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I n an article published in 2004 in the Radical History Review, Néstor García Canclini tells us about the difficulties of knowing what to do about Latin America’s past and future. García Canclini talks of “the disbelief about what happened and about what will come”—wondering whether this means that present-day Latin American subjects can trust only the denseness of the present moment, because there is no longer time for memory or for utopian thinking—and he uses a key phrase, “the strangeness of lost time.”1 This condition derives from the fact that a satisfactory balance has not been struck between a past that we will not (or cannot) forget and a future of apocalyptic prophecies.This imbalance evokes both denial and rejection among many contemporary artists and writers, a pessimism echoed by today’s young people. Central Americans are doubly caught in this conundrum. The region of their birth is haunted not only by an inability to come to terms with the end of the nineteenth-century dream of a reunified, stronger Central America (the present-day Central American parliament notwithstanding), but also by the rekindling of the region’s worst nightmares in televised images of the current Iraqi experience: military occupation , torture, dissolution of a national culture, fear. The sense of relief generated by the signing of peace treaties has faded. So have the utopian illusions of a functional nation, one that truly benefits its people. Indeed, if many individuals of the generation that militated in various revolutionary organizations in the late 1970s lived their militancy more like a carnival, it was not only because they were young or naive but because the utopian dream of a revolution was to generate, ultimately, not a socialized economy 219 Conclusion: Forever Modern, Forever Marginal but rather a state that would expand its people’s possibilities for happiness and build a decent society. As Spain’s President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero stated when arguing in favor of gay marriage, “A decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.”2 For five hundred years,Central Americans had lived humiliated and yearned for an end to their humiliations. They almost touched that possibility in the 1980s, but now it seems to have faded like a chimera, a mirage. Nowadays people are caught between the unsatisfactory memories of a traumatic past of civil war and the apocalyptic possibility of a virtual dissolution of their respective nation-states, presently run less by truly representative governments or even the traditionally corrupt politicians than by gangs of thugs operating outside of traditional channels of power. These gangs are newly ingrained institutions such as the Mara Salvatrucha (a transnational gang originally formed in Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrants), which operates in the cultural corridor extending south to north from Panama to California, with a true globalizing vision that has made it as emblematic of a regional power as TACA Airlines.3 Former army officers also form part of the extrainstitutional nongovernmental power structure. Though they are no longer in direct control of political power, they are still very much in control of the nation’s economy, often through their participation in and fomentation of illegal operations such as smuggling or the drug trade. Globalized corporations exploiting neoliberal hegemonization in the region also have a strong influence on the governments and economies of Central America, as the case of Wal-Mart in Honduras demonstrates. In 2004 the Los Angeles Times ran a series of articles on this subject, demonstrating how a single corporation was able to set workers’ compensation for the nation at a very low level. When workers pressed for higher wages and benefits, Wal-Mart simply pulled out of Honduras , leaving the nation’s economy in ruins. New immigrants to California from Central America, then, are fleeing different forms of oppression and mistreatment than did the previous generation, and their identities should be recognized in light of these differences. The tension, haunting, and disillusionment are clear in the negative reaction in Central America and among Central Americans to three memoirs regarding the Sandinista experience written by Gioconda Belli, Ernesto Cardenal, and Sergio Ramírez.4 Despite the fact that all three authors have broken away from the Sandinista Front (they define themselves as members of a renovated Sandinista movement), we can easily verify that not enough 220 Conclusion [18.225.255.134] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 09:35...

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