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EPILOGUE. Weathering the Storm: Central America in the Twenty-first Century
- University of Texas Press
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La vida no se detenía, las voces siguieron corriendo hasta estrellarse contra los ruidos de una ciudad en movimiento en la que el muchacho seguía inerte, atascado a su esquina. [Life did not stop, the voices continued flowing until crashing against the sounds of a city in motion in which the boy remained inert, stuck in his corner.] —daniel joya, Sueños de un callejero I n the aftermath of the civil wars of the 1980s, the institutionalization of peace in the 1990s, and the ratification of the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement on July 28, 2005, by the U.S. Congress and its final approval by the Costa Rican government on October 7, 2007, Central American literary and cultural production remains key to the (discursive) reconstruction of the isthmus . As William I. Robinson has suggested for Central American antiglobalization movements and narratives, “The next round [of struggle] will have to be a transnational struggle involving regional and transnational social movements searching for viable formulas of social and economic democratization, political empowerment and the construction of a counter-hegemony under the new conditions of global capitalism” (2004, 20). While the scale of social and economic injustice has intensified in Central America and its transnational communities, cultural responses and critiques thus far have been less defined and more diffused but nonetheless quite copious and stringent at the beginning of the twenty-first century. At the newest cultural divide unraveling before EPILOGUE Weathering the Storm: Central America in the Twenty-first Century 224 Dividing the Isthmus our eyes, a new Central American transisthmian narrative textuality is struggling for economic, political, social, and cultural representation amid the onslaught of global forces. From this space of struggle and survival emerge location-specific cultural and literary texts, as pointed out by critics of neoliberal cultural politics and narration (Masiello 2001; García Canclini 2002; Yúdice 2003). From the maelstrom of social reconstruction or engineering in Central America thus emerges a transisthmian neorealist textuality that is extremist, visceral, and at times so over the top as to appear surrealist, fantastic, and almost forensic. To name just a few texts: Franz Galich’s Managua Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) (Managua Salsa City: Devour Me Again) (2001) depicts the amoral, (dis)organized, and garish urbanity of Managua; Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El Asco (The Disgust) (2000) eschatologically satirizes postwar Salvadoran society; and Lety Elvir writes razor sharp short stories of Honduran women’s lives in Sublimes y perversos (Sublimes and Perverts) (2005). Even in Costa Rica, the proverbial exception to the rule, the city figures as an underworld of homelessness, despair, and survival, as depicted in texts by Fernando Contreras Castro (Urbanoscopio [Urbanscope] 1997), Sergio Muñoz Chacón (Los Dorados [The Golden] 2000; Urbanos [Urbanites] 2003), and Uriel Quesada (Lejos, tan lejos [Far, So Far] 2004). In his introduction to a collection of short stories titled Cicatrices: Un retrato del cuento Centroamericano (Scars: A Portrait of the Central American Short Story) (2004), Werner Mackenbach claims that the compiled stories in his book are about other wars: “la violencia de las ciudades, la lucha de géneros y los conflictos de los individuos [the violence of the cities, the struggle of genders, and the conflicts of individuals]” (2004, n.p.). As suggested by the title of the anthology, the stories emerge from the “cicatrices,” the scars and lacerations, left by the violence of the past decades in Central America. The stories are populated by flightless wounded angels (Patricia Belli, Nicaragua, “Cicatrices”), twisted hit-men-for-hire (Eduardo Callejas, Honduras, “El francotirador” [The Hired Gun]), eating disorder victims (Roberto Castillo, Honduras, “Anita la cazadora de insectos ” [Anita, Insect Catcher]), estranged and sexually frustrated couples, cynical prostitutes working the sex trade, ptsd sufferers, and other social outcasts of more recent wars. As a whole, the characters in these narratives attempt to move forward while still carrying the weight of the past, often wounded but never completely destroyed. On the other hand, with the prolongation and end of the civil wars came the transnationalization of Central American cultures. Writers [3.235.251.99] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:17 GMT) Epilogue: Weathering the Storm 225 from the Central American diaspora in the United States also wrote back to the isthmus from transnational sites. From San Francisco, the Salvadoran Martivón Galindo compiled her exile poetry and short stories , in a collection titled Retazos (Pieces) (1996). In Los Angeles, young Salvis paired up with their...