Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night

Introduction: Critically Inhabiting the Night

c r i t i c a l ly ฀ i n h a b i t i n g ฀ t h e ฀ n i g h t ฀ • ฀ 1 critically฀inhabiting฀the฀night Buenas Noches, Readers TropesofnightinU.S.Latina/oartstakeupthestigmaofdarknessasacondition to be inhabited ethno-racially and philosophically despite claims that the fate of U.S. Latina/os is to conform to an Anglo-American hegemony. Evocations of night might seem to be a way of making oneself palatable to a dominant Anglo culture through romanticization as people for whom the night is one long fiesta. However, exoticism within this rhetoric of night transgresses policed borders: a language of night and “vision-illuminated darkness” emerges to disturb people’s sleep.1 The escapism that is often associated with night—particularly in the idea of night as fiesta or respite from the day—is channeled to wake the comfortable sleep of dreamers, challenging the habits of readers and viewers. Illustrative of this aesthetico-political practice is the mention of night in Cuban American author Cristina García’s 2007 novel A Handbook to Luck.2 Under cover of night, the character Marta Claros flees the civil war in El Salvador and her abusive husband, who works on the firing squad killing rebels for the U.S.-backed military government: Marta had never seen a sky this dark. There was no moon, and the stars seemed to hide in the black folds of midnight. The silence was so complete that Marta feared life itself had withdrawn from these parts. At any moment she might cross the border from one world to the next, imperceptibly, like death. The coyote said that a night like this was good cover, that the yanquis’ fiercest lights couldn’t penetrate it.3 The dark night presents an escape route for Marta, a birth canal from El Salvador across Guatemala and into the United States where she must begin life all introDuction ฀ 2 ฀ • ฀ i n t r o d u c t i o n over again. She must survive the illegality of her status despite the forces ranged against her. García deploys night in connection with the experiences of Marta Claros, who is always journeying, like Lena Grove in Faulkner’s novel Light in August, originally titled Dark House. The relationship between darkness and light (and light as birth) is extensive and complex in both novels. García’s novel mobilizes whatever escapist romance might be associated with night to portray the precarious passage into the United States of those dehumanized under the label “illegals.” The darkest period of night is represented as the paradoxical medium of baptismal birth and survival for so many twentieth-century and recent immigrants from the Other America south and southeast of the United States, who become “Latina/os” with all the chaotic disorientations that attend the category that is not one category.4 Tropes of night are equally important to Latina/os who have been living for centuries within what became the geographical boundaries of the United States of America and yet, time and time again, have been rendered foreigners in their native land or, at best, secondclass citizens. Tropes of night express and construct the multiple dimensions of being los otros americanos. To convey the range of meanings of the Spanish phrase “buenas noches,” English must furnish at least two phrases: “good evening” and “good night.” “Buenas noches” serves a dual function in the Spanish language. It does likewise in my study, signifying hello and good-bye, arrival and departure, recognition and transformation, beginnings and endings, and beginnings. Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night takes as its subject Latina/o novels , short stories, poetry, essays, nonfictions, photo-fictions, photographs, and films that evoke night. These night works suggest that the presence of Latina/os forms the dark underside and projecting shadow of “American” culture, constituting both its end and its beginning and calling to mind the Other America that was there before America as the United States, that remains alongside it, and that represents its culturally transforming present and future. Night as the Other America is a major overarching trope that is concerned with the power of the supposedly formless to give form to experience and with the relations among aesthetics, identity, identification, and history. “Trope,” from the Greek meaning “turn,” is a pattern of speech or writing that stands out from the ordinary flow of thought precisely because it turns away from the merely literal.5 Latina...