Reflection Latinx

Article

CENTRAL AMERICAN- AMERICANS: INVISIBIL ITY, POWER AND REPRESENTATION IN THE US L ATINO WORLD

Arturo Arias University of Redlands, CA

Abstract

This article examines the specificity of Central Americans in the United States in

relation to issues of identity, history and politics. It also examines the

contrasting relationship between Central Americans in the United States and

Mexican immigrants, by historicizing the dynamics of power between these two

Mesoamerican regions since colonial times, with the idea of advancing our

understanding of inter-Latino relations in the United States. The article also

seeks to address the invisibility of Central American refugees in the United

States, arguing that the historical memory of rape and violence on the part of

refugees from Guatemala and El Salvador has led Central Americans in the

United States to keep themselves on the margins of social visibility and

presentability. This strategic non-identity, which to some extent is historically

related to Central Americans’ subordination to Mexico, as well as to their illegal

status within the US, contrasts the identity politics of reaffirmation that

constituted the Chicano and Nuyorican movements, with the present day

situation of ‘Central American-Americans.’

Keywords

Central Americans; identity; historical memory; representation;

power; immigrants and refugees

Latino Studies 2003, 1, (168–187) �c 2003 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/03 $25.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/lst

The Tattooed Soldier, the first novel written in English by a Guatemalan–

American author, Hector Tobar (2000), begins with the eviction of the

main character, Antonio Bernal, from his apartment in downtown Los

Angeles.1 A funny element is introduced. Antonio cannot understand his

Korean landowner, because in this city both of them ‘could spend days

and weeks speaking only his native tongue’ (3).

Antonio, once a middle-class government worker in his native land, is

now homeless in LA. Seven years before, he missed the death squad that

came for him but instead killed his wife Elena and young son, a boy of

two. His despair and shame at having fled continue to haunt him. In

MacArthur Park, not far from Antonio’s apartment, Guillermo Longoria

is playing chess. Longoria was a member of the Jaguar Battalion of the

Guatemalan army, and, it was he who killed Antonio’s wife and son in

Guatemala. The Tattooed Soldier is the story of these two tormented,

defeated men and the intersection of their lives in the LA area. By chance,

Antonio sees Longoria in MacArthur Park one day, and as he lifts his

arms to move a chess piece, Antonio sees the tattoo, and recognizes the

man: ‘For several seconds, the man’s bare arm was suspended above the

tabley . The arm was raised just long enough for Antonio to make out

the tattoo of a yellow animal’ (77). Later, in the middle section where

Elena’s obsession to learn Maya languages is detailed, the image of the

jaguar is recast as ‘Balam,’ the ancient Maya symbol of the warrior.

Having seen Longoria once again in an environment where their relations

of power are more symmetrical, Antonio is electrified by the possibility of

avenging his loved ones. This chance encounter provides a means for the

story to unfold, and takes us back to a lived past in Guatemala. As a

result, the drama begun in their homeland, will be played out in LA

during the riots of 1992.

The tattoo that gives the book its title is a mark, a sign left in a body. It

leaves the character marked for life, scarred for life. What interests me

here about this novel is that, whereas both characters live in LA and they

are represented as ‘Latinos’ by a Latino writing in English, their life is

‘unpresentable’ in this topographical site of migration. It has no meaning

outside of Guatemala. Longoria now works in El Pulgarcito Express,

a courier service specialized in sending money and goods to Central

America. However, he had ‘angry eyes’ (25). As the text reminds us, ‘this

was his practiced soldier’s gaze, his cara de matóny . Anyone in Central

America recognized this looky. Dead dictators and demagogues lived on

in these cold brown eyes’ (25–26). Longoria’s eyes, scar and demeanor

take Antonio back to Guatemala, and the entire middle section of the

novel is devoted to the relationship between Antonio and Elena in their

country of origin, prior to her murder, and his escape to LA. Once the

novel returns in its third part to the Angeleno landscape, their respective

1 Some critics have

noted that Francisco

Goldman’s The Long

Night of White

Chickens (1992) is

the first Central

American Latino text.

However, Goldman’s

identity is that of a

bi-national writer:

Goldman was the son

of an American citi-

zen living in Guate-

mala, who acquired

his knowledge of the

country while attend-

ing an American

school there for some

years. Others have

pointed to Carlos

René Garcı́a Esco-

bar’s La llama del

retorno (1987).

However, this novel,

though it deals with

Los Angeles immi-

grant life, was written

in Spanish for a Gua-

temalan audience by

a writer who spent

only a short period in

California, and has

never been translated

into English. In this

sense, Tobar’s novel

fits the mold of being

a true Latino novel: it

is written in English

by the son of an im-

migrant Guatemalan

couple, who was

himself raised in the

United States within

an immigrant Latino

community, and it

narrates some of the

doings of this same

community in the US.

Inv i s ib i l i t y, Power And Representa t ion 169 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ar turo Ar ias

imaginations are no longer central to their agency. Neither man has

dreams of reimagining himself, of constructing a new subjectivity. The

uncanny situation lived in their home country shaped their attitudes

forever.

This Central American ‘impropriety,’ this inability to represent

properly a stereotypical immigrant narration, is the focus of this paper.

I want to examine here the different baggage that Central Americans2

bring to the United States as immigrants, and why they remain ‘invisible’

to the great majority of US citizens despite their overwhelming presence

in the country, especially since the wars fought in the 1980s, when about

three to four million Central Americans fled from the nightmare of

violence and massacres. I would therefore like to create in this paper a

theoretical space for those dispersed faces of ‘otherness’ that do not fit

within the validated limits of either Latin Americanidad or the recognized

marginality of the United States.3 I will do so by naming locations and

relations selected from specific aspects of Central American intellectual

and political history, as well as their representations in literature and film,

in order to articulate the diasporic4 consciousness of this new identity

paradigm, ‘Central American-American,’ an awkward linguistic oddity,

in relation to other US Latino groups.5

As I stated above, it was the civil wars of the 1980s that created the

model described by Hamilton and Stoltz Chinchilla (2001: 2), in which

Central Americans ‘differ from many other immigrant groupsyin that

they are neither strictly economic migrants nor accepted as refugees, but

have the characteristics of both’. This population entered the country

primarily through California and Texas, and then fanned out through the

vast North American territory. Thus, although the bulk of Central

Americans still live mainly in California and Texas, with both Los

Angeles and Houston as the dominant urban areas where they are

clustered, significant pockets of Central Americans are present and visible

in such diverse cities as Miami, Chicago, Washington DC, New York,

Providence, and Boston. They are also present in rural areas of the United

States, including Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska.

Despite its numerical presence, the Central American population

remains nearly invisible within the imaginary confines of what constitutes

the multi-cultural landscape of the United States. To take a very recent

example, I wrote this paper amid great media excitement regarding the

Oscar chances of the film ‘A Beautiful Mind.’ Nonetheless, lost in the

speculation over whether Australian actor Russell Crowe, who plays

mathematician John Nash, would win back-to-back Oscars, or whether

Nash was gay or anti-Semitic, was the fact that Nash’s wife happened to

be a Central American woman, Alicia Lardé. In the film, no mention of

her Salvadoran origin and nationality is made, nor is she played by a

2 In ‘Central Ameri-

can-Americans?

Re-Mapping Latino/

Latin American

Subjectivities on Both

Sides of the Great

Divide,’ I stated that

we need to think of

the definition of cate-

gories such as ‘Cen-

tral American’ as

multiple and discon-

tinuous, and not as a

category with ‘onto-

logical integrity.’ We

can all be Central

Americans only to the

degree that we accept

a history of identifi-

cations generated by

the isthmus’s own

‘grand narrative’ of a

mythical geopolitical

unity existing already

in this region since

the time of the an-

cient Mayas, 2000

years ago. This would

include, of course,

Chiapas, Tabasco and

all of the Yucatan

Peninsula, throwing

into question Mexi-

co’s own ‘grand nar-

rative’ of origin in

turn. Indeed, we can

always activate any

part of this history

of identifications, and

it can always be

invoked in new con-

texts such as the pre-

sent-day diaspora and

exile. Precisely be-

cause each part is

latino studies - 1:1 170 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Latina actress. Alicia Lardé was herself a student of physics at M.I.T.

when Nash met her in the late 1950s, no mean accomplishment for a

Central American woman in those days. Lardé is the niece of Salarrué,

one of El Salvador’s most distinguished writers of the 20th century, who

was married to Zelie Lardé.6 The only other recent Central American-

American ‘celebrity’ I can think of is Rosa López. Followers of

sensationalist journalism might remember that she was O.J. Simpson’s

maid, whose testimony was decisive in his being declared not guilty. She

was a Salvadoran woman, too.

As I indicated in a previous paper (Arias, 1999–2000) ‘US Latino’ is a

complex category, whose specificity has come to refer to a variety of

groups living in this country – Caribbean, even Mexican – but we seldom

link the word with that singular and contradictory trope, ‘Central

American-Americans,’ an anadiplosis that sounds more like a redun-

dancy, a radically disfigured projection of what ‘Latin Americanness’ has

been assumed to be. I am troping here of course, in a fashion analogous

to Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman’s (1997) usage of ‘tropicalization.’

Unlike them, however, I do not believe that the latter, marked by its

Caribbeanness, should be extended to embrace all of Latin America.

There is too much risk of homogenizing and grouping what is in reality

a very heterogeneous array of cultural experiences and effects. The

Guatemalan, Salvadoran, or even Central American experience as a

whole is independent and irreducible to large unities that seek to

discipline its singularity. In this context, it works more like Sommer’s

(1999) ‘rhetoric of particularism,’ and, like her, I would see the very term

‘Central American-American’ as a dissonance, which is, in reality, a

‘performative contradiction’ that opens up the possibility for recognition

of this as-yet-unnamed segment of the US population.7 Besides, the

clumsiness of the sound itself, ‘Central American-American,’ underlines

the fact that it is an identity which is not one, since it cannot be

designated univocally either as ‘Latino’ or as ‘Latin American,’ but is

outside those two signifiers from the very start. It is not quite life on the

hyphen as Pérez Firmat (1994) put it, but more like life off the

hyphen, as Juan Flores (2001) asserted in a different sense. Not off

the hyphen because these people already inhabit a world that is a

montage of cultures, a hybridity so advanced that it has already

conformed to a new subjectivity. Rather, they are off the hyphen because

they are on the murky margins, not even of the Anglo, North American or

South American center: it is life on the margins of those hyphenated

others (Cuban-Americans, Mexican-Americans). It is a population that

has not yet earned the hyphen to mark its recognition, its level of

assimilation and integration, within the multi-cultural landscape of the

United States.

only one of many

conflicting histories,

it cannot point back

to an internally co-

herent and total his-

tory of a people or a

region.

3 Subjectivity is,

after all, a transgres-

sive position that re-

configures traditional

understandings of the

self, the nation, and

of citizenhood. In this

respect, the textual

in-betweenness enacts

a space of resistance

that critiques a nor-

mativity conceived

within the parameters

of ethnic sameness.

4 As Barkan and

Shelton (1998) argue,

the concept of ‘dia-

spora’ is an explana-

tory paradigm that

creates a ‘non-nor-

mative’ community,

in which ‘the restora-

tion of a collective

sense of identity and

historical agency in

the home country

may well be mediated

through the dia-

spora’. (5). Thus,

diasporic identity

provides only alea-

tory responses that

are discontinuous and

open-ended, while in-

tertwining margins

and center.

5 It most be noted, as

some critics have ob-

served, that Mexican-

American authors

such as Demetria

Martı́nez (1996),

Inv i s ib i l i t y, Power And Representa t ion 171 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ar turo Ar ias

To complicate matters further, we cannot even speak of ‘Central

America’ without running the risk of a greater homogenization of

national identities than is truly the case in the region. Central American

migration to the United States includes, after all, a heterogeneous array of

social groups, among which we can name anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans,

small groups of Hondurans and Costa Ricans, as well as Indigenous,

Afro-Caribbean and ‘Ladino’ (mestizo) sectors from each of these

nations. This does not take into account Belizeans and Panamanians,

who have a greater degree of integration with African-American and

Afro-Caribbean US populations as opposed to Latinos. We cannot but

recognize, as a result, the unevenness of representation that is present in

this very paper. For the opening up this possibility of recognition, as we

stated above, we play with the category of ‘Central American.’ None-

theless, we primarily emphasize the experience of Guatemalans and

Salvadorans, who comprise the largest Central American groups in the

United States.

The last step constitutes an inevitable risk, of course. If we are tempted

at times to run the risk of reifying the Central American identity, it is

because the Latino identity is often constructed in areas of the United

States like Los Angeles through the abjection and erasure of the Central

American-American, in much the same way that the Latin American

identity was often constructed in regions of Latin America itself – such as

the Southern Cone – through the abjection and erasure of the Central

American, indigenous or African subject, ‘within the larger theater of the

establishment of meritocratic individualism’ (Critique 119). We might

recall that, when Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999) criticizes Fernández

Retamar’s substitution of Caliban for Rodó’s model of Ariel as the

emblematic Latin American, she reminds us that both of these binary

opposites are cast in the function of Europe. They exclude ‘the

civilizations of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Incas, or the smaller nations

of what is now called Latin America’ (117). She reminds us of Gordon

Brotherston’s ‘effective foreclosure of the native Americans in the debate

over the question of Latin American identity’ (118), and she uses this

argument to confront the ‘ethnocentric and reverse-ethnocentric bene-

volent double bind’ (118) that effectively denies natives their own

‘worldling.’8 Is the marginalization of Central Americans somehow

linked to our indigenous ancestry, which is as plain as the nose on my

face, or our skin color? Or are we marginalized because, as Spivak notes,

hegemonic subaltern groups, however oxymoronic that phrase may

sound, run the risk of effacing other groups in their own quest for power,

reducing others to the ‘inaccesible blankness’ when they ‘claim to be

Caliban’ as a mechanism of legitimization?

who was involved in

the Sanctuary Move-

ment to harbor Sal-

vadoran War

Refugees in the

1980s, and Helena

Marı́a Viramontes

(1995) have also ex-

plored these identity

issues about invisibil-

ity, silence and repre-

sentation among

Central Americans.

Moreover, their texts

also deal with the

relational identities

between Salvadorans

and Mexican-Ameri-

cans within the Uni-

ted States.

6 A similar point was

made in the Los An-

geles Times, Calendar

Section, in an article

titled ‘Why the

Whitewashing of Ali-

cia Nash?’ by Lisa

Navarrete (Monday

April 1, 2002: F3). In

it, Navarrete argues

that ‘We could have

witnessed the por-

trayal of a true rarity

– a three-dimensional

Latina role model –

by a well-known, cri-

tically acclaimed ac-

tress. Even better, this

could have provided a

career-making oppor-

tunity to a Latina

actressy At the very

least, Howard and

Goldsman owe the

Latino community an

explanationy’

7 Jorge Tetzagüic, a

Guatemalan immi-

grant who works

with Latino urban

latino studies - 1:1 172 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, when we speak of indigenous groups in the Central

American context, we run into another conundrum: in Guatemala alone

there are 22 different Maya groups, and their own rivalries can be fierce.

El Salvador has Lencas and Pipiles who are Nahuatl speakers and, by

extension, not descendants of the Maya; thus, Maya history does not

apply to them. Nicaragua has Miskitos and Ramas, who are not Maya

either. Costa Rica had the Chiriqui, Chorotega and Chibcha, who were

culturally closer to the Incas and related to the Rama of Nicaragua.

Panama has the Kuna of San Blas. Although Mayas are clearly the largest

indigenous population in Central America (close to 6 million at present),

the most powerful economically, and have come the closest to asserting

their own rights and even dreaming of their own nation-state in recent

years, their experience is not shared by other groups. Thus, when

speaking of Central American indigenous groups, we also run the risk of

homogenizing their identity. Given the actual conditions and numbers of

Mayas both in Central America and in the United States, we will thus

limit our analysis to this group.

There is another connection between these exclusionary processes of

identity formation – Latino and Latin American. As in the superstring

theory of the universe, which sees all matter generated by the vibrations

of microscopically tiny loops of energy, we can see that, in representa-

tional issues, the identitary factors of mobile, deterritorialized trans-

nationals in polyglot communities are, willingly or not, connected to the

territorializing forces of colonialism.

I would like to suggest that the superstring that glues the smallest

quarks to the most gargantuan supernovas in this case would be the

articulation of body/power relations by the colonizing gaze and

discourse, throughout the history of the region, including the neo-

colonial forces at work today. The self-image imposed upon colonized

peoples by their conquerors articulates a new sense of disciplinary order

in the Foucauldian sense and generates a new iconography that becomes

re-enacted in deterritorialized, transnational spaces and performed as a

representation of an axis mundi that blurs the boundaries between old

and new homelands, and creates patterns of continuity with colonial

structures of power by perpetuating certain cultural values imposed

through conquest. However, this happens through the deployment of a

new rhetoric, one which generates new protocols of power that are,

unfortunately, uncannily similar to the old ones.

In pre-Hispanic times, the Maya and Teotihuaca/Toltec/Mexica worlds

played analogous roles in Central America to those of Greece and Rome

in the classical European world. For close to a thousand years, whether

the capital in the central valley of Mexico was Teotihuacan, Tula or

Tenochtitlan, and whether the leading Maya cities of the Central

gangs, argues that

young Central Amer-

icans do not necessa-

rily think of

themselves as such,

but mainly articulate

their point by saying

that ‘they don’t feel

comfortable with

Mexicans, they don’t

feel comfortable with

South Americans, but

they feel comfortable

in the company and

complicity of other

Central Americans,

even though they

themselves have not

thought of a Central

American identity.’

Personal communica-

tion. (Cambridge,

MA, April 6, 2002).

The statistical cate-

gory of ‘other Central

Americans’ displayed

by Michael Jones-

Correa in the graphs

he employs in his pa-

per ‘Swimming in the

Latino Sea: The

‘Other’ Latinos and

Politics,’ might also

point to a small seg-

ment of the Central

American population

in the US that chooses

not to identify by na-

tional origin (Guate-

malan-American, or

Salvadoran-Ameri-

can, for example). A

few individuals such

as poet Maya

Chinchilla have also

expressed themselves

publically about feel-

ing more ‘Central

American-American’

than ‘Guatemalan-

American.’

Inv i s ib i l i t y, Power And Representa t ion 173 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ar turo Ar ias

American Isthmus – which goes from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in

what is now the border between the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas in

Southern Mexico, to the gulf of Darien in the area where the Panama

Canal now stands – were Kaminal Juyú, Copán, Tikal, or K’umarcaaj,

the dialectical relation between the cultures of both geographical sites

complemented each other, not just through commercial exchange and

economic interdependency, but also by creating a hybrid cultural matrix,

expressed in a metaphorical grid upon which culture was written.9

On this grid and as part of this matrix, Mayas and the peoples of the

central valley of Mexico developed conceptions of Self and Other.

Symbolically and metaphorically, both groups saw each other as

complementary, with an identity based on their local ethnic group,

lineage, and relationship to their gods. Both groups associated themselves

symbolically with the warrior, which they represented emblematically in

the duality of the sun and the moon. By choosing the symbols of day and

night that followed each other in the cosmos in a sequential pattern, they

articulated a complementary identity between groups of both areas, the

Central Valley of Mexico, and the Isthmus. One group was the sun, the

other the moon. This duality was represented competitively in the ball

game. In this sport, sun warriors and moon warriors competed against

each other, in a ritualized re-enactment of the supernatural struggle

between the gods of heaven and those of the underworld. The logic of this

articulation is complex and could be the subject of a much longer paper.10

The Spanish conquest, however, broke the complementary pattern in

which both groups of people saw themselves. Instead, it articulated a new

logic of conquest and colonialism that changed the balance between them

from the horizontal to the vertical axis. According to Max Harris (2000:

123),11 in the third decade of the 16th century, Catholic Europe was

nervous, as the territory they controlled was eroded both by the

emergence of Protestantism, as well as by the advance of the armies of

Süleyman the Magnificent. For some Spanish Catholics, as a result, the

only hope that Catholicism had for survival was its implantation in the

new world. Thus, with Cortés in 1523, came 12 Franciscan missionaries

who were seen in the same light as the 12 apostles:

They believed themselves called to establish a pure church among the

Indians that would, in turn, restore God’s blessing to a Catholic

Europe presided over by the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain,

Charles V. The Franciscan order in Spain believed that the conquest

and conversion of the New World presaged a resurgence of Spanish

power and the imminent triumph of Catholicism in the Old World.

Spain, it was thought, would sail the converted Indian armies of the

New World across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean to join

8 To me, this is

emblematic of the

situation that I myself

have lived in, though

I have not suffered

the fate of many of

my compatriots, who

have experienced this

multiple-marginaliza-

tion in a more dra-

matic, tortured or

tragic fashion. We are

natives too, as Spivak

reminds Benita Parry

when she criticizes

her for not letting the

subaltern speak. ‘We

talk like Defoe’s Fri-

day, only much bet-

ter’ (190).

9 Pete Sigal com-

ments this in From

Moon Goddesses to

Virgins. See especially

p.41 for an analogous

analysis of this

matter.

10 These images

have been developed

further in my novel

Jaguar en llamas

(Arias, 1989).

11 See Aztecs, Moors

and Christians, espe-

cially the section on

‘The Conquest of

Rhodes (Mexico City,

1539)’ beginning on

p. 123.

latino studies - 1:1 174 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

forces with the Catholic armies of Charles V in a successful last

crusade against the Muslims and Jews of the Old World. (123)

In this context, the first achievement of the Conquest was the ‘miracle’

on the hill of Tepeyac, north of Mexico City in December 1531,

when the Virgin Mary allegedly appeared to an Indian convert named

Juan Diego.

The fact that the Mexica kingdom was chosen as the site of the new

Catholic Kingdom with the creation of an indigenous virgin, and that

Tlaxcaltec warriors were used by Pedro de Alvarado in his conquest of

the northern part of the Central American Isthmus, radically altered the

relations of power that had predominated during the previous one

thousand years. For the first time, the complementary roles of the Central

Valley and the Isthmus were broken, and the power of the first, now

renamed Viceroyalty of New Spain, was imposed upon the latter, now

inhabitants of the Kingdom (and later, ‘Capitanı́a General’) of

Goathemala. The Spaniards’ intervention thus changed forms of identity

in the region and set in motion a new dynamics of power.

Richard Trexler (1995: 60–81) had already pointed out in Sex and

Conquest that Spaniards often feminized their enemies in warfare, and

they often raped both the men and the women they conquered. Bizarre as

it may appear, this gesture was supposed to show Europeans that the

conquered peoples were less civilized than their conquerors. Sigal (2000:

44) adds that ‘the Spaniards feminized their enemies in order to assert

social distances between themselves and the Other’. Gendered notions of

power existed in pre-Hispanic times as well, but defeated warriors were

never raped, and they always had the choice of regaining their

masculinity through human sacrifice. The latter celebration, macabre as

it might appear to Western eyes, was perceived by indigenous peoples as a

symbol of rebirth that enables a community to move on from one era to

another. In this system of knowledge, human sacrifice was not just an

exercise to placate angry gods, as it has been popularly depicted, but

rather it was a marker of time, in which the sacrifice itself was a creative

act of self-empowerment that ensured survival and growth for the

community (Sigal, 2000: 47). Defeated warriors who had emblematically

lost their manhood in battle, could regain it and be held as heroes if they

consented to the ceremonial sacrifice. This exemplary process also helped

to preserve the balance between both regions of the Mesoamerican world.

Consequently, the ritualization of the flower wars (‘Guerras Floridas’)

was staged to preserve Mesoamerican dualism, as was the Ball Game,

with its ongoing struggle between Sun warriors and Moon warriors.

Nevertheless, once the military conquest by the Spaniards took place,

there was no further possibility of gender redemption. The masculinity

Inv is ib i l i t y, Power And Representa t ion 175 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ar turo Ar ias

of the defeated Maya warriors could no longer be saved through the

ritual of human sacrifice. Many other elements of the Mayas world also

changed at that moment, including the conflict between the concepts

of the warrior and the sinner (Sigal, 2000: 61), the participation of

Tlaxcaltec warriors recruited by Alvarado in the conquest of the Mayas,

the new name of the Mexica city, and the designation of that city as the

capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and also as the location of the

chapel of Guadalupe. Thus, a new discipline of both order and power was

established. It established that the inhabitants of the Isthmus were no

longer equals of the Mexicas, but inferior and subservient to the people of

the Viceroyalty. Defeated Maya warriors were feminized without the

possibility of regaining their masculinity. They also came to be seen as

irretrievably feminized in the eyes of the original inhabitants of the

Central Valley of Mexico.12

In other words, colonization changed the perception that the survivors

of the Mexica world, themselves subalternized by the Spaniards, had

about the people of the Isthmus. Now they were seen as defiled and

deflowered peoples, which justified their placement in a social strata

below their own. In this new order, as Garrett W. Cook (2000: 23) says,

Spain became the Tulan of post-Conquest mythology, Santiago became

the morning star, and Jesus became the trickster whose pursuit by enemies

established the world order. One of the direct consequences of this

placement of Indigenous peoples of the Isthmus at the bottom of the

regional hierarchy is the racialized saying by poor Mestizo peasants still

heard all over Guatemala to this day: ‘Mejor pobre que indio’ (Better

to be poor than to be an Indian). This phenomenon is also at the base of

Goldberg’s (2002: 4) argument that ‘race is integral to the emergence,

development, and transformationsy of the modern nation-state’.

According to Goldberg, the racial definition of modern states emerges

conceptually from the debates between Sepúlveda and Las Casas in the

1550s, where the nature of ‘indianness’ was to define the role the

conquered population would play in the colonial model just emerging at

that moment.

Of course, a good part of the explanation for the pecking order that left

Central Americans with such a lowly status was that, in European terms,

Mexico was wealthier. Whereas enormous deposits of silver were found

in the Mexican Sierra Madre, no precious metals ever surfaced in Central

America. As a result, during the colonial period, the isthmus was

subservient to the Viceroyalty of New Spain: the Captain General of the

Kingdom of Goathemala had to pledge loyalty to the Viceroy of New

Spain, the Goathemalan Inquisition was dependent on Mexico City’s

inquisitorial authorities as Goathemalan bishops were under the rule of

the Archbishop of New Spain, and all trade from the region to Spain had

12 This theme is the

topic of my analysis

of the character Ku-

kulkán in Asturias’s

Leyendas de Guate-

mala. See ‘El naci-

miento del neo-

indigenismo: Quet-

zalcoatl Resimboliza-

do.’ The symbolic

feminization of Maya

warriors might also

explain why in mod-

ern times, the greatest

insult in the region,

beyond the much be-

labored ‘hijo de la

chingada,’ is ‘hueco,’

euphemism for ‘gay.’

In the Iberian world,

a ‘hueco’ is not the

‘top,’ the male that

penetrates another

male, but only the

‘bottom,’ the pene-

trated one (Arias,

2000).

latino studies - 1:1 176 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

to stop first at Vera Cruz and receive a certificate from the Viceroy before

it could cross the Atlantic towards Cadiz.

When independence was declared from Spain in 1821, the Mexican

armies of Vicente Filı́sola immediately invaded Central America and

annexed it to Augustı́n de Iturbide’s short-lived empire. Accordingly,

when he fell from power and, on 1 July 1823, Central America once

again declared its independence, this time from Mexico. In the process,

however, the provinces of Chiapas, Tabasco, and Campeche–Maya-

inhabited areas that had been ascribed during colonial times to the

Kingdom of Goathemala – were lost to the new Republic of Mexico. Two

hundred years of tense co-habitation during the independent period have

made Central America a cultural province of Mexico where mariachis are

for hire, crowds have idolized Cantinflas and tacos dominate the

gastronomic scene, while at the same time paranoia about Mexico’s

political intentions has served to authorize and legitimize dubious

political regimes in the region, and parties are often organized whenever

the Mexican national soccer team loses a game during the Soccer World

Cup. This ambiguity appears in the film El Norte. When Enrique is

working illegally in a Los Angeles restaurant, a Mexican-American

denounces him to the INS, but another Mexican illegal saves him from

arrest.13

My narrative does not pretend to reduce to these few lines the complex

historical events that conformed a singular colonial grid during a period

of three centuries. I also do not mean to imply that the relationship

between Mexicans and Guatemalans has become permanently tainted, or

that it represents an essentialized binary opposition.14 In other words, I

do not want to be either reductionist, or coercive, as I have tried not to be

when it comes to Central American identities. Rather, I limit myself to

signaling certain contradictory aspects of the relation between Mexico

and Central America, which I attribute to the conquest and colonization

of the region. This ‘attitude of colonization’ spells out the ambiguous

perceptions that both populations have towards each other. By attitude

I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality in a sense of Foucault

(1981), denoting a way of feeling and thinking, a way of acting and

behaving that marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as an

ethos.15 When it comes to rearticulating a symbolic identity in a

deterritorialized context, I am more interested in showing how certain

factors stratified the past into regimes of socialization, and how, by

generating supporting psychological values, they installed a normalizing

discourse of power that generates reactive resistance in the realm of

action.

When we examine the situation of Central American immigrants to

the United States today, we have to keep in mind these indicators to

13 I simply note the

phenomenon here.

Elsewhere one might

problematize both the

nature of this filmic

representation, as

well as the negative

effect these scenes

generated on Mexi-

can-American view-

ers during the 1980s.

14 Indeed, it was the

experience of most

Guatemalan exiles in

Mexico during the

20th century that

they were welcomed

with open arms in

that country, offered

jobs, handed out

residence papers,

and provided all sorts

of solidarity, both

human and political. I

myself benefitted

from this in the

1980s.

Inv i s ib i l i t y, Power And Representa t ion 177 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ar turo Ar ias

understand their present-day behavior vis-a-vis the Mexican population

cohabiting with them. This gesture, combined with the truism that most

Central Americans entered the United States fleeing a war that the US

government supported, has created a triple taint on this population: they

are perceived by Americans as both ‘illegal,’ and ‘Communist,’ and by

themselves as lesser than Mexicans.16 This triple jeopardy has made them

hide their own identity all the more, as we can hear plainly in this

statement by Marlon Morales, a Salvadoran born in 1974, who migrated to

the US when he was a year old, published in izote vos (Cowy et al., 2000:

66):

yIn 1983, the few Salvadorans I knew went to Union Avenue, so at

Norwood I thought everyone must have been Mexican. But maybe

they were lying about it too.

On my first day in Mr. Bax’s fourth grade class, a little boy named

Alex asked me where I was fromy

‘Mmmm,’ I started. ‘Mmmm,’ I continued looking him in the eyes. I

was going to say Mexico. I’m supposed to say Mexico, add ‘but born

here’ and leave it at that. My mom said I’m supposed to say this all the

time, even at Union Avenue Elementary School. Anything Salvadoran

like pupusas, pacaya, flor de izote and Spanish was left at home, never

in publicy

Always say you’re Mexican

Always speak inglish en la calle

They’ll leave you alone.

The mixture of all these elements has intensified the burden familiar to

all immigrant groups.17

The Central Americans fleeing to the US had to cope not only with the

trauma of dead relatives or villages razed, but also with the angst of

having to pass for Mexicans. Being confused with Mexicans sometimes

worked to the Central Americans’ advantage, enabling them to

camouflage themselves as a mechanism of survival. Whereas, this was

positive from the point of view of safety and refuge from the INS, it also

forced them to adopt an identity that was not truly their own, an identity

they were somewhat familiar with, but that they did not master nor act

out with the same casualness of gesticulations than if they were simply

being themselves. Typical scenes of this problematic appear in the film,

El Norte. In one of them, both brothers jump into the back of a truck

stopped on the side of the road in Chiapas to fix a flat tire. When the

15 We are playing

here with Foucault’s

description of moder-

nity in ‘What is

Enlightenment?’.

16 Guatemalan im-

migrants José Mer-

cedes Sotz, René

Funes, and Byron

Titus spoke openly

of their ambiguity in

relating to Mexican

immigrants. Personal

communication.

Cambridge, MA,

6 April 2002.

17 We mean here

traditional issues we

have pointed out

elsewhere, such as

learning a new lan-

guage and a new cul-

ture, separation from

loved ones, as well as

the resentment of a

hostile population,

which in this particu-

lar case includes

Latinos from other

national groups who

arrived prior to them.

latino studies - 1:1 178 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

truck driver discovers them, they claim to be ‘from Oaxaca.’ Unfortu-

nately, Enrique and Rosa have no notion of geography. They point to the

south, to Guatemala, when in fact Oaxaca is to the north. In a different

scene, when they get caught at the border, they continually repeat the

word ‘chingada,’ a performance that seeks to gain them recognition as

Mexican subjects. This makes it evident that ‘acting Mexican’ is just

another counter-performance for Central Americans in the United States

which, contradictorily coherent, ultimately becomes only a parody of

ethnic stereotypes.

After all, when a person identifies with someone else, he/she creates an

internal image of that person, or, more precisely, who they want that

person to be and then they identify with that internalized and idealized

image. An identity is not modeled on concrete others, but on the image

of their image, the image of stereotyped Mexicans that popular culture

has projected to Central America. Consequently, in the embodiment of

‘acting Mexican,’ Central Americans articulate what they want that

‘Other’ to be, rather than what Mexicans – heterogeneous themselves –

really are. In fact, it can be argued that they are performing what the new

colonial power thinks the Mexican Other is, since, as in the case of Spain

and the Mexicas, the US sees Mexicans as ‘preferred undesirables,’ this

time for political rather than economic reasons. This process can draw

attention to the psychic devastation inflicted by systematically negative

portrayals of Mexicans or Mexican-Americans, as others who resemble

and mimic them internalize these stereotypes without problematization

or critical distance.18

The way in which Central Americans in the United States are forced to

parody ethnic stereotypes of Mexicans as ‘performative transvestism,’19

not only prevents their own emergence and recognition, but it also

undermines the identity of both the performer and the performed. It is a

reiteration of the normative. We must remember that this stereotype is a

simplification because it is a form of representation that denies the play of

difference between all those involved. Stereotypes fix differences. As

Bhabha (1993: 78) asserts, ‘The subjects of the discourse are constructed

within an apparatus of power which contains, in both senses of the word,

an ‘other’ knowledge – a knowledge that is arrested and fetishistic and

circulates through colonial discourse as that limited form of otherness

that I have called the stereotype’. These embodiments prevent Central

American migrants from working out a catharsis that enables them to

relieve the trauma of war. These representational strategies are also a

symbolic defilement of their own subjectivity to the degree that, in being

careful not to articulate any form of protest against racism, sexism or any

other oppressive practice, they prevent themselves from deploying power

and from challenging authority.20 More often than not, they only

18 This situation can

be seen both in the

pre-9/11 expectations

generated about the

legalization of Mexi-

can migration to the

United States, and in

the copy-cat gestures

of the Guatemalan

and Salvadoran con-

sulates in California

of granting consular

I.D. cards to its illegal

citizens following the

Mexican example.

19 I prefer the term

‘performative trans-

vestism’ to underline

the performative as-

pect of identity as

delineated by Judith

Butler’s work, rather

Inv i s ib i l i t y, Power And Representa t ion 179 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ar turo Ar ias

accentuate conflict among ethnic groups, and keep alternative imaginings

from appearing on the Latino landscape.

This is why when we turn to a Central American-American novel such

as Bencastro’s (1998: 2) Odyssey to the North, the Salvadoran

protagonist Calixto is ‘stunned, terrified, and livid, unable to say a word

about the tragedy’ when they ask him about his working companion,

whose rope broke while they were washing windows on the eighth floor

of an Adams-Morgan building in Washington DC and who fell to his

death. The triple past participle connotes the triple degrees of fear that

Calixto feels: shock at the death of his companion, fear of the police

because he is illegal, but also anger, a by-product of war trauma that still

haunts his relations with authority. He not only fears the police, because

‘they would blame him for the death and he would end up in jail, if not

deported for being undocumented’ like any other illegal immigrant to the

US, but also because he was unjustly persecuted in his homeland:

When several men arrived at the family’s room looking for Calixto,

Lina, his wife, was at her friend Hortensia’s apartment, at the other

end of the building. A neighbor came running to tell them.

‘They’re looking for Don Calixto to arrest him!’

‘Arrest him for what?’ asked Lina, in startled disbelief.

‘They say he’s an enemy of the government!’ y

‘They’re looking for you!’ she said, her cry muffled by distress and

exhaustion. ‘Someone reported you as an enemy of the government!’

‘It can’t be! I’m not involved in politics, you know that!’

‘You have to get out of here and hide, before they find you!’

‘But it must be a mistake!’ insisted Calixto. ‘Or someone’s slandering

me. One or the other.’

‘It doesn’t matter; you’ve been reported!’

‘Yes, but y’

He could not finish what he was going to say because the shout of

‘Calixto, someone’s looking for you!’ frightened him to the point of

stealing his words.

‘Go!’ his wife begged him. (1998: 10, 11)

The third instance of Calixto’s dilemma is summarized in the phrase

‘Yes, buty’ This phrase describes his positioning as a Central American,

and it will inform the third degree of fear that silences him.21 The

third degree of fear translates itself into a self-imposed impotence.

than similar terms

such as ‘cultural

transvestism’ which

has been used by

young critics like

Jossiana Arroyo

(2000) in presenta-

tions such as ‘Carna-

val, masculinidad y

máscaras de la iden-

tidad en Cuba y Bra-

sil: el travestismo

cultural de Fernando

Ortiz,’ to contextua-

lize some Cuban,

Brazilian, and some

Latino writers.

20 Here it might be

useful to remember

the distinction that

Z̆iz̆ek does of ima-

ginary identification

as an imagined re-

semblance with the

image that can be

seen, and symbolic

identification as one

with the gaze, with

the way we think we

look to others, thus

appearing in a certain

way, likable or con-

temptible, to our-

selves. Chow has

already commented

on these in Ethics

After Idealism (41–

42); and in ‘The Na-

tive as Image’ section

of ‘Where Have All

the Natives Gone?’ in

Writing Diaspora.

21 Guatemalan

immigrants José

latino studies - 1:1 180 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The difficulty in dealing with an explanation for his persecution

stands in the way of his responding without embarrassment to anyone

who positions him – or anyone else like him – in a Central American

identity. In a symbolic transposition, the impossibility to name

an explanation for victimhood becomes as problematic for war’s

victims, as the acknowledgment of being rape victims was for Maya

warriors in the 16th century. Both events – the present war trauma

and the vestigial past memory of rape – are clear indicators of

why the ‘odyssey’ of Central America’s immigrants to ‘the North’

is not the same as the conflicts that most immigrants face with the

law, a factor recognized by another one of the characters of Bencastro’s

novel:

‘Maybe he’s from Central America,’ said a woman, clutching her purse

to her chest. ‘A lot of them live in this neighborhood y You know,

they come here fleeing the wars in their countries y’ (3)

Central American immigrants faced elimination in their own countries

for posing a threat to a certain kind of national identity in which

they remained unrecognized. They were without a true identity, to

the degree that they were always disenfranchised as national subjects.

They functioned neither as an integral part of the community, nor

were they a true adversary standing outside of it. People who fled

Central American countries, indigenous or not, stood in opposition

to the oligarchic dream of self-realization. Peasants in all forms were

the inverse of what the oligarchy stood for. Seen by the oligarchic

gaze as formless, unaesthetic people which by definition could not

constitute a subject, they came to represent the process of national

destabilization itself. They were neither Western nor foreign to the

land. They were silenced and invisible from their very conformation

as an ‘improper’ social group, an unnameable, undefined otherness

that remains ‘unrepresentable’ in the oligarchic vision of what the West

is supposed to mean.22 Thus, they constitute a population that was

never fully defined even at home, never ‘home’ at home, with a tradition

of its own (Mayas would be an exception to this, of course). Thus,

as a traumatized population in the third degree of fear, they are not

trying to reimagine themselves in the United States, nor to necessarily

invent a utopian dream of greater political freedom or rising economic

expectations, even though these two elements are also present in the

community. Primarily, Central Americans in the United States are trying

to come to terms with how the stabilizing structures of their own

countries of origin tried to protect themselves by labeling them as an

unpresentable, and thus, disposable, population, an attitude expressed as

a limit-experience in the massacres and genocide of the 1980s. This is an

Mercedes Sotz and

René Funes speak

openly of this fear,

which prevents the

community to orga-

nize itself in the US,

according to them.

Personal communica-

tion. Cambridge,

MA, 6 April 2002.

22 These reflections

follow closely

Brandt’s (1998) ana-

lysis of the Jews in the

Nazi regime in her

article ‘Sharing the

Unsharable: Jabès,

Deconstruction, and

the Thought of the

‘Jews’.’ There is an

obvious similarity be-

tween the Holocaust

experience and the

Central American

Inv is ib i l i t y, Power And Representa t ion 181 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ar turo Ar ias

‘originary terror’ in the sense of Lyotard (1990). Its repercussions are felt

in the present silence of Central American-Americans, and in their

tendency to mimic what they perceive as their privileged other: Mexican-

Americans.23

In the film ‘The Silence of Neto’ (1994), directed by Guatemalan Luis

Argueta, a New York City resident, the reaction of the young child, Neto,

to the double trauma of the bombing of Guatemala City in June 1954 and

the fight between his favorite uncle Ernesto of the same name and his

father, is fear. When Neto tells his Uncle Ernesto:

– Por qué no mejor se queda callado?

[Couldn’t you just keep quiet?]

The ever-observant Uncle Ernesto, a worldly, cosmopolitan figure, who

has traveled all over the world and returned from Morocco to live the

overthrow of president Arbenz, with his family, and dies four months

later, replies:

–Eso serı́a lo más fácil, verdad Neto? Pero no. Cuando hay qué hablar,

hay qué hablar. Cómo te parecés a tu mamá. Tan callado como ellay

Tan callado como todo este paı́s. Neto, ese silencio no es bueno. Nos

lo metieron adentro desde que nacemos, pero hay qué luchar hasta

sacarlo por completo. Entonces podremos respirar.

[That would be easiest, wouldn’t it, Neto? But no. If you have

something to say, you must say it. How like your mother you are.

You’re quiet, just like heryjust like this whole country. Neto, silence

like this isn’t good. It’s ingrained in us from the time we’re born. But

it’s up to us to tear it out from inside ourselves. Not until then will we

be able to breathe.]

That is why Josefina Gutierrez, living in the Pico-Union district of Los

Angeles, says that ‘It was just easier to say I was Chicana’ (izote vos 28).

Or, why Josefina Martı́nez Pimentel, who came legally to the country, has

a B.A. from UCLA and an M.A. from Berkeley, writes:

My identity isn’t about asserting the difference between me and my

mexicana sistersy It isn’t about asserting to someone in MECHA

(Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) that Aztlán doesn’t

include salvadoreñosy it’s about the situations that make you

stronger and test your ability to survive’ (izote vos 59).

Still, Martı́nez Pimentel is silent on what the last phrase means. She

silences the war experience that traumatized her and her family, although

she recognizes that it is the formative element of her identity. Given the

imprint of ‘originary terror,’ this population preserves itself by pretending

genocide in both

1932 and in the

1980s.

23 It is in this con-

text that Hamilton

and Stoltz Chinchilla

(2001: 52) find in

their sociological re-

search that ‘children

and young people

were totally desensi-

tized to violence’.

They also note that

Central Americans

came to the United

States under similar

traumatic circum-

stances as the popu-

lation of Southeast

Asia, but whereas the

latter had legal status

and were entitled to

US economic assis-

tance, Central Amer-

icans were not

recognized as refu-

gees by the US gov-

ernment, and rarely

obtained political

asylum. As a result,

their fear of deporta-

tion became an ob-

session that enhanced

the trauma of the

‘originary terror.’

That is why Hamilton

and Stoltz Chinchilla

conclude by saying:

‘Salvadorans and

Guatemalans could

not be welcomed as

refugees or entitled to

asylum. Their undo-

cumented status

shaped their experi-

ences and limited

their options in cop-

ing with the psycho-

logical and emotional

scars they brought

with themy’ (53)

latino studies - 1:1 182 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

to be what it is not. It does not build on its victimization to create an

identity in this country or to obtain any recognition or privileges. In

a convoluted psychic process, they are trying to transcend it while

pretending at the same time that it never happened. Accordingly, Central

American-Americans end up in denial of their own beingness. This non-

identity negates the possibility for an identity politics.24

It is when we trace the heritage of genocide and the patterns it

engenders that we can undermine the self-certainty of what could be an

essentialized Latino representation where subaltern discourse seems to

merge into imperial discourse, becoming a reductionistic, coercive force

in its practical implications. Of course, we know about the complex

specificities, the commonalities, issues and existing tension, including

racial tension, among Latinos themselves. Mahler’s (1995) empirical data

collection shows these elements appearing between Salvadorans and

other Latino communities in Long Island.25 We agree with Laó-Montes

(2001: 17, 18) when we claim that latinization is first and foremost a

power process of social differentiation and cultural production, and that

differences within the Latino communities arise ‘as expressions of a desire

for a definition of self and an affirmative search for collective memory

and community’. By keeping the Central American-American at the

center of inquiry, we generate a rupture of the Latino trope that allows a

critique to take place, precisely to avoid an essentialization of the notion

of ‘Ladino.’ Menjı́var (2000) has also worked along similar lines in her

own research.

In Ethics after Idealism, Chow (1998) takes another look at the issue

of cultural otherness that has been central to all of her work. She argues

that at a time when cultural identity has become imbricated with the way

we read our many ‘others,’ what must be examined critically is no longer

identity politics per se, but the idealism – especially in the sense of

idealizing otherness – that lies at the heart of identity politics.

Recognizing the need for a critique of idealism allows Chow to constitute

a required set of ethics for the postcolonial, postmodern age. In

particular, she uses ‘ethics’ to designate the act of making decisions – in

her context, decisions of reading – that may not immediately conform

with prevalent social mores of idealizing our others, but that, in spite of

this, enable such others to emerge in their full complexity.

We could place the Rigoberta Menchú controversy within the

framework delineated by Chow. When anthropologist David Stoll

challenged her biographical account, the controversy proved to be more

about the nature of Guatemalan civil war than about Menchú’s life itself.

By insinuating that Menchu’s signifiers are brimming with ideologems

that make her ethnicity redundant, he conveniently forced her into the

stereotype of the devious, conniving person of color. This attitude masked

24 As I have indi-

cated in ‘Central

American-Ameri-

cans? Re-Mapping

Latino/Latin Ameri-

can Subjectivities on

Both Sides of the

Great Divide,’ de-

scriptions also run the

risk of homogenizing

what is in reality a

very heterogeneous

community. We must

remember that the

cultural displacement

and identity politics

that characterize

Central Americans

not only contrast

with those of other

Latino groups within

the United States, but

also differ greatly

among themselves.

25 See her book

American Dreaming.

Her study focuses on

a group of Salvador-

an immigrants who

settled in Long Island.

Mahler critically

examines academic

theories about

immigrant behavior

and communities,

and argues that mar-

ginalization fosters

antagonism within

ethnic groups while

undermining ethnic

solidarity.

Inv i s ib i l i t y, Power And Representa t ion 183 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ar turo Ar ias

the underlying threat and subterranean tension that subjects of color

insert onto the placid, stable surface – that is, the narcissistic tyranny – of

American white society. Notwithstanding, this very factor caused the

controversy to be read in the United States as an American ethnic

phenomenon, in which, not just Central Americans, but all Latinos ended

up being both accountable and erased, in one single gesture. One

consequence of Stoll’s innuendoes has been that US high schools,

community colleges or even universities have stopped teaching Menchú’s

text. This does not mean, however, that another Central American or

Latino text has taken its place. It simply means that the US mainstream

has been led to a disidentification with Latinidad as a whole, uncannily

represented by this singular Maya woman. It is all of Latinidad that has

been excised of its canonical status in the academic disciplines. Beyond

our moral disapproval of this particular consequence of the debate, we

are thus forced to ask the question: Why were they reading Menchú’s text

in the first place? Was it because she was Maya or Guatemalan, or was

she idealized in the sense Chow defines it, as the iconic representation of

otherness, which ellided her own particular Central American specificity?

Part of what we have to come to terms with is how Rigoberta Menchú

has been constructed as a native from the United States, evidencing an

essential transference of subaltern discourse into imperial discourse.

Chow had already pointed out that, despite (or perhaps because of) their

ubiquity, natives remain elusive. ‘Native’ works, bifurcated as either

timeless or historical, are determined in postimperialist discourse by the

search for ‘authenticity.’ In this sense, a healthy critique is welcome,

if it will unveil how, underneath the iconic idealism, a stereotype was

constructed that enabled a Maya woman to become a synthetic

representation of multiple identities in tension with each other. In this

sense, we have to take to heart Chakrabarty’s (2000: 14) suggestion that

we have to pluralize ‘the history of power in global modernity’ and

separate it ‘from any universalist narratives of capital’.

The controversy has become at least a possibility to historicize and

reconstruct the Central American experience of modernity. However, the

critique of Stoll’s Eurocentrism is further complicated by the reassessment

of the very notion of ‘Central Americanness.’ The view from the diaspora

should now challenge the various expressions of Latino essentialism and

open up intellectual spaces for the active contestation of meanings with

political and cultural implications for all ethnic and national representa-

tions originating in Latin America that are now present in the United

States.

In this framework, we also have to contextualize postcolonial or

subaltern criticism as a site for the enactment of anxiety and wish

fulfilment of critics in coming to terms with their own cultural and

latino studies - 1:1 184 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

professional identities. Indeed, something along these lines was already

expressed years ago by Williams (1996) during the debates pertaining

to Latin American testimonio as a genre. Chow’s criticism as understood

here represents a development in the field of Chinese studies that has

come to theorize, in both content and form, a subaltern position as an

alternative to the nation-centered theory of Chinese literature and

culture. In analogous fashion, our respective positionalities should

address the complex issues of identity constructions under the rubric of

‘Latino diaspora.’ This task has become even more complex now that we

must also pay particular attention to the ideological, military, and

cultural dicourse in the US regarding immigrants following the events of

9/11. We should attempt to bring to light not only the emancipatory

potential, but also the ironies of diasporic discourses, if we are to truly

critique the complexity of postcolonial self-positioning both within and

against the dominant cultures.

Rey Chow stakes her ground ‘neither in the Chinese nor in the Western

but rather on a dialectic on which ‘Chinese’ and ‘Western’ is played.’ Like

her, I cannot assign Central America an ‘absolute difference’ from either

Mexico, or from the West, but I would like to do an analogous move

by describing my own positioning as neither Central American, nor

Mexican, nor US-based, but rather, in the dialectic in which all three are

played to the detriment of the Central American subject. In this respect, it

seems to me that what is different between the Mexican-American and

the Central American-American is their diasporic consciousness. This is,

thus, the complex area that we have to problematize to understand the

particularities of the Central American-American in the United States.

To return to the detail with which I began, the soldier’s tattoo is,

ultimately, the imprint of ‘originary terror.’ It is the mark of the historical

weight that anchors Central Americans in the representational ambiva-

lence of non-identity. In Latino cultural politics, this tattoo serves as a

reminder not only of the difficulty of healing in diasporic displacements,

but also of the fact that the notion of a homogeneous identity politics is

only an ongoing fantasy.

About the author

Arturo Arias is Director of Latin American Studies at the University of

Redlands. Co-writer of the screenplay for the film El Norte (1984), his

most recent novel in English is titled After the Bombs (Curbstone Press,

1990). He is the author of six novels in Spanish – After the Bombs (1979),

Itzam Na (1981), Jaguar en Llamas (1989), Los caminos de Paxil (1991),

Cascabel (1998) and Sopa de Caracol (2002) – two of which have won

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him the Casa de las Americas Award and the Anna Seghers Scholarship.

He has also published various books of criticism, including La identidad

de la palabra, (The Identity of the Word, 1998), on Guatemalan 20th

century fiction, and Gestos Ceremoniales (Ceremonial Gestures, 1998)

on contemporary Central American fiction. Two new books edited by

him appeared in 2001: the critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s

Mulata, and The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, dealing with the recent

polemic about the Menchú’s testimonial. An article on this same topic

also appeared in the January 2001 edition of the PMLA. He is the

President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

References

Aparicio, Frances R and Chávez-Silverman, Susana (1997) editors, Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, Hanover: Universtiy Press of New England.

Arias, Arturo (1989) Jaguar en llamas, Guatemala: Editorial Cultura.

Arias, Arturo (1999–2000) ‘Central American-Americans? Re-mapping Latino/ Latin American subjectivities on both sides of the great divide’, Explicación de Textos Literarios, Vol. XXVIII, Nos. 1–2: pp. 47–63.

Arias, Arturo (2000) ‘El nacimiento del neo-indigenismo: Quetzalcoatl Resimbo- lizado’, in Miguel Angel Asturias, Mario Roberto Morales, editor, Leyendas de Guatemala: Edición Crı́tica. Madrid: Archivos.

Arroyo, Jossiana (2000) ‘Carnaval, masculinidad y máscaras de la identidad en Cuba y Brasil: el travestismo cultural de Fernando Ortiz’, Presentation at ‘Cuban Counterpoints: The Fernando Ortiz Symposium on Cuban Culture and History’ Wednesday 22 March 2000, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Barkan, Elazar and Shelton, Marie-Denise (1998) ‘Introduction’, in Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, editors, Borders, Exiles, Diasporas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bhabha, Homi (1993) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Bencastro, Mario (1998) in Susan Giersbach Rascon, translator, Oddyssey to the North, Houston: Arte Público P.

Brandt, Joan (1998) ‘Sharing the unsharable: Jabès, Deconstruction, and the Thought of the ‘‘Jews’’ ’, in Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, editors, Borders, Exiles, Diasporas, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chow, Rey (1993) Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Arts and Politics of the Everyday), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Chow, Rey (1998) Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cook, Garret W. (2000) Renewing the Maya World: Expressive Culture in a Highland Town, Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Cowy, Kim, Alfonso, Katherine and Serrano F. (2000) editors, izote vos: A Collection of Salvadoran American Writing and Visual Art, San Francisco: Pacific News Service.

Flores, Juan (2001) ‘Life off the hyphen: Latino literature and Nuyorican traditions’, in Agustı́n Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila, editors, Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York, New York: Columbia University Press.

Foucault, Michel (1981) ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Trans, New York: Pantheon.

Goldberg, David Theo (2002) The Racial State, Oxford: Blackwell.

Hamilton, Nora and Stoltz Chinchilla, Norma (2001) Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles, Philadelphia Temple University Press.

Harris, Max (2000) Aztecs, Moors and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Laó-Montes, Agustı́n (2001) ‘Introduction’, in Agustı́n Laó-Montes and Arlene Dávila, editors, Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York, New York: Columbia University Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François (1990) in Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, translators, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mahler, Sara J (1995) America Dreaming, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Martı́nez, Demetria (1996) Mother Tongue, New York: Random House.

Menjı́var, Cecilia (2000) Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pérez, Firmat Gustavo (1994) Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Sigal, Pete (2000) From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Sommer, Doris (1999) Proceed With Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Spivak, Gayathri Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Tobar, Hector (2000) The Tattoeed Soldier, New York: Penguin USA.

Trexler, Richard (1995) Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Viramontes, Helena Maria (1995) The Moths and Other Stories, Houston: Arte Público Press.

Williams, Gareth (1996) ‘The Fantasies of Cultural Exchange in Latin American Subaltern Studies’, in George M. Gugelberger, editor, The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press.

Latino Studies (2003) 1, 168–187. doi:10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600007

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