Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio

Appendix

16 Appendix A Brief History of Latin American Testimonial Narrative Both personal experience narratives and social justice writing have a long and distinguished tradition in Latin America, beginning with such works as Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las indias (An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies) (1552), Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (Castaways) (1559), and Sor Juana’s “Respuesta a Sor Filotea” (“The Poet’s Answer to the Most Illustrious Sor Filotea de la Cruz”) (1691). The more proximate genealogy of testimonio is frequently traced to works of political autobiography such as Ché Guevara’s Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria Cubana (Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War) (1963) and Diario en Bolivia (The Bolivian Diary) (1967), a genre that Juan Duchesne-Winter has called narraciones guerrilleras (guerrilla narratives). Further antecedents can be identified in sociological or anthropological accounts such as Ricardo Pozas’s Juan Pérez Jolote (1952) and Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sánchez (1961), and in “nonfiction novels” such as Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación masacre [Operation Massacre] (1957). These texts differ from contemporary testimonio principally in their speaking subjects’ status as already relatively well-known figures, their narration of the experience of injustice from the perspective of a thirdperson observer, or their status as documentation rather than explicit calls for action. Outside Latin America, testimonio finds close sibling genres in abolitionist testimony and in testimony from the Holocaust, among other literatures of trauma. These genres share with tes- 16 Can Literature Promote Justice? timonio speakers who are presented as representative of a larger collective, narratives of personal experiences of injustice, and calls for action on the part of readers. As in the case of Latin American testimonio, these genres are frequently collaborative projects between the speaker and a professional writer, but all three include as well firsthand accounts by writers themselves, both amateur and professional. The following annotated chronology offers an overview of the testimonial genre’s development in Latin America.1 The intent here is not to set forth an exhaustive catalogue of testimonios, but rather to offer readers who are not specialists in Latin American narrative some sense of the genre’s evolution and extension. As discussed in detail in the main text of this study, Latin American testimonio as such is generally considered to have begun in the 1960s with Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón (1966). Montejo’s testimonio was initially translated by Jocasta Innes as Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1968). The more recent translation by W. Nick Hill returns to the equivalent of the Spanish title: Biography of a Runaway Slave (1994). Barnet has also been a founding theorist of the genre that he classified as socioliteratura, beginning with comments that accompanied the writing and publication of that seminal testimonio. Barnet’s second testimonial work, Canción de Rachel (Rachel’s Song) (1969), was a composite chronicle of the experience of a number of women who worked in Havana’s dance-halls. While Biography of a Runaway Slave is widely acknowledged as the foundational work of Latin American testimonio, a strong case can be made for extending that honor to Quarto de Despejo (Child of the Dark) (1960) by Brazilian writer Carolina Maria de Jesus. In the wake of her first diary’s unprecedented success, a sequel was rushed into print in 1961. In Rio de Janeiro, Editôra Paulo de Azevedo published Casa de Alvenaria [The Cinder Block House]. Dated May 1960–May 1961, this diary Appendix 16 covered events from the signing of the book contract through the writer’s public appearances, book signings, and installation in the cinder-block house of the title. By this time, however, US publishers’ interests had turned elsewhere, and the English edition of this second diary appeared only in 1997, when the University of Nebraska Press released Melvin Arrington and Robert M. Levine’s scholarly edition and translation, I’m Going to Have a Little House. In 1969, Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska published Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (Here’s to You, Jesusa!), a testimonial novel based on a series of interviews with the woman she called “Jesusa,” a veteran of the Mexican revolution. In articles and interviews regarding the production of this text, Poniatowska has stated that she took free novelistic rein with the material from her interviews, but the...