Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America

Introduction: Is There a Central American Literature?

I n an academic discussion a few years ago regarding the programmatic changes needed to accurately reflect the local Latino population at a Southern California university, a Southern Cone professor asked ironically ,“But is there even such a thing as Central American literature?”At the time, the question seemed laughable, because every Latin Americanist recognized the quality of canonical Central American writers—Rubén Darío, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso, Claribel Alegría, Roque Dalton, Ernesto Cardenal, Sergio Ramírez—from a traditional literary perspective. After thinking carefully about the matter, I began to wonder whether the question might be implicitly, even unconsciously , racist, given that the bulk of Central American literature cannot escape the representational problems of indigenous subjectivity. The region is heavily marked by its indigenous, mostly Maya, origins and by the continuous presence of a significant Maya population engaged in nation-building. The question also seemed to signal the final collapse of the romantic notion of “Latin Americanism,”that sense that we Latin Americans were all citizens of a larger patria, or motherland,1 a patria grande (big motherland) that extends from the Río Grande on the U.S. border all the way to the Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of the continent. This nineteenthcentury notion, very much in vogue during the 1960s in the wake of Guevarist enthusiasm for a continental revolution,had already been on the wane, but parochial prejudice had not been spelled out so clearly for me since the end of the “guerrilla period” as on that day.2 The notion of a patria grande had populist roots as well. It was espoused ix introduction Is There a Central American Literature? by nonintellectuals like my father, who told me about Latin Americanism when I was a child. In 1958, when I was eight years old, we listened to the soccer World Cup transmitted from Sweden to Guatemala on the radio. It was six months before the triumph of Castro. When Argentina lost in the quarterfinals, my father told me:“Now we root for Brazil.”I asked him why, and he responded, “Because they are the only Latin American team left in contention.” That lesson shaped my identity not just as a Guatemalan or a Central American, but as a Latin American. As a writer, I locate myself more in those affective spaces where my personal story of Latin Americanism begins than in any type of theoretical ideology. Of course, my current insertion into the U.S. academy has led me to reframe the issue to address the question implicit in a colleague’s question: “Is there a need to study Central American literature in the United States?” It might seem at first glance that the basic premise of this book represents a clear “Yes.” Nevertheless, it is a question that has to be asked, along with a much broader one: Why should we bother studying literature at all in this day and age? Indeed, why should “we”? Some theorists of testimonio argued in the mid-1990s that we no longer needed to study “highbrow” Latin American literature and tried to make a valid point for its dismissal.3 A more wideranging issue, raised since the late 1980s, was that, with the end of nationformation in the world and the subsequent weakening of nation-states in general as a result of the emergence of globalization, the study of literature was no longer needed to frame national identities, the raison d’être for the formation of literary canons in the first place. Therefore, replacing literary studies with cultural studies—with the understanding that the latter addressed the specific practices of powerless people, subalterns—seemed to make perfect sense.Another of the repercussions of postmodernity was the understanding that critics did not occupy an objective position from which a work’s meaning could be determined (indeed, objectivity was no longer a credible claim for any field of study). All knowledge producers had only a fragmentary understanding of everydayness, dependent on time, location, and chance.4 Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life, for example, outlined the basic conditions within which cultural activity can be produced by those considered nonproducers by traditional analysts. Later John Beverley ’s Subalternity and Representation called into question the role of the academy in reading and representing the subaltern. For Beverley, the importance x Introduction of academic...