Changing Women, Changing Nation: Female Agency, Nationhood, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives

Chapter 5: Salvadoran-American Sleuthing in the U.S. South and Beyond: McPeek Villatoro’s Romilia Chacón Mysteries Series

Chapter 5 Salvadoran-American Sleuthing in the U.S. South and Beyond McPeek Villatoro’s Romilia Chacón Mysteries Series In the prologue to Home Killings, the first installment of the Romilia Chacón mystery series by Marcos McPeek Villatoro, Romilia, lead detective and protagonist, provides readers with a snapshot view of her complex subjectivity. Opening with the line “I’m twenty-eight, Latina, and a southerner,” Romilia lays claim to her pan-ethnic and gendered identity as a Latina while also distinguishing her connection to a specific geographic area within the United States, the South (McPeek Villatoro vii). Further complicating this self-portrait is the fact that Romilia is of Central American descent, specifically Salvadoran, as well as a single mother, and as the series progresses she migrates westward and relocates to Los Angeles, prompting another redefinition of her identity. Understood within the broader context of detective fiction and even that of multiethnic mystery novels, this multifaceted characterization of Romilia by McPeek Villatoro offers a pioneering example of a Salvadoran-American female sleuth. However, read against the backdrop of recent demographic shifts in the U.S. South and Central American migratory flows, Romilia’s portrayal also helps to disclose the multiple contours of Central American identity making and incorporation into the United States. As such, in this last chapter I examine how Romilia’s depiction and her crime solving in Marcos McPeek Villatoro’s Romilia Chacón series—Home Killings (2001), Minos (2003), and A Venom beneath the Skin (2005)1 —allow for a nuanced exploration of the complexities of 123 124 / Changing Women, Changing Nation being Latina and a second-generation Salvadoran-American. Emphasizing the question of Romilia’s identity affords an added critical dimension to the ongoing discussion in this book regarding Salvadoran women’s experiences, for Romilia deepens our understanding of female agency but does so by underscoring the process of Salvadoran-American ethnic individuation. As a second-generation Latina of Salvadoran descent, Romilia negotiates her existence in the United States in diverse ways from those of newly arrived immigrants. In addition to seeing herself as part of a larger pan-ethnic group of Latinos, she struggles to define herself in relation to a history of civil war and migration that is unknown to her. Figuratively speaking, Romilia calls to mind the notion of a Salvadoran immigrant nation marked by its different generations and cultural roots that has become part of the multiethnic landscape of the United States. Somewhat distinct from the construct of “woman as nation” seen in other trans-Salvadoran narratives, Romilia’s representation as such is also inherently linked to Central American history. Moreover, as much as Romilia’s overall portrait, including its allegorical functions, underscores the emergence of new Salvadoranbased gendered subjectivities and ethnicity, it also gives way to a broader discussion of Central American-American identities. Critical to Romilia’s depiction is her ensuing relationship with her adversary, Rafael Murillo, a Guatemalan-American, which signals her as part of a growing community of Central American-Americans whose identity politics are still, in many ways, “in process.” Making these novels all the more provocative is that, although Romilia’s investigating leads her to California, where the third installment of the series takes place, the initial point of reference for her identity formation is the U.S. South, a geographic location that has traditionally been marked by a black and white racial divide and has only recently experienced a significant upsurge in Latino immigration and settlement. Thus, unlike the U.S. Salvadoran narratives that informed my discussion in the previous chapter, McPeek Villatoro’s texts allow for a complementary yet divergent view of Salvadoran immigration and incorporation into the United States that falls outside the scope of urban locations such as Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles—well-known destinations and sites of migrant networks for Salvadorans and other Central Americans. It is on account of this unique vantage point that my analysis of Romilia within these novels will be largely premised and filtered through her construction as a Salvadoran-American and Latina with southern roots, even as I address the shifting nature of this identity in more ethnically diverse settings such as Los Angeles. Salvadoran-American Sleuthing in the U.S. South and Beyond / 125 Central Americans in a New Latino South Given its significance to McPeek Villatoro’s narratives, a basic outline of the recent demographic shifts transforming the...