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T he Tattooed Soldier, the first novel written in English by a Guatemalan-American author, Hector Tobar, begins with the eviction of the main character, Antonio Bernal, from his apartment in downtown Los Angeles.1 A funny element is introduced: Antonio cannot understand his Korean landowner, because in this city both of them “could spend days and weeks speaking only his native tongue” (3). 201 10 American Central Americans: Invisibility and Representation in the Latino United States Antonio, once a middle-class government worker in his native land, is now homeless in Los Angeles. Seven years before, he had escaped the death squad that came for him but instead killed his wife, Elena, and young son, a boy of two. His despair and shame at having fled continue to haunt him. In MacArthur Park, not far from Antonio’s apartment, Guillermo Longoria is playing chess. Longoria was a member of the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army, and it was he who killed Antonio’s wife and son in Guatemala . The Tattooed Soldier is the story of these two tormented, defeated men and the intersection of their lives in Los Angeles. By chance, Antonio sees Longoria in MacArthur Park one day, and, as Longoria lifts his arms to move a chess piece, Antonio sees his tattoo and recognizes him: “For several seconds, the man’s bare arm was suspended above the table. . . . The arm was raised just long enough for Antonio to make out the tattoo of a yellow animal”(77).Later,in the middle section of the book,which recounts Elena’s obsession with learning the Maya language, the image of the jaguar is recast as“Balam,”the ancient Maya symbol of a warrior. Having seen Longoria once again in an environment in which their relations of power are more symmetrical, Antonio is electrified by the possibility of avenging his loved ones. This chance encounter provides a means for the story to unfold and takes us back to a lived past in Guatemala.As a result, the drama begun in their homeland will be played out in Los Angeles during the riots of 1992. The tattoo that gives the book its title is a mark, a sign left on a body. It leaves the character marked for life, scarred for life. In fact, Longoria and Antonio are both marked, marked in particular as Guatemalans; that is, although both characters live in Los Angeles and they are represented as “Latinos” by a Latino writing in English, their life is “unpresentable” in this topographical site of migration. It has no meaning outside of Guatemala. Longoria now works for El Pulgarcito Express, a courier service that specializes in sending money and goods to Central America. Despite his seeming incorporation into mainstream U.S. society, however, his difference is manifested in his “angry eyes” (25). As the text reminds us, “this was his practiced soldier’s gaze, his cara de matón. . . . Anyone in Central America recognized this look. . . . Dead dictators and demagogues lived on in these cold brown eyes” (25–26). Seeing Longoria’s eyes, scar, and demeanor takes Antonio back to Guatemala, and this memory is literally embedded in the heart of the story, in the middle section, which explains the relationship between Antonio and Elena in their country of origin prior to her murder and his subsequent escape to Los Angeles. Once the novel returns to the Angeleno landscape in the third part, neither Antonio nor Longoria has dreams of reimagining himself, of constructing a new subjectivity. The uncanny situation they lived in their home country has shaped their attitudes forever. If my interest in the previous chapter was to open up the terms of my discussion on Central American immigration and diaspora by pointing out the linguistic slippages that denote a past, often idealized, identity that articulates those fissures of identitary continuity or discontinuity, the purpose of this chapter is to explore this Central American “impropriety,” this inability to properly represent a stereotypical immigrant narration. Here I want to examine the different baggage that Central Americans bring to the United States as immigrants to explain why they remain“invisible”to the great majority of U.S. citizens despite their overwhelming presence in the country, particularly since the wars fought in the 1980s, when three to four million Central Americans fled from the nightmare of violence.2 In this last chapter I would therefore like to create a theoretical space for those dispersed faces of“otherness”that...

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