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P o s t c o l o n i a l ฀ P r e - c o l u m b i a n ฀ c o s m o l o g i e s ฀ o F ฀ n i g h t ฀ • ฀ 1 3 5 chaPter฀three Postcolonial฀Pre-columbian฀ cosmologies of night in contemPorary฀u.s.-based฀ central american texts Then, the four hundred boys whom Zipacná had killed, also ascended, and so they again became the companions of [the boys] and were changed into stars in the sky. —Popol Vuh The Invisibility of U.S.-Based Central American Cultural Production Central America is the invisible sleeping giant or the eclipsed celestial body in the study of U.S. Latina/o culture, Latin American culture, and American (United States) culture. I deploy the phrase “sleeping giant” to remind U.S.based critics and readers of the ideological framework of a particular “Latin Americanism” (to borrow Román de la Campa’s phrase)1 that afflicts consideration of Central America, especially in the United States. An American Cold War against land redistribution and liberation movements in Central America and the proliferation of government-sponsored counterinsurgency operatives in many Central American countries (including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala , and Honduras) have over-determined U.S. consideration of Central America. This framework has played a significant part in creating an occlusion of U.S. vision with regard to both the living presence of Central Americans here in the United States itself (for example, over one million Central Americans live in Southern California around the Los Angeles area) and to the socioeconomic, cultural, and political complexity of each country and of the countries in relation to one another (the significant presence, for instance, of Salvadorans living in Honduras). Diaspora in relation to Central America is varied. It involves ฀ 1 3 6 ฀ • ฀ b u e n a s ฀ n o c h e s , ฀ a m e r i c a n ฀ c u l t u r e Central Americans in one Central American country moving to another Central American country as well as to other countries such as Mexico, the United States, and Spain. In his study Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), U.S.-based Guatemalan scholar and writer Arturo Arias minces no words when he describes the “neocolonial” subjugation of these Central American countries to an ongoing, now neoliberal U.S. imperial agenda and the marginalization and silencing of people who dare to express themselves inside their own countries as well as within the United States. At the same time, Arias points to the very important role of Central American and U.S.-based Central American literatures (the genre of the novel in particular) in the project of addressing and beginning to undo this occlusion: In Central America, cinema and other visual media productions are in their infancy. The images that people in the region see on television, in the movie theatre, or on the Internet very rarely represent their reality. These people are also unable to project their personal vision onto the worldwide screen. For this reason, the novel’s ability to give heteroglossic representations of its people and to assert their identity and history remains of primary importance. This is true as well for a significant portion of the Central American population living in the United States, who need a representation to become visible and “crawl into the place of the human.” [With this latter phrase Arias quotes Gayatri Spivak from Death of a Discipline.] The interactions between the United States and the Central American nations and societies it has dominated (and invaded, aiding in the slaughter of their best and brightest) since the early twentieth century can best be examined through a study of literature, which can frame and contextualize those “neocolonial” forms of subjugation that result from expanding capitalism and globalization.2 In the introduction to his study of Central American and U.S.-based Central American literature, Arias makes a strong case for the cultural work being done by the novel in particular, which is a form of expression simultaneously accessible enough, complex (heteroglossic) enough, and weighty enough to begin to make visible Central Americans and U.S.-based Central Americans in the Americas and, more specifically, in the United States. As a scholar of Latina/o cultural production, I am, like Arias, interested in the status of Central American cultural production, especially literature, in the United States itself, related as...

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