Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America

1. Revolutionary Endgame: Globalization and the Trajectory of Narrative

I nternational headlines during the 1980s demonstrated a large-scale concern for Central America’s revolutionary struggles. From a metropolitan point of view, however, the region “faded from view” in the ensuing decade,once its political instability appeared to have settled.Indeed, the 1990s pointed to the beginning of a new period in Central American history, one dating from the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in February 1990. Since then, globalization has exercised a structural determinacy over the entire region.1 The end of the thirty-year-long guerrilla cycle, and of the utopian dreams of revolution, changed the symbolic framework of most Central American subjects.2 It transformed those imagined spaces, or the symbolic horizon, that constitute a matrix, a culturally fluid space, inside of which a vast array of discursive mechanisms operate, constructing and deconstructing representational issues that define and redefine priorities, identities, and cultural projects in any given community. Unlike in metropolitan areas of the world, however, narrative textuality has continued to be the major representational form for framing subjective notions between place and self, between self and meaning in Central America .3 Narrative texts are vehicles that, however porous, multilayered, or uneven, articulate those symbolic traits that mark the subjects’ cultural imaginings, or what Rossana Reguillo has called the “emotional memory” of a region.4 Indeed, as a tenuous postwar peace settled on Central America , novel production, circulation, and consumption rose to unheard-of levels.5 In this context, by winning the 1998 Alfaguara Literary Award with Margarita, está linda la mar (1998, translated as Margarita, How Beautiful 3 1 Revolutionary Endgame: Globalization and the Trajectory of Narrative the Sea, 2005), Nicaraguan novelist Sergio Ramírez became the best-known Central American novelist in the Spanish-speaking world since 1967 Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias.6 His emerging international notoriety ensured a smooth transition from Sandinista vice president in the 1980s to full-time novelist and internationally recognized man of letters at the end of the century.7 This, combined with the overall blooming of new publishing houses,however small,and an abundance of new fictional works,became tangible proof that literary production continued to matter in postwar Central America. Before discussing the production of narrative textuality during the 1990s, however, I want to consider the general tendencies that prevailed during the guerrilla period. Consequently, although this chapter will first explain the nature of the postwar period, I will primarily reflect on the historical emergence of the “guerrilla” or “revolutionary” novel of period from 1960 to 1990. This will ultimately lead to brief considerations of the new forms of cultural production emerging in the 1990s, when a new generation of writers began to tell the stories of a postwar culture that was, once again, in flux. Contextualizing the Central American Transition to the 1990s and Beyond The guerrilla period, though marked by political upheaval, was also one of empowerment, of positive belief in the transformative capacity of people, whereby passivity became activity. There was a generalized sense that the region had finally come into its own and could join the ranks of nations experiencing modernity upon the triumph of its revolutionary movements. The 1980s therefore represent not only the specter of a collective tragedy, but also the apparition of utopian hope. They were a decade of great expectations , when changing the world still seemed possible and when being an actor on the world stage provided a shot of adrenalin. New tropes to define the effervescence of the period were invented from within the region to substitute for the worn-out phrase “banana republics”: the terms Sandinistas , Farabundistas, Mayas, and Garífunas, among others, entered the international vocabulary in the 1980s. Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton labeled this period “el turno del ofendido,” a phrase that can be loosely translated “the invisible peoples’ turn to gain visibility.”8 As late as 1976, it still was said that the Central American drama concerned absolutely no one. “Repression in Guatemala is worse than others,” 4 Revolutionary Endgame wrote Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, “not so much because of its unquenchable intensity, nor because of its heartless ferociousness nor because of its prehistoric duration, but rather because there is almost nobody left in the world who still remembers it.”9 The Colombian’s words, stated just prior to the acceleration of the civil war’s dynamics (the Sandinista urban o...