Abstract
This article posits Guatemalan American writer Héctor Tobar’s novel as an alternative to Latina/o representations of historical trauma following immigration to the United States. Scholarship on US Latino/a trauma narratives predominantly argues that past trauma experienced by immigrants in their Latin American or Caribbean homelands finds resolution through the existence of a collective Latino/a community that is able to perform the therapeutic function of witnessing. Tobar’s novel, however, represents ongoing traumas in order to question the possibility that this kind of community can exist for Guatemalan immigrants. This reading challenges accepted notions that narrative can heal historical traumas by giving voice to past atrocities and instead highlights the ongoing traumatic consequences of US imperialism in Central America, subsequent differential immigration policy towards Guatemalans, and the incorporation of US immigrants into US-Latino/a racial categories that make invisible important ethnic, class, and national origin differences among immigrant groups.
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Notes
While some Latino/a studies scholars, such as Caminero-Santangelo (2007) and Norma Alárcon (1996) emphasize that the US-Latino/a community coheres through difference, others such as Arias and Milian (2013), Milian (2011) and Rodríguez (2001) posit that Central Americans have been marginalized by US-based constructions of and labels for Latino/a identity.
This essay does not take for granted that there exists such a community, but instead proposes how the field of Latino/a literary studies might destabilize the sense of collectivity by theorizing immigration outside of US-based identity politics and by including groups, such as Central Americans, whose position within the Latino/a community is marginalized.
Though Danticat’s Farming of Bones is not typically considered a Latina novel, I include it here because the text shares some of Latino/a literature’s most salient themes including trauma in Caribbean nations and subsequent immigration to the United States. Its exclusion from the Latino/a canon perhaps suggests a narrow vision of what constitutes Latino/a literature.
This strain of trauma theory, which draws on Freud’s notion the relationship between language and the individual unconscious, has been challenged by more recent scholars in trauma studies such as Michelle Balaev, who argues that representations of trauma have value in their “greater consideration of the social and cultural contexts of traumatic experience” (2014, 3).
What Lowenstein (2005) calls those catastrophic, large-scale events that disrupt traditional logics of time and space.
See Linda Craft (1997).
For example, David Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1984) contested the truth value of Menchú’s testimonio and prompted many scholars, including those in Arturo Arias’ compilation The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2001), to consider the politics of memory and narrative form.
See Caminero-Santangelo (2009b) for extensive discussion on the link between narratives of historical trauma and testimonio.
Saskia Sassen argues that in the 1960s and 1970s the United States was part of an emerging global economy that developed links between “industrialized and developing countries” as well as mobile labor pools (1998, 34). When many thousands of Guatemalans began to appear in US cities and rural agricultural communities and at the country’s borders as a result, the United States pursued discriminatory policies toward Guatemalan immigrants that coded immigration issues as a domestic problem and silenced US involvement in creating this emigration. See Hamilton and Stoltz Chinchilla (2001) and Gzesh (2006) on Guatemalan immigration to the United States.
Arturo Arias also argues that Central Americans pose a particular problem for narrowly defined US notions of Latino/a identity because “they are perceived by Americans as both ‘illegal,’ and ‘Communist,’ and by themselves as lesser than Mexicans,” a labeling that is fraught given the power dynamic between Mexico and Central American countries (2003, 178). See also Karina Oliva Alvarado (2013).
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Claudia Sadowski-Smith for helping her conceptualize the genre of the Latino/a trauma narrative and commenting on many versions of this article, David Vázquez, Arizona State University’s American Studies Research Cluster and the Department of English writing workshop, and the Latino Studies editorial board and anonymous reviewers.
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Miller, C. Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier and the Latino/a trauma narrative. Lat Stud 14, 364–383 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-016-0010-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-016-0010-6