Roberta Fernández,” 100.  Muthyala, “Roberta Fernández,” 96.  Ibis Gómez-Vega, “La mujer como artista en Intaglio,” The Bilingual Review 18.1 (1993): 14– 22.

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how truthful we’ve remained to our origins.”³⁰ Finding the reply to this conundrum is what most Latina/o life writing in the United States is all about. So, in “Andrea,” we are facing two bicultural coming-of-age stories of migration that present lives lived between English and Spanish, between Mexico and the United States. Speaking of postcolonial literatures, Homi Bhabha provides an excellent description of the ironically privileged positionality “at the break” that can be applied to Chicana/o life writing. He speaks of the possibilities of being in between, of occupying an interstitial space that is not fully governed by the recognizable traditions from one’s place of origin. This third space is sceptical of traditional notions of identity that depend for their authority on being geographically “originary,” or concepts of culture which depend for their value on being kept “pure”: What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood -singular or communal- that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.³¹

At a time of unstoppable mass migrations, migratory flows, and border crossings, as Arjun Appadurai argues in Modernity at large, “[E]thnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality, has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders.”³² That is, while traditional immigrant literature in the United States was defined by its boundaries or the lines between here and there, and the distinctiveness of the two places, Fernández’s character locates herself in a hybrid space whose stance can be described as transnational, neither assimilationist nor necessarily oppositional. Andrea – and eventually, Consuelo too – separates geography from identity and comes to understand that national belonging and cultural roots are not only a question of place and land.³³ Moving now to Almudena Grandes and the short narrative that also presents two diametrically opposed female types, I will focus on “Modelos de Mujer,” a

 Ilan Stavans, Return To Centro Histórico. A Mexican Jew Looks For His Roots (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2012): 102.  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994): 1– 2.  Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996): 41.  Carmen Faymonville, “New Transnational Identities in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s autobiographical fiction,” MELUS 26:2 (2001): 2.

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story narrated in the first person by Lola, a young graduate student of Russian philology. The story opposes the “top model” woman, as slim and perfectly shaped as she is silly and superficial (symbolically named Eva) to Lola, the ‘realwomen-have-curves” type of woman, hired as an interpreter to accompany the actress and former Miss Spain to Hollywood, where she will act in a movie. Lola is an intelligent and witty, if rather oversized madrileña whose self-image is that of “a freak accident of nature, every time I cross the threshold of a boutique” and who, upon meeting Eva, thinks, “[T]he worst of it all was that I found her overwhelmingly beautiful, the cover page of a special issue of All Beauty” (MM, 165). Grandes views, with a critical eye and even outrage, that, after so much effort and struggle for the liberation of women from the roles assigned to them, the most admired and envied women today are the types imposed by Hollywood movies and red carpets: skinny and anorexic top models and actresses, women who sacrifice their lives for a beautiful body. Hence the opposition that takes place in “Models of woman,” between body and mind, or between artificial body worship (Eva) and spontaneous and graceful intelligence (Lola). Needless to say, the latter will triumph over the former; the full-figured Lola, a fascinating conversationalist, will win the heart of a very sophisticated and erudite Russian film director, who chooses her over the beautiful and frivolous actress. The real “model woman” of this story, obviously, is not the professional model,³⁴ and Grandes imbues this story with a liberating, feminist message that deconstructs gender roles and stereotyped discourse. Fernández’s feminist denunciation of the objectification of women is also evidenced in her story “Esmeralda,” about a beautiful girl really named Verónica, but whose green eyes gain her the nickname of the gem. Described as “the silent, bewildered young woman inside the glass enclosure” (I, 113) while selling theater tickets to the public, she is five years older than Nenita, but more innocent and dependant. The “mould” which Verónica fits into is that of the suffering victim, abused verbally by her uncle Alfredo – a violent bully and a wife molester. She is abused physically later on in the story by three men, neighbors who despite kidnapping and raping her, are never caught by the police. The rest of the story after the rape tells how the Luna women deal with this painful experience, taking care of her, applying home-made healing remedies, and having cathartic encounters during which they all cry together for the sorrows of all the women in the family: “a wailing session, Lloronas, todas” (I, 125). Cultural and communal memory is enhanced here with the appeal to the Mexican Indian ar-

 Glenn, “Almudena Grandes’s Modelos de Mujer,” 118.

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chetypal figure of La Llorona, intertwined with the inherited practice of curanderismo. But Verónica is also abused by unjust patriarchal conventions that stigmatize women as “whores” when they have been sexually assaulted by men. After the rape, Verónica is not only a “fallen woman,” but she also becomes a pregnant woman in search of a husband to provide legitimacy to what otherwise would be a bastard child. The fact that the women of the community have to marry Verónica off to a rather naive teacher named David Baca, concealing from him the bride’s pregnant state, translates into a double lie: while David candidly thinks he is the baby’s father, Esmeralda lies to herself when marrying a good man whom she does not love. I disagree with Ibis Gómez-Vega’s view when she states that, bearing in mind that many women presented in Intaglio end up giving themselves up to men in marriage, “One has to wonder what kind of feminism Roberta Fernandez believes in. The feminism represented in her stories is not the militant feminism of the women who took to the streets during the 1970s, as seen in characters like Andrea, Zulema or Verónica, who end up in marriage instead of having a life of their own.”³⁵ What Gómez-Vega omits is that this deceitful and “obligatory” marriage earns the total disapproval of Nenita, through whose voice Fernández transmits her feminist critical condemnation of such practices, enforced on women by prejudiced and sexist patriarchal conventions and by Roman Catholic religious beliefs. That is, Fernández’s gesture, in realistically exposing the sad destiny of so many Mexican women, constitutes in itself a feminist act.

Mirrors and revisionist mythmaking As is well known, Marcia Lieberman was one of the first critics of the golden decade of the 1970s feminism to denounce how traditional fairy tales have served to acculturate readers. Her main point is that: the best-known stories, those that everyone has read or heard, indeed, those that Disney has popularized, have affected masses of children in our culture. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White are mythic figures who have replaced the old Greek and Norse gods, goddesses, and heroes for most children. [ . . . ] Millions of women must surely have formed their psycho-sexual self-concepts, and their ideas of what they could or could not accomplish, what sort of behavior would be rewarded, and of the nature of reward itself, in part

 Gómez-Vega, “La Mujer,” 19.

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from their favorite fairy tales. These stories have been made the repositories of the dreams, hopes, and fantasies of generations of girls.³⁶

Moreover, Donald Hasse corroborates that “the fairy tale constitutes one of these sanctuaries of cultural myth – the space where gender identity is constructed.”³⁷ If I bring Lieberman and Hasse into my analysis is because both Grandes and Fernández practice, in two of their stories, what feminism has called “revisionist mythmaking.” As Alicia Ostriker reminds us, myth – and fairy tales would fall in the same category – “is quintessentially intimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire, inexplicable motivation – everything in the psyche that to rational consciousness is unreal, crazed, or abominable.”³⁸ So, revisionist mythmaking from a feminist perspective consists in making visible the fairy tale’s complicity with “exhausted” narrative and gender ideologies, and seeking to expose what the institutionalization of such tales for children has forgotten or left unexploited. Christina Bacchilega concurs: “This kind of rereading does more than interpret anew or shake the genre’s ground rules. It listens for the many ‘voices’ of tales as well.”³⁹ I will begin with Fernández’s revision of Sleeping Beauty, as it appears in the story entitled “Zulema,” a character whose role-model is that of the community’s storyteller. As a child, Zulema grew up believing that her missing mother Isabel would return some day, but that was just a false story she was told, for the real truth was that her mother was dead. When she discovers the truth, she decides that she would tell stories her own way, to reflect her own reality. The first story Zulema tells her siblings is that of Sleeping Beauty, who “was supposed to be awakened by the kiss of a gorgeous prince but that never really happened” (I, 142). According to Zulema, the prince was unable to find Sleeping Beauty “because a revolution broke out just as he was setting out on his journey. Word soon arrived that his white horse had been confiscated by Emiliano Zapata” and “the revolutionaries had proclaimed that he could no longer be a prince” (I, 142– 143). Because of these developments, the prince was not able to rescue Sleeping Beauty, and “without realizing what they had done, the revolutionaries

 Marcia R. Lieberman, “‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale,” College English 34.3 (1972): 384– 385.  Donald Hasse, “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship,” in Fairy Tales and Feminism. New Approaches, ed. Donald Hasse (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004): 22.  Alicia Ostriker, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,” Signs 8.1 (Autumn, 1982): 68 – 90: 72.  Christina Bacchilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997): 50.

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got rid of all those charming princes and the silly, pampered Sleeping Beauties as well” (I, 143). Muthyala argues that, in this revisionist rewriting of the fairy tale, “the characters in the story, Sleeping Beauty and the Prince, are indigenized as the Prince is made to represent the Mexicans fighting the revolutionaries, and Sleeping Beauty’s predicament, becomes, by implication, Zulema’s own predicament of waiting for her mother’s return.” Moreover, Emiliano Zapata is not cast as a heroic figure but as a spoiler of the happy ending. This cuento, Muthyala continues, “embodies a mode of translating Mexican history and Anglo mythology, a translation in which revolutionary heroes are demythologized and an Anglo-Saxon symbology is made to yield to local experience.”⁴⁰ In Fernández’s revision of the traditional fairy-tale and of the Mexican mythical hero, “silly” Sleeping Beauties are abandoned, princes are overthrown, and revolutionary heroes fail to provide happy endings for women. If Sleeping Beauty is debunked in Intaglio, Snow White and the myth of Medea are revisited in one of Grandes’s stories, “Los Ojos Rotos” [Broken Eyes]. subtitled “Historia de aparecidos” [Ghost Story], it is a very disturbing and uncanny love story that could be catalogued as “fantastic” in Tzvetan Todorov’s terminology, since we are placed, precisely, in the moment of hesitation between belief and disbelief of the supernatural. As Todorov says, “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”⁴¹ This ghost story, written in dialogue form with multiple voices, deals with people who are out of place, since the dead, apparently, mingle with the living, and the demented with the sane. The characters are the patients and staff of a hospital for demented people located near Madrid. The main character is Queti (Enriqueta), a bourgeois woman who is convinced that her husband has had her locked up so that he can steal her money (MM, 112). Mad Queti is unruly and rebellious, assertive and extremely talkative, often using vulgar language. Actually the reader can “hear” both her outer and “inner” voices throughout most of the story. A very moving character notwithstanding, Queti is an intern because she has been delusional since the death of one of her sons, who died of a heroin overdose. Although she is unruly, hysteric, and “grotesque,”⁴² her kindness, her profound grief at the death of her son, and her motherly attitude towards Miguela immediately gain the compassion of the reader.  Muthyala, “Roberta Fernández,” 98.  Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1975): 25.  Glenn, “Almudena Grandes’s Modelos de Mujer,” 114.

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The second main character is Migue (Miguela), a Down syndrome patient who has the mind of a child. Migue is in love with the ghost of Orencio, a Marxist militant who was murdered after the Spanish civil war and buried in the garden behind the mental hospital. Orencio “visits” Migue when she looks at herself in the mirror, according to Queti, who acts as an unreliable narrator (in so far as she is mad and delusional); his gaze has the power to transform her, so that when she feels his presence the image she sees reflected in the mirror is that of a beautiful young woman. Here is when the reader feels the moment of hesitation between belief and disbelief of the supernatural, for we are not sure whether it all happens in Migue’s – and Queti’s – perturbed minds, or whether supernatural lovers really populate the world until they find the peace that allows them to vanish into eternity, as so many ghost stories go. In any case, when the garden is dug up, Orencio’s ghost vanishes never to return, and Migue is devastated, for she no longer sees her beautiful reflection in the looking-glass. The tragic ending is set into motion when Migue injures herself by cutting her eyes with a piece of the broken mirror, and becomes blind. What is of the utmost interest in my discussion of revisionist mythmaking is the function that the mirror plays in this story. Janet Pérez, using Jenijoy La Belle as her referent, explains how not only does the mirror image possess a long literary history but also, mirror metaphors are persistently multivalent. From their original associations with vanity (i. e., Narcissus), mirrors have come to be associated with illusion, memory, dreams, and the subconscious, as well as epiphanies or moments of existential self-encounter. “Philosophically, mirrors are related to thought, while metaphysically, they help to invoke apparitions and serve as doors to other worlds, or to death.”⁴³ Going back to Lieberman, she exposes how the “beauty contest” is a constant and primary device in many of the traditional fairy-stories, where the focus on beauty is presented as a girl’s most valuable asset, and perhaps her only valuable one.⁴⁴ Like Lieberman, Gilbert and Gubar see the “beauty contest” as an instance in which the subordination of women to male judgement, to the male gaze, becomes clearest. In Snow White, this competition takes place in the dialogue between the Queen and her magic mirror that tells her “who is the fairest of them all,” and, according to Gilbert and Gubar’s revisionist interpretation in The Madwoman in the Attic, “the voice of the patriarch is represented by the

 Janet Pérez, “Forms and Functions of the Mirror Image in Contemporary Spanish Women’s Writing,” in Writing Women, ed. Alastair Hurst (Victoria, Australia: Antípodas Monographs, 2002): 9.  Lieberman, “Some Day,” 385

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magic mirror; the patriarchal voice of judgement that rules the Queen’s – and every woman’s – self-evaluation.”⁴⁵ Moreover, in their project of defining a feminist poetics, these critics make use of the metaphorical force of Snow White, and frame the conflict between the stepmother and the princess in the light of the conflict between the woman-angel (the ideal of passivity created by patriarchal discourse) and the woman-monster (female activity feared and demonized by that patriarchal discourse).⁴⁶ Grandes reverses the roles of the wicked stepmother and the innocent girl as they appear in Snow White, since it is the absolutely naive Migue (who has the mental age of a seven-year-old) who looks at herself in the mirror and sees herself “the fairest of them all.” That is, the (male) sanction of the mirror image offers her an acceptable route to socialization.⁴⁷ Clearly, Migue’s scenes in front of the mirror constitute instances of transcending time, place, age and, most importantly, physical otherness (as a Down syndrome woman), for the world of the mirror grants her the ability to see herself according to her own desires. Given that the tight association between the male ghost’s gaze, the mirror, and Migue’s facial transformation is so clearly established in the story, we can infer that Grandes is transmitting a critique of the “beauty contest” that Migue, as a totally childish creature would have absorbed and internalized, that is, the conviction that a woman cannot be loved unless she is beautiful. That is why, when Migue no longer sees the reflection of her deceitfully perfect face in the mirror, she becomes insane, violent, silent, and suicidal. “Broken Eyes,” thus, defies the patriarchal tradition and exposes the harmful fallacies transmitted by fairy-tales, and to what extent they serve as “training manuals” for girls.⁴⁸ In some ways, Migue brings resonances of Toni Morrison’s main character in her first novel, The Bluest Eye. A poor black girl, Pecola, believes that she is ugly because she and her community have also interiorized the standards that base ideals of beauty on whiteness and on having beautiful blue eyes. Again, Morrison constructs a narrative fiction around beauty as a girl’s most valuable asset, perhaps her only valuable asset, as Lieberman would put it (385). Pecola’s insanity at the end of the novel is her only way to escape the world where she cannot be beautiful, and to get the blue eyes she desires from the beginning of the novel. On the other hand, the co-protagonist and main narrator in Grandes’s story,

 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979): 38.  Matia G. Akrabova, “El espejo y el espejismo: ambigüedades interpretativas en ’Los ojos rotos’ de Almudena Grandes,” Letras Hispanas 3.2 (2006): 122.  Jenijoy La Belle, Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988): 117.  Lieberman, “Some Day,” 395.

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Queti, also brings echoes of another strong maternal, Medea-like figure: Sethe in Morrison’s (ghost story) Beloved (1987).⁴⁹ Beloved is the dead daughter of Sethe, whose ghostly spirit haunts her mother’s house and soul ever since she killed her, as a baby, in order to save her from a life in slavery. As we see, the myth of Medea,⁵⁰ the monstrous mother crazed with jealousy, is reversed in Morrison’s novel, when she creates a new black Medea who kills her baby out of love and protection, and not out of revenge. Likewise, Queti, the “stepmother” of this historia de aparecidos acts as a loving and protecting surrogate mother for the Down-syndrome woman: seeing a broken-hearted Migue suffer in silence, she pushes her “daughter” under the wheels of a truck so as to reunite the lovers in death. In death, Migue magically regains her round eyes and her smile. If, in the case of Grandes’s “Broken Eyes,” the confrontation with the mirror provides the novelist with a way of dramatizing and literalizing a metaphor of alienation from self and society,⁵¹ a very different metaphorical mirror scene appears in one of Fernandez’s stories. In “Leonor,” Fernandez proposes the theme of matrilineage through this grandmother figure, who plays the role of the keeper and transmitter of ancestral traditions that have to be passed on to the younger generations. The mirror scene occurs when Nenita and her friend Aura are twelve, and they visit the matriarch of the family, who performs a tarot-card reading for them. When the reading is over, Leonor asks the girls to stand in front of the mirror, and these are Nenita’s words: In the mirror I followed her movements. She took up a pair of scissors … the scissors snipped, then snipped again. My head felt very light and I quickly turned around to see her wrapping our long braids in two separate purple silk scarves. (I, 101)

This ancestral rite of initiation, that, conversely, constitutes a shocking “mutilation” for the Mexican girls upon seeing themselves deprived of their long, dark braids, their ultimate symbol of femininity, is followed by the matriarch’s explanation:

 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970); Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987).  Medea and Jason married and settled in Corinth, where they raised several children. Their happy days ended when Creon, the king of Corinth, offered Jason his daughter Glauce in marriage. Anxious to please the king, Jason abandoned Medea and prepared to marry Glauce. Medea took her revenge by sending Glauce a poisoned wedding gown that burned her alive. By some accounts, before fleeing to Athens, she also killed the children she had borne to Jason. (see “Medea” in Myths Encyclopedia [accessed January 11, 2017]).  La Belle, Herself Beheld, 122.

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Just as the little lizards effortlessly develop new tails, so, too, your hair will soon grow long again. […] Your hair will become thicker and more beautiful. […] transformations constantly regenerate your life […]. Whatever disappears or dies simply becomes transformed into something new. With this guidance, you can make your way on your journey. Now it is time for you to go (I, 101– 102, my emphasis).

An epiphanic moment has just happened in front of the mirror: the internalization, in the young girl’s mind, that transformations are regenerative. And this is the key to understanding Nenita’s ambivalent reactions to other women’s conservative insistence on preserving an “authentic” Mexican identity. If we refer to Pérez’s tentative typology of mirror functions, which can be counted as no less than 35, we may conclude that the use of mirrors in Grandes’s and Fernandez’s stories falls into several categories, such as “a device facilitating existential awareness, self-encounter or epiphany” (Nenita), “a device provoking or precipitating self-confrontation or self-analysis” (Nenita), “access to fantasy, dream worlds” (Migue), “to contrast reality and illusion, dreams, or unfulfilled hope and actuality” (Migue), access to metaphysical or supernatural realms (Migue), and to communicate psychic deterioration or madness (Migue).⁵² In any case, mirror scenes build another bridge that unites Fernandez’s moulds and Grandes’s models. One final consideration that also touches upon revisionist mythmaking is the deconstruction of the negative connotations associated with the stereotype of the woman as “witch,” and with witchcraft as the most extreme expression of female deviance, as provided by Fernández in her description of the mysterious allure that the old woman Amanda holds for the young Nenita in the story entitled “Amanda.” In Nenita’s childhood view, and in Fernández’s depiction of this traditional Mexican woman, Amanda is not so much a sinister witch, but an hechicera (I, 50), a sort of shaman for the community, a mystically powerful and loving woman, in spite of the fact that her whole existence, surrounded by other “witches” such as Librada and Soledad, is “a complex plot [Nenita] couldn’t figure out” (I, 51– 52). But what is most interesting for me, which has passed unnoticed for most critics of Intaglio, is the symbolism of the cape. Amanda is a professional seamstress, and one day Nenita asks her to make her “the most beautiful outfit in the world. One that a witch would give her favourite daughter, […][s]o horrible that it would enchant everyone” (I, 52). Reluctantly but lovingly, Amanda makes Nenita a very special dress with braided frogs, and with a black satin bruja cape. Seeing the outfit, Nenita’s mother forbids her from ever wearing it, lest she should be taken for a “witch’s daughter”  Pérez, “Forms and Functions,” 25 – 26.

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(I, 55). Years pass, and a now young Nenita finds the old cape in an old trunk in the store-room: “[F]rom then on I placed the little cape among my collection of few but special possessions which accompanied me everywhere I went” (I, 57). That is, the cape becomes a synecdoche of her past, the talisman that ties Nenita to an Edenic land and to a “joyous period in those splendid days of luscious white gardenias” (I, 57). But, again, the reality of displacement imposes its rules. The young girl becomes the mature woman who, after earning a university degree, moves towards her first job in the West coast. The suitcase containing the cape gets lost en route. Deprived of her cape, the symbolic tie to her far away and long ago, the now Americanized professional woman feels a terrible sense of loss. Although an in-depth comparative study of metaphoric outfits in literature is beyond the scope of this essay, if we were to do a reading of Nenita’s cape in the light of other “allegorical coats,” such as those presented by Thomas Carlyle in his Sartor Resartus (1836)⁵³ or by Jonathan Swift in “A Tale of a Tub” (1704),⁵⁴ the connotative and ambivalent meanings of the loss of the cape (ancestral roots, sense of a fixed identity, inherited legacy, etc.) would be more than clear to a perceptive reader.

Working women and/as surrogate mothers Returning once again to Grandes’s volume, and to antithetical women’s roles, a second story that presents two rival women is “la Buena Hija,” a case of motherly despotism and daughterly submission that leads to matrophobia. This is a retrospective coming-of-age story narrated in the first person by Berta, now a single 30-year-old woman who lives with and for her hypochondriac and selfish mother, after having renounced profession, love, and a full life of her own for the sake of nursing a domineering mother.  The imaginary “Philosophy of Clothes” that Carlyle proposes in this fascinating and influential novel holds that the changing of clothes symbolizes the continuous and inevitable change in history, as cultures reconstruct themselves in changing fashions, power-structures, and faithsystems.  “A Tale of a Tub” is an allegory that concerns the adventures of three brothers, Peter, Martin, and Jack, as they attempt to make their way in the world. Each of the brothers represents one of the primary branches of Christianity in the West. The brothers have inherited three coats (representing religious practice) by their father (representing God), and they have his will (representing Christian religion) to guide them. Although the will says that the brothers are forbidden from making any changes to their coats, they do nothing but alter their coats – their inherited religion – from the start.

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The antagonist types are, in fact, Doña Carmen, this cold, distant, and tyrannical mother, and Piedad, the housemaid, a warm, loving and truly maternal figure. Here, Grandes pays homage to the nurturing image of the nanny, a rural and hard-working model of woman who lived with the bourgeois families in the Spain of the 1960s and 1970s. Nursing the family’s children and doing all the house chores, the housemaid is the Spanish equivalent of the Southern U.S. African-American mammy. “Doña Carmen was my mother. Piedad was my mama” (MM, 208), the young girl feels. And it is Piedad’s language, the Castilian spoken in the rural borderland between Burgos and Segovia, that Berta feels is her mother tongue. Almudena Grandes, no doubt, had a Piedad in her childhood. The image of the nanny is also present in one of Fernandez’s stories, “Filomena,” arguably the most moving portrait in the whole volume, and, incidentally, a portrait of the only woman who is not a relative or an ancestor, but a working woman whose primary job, like Grandes’s Piedad, consists of helping the narrator’s mother take care of her. Nenita, just like Berta, utters a very similar feeling about her nanny: “I, sensing her deep love, began to view her as my second mother. By the time I was five I knew all about the various saints she admired” (I, 66, my emphasis). Being a mother herself, Filomena would honor her deceased kin every November, including her son Alejandro (killed in Vietnam), Nalberto (her father), and Martín (her husband, also killed in battle). As a representative of the migrant working mother, Filomena had to abandon Mexico and migrate to the United States as a young widow, leaving her two older kids behind in Michoacán. Having become a Mexican American, the story of Filomena presents the undermining of the myth of return to the lost Eden, mentioned above. When this working mother goes back to Mexico, the reason is not nostalgia for the lost land, but to celebrate the Tascaran ritual El Dia de los Muertos, and to see her two younger children, whom she had to leave behind. However, she chooses not to remain in Mexico, for now she feels that her home is in the United States, where her dead son and husband lay buried. “Hijitos, now more than ever, I know I have to return to my little home up North” (I, 76). In other words, to Filomena, the adopted home is more home-like than the land in which she was born, which, again, transmits an existentialist (as opposed to essentialist) vision of national identity. It affirms that existence precedes essence or even that “residence” precedes both, as Pérez Firmat says in his much-quoted sentence “residence precedes essence.”⁵⁵ As a result, Filomena decides to trans-

 Laura Alonso Gallo, Voces de América: entrevistas a escritores hispanos (Cádiz: Aduana Vieja, 2004).

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late her Mexican traditions to the United States, and decides to set up her own altarcitos in her house to commemorate the Day of the Dead with Nenita and other children. This observance of ritual revitalizes a communal form of Mexican religious practice in Texas, by which Fernández implies that one’s sense of ancestry can retain its vitality outside of its country of origin, and that ritual can be passed on to new generations. Because “cultural transplantation also involves cultural translation, a process in which the transplanted undergoes change.”⁵⁶

A concluding note I would like to go back to what, formally speaking, inspired this “dialogic reading” of a Chicana-authored composite novel – or “novel-in-stories” (Kelley 2005, 297)⁵⁷ and a Spanish one: the literary genre that both women have opted for, in order to give a (fictional) portrait of themselves through the portraits of other women that may fit the moulds and models they can identify with. In her essay on Chicana/o composite novels, Margot Kelley quotes Roberta Fernández during an interview in which she explains how she arrived at the composite novel as an appropriate genre for this book. Fernández noted that she sought a form that would allow her to deal with a “long time process,” while also allowing her to focus closely on one woman and one art form in each story. She sought to create stories that would independently present a “complete world.” She had other models in mind for this composite novel: Toni Morrison, Leslie Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston.⁵⁸ In the same essay, Kelley explains that the authorship of composite novels has disproportionately included women who live in positions of “double marginality” as members of visible minorities, and, in particular, Latinas. Moreover, she quotes Deleuze and Guattari, to justify her categorization of Intaglio (as a composite novel) as a sort of “minor literature,” where “minor” refers to both the secondary status accorded to the work (the short story cycle being a “minor” form, versus the “major” form of the conventional novel), and to the author as a member of a minority. Deleuze and Guattari’s “deterritorialized” author – as part of a cultural and linguistic minority – Kelley contends, faces “the impossibility of

 Muthyala, “Roberta Fernández,” 102.  Margot Kelley, “Gender and Genre: the Case of the Novel-in-Stories,” Julie Brown (ed.), American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005): 295 – 310.  Kelley,”A Minor Revolution,” 80.

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writing in the majority language, the impossibility of writing otherwise.”⁵⁹ So, in this minor form the minority writer has the capacity to say what s/he cannot say in a major literature. I will not contradict statistical studies here about gender and genre, but I will use Almudena Grandes’s preface to Modelos de Mujer, which, as stated above, constitutes a sort of poetics of her literary world, to prove that the short story cycle, or the “composite novel” is not minor literature because it is used by more female authors than male ones. It is, simply, a choice authors make for various reasons, and many times, actually, because some of the compiled short stories were written before the whole volume was published as a composite novel, as happened in both our cases. It is worth quoting Grandes at length to get a full view of her opinions on this issue of gender and genre: But in the literary world there is a prevailing principle of sexual discrimination […]Seeing as this is the case, I would like to clarify once and for all that […] I believe that women’s literature absolutely does not exist. […] It seems intolerable to me that a good portion of women who write tend to settle into a sort of falsely congenital minorness (minor genres, minor plots, characters of minor status, minor ambitions). […] In my opinion, this kind of attitude justifies the division of literature into two genres that, unfortunately, are not masculine and feminine (which, after all, would be harmless and silly), but instead into literature, plain and simple, and women’s literature. […] I try to write from my memory, taking into account both my gender and my childhood terrors, the disgust that Brussels sprouts provoke within me, and a myriad of other things beyond my control. (MM, 16 – 17)

Moreover, one could list a great number of not precisely “minor” or “deterritorialized” (male) authors who also chose the short story as their preferred genre, departing from Poe, who wrote in his Philosophy of Composition that If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression – for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed.⁶⁰

“The affairs of the world” that “interfere” were also often ignored in favor of a “unity of impression” by many other eminent (male) short-story writers like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling or Ernest Hemingway, to name just a few of those used by the Argentinian cuento writer, Jorge Luis Borges, to justify his never intending to write a novel, because “uno puede vigilar un cuen-

 Kelley, “A Minor Revolution,” 64.  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine 28:4 (1846): 163 – 167.

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to casi con la misma precisión con que uno puede vigilar un soneto: uno puede verlo como un todo” [one can survey a story with almost the same precision with which one can survey a sonnet: one can see it as a whole].⁶¹ Having clarified that “minor literature” is just a critics’ tag, I will now attempt a concluding proposal about the thematic concerns of both writers. Both women write about some models of women that populate their world, their cultural heritage, and their imagination: the immigrant working woman and the bourgeois woman; the bicultural Mexican and the confused Madrileña; the over-sized graduate student and the assimilated Mexican-American; the dominated daughter and the domineering mother; the victimized pregnant woman who must marry without love and the enamoured mongoloid who dies for love; the stepmother that becomes caring mother, and the witch that becomes fairy… and a whole world of other female portraits that function as self-portraits. It is true that for the Chicana writer, “remembering means, first of all, reviving her ancestors […] from whom a certain culture, a certain mode of living and thinking originated.”⁶² But, after having read Modelos de Mujer, isn’t it true for the Madrileña writer as well?

 Jorge Luis Borges, “¿Por qué no escribe novelas?” Ciudad Seva (2005). [accessed January 15, 2017].  Marcienne Rocard, qtd. in Gómez-Vega, “La Mujer,” 19.

III Writing the Borderlands of Culture: Interviews with Latina/o Authors

Daniel Schreiner

The Once and Future Chicano – World Literatures Between Intra-History and Utopian Vision: An Interview with Alejandro Morales¹ We don’t have to write about the great heroes of our time, we can write about simple people who are very powerful in their own way.² – Alejandro Morales

The socio-critical prose and the literary techniques of the Californian writer and scholar Alejandro Morales are unique within the canon of Mexican American literature of the last decades. Morales’s style and variety of themes differs significantly from other contemporary Chicana/o authors, influenced as it is by his education in Latin and world literatures at U.S. universities. Writers of the Latin American Boom such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as North American and European authors such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser, had a deep impact on Morales’s storytelling. Despite of his socio-critical preference for themes that deal with questions of immigration, commemorative culture, worker rights, borders, religion, feminism, and transculturation, Morales never was an activist of the Chicano movimiento. Within the U.S. university system, he rather chooses to influence the (Mexican‐)American discourse of social and cultural participation as a teacher and writer. Being positioned more or less outside the mystic-MarxistChicano nationalist discourse, Morales hence must be considered as an important international author of contemporary world literature who masters various techniques of style and narration. Morales’s stories go beyond the Mexican American realm with references to world history and art. Often Morales applies intra-history approaches and elements of biographic metafiction that enable him to create his very own historical style of narration, documenting and explaining history in everyday lives. Combining magical realism and a very morbid visual technique of wording in the tradition of the German poet and physician Gottfried Benn, Morales’s novels turn out to be fabulous portraits of society, or fables of

 Interview conducted June 10 – 11, 2015 in Irvine, California.  Yves Charles Grandjeat and Alfonso Rodríguez, “Interview with Chicano Writer Alejandro Morales,” Confluencia, 7.1 (1991): 113. https://doi.org/9783110532913-010

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the present, evolving plots along utopian ideas and discussing the future of the Americas. Alejandro Morales was born in 1944 and grew up in the Simons Brick Company town of Montebello, California, the youngest son of the Mexican immigrant couple Delfino Morales and Juana Contreras. Exposed to early gang experiences, Morales wrote his first fragments of literature during high school. Those stories would later become his first novel, Caras viejas y vino Nuevo. Morales earned his B.A. from California State University, Los Angeles and started working as a teacher at a Claremont high school for some years before he moved to the U.S. East Coast to start a doctoral program in Latin American literature at Rutgers University. In the early 1970s, Morales could not find a publisher who was interested in Caras viejas y vino nuevo; not even the just-founded Chicano publishing house Quinto Sol in Berkeley was interested because the novel drew a negative and violent picture of life in the Mexican American barrio. Literary scholar Francisco Lomelí, who translated Caras viejas y vino Nuevo into English, figured that Morales belonged with Ron Arias or Isabella Ríos to an “isolated generation,” whose authors had a stronger aesthetic than political approach as Chicano literature evolved out of the late 1960s.³ When Morales moved to Mexico City to conduct research at the Centro de Estudos Literarios at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he met agents of La Editorial Joaquín Moritz, one of the most important Mexican publishing houses, who distributed also the work of Octavio Paz, José Agustín, Elena Garro, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Vicente Leñero, and Rosario Castellanos. After his return to the United States, Morales started working as a professor of Spanish literature and Chicano culture at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), a position he holds to this day. Although he has various duties at UCI and a very engaging and caring teaching style, Morales always finds the time to work on his novels, which has drawn worldwide attention from scholars. With La verdad sin voz (1979), Reto en el paraíso (1983), The Brick People (1988), The Rag Doll Plagues (1992), Waiting to Happen (2001), The Captain of  “In the novel, the authors cultivate a distinctive narrative voice while opting for more literary and less explicit social concerns. Alejandro Morales in Caras viejas y vino nuevo […] shatters decorum in terms of language and imagery while offering a devastating depiction of a hard-core barrio. It is quite obvious why Quinto Sol did not accept the manuscript for the infernal ambience and brutal characters lack any semblance of idealism. This x-ray view of both environment and persons probes into effects more than causes, but the amplifications of the latter certainly confirm the origins of violence internalized through the process of victimization. The work, then, in its totality embodies a profound look into how a people are reduced to an infra-human level.” Francisco Lomelí, “Contemporary Chicano Literature, 1959 – 1990,” in Handbook of Hispanic Culture in the United States: Literature and Art, ed. Francisco Lomelí (Houston: Arte Público P, 1993): 98.

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All These Men of Death (2008), River of Angels (2014), and Little Nation (2014), Morales wrote various novels in Spanish or English, unique in their style and elaboration. In 2013, Stanford University acquired Morales’s papers to create an Alejandro Morales archive. Morales currently is working on a novel, Rainbow of Colors, which does not focus on the Mexican American experience. Instead, Rainbow of Colors is based upon the letters of Morales’s father-in-law, who lived and worked in Japan for the quarter-century leading up to the Second World War, and his friendship with a French artist, Paul Jacoulet, who became a master of Japanese woodblock prints.

Interview D.S.: How would you explain the following terms of self-identification and which one do you prefer: Latino, Chicano, Hispanic, Mexican-American? A.M.: The Latino population of the United States is heterogeneous; there isn’t any one term that can explain its racial and ethnic diversity. There is no one definition or explanation of these terms. Everybody has a version of what they mean. I am not partial to any one of the terms that attempt to define people and culture. I am not into defining culture, because culture is constantly changing. It is like language, constantly changing. I am all of these terms. But there are people, like some politicians, who see me and think wetback, beaner, illegal alien rapist and other pejorative terms. I am also all of that too, at least in the eyes of folks who hold negative attitudes toward Mexicans, Central Americans, and other Latino groups. Today it seems that a lot of writers do not want to be called Chicano. Well, I started as a Chicano writer and that is what I am. But I am also an American writer. I definitely do not like the terms or labels that place me in a niche, that categorize me. In terms of my writing, it has been identified as Chicano, historical, historiographic metafiction, intra historical, speculative, magical realism, fantastic, science fiction, ethnic, dystopian, biographical – and you can add many more terms and labels to the list. I am guilty. I do not like to be called a historical writer because I write about every-day Mexicanos and Anglo-Americans and about other racial and ethnic groups living and struggling to make a life. So I do not like literary labels, nor the ethnic labels to identify me, whether it be negative, derogatory or positive terms. I feel writers should write about whatever interests them, and they should not feel bound by labels, agents or publishing houses or readers. Authors should be free to write about whatever they want to explore. My writing transcends the

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limitations of literary terms and ethnic identity labels and goes beyond my personal experience to address existential questions. I hope that my works have something to say to readers worldwide. D.S.: Does it matter if you speak Spanish or English, since Spanish was also an earlier enforced language of the colonial system? A.M.: Spanish is definitely very important and part of our identity, although it was imposed as the colonial language. It is still part of who we are. It is part of us. Spanish is spoken everywhere in the United States today. It is a major language. Consider L.A. [Los Angeles]. Some of the biggest TV stations broadcast in Spanish. You go and dial through your radio and you run into a variety of Spanish radio stations. Big companies, big industries. What is happening? I am referring here to studies done by sociologists, experts who studied the process of migration. The first generation coming in, they speak Spanish. You always speak the language of your origin. You come from Germany and you speak German; your father and mother speak German. The second generation – because of their education in English – will slowly begin to lose their first language. In reference to Spanish speakers, you see that process of slowly being deterritorialized from using one’s first language. By the third generation – according to these studies – most of the Spanishspeakers are losing the language. By the fourth, they’ve lost that language and are predominantly English-speaking. That is what is happening here. But since we have large groups of recent immigrants, you still have Spanish being spoken and being preserved. I am hoping myself that we would become a bilingual nation just like some European countries. In Switzerland, for example, two or three languages are spoken there. But we are not that way. Americans in general think we have to be monolingual. Being bi- or multilingual is a great advantage. As far as literature is concerned, I started writing in Spanish. Then I started to write more in English because I wanted to reach a much larger public. But some people question that and ask me why I stopped writing in Spanish, although I have not. I have a collection of short stories in Spanish, Pequeña Nación, which was translated into English, Little Nation. However, most of my books, after my third book, were in English. You can see the transition from Spanish to English in a book called Reto en el paraíso, which is a completely bilingual book, and by bilingual I mean that the main narration is in Spanish. The characters who speak English, speak English; the characters who speak Spanish, speak Spanish. I do not change that. Most people have a tendency to speak Spanish and then English or vice versa. I think this novel is one of the best

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I’ve written. The novel reflects the linguistic reality that exists in Southern California. I hope more scholars study and write about this book. D.S.: Most of your books focus on an intra-historic approach dealing with regional, economic and political development connected to the life of the people. What is it that attracts you to this kind of narration and storytelling? What do you say if you are called a chronicler of the ordinary people? A.M.: The idea comes from a Spanish philosopher by the name of Miguel de Unamuno, who talks about la intra-historia, and what he means by that is not the history of the powerful kings and generals, popes and presidents, or wealthy entrepreneurs. He was interested in the history of the ordinary person in Spain who anonymously supported and bolstered these men in their national and international endeavors. Although I have wealthy characters in my books, even the wealthy people in my novel River of Angels have lived a real intra-history life. In that book the Rivers family is from poor origins, but the Keller family is from the very rich Philadelphia 500, very wealthy people who always had financial backing. The book offers an intra-historical view of what was going on in L.A. during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This is what really fascinates me: the untold story, the untold story of individuals you know. The work, the sacrifice and everyday life issues of unrecognized ordinary people are the essence of the collective community. This is Unamuno’s idea of intra-history. I understand intra-history as a metaphor for the unrecorded hidden history of the generations that came before us. This is not to say that I don’t focus on the life of successful wealthy powerful individuals. Yet these characters’ story is always related to the lives of the workers who were the foundation of their success. This is what I am digging for, a jewel: an individual, a family to reveal their story to the world. I write and research at the Huntington Library, looking through family documents and personal papers of wealthy Los Angeles families. I hope to find hidden stories of the workers, ordinary people who maintained the family estate or labored in the family business. I want to find that Mexican doctor, Mexican accountant, that uncommon Mexican professional and create an intra-historical perspective of their life, dedication, contribution in comparison to the wealthy Euro-Anglo bosses. D.S.: Your detailed descriptions of human decay, illness, pain and death, which can be found in most of your books, appear to me in opposition to the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” antiseptic approach of trying to ignore the facts of Vanitas within our own life period. Your descriptions furthermore remind me of the slaughtered lamb at the cross, Jesus. But as in the salvific history there is also

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always hope in your story. Can you explain your associations towards your fascination of the body? A.M.: [laughs] Tough questions you ask me! I do not really have an answer. I just write, and I create monstrous characters and horrific scenes. I can talk about the inspiration for a few. For example, The Rag Doll Plagues was inspired by a lecture given by Professor John J. Tepaske, a historian, about the medical and health conditions in Mexico City in the eighteenth century. It was most likely the year 1779, as rumors of revolution were circulating, and in the Caribbean black slaves were overrunning their plantation owners. There were reports of slaughter and rapes of whites and this affected the Crown to such a point that the king feared losing control over the colonies. Mexico City was in a terrible state and the residents there were suffering such a lethal plague that the king sent a doctor named Gregorio Revueltas to stop the plague and improve conditions in the heart of the New World colony. Professor Tepaske described the actual conditions of Mexico City and talked about El Protomedicato, the Spanish institution that Dr. Revueltas represented, that controlled all medical practices, medical training, and pharmaceutical care, everything that had to do with medicine and illness and treatment. With vivid detail he related surgical scenes from what the chroniclers had written about efforts to stop the disease from consuming the body. These scenes and treatments struck me in such a powerful way. After Tepaske’s lecture I could not escape the images. At that time I was writing Book II of The Brick People. I could not let go of the images. I sat down to continue the second part of The Brick People, but instead of (doing) that I began to write The Rag Doll Plagues. My character, who is also Revueltas in The Brick People, finds himself in 1779 Mexico City. My character wanted to go back to the times and to the places that Tepaske had spoken of. This is how the story started. I wrote the first part of the book, wrote it fast – it just came rapidly to my mind. D.S.: Bosch? A.M.: Yes, Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings are inspirational. I also have a book or two which describe with photographs how the women were killed in Juarez and even before then. My wife and I spent about a year in Mexico City and I read the newspapers and magazines that reported terrifying killings and the birth of monsters in Juarez and, for example, a niño monstro in Vera Cruz, and they had these violent horribly terrifying photographs. I mean the brutality just struck me. When I was a kid, I witnessed pretty ugly violence inflicted on the body, men dying of alcohol or drugs. One time I was playing in a parking lot and we saw a car, and this man was sitting in the car. He was not moving at all so we were afraid to

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open the door. But we did, and the stench was horrible, and I knew he was dead. The guy was dead. Another time an alcoholic man, I remember his name, Atilano. He came back from the hospital, but his liver was already gone, so he was bleeding from the lower colon. I remember walking down by where these men hung out, and he was still drinking. When I was walking by I saw him standing up screaming and all his backside was a drench of blood. He died. Another time, I was in the seventh grade or so, I walked into the barrio store and found the store owner on the floor, his face and arms blue. So, I mean, images like that, I saw these things myself. There were others dealing with overdoses of drugs, vicious fights and stabbings. D.S.: So your writing is like a therapy to get rid of the pictures? A.M.: If you are saying that creative activity is a kind of mental illness, then I don’t want to be cured. I just want to continue to write. It’s no therapeutic cure for me because I keep creating them. D.S.: Were you in one of the U.S. wars, since you were born in the early 1940s? A.M.: I did everything legally possible to stay out of Vietnam. A lot of my buddies went to Vietnam, but you know a lot of this stuff is based on images in paintings, in photographs or in distant memories that struck me. You know the book Waiting to Happen? Book I of the Heterotopian Trilogy is about a monster; it is about the terrible, horrible things that occurred in Mexico during the Salinas regime. President Salinas. This is the beginning of all the violence. This is the beginning of the drug violence, the beginning of the horrible violence in Mexico. Book II takes places in Orange County, California. The main character is a highly magical woman, well educated. Throughout the book a series of atrocities and odd things occur. The second book takes place in Orange County because she is forced to leave Mexico. She is in danger because she is an ilusa, and I explain the concept of ilusa in one of the chapters. But this woman comes to Orange County and gets established here. She has friends here whom she met at Princeton and Harvard. She was born into a wealthy Mexican family that sent their children to the best U.S. schools. Anyway, in the second book, in Orange County, she sees terrible things here, too. Book III of the trilogy is set in the future and is based on different demographics, information and my imagination foreseeing how Mexico and the United States borderlands will look in almost 100 years. You see these images start with my first book, Barrio on the Edge, with images of violence, of rape. This book which I wrote in high school also contains a lot of violent and brutal scenes. Violence and sexuality. Barrio on the Edge. Vi-

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olence. Sexuality. I saw all of these things when I was a kid. In my first novel there is a woman, who is also an alcoholic, abused by drunken men who do outrageous things to her. She never left them: after she was taken away by her family, she came back to that same corner, to those men who gave her wine. When I would see her, she smiled, she seemed happy. This is something I grew up with. D.S.: Are you a religious or a spiritual person? Have you ever experienced magicalike moments and events like those that occur in your book River of Angels after the disappearance of Toypurina? Are these only elements of a Mexican-style magical realism, which play around with stereotypical literary motifs and sujets, or do they originate from a deeper spiritual personal world view? A.M.: Well, I believe and think that spirituality is very important to the Latino community. I think it’s important to all communities, but it seems to be expressed more so in the Latino community, where they believe in miracles and pray to saints and go to church. There are two kinds of spiritualties. There is a religious spirituality and there is a secular spirituality, and I think both do appear in my work. The religious spirituality is about tradition and rituals and based on a holy book. The secular spirituality is really about how you react to certain situations, okay? How do you react to a person who is homeless, who is asking for money, for example? If you give him money because you feel something for this guy or woman, then this is your secular spirituality. It’s about kindness to other people and animals and the earth. And secular spirituality is in all matters of daily life, how you approach and react to certain situations, events, or people. I visit different churches, go to synagogues and mosques to experience how people worship. I believe in miracles, angels, spirits, devil, and unknown energy, supernatural powers, things like curanderismo. I was cured by a curandera, doña Marcelina, when I was a kid. My dad was cured by the same curandera. These things are not odd to me, since I lived them. Spirits and ghosts – I believe in those things. I believe for example, there is a term, ah, there is memory, human memory that doesn’t depend on human consciousness. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, magnificent book, explains the term re-memory. A re-memory does not depend on human consciousness. A re-memory is the energy of what is left behind from a dramatic powerful event. It is the energy of the event that remains in the place where it occurred. And it has the power to affect us, the power to affect human life beyond the particular energy. It constantly creates its own energy and people can sense that, hear it, maybe see it without knowing what it is. So this is what a re-memory is. It exists independently from human consciousness.

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D.S.: What are your literary influences? A.M.: My influence … I was trained mainly in the modern Latin American narrative. I studied twentieth-century Mexican writers and Latin American writers. I read novels, writers from the Latin American Boom, the new novel and modernist vanguard, like Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa. I also read Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Jorge Luis Borges. When I was an undergraduate at Cal State L.A. I read Hemingway, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe. There were all these impossible crazy experimentations that avant-garde artists and musicians and writers did, people like Picasso, and writers like Pablo Neruda and today people like Elena Poniatowska and Carmen Boullosa. All of these writers had a deep impact on my work, maybe because of the way they wrote. They combined all sorts of ideas, like the idea of totality. Carlos Fuentes wrote a novel called The Death of Artemio Cruz. It’s written in three voices: yo, tú, él. But the three voices are the same person. Yo is the first person, the very intimate present, tú is the personal historical past and él is the historical context of his life. It’s all combined. Also, writers like Borges and Cortázar experimented with time and space. Those are just a few to name … And of course twentieth-century American writers I studied as an undergraduate. But I must say that my literary heritage and what I am and my position being a Chicano … the American writers, Native American, South American and European writers have in one way or the other affected my work. Mexico is a country that treasures and has fallen in love with its magical women. My writing has been inspired by the magic and power of the following women: Coatlicue, Coyolxauhqui, La Llorona, Malinali Tenepal-Doña Marina-La Malinche, La Virgen de Guadalupe, Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, Las Ilusas, Doña Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez or La Corregidora, La Soldadera, Jesusa Palancares, Juana Contreras Morales, María Sabinas, Frida Kahlo, Helena Poniatowska, Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera-Garza. D.S.: Looking back on the Chicano Movimiento. How do you rate their impact on Mexican-American cultural and political participation in comparison to the union work César Chávez stands for? How did you think about concepts of Aztlán or the ideology of mestizo as José Vasconcelos was supporting? A.M.: All of that was happening in the three years of 1968 to 1970. The Chicano moratorium was in 1971. Rohde and I were back East… Rohde was pregnant. We have two children: one is Gregory and the other one is Alessandra. We were at

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Rutgers University in New Jersey. I was really not participating in the movimiento. But we did participate in César Chávez’s [United Farm Workers] boycott. We came back later to California, and I started working at UCI in 1974. I did not participate directly in the Chicano movement. I was more involved in what was happening on campus, because back east it was not Chicanos but Puerto Ricans and Dominicans over-taking the street. The Young Lords in New York City, the Puerto Rican groups, the Black Panthers were the activists who took over Columbia University and demanded what we Chicanos were demanding on the West Coast. You see, all these groups from the Civil Rights Movement followed examples, either non-violence from Martin Luther King or more violence from Malcolm X. So, a lot of these groups, like The Young Lords and the Black Panther Party, were more confrontational. We heard of César Chávez, sure, and when we came back to California in 1974, we supported César Chávez and the boycott. And we would not buy grapes that didn’t have the black eagle, the symbol which represented the union. So we respected that. Let me add one more thought: I followed the Chicano movement philosophically and politically. What they experienced, I experienced; what they felt, I felt; what they wanted, I wanted; what they believed, I believed. I felt Chicano then, and today I feel even more Chicano. D.S.: What do you think about racial categories like Caucasian, Hispanic in documents or surveys like the census? A.M.: Yeah, the census asked for this. D.S.: What is your opinion about it? A.M.: I personally think these questions are asked to keep track of demographics. We live in a panoptic society of constant surveillance by institutions – educational, medical, religious, legal, economic – that monitor and require a certain kind of behavior and that record your life history. It’s part of constant surveillance and monitoring of parts of your life: the financial status, the psychological status of your life. Where do you live? Which school did you go to? What is the highest grade of education you got? Somebody wants to know all about you, and it’s getting worse. D.S.: While we are witnessing the Arabellion and a political Islam that is filling the gap the communist promise of social justice has left, we also can see an upsurge of nationalism within Europe, which blames the refugee and Muslim for its internal problems. At the same time, more and more people in Europe and other

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parts of the world are criticizing the neoliberal economic world order implemented by the United States. Is that a discussion in the United States outside academia and media? A.M.: Yes, I think there is a discussion going on, from family discussions to community discussions. People are concerned. People talk usually about what they see in the media. What is going on in the Middle East? This is one of the big discussions. The fear of attacks here in the U.S. – this is definitely a constant fear since 9/11, the towers being attacked and destroyed. The other side of this would be the economic support, what I mentioned the other day. How are we involved in these particular countries? Some people question why we have to be there; they question why we are still in Iraq, although we supposedly are out of there already, and the billions and billions it is costing us to be in these countries? George Bush – as I understand it – had a domestic budget, but the war budget that he separated from the national budget cost us billions to finance the Iraq War. That unnecessary war added to the national debt. People are concerned about how we spend money in the U.S. In addition to the national debt, they are concerned about jobs being offshored to Asia, Europe, Latin America. Political parties have lost the ability and desire to compromise on health care, military spending, education, immigration, trade. The parties are so restrictive, set against each other that nothing gets done. Political parties have stifled the freedom to compromise in America’s political arena. This judgment is reflected in the American people who have reached a saturation point with their elected congressional representatives’ failure to pass bills for the greater good of the country. Constituents are suffering a malaise of political helplessness that has boiled over into anger, hatred, and ugly rhetoric that has revealed long-standing repressed systemic nativist attitudes of intolerance and racism toward ethnic, racial, and religious populations. D.S.: Last question: How will the United States look 50 years from now? What do you wish for? A.M.: The last part of The Rag Doll Plagues offers a version of the future. I will give you a brief overview. What will happen is that the borders will disappear. No longer will there be borders between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. We will have major roads going north and south connecting Canada to Mexico. In The Rag Doll Plagues one of these travel ways is the LAMEX Corridor connecting Mexico City to L.A. We already have a borderless economy. We have billions and billions of dollars crossing every day into the U.S., Canada and Mexico. What is

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today known as the borderlands will become the central financial and transportation hub of the Triple Alliance between Canada, the United States and Mexico/ Central America. This will have a lot of economic impact. The standard of living in Mexico will rise. The same will happen in the center of the U.S. borderlands. Mexico City will no longer be the economic hope of poor Mexicans or Central Americans; it will become a transition point to the cities further north in the borderlands. Look at the statistics of the population of the U.S.A.: 55 million Latinos. It will grow in 2050 to 75 million Latinos, some say even more, to 90 million by 2075. What is going to happen is that you’ll have over 90 million Latinos living in the U.S., a lot of them right here near the border. In close proximity to the Mexico-U.S. border, cities like Monterey, Chihuahua, Hermosillo, Ensenada will become bigger and bigger. These cities will attract migrants from the south and the north, eventually developing into cosmopolitan centers. Water will be a key factor. There will be desalination plants along the coast. We already have them, but we don’t use them. In Mexico there was a lot of protest, especially in the Gulf of Cortez, since they pumped the salt back into the ocean and this was affecting the whales, so the plants were shut down. Now they reactivated some of these plants in Baja California. This water will go into the desert, to the cities in Northern Mexico that I mentioned. And what did we do in Las Vegas, creating this big city in the middle of the desert? We brought water from the North for L.A. and connected the Colorado River. Water will be the big issue of the twenty-first century. But once you have water in this area you are going to develop its agriculture and business and housing. They say 45 million to 50 million Latinos, mainly Mexican, will be living on the Mexican side of the borderlands. You will have possibly 150 million Latinos living north and south within this borderland area. The borders will go away because of environmental, energy, security, and economic reasons. The armies of the U.S., I believe, will no longer be composed of U.S. soldiers. The majority of the armed forces of the Triple Alliance will be recruited from Mexico and from Central America, and possibly from South America. The military will constitute legions, divisions of Mexican, Central and South American recruits and volunteers. This speculation of the future in is in The Rag Doll Plagues. We are going to have issues with computers. Computers are memory banks that will accumulate information on individuals. Computers will have millions and millions and millions of details of who you are, what you are, what your body is, what your DNA is, data on your health, how you think, everything! Eventually, computers will not be able to store and securely handle big data clusters that will eventually energize, mutate, break free in search of larger, more powerful computer systems.

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In The Rag Doll Plagues these computer ghosts – a new form of being – are able to travel through time and space and have an impact on the lives of human beings. Thank you for the interview and for considering my work.

Patricia M. García

The “I” Before the Border: An Interview with Reyna Grande Reyna Grande (b. 1975) is a novelist, memoirist, and activist whose writings about coming-of-age experiences, familial conflict and bonds, and female friendships are all positioned against the backdrop of immigration and border narratives. Ms. Grande was born in Iguala, Guerrero, in Mexico. As a young child, her father and later her mother left to seek work in the United States, leaving Grande and her siblings to suffer neglect and abuse while in the care of other family members. Growing up in these impoverished conditions, Grande longed for the return of her parents. Once in the United States, her parents’ marriage breaks up, and Grande’s mother returns home. Life in the United States, however, had made her distant from her children, and the reunion is not all that Grande had hoped for. In 1985, Grande’s father returns to Mexico and decides to bring Grande, now almost ten years old, and her siblings back to the United States with him. Entering the United States on foot as an undocumented immigrant, Grande found life in California challenging, as she and her family struggled with economic uncertainties, family violence, and the underlying fear of arrest and deportation. School, especially reading and music, became a refuge for Grande. In 1986, she and her siblings became legal residents under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, enacted under U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and Grande became a U.S. citizen in 2002. She became the first person in her family to graduate from college with a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999, and eventually M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University in 2008. Grande’s novels reflect many of her experiences by presenting lives lived on both sides of the border. In her first published novel Across a Hundred Mountains ¹, the two central female narrators alternatively weave their tale of migration, family loss, poverty, and friendship that merge together with the death of one narrator and the assumption of her identity – as a legal citizen – by the other. In her second novel Dancing with Butterflies ², the women characters struggle with their multiple identities as Latinas – as mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends – and in their struggle to embrace their own agency. Ultimately, Grande’s characters come to understand their difficult pasts as part of their identity as Lat Reyna Grande, Across a Hundred Mountains (New York: Washington Square P, 2006).  Reyna Grande, Dancing with Butterflies (New York: Washington Square P, 2009). https://doi.org/9783110532913-011

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inas. Grande’s memoir The Distance Between Us, just recently re-published in a revised Young Readers edition,³ has received the most critical attention for its honest portrayal of the effects of immigration on families, especially in the current U.S. political climate. A popular figure on the speaking circuit in schools and universities, Grande is keenly aware of the ways in which social media, including her website, blog, and Facebook profile, helps writers promote their work by connecting to their readers. Grande uses such tools to further the themes of her works, moving from artistic expression to social activism. In 2015, she walked the migrant trail along the Arizona border with the Borderlinks program,⁴ leaving water bottles at stations set up for migrants making the difficult journey with few supplies. She did this to mark her own journey three decades earlier, and posted photographs of this visit on her Facebook page. These were shared and viewed over eight million times. The previous year, her hometown of Iguala was the site of the mass kidnapping of 43 student protestors. They have never been found, and the incident highlights the political corruption and organized cartel violence in Mexico. Grande has been passionate about speaking about the students and the deteriorating conditions in her hometown. For the last two years, she has organized Christmas toy drives for the children of Iguala. Her desire to help these children speaks to the ways in which larger political and economic crisis affect the most innocent in society. In our interview, conducted over a few months via email, Grande stressed her sense of a split identity, not only across physical borders, but also in her roles as mother, daughter, writer, and activist. When she returns to Mexico, she speaks about how even though Iguala is her hometown, she feels the disconnection as both an American and as a writer, especially because her family there sees her as “Reyna the niece.” She also feels the strains between her writing life and her family life, especially as she strives to be more present in her children’s lives in a manner her own mother was not. The fractured mother-daughter bond and feelings of abandonment are an important theme in The Distance Between Us, as Grande sought out maternal figures in her grandmother, her older sister, her step-mother, and eventually her teacher. In Dancing with Butterflies, two of the main characters are sisters whose mother has died. Adriana, the younger

 Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us (New York: Washing Square P, 2012); The Distance Between Us: Young Readers Edition (New York: Aladdin, 2016).  Borderlinks’s website describes their program as follows: “BorderLinks coordinates educational delegations and leads workshops in the U.S-Mexico borderlands and in southern Mexico, giving groups a variety of experiences to deepen their understanding of borders, immigration, and social justice.” [accessed February 9, 2017].

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of the two, recalls how her older sister Elena “tried to fill the gap our mother left in my life,”⁵ much as Mago, Grande’s older sister, became the “little mother” who comforts and protects Reyna. Both Elena and Mago eventually leave their younger sisters to pursue their own goals, forcing them to deal with a second abandonment. The novel ends with the sisters and their friend Ysenia, the director of the folklorico⁶ dance company that bonds the women, working together to help smuggle their friend Soledad back across the border and reunite this surrogate family. In the memoir, Grande’s friendship with her teacher Diana Savas helps her focus on her education and, eventually, her writing career. Grande states that her new memoir will focus more on this aspect of her life as a first-generation college student and emerging Latina writer. She recently completed this first draft of this project, announcing it in the most modern of ways: an image of stacked pages of the printed draft posted on her Facebook profile.

Interview P.G.: Thank you for agreeing to this interview.⁷ In each of your three books, your publisher has included a reader’s guide along with an interview. You also provide links to an interview and to your blog pieces on your website, www.reynagrande.com. What do you see as the importance of providing such insights into your life and writing processes to audiences interested in your work? R.G.: I really appreciate when readers take the time to pick up and read my books. Time is valuable, and the fact that they decide to spend their time reading my stories fills me with gratitude and humility. To show my appreciation, I try to do my best to make myself available to my readers in as many ways as possible. They can email me, follow me on social media, read my interviews or blogs, visit my website, or come see me at one of my readings (I am on a permanent book tour it seems!). As a writer, it is important to me to maintain a connection with my readers long after they finish reading my books because I write to empower

 Grande, Dancing with Butterflies, 93.  Folklorico dances are the traditional dances from Mexico, performed in traditional costumes and accompanied by mariachi music. The dances, costumes, and music vary from region to region in Mexico, and Grande explores these various forms in the many performances of the dance company in the novel.  This interview took place via email exchanges over the course of 2016. Grande’s initial responses were sent on July 9, 2016, and responses to follow up questions were sent on November 3, 2016.

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others, to make them feel less alone, to tell them that their stories matter. To continue to inspire them I must find ways to stay connected to my readers beyond the books I write. P.G.: You have just returned from presenting at two international conferences in Europe, el Congreso Internacional Sobre Literatura Chicana y Estudios Latinos, held in Madrid, Spain, in May 2016, and the Central European University School of Public Policy Annual Conference “The View from Here [:] Artists // Public Policy” held in Budapest, Hungary, June 2016. At these meetings, what message did you present about Latino/a literature, especially its relevance to a more global audience? In what ways do you see this engagement of public policy as an extension of your creative works? And, now that you have returned to the United States, how do you think such global perspectives will inform your writing? R.G.: When I spoke in Madrid at the Congreso, one of the points I addressed in my talk was that there must be room for immigrants in our hearts, in our countries, and in our literature. We are living at a time of the highest-ever international migration. There are more displaced people in the world today than ever before. I felt it was important for me to talk about the immigrant experience while I was in Spain because there (in Europe) they are dealing with a migrant crisis and I wanted to make sure I used my time on stage to speak on behalf of immigrants. I spoke of displacement, of the search for home and identity, of what is lost and gained when one migrates. For me, not knowing where I belong has been a struggle ever since I set foot in the U.S.; I’m too Mexican in the U.S. and too American in Mexico. During my talk I spoke about how reading Chicano/Latino books helped me find my place in the world, how those books saved me. In a conference about literature, I thought it was important to talk about how books change lives! One of the most interesting experiences I had while in Spain was that over there whenever I opened my mouth to speak in Spanish they would say, “Mexicana?” When I go to Mexico and I speak Spanish they say, “Americana?” I had to go to Spain to be treated like a real Mexican! To me, this has been a very difficult part about being an immigrant – to always wonder what I am (Mexican? American? Both? Neither?). It was nice to be in Spain and for the first time not have to wonder. In Budapest, I had an interesting experience. I was in two panels with Mexican writers where we spoke about the situation in Mexico. I kind of felt like an imposter because after 30 plus years of living in the U.S., I guess I am not exactly a “Mexican” writer. It really made me see how living in the U.S. has shaped how I see the world and how I see the place of my birth. I have no qualms about criti-

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cizing Mexico and the Mexican government for its corruption, impunity, and violation of human rights. I also did not hesitate to criticize the U.S. government’s role in the violence and poverty that is raging across my native country. In Budapest, we focused our panel discussion on an artist’s responsibility to society, to his/her country. It was an interesting approach to discuss public policy through an artist’s eye. I spoke about the violence that has plagued my hometown of Iguala, Guerrero, focusing on the 43 students who disappeared there in 2014 and the impact that tragedy has had on my hometown and in the country as a whole. For me, I take it as my personal responsibility to speak about how the war on drugs has affected my hometown, the negative changes that have taken place – the violence, the poppy fields, the 43 disappeared students and the thousands of other disappeared, and the 100-plus mass graves that have been found around my city. I feel that the media has not paid enough attention to what has been happening in Mexico, so when I’m in front of a microphone, I speak about the situation. Being invited to Budapest was very inspiring to me because I was able to see that there is a genuine interest in the tragedies taking place in Mexico and that yes, even a country as far away as Hungary cares about the plight of my people! That was, above all, very heartwarming. P.G.: You traveled to Mexico on two different occasions in the last year, once on what has become your annual trip to deliver Christmas presents to the children in Iguala, and later on to participate in the “Under the Volcano” Writers Conference in Tepoztlán, Morelos. How does each return to Mexico inform your sense of identity both as an individual and as a writer? R.G.: When I return to my hometown it is very bittersweet. I love visiting my family and reconnecting to my place of birth. But when I go there I don’t go as Reyna the writer. I go as Reyna the niece, Reyna the cousin. I have to leave behind (in the U.S.) a big part of myself because there is no place for Reyna the writer in Iguala. My family there is very poor and they have a very limited education. They don’t know much about books and literature. Most of them have never been to the U.S.. In other words, they don’t know much about the world I live in, so when I go, I try to be as humble and generous as possible because that’s the part of me my family will understand, since humility and generosity is what they know. When I go to Iguala, it is like going to a war zone. The poverty there is heartbreaking. It is everywhere. It is personal, because it is my family that lives in it. The cardboard shacks, the dirt roads, the lack of running water and electricity. The trash. When I return to the U.S., it takes me weeks to recover from what I witness in Iguala. I feel an overwhelming sadness and helpless and anger. I feel outraged that the policies of both governments – U.S. and Mexico –

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have forced my people to live in a place where there is a scarcity of jobs and educational opportunities but an abundance of misery and despair. P.G.: You divide your memoir The Distance between Us into two sections, one set in Mexico following your parents’ immigration to the United States and the second set in the United States, exploring your own immigration experience as a child through young adulthood. Likewise, many moments in the text evoke memory through setting such as a return to your childhood home where your ombligo (belly button) is buried as a connection to your mother or the safety you find in your college professor’s home after dealing with your father’s abuse. What relationship do you see between place and memory in your works, especially since they are set on or focus upon the crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border? R.G.: I think place defines who we are. The place where we are born, where we grow up, where we live, where we die. Place shapes us into the people we grow up to be. It is the setting of our story as human beings. So in writing my books, place is one of the most important aspects. I cannot write about a particular incident in my life (or my characters’) without writing about where and when it happened. “Home” is very important to me because I think my whole life I’ve tried to find a home. In Mexico, the closest I came to having a home was when I lived with my maternal grandmother because it was her unwavering love and generosity that made me feel protected and cared for. It wasn’t a perfect home because there were times when we had no food to eat or shoes to wear. Also, my mother was not there, nor was my father. But when I think of my grandmother’s house, I think of it as home in that for brief moments – when the pain of my parents’ absence was bearable – I was happy there. Same thing with my teacher’s house. Though I lived with her for only a few months, her house, unlike my father’s house, felt like home to me because I felt safe and protected and of course, loved. The U.S. border is an important place for me – and that is why I write about it so much in my books – because it is one of the places that has really defined who I am. To me, my life has always been a before-and-after – my life before I crossed the border, my life after I crossed it. I still think about those three attempts at crossing the border. Sometimes, when I hear a helicopter flying above, I am taken back to that moment and the fear I felt as a child – to be caught by border patrol, to lose my chance at having a family – still paralyzes me. P.G.: The memoir is dedicated to the memory of your father and to all DREAMers, the undocumented young men and women in the United States who immigrated

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as children with their parents. In what way do parent and children relationships form much of the central conflicts in your works, and how do such conflicts become further strained when placed within the backdrop of the political and economic realities facing immigrant families? R.G.: Yes, I dedicated the book to my father because he is the parent that had the deepest impact on who I am today – in good ways and bad ways! But mostly good! My father made me a dreamer. He made me a hard-worker. He made me aspire to be self-sufficient, strong, a fighter, and above all, relentless. I owe my perseverance to my father. To the DREAMers I dedicated my book because one of the reasons I wrote The Distance Between Us was to show what it is like to be a child immigrant and to try to inspire more compassion and understanding in people who might not know much about the complexities and difficulties of being a child immigrant. I also wanted to show how the fact that I was given the chance to legalize my status when I was fifteen years old had such a positive impact on my life, allowing me to reach my full potential and put myself in a place where I can now use my skills and talents and passions to give back to this country (the U.S.). This is what I think will happen when we give DREAMers that chance. I always write about parent-child relationships because my relationship with my parents was so complicated I guess I am still trying to understand it. I write about parents who leave their children – emotionally or physically – because that is what happened to me. Of course, I frame my parents’ abandonment within the immigrant experience because part of that experience is family separation, and in some cases, disintegration. With immigration, there is always someone who leaves and someone who is left behind. There is no way to get around that. P.G.: You begin your memoir by re-imagining the folklore figure of La Llorona, the weeping woman who roams the canals and takes children away, as the United States who, as in your case, draws parents away from their children left behind in Mexico. As I mentioned in my last question, the memoir is dedicated to your father. Yet throughout the memoir, the difficult relationship with your mother leads you to search for maternal figures in various women including your aunt, maternal grandmother, older sister, stepmother, and your college professor. What did you learn from these relationships to help you grow as a woman and now as a mother? How important is motherhood as a theme in your works? R.G.: Even at forty years of age I am still searching for mothers! Many of my friends are much older than me, and I know that part of it is because I look for mother-figures, for women who will fill the gap that my own mother cannot

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or will not fill. When my mother left when I was four, I turned to my older sister to fill the void my mother left behind. My older sister had to put her own childhood aside to become my little mother. Her sacrifice helped me to survive some of the worst years of my life. My sister taught me to believe in love. I think without that I would have become quite cynical about love otherwise. Through the years, my needs as a daughter have not been met by my mother. I think the separation we experienced in Mexico set the stage for what our relationship would be for the rest of our lives. Then when I came to the U.S., my assimilation became yet another distance between us, and the void just became bigger and bigger. As a college graduate and writer, I am not able to share my experiences with my mother. She has a sixth grade education and doesn’t know much about books, about college, about what being a writer is. I cannot share that with her, and the few times I’ve tried, they’ve been a disaster. When I have news to share about my career successes I don’t call my mother. I call my college teacher and my friends. When I became a mother, I thought motherhood might be a way to connect with her, but again, she has been very aloof with my children (and my siblings’ children) so when I need advice, I don’t call her. I call my friends or my siblings. I have always been secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) jealous of friends who have great relationships with their mothers (or their fathers, too!). When they say things like “my mother is my best friend,” I feel a pang in my heart because I will never know what that feels like. My relationship with my children is a bit complicated because of my relationship with my mother. It is always bittersweet. I cannot snuggle my daughter in bed without thinking that when I was her age I had no mother to snuggle me. I cannot go to my children’s school events without thinking that I never had a mother to go to mine. Then there is guilt. A lot of guilt. As a writer, as a wife, as a mother, as a public speaker, I am always struggling to find the time to work on my books. Sometimes, I feel so frustrated that I don’t have time, I try to claim it by leaving the kids with my husband at home and going to a coffee shop to write, but then I feel guilty thinking that I should be with my family. Sometimes, I fantasize about going on writing retreats like other writers do, but I can’t because of my kids, because of my responsibilities at home. I feel guilty – and then I say, “I am just like my mother, thinking of my needs, of my dreams, and not my children.” I struggle to find a balance. How much of myself can I keep for myself? How much of myself can I give to my children? I don’t want to be like my mother, but I also don’t want to give up all my dreams for the sake of my children, like many women have done. I once read Shel Silverstein’s children’s book, The Giving Tree, and it scared me to the core. It was scarier than any Stephen King book I’ve ever read. The

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message in that book about motherhood – that you have to give everything of yourself to your children (your apples, your branches, your trunk) until you are nothing but a stump, really frightened me. I don’t want to be a stump. I don’t want to give up so much of myself that there is very little left. But I also don’t want to be like my mother. P.G.: Your two works of fiction, Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies, utilize multiple narrators to tell the story. In terms of craft, how do you maintain separate voices in the text? Thematically, how does the choice to present multiple viewpoints reflect the border realities of your characters? R.G.: I really enjoy writing in multiple points of view. The way I approach my characters is by writing from one point of view at a time, and really spending a lot of time with each character so that I can learn how they think, feel, speak, and act. This is how I capture their “voice.” Once I have written all the points of view, I start to weave the stories together. To me, multiple points of view reflect the realities of the immigrant experiences, which are unique in their own way. No immigrant story is the same, though of course there is a universal commonality. I also write about identity because, as immigrants, we are always searching for identity and mourning the loss of it. We reinvent ourselves when we arrive here, either willingly or we are forced into it. In my situation, when I arrived in the U.S., I had to lose one of my two last names (in Mexico we use two). So instead of Reyna Grande Rodriguez I became Reyna Grande, which was shocking to me. I also have friends who are undocumented and they use “borrowed” papers to work, which means that at work they have a different name than at home. They become two people with two identities. There is always the “I” before the border. And the “I” after the border. P.G.: In Dancing with Butterflies, you write detailed descriptions of the folklorico dances and the costumes that are a part of the main characters’ lives. You also begin each chapter with a pencil drawing of dancers that you did yourself. Your memoir includes personal photos with various chapters, another example of intertextuality of your works. What do you see as the relationship between the visual and the written word, and how does your work as an artist influence your work as a writer?⁸

 My thanks to Julie Minich for her insights on Grande’s work employing intertextual elements and themes of disability in this and the following question.

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R.G.: Well, let me just say that I don’t consider myself an artist in that way. Yes, I like to draw – and once upon a time I actually dreamed of being a painter – but that dream is no more because, well, I’m not that good at it. So I dedicated myself instead to painting with words, which I had better luck with. Even though I am a failed painter, my artistic sensibilities do serve me well in my writing. They help me paint the picture for the reader. I have been told on numerous occasions by my readers that when they read my books they can see it all in their heads – as if they were watching a movie or looking at a painting! I like visuals. I think we live in a world where readers are used to images since they are bombarded by them on a daily basis. We can see in the popularity of graphic novels how important images are to readers. I chose to include photographs in The Distance Between Us for two reasons: I felt it would help the readers connect with the people I was writing about, but also, the photos helped me to remember more clearly the things I was writing about. As I looked through my photographs, they took me back to my childhood in a way I might not have gone back without the visual triggers. P.G.: Dancing with Butterflies focuses on the lives of dancers, especially the physical and emotional toll dancing takes on each of the characters. Yesenia, the dance group’s founder and teacher, feels the pains of both dancing and aging, but complicates this suffering by deciding to cross the border to undergo cosmetic surgery in Mexico, a decision that ultimately brings about more suffering when the surgery has painful complications. She asks, “What is this worth? To have done this to my body after the years of joy it gave me.” Elena, one of the group’s star dancers, feels the emotional and physical pain of miscarriage. Her sister Adriana sees herself as unattractive and overweight. Soledad, the group’s costume designer, has a large facial birthmark that marks her as different, and, in her view, ugly and even cursed. How are these physical experiences important to the characters’ development? Do you see disability or ability as important to the characters’ sense of identity as women, dancers, and Latinas? R.G.: What I was trying to explore in Dancing with Butterflies was women’s relationships with their bodies. I think that is a huge issue for us women. At least within my own family and community, I see body image being a big deal, for some more than others, of course. There is a lot of plastic surgery going on, there is a lot of angst over being overweight or not pretty enough or not lightskinned enough, etc. I, myself, sometimes look in the mirror and I struggle with what I see! I’ve never felt pretty. I’ve never been happy with my body. And now that I hit 40, it’s gotten worse. I have always felt too short, too chubby, my nose too big, my eyes too slanted, my forehead too small, etc, etc. I admit I

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have let society’s standard of beauty affect me. My stepsister had the tip of her finger accidentally cut off when she was born, and for the rest of her life she has kept her hand in a fist so that no one can see that finger. It is a half inch of missing flesh, and yet it has affected her tremendously. My sister Mago, when she was a little girl, was injured while playing hide-and-seek and now she has scars on her face, and though they are small scars, they have affected the way she sees herself in numerous ways. So because I see how body issues impact women I know, that is why I brought these to the characters in Dancing with Butterflies. I wanted to create characters who battle with these real struggles, and ultimately, find the courage and strength to overcome them. I hope to give my female readers the inspiration to overcome their own. P.G.: You comment in an interview about Dancing with Butterflies that your brother questioned why you write books with Latina/o characters and themes instead of more universal figures, and your father asked why you didn’t move on from the past and write about something else. As one of your readers, I am glad that you keep revisiting these stories and issues. In light of the current immigration crisis in the United States and Europe and the corresponding hostile attitudes and rhetoric toward immigrant communities, what do you hope your life story and your creative works can add to these conversations? R.G.: Above all, I want to inspire compassion and understanding towards immigrants. I want to remind people that immigrants are human beings and we deserve to be treated with dignity. Through my work, I try to balance out what people might hear from politicians and the media. I feel that many times people are anti-immigrant because of ignorance, because they honestly don’t know, because they haven’t been exposed to the issue from a perspective that highlights the human cost and heartbreak. I want to remind people in the U.S. to remember where they come from. It sounds like a cliché but it is true – everyone, except Native Americans and victims of slave trade – migrated to this country. At some point in your family’s history, there was a sacrifice made. There was heartache. There was fear. There was a dream. P.G.: Your memoir begins with a quote by a Carl Sandberg (“Nothing happens unless first we dream.”), and Dancing with Butterflies uses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of happiness as a “butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, bur which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” What message do you think each quote provides for the reader approaching your texts? You’ve also chosen quotations from two well-known American

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writers; how do see your work as a Mexican American writer fitting within the canon of American literature? R.G. I did not choose the quotes because of who wrote them, but rather, because the quotes themselves fit perfectly with the theme of my books. In The Distance Between Us, I really wanted to deliver the message of the importance of dreaming, of having goals. Whenever I speak to students, I always tell them that without dreams they can go nowhere. Dreams give us the direction in which to take our lives. Without dreams, where do we go? Like a GPS [Global Positioning System], if you don’t put in the address, then you will never arrive at your destination. In Dancing with Butterflies, my characters spend a lot of time pursuing happiness – mostly the wrong way! But as Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “Happiness is like a butterfly…” the more you pursue it the more it runs away from you. I thought that quote fit perfectly with the message in the novel in that pursuing happiness should not be the goal in our lives. Happiness will come if we focus on the things we love to do, if we nurture our passions, if we allow ourselves to grow as individuals. And of course that novel is wrapped around the butterfly as metaphor so that quote was extra perfect! Mexican American authors write about the American experience from a Latino lens, therefore, we should fit perfectly within U.S. Literature. I say should because the powers that be still keep us on the margins, still label us as “ethnic.” Latino writers still struggle to be included in the canon, or in the mainstream. In the world of literature, there is a denial of the changing face of America. The U.S. is home to a diverse group of people from different ethnicities, cultures, and religions – we are all America, and as such, American literature should reflect the rich diversity of this country. P.G.: Looking ahead to your next project, the young adult version of The Distance Between Us is set for publication in fall 2016. How will this work differ from the original memoir, and why did you decide to present it in such a format for young adult audiences? What are your hopes in reaching out to this audience, especially as you work for immigrant rights and acceptance? R.G.: The young readers version of The Distance Between Us is about a hundred pages shorter (though because the young readers version has a bigger font, both books are around 300 pages.) I deleted sections that were inappropriate for young readers, and I shortened some chapters by keeping only the most essential elements of the story. I also added new material that is not in the original. Why did I adapt it? The U.S. is a nation of immigrants, and I think it’s important

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that our youth have access to stories that reflect this important (and beautiful) aspect of our country. I wanted to offer immigrant youth this book as a mirror in which they could see themselves. Seeing their experiences reflected in American literature will make them feel less alone. Knowing that their stories matter is incredibly empowering to immigrants. For non-immigrant youth, I wanted to offer this book as a way for them to learn about their immigrant peers but also to remember their family’s history – for most readers, at some point in their family, someone was an immigrant and went through similar struggles that I write about in my book. One of the themes in the book is remembering where you come from. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes I feel that people become anti-immigrant because they have forgotten their roots. I’m hoping this book will be an inspirational reminder! P.G.: According to your recent Facebook and blog posts, you are working on the sequel to your memoir. After finishing the memoir, one thing that I wanted to read more about was your development as a writer. While I hope that is a part of the next memoir, could you speak to what events or persons encouraged you to begin writing fiction, and how you continue to develop your craft? You also have been mentoring many writers in workshops and lecture series. What lessons do you share with new writers, especially those of Latina/o origin? R.G.: Yes, I am very close to finishing the first draft of my new memoir, though I don’t have a title for it yet. Usually my titles come at the end! In the sequel to The Distance Between Us, I write about my experiences as a first-generation university student struggling to find my way in a mostly white institution. Usually in my creative writing classes I was the only Latina, and some of my teachers and peers did not understand my writing at all. I was accused of having a wild imagination (because I wrote about characters who lived in extreme poverty or who dealt with extraordinary circumstances). I was told my writing was overblown, over-written, full of clichés, over the top, etc, etc, etc. There were times when I wanted to give up, but didn’t. In the second part of the book I write about my struggles after graduation, fighting for my dream to become a published writer. The book ends with the publication of my first novel, Across a Hundred Mountains. So there is a happy ending! The person who encouraged me to write was my English teacher at Pasadena City College, Diana Savas. She was the one who exposed me to the works of Latina writers and told me that if “Cisneros could do it, you can do it.” When I went to U. C. Santa Cruz, I was very fortunate to find a teacher in the Spanish department who encouraged me to keep writing. She told me my stories reminded her

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of Juan Rulfo and Tomás Rivera. I had never heard of those authors before but she gave me their books and told me to keep writing. I am very big on developing my craft. I never get complacent. I never get lazy with the writing. I write and rewrite and rewrite. I read books on craft. I exchange manuscripts with writer friends. I have a really good support network of people who love writing as much as I do. I am constantly striving to be a better writer, and I never think that just because I’ve written three books the next one will be easy. Every book is challenging. I pour my heart and soul into each of my books. I am also the kind of writer who promotes her work. I don’t believe that a writer’s job is solely to write a book. Once you publish a book and your book has a price tag – well then it is no longer just a work of art, but a product. Which means, you need to become a salesperson. I am a very active self-promoter, and it is that – not the grace of God – that keep my books selling strong. In fact, Across a Hundred Mountains sell more now than it did ten years ago when it first came out! So the main lesson I always teach my writing students is this: work on your craft and do everything you can to be a better writer, but also educate yourself on the business of writing and be ready to advocate for your book and pound the pavement to promote it. Don’t even think for a minute that your job is only to write books. Writing is half the battle. To ensure the success of your books and your future writing career, you need to promote. There’s no way around that.

Ylce Irizarry

“Where I Find Poetry and Tension”: An Interview with Daniel José Older Daniel José Older is a writer and a musician. He was born and raised in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Before attending college, he road-tripped across the United States, traveling south to the U.S.-Mexico Border and making a western trek that led him to San Francisco. He attended Hampshire College and studied abroad in Cuba after this year of travel. Older worked as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) for over a decade while pursuing his creative writing and playing with his band, Ghost Star. His fiction and cultural criticism have appeared in venues such as Apex, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, and Salon. Mr. Older is prolific: since 2009, he has published four books and multiple stories and essays. Older returned to study and completed an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University after publishing his first collection of short stories, Salsa Nocturna Stories (Crossed Genres 2009). He publishes, teaches, and offers workshops as a full-time writer now; his years as an EMT, though, mark his writing significantly. His fiction has been anthologized and can be found in Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm ¹ and in Mothership: Tales Afrofuturism and Beyond. ² Like many writers, Older’s educational experiences influence the form and content of his writing. As a young man in Massachusetts, he faced what he describes as conflicting treatment as a person of color. In his primarily Irish American Catholic neighborhood, he experienced hostile racism as a brown body: Older is of Cuban ethnicity and was raised in the Jewish religious tradition. In his school setting, he experienced a systematic racism: an exoticizing of his racial and cultural difference. The author’s writing engages issues of multiracial and multinational experience. Older continually crosses boundaries in order to foreground the reality of the Western world: it has always been transnational and multiracial. Yet, his writing is not about ethnic identity alone; rather, Older’s publications straddle cultural, generic, and marketing boundaries. Salsa Noctur-

 Bart Leib, ed., Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm (Somerville: Crossed Genres, 2011).  Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall, eds., Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond (Greenbelt: Rosarium Publishing, 2013). https://doi.org/9783110532913-012

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na Stories ³ is considered ghost noir; Half-Resurrection Blues ⁴ and Midnight Taxi Tango ⁵ form parts of The Bone Street Rumba Series and are marketed as urban fantasy. Shadowshaper ⁶ is a Young Adult novel that combines all of these genres into a work of speculative fiction; Shadowhouse Fall ⁷ is its sequel. His forthcoming novel, Flood City,⁸ is a work of science fiction written for a middle grade audience. Though all of his creative writing is set in the boroughs of New York City, his characters defy physical, temporal, and national boundaries. In our conversation below, Older discusses the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa on his writing; his conception of Noir Brooklyn offers readers a new context in which to appreciate the complexity of Anzaldúa’s border theory. Older suggests death, like other borders, is neither static nor unidirectional. Perhaps because the author is a practitioner of Santería, a syncretic religion uniting Yoruba and Catholic spiritual traditions, or perhaps because of his experience as an EMT, Older portrays death as fluid, multimodal movement, especially in the being of the principal narrator. Carlos Delacruz, the protagonist of Salsa Nocturna Stories and the novel Half-Resurrection Blues is in a unique position to collect and contain the misbehaving dead because he, too, exists between life and death. In Salsa Nocturna Stories, he appropriates racial slurs to describe his existence: “half-and-half ass”; half-dead-half-alive ass”; and “halfie.” Drawing on the racial discourse of Colorism, he confesses, “I’m only half dead. Yes, my skin in more gray than brown” (SNS, 64). Carlos emphasizes his constant displacement embodied in his skin, which is a “weird neither here-nor-there hue, just like me, and I’m eerily cold to the touch” (SNS, 64). This description simultaneously evokes a specific Nuyorican discourse of being “ni de aquí ni de allá” [neither here nor there]. His combination of this sense of non-belonging with the use of the expression “half and half” takes the new mestiza’s “tolerance for ambiguity” and transplants Anzaldúa’s challenges to hegemonic constructions of the U.S.-Mexican border within noir Brooklyn. Carlos and Gordo illustrate that their border crossings do not transmogrify them. The portrayal of life between meta-physical borders has much to offer readers outside the United States. The contemporary refugee crises in Europe and Africa attest to the persistence of age-old social justice questions: how do societies offer refugees safe spaces in

 Daniel José Older, Salsa Nocturna Stories (Somerville: Crossed Genres, 2009); further references in the text, abbreviated as “SNS.”  Daniel José Older, Half-Resurrection Blues (New York: Penguin, 2015).  Daniel José Older, Midnight Taxi Tango (New York: Penguin, 2016).  Daniel José Older, Shadowshaper (New York: Scholastic Books, 2015).  Daniel José Older, Shadowhouse Fall (New York: Scholastic Books, 2017).  Daniel José Older, Flood City (New York: Scholastic/Levine, 2018).

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times of war? How do people adapt to new cultures? Can refugees ever be ‘at home’ in their countries of origin after those nation spaces have suffered the ravages of war and oppression? Older’s deft use of genre fiction allows him to portray characters whose mobility exposes the transnational history and reality of the world. The story, “Red Feather and Bone,” is a particularly useful example of how Older revises some of the standard histories about Latinos, including Latinos’ African ancestry and intra-Latina/o racism. He evokes the transnational, pre-Colombian African origins of Latinos, portraying the artificial racial borders within Latina/o communities. In this story, the ghosts of Africans who were kidnapped for slavery but escaped and occupy a park in Brooklyn end up saving Carlos from a succubus. Carlos explains, “some folks […] get confined within the district limits of whatever city or county they end up in” (SNS, 70). The story, “Phantom Overload,” appears later in the collection Salsa Nocturna Stories and continues this project of revising histories. The crisis of the story is that a group of Latin American dead has broken out of confinement. As Carlos explains the problem, the other characters illustrate the pervasiveness of intralatina/o racism. Carlos has marked another agent, Silvan García, as Mexican. Gordo corrects him, noting, “He’s Ecuadorian.” Carlos retorts: “Either way, he’s already given the dirty eye because Botus did his poor Hispanic communities thing and now I’m like Malinche again” (SNS, 126). The reader observes additional irony here – Carlos crosses a gendered, ethnonational border to equate himself with the Mexican figure of Malinche (he identifies himself as Puerto Rican). In short space, he presents the historical narrative associated with Malinche: “The chick that helped a couple white guys on horses take down the whole Aztex empire” and the revisionist version of it, “Or got kidnapped and forced into being a historical scapegoat, more than likely” (SNS, 126). Gordo, his musical and life mentor, says, “It is always easier to blame one of our own” (SNS, 126). Gordo is Cuban; his statement reflects a pan-Latina/o consciousness that Carlos has yet to achieve. These are but two examples of how Daniel José Older’s fiction reflects the fluid and dynamic realities of U.S. Latinos and other ethnic minorities. In this way, Older is an important U.S. Latino writer; he is one of several writers moving contemporary Latina/o writing away from strict ethno-national discourses and identity politics. His engagement of multiple genres in his fiction and critical cultural work comprises his larger project of social justice. More importantly, his writing, especially his cultural criticism, has reached audiences beyond academia. Older has centered his public discourse on the challenges and the promises of diversifying the publishing industry by discussing these issues in primarily digital publications and venues. Older’s Twitter followers are over 25,000 and his

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Tweet count has exceeded 250,000. He is particularly concerned that the publishing industry continues to foreground the experiences of white characters and to publish white authors. In the interview that follows, Mr. Older discusses his writing, genre fiction, and the politics of publishing.

Interview Y.I.: Let’s start by telling the readers of Symbolism a little about you – something that might not appear in your own blogs or the online interviews with you published to date. D.J.O.: Well, I grew up in Boston. It is a very segregated, very complicated city. My family grew up in an Irish, mostly unfriendly, neighborhood. I had a great childhood but we definitely did not fit in. My Dad went to Harvard – that might be why we ended up in Boston. My parents bought a house in the 1970s to raise a family. We were in Charlestown – a hood, a sort of Irish mafia area that today is being gentrified quickly. Even with the gentrification, though, it is also pretty diverse. Charlestown has lots of Latinos now. Growing up, though, the white elements of Charlestown were not connected for me. I went to both public and private school and the contrast was extreme. On the one hand, there was blatant racism on the streets. In the schools, there was another kind of racism, the exoticizing kind. Those extremes stuck in my head – how power and race work. Those two elements stuck with me and are pretty traceable in my writing. Y.I.: After Boston, where did life take you? D.J.O.: I took a year after high school and drove across the country. I actually did that. It was fascinating and amazing. I was eighteen and out in the world. I drove south, through Texas, to the border. For a few months, I stayed in San Francisco. I was a bike messenger there. I was just trying to see what shit was about. But San Francisco never quite clicked with me – I actually didn’t find a lot of diversity there. This was late 1990s. I just never found my niche there. I had been accepted to Hampshire College, so I went there. I did a semester in Havana – I loved the music and the culture. I was there during a hurricane…it was crazy. Y.I.: After school, you became a paramedic. You are no longer an EMT but you remain a musician, and of course, an author. Which of these careers shapes your writing most?

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D.J.O.: Being a paramedic in New York City definitely shapes how I write and what I write. I actually started writing fiction because of my EMT blogs. First, there was a period in my twenties where my writing was all over the map – I was writing screenplays, I was writing poems, I was writing essays. Then, I started tweeting and blogging ambulance stuff. It crystalized how to tell a story. I love storytelling. With blogging, you have to punch something out. In twenty minutes, I could blog something. But then there’s the thinking part – “How can I make this smart or brilliant?” – that doesn’t always work in fiction. Sometimes, you need to just shut up and tell the story. I learned this from blogging. Y.I.: In a guest post for The Guardian, you connect paramedic work and writing: “As first responders, we show up in the thick of most people’s moment of crisis, that peak of the mountain on the plot chart they always show in writing classes, and we’re usually the ones ferrying them right into the falling action.”⁹ How do you make that move from first responder to storyteller? D.J.O.: Paramedics make great storytellers. They are the best storytellers in live time. You can just be sitting around, talking shit about your run and you get ideas. But I always try to remember that storytelling comes directly from a much longer history of the word, of the spoken word. I have done spoken word poetry and storytelling, but I mean just the spoken word – one person telling another person something. That’s why most of my writing is in the first person – it makes the element of storytelling come alive. What is amazing to me is the intimacy of someone relating something that happened to him or her to you. Y.I.: Let’s talk about your writing history – how you wrote and published your books. Your first was Salsa Nocturna Stories. You have three novels published as well: Shadowshaper and two in the Bone Street Rumba Series: Half-Resurrection Blues and Midnight Tango Taxi. Please describe the process of writing each of these books. D.J.O.: The first novel I sat down to write, Shadowshaper, ended up being all over the place. I actually ended up publishing Half-Resurrection Blues first. As a reader and a writer, I was between loving Harry Potter ¹⁰ and feeling unfulfilled by Harry Potter. So the first novel just unraveled. In trying to write who we are,  Daniel José Older, “Writing from the Crossroads of Life and Death,” The Rejectionist (July 2011). [accessed June 19, 2016].  J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997).

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grounded in the spirituality and Latino identity, that just set it back on track. Why is the protagonist a girl? Because there just aren’t enough girls – definitely not enough Latinas – in speculative fiction. This is what the story wanted. The story will demand things of you. The protagonist of Shadowshaper, Sierra, is like me in some ways and not like me in other ways. It is good that it has taken me to get to this point. The publishing process takes time. Meantime, I started writing the stories that developed into Half-Resurrection Blues. I am usually a first draft writer. This book was the hardest – it has taken so many drafts. I am glad it has been that way, in the five years it has taken to write it! I have learned more about race and politics. When you are writing a character less privileged, you have to make yourself uncomfortable. You have to acknowledge yourself. Y.I.: So how do you get from writing a story to writing a novel? D.J.O.: Well, it’s not always a straight line for me. Take for example, the story, “Forgive Me My Tangents”: nothing really happens. Compare that to “Tall Walking Death.” Here, I wanted to try something grander, with sections. I became comfortable with the characters. A story lets you know as you develop it. If it starts to run off, you either rein it in or you write a novel. These stories ended up in a collection. The first story I ever wrote, though, turned into a novel that ends on an open note. The story spoke to me as a novel. Y.I.: Young Adult (YA) writing: what are the challenges and the rewards? D.J.O.: Some writers might feel constrained by young adult fiction – I don’t feel constrained by it at all. Sure, you do have to be more mindful of how you are approaching the audience. More realistically, teenagers are a bigger audience. I want it to reach as many readers as possible. I’ve run into some issues with libraries and have learned to be strategic. People do not want to talk about it in publishing – the racism and lack of books for kids who aren’t white. For me, it is easier to write teenage characters in young adult fiction than to write adolescent characters into adult books. It’s not that it is simpler writing – young adult fiction needs to be complicated. Teenagers are an amazing audience; with media, they are always is in conversation with you. Y.I.: But let’s tease this out. You write a specific kind of YA novel, speculative. Genre writing is your modus operandi for all of your audiences. Tell us more about that.

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D.J.O.: Yeah, genre writing has a stigma that it is complicated and messy. But I try to straddle another line, to ignore the hype about genre. Genre writing has some amazing teachers – who show there are differences in how you approach genre writing. The way that you unravel the plot and the marketing is for sure part of the conversation. Traditionally, writers focus on voice and story. Some writers cross both lines, like Junot Díaz, Octavia Butler, Walter Mosely, Tananarive Due, Ishmael Reed, Martin Barber, Dennis Lahane. Genre or non-genre, we claim Poe. Y.I.: When I think of genres, especially sci/fi, fantasy, or horror, I think of what have become the visual symbols for those genres: isolated rural settings, castles, deserted towns or mansions, wilderness. Cult classic science fiction or horror films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers ¹¹ and Children of the Corn ¹² are set in small town, rural America. More recent sci/fi and fantasy movies such as Strange Days ¹³ or Sleep Dealer ¹⁴ are set in the technologically advanced but dystopic futures. I am struck by the urban, recognizable settings of your fiction. Why do you choose to set these speculative events in contemporary city geographies rather than during a historic period or in a rural area? D.J.O.: Well, there is the element of “write what you know.” I like the balance of bringing something magical and speculative into the present. This is maybe archaic, but I think of these two movies: The Labyrinth ¹⁵ and The Dark Crystal. ¹⁶ One is the about the clash of the cultures between the real world and the fantasy world. The Labyrinth is the meeting of the worlds. The other, The Dark Crystal, is a straight up fantasy with no real people characters. It is a beautiful movie but there was no tension for me. What the speculative allows me to do is to focus on actual borders, borders inside people as well as outside of them. These moments of cultural clash happen on a daily basis and that’s where I find poetry and tension.

 The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Phil Kaufman (Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1978). Film.  Children of the Corn, directed by Fritz Kiersch (USA: Angeles Entertainment Group, 1984). Film.  Strange Days, directed by Katherine Bigelow (Santa Monica: Lightstorm Entertainment, 1995). Film.  Sleep Dealer, directed by Alex Rivera (New York: Likely Story, 2008). Film.  The Labyrinth, directed by Jim Henson (Hollywood: Henson Associates, 1986). Film.  The Dark Crystal, directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz (London: Incorporated Television Company, 1982). Film.

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Y.I.: Your first publisher is a proponent of genres – of defying them, at least. Crossed Genres published Salsa Nocturna Stories and then Penguin picked up Half-Resurrection Blues and Shadowshaper. What has your experience been working with both small and large publishers? D.J.O.: It was nice to start out with a small press. I was very involved in the process. Every aspect was a conversation. We were on board for everything. That is not something I expected from a large house – but since I went to Penguin and Scholastic, both have kept me very involved in the process. This is not always the case. I know some authors who have been kept out of the process. My experiences have been positive. I never thought I could have that level of input – down to the face models for the protagonist, Sierra. The editors are involved; they have a heightened awareness of race and publishing. People before me have led the path against whitewashing the covers, etc. These editors are upfront about doing it right. Y.I.: Whitewashing covers is just one example of the problems you encounter in publishing urban fantasy. In one of your essays, you explore more challenges to publishing diverse books and layout a humorous but scathing critique: “In this literary gentrification, the American city becomes either a goofy whitewashed playground, girls with werewolves and vampires, or an abysmal urban nightmare. And like most dystopias, neither fictionalized versions of this city have much to say about the real-world conflicts threatening urban communities of color like police violence and gentrification.”¹⁷ How do you see your writing resisting this literary gentrification? D.J.O.: Well, in Salsa Nocturna Stories, I was thinking about physical gentrification; I was writing about economics and about of all these different levels of city life in Brooklyn. There are the things that pop up as a character moves in that world. For example, a character sees a jogger in a neighborhood that usually does not have white people in it. Suddenly there are white people in spandex. I have found a way to bring this to the conversation subtly with context rather than plot. And this should make readers uncomfortable with what they think they know.

 Daniel José Older, “Move over HP Lovecraft, fantasy writers of colour are coming through,” (London) The Guardian (December 9, 2014). [accessed May 9, 2015].

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Y.I.: Let’s stick with diversity and social justice and throw technology into the conversation. Many of your tweets deal with the social justice lens you’ve mentioned a few times in our conversation. The tweets respond to current politics but the more consistent thread I see is the literary gentrification – the lack of diversity in the publishing industry. You noted for example, “Social media revolutionized fandom in ways few saw coming, and content creators of color find ourselves with unprecedented access to audiences” (“Move over HP Lovecraft”).¹⁸ How does Twitter impact your writing projects? And, does Twitter aid in this particular area of social justice? D.J.O.: With Twitter, you get to be in conversation more. It grows you and grows your reach. The problem is sometimes people enter the conversation just to market their stuff. But I like to remember you are having a conversation with readers. I encourage followers to do a live feed with a hashtag because a great conversation feed has got to be interactive. It’s a great platform, for sure. There has never been anything like Twitter. On the other hand, I can’t stress how important the hashtags have been in showing different lines of power and alliances. For example, the reality of “Hashtag activism”: people are having conversations that are not supposed to happen. #SolidarityisForWhiteWomen reached seven million people. How else are you going to reach seven million people? This kind of activism works – it makes people uncomfortable. Y.I.: Discomfort can promote growth – but not just for readers. Really, most of your characters are constantly uncomfortable. They might have more than one ethnicity or cultural origin. More often, they inhabit multiple social spaces or worlds. Your lead character in Salsa Nocturna Stories, Carlos de la Cruz – his surname really says it all – at the cross – moves between life and death. He refers to himself as “half-dead.” What is it about liminal characters that you find so attractive? D.J.O.: The in-between space is rife for literature, for stories, for art in general. It is a both a source of power and source of pain in a very vivid way for people who live there, for someone who is mixed race, who gets confused for different races, or gets crap for living in a different neighborhood. It is so complex at the emotional level – how could you NOT write about that? My writing reflects that complexity of identity and geography. Gloria Anzaldúa was really formative for me.

 Older, “Move over HP Lovecraft,” n. p.

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Borderlands/LaFrontera – it is spiritual, mythological, and very academic.¹⁹ Here is someone who created a whole mythology and an intellectual practice out of it. My first novel, Half-Resurrection Blues, uses quotes from Borderlands to start each section. Anzaldúa’s conversation is about gender, race, and nationality – all these layers. The living/dead thing is not a direct racial correlation. It is about what it is to move between worlds. It can be a blessing and a curse at the same time; the novel is how people will use that element of you until you employ it strategically. This is really where a lot of Latinos see themselves – as a political, racial power category. Complex race categories are now used in the census, for example. For the narrator, Carlos, he is realizing how he is being played and learning how to play back and in the processes, learning about community. The community is not the half-dead, but rather, like-minded Latinos. The trajectory is from lone, one man soldier to someone in the thick of something much greater than he is. He finds his people. Y.I.: This line of conversation brings us power and positionality, something I think Anzaldúa would approve us discussing. Anzaldúa’s creative work, for example, is again being integrated into criticism on science fiction and the speculative tradition.²⁰ Many other authors write about trajectories of ethnic self-discovery but not so many in the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction. Being in those border spaces allows you insight into at least these two spaces. Why have you chosen speculative fiction as the genre through which to tell your stories? D.J.O.: Ah, it goes back to my childhood. I loved Star Wars ²¹ and Lord of the Rings. ²² I loved the epic sci-fi stories. These just felt like home. And if you look at my EMT work, I was dealing with the dead on a daily basis for a decade. And, I’m a santero. We have a close relationship with our ancestors and commune regularly with our ancestors. How can I not write about ancestors?  Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).  For an early discussion of Anzaldúa’s work as science fiction, see Kevin Concannon, “The Contemporary Space of the Border: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and William Gibson’s Neuromancer,” Textual Practice 12.3 (1998): 429 – 442. See also Lysa Rivera, “Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands Science Fiction after NAFTA,” Science Fiction Studies 39.3 (2012): 415 – 436. Most recently, see Catherine S. Ramírez, “Recovering Gloria Anzaldúa’s Sci-Fi Roots: Nepantler@ Visions in the Unpublished and Published Speculative Precursors to Borderlands,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 40.2 (2015): 203 – 219.  Star Wars, directed by George Lucas (San Francisco: Lucas Film, 1977). Film.  Lord of the Rings, directed by Ralph Bakshi (Fantasy Films, 1978). Film.

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Y.I.: Social discomfort is a recurring concern of yours. In the essay “Move over HP Lovecraft,” you assert, “We’re entering a new time – one not so enraptured by the same tired hierarchies – and the genre itself will be stronger for leaving its oppressive tropes behind.”²³ Yet, colorism remains a viable problem especially for the characters in the story, “Phantom Overload.” How do you reconcile that with your desire to move beyond oppressive tropes? D.J.O.: Well, I don’t mean that the tropes are completely gone. Certainly, ignoring them doesn’t help. Rather than recreating them, literature is a place to confront them, a place to show truth. In Shadowshaper, for example, the protagonist Sierra has to deal with racism. As seen through Sierra’s eyes, the critique of racism is very clear and a reader can’t leave the text without seeing that critique. Y.I.: In May 2014, there were discussions about a lack of diversity at Book Con²⁴ and other conferences, as well as institutional discrimination wherein writers of color are not necessarily sought after and not necessarily respected as much as white writers. In the years you have been writing, have you seen any positive shifts? D.J.O.: Yes. The “We Need Diverse Books” group grew out of those discussions. They have kept the discussions going and they’re working on a conference. Some publishers are not only talking about diversity but illustrating a commitment to it. Rosarium Publishing is one – they publish Afro Futurist Books and Comic Books by and for people of color. And of course, my first publisher, Crossed Genres is another. I co-edited the anthology they published, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. ²⁵ The press is working on a sequel anthology, Hidden Youth: Speculative Fictions from the Margins. ²⁶ Y.I.: Let’s move into some teaching talk. You pursued an MA in Creative Writing after you were published – why? And, what does “the workshop” mean for you? What you think needs to happen in it?

 Older, “Move over HP Lovecraft,” n.p.  Ian Chant, “BookCon-troversy: Uproar Over Lack of Diversity at BEA’s Consumer Day,” Library Journal (May 2015). [accessed June 19, 2016].  Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, eds., Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (Somerville: Crossed Genres Publications, 2014).  Mikki Kendall and Chesya Burke, eds., Hidden Youth: Speculative Fictions from the Margins (Somerville: Crossed Genres, forthcoming).

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D.J.O.: Well, the MA was to be able to teach but I am a writer, first. What that means is that I do workshops that are about storytelling from a social justice lens. I do them for all ages, ten-year-olds to grad students. I am always dealing with the fundamentals of craft. Grad schools do not talk about craft. I am talking about voice and elements, the basics and the nuances but then how we relate gender, race, and power without being didactic. I always like to open with analysis of power in a story – this is a way of thinking about power and getting people to come to their craft. Because we live in America, these issues will come up. Instead of getting to it later, we start out with it. Y.I.: My students absolutely loved your work. I was teaching Salsa Nocturna Stories toward the end of the course in U.S. Latina/o literature. Of all the texts we had read that semester, they could “just get into” the stories. At the same time, they noted that if they had not read some historical and sociological background, “maybe we would have approached the text differently.” According to them, it was freeing to have story, not just theory and criticism about social justice. D.J.O.: That definitely touches on my approach to literature and social concepts. I try to utilize the context of the story for that purpose but not make the plot carry the weight. When you try to force a plot to be socially conscious and deliver a message, that’s when things get didactic. I think you need to allow the world building. And there’s two things to that. It has to be done – even when you are pretending not to do it. So, first, do it with a conscientiousness. The second thing is to let the world carry the weight. The world has so many opportunities to do it and the story does not, when you get to the nuts and bolts of writing. Y.I.: In the political pedagogical essay for BuzzFeed, “12 Fundamentals Of Writing ‘The Other’ (And The Self),” you offer readers twelve ways for people to “respectfully write from the perspective of characters that aren’t you.”²⁷ You call them “guidelines” – but they seem uncannily like Alcoholic Anonymous’ 12 Steps. Are you suggesting that the literary gentrification you resist is a kind of addiction?

 Daniel José Older, “12 Fundamentals of Writing ‘The Other’ (And The Self): How to respectfully write from the perspective of characters that aren’t you,” BuzzFeed (January 15, 2014). [accessed June 19, 2016].

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D.J.O.: [laughs] I hadn’t thought of that connection really. Though I suppose treatment is the way to deal with a problem. You have to identify it then move forward to solve it. I don’t think one book or one writer is going to solve the problem. Really, it’s a combination of the steps, addressing, calling a thing what it is, etc. Y.I.: So, is it a fair to say that this gentrification functions like a disease – instead of the human body, the body of publishing is afflicted with publishing characters from unrealistic or problematic perspectives other than the white mainstream? D.J.O.: Yes, I guess I think of it more like another step program, the five steps of grieving. As an industry, publishing needs to recognize its problem. But it is complex. Different writers have different ways for calling out the problem. It is important to always understand the history of the lack of diversity in publishing and then to use different strategies to change the present and the future. Y.I.: One of your recurring strategies deals with the present- and future- movement. In Salsa Nocturna Stories, almost all of the individual narratives take place as the characters are physically moving from one place to another. The readers do not get recollections of trips or travel; they experience the movement with the characters. How does movement play into your narrative lines? D.J.O.: Well, it is not as if the characters are just sitting at home and then boom! Something happens. Stories are where things happen. People have to move. You can have a story with people just sitting around talking, of course. Hemingway was big on that, in addition to shooting big animals! But I think people enjoy seeing other people in motion. For me, there’s a tension, a balance I want to achieve between writing good ideas and writing good action, so it doesn’t become an essay. I write essays. Essays can get boring if you’re not careful. Shit has to happen in fiction. In the case of Carlos, most of his movements are related to his job working for the Council of the Dead. His guerilla actions are also related to the different part-time jobs that he takes. Y.I.: Lyricism is another kind of movement in your work. Musical expression is the heart of Salsa Nocturna Stories. Music is integral to the lives of the characters, including Gordo and Carlos. Some of the authors you mentioned earlier, including Ishmael Reed, not only use references to popular music but also make music itself central to their novels. How do you decide where and when music is integral to a story or novel?

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D.J.O.: This has become something intuitive, really. I write characters who listen to music or who play themselves. It is really part of the mechanism of world building. I like to create a certain aesthetic and music allows a character to reveal or realize things in important ways. Y.I.: Your use of music, though, goes beyond characters listening to music or making references to specific artists. Who first introduced you to music and how are you integrating music in your fiction? D.J.O.: My parents didn’t play any instruments but they loved music, so I grew up hearing music a lot. My formal training started with studying guitar as a teenager. In college, I started studying composition. I was also fortunate enough to study under Yusef Lateef while I was at Hampshire College. I also studied music the semester I was in Havana. Y.I.: You have discussed this point about the genre, specifically, about what is perceived as the fantastic: “Other people’s cultures/ beliefs are not fantasy. It’s one thing if a demigod or spirit is out walking around, interacting with the world, and even that walks a complex line, but to have people simply celebrating their beliefs be a ‘fantastical’ element is racist cultural imperialism.”²⁸ What contemporary writers do you think are addressing the problems of racial cultural imperialism? D.J.O.: A few come to mind easily. Nalo Hopkinson. Sophia Samatar. Shana Smith. Tananarive Due. Y.I.: These are all women writers – what is the relationship between gender and speculative fiction? D.J.O.: Women have always been writing speculative fiction. I think it is just that now they are getting the prominence they deserve. It’s not that there are no men writing, but these are the writers I enjoy and think are really changing the imperialist narrative. Y.I.: This point seems to be illustrated in “Red Feather and Bone,” which features characters of ancient African origin. For those who do not practice Santería, what do these characters offer the reader?

 Older, “12 Fundamentals of Writing,” n.p.

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D.J.O.: A reader does not have to know anything about Santería, really, to enjoy the story. Santería does not have a lock on the valuing of ancestors. Everyone understands ancestors. I draw inspiration from relationships with ancestors. For the characters, it’s about portraying that relationship as conversations with the dead, not just being terrified of the dead. I guess that’s what makes speculative fiction different from, say, Western ghost stories. Y.I.: Shadowshaper does have consistent engagement of ancestors. How did you come to choose murals as a central medium for that ancestor communication? Were you thinking of a particular mural tradition or is this related to the place of murals and graffiti in urban communities? D.J.O.: I was thinking of the power of memorializing people not memorialized in the Times Op Eds or obituaries. Murals and RIPs pieces do that and affect communities in specific ways. I wanted to create a mythology in a very physical way. Sierra becomes a painter to have a deeper relationship with the magic she experiences. Y.I.: In the earlier work, Salsa Nocturna Stories, there are very few markers of the inclusion of Santería. How would you describe the influence of Santería in the text? And do you see your use of it evolving further in future novels or short stories? D.J.O.: True – it is very subtle in the first book. Other people have pointed it out to me; I wasn’t consciously working it into the stories. That’s how spirit works through you. As far as the Santería, the characters literally deal with the ancestors throughout the book. They drink and smoke cigars, they’re just doing it at bars, so it blends in rather than sticks out. In Half-Resurrection Blues, which is Carlos’ story, he has a good friend who owns a botanica. I want it to be subtle, though. It can be too easy to include one’s own experiences in speculative fiction. For example, there is only one story about being a paramedic in Salsa Nocturna Stories – Victor’s story. I try to come at things from the side. The stories with The Council of the Dead are directly related to my dealing with bureaucracy – even in life and death situations – as a paramedic. Y.I.: Speaking of drinking. I have to ask about coffee. When Carlos Delacruz is not moving, he is sitting drinking coffee at one of his several favorite coffee places. Sometimes it’s Puerto Rican, sometimes it’s Dominican, sometimes Cuban. Which is your favorite?

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D.J.O.: [laughs] Cuban – without doubt. But the character Carlos does a lot of walking. He’s in NYC, so, the coffee places capture the different neighborhoods and indicate the histories of these neighborhoods. Y.I.: Do you see yourself returning to adult audiences in future novels or story collections? D.J.O.: Well, I’m actually writing for three age groups all of the time. The Bone Street Rumba series is adult; Shadowshaper is intended for a young adult audience, and right now, I am working on pre-young adult, more like middle school aged, books. Y.I.: Our time together is drawing to a close. One last question about poetry and language. What are your influences? How would you describe the role of poetry in your fiction? D.J.O.: I have written poetry. The poem opening Salsa Nocturna Stories is mine even though it is credited to someone else. I did that because a character in the YA adult novel writes it. Other characters make their way into other books as they do in Half-Resurrection Blues and Shadowshaper. But to get to the poetry. Oral traditions. I call it the poetic vernacular. I take a lot of inspiration from the spoken word, even more so than the written word. I pay attention to the way people speak, to the music and poetry in their conversations. Y.I.: It’s my hope our conversation will help others find more poetry and tension in their reading and writing. Thanks for sharing a glimpse of your world. D.J.O.: Thank you for your interest in the work.

General Section

Brett Shanley

Typeface Teutonicus: The Socio-Semiotics of German Typography Before 1919 The relationship between national identity and its symbolic representations are seldom static, but rather fluctuate over time depending on the imagined meaning of the symbols and the socio-historical circumstances in which they are situated. Few such relationships in the world demonstrate the elasticity, and parallelism, observable between German identity and the font known as Fraktur. Starting with a typographic schism shortly after the development of printing, the duality of German blackletter and the “Roman” fonts called Antiqua became loaded with meaning that went far beyond the aesthetic taste of typesetters. Rather, the unique historical circumstances surrounding the development of German national identity lead an aesthetic debate around typeface that became hyper-loaded with symbolic meaning, so that the fonts in question became avatars for developing ideations of German identity in opposition to an imagined “other.” The Reformation, the Napoleonic Wars, and Romanticism are of particular importance here, each repositioning the meaning of signifier and signified. Throughout however there remains a remarkable connection between Fraktur and the Germans, one that transcends dramatic social upheaval over an extended period of time. Typeface must carry symbolic meaning beyond their aesthetics impression, or else print, both past and present, would be a wildly variant collection of fonts based purely on the individual personal choice of printmakers.¹ Consider the flippancy of Comic Sans, the classicism of Old English, and the institutionalized, semi-sophistication of Times New Roman: Each is imbued with collectively understood, if generally unstated meaning, transcending whatever content these forms are meant to convey through the written message. The social-situatedness of this symbolism, in turn, requires its understanding within imagined communities, themselves subject to historical circumstance, and highly volatile over time. Perhaps no case study better illustrates the symbolism of written form quite like the case of Fraktur’s relationship with German self-ideation, particularly evident alongside, and in contrast to, the typefaces collectively known as Antiqua.

 Very strictly speaking, “typeface” refers to a style of text (Helvetica, Papyrus), while “font” is reserved for the stylists within them (bold, italics). This distinction is upheld almost exclusively among graphic designers, and, even then, usually among those of older generations. Here they will be used interchangeably for variety, with a general preference towards “typeface.” https://doi.org/9783110532913-013

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Their pattern largely follows a model outlined by Barthes’ Mythologies, wherein an object serves as representational of national self-ideation. Milk, to the Dutch, is reflective of a shared past rooted in idyllic simplicity and connection to nature. Tea, for the English, is more than a hot beverage – it is a symbol of leisure, manners, and tradition. Likewise is the nature of wine as liquid made from fermented grapes a rather trivial aspect of its understanding by the people who consider it. It is intoxication, it is relaxation, it is celebration and joy. To the French in particular it holds a special meaning, one deeply tied to their national character. Barthes’ myths were representative of an idealized imaginings of the nation, these so often associated with the pastoral, the imperial, and the romantic, as seen in his choices for the Dutch, English, and French, respectively.² That these symbols are so often taken for granted make them all the more valid as national “myths,” thereby more true to the extent they go unrealized. What is lacking in these examples is evidence of plasticity. National identity changes over time; it stands to reason that, with this change of identity, so would the ideation of the symbols that represent it. Examples of these are more difficult to come by, particularly over a long period of time. Bullfighting in Spain could be offered as an example of a symbolic ritual that has evolved over time, largely fading from popular appreciation as spectacle, if not as symbol. While representative of the past and in conflict with political-social conceptions of modernity, bullfighting too proves an imperfect symbol for our purposes. Truer plasticity would mean symbols that evolved along with, and concurrently, with that which they were said to symbolize. This would present a parallelism of meaning; wherein throughout shifting historical discourse a constant-if-evolving idealized set of symbols were to change in accordance to a constant-if-evolving identity. The use of the typeface Fraktur within Germany is an example of just such a symbol,³ one that has changed with evolving social circumstances for hundreds of years. In order to devote adequate attention to the connection itself, the paper will focus on that period leading up to the end of World War I. This is not an attempt to defer from contentious material. Rather, it is necessary to devote adequate attention to the idea of symbolic representation over a span of time. The

 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang. 1972): 79 – 88. Barthes’ work is highly foundational to the findings presented here.  As with any typeface in predigital times, some level of variation must be expected. What is called here Fraktur is that which was regarded by printmakers as such, generally conforming to a recognizable aesthetic. To complicate matters, the early part of print history in Germany (until the mid-sixteenth century) was dominated by a typeface known as Schwabacher. Nearly identical to the untrained eye, its history is here collapsed with that of Fraktur for the ease of understanding.

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history of German identity is notoriously tumultuous, and exelerated in relation to comparable nation-states. Even by these standards the time since 1919 must be seen of exceptional upheaval. The enduring parallelism of form and identity during this period is simply too much to fit into one paper with the relevant history that preceded it. To put it another way: The post-Kaiserreich Germany is omitted precisely because the linkage between people and symbolic representation has proven too strong, and the last century has proven too volatile for both to be adequately treated here. Far from beginning in either 1945 or 1933, the origins of the current highly politicized nature of Fraktur within Germany have existed as long as the font itself. To an unfamiliar party that a typeface could carry so much meaning in and of itself is difficult to believe. And yet, Fraktur’s nature as a form of writing does not detract from its symbolism, but, in many cases, adds to its validity, much the way language does. Stripped of whatever message their content could convey, the form of writing an author selects itself becomes part of that message, and the overall content, as perceived by a reader, not unlike the way intonation can alter the reception of a spoken message. According to Bakhtin, this extends from discourse as a fundamentally social phenomenon at all levels.⁴ The sociability of discourse necessitates that a wealth of agreed-upon understandings is needed for communication to succeed. Therefore the method and means of the communication is itself part of the message, loaded as it is with these shared understandings of varying levels of complexity. Such associations are usually not openly imagined as part of the message itself, sometimes intentionally. Fonts, for example, are usually selected for their appropriateness to a given message, and are usually not meant to distract from what the author hopes to convey. Further, as noted above, these associations even at their most jarring can feel innocuous, or at the least apolitical. To an unfamiliar, anglophone audience, that fonts could carry political meaning feels foreign. How can serious concerns of identity – to say nothing of sincerity, violence, femininity, rationalism, or hate, among so many others attributes – relate to the superficial aesthetics of font choice? In fact, typography can serve as the perfect avatar for examinations of national identity and all of the loaded meanings that can come with it. According to eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, a nation is a community that was made up of kinship and history and social solidarity and cultural affinity and was shaped over time by climate and geography, by education, by relations

 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981): 259.

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with its neighbors and by other factors, and was held together most of all by language, which expressed the collective experience of the group.⁵

Note that in Herder’s definition “language” is not meant as that which is spoken/ heard or written/read. Rather, he refers to the method of communication itself, the commonality of the words such that the speaker/writer can be understood by the listener/reader. Typeface is where words gain materiality. It is language made visible.⁶ Such is the case with the use of blackletter fonts within Germany. Called blackletter because of the preponderance of blackness on the page, they include the more familiar Old English font, which the German blackletters superficially resemble in their perceived ornate, “Medieval” aesthetic. Similarly, too, the German blackletter fonts today carry some of the “olde-timey” connotations of the Old English within their respective language. Its use survives in Germany in those connotations meant to recall the comfort of a simple, domestic life, like on beer advertisements and the signage of rustic roadside inns.⁷ This association, however, is but a tiny and positive one in use today. With the benefit of a historical perspective we can witness an evolution of meaning to these typefaces, possessing associations far more complex than the idea of quaintness noted above. The German blackletters steeped in layers of meaning that the font Old English will never know. This of course is not always positive. In his seminal Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use, author Daniel Berkeley Updike reserves his by far most editorial and damning language in 291 dense pages for Fraktur’s ubiquity within Germany in the late sixteenth century: The title-pages in which red is so unsparingly introduced are typographically as tasteless and bad as they can be, and exhibit a “frightfulness” which leaves nothing to be said. As the century went on, the work seems even worse. The Historia von Dr. Johann Faust printed in Frankfurt in 1587 and other editions of the same work are very ugly and very obviously Teutonic.⁸

 Gordon Craig, The Germans (New York: Putnam, 1991): 24.  Paul Bain and Peter Shaw, “Blackletter vs. Roman: Type as Ideological Surrogate,” in Blackletter: Type and National Identity, ed. Peter Bain and Paul Shaw (New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1998): 10 – 15, 13.  Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin, “Broken Images: Blackletter Between Faith and Mysticism,” in Blackletter: Type and National Identity, ed. Peter Bain and Paul Shaw (New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1998): 50 – 67, 57.  Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing Types, Their History, Forms and Use (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1922): 146.

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The immediacy of its publication after World War I, combined with the author’s fairly open Anglo-exceptionalism, do much to explain his apparent distaste for not just this German font, but the German people. The linkage between the two he himself provides in the final six words of the section above: “very ugly and very obviously Teutonic.” Here we again see an opportunity for culturalsemiotic analysis of the relation between people and form – and from the exact opposite perspective that we have explored here. Updike was certainly not alone in his opinion, and many non-German commentators throughout the centuries had similarly unkind words for the German preferred font, knowingly or unknowingly using it was a surrogate for the ideations of the people who used it. It is no coincidence that such a symbolism-heavy typeface is associated with a people who, even by the complex standards of national identity, have come to stand for a wide range of meanings. This is especially true in terms of their selfidentity as seen through the ongoing making of meaning through symbolic form. In this way German identity, like their associated script, presents a fascinating case studies of imagined group self-perception over a remarkably short period of time.⁹ A study of self-ideations of the German people can become an avatar for the study of the Fraktur typeface. The same works in reverse. True, these fonts exhibit an extremely high level of politicization, and variation within this semiotic-political imagining. What is yet more fascinating for our research is the co-development of these fonts with German identity, wherein the associated meanings of one prove highly fluctuating, but consistently parallel with the other. The evolution of the ideation of this form proves what I will call parallelism with the self-imagining of the people. Another feature of identity (especially national identity, and German national identity in particular) is its relational nature. Those aspects that define a group are not imagined in a vacuum but rather in contrast to their non-representational nature for other groups.¹⁰ The sense of ‘self’ is perhaps most easily grasped when juxtaposed to the imagined ‘other’ – as demagogues have capitalized on for ages. The ideal symbol set by which we could examine the imagined selfidentity of a group of people would therefore a) provide flexibility, with its perception variable over time, b) prove something imagined as distinctly and exclusively related to that group, and c) exist in contrast to a comparable set of symbols imagined as representing others.  Sanna Inthorn, German Media and National Identity (Youngstown, NY: Cambria P, 2007): 49.  James Liu, Nora Onar, & Mark Woodward “Symbologies, Technologies, and Identities: Critical Junctures Theory and the Multi-layered Nation-state,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 43 (2014): 2– 12, 9.

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This is a paper about just such symbols, and their relation to the people they are made to represent. While Fraktur is a specific font, for our purposes it will be used to describe a family of related fonts, as it is within Germany still today. Likewise, we will use the German term for serifed, “Roman” script, Antiqua, when referring to the non-Fraktur typefaces ubiquitous today. Loaded with (contrary) meaning, Antiqua (generally presented in singular) represents a metaphor for the creeping influence of the mostly Latinate-speaking peoples of Europe – and the ideas that came with them. Lutheran Pietism vs. Italian Humanism, German Romanticism vs. the French Enlightenment – to name but a few associations of the Fraktur/Antiqua divide.¹¹ Thus is this semiotic conflict reflective of the German quest to define itself over dramatically shifting historical circumstances. For these reasons the study of the Fraktur typefaces serves as the ideal case study for the co-development of symbol and identity, of graphic form and unseen feeling.

The historical setting of a symbolic interpretation The tumultuous nature of German history all but requires a strictly chronological account of the development of its symbolic representations, as is likewise presented in the tome Graphic Design in Germany: 1890 – 1945. The period-centric approach to social semiotics proves especially suitable in this case given the expanse of time being considered, and the unique associations between print and the German people, an association first recorded in the Middle Ages. Understanding the symbolism of German typeface, then, means considering “Germany” as an idea. Compared to other large nation-states Western or Central Europe, the Germans were late to develop a cohesive identity. Before the nineteenth century, the closest proximity was the Holy Roman Empire. As Voltaire is said to have remarked (perhaps with some playful Franco-German rivalry), the H.R.E. was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” It also cannot be called “German” in a modern sense, despite “deutscher Nation” (“of the German Nation”) being added to its name as early as 1502. As nation-states began to form elsewhere in Europe, the loose confederation of ethnic- and linguistically diverse states grew increasingly undesirable even for the German-speaking majority. By the seventeenth century legal philosopher Samuel Pufendorf calling the H.R.E. as an “unnatural monster.”

 Bain and Shaw, “Blackletter vs. Roman,” 11.

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It can be said that even larger patterns were at work. In his book German Identity: 1770 to the Present Day Henry James identifies a cycle of national doctrines evident in German history, from the economic to the cultural to the political, and back again, with the radicalism of each generally increasing over time. It could be said that the Holy Roman Empire served a practical economic and organizational function, while leaving both the ethnic and ideological realities of its people unfulfilled. In this socio-political vacuum emerged a clear and confident model of the centralized nation-state. In almost every respect, France served as the idealized model for the German peoples, who developed their own identity by borrowing applicable concepts to fit with their own identity. In apolitical, cultural contexts the French were celebrated as a people worth mimicking, even at times in a manner bordering on self-hate. Frederick the Great is said to have often expressed his fondness for the French language, and his aversion to the comparably “barbaric German tongue.”¹² The dichotomy of (French) civilization and (German) barbarism proves a common thread throughout the history of Franco-German relations, as well as the great Antiqua-Fraktur debate, albeit frequently with different evaluations by the common people than those expressed of the arch-bourgeois sophisticant Friedrich II. On the whole, however, the modeling of German identity on the French attempted to keep more superficial German aesthetics traditions where possible. The German philosopher Christian Thomasius fought to replace Latin with German as the language of scholarship in otherwise German-speaking lands, but used the successes of the French vernacular as his model. His 1687 work Discourses on What Forms Should be Imitated from the French in Daily Life and Behavior defined the francophilia of his time: Today everything must be French with us. French clothes, French food, French household goods, French language, French morals, French sins, and even French diseases are everywhere the rage… Frenchmen are after all today the most skillful people and know how to order all things in the appropriate way.¹³

Rather than decrying these imitations as an affront to German culture, Thomasius reasoned that it was instead a useful learning process through which Germans would ultimately assert their own national attributes with greater sophis-

 Harold James, A German Identity (Phoenix: Phoenix P, 2001): 15; further references in the text, abbreviated as “GI.”  Gordon Craig, “Herder: The Legacy,” in Herder Today: Contributions from the International Herder Conference, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990): 17– 30, 24.

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tication. He was far from alone in this push for moderate assimilation. The “Frenchified” urban middle- and upper-classes were called the “bourgeoisie” in German, while those from smaller towns and provincial villages were “Bürgertum” – the German translation of bourgeoisie (GI, 16). This linguistic differentiation serves to highlight both the comparable un-Frenchness of the German lower classes, as well as the linkage between French culture and idealized sophistication. Over time, German imitation of the French gradually “entered the language of national politics” and created an ambitious nationalism around what was, for the Germans, “an unattainable ideal” (GI, 31). The French Revolution increased this politicized mimicry, particularly among the German left. Contemporary German poets such as Schiller and Klopstock, and the philosopher Fichte, saw promise in the expansion of the French Enlightenment, and celebrated the overthrow of the ancien régime. Outside of intellectual circles, however, most Germans were “untouched and unaffected” by the political happenings in their neighbor to the west (GI, 17). This apathy towards French politics among the common people did not last long. Napoleon I crushed the decentralized Holy Roman Empire, and with it prior conceptions of German identity. Using again the cycle of James, wherein national identity moves from the economic to the cultural to the political, the invasions in the first years of the nineteenth century forced the transition away from economic concerns and towards the ideological and cultural-minded. In the face of the Grande Armée, French ideas were applied in consciously “German” ways, just as Thomasius had predicted in print over a hundred years earlier, albeit in a more politicized form. As a national identity, Germany began with the French invasion.¹⁴ Linked at the time with liberalism, German nationalism was officially suppressed by the slightly less splintered German states that followed Napoleon’s defeat. The Rhine Crisis of 1840, however, revealed a possible split between political leftism and German nationalism.¹⁵ This divorce of ideology and identity grew wider in the following decades, and was ultimately championed by the arch-traditional Otto von Bismark. At his behest, “Germany” finally appeared on world maps in 1871 – centuries after France, England, or Spain. This went against the hopes of the liberal, largely student-favored “big Germany solution” (Großdeutsche Lösung) which would encompass all German-speaking territories.

 Inthorn, German Media and National Identity, 9.  Tim Blanning, The Triumph of Music: Composers, Musicians and their Audiences, 1700 to the Present (London: Penguin, 2009): 282; further references in the text, abbreviated as “TM.”.

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Popular in the “singing clubs” of the 1840s (themselves hotbeds of nationalist sentiment), poet Ernst Moritz Arndt’s “Long Live Germany!” reflects the Romantic, pan-German sensibilities of the time: What is the German’s Fatherland? Is it Prussian land? Is it Swabian land? Is it on the Rhine, where the vine blossoms? Is it on the Belt, where the sea-birds call? Oh no! no! no! His fatherland must be bigger. Tell me it is the entire land! As far as the German tongue is heard. (TM, 283 – 284)

The triadic relationship between people, land, and language demonstrated by these lyrics proved fertile ground for symbolic representation. When the “small Germany solution” (Kleindeutsche Lösung) triumphed in order to assure the hegemony of Prussia (Preußen) at the exclusion of Austria (Österreich), the importance of symbolic representation did not disappear. On the contrary: The divide between cultural-linguistic and national borders further intensified lingering questions of self-identity.¹⁶ It in essence served as the institutionalization of two facets of German identity that had existed for hundreds of years: a hyper-relational self-consciousness, and the feeling of lagging behind. It is in this context that all ensuing semiotic analysis must be situated. Historiography frequently notes that the Germans are “a people atomized for long stretches of their history, [and] have always brooded over the question of their identity more than other peoples.”¹⁷ It is logical, then, that the same would go for symbols of their national identity. The highly charged and variable ideations of the Fraktur typeface cannot be separated from the historical circumstances which birthed them. The first historical period to consider recounts the aesthetic schism that occurred in the early bookmaking of sixteenth century Europe. This period is one of relative stability in the politicized meaning of form; the relationship between German-speaking and Romance-speaking Europe is a highlight of this period. Religious sectarianism plays a larger role here than in other eras, given its high importance at the time, and the developing tensions into what would become Protestant and Catholic churches. The preferences of individual printmak-

 Jörg Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics: 1848 to the Present (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1996): 21.  Craig, The Germans, 149.

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ers of increasingly divergent traditions serve, in retrospect, as clues for what was to come. The second and pivotal turning point is that of the aforementioned invasion by Napoleon I’s armies and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Amid growing secularism and with Protestant-Papal affiliations (somewhat) calmed, nationalism replaced religion as the dominant force in the development of identity. Fears of the Roman pope and Italian cultural influence subsided, and German attention shifted north-west. France was the dominant cultural force, and political opposition. The ideations of typefaces at this time reflect this conflict. Lastly is German unification under the leadership of Prussia as Imperial Germany. Print in Germany during this period possessed a de-facto dual-lettering system, in that most outsiders count not read Fraktur while German society utilized both depending on preference. Fraktur was the clear ‘national’ font – a part of the still nascent German national identity. This period provided a level of institutionalization to Fraktur, just as Imperial Germany provided institutionalization to Germanness. It also came with a new-found politicization, at least partly based on the militarist, conservative, Junker-class ruled conceptions of the state which claimed German identity – and its symbols – as their own.

The typographic schism and early associations of German blackletter Before examining the events that created the intensely loaded meaning of form we examine here, a background in the forms themselves would be useful. These are after all a collection of fonts, designed by print makers long ago to express meaning; they were not, at the time of their earliest creation, meant to be associated with anything discussed below. Appreciating this is foundational to appreciating the extent to which historical circumstances shaped the meaning of these forms, changing through time yet paralleling less symbolic, and more tangible, meaning as they go. To begin with, both blackletter and (neo‐)classical fonts predate the focus of this study by many hundreds of years. Blackletter, including what we would call Old English, Fraktur, and a host of others, were popular throughout Europe as late as the fifteenth century, when they began to fall out of favor in all but German-speaking lands.¹⁸ The reasons for the adoption of Antiqua typefaces elsewhere in Europe have stem from both technological convenience and symbolic association. Guten-

 Updike, Printing Types, Their History, Forms and Use, 60.

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berg’s Bible famously is printed in Fraktur, which enjoyed widespread popularity for several decades thereafter. Soon, however, challengers arose in the south: In 1470, in Venice, typographers designed printing blocks not based on illuminated manuscript handwriting, as Fraktur is, but conforming to contemporary calls for a cleaner aesthetic and consistent size among characters. This was the foundation for most typography even today, including that seen here. Intellectual currents aided in its adoption in most of Europe. In fact, the symbolic rationale seems to take preeminence in scholarship, befitting the intellectual upheaval of the early Renaissance. As thought and culture turned towards the new ideals of the age, its aesthetic associations celebrated in turn. The geographic origin of the Renaissance, northern Italy, became en vogue, as did its historical inspiration of Classical Antiquity. This “turn south” favored the Roman typefaces over the Blackletter, the latter imagined as both northern and Medieval. To quote Bringhurst’s knowing anachronism, in most of Europe Antiqua typefaces became “cool.”¹⁹ The continued use of Fraktur in German-speaking lands is best viewed as a hold-out, rather than a novel development on its own. As we will explore, the reasons for its continued use in Germany are something of a mirror image of its reasons for falling out of favor elsewhere. That is not to say that Fraktur, as a distinctly German form of blackletter, did not have its own unique origin, having developed from a very similar, earlier form of blackletter, itself uniquely German in origin. Designed in 1492 in the Franconian (northern Bavarian) town of Schwabach, near Nuremberg, Schwabacher quickly became the typeface of choice for German printers. Fraktur developed from this font around a fifty years later, and existed concurrently with it until around the mid-seventeenth century, by which point Fraktur had firmly established itself as the typeface of the German language.²⁰ Both Schwabacher and Fraktur had proto-nationalist connotations by the late sixteenth century, “proto” for the extent to which it differs from that of the nineteenth century. Contemporary ideations of nation-states did not yet exist, and certainly not in Germanspeaking areas. This was before French invasions and dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Associations between symbol and symbolized were more subtle, and less evident to the people who used it, given the less coherent nature of the symbolized “German-ness” and any associations that would come with it. But as even major historical events like the Napoleonic invasions have historical threads preceding them, so too is the association between blackletter fonts and German volk identity discernable even at this early stage of both typo-

 Simon Loxley, Type: The Secret History of Letters (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006): 25 – 27.  Bain & Shaw, “Blackletter vs. Roman,” 9.

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graphical and national development. For example, when Martin Luther used Schwabacher for his German-language Bible he did so with intent. Although this blackletter font was favored in his region and among those who spoke his language, it has since been theorized by Bertheau that although Martin Luther “flatly opposed” nationalist movements –such as existed at the time– his choice of font was indeed politically motivated in its way.²¹ Like other associations described here, this association was linked to the relevant “political” struggles of the time. Martin Luther and his followers favored Schwabacher in conscious typographical opposition to the Rotunda form used elsewhere in Europe precisely because of its use elsewhere in Europe. Rotunda – here serving as a sort of proto-Antiqua– was linked with Latinate Europe, and by association the hated institution of Papacy. Schwabacher, due to its decidedly non-association with Latinate Europe, became imbued with “political” meaning not because it was German, per se, but because it was not used in the imagined Catholic heartlands (particularly Italy) – places that just happened to be nonGerman. Even by the sixteenth century, then, the typefaces were politicized, if only so far as they related to religious institutions. Schwabacher was favored because it was deemed less-Catholic, because German-lands were imagined as less archetypically Catholic, and Schwabacher is what they used. Although this is different from later rationale based more explicitly on ethnic and national (rather than religious/institutional) identity, the similarities of neutral form becoming loaded with human meaning is unmistakable, and identifiable even at this time. These threads of semiotic-ideological consistency are extremely useful in understanding the more modern –and much more complex/ loaded– interpretations of the Fraktur and Antiqua fonts that followed from Schwabacher and Rotunda. As with later understandings, there was a co-development between the institutionalized meanings and the more personified ones. The reciprocal nature of these understandings as related to the loaded meaning of form begin from the institutional and move towards the personified, in a reciprocal nature. This pattern could be said to begin with Lutheran’s use of Schwabacher. From the outset Lutheranism was populist in its outlook: translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, attacks on the primacy of papal interpretation, and so on. That this interpretation of blackletter typefaces was not yet linked with German identity – which, again, did not as such exist – does not preclude its “völkisch” undertones; only that at this time that volk need not be German. Rather, the volk implied relates to the older, truer definition of the Germanic

 Bain & Shaw, “Blackletter vs. Roman,” 22.

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word, one with shades of meaning for which neither “people” nor the English cognate (and phonetically near-identical) “folk” quite capture. Its implication is that of the common people and everyday existence, as opposed to institutionalized systems of power and prestige. It should be acknowledged that this was an ideological-cultural association, if mainly cultural in the ways that religions can be imagined best as traditions rather than systems of collective belief. It cannot, in contrast, be said to originate with any intrinsic attribute of the different forms themselves. That blackletter typefaces were associated with popular culture and völkisch accessibility may be surprising, given that blackletter appears by far the more complex and ornate form. This is particularly so to current eyes, yet was also said of the time.²² Their symbolism is not rooted in their actual aesthetic virtues, however, but rather the imaginings of the people and institutions that used them.

1803 – 1871: French invasions and the rise of German national identity Per the loaded ideation of these symbols, political upheaval will naturally alter its perception. If a single year can be said to typify this semiotic baggage – or, at the very least, mark the beginning of its politicization – that year would be 1803. The invading French armies awoke the perceived need for national unification so as to ‘catch up’ with the nations around them in terms of ethno-national stability and modernization (“FN,” 40). The period between 1803 and unification under Prussian leadership in 1871 was the rapid development of German nationhood, and, with it, the symbols associated with that nascent identity. The developing relationship between people and nationhood also took on profoundly philosophical dimensions within Germany, particularly given the comparably novel idea that nationhood presented to that people. The Zeitgeist of the era was summed up thusly by Hegel: The nation to which is ascribed a moment of the idea in the form of a natural principle is entrusted with giving complete effect to it in the advance of the self-developing self-con-

 Philipp Luidl “A Comparison of Fraktur and Roman Type: A German Study,” in Blackletter: Type and National Identity, ed. Peter Bain and Paul Shaw (New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1998): 16 – 21, 18.

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sciousness of the world mind. This nation is dominant in world history during the one epoch, and is only once that it can make its hour strike.²³

As a young man Hegel even witnessed the catalyst for this developing identity in the flesh: I saw the Emperor [Napoleon] – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it […] this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.²⁴

Hegel was unwittingly describing the sentiment of the German people towards nationhood generally. In some way Napoleon served as the idealized national identity personified – bold, self-assured, strong – albeit not their own. The task for Germany, then, was to develop such an identity, which, as noted earlier in the works of Barthes, largely come in the form of “mythologies,” or, more generally, collective symbols. The German national anthem “Lied der Deutschen” was written in 1841, meant to symbolize the need for the subordination of regional identities in favor of a national one (GI, 35). Likewise were the Brothers Grimm active in this time, and Germanic folklore and ancient mythology re-entered the public consciousness. According to historian Christ Kaminsky, the codifying of these tales served as “a living tradition of the vernacular,” a service that can likewise be said of the form in which they were recorded.²⁵ The process of creating symbols of nationhood, and reimagining old ones, was in full swing. The most popular typeface in Germany became one such symbol, most obviously because of its disuse elsewhere. More meaningful than any separate ideological aspect was the font’s association with Germanness. Given this linkage, the key to understanding the loaded associations of Fraktur is found by a study of German self-ideation. Germany – or, less anachronistically, the German peoples – saw themselves as under threat. Quite understandably so, as the fractured states of the Holy Roman Empire were, at least at first, wildly outmatched by the French war machine. The Napoleonic invasion can be seen as a highwater mark in German national paranoia – it is however by no means exclusive. German identity can itself be said to develop from imitations of other peoples,

 Georg Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Malcolm Knox (London: Oxford UP, 1967): 217– 218.  Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000): 149.  Lawrence Mirsky, “The Crystalline Plant,” in Blackletter: Type and National Identity, ed. Peter Bain and Paul Shaw (New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1998): 6 – 9, 7.

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and was, from its earliest and most primitive origins with Martin Luther, be seen in terms of reaction against outside forces generally regarded as more powerful, or at least secure, than themselves (GI, 12). The events 1803 confirmed the worst suspicions of the German people, and cemented their feeling as a people under threat. Nationalism was the result. Both left and right, German national identity was largely borne from this idealized self-preservation of formerly disparate populations. This pressure, combined with the feeling of latent national development, provided fertile ground for much of what followed in the next 150 years.²⁶ These peculiarities of German national identity cannot be underestimated when attempting to understand the semiotic implications of Fraktur typeface, past and present. While for hundreds of years blackletter fonts had been associated with German-speaking lands both without and within, these were rooted in apolitical tradition and völkisch accessibility. At most, the letters were associated Lutheran piety in opposition to French and Italian Catholicism. The nationalism of other European peoples did not go unnoticed, and Napoleon’s invasions brought them to the fore. Antiqua was the Grande Armée and the threat of foreign domination; Fratkur was an old aesthetic linked with a new idea. Given the historic intensity of both Francophobia and German nationalism, this period serves as the crescendo for Antiqua as representative of the hated “other,” and Fraktur as symbolic of the under-seige “self.” The unification of Germany meant the solidifying of the meanings of form discussed here. This period, up until Germany and Austria-Hungary’s defeat in World War I, was one of relative of stabilization in terms of both identity and interpretation of form. While Austria was notably excluded from Germany proper, relations were normalized and close ties were created, creating a distinct development of a “Mitteleuropäische” (Middle European) identity that had its heyday in this period.²⁷ This stability and German hegemony likewise gave way to an empowered, popular usage of Fraktur as “the” German script.²⁸ The Fraktur-Antiqua debate seemed largely settled, in that both typefaces were legible to the German people, and were used in public life. During this period Germany could be considered digraphic, with a population using two scripts

 Hans Peter Willberg, “Fraktur and Nationalism,” in Blackletter: Type and National Identity, ed. Peter Bain and Paul Shaw (New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1998): 40 – 49, 40; further references in the text, abbreviated as “FN.”  Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics, 25.  Philipp Theodore Bertheau, “The German Language and Two Faces of Its Script: A Genuine Expression of European Culture?” in Blackletter: Type and National Identity, ed. Peter Bain and Paul Shaw (New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1998): 22– 31, 26; further references in the text, abbreviated as “GL.”

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with equal proficiency, the way Serbian uses both Latin and Cyrillic letters. Fraktur was the preferred method, with 57 % of all books and 60 % of all periodicals printed in blackletters in 1891, with approximately 90 % of these in the specific typeface known as Fraktur. These figures had been consistent for some time, and would remain so until 1941 (“GL,” 27). Frequently, Fraktur was used as the body of a text, with foreign words and names set using Antiqua font, a juxtaposition which highlights the nationalized understandings of the forms. A stabilization of the Imperial German state likewise meant a stability in the symbolic understanding of its typeface. When Otto von Bismarck, who famously declared “Deutsche Bücher in lateinischen Buchstaben lese ich nicht!” (“I do not read German books in Latin letters!”) he was reflecting the understanding of the German public, albeit in ways less bombastic and more domestic in nature (“GL,” 22). The two fonts were also utilized in different contexts: Literary works could be trusted to be in the Fraktur, while scientific texts were more likely to be in Antiqua (“GL,” 27). This is reflective of some of the ideations of typeface as explored below, representing the associations made between Antiqua and Fraktur as understood by the German(‐speaking) public between the Napoleonic Invasions of 1803 and the end of World War I in 1918. Some of this symbolism involves a personification of form, such that the fonts take on human attributes; others are more systemically-situated. In either case, they evolve over time concurrent with German identity. It is worth remembering that the objective validity of these evaluations is irrelevant; they are real to the extent to which they are believed. They are linked not only to historicity but also to evolving understandings within collective memory. That such historical circumstances could imbue inanimate objects like typefaces with personified meanings seems far-fetched at first glance; however, the personified symbolism is a daily reality. Consider the masculine attributes of a sword, warlike and phallic, or the studious associations of glasses. That “studious” is an innate human attribute, and therefore inapplicable to an object (for glasses cannot study) makes this a personified meaning of an inanimate object. Likewise, that there is no evidence that those with glasses are more intelligent than those without glasses, that the perception in popular imagination remains shows the enduring power of symbols to contain meaning purely based upon culture-bound human associations. Symbolism can be historically determined, such as the guillotine with both violent revolution and France, as well as alter over time: despite being domesticated in the Andes thousands of years ago, the potato is today associated with Ireland, where it did not exist prior to the late sixteenth century. Fraktur and Antiqua carried similar meanings in Germany, particularly starting around 1803. The personified associations did not develop in isolation, but

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were in fact wrapped up in respective ideations of cultures for one another in what amount to something of ethno-national stereotypes. These associations are also more related to ideations of place and people than to specific historical circumstances – that is, the ideas associated with (usually national) identity, rather than separate, sub-identities that may come with it. The greatest breadth and depth of meaning bound to Fraktur and Antiqua was within Germany, and in direct opposition to imaginations of Italian and, increasingly, French culture. As discussed at some length this was particularly so as Franco-German relations grew most antagonistic, during Napoleon and subsequent conflicts. Put simply, Antiqua was not just “French” but “France,” Fraktur not just “German” but “Germany” (or rather, the German people). Personified meaning of form was the inevitable result. Many of the meanings found here are best understood in relation to one another, often discernable into pairs. For example, the bifurcated writing system took on a gendered ideation. The refined, effeminate Frenchman and the almost barbarically masculine German have been part of the popular imaginings of the two peoples since at least the eighteenth century – ideations held about each country, by both countries (GI, 16). The gendered nature of the border between France and Germany is partially evidenced in usual personifications of the two countries as well as in the perceived sound of their languages. The Antiqua and Fraktur typefaces, as perceived by the German public in this period, developed these gendered meanings in turn.²⁹ The fonts were further imagined in terms of their relative decadence versus thoughtfulness. The spirit is epitomized in the German self-characterization – still very much used today – of Germany as “Das Land der Dichter und Denker” (“The Land of Poets and Thinkers”). Then as now it was used with deeply Romantic undertones, carrying the meaning of a people imperfect, but trying, misunderstood, but with something special to offer. A major aspect of German identity, at least at its most positive, revolves around the self-conceptualizations of depth. Up until its subsequent reactionary politicization in the mid-twentieth century, Fraktur was heavily, and rather explicitly, imbued with this meaning within Germany also. This was not only by its association with Germanness – although certainly that. It is additionally reasoned the density of the script, in terms of the closeness of letters and preponderance of ink, conveyed a level of power by nature of the form. This attribute was noted even among detractors of the script, who otherwise found it burdensome and overwrought in its aesthet-

 Bain and Shaw, “Blackletter vs. Roman,” 12.

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ic appeal to depth.³⁰ This nonetheless conformed to the thoughtful, humble, and honest values the Germans ascribed to themselves. Germans were like “an intense intellectual exercise,” while French culture was “alien” to “profound emotions” (TM, 276). By extension, Fraktur was true, if misunderstood, with Antiqua symbolically carrying superficiality, decadence, avarice, and duplicity. The reflections of these forms to German conceptions of themselves and others (namely, the French) is unmistakable. This symbolism can be taken still further; indeed, demarcation between symbolic meanings is not always clear, with one signified concept bleeding into another with shades of gradation. Such is the case with the aforementioned notions and the gendered nature of certain borders.³¹ That relationship between the French and Germans has long been so imagined, with France (and, indeed, Latinate Europe at large) associated with femininity in the minds of Germanic peoples, and Germans, conversely, as masculine. True to the nature of symbolic representation the associations are rarely spoken out loud. Instead, they are crouched in seemingly unrelated content that themselves serve vehicles for the symbolic meaning. Consider the following critique from 1835 on the differences between Italian and German music: You say that Italian music is the mother of all music. That may well be. But a mother is usually a woman, consequently she is also subject to the fate of that sex, which, as is well known, increases in talent and beauty only to a certain age and then with every year becomes richer in wrinkles and poorer in spirit… The music which lives in Germany is of the male sex, has a serious nature, is somewhat imbued with Protestantism, and therefore likes to ask the question –why?– and, when creating, thinks more about what is right than about what is beautiful… for this reason, the German deserves the place of honor. (TM, 277)

Music here serves as the stand-in for conceptualizations of national identity. Interpretation of the visual representations of peoples would be perceived likewise. That is, the gendered nature of Franco-German border was extended to encompass those imagined associations of the genders, thereby becoming associated with otherwise neutral symbols of the respective peoples. The relationship between Antiqua and Fraktur font carried the same gendered meanings as the music described above, for the same reasons, at the same time, to the same people. Despite the allusions to beauty and motherhood, the gendered (and associated) meanings of the typeface schism were binary, and one-sided: honesty ver-

 Updike, Printing Types, Their History, Forms and Use, 147.  Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan, Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009): 19 – 20.

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sus duplicity, depth versus superficiality, and so on. These were personified meanings, generally devoid of politicization on their own. Not so the symbolic representation found with Rationalism versus Romanticism. Likewise owing some derivation to cultures of France and Germany, the complexity of these associations meant a more nuanced rendering of symbolic national identity, and one firmly situated in the ideological-political struggles of the time. Perhaps because of its concurrence with the foundational development of German national identity, the German Romantic Period left a greater mark on impressions of the people, and the national consciousness, than did the Romantic Period in other regions of Europe (GI, 92– 93). As explored elsewhere in this paper, there remained semiotic linkage between Fraktur and other symbols of German identity, particularly those utilizing print. The collected works of the Brothers Grimm, for example, would have aided and been aided by this association, creating a reciprocal nationalizing of symbols rooted in the Romantic tradition. The longstanding connection of Germany with print itself, as befitting of the land of Gutenberg and the first (European) print shops, further highlights the connectivity between the long-predominant Fraktur typeface and recollections of earlier times. Not as early as the Antiqua fonts called upon the Classical World, but rather, to the Middle Ages, and the ideations of courtly Romanticism that came with it. Lingering associations existed well into the early twentieth century, and may be said to be evident even today in the linkage of Fraktur of radical nationalism. Romanticism renewed interest in a past already associated with Germany, wherein even the famed poet Goethe can be said to have been caught up in the spirit of medievalism (GI, 41). In this way the formation of German national identity followed the pattern found in other European countries, referring back to a proto-imagining of the nation as a source of contemporary inspiration. French nationalism renewed interest in the ancient Gauls, and English nationalism invoked the memory of Boudicca and Arthurian legend, even privileging the Anglo-Saxons over the Norman invaders. In the disunified German states, a uniting force was a shared history of opposition to empire – particularly that of Ancient Rome. Despite the passage of over 1,500 years, the ultimately successful Teutonic resistance to would-be Roman domination became a point of pride for developing national identity. The Hermannsdenkmal (Hermann Monument) was begun in 1838, memorializing the leader that ultimately thwarted Roman ambition in Magna Germania.³² The Romans, of course, had better luck to the southwest, conquering Gaul and Latin-

 Hans Pohlsander, National Monuments and Nationalism in 19th Century Germany (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008): 14.

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izing its people. From all sides Germany was surrounded by former territories of the Empire, including that which invaded in great number in 1803. In a way neither totally coincidental nor smoothly related, the use of Fraktur typeface, versus the use of Antiqua, was, particularly to Germans in a nationalist and defensive time, easily analogous to the borders of the old Roman Empire. Once more the German people were forced to defend themselves against encroachment from the same directions as before, if in a very different contexts. The literal invasion came with muskets and bayonets where once there had been the iconic Roman gladii. Typographically, the encroaching hegemony of Antiqua typeface, with all of its other associations described here, provided an ancient historical association for an already loaded conflict of forms. This geo-cultural overlap millennia later was only exacerbated by the very real aesthetics of the forms themselves. Antiqua typefaces –encompassing a range of fonts including the aptly named New Times Roman – are indeed based on font used by ancient Rome. This association worked in the other direction, also, with reversed meaning and appreciation. Antiqua and Fraktur become symbols of the Enlightenment and Medieval world, respectively – associations that to some extent are evident even today. The linkage between the Classical Era and the Renaissance, and subsequent Enlightenment, was explicit, with thinkers at the time attempting to rediscover the wisdom, stability, and cultural advancement of the ancient world. For our purposes it is the aesthetic alignment with the distant past that privileged non-blackletter fonts in these areas, at least to the extent that their adoption was not complete already for other, less loaded reasons.³³ The typefaces known as Fraktur, in contrast, appeared not just old fashioned – the way Old English appears to Anglophone readers today – but reactionary, given their closer proximity to the Dark Ages and their more ubiquitous use at that time. Within Germany (or, again, German-speaking lands), this was viewed with much less stigma than among societies whose identities were more linked to the Classical, pre-Dark Ages past, and more readily embraced enlightenment thinking. German peoples, in contrast, had little Classical historical foundation to cling to, and were more apt to celebrate their Medieval past and its aesthetics. The creation of Neuschwanstein Castle, the operas of Richard Wagner, and the penning of the Brothers Grimm folk legends all occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. That this period of fascination with romantic renderings of the Middle Ages coincided with political events that encouraged unification further solidi-

 Luidl, “A Comparison of Fraktur and Roman Type,” 18 – 21.

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fied the symbolic representations of the Mediaeval world as foundational to German national identity. In this sense the symbolism of Fraktur to the Germans mirrored that found elsewhere, but was more likely considered a positive than a negative. In a period of turmoil and national soul-searching, the form of traditional German typeface seemed to provide stability, comfort, and pride, just when these things were needed most. For this reason the positive associations of Fraktur with the Middle Ages superseded the potentially positive associations of Antiqua with the Enlightenment, even among those Germans appreciative of the more substantive, non-aesthetic changes the Enlightenment brought to Europe. German thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition also celebrated Fraktur, their culture more inclined as it was to appreciate the aesthetic aspects of this period. Mirroring this ideological-aesthetic relationship and its transcendence of true ideological evaluation was the linkage sectarianism and typeface, beginning as early as the Protestant Reformation itself. While not exclusive to either group, the association of Antiqua with the Roman Catholicism was established by at least the sixteenth century, particularly in the eyes of German Protestants (“GL,” 26). The strong associations of Martin Luther with Protestantism in general is well established, as is the Germanness of Luther himself. The deeply Catholic nature of much of German-speaking lands, specifically southern Germany and Austria, did not of course preclude the use of Fraktur within these areas. The use of the font was associated first and foremost with the German language and people, which, of course, Austrians and Bavarians and Swabians and so on are included within. The question is not whether these respective typefaces were used exclusively by these respective traditions – they were not. Rather, the religious implications, like the others described here, were rooted in the usually unstated evaluation of the forms. The linkage between Protestantism and Germany was undeniable, as was the fact that, even within Catholic German-speaking lands, Germans were known to be less homogeneously Catholic than France, especially after the Counter Reformation and extermination/expulsion of the Huguenot populations. It was certainly less Catholic than Italy or Spain. Fraktur, then, was imbued with Protestant meaning due to its explicit associations with Germanness, even among those Germans in the Catholic tradition.

Imperial Germany and the politicization of Fraktur As the social importance of the religious schism cooled and conflict within political thought intensified, so, too, did the symbolism of typefaces in Germany gradually adopt a predominantly secular tone. This was the period of rising na-

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tionalism across the European continent, and Germany was no exception. The distinctly nationalist flavor of the French Revolution and subsequent military invasions further aroused similar –and opposing– feelings in the peoples on and east of the Rhine (TM, 273). The formative period of German national identity roughly approximating the first half of the nineteenth century was not marked with the reactionary militarism that was to follow. The student protests of the 1830s were both radically nationalist and radically liberal, not unlike more recent “national liberation” movements, and very unlike the highly reactionary nationalism that characterized the Weimar Era. Fraktur’s relative apoliticism at this time in relation to a left-right dichotomy would nonetheless best be imagined through a nationalist lens. The symbolic nature of the font was political only in so far as it represented Germany as an as-yet unrealized nation. Pan-Germanism at the time had no strict ideological association (TM, 280). What is most relevant for this study is the ways in which the period leading up to the collapse of Imperial Germany in 1918 shaped the political meanings of the Fraktur typeface and, thereby, laid the foundation for the hyper-politicization that was to follow. To be sure the Fraktur typefaces were seen as firmly “German,” both within and outside of Germany, and utilized as such by both the political left and right. Still, one does not have to be English to use the Old English font. It is clear that there were political associations with the Fraktur and opposing Antiqua fonts, in contexts that parallel the nature and intensity of larger political concerns at that time. Much like the older, broader associations with the German people themselves, a symbol cannot represent a thing which cannot be imagined. The meanings described below, then, must be considered strictly in the context of pre-1918 political discourse, one very different than the post-Imperial Weimar era and all that has followed from it. There was indeed a continuum, with Fraktur having become the ‘conservative’ font somewhere between the German unfication and 1919. The reasons for this are fairly straightforward, and in some ways relate more to ideations about places and people (namely, France and the French) then to historical events. Then as now the Enlightenment Era was strongly associated with France, associations which were further cemented with the French Revolution in the 1790s. Their preferred typeface, to Germans known as Antiqua, had leftist connotations that fluctuated depending on the pressure from France (politically, militarily, or culturally), and the upswing in conservative-nationalist sentiment that came with it (“FN,” 42). The aforementioned quote by the conservative Otto von Bismarck can certainly be said to reflect this interpretation of “German letters,” as can the words of famed German type designer Rudolf Koch:

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German script is like a symbol of the inherent mission of the German people, who, among all civilized races, must not merely defend but also act as a living model and example of its unique, distinctive, and nationalistic character in all its manifestations of life (“FN,” 43).

The “German way of being,” felt Koch, was expressed in “the German way of writing,” i. e., the Fraktur script. In this context of Fraktur as currently imagined, with its Fascist associations all but confirmed by 1945, these words do not seem out of place, but rather boilerplate pontificating of a Nazi demagogue. But Koch was in fact neither a fascist nor a politician – he was a fairly apolitical man who designed fonts for a living. He was the inventor of a wide range of typefaces, many san-serifed and decidedly modern (“FN,” 42). His sentiments therefore were almost emotionally nationalistic and conservative in a comparably apolitical, pre-Nazi context. Fraktur was not just conservative because Antiqua was “French;” it also represented the “home” vs. the “other.” The pressure to conform to the more panEuropean script of Antiqua was itself based on the mounting cosmopolitanism of a rapidly industrializing world power (which, it could be said, ultimately doomed its use in 1941). By representing the outside other, Antiqua, by definition, went in the face of German traditionalism, particularly given the aforementioned hyper-comparative nature of German nationalism. By definition cultural conservatism relates to the upholding of tradition in the face of new reforms – Fraktur was nothing if not a typographic example of this ideal. It is therefore fair to say that the liberal-nationalists at this time, influenced as they were by democratic ideals, did not favor Fraktur for its political but rather for its purely nationalist implications. Conservatives, in contrast, could claim both associations (that is, German/national and conservative), given its imagining as preor anti-Enlightenment by virtue of being natively German, and additionally non-French. To be sure there was usage of Fraktur among the left, popular as it was with all segments of German society. The largely student nationalists of the eighteenth century especially can be said to hold deeply liberal (that is, democratic as opposed to monarchist) ideals, while simultaneously being firmly pro-Fraktur as a symbol of the German people. In less nationalist context Fraktur was used for German print media of all persuasion, including the major newspapers of the German left: Both the Communist Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) and the Social-Democrat Vorwärts (Forward) were printed entirely in Fraktur, down to the miniscule dates and subheadings. It would be a mistake to presume the conservative association with Fraktur was absolute, and timeless. Nonetheless, it was the National-Socialists that politicized Fraktur to the remarkable degree with which it is burdened today, notably playing up the hyper-

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Germanness with variations titled “Deutschland,” “National,” and “Tannenberg,” the latter referencing the site of a major battle against Imperial Russia in World War I, itself named in revenge for a defeat by the Teutonic Knights in 1410 (“FN,” 46). The Nazi’s would go on to outlaw Fraktur typefaces in 1941, absurdly condemning them as “Judenlettern,” or “Jewish letters” as a means of stigmatizing their form. In reality, the latent conformity to Antiqua script by the Nazi authorities was inspired by pan-European hegemony, and the wish for non-German peoples to be able to read and understand their printing (“FN,” 44). Even here the symbolic meaning of Fraktur parallels to German identity, with ideas of tradition being superseded by the Nazi’s distinct brand of modernist, materialist thirst for control. In spite of this abolition, Fraktur has now become linked with the “N.S.-Zeit” (National-Socialist Era) in the minds of most Germans today (“FN,” 48 – 49). Before this the most conservative associations of Fraktur (or, indeed, German-ness) might be that of the Counter-Enlightenment, from which certain strains of German Romanticism wholeheartedly subscribed. While perhaps marginal compared to the whole of its use during this time period, as compared to the host of other associations, this imagining of conservatism would prove its most enduring association. Here, too, the typeface parallels the self-conceptualization of the German people: In the post-war period Fraktur has fallen out of popular usage, and remains stigmatized, in accordance with the current aversion to nationalism among the German population. Indeed, outside of an explicitly apolitical, innocent, old fashioned context, the typeface may be said to prompt discomfort, representational as it has become of Germany’s darkest days. The reasons for this aversion –and the history that lead to it– is itself greatly worthy of study. The ideation of Fraktur within post-Kaiserreich Germany must serve as the topic of a separate paper. Its general omission here is symptomatic of its complexity, and its enduring parallelism to German self-identity over time. The symbolism of Fraktur has continued to co-evolve, within and alongside a society that has undergone frequent, rapid, and dramatic upheavals, in a remarkably short period of time. With the resurgence of the radical right, in Germany as elsewhere, the relationship between national identity and symbolic representation has become all the more pressing, and therefore worthy of thoughtful consideration. Without their human context the German blackletter fonts known as Fraktur are but a collection of symbols on a page, generally less angular than more familiar typefaces and utilizing a higher density of ink. Whatever they are made to represent upon a page, that is, the actual message conveyed through strictly content, the Fraktur typefaces have been burdened with layers of understanding that transcends any and all of its messages, at least in contexts where it is imagined

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in relation to the elsewhere (and now) ubiquitous Antiqua forms. For all of its incarnations, German identity – both imagined as origin and as ambition – has been mirrored by the perception of these set of fonts. Among all the variable imaginings of this form, the idea of this enduring linkage remains the sole constant, evolving in accordance as with few other symbolic pairings on earth.

Inbar Kaminsky

Parenthetical Embodiment and the Posthuman Body in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ¹

The essay explores the theory of posthumanism in relation to Woolf’s extensive use of round and square brackets in her influential novel To the Lighthouse. The article essentially argues that all of the emerging patterns confine corporeality in order to produce a ‘pure’ thought process that is not contingent upon materiality and subsequently creates a posthuman body, which is made out of the distilled consciousness of the main narrative and the parenthetical embodiment of corporeal elements. The posthuman body in the novel is traced by providing evidence of individual consciousness within the lines preceding many of the round and square brackets that appear throughout the novel, while distinguishing between the different parts of the novel, the different shapes of brackets and the contents of the brackets, which include mental processes, physical activity, the marginalization of a character and the decay of the flesh. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse maintains two unique elements of style and structure; the stylistic element entails an abundance of parentheses and square brackets that are dispersed throughout the text.² The structural element entails the division of the novel into three disproportionate parts: ‘The Window,’ which contains approximately 177 pages, the relatively short section named ‘Time Passes,’ containing approximately 25 pages and ‘The Lighthouse,’ which contains approximately 93 pages. This posthuman body is essentially created by the parenthetical practice of confining anything that is not ‘purely’ a product of consciousness, thus allowing the thoughts and feelings of various characters to roam freely throughout the text of To the Lighthouse, unanchored by materiality in its various forms. In this essay, I intend to show that the two elements of parenthetical practice and disproportionate chapter division are closely related and that together they create a posthuman body, a consciousness that does not rely upon any form of corporeality for its continual existence.

 The author wishes to thank Professor Hana Wirth-Nesher for her support. This essay originated in Professor Wirth-Nesher’s inspirational M.A. seminar on Virginia Woolf.  By ‘parentheses’ I am referring to the novel’s distinct use of round brackets as opposed to square brackets. https://doi.org/9783110532913-014

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The symbolic construction of this posthuman body corresponds to Jean Guiguet’s view of Virginia Woolf’s work as capable of expressing “the inward by the outward, depth by surface, silence by words, the abstract by the concrete.”³ This apparent paradox is resolved by what Myra J. Seaman referred to as theoretical posthumanism, which transforms the humanist subject into many subjects, in part by releasing the body from the constraints placed on it not only by nature but also by humanist ideology, and allowing it to roam free and ‘join’ with other beings, animate and inanimate.⁴

By parenthetical embodiment, I am referring to Woolf’s attempts to create the Cartesian separation between thought and matter, or in other words, “the Cartesian conception of mind as an informational pattern separable from the body.”⁵ It should be noted that neuroscience has disproven the effectiveness of the Cartesian dichotomy of body versus mind as an accurate depiction of the human mechanism. Instead, neuroscientists and cognitive researchers, such as Antonio Damasio and Francisco Varela, maintain that human consciousness cannot be solely attributed to a cluster of neural connections since consciousness is also “highly dependent on the material substrate of the biological body, with emotion and other dimensions as supportive structure.”⁶ However, the fact that the scientific community has deemed the Cartesian model manifestly impossible in human form can potentially render it posthuman, and in Woolf’s case, Cartesian logic serves the artistic purpose of freeing the stream of consciousness from the bounds of corporeality and materiality by creating parenthetical embodiment. The issue of embodiment is indeed problematic, and posthuman embodiment even more so. Donna Haraway has related to this issue from a feminist perspective by stating that embodiment is no longer inherently linked to the issue of gender, in part due to the growing refusal of both men and women to be classified according to the restrictive binary of male/female.⁷ In addition, Haraway’s definition of posthuman embodiment befits Woolf’s parenthetical practice – “embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations […] Embodi Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Hogarth, 1965): 368.  Myra J. Seaman, “Becoming More (than) Human: Affective Posthumanisms, Past and Future,” Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 (2007): 246 – 275, 248.  Timothy Lenoir, “Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape: Part One: Embracing the Posthuman,” Configurations 10.2 (2002): 203 – 220, 205.  Lenoir, “Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape,” 205.  Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991): 148.

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ment is significant prosthesis.”⁸ The image of embodiment as prosthesis is instrumental in conveying the complicated relationship in To the Lighthouse between the parenthetical content of the material world and the disembodied consciousness of the characters in the novel. The textual separation of these two elements – thought and matter – and their subsequent prosthetic correlation constitute a posthuman body precisely due to their artificiality and inconsistency with how the human mind and body work seamlessly together, interwoven at every stage of human consciousness. The issue of textual separation is not only evident in Woolf’s parenthetical practice but also in her choice to render the three parts of To the Lighthouse as thematically separate; ‘The Window’ deals with young James Ramsay’s wish to go to the lighthouse, despite poor weather conditions and his father’s disapproval. It also presents the gathering of guests, most notably, Lily Briscoe, a young and insecure painter; William Bankes, a botanist; Paul Rayley, a young man who is enchanted by Mrs. Ramsay and thus, according to her wishes, intends to marry Minta Doyle and the preparations for a dinner party. ‘Time Passes’ introduces the passing of ten years, during which World War I takes place and several characters, including Mrs. Ramsay, die. The setting is one of decay and abandonment as Mrs. McNab, an elderly woman who is entrusted with the care of the house in the absence of the Ramsays, attempts to restore it. ‘The Lighthouse’ deals with the remaining members of the Ramsay family returning home and attempting to complete the journey to the lighthouse, while Lily attempts to complete her painting and liberate herself from the overbearing shadow of Mrs. Ramsay. As previously stated, in spite of several stylistic choices that operate to dissolve the boundaries between the spiritual and the corporeal, Woolf employs at least one stylistic technique that creates the opposite effect. Accordingly, I make the claim that Woolf’s distinct use of parentheses and square brackets in this novel is an effort to confine corporeality and liberate mental activity from the bounds of the body, which subsequently creates a posthuman body. Although the term itself had not yet been invented during the writing of To The Lighthouse, I believe it is the only fitting theoretical framework to describe Woolf’s parenthetical practice. I shall adhere to Katherine Hayles’s conceptualization of posthumanism that traces the posthuman along the binary of “pattern / randomness,”⁹ in which var-

 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 195.  Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999): 373.

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ious embodied agents work simultaneously as “distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind.”¹⁰ This form echoes Erich Auerbach’s multipersonal representation of consciousness, one of the most influential studies on Woolf. However, Hayles’s binary of the posthuman also includes the corporeal element, which I believe to be pertinent to what Woolf attempted to achieve; namely, a representation of multiple disembodied consciousnesses and their corporeal relics that are subject to confinement precisely because they are not to be discarded but rather preserved. In Mimesis, Auerbach coins a specific term relating to Woolf’s depiction of the various characters’ thought process in To the Lighthouse; the “multipersonal representation of consciousness” is referred to by Auerbach as Woolf’s technique of creating a consciousness that constantly shifts from one focalizer to another.¹¹ Auerbach also makes the distinction between his technique and related definitions, which he believes do not apply in the case of To the Lighthouse – interior monologues and stream of consciousness: The devices employed in this instance (and by a number of contemporary writers as well) to express the contents of the consciousness of the dramatis personae have been analyzed and described syntactically. Some of them have been named (erlebte Rede, stream of consciousness, monologue interieur are examples). Yet these stylistic forms, especially the erlebte Rede, were used in literature much earlier too, but not for the same aesthetic purpose.¹²

While my purpose in this essay is to attempt to isolate individual consciousness in relation to confined corporeality, I do bear in mind that such a separation is not always possible and that it is certainly a complex matter, precisely because one has to extract fragments of individual consciousness – alternatively named ‘thought’ or ‘focalization’ throughout this essay – out of what Auerbach rightfully defines as multipersonal representation of consciousness. In The World without a Self, James Naremore maintains that To the Lighthouse is first and foremost a narrative that engages the theme of Death.¹³ Naremore also claims that certain stylistic choices create a unique impression, one in

 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 376 – 377.  Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature [1946] Fiftieth Anniversary Ed., trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003): 536.  Auerbach, Mimesis, 535.  James Naremore, The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven: Yale UP: 1973): 112.

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which activities and events are not clearly separated from the thoughts of the characters: Everything seems to be refracted through the medium of a prose which tends to blur distinctions. There is an increased tendency to suppress or muffle exterior actions or events; dialogue is usually reported indirectly or filtered through the sensibilities of the characters; even the details of setting have been reduced to a minimum.¹⁴

Regarding the issue of parentheses, Naremore maintains that their content is simply a natural continuum of a given character’s thoughts, or a place designated by Woolf for overarching comments in the form of the omniscient narrator – “Mrs. Woolf is fond of parenthesis […] Sometimes it represents a shift in a character’s thoughts, and sometimes it is used for remarks by the author.”¹⁵ It is clear that Naremore does not attribute any importance to the role of parenthesis in the novel, but rather sees it as a storehouse into which objects are randomly discarded. I maintain the opposite; this essay strives to show that the act of confinement via parentheses or square brackets in To the Lighthouse is not random but rather intentional. In “Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship,” Maria Dibattista asserts that Woolf’s language in this novel alternates between a grounded dialect of the present and an abstract dialect of timelessness. Dibattista maintains that the dynamics created by these two languages is an integral part of the activities that take place in the novel.¹⁶ While I do not subscribe to Dibattista’s claim, this strange affinity between the emotional language of Woolf’s “sensations and imaginings” and the novel’s depicted activities underscores an important point;¹⁷ the reader of To the Lighthouse is constantly asked to reconcile two contradictory elements. On the one hand, the reader is subjected to the inner thoughts and feelings of various characters, and on the other hand, the few physical activities that do take place throughout the narrative seem somehow contrived and marginal, in light of the overwhelming amount of mental activities. Jack Stewart sees To the Lighthouse as a site of conflation between the seemingly contradictory elements of the natural world and the subjective inner world of human consciousness:

 Naremore, The World without a Self, 113.  Naremore, The World without a Self, 125.  Maria Dibattista, “Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000): 127– 145, 138.  Dibattista, “Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship,” 138.

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Woolf embodies emotion and idea in images that concretize mental activity. Such visualization marks the elegiac language of To the Lighthouse […] A striking fusion of inner and outer, past and present, concrete (body/earth/color) and abstract (friendship/reality/memory).¹⁸

Auerbach maintains that thought supersedes action in this novel, as he discusses Woolf’s revolutionary plotline, in which inner events shape exterior events and not vice versa.¹⁹ Another confirmation of this pattern is presented by Mitchell Leaska, who emphasizes the steady predominance of consciousness over action throughout the To the Lighthouse. ²⁰ A more elaborate statement is presented by Susan Dick, who maintains a similar notion regarding the predominance of thought over action in the different parts of To the Lighthouse. ²¹ Dick in fact distinguishes between the different parts of the novel by maintaining that both part I and part III, which together cover most of the novel, encompass more thought than action. However, it is important to note that although Woolf’s parenthetical practice is far more subversive than the mere favoring of thought over action, this distinction represents an important steppingstone towards the conceptualization of the posthuman body in the novel, precisely because it reflects upon the complex relations between consciousness and its physical counterpart or manifestation via performance. Yet another possible solution to the conflict between thought and action throughout Woolf’s novel is presented by Martin Gliserman, who claims that Woolf’s choice of verbs that describe movement and nouns that convey the notion of center creates an effect upon the reader, fosters attention to that which “centers and middles.”²² I believe that Gliserman’s general hypothesis is useful to the analysis of parentheses and square brackets in this novel; conceived as a form of confinement, the parentheses and square brackets in To the Lighthouse seem to contain elements that might disrupt the natural flow of thoughts; namely, any activities that involve the body. Suzanne Raitt brings autobiographical evidence to support the hypothesis that Woolf’s use of parentheses has to do primarily with her desire to convey

 Jack Stewart, “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Surreal’ Imagery in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 12/13 (2013): 299 – 320, 312.  Auerbach, Mimesis, 538.  Mitchell A. Leaska, Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method (London: Hogarth P, 1970): 109.  Susan Dick, “Literary Realism in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000): 50 – 71, 60.  Martin Gliserman, Psychoanalysis, Language, and the Body of the Text (Gainesville: U State of Florida P, 1996): 134.

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to the reader the feeling of overlapping events; Raitt provides a quote from Woolf’s diary to that effect: Woolf was concerned that in the novel we should feel that we see more than one thing at once. We have already noted that this desire was particularly pronounced in the case of the ending of the novel. Woolf wonders ‘how to bring Lily & Mrs. R[amsay] together & make a combination of interest at the end […] Could I do it in a parenthesis? So that one had the sense of reading the two things at same time (D, III, 5 September 1926, 106).²³

This desire to convey to the reader the feeling of simultaneous experiences is certainly important to the representation of consciousness and also seems to correlate to Auerbach’s definition. An important insight supplied by Stewart in relation to ‘Time Passes’ section – “The challenge was to represent the phantom house as it exists in raw time and space, beyond the reach of human consciousness.”²⁴ In relation to parenthetical writing in this section, Stewart adds that The narrator foregrounds natural forces and human archetypes, reinforcing their impact on individual lives by framing references to marriages and deaths within parentheses that relate metonymically to social rituals and historical events.²⁵

The issue of consciousness and literature has been thoroughly researched by David Lodge in Consciousness & the Novel, where he discusses the gap of representation between consciousness and its literary depiction. First, Lodge maintains that literature cannot fully articulate the aloof feeling of consciousness;²⁶ second, Lodge claims that representation by narrative will always take a linear form, while consciousness is not experienced linearly, but rather as several stimulations that are experienced simultaneously.²⁷ Therefore, if one follows Lodge’s logic, it is entirely possible that Woolf’s use of parentheses and square brackets was not done for the sake of confining anything, but rather as a literary devise that would imitate the human consciousness as closely as possible. However, I maintain that the importance Woolf attributed to the thinking process, as exemplified in other experimental works like The Waves (1931), seems to rule out such a possibility; as a writer who cherishes soliloquies, it

 Suzanne Raitt, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990): 53; further references in the text, abbreviated as “VWTTL.”  Stewart, “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Surreal’ Imagery,” 316.  Stewart, “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Surreal’ Imagery,” 316.  David Lodge, Consciousness & the Novel: Connected Essays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002): 31.  Lodge, Consciousness & the Novel, 62.

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is far more likely that Woolf’s extensive use of parentheses and square brackets is done for the sake of elevating consciousness to the coveted status of an autonomous entity, a posthuman body that does not need corporeality in order to exist. Indeed, Woolf is preoccupied with marginalizing corporeality, as Patricia Waugh asserts by maintaining that Woolf admires the format of the diary due to its capacity to document the marginalized materiality of our world.²⁸ Another possible approach is presented by John Mepham, who argues that while the parentheses stress the existence of a narrator, the square brackets stress the absence of any thematic connection between the content of the brackets and the rest of the text.²⁹ In other words, Mepham seems to imply that while the parentheses are simply the narrator’s comments regarding the unfolding events of the plot, the square brackets contain independent narratives that are not related to the rest of the plot. However, I will later show in detail that the patterns which emerge as one examines the contents of both the parentheses and the square brackets throughout the novel reveal that there is at least one other possibility; namely, Woolf’s attempt to separate the physical body of the characters from their distilled thought process. Raitt also comments on the transformation that the brackets undergo throughout the different parts of the novel; while ‘The Window’ is infused with parentheses, ‘Time Passes’ introduces square brackets which also reappear in ‘The Lighthouse’, along with parentheses (VWTTL, 56). Raitt refers to Mepham’s conceptualization of relating the use of square brackets to the use of metaphor as “the fusion of two entities previously thought to be separate” (VWTTL, 56). According to Raitt, the two entities merged by the use of the square brackets are “the shock of death, and the shock of recognition” (VWTTL, 57), in relation to the death of Mrs. Ramsay. It seems that all of the aforementioned theories attribute greater importance to the fact that consciousness and its thought process reside exclusively in the main narrative rather than the thematic and structural significance of Woolf’s decision to exclude the corporeal element of these thought processes from the main narrative. However, I believe that the latter distinction should be addressed as it is crucial to the analysis of To the Lighthouse, precisely because it provides an uncharted point of view, which could potentially shed light on Woolf‘s relation to corporeality.

 Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1989): 99.  John Mepham, “Figures of Desire: Narration and Fiction in To the Lighthouse,” in The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer and the Work, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (London: Open Books, 1976): 149 – 185, 155.

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It is clear that there is no single consistent pattern of parenthetical practice in To the Lighthouse, yet one can clearly observe several central patterns. In ‘The Window,’ the first kind of parentheses consists of a thought encompassing an action or a series of actions. As the following passages illustrate, the confined action may be the act of thinking, although it is clearly a mental activity, it is not part of the thought itself. In the first passage, James Ramsay is pondering over his profound disdain toward his father, but the indication of this mental activity is enclosed in round brackets: Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. (TTL, 10)³⁰

In the second passage, it is the mental activity of Lily Briscoe, who is observing the bay and the dunes alongside William Bankes, which is enclosed in round brackets: […] both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness – because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. (TTL, 34)

However, the far more frequent kind involves physical activities; the parentheses confine activities which pertain exclusively to the bodily. A clear example of this pattern is presented when Mr. Ramsay reflects upon his children while stretching his back, thus confining the corresponding physical act to round brackets and separating it from Mr. Ramsay’s thought process: He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure. (TTL, 10 – 11)

 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse [1927] (London: Penguin, 1996); further references in the text, abbreviated as “TTL.”

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Another illustration of this pattern is the occasion in which Mrs. Ramsay muses about various noises while sitting in the window; once again, only the physical act of sitting is confined to round brackets: Odious little man, thought Mrs. Ramsay, why go on saying that?…The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking […] (TTL, 26 – 27)

Similarly, the following passage depicts Lily Briscoe, who is thinking about love while staring at Mr. Bankes. Lily’s mental act of pondering over the meaning of her life resides in the main narrative while the physical act of looking around the room is confined to round brackets: Such a rapture – for by what other name could one call it? – made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say […] That people should love like this, that Mr. Bankes should feel this for Mrs. Ramsey (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting. (TTL, 74)

Moreover, in ‘The Window,’ parentheses are sometimes used to suggest the selfimage of a character. Accordingly, Lily first marginalizes her own thoughts when she attempts to adapt Mrs. Ramsay’s point of view: She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be – Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr Bankes saying, “The vegetable salts are lost.” (TTL, 76)

In fact, Lily is subsequently marginalized; as the following passage illustrates; her observations and thoughts are placed within parentheses in the presence of Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts: Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met them, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay watching the children throwing catches. But still for a moment, though Mrs. Ramsay greeted them with her usual smile (oh, she’s thinking we’re going to get married, Lily thought). (TTL, 111)

However, ‘Time Passes’ introduces a new form for confining corporeality and a new form of confined corporeality; square brackets are used to enclose the

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deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and her children, Prue and Andrew Ramsay. Dick explores these passages of ‘Time Passes,’ in which the reader is informed via square brackets about the death of the leading character, Mrs. Ramsay, as well as her children, Prue and Andrew: The harmonies achieved at the end of Part I are broken in part II where the house and the natural world move into the foreground and the characters’ lives go on elsewhere. In the first draft, news of the Ramsays comes only through the thoughts of Mrs. McNab. At some point late in the writing of the book, Woolf decides to supplement these muddled reports with the bracketed passages that announce the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue and Andrew, along with other facts.³¹

Raitt also discusses the aforementioned passage regarding Mrs. Ramsay’s death, yet she claims that the thematic separation, which is forced upon the reader by the appearance of the square brackets, has a reversed effect; it only reinforces the thematic unity of the content from both inside and outside the brackets, as both ‘narratives’ engage in the absence of Mrs. Ramsay: The square brackets signal the violence with which we are forced to associate the decay of the house with that of Mrs. Ramsay, and to admit that wherever we look, she is in the end what we see. The brackets indicate at once a break in the narrative, and its essential truth. (VWTTL, 56)

In addition, Dick distinguishes between the two different types of brackets that Woolf uses in this novel; the common round brackets, or parentheses, and the less frequent square brackets. Much like Mepham, Dick maintains that the square brackets stress the split in content between the poetic descriptions of an abandoned house versus the direct and dry reports of Mrs. Ramsay’s death, which are confined to square brackets.³² However, I maintain that another distinction can be drawn between the parentheses of part I and the square brackets of part II; as the following passages show, the text outside the square brackets does not simply display multipersonal representation of consciousness, but rather resorts to literary devices designed to enhance the corporeal element, such as synecdoche and personification. The first passage introduces synecdoche as a representation of Mrs. Ramsay, who is “The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear.” It also introduces personification; the night seems to be as lost for answers as Mr. Ram-

 Dick, “Literary Realism,” 61.  Dick, “Literary Realism,” 61.

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say, thus “it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore”: The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer. [Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty]. (TTL, 192)

The second passage personifies spring, as the season of renewal seems to mourn the forthcoming knowledge of Prue Ramsay’s death while the wind can employ spies: Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind. [Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well.] And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the house again. (TTL, 197)

The third passage introduces multiple personifications; the sentence preceding the square brackets does not entail any human being, instead it is “silence fell” (TTL, 199), only to be replaced by a great noise – “there seemed to drop into this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling” (TTL, 199). The subsequent square brackets inform the reader of Andrew Ramasy’s death in combat – “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]” (TTL, 199). In the sentence following the square brackets, human beings almost become ghosts, accounted for but not specified beyond the general pronoun of “those,” who grant nature the ability to answer as they “ask of the sea and sky what message they reported” (TTL, 199). I argue that the use of both these devices creates the sensation of disembodiment; it is hardly a coincidence that Woolf chooses to depict disembodiment right before she confines the epitome of corporeality; the departure of the spirit from the body. Thus the dichotomy of thought versus action still applies, even though in a far more implicit manner than the use of parentheses in part I of the novel. Both synecdoche and personification are poetic and literary devices that do not exist outside the human mind and are the pure product of thought, while death is part of the natural process of all living organisms and is associated mainly with the decay of the flesh.

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However, the parentheses in ‘Time Passes’ seem to fulfill a double duty; they are both markers of present time, as only fitting for a section that deals almost exclusively with the passing of time, and serve to confine action. In the following passages, Mrs. McNab’s thoughts are mainly preoccupied with the past, as visions of the departed Mrs. Ramsay wash over her. Yet the parentheses enclose Mrs. McNab’s present reality and it seems they also serve to anchor her to the current activities she takes part in: Poor lady! She would never want THEM again. She was dead, they said; years ago, in London. There was the old grey cloak she wore gardening (Mrs. McNab fingered it). She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds) – she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. There were boots and shoes; and a brush and comb left on the dressing-table, for all the world as if she expected to come back tomorrow. (TTL, 202) Why the dressing-table drawers were full of things (she pulled them open), handkerchiefs, bits of ribbon. Yes, she could see Mrs. Ramsay as she came up the drive with the washing. “Good-evening, Mrs. McNab,” she would say. She had a pleasant way with her. The girls all liked her. But, dear, many things had changed since then (she shut the drawer); many families had lost their dearest. (TTL, 203)

The last part of the novel, ‘The Lighthouse,’ reinforces certain former patterns of brackets by taking them to new extremes. In ‘The Window,’ chapter XIV is overarched by parentheses as it is an answer to the question asked by Mrs. Ramsay at the end of the preceding chapter – “Did Nancy go with them?” (TTL, 112). The chapter begins with a short reply by the narrator and rapid shift into the thoughts of Nancy, one of the Ramsays’ daughters, and concludes with the thoughts of Paul Rayley: (Certainly, Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after lunch, to her attic, to escape the horror of family life […] But, good heavens, he [Paul] said to himself, putting his hand to his tie, I must not make a fool of myself.) (TTL, 112– 119)

However, when entire chapters are enclosed in ‘The Lighthouse,’ this time by square brackets, the chapters themselves are much shorter and only involve one character – “[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea]” (TTL, 246). Another example of this pattern entails a short chapter that centers on Lily Briscoe:

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[The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe, still standing and looking out over the bay. The sea stretched like silk across the bay. Distance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up in it, she felt, they were gone forever, they had become part of the nature of things. It was so calm; it was so quiet. The steamer itself had vanished, but the great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction.] (TTL, 275 – 276)

The marginalization of Lily’s thoughts, which begins in ‘The Window,’ is much more extreme in ‘The Lighthouse’ since Lily is essentially marginalized by the haunting presence of a ghost. While in ‘The Window,’ Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts overshadow Lily’s thoughts, which are confined to brackets, in ‘The Lighthouse,’ Lily’s thoughts about Mrs. Ramsay are confined to parentheses despite, or perhaps due to, Mrs. Ramsay’s physical absence: And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger (to be called back, just as she thought she would never feel sorrow for Mrs. Ramsay again. Had she missed her among the coffee cups at breakfast? not in the least) lessened; and of their anguish left, as antidote, a relief that was balm in itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of someone there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that the world had put on her, staying lightly by her side and then (for this was Mrs. Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a wreath of white flowers with which she went. Lily squeezed her tubes again. She attacked that problem of the hedge. (TTL, 256)

Finally, in ‘The Window,’ the pattern of thoughts encompassing corporeality in parentheses is quite common. In ‘The Lighthouse,’ however, it is not everyday actions that are confined to parentheses, but rather character-defining actions which seem to encapsulate the character’s personality. The following passage introduces the confined characterization of an insecure and grief-stricken Lily Briscoe: This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) – this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said. “Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her. (TTL, 237)

Another prominent example is the confined characterization of a contemplative and bookish Mr. Ramsay: For no one attracted her more; his hands were beautiful, and his feet, and his voice, and his words, and his haste, and his temper, and his oddity, and his passion, and his saying

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straight out before every one, we perish, each alone, and his remoteness. (He had opened his book.) (TTL, 249)

Furthermore, the aforementioned pattern of confining character-defining actions into brackets is also evident in case of James Ramsay, who has been eager to sail to the lighthouse from the beginning of the novel. James’s wish to sail to the lighthouse also represents the first conflict he has with his father at the tender age of six, which escalates into hatred as the plot unfolds: Lest this should be wrong, she looked at him reading the little book with the shiny cover mottled like a plover’s egg. No; it was right. Look at him now, she wanted to say aloud to James. (But James had his eye on the sail.) He is a sarcastic brute, James would say. He brings the talk round to himself and his books, James would say. He is intolerably egotistical. Worst of all, he is a tyrant. (TTL, 278)

The parenthetical practice of inserting characterization reinforces the notion that the use of round and square brackets in the novel is a calculated effort to create a fitting alternative to corporeality, rather than simply toy with the idea of disembodiment. Clearly, the use of both round and square brackets, as well as the distinct patterns that each type produces, indicates that Woolf does not randomly place excerpts of narrative within these forms of confinement, but rather chooses deliberately what to exclude from the main narrative. There is a beautiful passage that emerges in Lily’s focalization, which is emblematic of the novel’s attitude toward corporeality – “Let it come, she thought, if it will come. For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?” (TTL, 284). These feelings of displacement and disembodiment seem to be the underlying motivation for Woolf’s distinct use of both parentheses and square brackets. I further maintain that Woolf’s ability to convey what Auerbach refers to as multipersonal representation of consciousness would have been significantly diminished had she not resorted to parentheses and square brackets in order to confine and remove as much of the bodily as one possibly can when depicting the human thought process. Moreover, it is precisely this very act of confinement that allows one to unfold the complexity of Woolf’s conceptualization of posthumanism, since the bodily is removed but not absent, it is present as an embodiment, a frame, a necessary outer shell that encompasses consciousness but does not nourish it or carry it as the human body does. This unusual arrangement raises the same argument that contemporary scholars, such as Slavoj Žižek, have been grappling with; regardless of the technological advances that have made the posthuman a viable possibility, the human consciousness still requires what Žižek refers to as “pseudo-concreteness,” the necessary illusion of embodiment – “there is

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a great need to re-create an artificial concreteness in order to enable individuals to relate to their complex environs as to a meaningful life-world.”³³ Subsequently, the search for an alternative to corporeality as exemplified by Woolf’s posthuman body in To the Lighthouse can be found in contemporary literature as well. As Hayles maintains, there is a growing need to replace the literary depiction of the traditional human body.³⁴ This is especially evident upon the analysis of postmodern narratives, which often display a cardinal dissatisfaction with the physical world around them, including their own physical manifestations. Waugh maintains that To the Lighthouse attempts to offer “aesthetic autonomy” as a solution to what seems to be an inherently postmodern sensibility in which grand narratives no longer explain our world.³⁵ Much like many postmodern narratives, To the Lighthouse creates a world that can only be redeemed by one’s consciousness, a world which is “otherwise rendered meaningless by death.”³⁶ In the end, all that remains is to find meaning in one’s own creative imagination and the alternative world it sustains.

   

Slavoj Žižek, The Parallex View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006): 196. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 247. Waugh, Feminine Fictions, 107. Waugh, Feminine Fictions, 107.

Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz

Monument Narratives in Recent Anglophone Fiction In recent research, war monuments and their narrative representations have been variously made the object of scholarly investigation, whereas the range of different kinds of monuments or memorials and the texts about them has not yet been explored. After pointing out the substantial scope of monumental reflection in literary works, this article restricts the examination of narratives to two types of monuments that hold different objectives in terms of content: the material visual sign and the performative ritual. Public and private concerns can collide, conflate or contradict in the textual representation, when an individual’s secret thoughts are displayed facing the public demonstration taking shape in a material structure or official act. Literature’s immersive gift, by which it can empathetically convey the disparity of personal responses to communal symbols of greatness, power or commemoration to the reader, is revealed in the analysis of fictional narratives by British respectively postcolonial writers. Works by Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Atwood, Alan Hollinghurst, Graham Swift and Ivan Vladislavić are the most important among them. My starting-point for this article is the contraction of temporal and spatial distance in monuments, which in an artistic “time space” – Mikhail Bakhtin’s novelistic “Chronotope” – retrieve what is not there any longer. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘monument’ as “[a] statue, building, or other structure erected to commemorate a notable person or event,”¹ thereby also connecting the other three dimensions with “time as the fourth dimension of space.”² Russell WestPavlov equally goes beyond the two- or three-dimensional concept of ‘monument’ and points at the merging of time and space when he identifies the purpose of a monument: “Memorials [are] Spatial Signs to Rescue Memories from the Obscurity of a Closed-Up Archive.”³

 [accessed November 25, 2016].  Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays [1981], ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 2008): 84– 258, 84.  Russell West-Pavlov, Spaces of Fiction / Fictions of Space: Postcolonial Place and Literary DeiXis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 204. https://doi.org/9783110532913-015

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Thus, topography and history are fused in monuments.⁴ Similarly, landscapes and museums exhibit the material coinciding of time and space, because they equally display the impact of human history on places, a connection that is explored in the monograph Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative. Its authors conceptualize “the potential of narrative geography,”⁵ including a theory of “Street Names as Story and History.”⁶ They investigate the particular collapse of time and space in street signs which, I claim, is also constitutive for the monument. A cityscape can be mapped according to these material signs. Frequently, commemoration of persons or events is a street sign’s secondary purpose after spatial orientation; in the case of the monument this hierarchical order is reversed and remembrance placed first. A monumental site, like a sculpture or a plate with an inscription, “actuates remembrance.”⁷ Since the nineteenth century especially, abstract material signs or visual representations in objects and memorial sites have served to render the past present and the distant close. Differences and conflations between the concepts of ‘monument’ and ‘memorial’ are discussed in the introduction of Marzena Sokoɫowska-Paryź’s book about commemorative fiction of the Great War, a well-explored field in monument studies.⁸ Her argument complies with definitions of ‘memorial’ as the more extensive notion – including dates, ceremonies, rites – and ‘monument’ as its sub-category identifying material objects of commemoration.⁹ But she also concedes that the two terms often overlap in common usage. In Schlote’s article, the architecture of war monuments as represented in literature of different genres is considered mainly as an expression of a political or

 Schlote’s article on literary monumental architecture contains references to studies of this specific connection between memory and space. Christiane Schlote, “Monuments of Protest and War: Literary Representations of Memorial Architecture,” in Anglistentag 2005 Bamberg: Proceedings, eds Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe, and Anja Müller (Trier: WVT, 2006): 79 – 91.  Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Madz Azaryahu, Narrating Space / Spatializimg Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2016): 139.  Ryan, Narrating Space, 138.  Ryan, Narrating Space, 142.  Marzena Sokoɫowska-Paryź, Reimagining the War Memorial, Reinterpreting the Great War: The Formats of British Commemorative Fiction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012): 3 – 10. For the published research on war memorials and their narrativizations see also “Re-Imagining the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in Contemporary British Writing” by the same author in Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture, eds Anna Branach-Kallas and Nelly Strehlau. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015): 92– 109.  Sokoɫowska-Paryź, War Memorial, 3.

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national interest and its criticism.¹⁰ Christoph Henke investigates commemorative rituals in fictional texts by Julian Barnes and Graham Swift after discussing theories of cultural and individual memory.¹¹ Both Schlote and Henke refer to James E. Young’s study The Texture of Memory (1993). This paper proposes, firstly, to pursue the expanded definition of ‘monument’ as memorial or the public manifestation of an intention to present and demonstrate. From the monument’s materiality the focus shifts to its function, when the term is semantically stretched. The material monument itself, even though it can be identified as a non-narrative mode of representation which may or may not bear an inscription, possesses narrativity; it already indicates ‘the story behind’ even without an engraving.¹² My article will, secondly, concentrate on the varied narrative modes of representing a monument. Although fictional texts about monuments connected with war seem to outnumber narrative representations of other memorial types I wish to foreground a wider scale and explore diverse examples. To achieve this purpose I will briefly outline the cultural range of objects covered by the concept ‘monument’. Since here the focus lies on the function, the term ‘monument’ can signify a site, a concrete thing, a ceremony or even a date.¹³ A two-dimensional painting – Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ for example – or an iterative public act can be regarded as equally expressing the will of a community to recall a person or an event, and thus as fulfilling the semiotic characteristics of a monument. The concept of ‘monument’ enlarged beyond the limits of the long-lasting material sign comprises the temporally limited and ephemeral act, with the public memorial performance often including the material structure of a stone or edifice. Commemoration rituals like those on Remembrance Day and fixed dates like the National Day – St. Patrick’s Day, the Fourth of July, or the fourteenth, depending on nationality – may be considered as monuments commemorating the formation of a nation.¹⁴ If the attempts at a definition point to the variance of the memorial concept, the monument discourse reveals itself as similarly manifold and flexible due to  The literary examples Schlote discusses are a play by an American dramatist, a novel by a Canadian and an essay by a British writer.  Christoph Henke, “Memory, Ritual, Literature: Commemorative Rituals in the Fiction of Julian Barnes and Graham Swift,” in Anglistentag 2003 München: Proceedings, eds Christoph Bode, Sebastian Domsch, and Hans Sauer (Trier: WVT, 2004): 367– 381, 367– 371.  Cf. Ryan, Narrating Space, 157, 159.  See Schlote, “Monuments of Protest,” 81.  A piece of music may also acquire the status of monument. “Remember Me” is originally an aria from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas sung by the melancholic Dido before her suicide. It is differently contextualized in the official ceremony of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.

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shifting historical, national or religious interests.¹⁵ The transformative or distancing expression of a personalized impact is achieved as soon as the monument narrative adopts the fictional perspective of a focalizer or narrator, as will be demonstrated in my analyses. Whereas different types of memorials address the collective identity of a community, individual manifestations of commemoration, too, may gain the state of monument. Tombstones, epitaphs or poems can present a non-literary or literary text-as-monument, as in Percy B. Shelley’s “Elegy on the Death of John Keats.”¹⁶ The textualization of monuments accessible to visual and/or haptic perception has produced a mediated experience of the absent as old as travel literature; this also covers non-commemorative monuments as defined by the Oxford Dictionary (paragraph 1.2). In “Adonaȉs” Percy Shelley refers to the Pyramid of Caius Cestius as adjacent to the grave of Keats. The hint at this monument erected as the tomb of the antique Roman is embedded in the written text of Shelley’s elegy mourning the deceased poet and friend. The Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where Keats and Shelley’s ashes are buried, has variously been visited by English and American writers, among them Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde and Henry James,¹⁷ whose letters, reports and fictional texts describing the visit survive. That monuments can be subject to misapprehensions becomes visible in the travel diary of

 Schlote (“Monuments of Protest,” 79 – 80 and 89) argues that, like identity and memory, memorials have to be reconceptualized as fluid. – The “change through time” and intended cancellation of the mnemonic function inherent in street names is elaborately depicted in Ryan, Narrating Space, 150 – 156. Inversely, names and the memory of their bearers can be saved from intended obliviousness due to national interests, as has happened in the German Federal Republic with opponents or victims of the Nazi regime, for example, accompanied by an ongoing dispute about the measures taken. The influence of stances due to religious denomination on London’s Monument is the subject of Vera Nünning’s paper mentioned below.  For the interpretation of literature as monument see also Ann Rigney, “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans,” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 361– 396. [accessed October 10, 2016 via MUSE]. Rigney interrogates the “memorial dynamics” (361) which rule the communicative processes relevant for the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of cultural memories. Sokoɫowska-Paryź, War Memorial, 10 mentions that the publication of dead soldiers’ letters and diaries can be considered “acts of commemoration” and are therefore monuments, constructed by bereaved friends and relatives to memorialize the man who died.  Nicholas Stanley-Price, “See Rome – and Die: Legacies of the Grand Tour in a Roman Cemetery,” in The Legacy of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Colletta. (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2015): 169 – 183, 178.

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a female nineteenth-century Grand Tourist, who wrote about the Protestant Cemetery: “One poor poet complains, that his name is written in water.”¹⁸ The forms of fictional and nonfictional textual representations of monuments are multilayered, and in the recent past one particular monument that consisted of a disturbing absence has also inspired literary repercussions which seemed provocative and remained controversial: In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) presents Ground Zero as the commemoration site of Nine/Eleven in the pictorial narrative of a comic strip by Art Spiegelman. Even though this work is not as defamiliarizing as his graphic novel Maus it was not accepted for serial publication in the United States until several years later, when it came out as a monumental book. Architecturally, Ground Zero gave way to Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence memorial – called “more than a metaphor” by the press – in 2011, beside which the One World building was erected. The original site that consisted of the crushing blank, a counter-monument, has vanished.¹⁹ For years, though, Spiegelman’s non-canonical graphic novel recalled the emptiness that emerged after the disappearance of so many lives and two skyscrapers. The endeavors at a disappearance of emptiness can be considered symbolic of grief work – so that there might be something instead of nothing. Spiegelman actually defined his graphic novel as grief work. A commemoration of an absence and a catastrophic destruction, In the Shadow of No Towers can now be addressed as the historiographic fiction of loss and futile attempt at retrieval. Consequently, the reviewer in The Guardian called the cartoon Spiegelman’s “9/11 monument.”²⁰ The dialogic situation constituted by memorial, reflector figure in a fictional narrative and reader feeds into the diversified discourse on the memorable. The selectiveness of commemoration, which is determined by a limitation to ‘the memorable,’ introduces another ethical dimension into the monument’s narrative representation after the fight against oblivion.²¹ The subtitle of one of Judith Butler’s books, When is Life Grievable? questions this aspect of preference and  Stanley-Price, “See Rome,” 179.  Arad himself referred to the black craters replacing the foundations of the Towers as “voids.”  Aili McConnon, “The Glowing Bones,” The Guardian, September 11, 2004. World War Two and were killed [accessed October 13, 2016]: n. pag.  According to Claire Larsonneur, “Revisiting London’s monuments: sidelining Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis,” in (Re‐)Mapping London: Visions of the Metropolis in the Contemporary Novel in English, ed. Vanessa Guignery (Paris: Publibook, 2008):113 – 127 monuments serve “as emblems of the establishment and as tokens of the common weal” (116). To define the latter has frequently become a matter of controversy either diachronically or synchronically by nonhegemonial groupings of the community.

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selection. To give an example of the purpose of her collection of essays with regard to the subtitle, I quote Butler’s introductory statement about ‘framing war’, which is defined as “[…] a way of giving an account of whose life is a life, and whose life is effectively transformed into an instrument, a target, or a number, or is effaced with only a trace remaining or none at all.”²² Inside these ‘frames,’ which stigmatize certain groups or populations, life is not deemed “grievable.”²³ Monuments, it seems to be the common consent, are created to honor events, periods and persons that are considered worth of mournful or solemn remembrance. Undeniably it is not only historicity which bestows value on the remembered – nor is there always a general agreement on ‘the memorable.’²⁴ In view of the discrepancies emerging among different groups and times, it cannot be ignored that memorial spaces or ceremonies are the result of a pre-selection, on which the following exploration of the respective literary narratives also has to rely. Aware of well-known modernist narrativizations of art works as monuments, e. g., in the novels by Henry James or E.M. Forster, whose setting is often Italy, my paper investigates some of the ways in which contemporary prose fiction reflects a protagonist’s perception of memorials. The experience of the traveler abroad is seldom addressed here. Occasionally, the extensive description of a monument becomes a central concern in the narratives of my sample; more often it appears

 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso pb, 2010): ix–x, emphasis in original. Beside two prefaces, the book comprises five socio-political essays written between 2004 and 2008.  The following examples demonstrate the recently increased diversity of the monument discourse: Sokoɫowska-Paryź (“Thiepval Memorial,” 102– 103) draws attention to the aspect of ‘eligibility’ for a memorial with reference to Robert Goddard’s In Pale Battalions and William March’s novel Company K. A war monument indiscriminately honors all the dead, which involves ambiguities. Ryan, Narrating Space, p. 146 bluntly states: “Villains, of course, are excluded from toponymic histories, since they are not entitled to the honor bestowed by a public commemoration.” Disparity is also expressed in a monument erected near the main building of the university of Hamburg for soldiers who deserted from the Wehrmacht in World War Two and were killed by the Nazis: or [accessed November 10, 2016]. The aim of the initiators, elected representatives of the citizens of Hamburg, was to conceive “new forms of commemoration for neglected aspects” (“Neue Formen des Gedenkens, vernachlässigte Aspekte”). The concept of “collected memory” thus competes with “collective memory” in contemporary monument culture (J.E. Young 1993, qtd by Schlote, “Monuments of Protest, 89).  Vera Nünning, “Fictions of Collective Memory,” REAL: yearbook of research in English and American literature 21 (2005): 305 – 313, esp. 308 – 313 analyzes the roots and fate of the inscription on The Monument in London in its changing socio-historical, national and religious context.

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as an episodic or marginal element of the text, enabling the reader to geographically localize plot and setting as ‘realistic.’ At closer inspection, however, the experience of a monument is part of the textual structure. It conveys a purpose and may disclose a hidden meaning, regardless of whether the perceived monument is itself imaginary or if it really exists. The selection of the narratives discussed here is based on the decision to renounce further comments on literary representations of historical war monuments and look instead at other memorial types in British and diverse postcolonial fictions after 2000. Their disparity is prefigured in the narrative examples by Peter Ackroyd, one of which dates as far back as the early 1980s. In the face of the variety of monuments and their textual representations, this article can only aim at filling a gap in the analysis of monument narratives by focusing on two kinds of fictionalized symbols: the material sign and the performative act. Several novels, where the effects of a war dominate the memory of protagonists at least for a limited time, are included. Graham Swift, like Canadian authors Margaret Atwood and Jane Urquhart, attaches unaccustomed meaning to war monuments by the use of narrative perspective. Yet, other memorials recall events and persons representing disaster or past greatness and show how the effort to commemorate may be outbalanced by subsequent struggles to obliterate the once memorable. Investigating the increasing diversity in representations of contradictory memorial statements can begin to reveal a typology of monument narratives.

Sacred spaces: So Many Ways to Begin (2006), The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) and The Strangers’ Child (2011) Claire Larsonneur’s article about novelistic representations of London monuments states as a result that in contemporary monument narratives the personal has the prerogative over the general or, respectively, the immaterial signification over the material sign.²⁵ If Larsonneur adds that the everyday and commonplace now supersede the transcendental, this can equally be confirmed by a number of narratives, however not without exceptions. I wish to show that in recent novels, which narrate memorials connected to a war, symbolized religion is still addressed as part of cultural history and identity.

 Larsonneur, “London’s Monuments,” 125.

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In Jon McGregor’s novel So Many Ways to Begin,²⁶ a man’s quest for his genetic origins touches the significance of a monument literally in passing, and yet the edifice represents more than a mere detail in the narrative’s setting. Coventry, the city where much of the action takes place, holds for David, the ambitious archeologist, a memorial that cannot be eclipsed by a new building. In the figural perceivers’ view, the ruins of the Old Cathedral emerge as the backdrop of an estrangement from origins and persons. Born in the forties of last century the male protagonist has experienced the austerity of the post-war years from which he was shielded by the kind couple with whom he grew up (SM, 134). But, when he accompanies his foster mother Dorothy across town, knowing by then that she has withheld the knowledge from him that he is a desperate Irish girl’s illegitimate son who was left as a baby at her house, he becomes acutely aware of the city’s history: They walked past the old cathedral, and David glanced up at the ruined north wall, the unroofed sky a burnished August blue through the arched hole where the windows had once been. He’d seen archive photos of the fire, the great billowing folds of flame reaching up through the sky to light the bombers’ path, and he’d read the accounts of the church-wardens […]. (SM, 132)

The anonymity of his parentage and the shock about his foster mother’s insincerity mar his entire adult life. The job as a museum curator he had aspired to and the marriage he had longed for do not turn out as he and his young wife had imagined (SM, 189). When she develops a depression and has panic attacks, David remains unable to reach her, whose parental home is a cause of despair, in her gloomy mental state: “She looked straight past him, out across the craters and ditches and weeds, looking past the ruins of the old cathedral to the sheer glass soar of the new, its scaffold spire breaking into the sky” (SM, 192). History reaches into the present and cannot be eliminated, neither for the city nor for each of the protagonists. ‘Digging up’ the past and collecting its remains (or debris) had been David’s obsession since childhood. In a conclusive anticlimax he is confronted with the impossibility to retrieve the ‘original’ foundations by help of the commemorative pieces he has gathered from the depths of the ground and his life. The symbolic meaning of a monument extends beyond the general, commonly accepted one, as in the Old Cathedral in Coventry, whose sight in the narrative throws light upon the isolated situation of the individual, where commu-

 Jon McGregor, So Many Ways to Begin [2006] (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) (electronic edition). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “SM.”

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nication fails and the past is lost. In William Trevor’s short novel The Story of Lucy Gault war reemerges at different times in the lives of the protagonists, an Anglo-Irish Captain, his English wife and their daughter Lucy.²⁷ Her parents have experienced hostilities and armed conflicts from the Great War through the 1919/21 wars in Ireland, to the Second World War in Italy. In the town of Montemarmoreo, where the couple live in exile, grieving about their daughter they imagine dead and lost, the city’s patron saint becomes a symbol of endurance for the mother: “the church of Santa Cecilia, the saint whose courage in her tribulations had for centuries given heart to this town: all was peace, as much as there could be” (SLG, 67). Yet, violence and destructiveness threaten to become overwhelming to Héloȉse, who remains forever unaware that their child has survived and remained in Ireland. Fled to Switzerland from Italy with the Captain his wife wonders about the fate of the church with the painting of the saint, patron of music and its harmony: “In the church of Santa Cecilia there had been Montemarmoreo’s single image of the saint the town honoured. Had that been lost in rubble, violently destroyed, as the saint herself had been?” (SLG, 133). In Héloȉse’s mind, the image of the saint and their child conflate. Filled with a melancholic joy, which she draws from her memory of this monument and other works of art they have seen, she dies, succumbing to the grief about the loss. The couple’s mournfulness reflects the condition of the world in which they live. The sacred and the secular can still appear as insolubly mixed in monuments and their history, demanding awe and simultaneously demonstrating the builders’ involvement in worldly matters. It seems strange or at least dated for a twenty-first-century British writer to activate the memory of a connection between Christian religion and warfare, because in the third millennium we have been alert to the idea of Jihad as the Islamists’ holy war. In Hollinghurst’s recent novel, whose protagonist is the eldest son of an English baronet, the evocation of the crusades is therefore striking. Cecil Valance appears in the first part of The Stranger’s Child vitally alive and seductive.²⁸ The novel’s following sections serve to posthumously remember and (re)construct his image in biographies, conversations and – a monument. A homosexual poet and distinguished hero of the Great War, he is fatally wounded in France in 1916 and buried in the chapel of his family’s mansion Corley Court, a nineteenth-century country house

 William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault [2002] (London: Penguin, 2003). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “SLG.”  Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (London: Picador, 2011). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “SC.”

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and monument of Victorian architecture. When Claire Larsonneur remarks about Swift’s Last Orders that the detours of the funeral pilgrims traveling to Margate comprise with Army, Church, and English countryside the three pillars of Victorian society,²⁹ this is reaffirmed by The Stranger’s Child. The thematic emphasis on stratified society, art, and cultural diversity in Hollinghurst’s historical novel also demonstrate developments of the past hundred years regarding tenets related to British identity. The significance of the individual’s perception is augmented during this temporal process, as the polyphony of disparate voices persuades the reader to believe. The late-Victorian environment and the characters’ mindscape are portrayed in retrospect through a fragmentary, multiperspectival narrative. The monument of Captain Valance’s tomb, erected on commission of his mother who had also wished that her eldest son volunteered, is viewed by George Sawle, Cecil’s Cambridge pal, whose lover in an “imperious way” (SC, 151) the deceased had been. Ten years after Cecil’s death, friends and family visit Corley Court to contribute to his biography, which is meant to further elevate him and purify his image of every trace of frivolity and egomania. The stifling and in George’s eyes hypocritical atmosphere causes him to leave the company for a while: “[H]e saw the charm of avoiding the party for a little longer, and decided to visit the chapel and look at Cecil’s effigy” (SC, 151). The viewer’s approach is personal; irreverence mixes with the sublime and the legendary: It was a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper. It struck George, as the chapel itself had on that first day [of his earlier visit], as a quietly crushing assertion of wealth and status, of knowing what to do. It seemed to place Cecil in some floating cortège of knights and nobles reaching back through the centuries to the Crusades. George saw them for a moment like gleaming boats in a thousand chapels and churches the length of the land. (SC, 153)

This commemorative manifestation in Carrara marble expresses a self-assured statement of the ruling classes at the end of the Great War, perceived through the eyes of the Oxford history don that George has become. In hyperbolic extravagance, the Latin inscription on the tomb quotes Ovid and identifies Cecil Teucer Valance with the mythical Greek hero, whereas the resemblance between his friend and the figure on the marble tomb seems somehow quite wrong to George (SC 153, also 455). Elsa Cavalié tries to pass off the novelistic portrayal of Cecil Valance as that of a national emblem:

 Larsonneur, “London’s monuments,” 117.

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Cecil indeed represents the perfect specimen of a lost species: that of gentlemen, whose staple characteristics are recycled and derided, from the gentleman’s obsession with hunting, to his supposedly high-standard moral values.³⁰

This fascination deceptively charmed and captivated young George and his even younger sister Daphne – soon, however, to be superseded by disillusion. The disenchantment persists after the death of the war hero and seizes the reader “with a cold demystification,” as Cavalié eventually admits. Regarding the marble monument, however, the ennobling ‘invention of tradition’ seems to George Sawle “magnificently proper” even in 1926.³¹ The time structure of the novel renders the representation of the figure of the fictional dead Victorian poet-hero a palimpsest, with the monument as one of his many images. Demythologization displaces the spirit which generated the “thousand chapels and churches the length of the land” that recalled that imagined “cortège of knights and nobles” reaching back to the Middle Ages. By disconnecting the 1926 marble monument from the living Cecil of 1913 as well as from later portrayals, the novel’s organizing consciousness exposes the effigy’s narrativity – ‘the story behind’ – as one of several disparate stories. In the 1960s to ’80s, the tomb in the chapel of the grand country house becomes part of the museum culture. The quasi-religious observance of the monument sanctifies the narrative of the national heritage.

Commemoration of calamity: The Great Fire of London (1666; 1982) “Nothing had really changed in a society which had such places as its monuments.”³² In this verdict, the young film director Spenser Spender utters his distress about what he sees and experiences in London. To him futility shapes the sight of that part of the city where the grounds of Marshalsea Prison and its modern counterpart, surrounded by dilapidated warehouses and the closed-down cheap amusement arcade ‘Fun City,’ still “represented the same appalling

 Elsa Cavalié, “‘A book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight’: Englishness and Influence in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child,” Revue Interdisciplinaire “Textes & Contextes” 7 (2012): n. pag. [accessed October 31, 2016].  The Invention of Tradition is the title of a collection of essays by Eric Hobsbawm (1983).  Peter Ackroyd, The Great Fire of London [1982] (London: Penguin, 1993): 57. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “GFL.”

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waste of human life” (GFL, 57). To Spenser this urban monument reflects the condition of the past and present society. To consider monuments as expressive of a homophonous acknowledgment usually was the declared purpose of those who planned and built them. A memorial can become controversial for the very reason that dissenting voices remain unheard. Erected on the supposition of a common consent, monuments often actually exhibit a historical viewpoint, the sovereign intent, or a hegemonial class’s commemoration, as shown in the narratives discussed above. In a novel that works by associating dates with places and historic events with their simulation or current developments, Peter Ackroyd unveils the dreary continuity in change, which seems to make progress a spurious notion. Instead, history becomes a repetition of the same. ‘The Great Fire of London’ is usually associated with the blaze that consumed most of the medieval town in 1666. The Monument, magnificently built by Christopher Wren, possesses itself narrativity, but the highest column in the capital of the UK also bears an inscription that tells a politically engendered story, which became controversial.³³ Ackroyd’s title The Great Fire of London, as disclosed at the narrative’s end, refers to a fictional fire, lighted by a mad woman and some tramps in a more sordid part of the city. It destroys a film set for a movie to be made by Spenser of Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit. “Spenser had insisted upon realism” (GFL, 55), says the narrator, and therefore absolutely wanted the site of the old and the new prison as shooting location. Thus, the simulacrum, the movie of Dickens’ narrative fiction, materializes (GFL, 54) and, dialectically, makes reality visible. Spenser Spender is allowed to use an abandoned wing of the prison to shoot the scenes which took place in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, where Little Dorrit had been born (GFL, 55). The menacing atmosphere which Spenser wanted to evoke becomes more real than he could have imagined. The famous old Marshalsea prison, immortalized by Dickens’ novel, had been destroyed by fire on December 14, 1885, as the notice on a metal sign informs passing pedestrians (GFL, 25). The prison, a heterotopian place already presented by Charles Dickens as the city’s monument, exhilarates every single one of the confused characters and mostly incites them to destruction. In Spenser, the prison inspires creativity, since “the Victorian design perfectly suited Spenser’s vision of decaying and repressive authority” (GFL, 120). Tellingly, a superior film producer prohibits the accomplishment of this dangerous undertaking, and Spenser, the artist, is devastated by the decision. ‘Fire prevention’ in every sense, however, proves ineffective.

 See V. Nünning, “Collective Memory.”

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The apocalyptic ending, in which props, stages and adjacent buildings are destroyed together with a number of human lives, including Spenser’s, “came to be known as the Great Fire” (GFL, 165). Fusing fiction and fact, the book becomes the memorial of disaster, a counter-Monument of Wren’s column. Analogous to Little Dorrit and the plate reminding of the Marshalsea prison, it points to social grievances. With regard to temporality, the novel merges the past with the future, the narrative present being an in-between state. The heterodiegetic narrator’s sentences published in 1982 sound like a prophecy “of yet more terrible things to come” (GFL, 165), of another historic visitation on ‘the City’. A visionary sight of urban monuments destroyed after the millennium, notably the Twin Towers in New York City, is evoked in the twenty-first-century reader. The film set in the historic prison represented, in the narrator’s terms, much that was false and ugly, or splendid and beautiful (GFL, 165), depending on the individual perspective. The contradictory responses raised by the destroyed prison monument are reflected in the ambiguity which characterizes the use of language when the narrator states that “power” fails in the modern prison on account of the fire, so that the pygmy Little Arthur, one of those forgotten by the city, can free the inmates (GFL, 168 – 169). Ackroyd, the writer who is almost constantly concerned with the metropolis, variously thematizes its fictional and factional chronotope. One of the key symbols among the urban monuments, whose narrativization Ackroyd’s introduction to A Traveller’s Companion to London announces, is St. Paul’s.³⁴ Among the collected memories about the cathedral is the narrative by a historic witness of the Great Fire of 1666. On several consecutive days, the diarist John Evelyn writes about the destruction which also consumes St. Paul’s. The excerpts of September 3, 4 and 7 describe the devastation with the terms of war: The stones of Paul’s flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse nor man was able to tread on them, and the demolition had stopped all the passages, so that no help could be applied.³⁵

Evelyn continues on 7 September describing the result of the disaster:

 Peter Ackroyd, “Introduction,” in A Traveller’s Companion to London, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Constable & Robinson, 2004): xxxvii-li.  John Evelyn, Diaries, qtd. from Wright (ed.), Traveller’s Companion, 68. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “Diaries.”

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I went this morning on foot from Whitehall as far as London Bridge […] with extraordinary difficulty, clambering over heaps of yet smoking rubbish, and frequently mistaking where I was; the ground under my feet so hot that it even burnt the soles of my shoes. (Diaries, 68) At my return I was infinitely concerned to find that goodly Church St Paul’s now a sad ruin, and that beautiful portico (for structure comparable to any in Europe, as not long before repaired by the late King [Charles I]), now rent in pieces, flakes of vast stone split asunder, and nothing remaining entire but the inscription in the architrave, showing by whom it was built, which had not one letter of it defaced. (Diaries, 69)³⁶

In his introduction, Ackroyd draws a parallel between the historic Great Fire and the Blitz. ³⁷ The bombs also destroyed Wren’s epitaph over the entrance to the transept: “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”³⁸ Among the similarities, the contrast between the narrative description of the burnt-out church in Evelyn’s report and the prison site in The Great Fire of London is significant. ‘Monuments’ may incorporate even in their destruction values of pride and glory, but equally commemorate occasions of mourning or shudder. As symbols of a collective, their existence and evaluation shift, so that they are objects of admiration as well as controversy or hate.

Signs of impermanence: ‘Propaganda by Monuments’ (2011) and Nora Webster (2014) The mutability of monuments becomes conspicuous where they were erected as signs of power, later overturned and subsequently replaced by new symbols of sovereignty or blank spaces. The short story “Propaganda by Monuments” of South-African writer Ivan Vladislavić can be read as an absurdist or obliquely humorous comment on revolutions and their aftermath.³⁹ The story reveals the grotesque features that an abrupt change of political systems entails. In this narrative the collapse of the Soviet Union is structurally and thematically connected to the imminent fall of the Apartheid regime. Set alternately in Moscow and a

 The last quote also contains a hint at political history: Evelyn, a sympathizer of the monarchy throughout the Civil Wars, reminds of the executed King, who had commissioned Inigo Jones with the building of the portico.  Ackroyd, “Introduction,” xii.  W.R. Mathews, “Saint Paul’s in wartime (1939 – 1945),” qtd. from Wright (ed.), Traveller’s Companion, 74.  Ivan Vladislavić, “Propaganda by Monuments,” in The Granta Book of the African Short Story, ed. Helen Habila (London: Granta, 2011): 252– 276. Further references in the text, abbreviated as “PM.”

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town in Transvaal in the early nineties, its subject is the correspondence of an African pub owner with the specialist in English and translator of the Kremlin Administration for Everyday Services, Pavel Grekov, who obliges the Ministries of Foreign Affairs or of Culture. The reflections of the two letter-writers and the Russian translator, who adds handwritten comments, amplify the exchange. Thus, an epistolary narrative mingles with personalized descriptive passages and an omniscient narrator’s irony to give the full view of a complicated situation. The comedy results from the ignorance about the other’s socio-cultural reality (linguistic difficulties included, from Cyrillic letters to American slang) none of the reflector figures can hide as well as from the confrontation of disparate interests. The South-African publican Boniface Khumalo would like to re-decorate and re-name his tavern and writes to Kremlin officials to make them donate one of the “spare statues of V.I. Lenin” (“PM,” 261), since he has heard that they are no longer needed. He would even be willing to purchase one, using any of the current paying methods, and convincingly elaborates on his know-how as an aspiring capitalist, calling their proposed business a win-win situation (“PM,” 262). The ensuing correspondence, which involves an amount of red tape, doubtlessly provides an enlargement of translation theory. In the end, Khumalo’s request is surpassed by the complete turn in the Russian economic system and the resolution of the Moscow City Council to officially offer the hundreds of dismantled Lenin monuments to “all enterprising businessmen,” considering especially South Africa “a ready market” (“PM,” 272). Khumalo reads this advert in the Pretoria News, while he is watching the statue of J.G. Strijdom, a prime representative of Apartheid, being toppled from its pedestal in the city square. Like the tumble of Lenin’s image, the fall of the statue of the former Prime Minister of the Union in Pretoria, part of the so-called Freedom Symbol of the Apartheid Regime, “emphasizes the instability of such signs, which were intended to guarantee the permanence of the state’s values.”⁴⁰ Khumalo, worried by the letters from Moscow more than about the “capricious epoch” he lives in (“PM,” 271), distrusts in commercial matters the reliability of his Russian correspondent and the translator Grekov, who in his turn had been suspicious of the South African as a possible foreign spy. Moreover, if the Russians really dispatched the giant head of Lenin to Khumalo’s address it might prove too large for his tavern. The attraction of the short story resides in the insight into the minds of incompatible protagonists immersed in different Weltanschauungen. They pretend  Shane Graham, “Memory, Memorialization, and the Transformation of Johannesburg: Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket and ‘Propaganda by Monuments,’” Modern Fiction Studies 53.1 (2007): 70 – 96, 75. The article mainly explores ideological implications and absurdities revealed in the short story.

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to know the ideology of the other country, while their practical concern is not with the past reality of the signified ideologies, but with the visible symbolic signifiers of the personality cult in a collapsed political system. Eventually Khumalo and Grekov contemplate only the de-based visual representation of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin respectively Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom as the representatives of politically powerful ideas they are estranged from. The correspondents’ serious epistolary attempts at communication show how they wish to be seen by the recipient, thus creating a discursive image of themselves. Khumalo assures his addressee that he will attach a written acknowledgement to the exhibited gift in his future ‘V.I. Lenin Bar & Grill,’ reading: “‘ This Beautiful Monument was donated to Working People of Atteridgeville by Kind Masses of Russia’ ” (“PM,” 262). Grekov, on the other hand, had early on experienced melancholy at the material signifier of “the making and unmaking of history” (“PM,” 257) and been in two minds about the overthrow of the enormous Lenin bust on an imposing pedestal: “The eyes in the head of Lenin looked straight at Grekov. […] They were kindly eyes, if not quite grandfatherly, then more than avuncular” (“PM,” 256), but tellingly they change their expression depending on the spatial position from which they are watched. The action of dismantling the monument by the work and remarks of the construction (or deconstruction) crew appears to this passer-by as undignified, considering the historic importance of what the statue had stood for (“PM,” 259). The narrative representation of a portrayal visualizing past personified political hegemony demonstrates the receding of ‘the real’ into blurred remoteness. This ‘retreat’ of the real was a concept postmodern writers, among them Ackroyd, have frequently addressed. In the short story, Grekov’s musing relates to the sculpture of Lenin and the expression conveyed by the stone, whereas Socialism as a system has been abandoned. The reader receives the perception of this monument through the eyes and thoughts of a post-Soviet-Unionist Russian. The post-Apartheid tavern owner, without an education, is moved neither by Strijdom’s memorial nor its demolition. Indifference towards a monument of the once powerful and admired also characterizes the reaction of a child in Ireland towards a monument signifying the former colonial and victorious power of the British. In a brief scene in Nora Webster, Colm Tóibìn’s novel set in 1969 to ’72, in which the widowed mother and her two young sons visit Dublin, the boys talk about Nelson’s Pillar that stood on O’Connell Street until 1966.⁴¹ “‘ I remember it,’ Conor said. ‘You ccouldn’t. You’re too young,’ Donal told him. ‘I do. It was tall and Nelson was

 Colm Tóibín, Nora Webster. London: Penguin, 2014.

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on top of it and they blew him into smithereens.’ ” ⁴² The chronotope of the narrative gives his remark a special significance, for with the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland imminent at the moment of the narrated time Conor’s memory gains in topicality. The narrativized monuments of historical persons, mingled with fictional events and figures, characterize Vladislavić’s short story as well as the above passage in Tóibín’s novel. The monument narrative representing the effigy of a historic personage on the one hand emphasizes the nature of fiction as a simulacrum. On the other hand, the memorialized personage’s spatiotemporal remoteness is thereby particularly accentuated. Narrativization of the volatility of monuments, which are not only destroyed by fights, vandalism, oblivion or the weather, as Shakespeare pronounced in Sonnet 55, is not infrequent. They may also fall victim to the changeability of values or taste and the limited stability of socio-political systems. These cause ruptures in cultural expression and have an impact on the devotion of the arts.

Acts of remembrance: The Blind Assassin (2000) and Wish You Were Here (2011) If the demolition of a monument is a symbolic and momentous act, the unveiling of one is by a community usually regarded as a grave ceremony. The actions of erecting and dismounting, I claim after looking at “Propaganda by Monuments,” receive more weight than the quiet presence of a material monument. In the poststructuralist marking of time and space as fluid categories of human experience, acts of moving certainly surpass fixation in significance. The fleeting or transient receives similar attention in postmodern fiction as diversity and ambiguousness. Connecting mourning with romance and historiography, Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers includes historic figures and fictional characters in the novel about the aftermath of the Great War. It addresses the unveiling of Walter Allwood’s Vimy Ridge Memorial for Canadian soldiers on “the now altered, manicured battlefield.” The opening ceremony took place in 1936 “with great fanfare, the ribbon cut by a king whose own reign was but a brief season [Edward VIII].”⁴³ “A brief season” of peace was also approaching its end, as the retrospective nar-

 Tóibín, Nora Webster, 19.  Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers [2001] (London: MacLehose P, Quercus, 2014): 372 (electronic edition). For analyses of The Stone Carvers see Schlote (2008, 85 – 86), Virginia Richter in Peters et al. (2010), and Alicia Fahey in Löschnigg/ Sokoɫowska-Paryź (2014).

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rative subtly reminds the reader, even though the novel’s closure portrays the protagonist in an optimistic mood. The irony of the circumstance that especially the sponsors of a monument want to be remembered is ignored neither by Vladislavić’s story nor the narrator of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. ⁴⁴ In her novel, the homodiegetic narrator’s father and invalid veteran of the Great War argues with other inhabitants of the town about the ‘proper’ way of commemorating the soldiers: should the memorial remind of the sacrifice or the victory, of the present donors or only the dead? The children’s father, who is the Chase family’s sole male survivor of the Great War, has decisive influence in shaping the monument dedicated to those killed in action and its unveiling. Laura’s question “What for? Do they like it?” is answered by the housekeeper Reenie, who argues that their father’s opinion is just one way of looking at it and observes: “It’s not for them, it’s more for us” (BA, 183). To give mourning and remembrance a place and a fixed date, to offer the security inherent in predetermined acts and words, which point at an empty space, are aims preserved in the unveiling ceremony at the stone sculpture. Norman Chase, on whose demand all religious denominations participate in the unveiling act, was also able to enforce – by financing and opposing anything else – the realization of the statue of the Weary Soldier instead of the Goddess of Victory as a memorial of the dead.⁴⁵ The defamiliarization of the commemorative acts is achieved by Laura’s subsequent ‘innocent’ youthful perspective controlling the dialogue, which allows for an involuntary ironization that from an adult focalizer would seem impossible (BA, 180). The narrative representations of ritual acts are individualized by the inclusion of spontaneous, ephemeral performative elements such as disagreements and arguments among the fictional characters about the way and sense of adequate remembrance. The prerogative of interpretation, usually shaped by national interests, as Schlote claims, here would have been expressed in the inscription “For Those Who Willingly Made the Supreme Sacrifice” (BA, 180). This wording is released from the collective Imaginary by the father, changed and set into a different Symbolic, which becomes manifest in the words “Lest We Forget.” Watched by his elder daughter, Norman Chase, who knows the Real, is uncertainly aware that it resists verbal representation or other ways of symboliza-

 Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin [2000] (London: Virago, 2001). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “BA.”  The controversies about the sculpture itself supply a superb example of ‘the story/ies behind it’: the Weary Soldier eventually defeats the Goddess of Victory.

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tion.⁴⁶ Only the veteran’s body language expresses his experience of the battlefield (BA, 182). In one of his early essays Hayden White focuses on the theory of historiography, but his opening reflections address narrativization in a wider scope. If narrative substitutes meaning, as White quotes Roland Barthes, “it would follow, on this view, that the absence of narrative capacity or a refusal of narrative indicates an absence or refusal of meaning itself.”⁴⁷ Both this absence of narrative capacity felt by Norman Chase and the citizens’ refusal to listen to any narrative of the Real he threatens them with unfold in the planning and the revelation of the monument represented in The Blind Assassin: no narrative presence exists that would be capable of symbolizing the absence of meaning. At least for some silent participants, the commemorated events cannot be credited with any meaning.⁴⁸ In Atwood’s novel dialogues and descriptive elements are presented by the aged first-person narrator Iris, who reconstructs the viewpoint and verbal expression of children, which she mixes with her adult comment. Twelve-year-old Iris appears as a mere observer and chronicler of the creation and unveiling of the monument, while her little sister inquisitively and with childish naȉveté asks questions. As a result, the stone sculpture of the Weary Soldier appears as representative of a presumably unified communal voice, whereas the diversity of interests and evaluations resides in the concomitant performative acts / speeches and is mirrored in the monument narrative. It comprises Norman Chase’s reactions as well as the above-mentioned usual phrase “some people in town” (BA, 180) would have preferred as an inscription, which he can only reject as a euphemism. The controversy about the monument concludes with a religious interpretation of the soldiers’ death, supplied by the housemaid (BA, 183). Representations of performative memorial rituals dominate Graham Swift’s novel Wish You Were Here. ⁴⁹ The protagonist’s emotional responses to events

 Lacan’s psychoanalytical terminology of the formation of the subject is for my argument applied to the community at large.  Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5 – 27, 6.  In Last Orders, silence is the only response of the protagonists to the visit of the Chatham Naval Monument (Graham Swift, Last Orders [1996] (London: Picador, 1999); (Waterland and Last Orders in one vol.): 123. Henke’s article puts the main emphasis on the connection between memory and ritual. One of the examples of ritual remembering he explores is Last Orders; he also points at forgetfulness addressed in memorial narratives (375). As a digression from the interpretational sovereignty of the national government The Stone Carvers (272) depicts a marginal scene of revolt.  Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here (London: Picador, 2011). Further references in the text, abbreviated as “WYWH.”

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and ceremonies are displayed in figural narrative. The first of these occasions is Remembrance Day, the second a repatriation act of three British soldiers killed in Iraq, among them his younger brother. The first-mentioned event is especially characterized by its reiterative nature; Remembrance Sunday will approach regardless of the personal situation, like Christmas (the comparison is actually briefly made in the novel). A strictly controlled order, which ought to prevent every unforeseen incident, equally underlies the repatriation ceremony. Its representation, however, is that of the unbalanced reflector figure, rarely interrupted by another focalizer or the authorial narrator. For the central character of the novel, his assistance at this predefined performative act is new – and it will never return.⁵⁰ It differs from the repetitive and commemorative function of November 11 in its uniqueness.⁵¹ The reflector figure of the third-person narrative, Jack Luxton, the eldest son of a dairy farmer gone bankrupt in the heart of England, is presented as an ordinary man, taciturn but sensitive and the last of his family. He is burdened with memories of petty contentedness, misfortune, and despair that resurge in the contracted time-span of a few hours after his return from the funereal ceremony, when he believes to have also lost his wife. The chronotope of Remembrance Day with its clear markers of the unity of time (November 11, respectively the Sunday closest to that date) and place (the local cemetery, Whitehall in London) is exceptional and fulfils a structuring function for the year as for the novel’s opening part. The date has a special meaning for the Luxton family, as one of the father’s ancestors was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal after the Battle of the Somme, where he and his brother died. Moreover, Jack Luxton is obsessed by the chronotope of the 1994 Remembrance Sunday, having “every reason to remember it, setting aside that it was Remembrance Day anyway” (WYWH, 13), thus displaying the simultaneous disparity of public and private remembrance. Year after year, he had accompanied his father during “the Luxton Remembrance Day ritual” (WYWH, 14), which was communal yet also special and comprised the visit at the memorial cross in Marleston in their best (and only) suits. They would wear poppies in their buttonholes, afterwards stand by his mother’s grave in the adjacent churchyard for a moment,⁵² and then spend the one yearly visit

 The phrase “never to return” is repeated several times in the novel, mainly in connection with the departure of soldiers. It contains the refraction of dramatic irony, since the declamatory “repatriation” ceremony pretends to do exactly that, yet cannot achieve the return of the dead.  See Henke, “Memory, Ritual,” 369.  Vera Luxton’s repeated story-telling regarding the medal is another personal ritual her son was familiar with since his early childhood and which in his memory is associated with the date and the piece of metal.

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to the Crown for a pint. There the father would allow other patrons to glimpse at the DCM he kept in his pocket, and subsequently used to invite his neighbors and also his sons for a drink since Jack and Tom were teenagers. Jack only realizes the significance of the last part of this ritual – that the three of them were still standing together and had some reason for patriotic pride in the family – when the pub visit is silently cancelled after Tom on the date of his majority deserts the farm and his father to join the British army. Jack recognizes too late that he might have continued the custom and thus shown a sign of solidarity with his father (WYWH, 17– 19), who soon after commits suicide. The problem of communicating with each other has plagued Jack in his home and his marriage. In the narrative present it threatens to result in another act of violence. The fictional narrative of the Remembrance Day ritual reveals on the one hand the attempt at honoring the dead with a dignity not diminished by time and on the other the worn-out, stale atmosphere surrounding the tradition that commemorates their death (WYWH, 19).⁵³ An impression of immovable stasis, a paralysis that envelops the remaining Luxton family members foreshadows a destiny none of the three male characters seems able to escape. However, it is the breach with tradition in November 1994 that announces the peak of a crisis that expresses itself in a series of cancellations, annihilations and disappearances. Instead of the fleeting moment of the annual intimate celebration, an atmosphere of wordless depression emerges between Michael and Jack Luxton and the community. The repatriation ceremony, whose narrativization does not ignore the doubly fictional nature of an ‘as if’ action,⁵⁴ is occasionally presented from the point of view of an official homodiegetic focalizer: the army major who also notified Jack about his brother’s death in Iraq. With a perspective closer to the national interests than Jack’s, who has come with feelings of guilt to meet a brother he had not thought of for a long time, even the major ponders about the British army’s involvement in the war in Iraq. Jack realizes that other mourners appear to him “as if they might be approaching a cathedral. This clearly wasn’t some small event. But of course it wasn’t” (WYWH, 159). The religious association in a military context emphasizes the sublime in the ritual, which also affects the shocked man. Spatial and temporal determinants combined form a narrative reflection that is replete with personal emotions and with the values these deaths are inscribed with by the national agencies. The attitude of Tom Luxton, who joined the army

 Cp. Henke (“Memory, Ritual,” 374– 375) on Julian Barnes’s short story “Evermore.”  Henke generally points at the “subjunctive” potential of commemorative rituals (“Memory, Ritual,” 371). This potential is enhanced by presenting the ‘fake’ funeral in Wish You Were Here.

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for a private reason and did not care about these merits, is only made known to the reader (WYWH, 202– 204) after his brother’s view (WYWH, 178 – 179). To conclude: Henke’s explanation that the English novel has always put an emphasis on the individual, a circumstance which has “a complicating effect” on the narrative representation of “collectivist” rituals and commemoration (“Memory, Ritual,” 379), illuminates only one side of the coin. Especially The Great Fire of London, The Stranger’s Child and Wish You Were Here illustrate the reverse side. Facilitated by the epic expansion of the genre, the recent ‘complicated’ narratorial diversity reveals itself as the novelistic representation’s special asset. This observation proves equally valid for the other Anglophone novels discussed in this article, in particular that of the Canadian Atwood.⁵⁵ Narratives of performative rituals as well as of material memorial signs profit from the novel’s versatility; Vladíslavic’s short story displays satirical pointedness. It is the monument narrative – the symbol of a symbol of the Imaginary –, which by methods such as perspectivization, a limited or unreliable point-of-view expresses plurality, nonconformity and “personal moral beliefs.” The monument, in contrast, used to be a means to demonstrate consent and the (supposedly united) “concept of public morality.”⁵⁶ Distinct from the socially approved monolithic object or ceremony, the portrayal of silent individual response to it also conveys freedom of expression as the fictional narrative’s uncensored virtue. Its unique feature, however, is empathetic creativity which functions as a counterbalance to conventions or socio-politically (re)established principles, and not least also counters worn-down indifference. Presenting volatile, often uncertain and emotional reactions, the narratives’ main thrust proves particularly forceful in the representation of the complex reception of symbolic signs.

 Whereas Atwood’s narrator of the war monument leaves no doubt about the characters’ unbroken loyalty to the British Crown at this point Trevor’s and Tóibín’s narratives address the conflicts of national identity in the background of the monumental narratives together with the burden of Irish history. The South-African short story, I wish to argue, fulfils the purposes of satire not least by linking nationalities together whose incomparability is farcically defined as similarity by one of the letter-writers. The topic of national identity itself is thereby seasoned with sarcasm.  Hayden White, “The Narrativization of Real Events,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 793 – 798, 798.

Book Reviews Gwilym Jones. Shakespeare’s Storms. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016 [2015]. x + 198 pp. ISBN 9781526116826, GBP 14.99. Gwilym Jones’ first monograph allows the reader to consider the multiplicity of ways in which Shakespeare deploys storms in his dramatic work by providing insight not only into the theatrical means by which such storms were created onstage, but also through a careful assessment of how early modern society thought about and conceived storms as meteorological events. Winner of the 2016 Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award, Jones’ work has been praised for both its style and substance in conveying some complex ideas to both scholars and the general reader. In this assessment I am happy to concur. Shakespeare’s Storms displays a refreshingly open enthusiasm for its research and its practical potential in performance both on the early modern stage and in modern reconstructed theatre spaces such as Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The result is a book as delightful as it is illuminating, combining intellectual rigor with a deft lightness of touch. An ideal example of this occurs in Jones’ opening paragraph of his introduction, in which he recounts witnessing a performance of King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2008. In discussing an incident where stormy weather on London’s South Bank eerily seemed to mirror the action of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Jones reveals how anecdotal incidents can both illustrate performative issues and act as critical evidence in their own right. All performances, of course, and all records of performances, are necessarily ‘one-off’ events; even when the same actors perform the same play in the same space, any number of elements may differ from day-to-day. One such element is, of course, the weather itself, and, indeed, for the audience present at the matinee of the Globe’s King Lear in 2008, their experience and subsequent recollection of the production was and is irreducibly connected with the stormy conditions of performance on that particular afternoon in May. Jones is hasty to explain that there is far more at stake than this. For one, he contends that “Shakespeare’s storms have so far been misread, if not ignored” by critics (2), and his analysis takes into account the dramatic function of storms in addition to their evolving symbolism throughout Shakespeare’s body of work. In order to do this, he focuses on five plays in particular (Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Pericles, and The Tempest) and devotes a chapter to each. These are interspersed with shorter chapters on particular types of stormy weather (thunder, lightning, wind, and rain) which explain how these elements were understood in https://doi.org/9783110532913-016

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the Renaissance. This structuring offers benefits and disadvantages. On the one hand, it neatly allows the reader to navigate the book according to one’s own personal interest. On the other, the individual sections on the weather sometimes feel rather episodic. Perhaps, in addition to the more general introduction to the monograph, the author could provide a second introductory chapter, which would serve as an overview of Renaissance weather theory. This would have the added benefit of considering the individual elements of the storm – thunder, lightning, wind, and rain – in combination rather than in isolation. The brief spotlights on the weather are, however, laced with fascinating detail. Chapter three, on lightning, opens with an account of a church steeple being struck by in 1606, and how this incident led clergyman Simon Harward to write A Discourse of the Several Kinds and Causes of Lightnings. Lightning, like thunder, was seen as a kind of “exhalation” within the elements; this furthers Jones’ analysis of thunder in Chapter one, in which he uses early modern meteorological ideas in order to reconsider lines by the player in 2.2 of Hamlet. It is a very good example of what the author frequently does extremely well: use his research and knowledge of how stormy weather was conceived in the period, in order to close-read Shakespeare’s dramatic texts and enrich our understanding of both the play and its context. A further instance of this occurs in his chapter on wind, in which he suggests that Hamlet’s line “I am but mad north-north west” is a reference to the belief that different winds had different characteristics which could affect “those suffering from melancholy madness,” (84) with the north wind being considered especially cold and dry. Jones’ chapter on rain is far shorter than the others, but he does include some interesting insights into how the quarto and folio versions of Hamlet, where “sallied” is changed to “sullied,” both support a metaphor based on meteorological language. This does, however, raise further questions about how textual differences may affect the close-reading Jones does with such aplomb. How, for instance, might the quarto and folio versions of King Lear affect the way in which the storm is discussed and evoked? Instead, Jones’ reading of King Lear explores how it is dominated by “event” rather than location, with his central proposition being that it is “the storm itself, aesthetically and structurally, [that] sustains the play” (59). By thinking about Lear being lost in the storm rather than within a specific location per se, Jones offers a reading of the tragedy, which equates the loss of sanity and meaning with the inability to map precisely where Lear is, instead using the storm to consider what he is caught up in. Critics as far back as A. C. Bradley have noted the vagueness of location in the play; however, Jones applies this to an ecocritical framework, which enables the reader to consider the idea of “nature as event,” (69) in order to further engage with debates about climate change. However, the author’s reading is still mostly rooted in the play and its dramatic possi-

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bilities, which is no bad thing. In his chapter’s conclusion, Jones focuses on the word “cause,” which we are told occurs “relentlessly” throughout the play. (76) Asking “what is the cause of thunder?” (78) allows Lear, in Jones’ eyes, to finally become humanized. As Lear accepts his lack of power over the storm, this in turn allows the audience to consider not only whether the storm’s cause is natural or supernatural, but also to question “the phonic system of signification in early modern theatre.” (78) The chapter on Julius Caesar considers the way in which the play “engage[s] with the spectacular,” (31) both in general and also specifically through the use of the storm, and applies this to an argument that the play was used for one of the Globe’s inaugural productions in 1599. The newly-built playhouse afforded the company the opportunity to use brand new stage effects. In this way, the staging of the storm would have served as a powerful way to display the capabilities of the Globe, with the noise of the rolling thunder able to carry across to other rival playhouses whose audiences would wonder what they were missing. Jones provides detailed insight on how the storm effects would have been created through swevels – a kind of “firework rocket” – and cannonballs, which together would provide both “noise and spectacle.” (34) The smell of gunpowder from the fireworks would have been discernible from the neighbouring theatres too, once again allowing the Globe to be seen “as a vibrant and exciting new theatre with an effects department to outmatch its rivals.” (37) Jones even goes as far as to argue that this may well have been the first time that audiences were able to experience stage battles “in a fully multi-dimensional soundscape.” (39) This level of insight allows us to reconceive Julius Caesar as an early modern blockbuster; rather than a play whose dramatic narrative peaks too soon with the murder of Caesar, the real spectacle occurs afterwards with the storm and battle scenes which made use of exciting new technology used to dazzle the early modern spectator. In Macbeth, we are given a play that opens with thunder and lightning, and Jones uses the stormy weather to consider the drama’s theme of equivocation by asking if the storms are natural or supernatural. To do so, Jones draws on contextual thought about witches and James I’s belief that “[t]hey can rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire,” (90) while also turning to how the witches’ use of language is a way of performing the storm (93). The chapter further explores the phenomenon of earthquakes, believed in the early modern period to “prognosticate a time of terrible upheaval.” (95) However, it is not until page 97 where Jones reveals the crucial connection that early moderns considered earthquakes as a type of storm, where “wind, trapped beneath the surface of the earth, rushes and swirls underground, causing the earth to shake.” (97) Jones furthers this discussion by turning to sources, such as Arthur Golding, Pliny, and the aforemen-

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tioned Simon Harward, although Jones misses an opportunity to mention how in Canto 3 of Dante’s Inferno, the description “the fearful ground exhaled a wind” (1.3.133, trans. by Peter Dale) is used to evoke an earthquake that occurs on the banks of the River Acheron. This idea of the earthquake being due to an exhalation would further consolidate Jones’ argument, given that thunder and lightning were also thought to be caused by exhalations in the atmosphere. Jones’ chapter on Pericles uses the co-authored play as a direct means to compare and contrast Shakespeare’s treatment of storms with the approach taken by George Wilkins. The analysis here is intriguing and serves as an excellent example of how Shakespeare’s dramatic vision of storms differs from his contemporaries, and Jones astutely observes that while “Wilkins symbolizes,” Shakespeare “dramatizes the human capacity to symbolize.” (123) This is a vital and fascinating distinction; I wonder how this juxtaposition could be more regularly extended to consider writers other than these two. While I concede that there will always be a limit to what can be adequately covered in the space of a monograph, the largely Shakespearean focus requires a bit more justification than what Jones currently offers. However, this is one of the book’s outstanding chapters, and its analysis of storms in both biblical and dramatic contexts create some very perceptive connections between the literary cultures of the early modern period. The final play Jones gives extensive analysis to is, fittingly, The Tempest. In this chapter, he analyzes how the storm of the first scene informs the other references to the weather mentioned in the text. Taking Timothy Morton’s term, “rendering,” as “a name for the process by which a text presents itself as reality and encourages the reader or audience to accept it as such,” (127) the chapter moves beyond Andrew Gurr’s work on how the opening storm may have been staged, in order to consider the authenticity Shakespeare was aiming for. Observing the precision of the maritime language used in 1.1 (at odds with Shakespeare’s often casual relationship to factual accuracy regarding, say, geographical details), Jones argues for the unexpected realism of the orders shouted by the boatswain as a further way of conjuring the appearance of a realistic storm. Jones also makes an interesting case for the storm continuing into the second scene of the play, noting how the deictic “this roar” implies that the bad weather is occurring in the present moment (136). In doing so, Miranda reveals “the aesthetic framework” hidden in the first scene (137), which leads to Jones ultimately concluding that “the play presents nature as only accessible through a distorted theatrical lens, one which reflects both subject and object through its self-awareness.” (150) Such an assessment is, in many ways, an interesting summation of the book’s overall aims and conclusions. In his introduction, Jones claims that “[t]

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hematic studies can teach us not only what to look at, but also how to look at ourselves looking.” (21) His application of this to Shakespeare’s drama reveals both the symbolic, practical, and theatrical resonances of weather in the early modern period, with the intrinsic self-awareness of theatre proving to be an exemplary medium for such an exploration. Shakespeare’s Storms’ overall achievement is to prove the relevance of chasing something as seemingly ephemeral as the weather in order to reveal how such meteorological phenomena shape our relationship to the world around us. It is an original and fascinating study that will be of interest to scholars researching ecocriticism, performance history, and early modern drama from a range of thematic and practical approaches. Miranda Fay Thomas

Shakespeare’s Globe, London

Judith Butler. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 256 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-96775-5, USD 27.95 This is a powerful book that shines new light on the centrality of performativity for socio-political action and reform. At a time when damaging forms of individualism, in particular nationalist ones, have gained new currency, Notes revises the notion of individualized (identity) politics, opting instead for alliance, cohabitation, reciprocal vulnerability, and shared precarity as a foundation of human sociality. Developing further her concept of gender performativity from the 1990s, and drawing on Hannah Arendt’s work on public space, Judith Butler presents a concept of collective performativity through which minorities may lay claim to the ‘public sphere of appearance’ and, as such, to the very concept of humanity. Presenting challenging ideas throughout in a lucid and readable manner, and referring to a range of recent phenomena and events including European populisms, demonstrations on Tahir square, and the always current struggle of Israel and Palestine, Notes is an important and timely book that helps its readers grasp the complexity of resistance against marginalizing forces in the current historical moment. Though published before the Brexit vote and the on-set of the Trump presidency, the book is of great relevance for these events, offering insights that are likely to enlighten debates on politics, sociality, and ethicality for many years to come. Combining ideas from humanism, anti-humanism, and post-humanism, Butler pursues an ambitious path of tackling the very basis of sociality: living together; living together in equality; and, more broadly, living in balance with one’s environment both human and non-human. This path is developed by Butler over an intro-

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duction and six concise and inspiring chapters, which, it seems, build on the entirety of her previous work, from her publications on gender performativity to later works on livable lives, grievability, precarity, and vulnerability.¹ In chapter one, “Gender Politics and the Right to Appear,” Butler takes gender performativity as a starting point, emphasizing particularly the precarity that underlies gender performance. Taking up ideas from her well-known Gender Trouble (1990; 1999) and Bodies that Matter (1993),² Butler reminds her readers that performing gender always risks “missing the mark” (30); depending on the severity of its failure, this can incur social punishment ranging from ostracization to death. In later works, she extrapolates from this indicating that ‘missing the mark’ is always a risk, not only in terms of gender, but also with regard to every other marker that enables recognition of someone as human. In Notes, Butler advances two notions to develop this idea further: “intelligibility” and “sphere [or: field] of appearance.” Becoming intelligible means appearing in ways that can easily be decoded according to normative structures of perception which makes intelligibility an existential question. It directly informs who is perceived as human in society: “Which humans count as human? Which humans are eligible for recognition within the sphere of appearance, and which are not? What racist norms, for instance, operate to distinguish among those who can be recognized as human and those who cannot?” (36). Harking back to Precarious Life and Frames of War, Butler thus presents the crucial view that “the human is differentially produced” (41), rendering life precarious and vulnerable where it fails to conform to normative intelligibility. She then defines collective performativity as an assemblage of disenfranchised groups who, through their very act of coming together, lay claim to public visibility through public assembly (58). An important point for Butler is that disenfranchised groups do not share precarity homogenously, or equally. Instead, “women, queers, transgender people, the poor, the differently abled, and the stateless, but also religious and racial minorities” suffer in different ways and to differing extents from “failing social and economic networks of support,” in addition to being “differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (33). Honoring such differences of experience, ‘precarity’ presents a way of moving beyond identity politics as it assembles

 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); Judith Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1999); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ (New York: Routledge, 1993).

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in one place a variety of groups or populations whose lives are rendered precarious differently. In other words, the collective ‘we’ is always organic and dynamic, an “assembly of bodies, plural, persisting, acting” (59) and thus changeable, inconsistent, and non-uniform. It is such a diverse assembly that brings into being the sphere of appearance in the first place (60), so that what counts in resistance is not identity but alliance. Taking up this cue, in chapter two (“Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street”) Butler stresses the importance of interdependency and what she calls “an ethics of cohabitation” (70). Inspired by her previous work on ‘queer’ (“queer does not designate identity, but alliance”), and working in more detail with Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “space of appearance” (73; my emphasis), Butler makes the important point that no single body ‘makes’ space, but that the performative act of laying claim to visibility “happens only ‘between’ bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s” (77). Butler thus counters individualism and individuation as foundations of political action, instead stressing the need for intersubjective – intercorporeal – amalgamation. Discussing the demonstrations on Tahir square in this context, she foregrounds how a conglomerate of bodies cohabited in the square for a period of time, eating and sleeping, socializing and protesting, giving speeches and thus laying claim to the very possibility of public representation. Some readers might be surprised that Butler emphasizes the equality between different genders during the Tahir protests (e. g., shared responsibilities of public speaking and cleaning of sanitary facilities), whilst not mentioning the gendered attacks against women that also featured (e. g., mob sexual assault, harassment, rape). She explains in a later chapter why she prefers not to understand vulnerability as gendered – to counter essentialist constructions of women as vulnerable – and this contextualizes the omission. Nonetheless, it appears that Butler’s discussion of the Tahir demonstrations speaks of a degree of idealization of public assembly and its ostensive promotion of equality amongst those assembled. Certainly, a more detailed argument is needed here acknowledging not only aggressive behavior toward women during the protests (and women’s readiness to sacrifice personal safety for political ends), but also explaining how these points might complement or extend Butler’s argument against gendered constructions of vulnerability – an argument which, there can be no doubt, is highly relevant. Chapter three, “Precarious Life and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” takes up the question of mediation; of mediated wars or violence and the perspective of the viewer. Crucial for this chapter is again the development of an understanding that life is interconnected of necessity, that each and every one is part of a larger organism and as such is also vulnerable. This sense of interconnectedness must

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transcend both, local familiarity and abstract distance: “if I am only bound to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary. If I am only bound to those who are ‘human’ in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others” (104). Reading Levinas and Arendt, Butler arrives to the view that we should “struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity” (119), and which gives the viewer a sense of shared vulnerability that interconnects everyone in cohabitation at whatever scale. It is in this context that I also understand a brilliant quote from chapter two, indicating that our own existence is always, in a sense, mediated; that our bodies always depend on translation by another: The body is constituted through perspectives it cannot inhabit; someone else sees our face in a way that we cannot and hears our voice in a way that we cannot. We are in this sense— bodily—always over there, yet here, and this dispossession marks the sociality to which we belong. Even as located beings, we are always elsewhere, constituted in a sociality that exceeds us. This establishes our exposure and our precarity, the ways in which we depend on political and social institutions to persist. (97)

The reversibility of proximity and distance in media representations (bringing distant suffering to our immediate attention/awareness) is thus mirrored by the positioning of the body as a body that is always constituted by others (whether in assemblies or in the media), indicating that precarity is a joined condition as no one is simply ontologically ‘there.’ As Butler also notes in Frames of War, “This ‘being’ of the body […] is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others.”³ It is the latter part of this quote referring to the “uneven distribution of precarity” (119) that finally raises questions as to the translatability of Butler’s theory into practice: uneven distribution of precarity means some lives are more privileged than others. How and why are people moved in the direction of giving up such privilege? If every life is, per definitionem, precarious and if this insight can inspire new approaches of cohabitation and alliance, how are people possibly motivated to translate this abstract insight into practice which would redistribute precarity to their own detriment, if there are others whose lives are more precarious? This is perhaps another instance of idealism in Butler’s theory. It is a question not easily resolved, and yet it is a question that is key for the current historical moment: strained by Trump and Brexit, rising populism in a range of

 Butler, Frames of War, 2– 3.

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European countries etc., awareness of a shared precarity across cultural and religious, gender and class lines, has greatly suffered, disrupted by borders and walls of many different kinds. Delving deeper into these matters, chapter four (“Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitional Politics”) features a discussion of the politics of the term ‘vulnerability.’ Taking up posthuman theory and disability studies, Butler argues that the human body is necessarily an extended formation that is dependent on infrastructures of different kinds (133). Bodies and their claims to mobility are thus not naturally given; instead they are vulnerable. Moving on to a broader discussion, it seems that Butler picks up the issue of gendered vulnerability left to one side in her discussion of the Tahir protests. Where ‘women’ are posited as ‘weaker’ and more vulnerable this easily slips into a discourse that consolidates the category of ‘woman’ in an essentializing way, giving rise to a variety of exclusions and discriminatory actions. In other words, Butler opposes the notion of “unchanging” (140) vulnerability, one which becomes constitutive of marginalizing identity categories, whilst she promotes a discursive practice that links vulnerability to resistance, a resistance against actual threats and against potential essentialisms based on the notion of ‘vulnerable.’ In a further move that resembles Jack Halberstam’s argumentation in The Queer Art of Failure (2011),⁴ Butler objects to neo-liberal positionings of vulnerability as related to ‘responsibilization’ where populations designated as vulnerable or precarious are constructed as accountable for their own precarity (144). Moreover, Butler notes that patriarchal and/or populist discourses frequently posit masculinity as vulnerable to feminists (145), or white majorities as vulnerable to immigrants. Thus very effectively exposing the politics of the term vulnerability, and the complications with which it arises, Butler raises questions crucial to any consideration of precarity, including the planetary perspective: “To say that any of us are vulnerable beings is to mark our radical dependency not only on others, but on a sustaining and sustainable world” (150). While this posthumanist angle is certainly convincing, it does not emerge how precisely it can be reconciled with the antihumanist angle also promoted by Butler. The antihumanist angle would continue to foreground the actual discrepancies in the distribution of precarity in society, as well as in the forces of marginalization that are at work in groups and/or collectives of all stripes. This is then another instant in which actual inequality collides with a preference of a more all-encompassing perspective (see Butler’s discussion of the Tahir demonstrations), and it is another moment when utopianism enters Butler’s considerations. Again, there is need for further work here, as the ques-

 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011).

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tion how to reconcile the tension between an abstract (and equally) shared vulnerability and the de facto uneven distribution of vulnerability in social groups is a central one in the current socio-political climate. “‘We the People – Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” chapter five, takes a different thrust by investigating the enigmatic notion of ‘we the people’ and the practice of non-violence. Butler considers the necessarily exclusionary nature of the phrase ‘we the people’ and highlights how “coming together […] is already an enactment of a popular will” (156; emphases in the original). Moving through a discussion of “popular sovereignty,” its relation to the state, and the inverse of public assembly, the prison, Butler suggests parallels between the prison and the market/privatization: “If privatization seeks to destroy public space, then prison is the ultimate way of barring access to public space” (186). The notion of the market as ‘enclosure of the commons’ is a popular one in contemporary theory; yet its allegory in ‘the prison’ is more unusual, linking privatization, on the one hand, to criminalization and loss of self-autonomy, on the other. This point is perhaps made a little hastily by Butler (elaborated less than some of her other points) and cries out for further discussion. After all, apart from the joint effect of removing a naturalized claim (a claim to land/resources and that to one’s own life), ‘privatization’ and ‘prison’ also operate quite differently, in different contexts (assertion of economic power vs. assertion of state power) and with different contents (privatization tackles objects, institutions, or land; prisons are immediately directed at human lives). Without further discussion of possible commonalities and differences, Butler closes the chapter with a consideration of non-violence, an “ethos and a tactic” (192) which is crucial in its performative alternative to the mechanisms of war and suppression and is promoted by Butler over violent forms of resistance. “Do I establish myself in the terms that would make my life valuable, or do I offer a critique of the reigning order of values?” (200) – this is the central philosophical problem that Butler poses in her concluding chapter, “Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life?” The chapter title is inspired by Adorno’s statement: “Es gibt kein gutes Leben im Falschen,” literally translated as ‘There is no right/true life in a wrong one.’ Butler takes this quote and focuses in particular on the term ‘life’ which features twice in the English translation and once in the German original where the second ‘life’ is omitted through an ellipsis (‘im falschen Leben’). Asking again “Whose lives matter?” Butler makes the significant point that “Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life” is a question for the privileged: not everybody’s life is valued as a life; is considered or recognized as a life. One can only question the quality of one’s life if one is already constituted as alive, or living, and as such as a life that will be grieved when lost. That this is not a purely philosophical but thoroughly existential question emerges when Butler suggests: “If

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only a grievable life can be valued, and valued through time, then only a grievable life will be eligible for social and economic support, housing, health care, employment, rights of political expression, forms of social recognition, and conditions for political agency” (198). Given the plight of those not recognized as ‘living,’ Butler demands a new integrity that acknowledges the privilege of the question ‘how do I lead a good life’ and a critical disposition to the very categories and conditions that facilitate the distinction between livable and non-livable lives: “I cannot affirm my own life without critically evaluating those structures that differentially value life itself” (199). Critically evaluating these structures also means returning to questions of vulnerability and dependency. As Butler emphasizes, every human being, to lead a livable life, depends on a variety of support systems both human and non-human. Without dependency, which has commonly been assessed critically in the context of economic exploitation and colonialism, no life is livable. Therefore, both dependency and vulnerability need not only be equally distributed in society (210), but, vice versa, any disavowal of dependency and vulnerability produces inequality, constituting some groups or individuals in essentialist terms or “shoring up paternalism” (211). In order to facilitate resistance against inequality, against leading a false life by taking ‘life’ for granted, resistance must necessarily be plural and embodied (218). It must rely on interdependency and is not necessarily loud and active; it can be silent, building on the coming together of bodies that lay claim – in one way or another – to the sphere of appearance. Ultimately, Butler is in favor of social movements that “do not seek to overcome interdependency or vulnerability as they struggle against precarity” but instead seek to “produce the conditions under which vulnerability and interdependency become livable” (218; my emphasis). These are the “critical conditions of democratic life” (219). There can be no doubt that Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly is a truly meaningful continuation of Butler’s work, expanding central concepts, promoting new ones, and offering the most relevant insights into the politics, mechanisms, and effects of public assembly and their potential to contest the status quo. Most importantly, this is a visionary work that indicates how we might change our epistemology to realize forms of sociality more profoundly founded on equality. Despite its utopian moments – or perhaps precisely because of them – we are encouraged to challenge received notions of individualism, identity politics, and ethics, delving instead into a framework that rests fully, and productively, on a shared sense of collectivity. Caroline Kögler

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

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Andrew Escobedo, ed. Edmund Spenser in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. ISBN 978–1107094536. GBP 74.99. Edited by Andrew Escobedo, Edmund Spenser in Context is the latest addition to the Literature in Context series published by Cambridge University Press. It brings together 37 compact chapters by leading scholars in Spenser studies and, more generally, in Renaissance studies. Following the by now well-established pattern of the series, the contributions place Spenser and his works within their various literary, historical, and cultural contexts. Structured into three parts, the volume aims at furthering the critical understanding of Spenser’s divers, and at times contrasting, poetic personae that are listed in the introduction as the “careerist poet,” the “philosophical poet,” the “religious poet,” the “sensuous love poet,” and the “political poet” (1). The ten chapters that form the volume’s first part called ‘Spenser’s Environment’ discuss the poet’s works with a view to what the editor sees as “the structures and institutions to which Spenser responded” (2). The first chapter, for instance, analyzes the influence that “the theory and practice of humanist pedagogy had on Spenser’s imagination throughout his early career and into his mature work” (13). The subsequent chapters discuss Spenser’s self-fashioning as a laureate poet (chapter 2); his shifting “poetics of patronage” (chapter 3, p. 30); the church controversies framing his poetry (chapter 4); and Spenser’s praise and criticism of Elizabeth I (chapter 5). In addition, there are chapters that place Spenser’s work within the contexts of the early modern market in print publications (chapter 6); the English colonialization of Ireland and North America (chapters 7 and 8, respectively); Spenser’s Irish circle as “being bound up not only with the company he kept, but also with the ripples he caused” (chapter 9, p. 86); and, finally, the poet’s investment in writing Irish borders and boundaries (chapter 10). Shifting the critical perspective to “the modes in which [Spenser] wrote,” (2) ‘Part II – Genre and Craft’ includes thirteen chapters which consider the influences of genre, religious writing, literary theory, and literary history. These contributions discuss Spenser’s writings in the contexts of epic (chapter 11); pastoral (chapter 12); romance (chapter 13); the “key elements of sixteenth-century Reformed biblical hermeneutics” (chapter 14, p. 137); the literary traditions of complaint and satire which “for Spenser […] remain central, providing a cover for his trenchant critiques” (chapter 15, p. 156); Renaissance literary and rhetorical theories (chapters 17 and 18, respectively); and Spenser’s commonweal poetry in which he “fashions himself as embodying the nation itself” (chapter 19; p. 183). The last three chapters of the volume’s second part analyze The Faerie Queene as an “ahistorical historical poem” (chapter 20, p. 191); Spenser’s dis-

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tinctly pre-modern strategies of character writing (chapter 21), as well as “the productive contexts for Spenser’s prosody” (chapter 22, p. 211). Focusing on the “resources [Spenser] drew upon,” (2) ‘Part III – Influences and Analogues’ includes fifteen chapters that cover a large variety of aspects ranging from poetry such as Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch and Chaucer (chapters 23 to 26) to Spenser’s engagement with the Sidney circle (chapter 27) and with French literature (chapter 28). Spenser’s poetry is placed within the context of Platonism (chapter 29), Aristotelian virtues (chapter 30), and Elizabethan Protestantism (chapters 31 and 33). There are chapters on how Spenser inscribes himself into the emblematic and iconographic tradition of the Renaissance (chapter 32) and on how his poetry “absorbs the epistemological power of cosmography and cosmology” (chapter 34, p. 330). The volume’s third part closes with three chapters on topics as diverse as Spenser’s “manipulation of georgic imagery and splicing of georgic industry with the more languid forms of pastoral retreat” (chapter 35, p. 334), as well as “his complex and fluid representations of sex and eroticism” (p. 343) within the religious, social, legal and racial discourses of Elizabethan England (chapter 36), and finally the negotiation of gender in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (chapter 37). There is much to recommend in this rich volume, which successfully contextualizes the writings of a poet who, as Escobedo puts it, “has become one of the most difficult for modern readers to appreciate” (2). Although each chapter can be read on its own, different chapters across all three parts of the volume are linked to each other through shared concerns, thus strengthening its thematic as well as its structural coherence. For instance, Andrew Wallace’s discussion of Spenser’s poetry within the context of humanist pedagogy (Part I, chapter 1) is complemented by Joe Moshenska’s contribution in which he retraces the influence that Aristotelian ethics had in Renaissance classrooms and, therefore, on Spenser (Part III, chapter 30). Chapters 5, 12, and 23 also work well together, again creating links between the volume’s three parts. In chapter 5 (in Part I), Anna Riehl Bertolet analyzes the “multifaceted royal image” (51) which functions as a means of both admiring and criticizing Elizabeth I in both The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene. Reading the “pastoral cameo” of the queen (45) in the fourth eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, Bertolet’s chapter is linked to Katherine C. Little’s contribution on Spenser’s use of the pastoral mode (Part II, chapter 12) as well as to David Scott Wilson-Okamura’s chapter on Virgil as one of the resources that feed into Spenser’s poetry (Part III, chapter 23). Discussing The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout, and Book VI of The Faerie Queene, Little shows that Spenser was “preoccupied by the pastoral mode throughout his writing career” (117). While Little identifies Virgil’s Eclogues as “the most influential model for [the pastoral poetry of] Edmund Spenser and his contemporaries,”

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(110) Wilson-Okamura outlines Spenser’s borrowings from Virgil across his oeuvre. Little argues that “[f]or [sixteenth-century] writers who were defining themselves as such, the pastoral must have offered an energizing and validating model,” (115) and Wilson-Okamura shows how Spenser came to be identified as an “English Virgil” (217). Due to their shared interest in Spenser’s self-fashioning as a poet, these two chapters also tie in with William A. Oram’s discussion of what he terms Spenser’s “laureate career-fashioning” (chapter 2, p. 14). The volume works very well in placing Spenser’s poetry into the diverse contexts it emerged from. In some cases, chapters seem to privilege the poet’s contexts over his writings. In chapter 4, for instance, Gregory Kneidel succinctly outlines the complex issue of church controversy “that remained unresolved throughout Spenser’s lifetime” (34). Almost purely contextual, this chapter is however complemented by Susannah Brietz Monta’s reading of Spenser’s poetry as a means of “prepar[ing] readers to negotiate the religious confusion caused by the Reformation” (chapter 33, p. 314). All in all, this volume succeeds in taking into view the “great variety of Spensers” (1) which shape and are shaped by his works. A highly recommended read, especially for those who are new to the field of Spenser studies. Lena Steveker

Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken

Nigel Purse. Tom Stoppard’s Plays. Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony. Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017. 654 pp. ISBN 978-0-90-0431836-6, EUR 175.00. One famous albeit disputed anecdote about Tom Stoppard has it that, after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was staged in New York, a member of the audience asked the playwright after the performance what the play was about. To this he allegedly replied: “It’s about to make me rich.” Since the day Stoppard has begun writing plays and other works of fiction, critics are on to him, trying to answer the question of what his work is truly about. By now, this scholarly criticism fills entire bookshelves and one could wonder whether the question has not already been answered. However, it speaks for Stoppard’s oeuvre itself – and for the imaginative and ambitious scholarship of the critics – when there is yet another essay, another monograph explaining an overlooked connection to an author, theory or philosophical idea. The themes and topics Stoppard incorporates in his work appear to be so plentiful and diverse that it seems to be open for endless discussions.

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Enter Nigel Purse who has written a 654 pages long book in which he aims at nothing less than to provide an overall and unifying pattern in which to assess and evaluate the whole Stoppardian canon in an attempt to […] identify the patterns behind a context […] which must be capable of encompassing the […] plenitude […] within Stoppard’s work. (XXII)

The patterns he aims to identify are those of methods, themes, and of dramatic devices (cp. XXVIII). However, as one could easily say that all of these topics have been broached upon before in one way or another, Purse’s new take on Stoppard’s truly entire work is the application of “the principle of parsimony” in the form of Occam’s razor: The idea, attributed to William of Ockham, that when a multiplicity of possible explanations may be applied to a complicated problem it is usually the simplest one which provides the most satisfactory answer is the foundation upon which the edifice of the complex arrays of ideas and events that comprise the sensory and intellectual onslaught of Stoppard’s plays is built. (XIII)

Hence, the subtitle of his book, Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony: “The manifest plenitude of Stoppard’s plays belies the broad patterns beneath his drama and, ultimately, the parsimony of Occam’s razor” (XIII–XIV). At first glance, the monograph is structured accordingly. It starts with an explanation of the parsimony principle that is Purse’s theoretical base of criticism, Occam’s razor (chapter 1), and is followed by the various forms Stoppard applies it to his work. Purse shows that the idea for plays such as After Magritte – “a triple version of the Occam’s razor principle – that in a complicated situation or argument […] it is the simplest that is the most likely to satisfy” (8) – or Jumpers is based on the principle of parsimony and that also “Stoppard’s creative process employs a form of Occam’s razor” (18). The latter play is also drawn upon as an example of applying the parsimony principle to the question whether or not morality is absolute or relative (cp. 21), before Purse turns to Stoppard’s most frequent application of the principle “as a methodological means of reducing arguments to an understandable and concise conclusion” (23). What Purse argues here is that Stoppard boils his various and apparent contradictory topics and arguments in his work down in form of a few sentences (for example in Travesties and The Invention of Love), a single speech (The Coast of Utopia trilogy), an idea (chaos theory in Arcadia, quantum physics in Hapgood, illusion and reality in The Real Thing, value in The Hard Problem) and symbolism (the painting in Indian Ink, songs in Rock ‘N’ Roll or the final ‘orchestrated’ scene in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour).

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One could think that the study actually ends here, as Purse has by then successfully convinced the reader of how Stoppard employs Occam’s razor in his work. However, Purse is just getting warm. What follows is “an assessment of what he is reducing or eliminating by his use of parsimony” (56), i. e., the above-mentioned patterns. In detail, these are patterns of a) method: the Stoppardian stage debate (chapter 2) and the fusion of the dramatic vehicle with an idea (chapter 3); b) themes: ethics (chapter 4) and the duality of illusion and reality (chapter 5); and c) dramatic devices: theatricality (chapter 6, which includes among others comedy, adaptations and literary influences) and time shifts (chapter 7). Here, too, Purse gives a detailed and convincing reading of Stoppard’s work with regard to the identified patterns. He neither leaves out devices (as far as I know the first scholar to consider nudity in Stoppard’s plays) nor works of fiction (considering even an obscure radio play such as Doctor Masopust, I presume) in order to finally argue that because of the plenitude at work in Stoppard’s canon, the principle of parsimony in the form and by the application of Occam’s razor, is what his work is really about. Nevertheless, while Purse’s knowledge and understanding of Stoppard and his work is as immense and astounding as his (primary) research is diligent and immaculate, I cannot refrain from observing that it would have been helpful if the identified principle of parsimony had been applied to Purse’s own book. There are a number of redundancies which could have been avoided, for example lengthy double quotes (e. g., cp. 15 – 16 and 127, or 16 and 128), the explanation of elements in plays which has been written about by a large number of other critics in various essays and monographs before (e. g., the use of the various intertexts in Travesties, cp. 159 – 171, or the meaning of chaos theory and landscape gardening in Arcadia, cp. 136 – 152), or the constant reassurance of an original textual-critical observation in a play by directly referring to quotes by Stoppard himself. However, the main reason why the book feels in parts redundant lies in Purse’s method of choice: “It tries to address Stoppard’s work horizontally: that is to say, by picking out the patterns of the key themes across all his works. More ambitiously, it also tries to work them into an overall context” (XII). Hence, in the course of the book, we meet the usual suspects again and again (cp. General Index, 638 – 654): for example, chaos theory is mentioned and/or discussed in almost all chapters, which, of course, makes sense as it is a central metaphor in Arcadia, one of Stoppard’s most famous plays, and it reflects in various degrees almost all of Purse’s identified patterns. Nevertheless, because Purse chooses to discuss the plays non-chronologically, i. e., by pattern, it sometimes is laborious to read about the same subject matter under a different subheading. In his defence, I must say that I am not convinced that a different methodo-

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297

logical approach would have proven more successful. On the contrary, Purse’s scholarly thoroughness and understanding of Stoppard is to be admired (one only has to consider the appendix sections and the bibliography to be convinced of that). However, maybe sometimes less could have been more and he should have fallen back more on previous publications on Stoppard when possible in order to save time and space. In a nutshell, Nigel Purse has succeeded in his study Tom Stoppard’s Plays: Patterns of Plenitude and Parsimony by application of Occam’s razor – which he identifies as the foundation of Stoppard’s work itself – to identify the central leitmotifs that make up the playwright’s truly entire canon. He does so in a most elaborate and comprehensive way not shying away from any archive or obscure publication of the artist. This, however, sometimes leads to redundancies due to the absolute claim of Purse’s undertaking, meaning that the study’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Or to put it in another famous Stoppard misquote: “Good things, when short, are twice as good.” Holger Südkamp

Neuss

List of Contributors Maritza Cárdenas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona. Her research and teaching interests focus on U.S. Central Americans and Latina/o cultural productions, identity, and subject formation. She has published in journals such as Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, and in the anthology Race and Contention in Twenty-First Century US Media. Other essays are forthcoming in the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and in the anthology U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance. Her manuscript Constituting Central American-Americans: Transnational Identities and the Politics of (Dis)Location is currently under contract with Rutgers University Press. Isabel Durán is Professor of American Literature and Vice-provost for International Affairs at the Complutense University of Madrid. Former Chair of the English Department and former Associate Dean of the School of Philology, she is the President of the Spanish Association for American Studies; she has also served as member of the General Council of the American Studies Association and of its International Committee. She was a research fellow at Harvard University (through Real Colegio Complutense) in 2012. Her publication record on gender studies, literature, autobiography, and ethnicity include the edition of an eight-volume Gender Studies collection, the latest being the bilingual Estudios De Género: Visiones Transatlánticas/Gender Studies: Transatlantic Visions (2016). Her book Autobiography: Female Versions in 20th Century American Literature was published in Spanish. She is also co-editor of Miradas Transatlánticas/Transatlantic Vistas: Cultural Exchanges between Europe and the US. She is currently working on a book about contemporary American autobiography, and is also doing research on Latina/o literature. She is the creator of the Complutense Research Group “Women’s Studies in the Anglophone Countries,” and has been a Fulbright fellow on two occasions. Patricia M. García is Lecturer in the Department of English and faculty affiliate of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published numerous book reviews on Latina/o literature, English Renaissance literature, and English pedagogy in the journals Choice and Seventeenth Century News. She contributed a chapter on teaching poetry entitled “Karaoke Poetry” to The Pocket Instructor: Literature (2015), published by Princeton University Press. She is also a faculty member in the Free Minds Program, teaching humanities courses to post-traditional students returning to college learning. John Morán González is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (University of Texas Press, 2009) and The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels (Ohio State University Press, 2010). His articles and reviews have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Aztlán, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics, Western Historical Quarterly, and Western American Literature. He edited The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature (2016),

300

List of Contributors

and co-edited (with Laura Lomas) The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (forthcoming 2018). Ylce Irizarry is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida. Her research areas include Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Hispanic Caribbean Literatures, Testimonio, and Visual Rhetorics. Her major publication is the monograph Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in edited volumes including in Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016) and Hispanic Caribbean Literatures of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave, 2011). Dr. Irizarry’s most recent journal article is “Because Place Still Matters: Mapping Puertorriqueñidad in Bodega Dreams” (Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 2015). Other articles have appeared in Antípodas (2009), Contemporary Literature (2007), and Comparative American Studies (2006). Inbar Kaminsky holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral thesis examined metaphoricity and embodiment in prominent contemporary novels, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. She has contributed two essays to Philip Roth Studies about Operation Shylock (2012) and Nemesis (2014), as well as several articles to the following edited collections: Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Critical Reflections on Audience and Narrativity (Ibidem-Verlag, 2014); New Women’s Writing: Contexting Fiction, Poetry and Philosophy (Cambridge Scholars, forthcoming); The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool UP, forthcoming) and Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction (Rodopi, forthcoming). Julie Avril Minich is Associate Professor of English and Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico (Temple University Press, 2014), winner of the 2013 – 2014 Modern Languages Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Minich is currently completing a new book about compulsory able-bodiedness, Latina/o literature, and the racialization of health care. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz taught English and American Literature and Cultural Studies as Assistant Professor in the English Department at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her Ph.D. thesis was on Konzeption von Freundschaft und Liebe in Shakespeares Sonetten (Concepts of Love and Friendship in Shakespeare’s Sonnets); her second monograph on Science Fiction and Postmodern Fiction (Eng. 1992, Germ. 1986). With Wolfgang Karrer she edited a collection of critical essays on The African American Short Story, 1970 – 1990 (1993). She co-edited (with Anette Pankratz) a volume on the Female Artist in Contemporary Fiction published as Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing (2012) and a collection of essays, Narrating Loss: Representations of Mourning, Nostalgia and Melancholia in Contemporary Anglophone Fictions (2014, with Brigitte Glaser). In 2013 she was focus editor for Anglistik on “The Feminization of Fiction” and in 2016 on “Comic Representations in Post-Millennial Fictions.” Her articles published in edited volumes and scholarly journals are mostly in the fields of Early Modern literature and contemporary fiction.

List of Contributors

301

Marion Christina Rohrleitner is Associate Professor of English at The University of Texas at El Paso, where she researches and teaches contemporary American literature with an emphasis on Chicanx, Latinx, Caribbean diasporic, and world literatures and a focus on postcolonial and queer theories. She is the co-editor of Dialogues Across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation (Lexington, 2012) and her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Antípodas, Callaloo, El Mundo Zurdo, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Latino Studies and Melus. She is a contributor to the Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies, and has chapters in Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry (University of Arkansas Press, 2016) and in Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez (SUNY, 2013). Her essay on Justin Torres’s We the Animals is forthcoming with The European Journal of American Studies. Her current book project, Transnational Latinidades, explores the production, translation, and marketing of Latinx narratives in the European Union and in Canada. Elda María Román is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Southern California. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, comparative ethnic studies, Latina/o and African American literature, and popular culture. She has essays published or forthcoming from Aztlán, Contemporary Literature, and American Literature in Transition: 2000 – 2010. Her book Race and Upward Mobility: Seeking, Gatekeeping, and Other Class Strategies in Postwar America is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2017. Brett Shanley is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, in the field of English Education, and a Lecturer at Pace University, both in New York City. He also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction Writing from The New School. A native of Northern California, as an undergrad Brett spent three semesters studying in the historic German university towns of Tübingen and Heidelberg, where much of the inspiration for this paper originates. His interdisciplinary research has included the role of silence as political discourse, the rhetoric of public intellectualism, and online “pop” lexicography as determinant of social unrest. His doctoral dissertation on the development of sincere student engagement within undergraduate writing is set for completion in the spring of 2018. Daniel Schreiner is a Ph.D. candidate within the scholarship program of the Friedrich-EbertFoundation. After studying at the University of Applied Science in Cologne, the Bosporus University in Istanbul, and the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn, he received a Diploma in Social Work in 2006 and a Masters degree in Comparative Literature, Politics, and Middle Eastern studies in 2009. For his doctoral project, titled “Mexican-American and Turkish-German Literature in Comparison – Writing as a Tool of Political and Cultural Participation,” he undertook a year-long research at the University of Texas at Austin, interviewing major Chicano/o writers such as Alejandro Morales, Demetria Martinez, Rolando Hinojosa, Luis Rodríguez, and Richard Rodríguez. In Germany, he conducted interviews with the Turkish-German writers Zafer Şenocak, Selim Özdoğan, Mutlu Ergün, Yade Kara, and Deniz Utlu. Jennifer Harford Vargas is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the co-editor of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in journals and edited books such

302

List of Contributors

as MELUS, Callaloo, and Latina/o Literature in the Classroom: 21st Century Approaches to Teaching. David J. Vázquez is Associate Professor and Head of English and a contributing faculty member in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Oregon. His first book, Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011. Vázquez’s articles have appeared in the journals CENTRO, Latino Studies, and the Journal of Transnational American Studies. He has also contributed to the Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature and Erasing Public Memory: Race, Aesthetics, and Cultural Amnesia in the Americas. In addition to his current affiliations, he is a former director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon and a past fellow at the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University and at the Oregon Humanities Center at the University of Oregon. He is currently working on two new book projects: a monograph that considers the intersections of Latina/o studies, experimental fiction, and environmental studies, and a co-edited volume that brings together Latina/o literary and cultural studies and the environmental humanities.

Index Ackroyd, Peter 259, 265, 269 – 272, 274 Alarcón, Daniel 7, 79, 81, 96 – 101 – Lost City Radio 7, 81, 96, 99 – 101 Alexander, Jeffery 17 – 18 alienation 79, 81, 95, 161 Alier, Juan Martínez 60 – 62 – Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South 61 American Dream 7, 44 – 45 ancestor 146, 164, 167, 208, 213 Anthropocene 66 – 67, 75 – Novels of the Anthropocene 66 anti-immigration policies 52 – 53 anti-imperial 50 – 51 anxiety 110, 134 Anzaldúa, Gloria 23, 31 – 32, 35, 47, 60, 71 – 72, 123 – 124, 127, 129, 133, 135, 137, 140, 144, 200, 207 – 208 – Borderlands, La Frontera 23, 31 – 32, 35, 55, 60, 123, 146, 208 Appadurai, Arjun 46, 154 art 36, 47, 52, 79, 97, 165, 171, 207, 264, 267 – 268 Atwood, Margaret 259, 265, 276 – 277, 280 La Bestia/The Beast 5, 13 – 26, 28 – 29, 43 bilingual 48 – 49, 97, 174 blackletter 217 – 241 body image/body issues 194 – 198 border 5, 8, 13, 15 – 17, 23 – 25, 27 – 29, 31 – 39, 42 – 43, 46 – 48, 52, 63, 70, 79, 81, 123 – 124, 127, 130, 134 – 137, 152, 154, 182, 185 – 198, 199 – 202, 208, 233 – 234 – border (landscape of death) 16 – border policing 46 – borderlands 4 – 6, 13, 15, 17, 22 – 25, 29, 32, 34 – 35, 79, 81, 123 – 124, 136, 143, 146, 152, 164, 177, 182, 186 Borges, Jorge Luis 166 – 167, 171, 179 Bradley, A. C. 282 Bush, George 181

https://doi.org/9783110532913-017

Cacho, Lisa Marie 39 Caminero-Santangelo, Marta 16, 25, 46, 59 Capitalism 3, 9, 28, 41, 62, 70, 103, 181 Catholicism 156, 199 – 200, 225, 228, 231, 237 Caycedo, Germán Castro 32, 36 – 38 Central America 4 – 5, 8, 13 – 29, 31, 33, 35, 38, 43, 82, 182 Central American transmigration 13 – 15, 29 Cepeda, María Elena 32 – 33, 35, 41, 46, 51 “charismatic megafauna” 71 Chávez, César 179 – 180 Chávez, Leo R. 43 “Che” Guevara, Ernesto 50 – 51, 83 – 87, 89 – 90, 101 Chicano movimiento 171, 179 – 180 citizenship 26, 28, 31, 34 – 35, 40 – 46, 51 – 52, 93, 107 – 108 class 19, 37, 55, 57 – 58, 60, 75, 90, 103 – 106, 109 – 111, 113 – 116, 121, 127, 132, 137, 223 – 224, 226, 268, 270, 288 – 289 classical antiquity 227, 235 – 236 climate change 60, 63 – 64, 282 Coatlicue 179 code-switching 83, 88, 92, 96 Colin Clout 293 collective memory 16, 232, 264 Colombia 6, 31 – 49, 100 Colombian identity 33, 46 coloniality of power 4 colorblind racism 65 Coyolxauhqui 179 coyote 38 cultural capital 41, 44, 93 – 94, 101, 113 – 114 cultural citizenship 46 cultural criticism 111 – 112, 199, 201 cultural difference 81, 96, 154, 199 cultural imperialism 212 curanderismo 151, 156, 178 Dante 284 decay 68 – 70, 175, 243, 245, 253 – 254 decolonisation 7, 62, 103, 111 – 112, 121

304

Index

deportation 15, 28, 41, 46, 51, 136, 185 depression 7, 109, 124, 126, 130 – 134, 139, 266, 279 El Derramadero 69 – 70 detention 4, 15, 46, 48 Díaz, Junot 6 – 7, 9, 63, 79, 81, 83, 91, 93 – 96, 103 – 121 – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 6, 9, 81, 83 – Drown 7, 91, 103, 106, 108, 111, 114 – “Negocios” 106 – 109 – “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” 115, 117 – This is How You Lose Her 7, 91, 94, 103, 108 – 109, 111, 115 disability 7, 125 – 126, 129 – 130, 140, 193 – 195 disability studies 7, 129, 140, 289 disembodied wound 13, 15, 17 DREAMers 190 – 191 early modern poetry 292 – 294 early modern stage 281 earthquake 112, 283 – 284 ecocriticism 57 – 58, 60, 63 – 65, 282, 285 economic exploitation 50, 291 Elizabeth I 292 – 293 EMF (El Monte Flores) 56 – 57, 67 – 69, 71 – 74 empire 93, 201, 222, 236, 292 Enlightenment 222, 224, 236 – 240 environmental activism 70 environmental justice (EJ)/environmental injustice 6, 55 – 60, 65, 67, 71 – 72, 74 – 75 environmental racism 6 environmental trope 67, 70 environmentalism 55, 60 – 62, 64, 75 – environmentalism of the poor 55, 61 – mainstream environmentalism 62 – subaltern environmentalism 62 equivocation 283 ethnicity 65, 80, 82, 127, 144, 152, 199, 207 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser) fantastic 113, 158, 173, 212 farmwork 67 – 69, 73

292 – 293

female 8, 45, 51, 144, 147 – 148, 154, 160, 162, 166 – 167, 185, 195, 244, 263 feminism/feminist 8, 51, 57, 72, 124, 137, 146, 155 – 157, 160, 171, 244 Fernández, Roberta 8, 143 – 147, 150 – 158, 161 – 162, 164 – 165 – Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories 8, 143 – 147, 150 – 151, 156, 158, 162, 165 fireworks 283 Firmat, Pérez 164 first generation 174, 185 – 198 – first generation college student 187 Flores, Juan 32, 47 folklorico 187, 193 font 196, 217 – 241 “foreignization” 79, 81, 83, 88, 94 – 95, 98 – 99, 101 Fraktur 217 – 241 France 4, 10, 223 – 224, 226, 232 – 238 Franco, Jorge 31, 35 – 37, 40, 42, 44 – Paraíso Travel 35, 37 – 43, 45 la frontera 32, 34, 146 fungal contamination 68 gender 7 – 8, 19, 82, 90 – 91, 111 – 112, 114, 124, 127, 130 – 131, 137, 140, 155, 157, 166, 201, 208, 210, 212, 233 – 234, 244, 285 – 287, 289, 293 genre 91 – 92, 98, 103, 116, 121, 145, 147, 157, 165 – 166, 200 – 202, 204 – 206, 208 – 209, 212, 260, 280, 292 gentrification 64, 202, 206 – 207, 210 – 211 German translation 79, 81 – 91, 95 – 101, 224 Germany 83, 86, 93, 96 – 98, 101, 174, 218 – 241 ghost noir 200 Golding, Arthur 283 Grande, Reyna 8 – 9, 185 – 198 – Across a Hundred Mountains 185 – 198 – Dancing with Butterflies 185 – 198 – The Distance Between Us 185 – 198 Grandes, Almudena 8, 143 – 151, 155, 157, 160 – 164, 166 – Modelos de Mujer/Models of Women 8, 143 – 144, 146, 148 – 151, 154, 158, 166 – 167

Index

Gruesz, Kirsten Silva 33, 80 Guha, Ramachandra 58, 60 – 62 – Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South 60 – 61 Gurr, Andrew 284 Gutenberg, Johannes 235 Harward, Simon 282, 284 – A Discourse of the Several Kinds and Causes of Lightnings 282 Heise, Ursula 58, 64 Hellman, Lillian 145, 150 hemispheric belonging 31, 51 Heredia, Juanita 35 heteropatriarchial 51, 126, 132 heterosexual 46, 133 heterotopia 17, 22 – 27, 29, 177, 270 – heterotopia of deviance 27 Hollinghurst, Alan 259, 267 – 269 Holy Roman Empire 222 – 227, 230 el hueco 6, 31 – 53 humanism/posthumanism 222, 243 – 245, 257, 285, 292 – 293 identity 5, 10, 15, 32, 35, 42, 46 – 48, 59, 87, 110, 115, 147, 149, 152, 154, 157, 162 – 164, 174, 185 – 186, 188 – 189, 193 – 194, 199, 204, 207, 217 – 241, 262, 265, 268, 280, 287, 289 identity politics 201, 285 – 286, 291 Iguala 185 – 198 immigration policies 28, 37, 53 intertextuality 23, 193, 296 intra-historia, la 175 intra-Latina/o racism 201 isolated generation 172 Jones, Gwilym

281 – 285

Kelley, Margot 145, 150, 165 – 166 kinship 23 – 24, 37, 39, 42, 46, 52, 61, 133, 219 Kofre 31, 35, 47 – 53 labor 38, 44, 67 – 68, 104, 108 – 109, 118, 132 – 133

305

Latin America(n) 4, 6 – 7, 16, 33, 35 – 37, 43 – 44, 47 – 49, 51 – 52, 70, 79 – 80, 83, 86 – 87, 93, 96, 99 – 100, 171 – 172, 179, 181, 201 – Latin American Boom 7, 99, 171, 179 – Latin American revolutions 51, 86 Latina/o culture 60 ,83 Latina/o literature 3 – 9, 57, 60, 64, 79 – 83, 87, 103 – 105, 114, 121, 143, 210 Latina/o studies 13, 16, 29, 31 – 36, 55 – 57, 59 – 60, 63 – 65, 79 – 80, 104 Latinidad 59, 79 – 80, 101, 114 Latino middle class 41, 103 – 104, 109 – 110, 115 Latinos 124 – 125, 150, 182, 201 – 202, 208 Lauter, Paul 144 lead (element) 70 – 74 – lead poisoning 72 – 73 – lead shield 72 Lejeune, Philippe 150 lightning 281 – 284 literature 125 – 127, 129 La Llorona 179 Lomas, Laura 43 Madrid 144 – 145, 149, 158, 188 magical realism 71, 93, 171, 173, 178 Malinali Tenepal-Doña Marina-La Malinche 179 maritime 284 Marshall, Kate 65 – 67, 74 Martí, José 43 – 44 Martinez, Oscar 13, 19 – 25 masculinity 6, 51, 83 – 84, 86 – 87, 101, 103, 106, 112, 115, 120, 123 – 124, 130 – 132, 134 – 138, 289 material sign 260 – 261, 265, 274 McGregor, Jon 266 mechanical tortoise 68, 70, 72 medieval 220, 227, 235 – 236 memorable 263 – 265 memorial 259 – 266, 270 – 271, 274, 276 – 278, 280 Menéndez, Ana 6, 79, 81, 83 – 85, 87 – 88, 101 – Loving Che 83 – 84, 88, 90 mental health 123 – 141

306

Index

mental illness 8, 124 – 126, 129, 137, 140 metaphor 6, 15 – 16, 24, 31 – 35, 39, 43 – 44, 47 – 48, 51 – 52, 69, 71, 74, 123, 144 – 147, 151, 159 – 161, 163, 175, 196, 222, 250, 263, 282, 296 Mexican American literature 60, 134 – 135, 171 Mexican Revolution 38, 151 la migra 14, 48 migration 3 – 6, 8, 13 – 16, 19, 26 – 27, 31 – 37, 39, 41, 45, 47 – 48, 51 – 52, 70, 82, 100, 125, 152, 154, 174, 185, 188 – migration industry 37 – 38 militarized border 46 Minich, Julie Avril 123 – 141 monument 259 – 280 – counter-monument 263, 271 – monument discourse 261, 264 – text-as-monument 262 Morales, Alejandro 171 – 183 Morrison, Toni 160 – 161, 165, 178 Morton, Timothy 284 motherhood/mothering 191 – 193 movement 34, 37, 46, 58 – 59, 61 – 62, 66, 71, 73 – 74, 84, 104, 180, 211, 228, 238, 291 music 14, 35, 47, 51, 179, 185, 187, 201 – 202, 211 – 214, 234 Napoleon 224, 226, 230 – 233 narrative experiment/experimentation 65 – 67 narrativity 261, 269 – 270 Nasser de la Torre, Michelle Rocío 35 nation state 17, 26 – 27, 33 – 34, 38, 42, 46 – 48, 51, 219, 222 – 223, 227 national identity 5, 10 ,35, 47, 164, 217 – 219, 221, 224 – 226, 229 – 240, 280 nationalism 3, 5 – 6, 9, 51, 71, 73, 180, 224 – 226, 231 – 240 nationality 208, 261 natural 25, 34, 229, 247 – 249, 253 – 254, 283 Natural Resources Defense Council 63 National Socialism 83, 239 – 240, 262, 264 Nevins, Joseph 47

New York City 36 – 37, 42 – 45, 48, 50, 116, 119, 152, 200, 203 Ngai, Mai 6, 40 Nixon, Rob 55, 62 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 27, 70 novel 31, 35 – 42, 44 – 46, 52 Nuyorican 200 Oboler, Suzanne 35 Older, Daniel José 199 – 214 – Salsa Nocturna Stories 9, 199 – 201, 203, 206 – 207, 210 – 211, 213 – 214 omniscient narration 57, 69, 130, 247, 273 Operation Gatekeeper 16, 46 – 47 pan-Latina/o consciousness 201 parallelism 19, 217 – 241 Paredes, Américo 34, 127, 129 parenthetical embodiment 243 – 258 pastoral 68, 70, 218, 292 – 294 Perales, Monica 35 performance 187, 248, 261, 281, 285 – 286 – performance history 285 – performative act 265, 277 – 278, 287 personification 232 – 233, 253 – 254 photography 84, 88 Plan Colombia 41 Plascencia, Salvador 6, 9, 55 – 75 – The People of Paper 55 – 75 Pliny 283 Poe, Edgar Allan 166, 205 poetic vernacular 214 politicization 221, 226, 229, 233, 235, 237 – 241 posthuman body 243 – 245, 248 – 250, 258 postrace fiction 66 – 67, 74 postrace text 66 precarity 17, 25 – 26, 28, 48, 285 – 291 preservation 61, 70 – 71, 95, 231 prolepsis 67, 74 Prussia 225 – 226, 229 el pueblo 49 – 52, 119 Pulido, Laura 58 – 59, 62 punctum 17 queerness

51, 93, 115, 286 – 287

Index

race

10, 37, 57 – 58, 64 – 66, 114, 123 – 124, 126 – 127, 130, 202, 204, 206 – 208, 210 racialized mental health disparity (disparities) 7, 123 – 141 rain 281 – 282 Ray, Sarah Jaquette 64 Reformation 217, 237, 292 – 294 relational lives 151 Remembrance Day 261, 278 – 279 Renaissance 227, 236, 282, 292 – 293 repatriation act/plan 28, 278 – 279 revisionist mythmaking 156 – 162 Riofrio, John D. “Rio” 37, 45, 59 ritual 117, 164 – 165, 218, 259, 276 – 280 Rodriguez, Richard T. 144, 152 – Next of Kin: The Family in Chicana/o Cultural Politics 51 Rosaldo, Renato 46 Russeau, Jean-Jacques 143 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina 51 Saldívar, Ramón 9, 56, 65 – 67, 71, 127 Santa Ana, Otto 43, 52 Santería 200, 212 – 213 Schmidt Camacho, Alicia 51 – 52 Schwabacher 218, 227 – 228 science fiction 8, 67, 91, 108, 173, 199 – 200, 205, 208 “second elevation of the novel” 9, 65 – 66 self-ideation 217 – 218, 230 Shakespeare, William 275, 281 – 285 – Hamlet 282 – Julius Caesar 282 – 283 – King Lear 281 – 282 – Macbeth 281, 283 – Pericles 281, 284 – The Tempest 281, 284 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre 281 Shepheardes Calender, The (Spenser) 293 social class 132, 152 social death 36, 39 – 42, 46 – 48, 52 social justice 6, 51 – 52, 55 – 56, 58, 63, 65 – 66, 79, 81, 180, 186, 200 – 201, 207, 210 social location 40, 42, 45 social mobility 110, 114 sociolects 91, 97

307

Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz 179 speculative fiction 8 – 9, 200, 204, 208, 212 – 213 speculative realism 9, 67 Spenser, Edmund 292 – 294 spirituality 178, 204 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 79, 82 – 83 stakeholder model 63 Stavans, Ilan 153 – 154 storm 281 – 285 subjectivity 31 – 33, 35 – 42 supernatural 158 – 159, 162, 178, 283 Swift, Graham 259, 261, 265, 268, 277 symbolic 13 – 14, 17, 24, 29, 31, 38, 42, 47, 73, 134, 145, 153, 163, 217 – 222, 225 – 227, 231 – 232, 234 – 241, 244, 263, 266, 274 – 276, 280, 285 technology 145, 207, 283 testimonio 36 – 37 Tóibìn, Colm 274 – 275, 280 Torres-Saillant, Silvio 35 toxicity 55 – 75 transculturation 3, 5 – 7, 9, 171 translation 6 – 9, 35, 38, 42, 79 – 101, 146, 153, 158, 165, 224, 273, 288, 290 transnational 13, 15 – 16, 26, 29, 37, 41 – 42, 46 – 47, 52, 79 – 80, 84, 94, 97 – 98, 100 – 101, 112, 114, 116, 121, 135, 153 – 154, 199, 201 – transnational identity 35 – transnational imaginary 15, 52 trauma 5, 13, 15 – 29 – collective trauma 13, 15, 18 – cultural trauma 17 – 18, 22, 25, 29 – language of 21 – personal trauma 20 – vicarious trauma 20, 22 Trevor, William 267, 280 Turkish immigrant 92 – 93, 96 de Unamuno, Miguel 175 U.S. Columbian literary production 31, 35 – 36 U.S. (Customs and) Border Patrol (CBP) 14, 18, 28, 38, 48, 135, 190 U.S. ethnic nationalisms 51

308

Index

U.S. Latina/o border studies 16 U.S. Latina/o studies 13, 16, 25, 29 U.S.-Mexico border 15, 17, 23, 25, 29, 31 – 32, 34, 36, 38, 43, 46, 70, 79, 81, 123, 190, 199 undocumented (Latin American) migrants 6, 31 – 53 undocumented migrant imaginary 36 undocumented migration 8, 31 – 41, 53, 68 “UndocQueer Movement” 51 undocumented subject 6, 31 – 53 “untranslatability” 79, 81 – 82, 92, 96 upward mobility 7, 103 – 121 urban fantasy 200, 206 Urquhart, Jane 265, 275

Vasilogambros, Matt 64 La Virgen de Guadalupe 179 Vladislavić, Ivan 259, 272, 275 – 276, 280 Wald, Sarah 59 war against the commodification of sadness 56 – 57, 67, 69, 71 – 72, 74 weather 281 – 285 White, Hayden 277, 280 Whitewashing 206 Wilkins, George 284 wind 254, 281 – 284 Woolf, Virginia 243 – 250, 253 – 254, 257 – To the Lighthouse 243, 245 – 248, 250 – 251, 258 World War I 218, 221, 231 – 232, 240, 245 Ybarra, Priscilla

59 – 60