City of (Post) Memory: Memory Mapping in Nona Fernández's 2002 Mapocho

In Mapocho (2002), Nona Fernández depicts the ghostly topography of post-dictatorship Santiago, Chile. Only the equally ghostly protagonist, la Rucia, an exile who returns to her childhood home in the liminal space between life and death, can conjure forth the memories of historical injustice guarded by neglected sites of memory. The novel traces la Rucia's movements through a city transformed by the forces of neoliberalism, modernization, and trauma, traversing the layered history of structural injustices in the traditionally indigenous and working-class neighborhood, la Chimba. The protagonist challenges the state's betrayal of local, grounded history as she digs beneath the modernized surface of the city to unbury suppressed subaltern histories. Can fiction open up new ways of inhabiting these haunted spaces? This work invites an analysis of second-generation memory, post-memory, and memory "transfer," arguing that fictional urban space allows for memory to be read topographically.