The Routledge Handbook of Violence in Latin American Literature

Pablo Baisotti, Pablo Baisotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000536232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This Handbook brings together essays from an impressive group of well-established and emerging scholars from all around the world, to show the many different types of violence that have plagued Latin America since the pre-Colombian era, and how each has been seen and characterized in literature and other cultural mediums ever since.

This ambitious collection analyzes texts from some of the region's most tumultuous time periods, beginning with early violence that was predominately tribal and ideological in nature; to colonial and decolonial violence between colonizers and the native population; through to the political violence we have seen in the postmodern period, marked by dictatorship, guerrilla warfare, neoliberalism, as well as representations of violence caused by drug trafficking and migration.

The volume provides readers with literary examples from across the centuries, showing not only how widespread the violence has been, but crucially how it has shaped the region and evolved over time.

Section IVNew Forms of Violence in Latin American Literature

22Sons Without a HomelandYoung Migrants in Contemporary Literature

Elena Ritondale

DOI: 10.4324/9780367520069-27

Many of the most interesting works published by Hispanic American authors on contemporary migration represent different forms of violence connected to wars, dictatorships and repression, which are consequences of the criminal economy and its relationship with neoliberalism, produced by machismo and trafficking of women and children. However, symbolic and epistemic violence deserve special attention, perhaps because they are less visible than the other ones. They are due to the stigma imposed on “other” identities, non-normative sexualities, or the structural marginalization of subaltern subjects (for example, indigenous people and people from disadvantaged social classes, but also women and young people).

I suggest that this occurs because a relevant part of the narratives about the migration experience that are made in the framework of postmodernity and so-called globalization challenges not only states, their borders and the discourse on national security (Ritondale 2020), but also some of the narratives that have accompanied these nation-states. I refer, in the first place, to the leading role of the male, adult and heterosexual, usually white or mestizo (in the Mexican case), as the hero of the homeland.

In the corpus to which I refer in this chapter, protagonists and narrators of the migratory experience are increasingly teenagers, children, women or, in some cases, people who question the binarism of gender identity and sexual orientation.¹ Moreover, there is no lack of drug addicts or mentally disturbed characters.² One of the hypotheses of my work is that, by choosing these narrative points of view, the migration narrative becomes an act of indictment of structural and epistemic forms of violence present in the states – and to some extent in modernity – and linked to their history and discourses.

From this first hypothesis proceed others, as well as the main research questions to which I will try to respond here. The protagonists and narrators of these works no longer fight for their homeland, but try to flee from it and its violence, rebuilding essential community ties in other places. In this sense, I propose as a second hypothesis that the use of myth present in some of them should be interpreted precisely in relation to the questioning of nationalist discourses.

In the following pages, I propose a journey through these “other” narrators and protagonists, analyzing how they dialogue, question or rethink elements such as identity, belonging and even history. I will focus on Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (2010), by Y. Herrera, which I will put in dialogue with Unaccompanied (2017) by J. Zamora, not forgetting other works that I investigated in previous texts and that I mentioned a few lines above.³

However, prior to this, I will indicate some theoretical references – which are not meant to be exhaustive – that have studied to what extent modernity was founded on the exclusion of women and children from the public space, choosing the heterosexual man – the supposed pillar of the family, first nucleus of the state – as its protagonist.

The Modern State: an Alliance of Adult Men

Different Mexican authors, who have questioned the idea of the nation-state as a source of social welfare, have done so from a gender perspective. In particular, Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba proposes that Mexico’s post-colonial condition has generated a criminal culture since the nineteenth century, whose main pillar has been homosocial ties (Domínguez Ruvalcaba, 2015). Domínguez Ruvalcaba who is also the author of Translating the Queer. Body Politics and Transnational Conversations (2016), in which he analyzes queer studies in dialogue with decolonization carries out his analysis based on a specific object of study: criminality and its links with the apparatuses and institutions of the state in Mexico. According to the author, these alliances and links determine the ideological component of criminality, as part of a code of conduct implicit in everyday culture. The complicity between men, in a post-colonial country and within the patriarchy, is transversal and stronger than the logic of any law.⁴ Rather, the strong man, as proposed by Domínguez Ruvalcaba, already from the struggles for independence and then during and after the Revolution, imposes and establishes his own laws, with the active complicity of other strong men, and this would be the basis of the ideology and the very structure of the Mexican state.

Along the same lines, although his research focuses on more recent times and is linked to a neoliberal economy, is Sayak Valencia (2010). At a point in her study that seems of great interest for my proposed reading, Valencia recalls the words of Carlos Monsiváis (1981), who taught how the term “macho” was heavily implicated in the state construction of Mexican identity, having spread after the revolutionary struggles. The author highlights the fact that, at that moment of configuration of the Mexican nation, the word “macho” “came to be a superlativation of the concept of man” (Valencia 2010, 39), whose main characteristic would be the assertion of authority at any level. The author also states that “Gender constructions in the Mexican context are intimately related to the construction of the State” (39).

Beyond the specific context of Mexico, Ochy Curiel, while studying the Colombian Constitution of 1991 in her work La nación heterosexual (2013), finds a fundamental link between the hegemonic values of society, its laws and patriarchal heteronormativity. Curiel recalls the well-known work of Benedict Anderson (1983), which I am keenly interested in mentioning with respect to the relationship he establishes between nation, borders and imagination. In particular, I propose that Anderson’s work continues to represent a reference in what refers precisely to imagination, which in turn implies a link between the creation of a discourse from hegemonic values and a “perceived”, “constructed” community.

With this, Anderson offered an anthropological definition of nation as an imagined political community that is inherently limited and sovereign: community because, despite the inequalities and exploitation existing within it, its members conceive themselves from a deep, fraternal, horizontal fellowship; imagined because there is, therefore, the idea of communion, although its members do not know and do not relate to each other; limited, because its borders are finite although elastic, and because the nation will never be assumed as the whole of humanity; sovereign because everyone in the nation dreams of being free, and the guarantee and emblem of that freedom is the Sovereign State. For Anderson, the cultural roots of nationalism are in that fraternity and this imagined freedom, which even justify killing and being willing to die for the nation.

(Curiel 2013, 32; emphasis mine)

Different commentators (Bauman 2004; Negri and Hardt 2000; Reguillo 2007, among others), in the last 30 years have written a lot about the rupture of social and community ties as an effect of the last stage of global neoliberalism. The idea that I explore in this chapter is that, after the rupture of certain ties (including the ones between a territory and those who feel part of it because they were born there), voices begin to be released from the margins, voices that were previously ignored or not recognized as real and important parts of citizenship. This does not necessarily happen because of a democratization of the cultural world, although the effect of struggles from feminism, anti-racism or LGBTQ collectives cannot be ignored. Rather, I propose that these voices belong to the subjects most damaged by the last stage of financial capitalism, whose experiences acquire a fundamental value and importance by shedding light on structures of coercion – even symbolic ones – that seemed unbreakable.

Curiel, speaking of his study on the relationship between heteronormativity and the state, and referring to the concept of hegemony formulated by Gramsci, explains that:

Although Gramsci used this concept in relation to social classes, it was useful for this research, because this same process occurs around other types of social relations in which there are relations of power and domination, such as those of sex and race. On the basis of this concept I want to show that the fact that ideas of common sense or doxa appear from a heterosexual ideology, converted into laws in the Political Constitution, is the product of hegemonic visions that also exist in society in general.

(Curiel 2013, 36)

Finally, I want to highlight the contribution of Silvia Federici’s studies, particularly in Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004). Its relevance lies in understanding to what extent the female body – has been a pillar in that process of accumulation that is situated at the root of modernity and, therefore, of the formation of states.

Returning for a moment to the corpus that I analyze in the following pages, and focusing on the point of view and place of enunciation of its protagonists, it will be understood to what extent they depart from some of the pillars of modernity. It should be recalled that Julia Kristeva defines postmodernist writing (in whose framework the proposed narratives are situated, at least at the temporal level) as an “experience of the limit” (in Hutcheon 1988, 8). Kristeva refers to the limit of language, subjectivity and sexual identity, among other things, thus providing a very interesting comparative guideline for approaching “borderline” texts written in the last 40–50 years. Moreover, in the face of the discourse that interests us, art and postmodernist theory, according to Hutcheon, work to reveal the complicity between discourse and power, re-emphasizing enunciation. This aspect seems very relevant when the subjects of enunciation are “atypical” with respect to hegemonic places and subjects: “the act of saying is an inherently political act” (Hutcheon 1988, 185). Discourse is an effect of power and, at the same time, one of its tools.

What has just been introduced then strengthens the central question of this chapter: what do these narratives tell us from the perspective of subjects marginalized by the elites of the states? What do they illuminate about this transnational era?

To close this brief theoretical journey, it is also worth mentioning that, in the context of Latin America, it has been much debated to what extent modernity itself – with its institutions – has had a peculiar course, to the point that its subsequent postmodern and globalized stage also requires different analytical tools.

Rossana Reguillo (2007), for instance, states that certain processes linked to modernity – such as secularization – have remained unfinished in the Latin American continent, as I have indicated in a previous work (Ritondale 2015). The researcher refers, in particular, to the sources of knowledge or symbolic capital, which remain in the hands of “historical institutions that have traditionally operated as spaces of power-knowledge: the church, the State, and the political and intellectual elites” (Reguillo 2007, 93).

Thus, the structural reforms that have led to economic precariousness at the global level have caused what Reguillo calls, citing Gonzáles de la Rocha and referring to the Mexican case, “accumulated disadvantages” (2007, 105). This situation produces in much of Latin America, poverty and marginality in the peripheries of the megacities, the well-known presence of organized crime, distrust in institutions and, precisely, as the most visible phenomenon, massive migration.

Beyond the dynamics between genders, as I mentioned at the beginning of this research, another fundamental pillar for understanding the structure of modern states is the relationship between generations, with the attribution of different and separate spaces, institutions and “prerogatives” for adults and minors.

Minors have traditionally been attributed the private space. Thus, public places continue to be the right and the privilege of adults.⁵ The attribution of private space to children is part of what María José Punte, (2018) has defined as a specific “technology”, which has constructed childhood through language and representation from the perspective of adults. Punte takes the idea of “gender technology” from Teresa de Lauretis and that of “disciplinary technology” from Foucault, who theorizes that childhood, as a historical construction, has been functional to the processes of creating docile bodies in modern societies. Punte proposes that we can also speak of a “technology of childhood”, precisely referring, on the one hand, to the idea of an identity constructed according to certain performances attributed to it and, on the other, emphasizing that this construction is influenced by the values an...