Abstract
This chapter examines South Korean novelist Young Ha-Kim and Mexican novelist José Revueltas in the theoretical framework of “contact zones.” Their novels deal with a major conflict in their respective countries, the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and the Korean War (1950–1953). In the novel Black Flower by Young Ha-Kim, one thousand Koreans arrive as indentured servants to Mexico in 1905 to work in substandard conditions during the hacienda system. In the novel, Los motivos de Caín [“Cain’s Motives”] by José Revueltas, we find a character experiencing a post traumatic injury after being forced to torture a Mexican-Korean. The Korean author claims an influence of Magical Realism in his fictions through the use of multiple voices, and founding a new community. The fog of conflict, as seen in the novels discussed in this chapter, stirs the identities of the characters and their fixed idea of an “imagined community” and challenges the idea of nation via immigrant hybrid identities that claim connections to both countries.
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Notes
- 1.
For Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó, Calibán, a Shakespearan character, embodies the United States as a materialistic and spiritual wasteland. His counterpoint is Ariel (Latin America) who is quite the opposite.
- 2.
Latin American Boom writers of the 1960s, such as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, and particularly, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, imposed a literary style and form that made waves across world literatures. A criticism of Magical Realism, from a marketable perspective, is that it has created an exportable or digestible version of Latin America, which means that it can be read as concentrating too much on its “magicality” rather than on its harsh realities. Besides Magical Realism, another important literary movement that influenced Asian writers, particularly in the Philippines, was Ibero-American Modernismo . At least two essays in this volume address this connection in the works of Jesús Balmori.
- 3.
Regarding the name, the author states in a note: “Black is a color created by combining all the other colors. Similarly, everything is mixed together in this novel—religion, race, status, and gender—and what emerges is something completely different” (304).
- 4.
In 2007, Yucatán inaugurated the Commemorative Museum of Korean Migration that includes the voyage of those Koreans who went to Mexico searching for a better life in the henequen (“green gold”) fields.
- 5.
A South Korean film, Henequen [애니깽] (1996), directed by Kim Ho-Sun, deals with the same topic. It focuses on bad working conditions at the sites. The landowner abuses workers by cutting their hair with a knife. Meyers appears in the film as a ruthless individual who has benefitted from Korean labor. The film concludes with Zapatista revolutionaries liberating the Koreans. A similar production, in the Brazilian context, is Gaijin: Caminhos da Liberdade [“Gaijin: A Brazilian Odyssey”] (1980) by Tizuka Yamasaki, based on real events of Japanese immigrants and their misfortunes in Brazil.
- 6.
The novel tells of a revolt squashed after the death of Manuel Antonio Ay. Lara Zavala uses the historical figure of Justo Sierra O’Reilly, as a character, and describes the racial tensions between the indigenous populations and the Whites, that did not intermarry.
- 7.
Belize Blacks from neighbouring country Belize (below Yucatan) brought by British colonists as slaves. Mayans were the local indigenous communities, Guangzhou coolies were unskilled laborers from Asian countries, mulattoes were people of mixed black and white ancestry.
- 8.
Mexican writer Julián Herbert’s The House of the Pain of Others: Chronicle of a Small Genocide (Minneapolis: Greywolf Press, 2019), relates the story of 300 Chinese immigrants that were assassinated. A despicable event of racial hatred that took place in Torreón, Coahuila on May 13–15, 1911 by the forces of Francisco I. Madero and a local mob. This was a reaction to the success of Chinese merchants and their disposition to work for lower wages. This sentiment culminated with the deportations of Chinese populations from Mexico in the 1930s.
- 9.
The presence of Chinese communities in Mexico has received ample attention from a historical perspective in the following books: Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico 1882–1940 (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2010), Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism and Exclusions in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands (Stanford; Stanford UP, 2012), Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migrations and the Search for a Homeland 1910–1960. (Chapell Hill, U of North Carolina P, 2013) and Jason Oliver Chang, Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2017).
- 10.
Another Korean novel that acknowledges an influence from Magical Realism is The Guest (2001) written by Hwang Sok-Yok, one of South Korea’s most important writers, narrates its characters’ war traumas and scars that need to be healed. In the novel, Catholicism and Marxism, likened to a “plague” (also known as “guest”), are foreign fanatical concepts that have invaded and devastated Korea. The novel follows a twelve-chapter ritual, a type of exorcism. The ghosts that appear in the novel represent the unresolved issues of the past. In this same introduction, the author mentions Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example where “the reader is exposed to the ghost of a forefather who inexplicably returns to life” (8). The dialogue with the ghost is a leitmotif in García Márquez novel, for example, Prudencio Aguilar whose ghost returns to meet José Arcadio Buendía. The ghost manifestation is an opportunity to deal with the past and to find a path to reconciliation and healing. Indeed, supernatural events are common in magical realist texts that challenge rationalist structures.
- 11.
Revueltas was a political activist and writer who was jailed due to his political activism. He was incarcerated when he was fourteen years old and was sent to the “Islas Marías” prison and later to the Palacio de Lecumberri penitentiary. He joined the Communist Party in 1928 and was expelled in 1948. Among his works, we find Los muros de agua [Water Walls] (1941), El luto humano [Human Mourning] (1943), Dios en la tierra [God on Earth] (1943), Los días terrenales [“Days on Earth”] (1949), Los errores [“Mistakes”] (1964), and El apando [The Hole] (1969).
- 12.
In Los Angeles, the “Sleepy Lagoon” case referred to the murder of José Gallardo Díaz in 1942. The police quickly arrested several Mexican Americans. This murder is considered as a precursor to the Zoot Suit riots by “pachucos.” That same year Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps.
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Camps, M. (2020). Disrupted Nationalisms in Times of War: Young Ha-Kim and José Revueltas. In: Lu, J., Camps, M. (eds) Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections. Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55773-7_5
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