Postcolonial Approaches To Latin American Children's Literature by Ann B. González (review)

In her monograph, Ann B. González explores a little-studied aspect of Latin American literature for children and young adults. A professor in Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of North Carolina, she asks whether and how literary works for young readers reflect the conquest and colonialization of Central and South America and their enduring political, economic, social, and above all cultural consequences.

Using the theoretical framework of post-colonial studies, she traces colonial structures, which are visible in the antagonism and unequal distribution of political, economic, and cultural influence and participation among descendants of former colonizers and native groups. Even the largest group, the mestizo, is unable to bridge the gap, and is instead caught in a double bind: on the one hand, they feel inferior to the "white," "Western," European, and North American culture; on the other hand, they look down upon indigenous culture, even though it is also part of their roots, and try to distance themselves from that heritage.

In each chapter, González presents a case study of one work of fiction to illustrate her argument. Despite the study's title, the corpus is restricted to Spanish-language literature; books in Portuguese from Brazil, or in French from Guinea, are not taken into consideration, nor are the few titles for children published in indigenous languages. In fact, the choice of texts is unconventional. Recent books for children remain the exception, such as the novel Mo by Costa Rican author Lara Ríos. Most works are by canonical authors of Latin American literature, such as Horacio Quiroga, Augusto Roa Bastos, and César Vallejo, who are less known for their books for children; other works were not originally addressed to young readers but only subsequently adapted, such as the creation myth of the Quiché-Maya "Popol Vuh" or the Nicaraguan drama "El Güegüense" (aka "Macho Ratón"), dating back to colonial times and remarkably adapted to picturebook format by María López Vigil and Nivio López Vigil.

Despite the surprising and somewhat random corpus, the individual chapters are convincing. González never loses sight of the overarching question while analyzing the various examples of historical, social, and literary context, shedding light on a wide array of aspects. In the chapter on César Vallejos, for example, she uses the story "Paco Yunque," created in 1931 and first published in 1951, to show how the protagonists, Paco Yunque, the indigenous boy, and his classmate Humberto Grieve, a member of the white upper class, embody the unresolved antagonism between the contrasting heritages. While other critics have focused on the contrast between rich and poor, González frames the conflict from a cultural perspective, by looking at different ways of communicating, for example, or opposing views on personal property.

In the chapter on "Popol Vuh," González traces how different adaptations and rewritings have culturally appropriated the original myth, a linguistically complex work with a confusing chronology. Stripped of its indigenous cultural roots by at times drastic changes, it suffered linguistic Hispanicization as well as narrative streamlining to comply with Western linear storytelling traditions. Only more recent adaptations for young readers have begun acknowledging the indigenous origins of the myth, in text and image, instead of veiling it.

Overall, Ann B. González has written a stimulating study, well worth reading, which opens up new perspectives on Latin American children's literature. It demonstrates how historical events continue to impact social conditions and questions of cultural identity, and how literary works, to this day, still reflect them, consciously or unconsciously.

For future research, it would be interesting to extend the scope of this study to include more contemporary works, explicitly aimed at children, to see whether and how they perpetuate the double bind diagnosed by González.