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Anti-gritos: screaming as witnessing in postwar Central America

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Anti-gritos: screaming as witnessing in postwar Central America

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Content 1 ANTI-GRITOS: SCREAMING AS WITNESSING IN POSTWAR CENTRAL AMERICA by Lacey Schauwecker A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) May 2018 © Lacey Schauwecker 2018 2 Table of Contents Acknoweldgements………………………………………………………………………… 3 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………… 4 Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………… 33 “Aquella Gran Gritazón”: Inaudible Evidence and Unclaimed Rights Chapter 2…………………………………………………………………………………… 65 “Tengo que gritarlo”: Historical Witnessing and Testimonio’s Moment, Again Chapter 3…………………………………………………………………………………… 96 Gritos Bestiales: Toward a Posthuman Migrant Politics Chapter 4…………………………………………………………………………………… 124 El Grito del Epicentro: Traumatic Affect and Unbound Solidarity Epliogue……………………………………………………………………………………. 159 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….. 163 3 Acknowledgements A full list of thanks for everybody who contributed to this project would surpass the project itself, in length and profundity. My advisor, Erin Graff Zivin, has diligently mentored me into bolder thinking and writing. I also feel steadfast gratitude for the many teachers, students, family, and friends who have given my work, and life, meaning beyond words. Thank you. 4 Introduction I. Jonathan Moller’s Our Culture is Our Resistance We do not speak, our songs are caught in our throats, misery with spirit, sadness inside fences. Ay! I want to cry screaming! -- Humberto Ak’abal, “And nobody sees us” (Moller 36) I speak to cover the mouth of silence. -- Humberto Ak’abal, “Covering the Mouth of Silence” (Moller 134) In Jonathan Moller’s Our Culture is Our Resistance (2004), the pithy words of Guatemala’s most recognized Mayan poet accompany photographic portraits of war victims, survivors, and human rights activists. According to Humberto Ak’abal, his native language of K’iche’ has no word for poet so he identifies as a “singer” (“Humberto”). In the lines above, he suggests his songs to be speech that eventually replaces the desire to scream, yet not in a way that gives voice to silence. He speaks “to cover the mouth of silence,” which implies concealment: people cover mouths in order to muffle sound, rendering it inaudible. To speak in a way that deadens silence, however, curiously looks a lot like screaming within Our Culture is Our Resistance and its associated archive. Here, making silence inaudible entails making it visible and, in this sense, actually uncovering the mouth of silence as also the mouth of screaming. This mouth appears in Moller’s photos of mass grave exhumations, which began soon 5 after Guatemala’s state and guerrilla armies signed peace accords ending a 36-year-long war. 1 During this war, the state army committed numerous human rights abuses, including genocidal scorched earth campaigns against indigenous populations residing in the country’s highlands. 2 Though Moller did not publish all of his photos in Our Culture is Our Resistance, they all extend the book’s aim to document the faces, events, and memories associated with this land. Many of the book’s photos capture living faces that, according to Moller, display the humanity and dignity of Guatemala’s Maya indigenous peoples (13). These photos include women making tortillas, couples getting married, men gathering leaves, and chidren playing in a river. In contrast, Moller’s photos of deceased victims resemble screaming faces that are more disturbing than indeed dignifying (Figures 1 and 2). Figures 1 and 2. Untitled photos from Moller’s Archive, “Nuestra Cultura es Nuestra Resistencia.” 2000-2001. Provided by Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA). As viewers of these photographs, we are struck by images that are both poignant and seemingly deficient. Rather than observe these individuals practice their syncretic faith, we see the complexity of their convictions reduced to a makeshift cross. Instead of watching them cultivate their resource-rich land, we see their flesh decomposed into the very dirt that aided their murders, as they were likely buried alive. To read screaming into the gaping jawbones of these 1 Peace accords were signed in 1992 and exhumations began in 1993. Moller took many of the photos within Our Culture is Our Resistance between May 2000 and July 2001, while serving as a staff photographer for a forensic anthropology team supported by the Office of Peace and Reconciliation, which is a part of Guatemala’s Catholic Diocese (Moller “Our” 83). These exhumations occurred in the areas of La Sierra and Ixcán. 2 The two truth commission reports in Guatemala, Guatemala: Nunca Más (1998) and Guatemala, memoria del silencio (1999) concluded that over 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during the armed conflict. They attributed over 90% of these human rights abuses to the state army or related paramilitary groups (Proyecto, Oficina). 6 corpses may seem like an interpretive stretch, yet Ak’abal’s poetry affirms the spectral and synesthetic nature of voice. As “songs […] caught in our throats,” the voice can be present as absence, and visible as silence (Moller 36). In lieu of hearing these corpses’ stories of survival, we witness their inability to testify by the traditional means of language and narrative. Having been permanently silenced by death, however, these bodies nevertheless reveal a paradoxical capacity for screaming in a figurative sense. As an image of a sound—or, indeed, an imagined sound—such screaming powerfully elicits viewers’ confused attention, prompting further consideration of this aporia between screaming and silence. Yet, according to the human rights discourse behind such exhumations, the truth value of these remains does not inhere in this figurative screaming. Treated as material evidence containing traces of physical trauma and DNA, victims’ bones have created legal cases convincing enough to prove past crimes, condemn their perpetrators, and thereby secure justice, at least in a juridical sense. As silently screaming faces, however, these remains’ evidentiary nature exceeds this paradigm, demonstrating a mode of witnessing that does not abide by, nor appeal to, legal standards and processes. With Ak’abal’s poetry, these exhumation photos uncover the mouth of silence and make inaudibility visible. In doing so, they foreground the ways certain populations, including indigenous Mayans, remain unrecognized and unprotected within Guatemala and larger postwar Central America. “Screaming as witnessing” is not just poetic and photographic; it is also literary, filmic, and performative. Within this dissertation’s corpus, such witnessing involves survivor-activists quarreling with anthropologists; visual artists protesting institutional impunity; U.S.-bound migrants rejecting humanitarian aid; and Latino poets resignifying trauma. As varied as such cases of screaming are, they all expose human rights discourse as compliant with the very 7 colonial and neocolonial orders it claims to resist. This compliance inheres in its reliance upon predominately occidental understandings of truth, time, subjectivity, and solidarity, all of which sideline screaming as a legitimate mode of testimony. Informed by the Enlightenment and established by the United Nations after World War II, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights upholds principles of “freedom, equality, and dignity,” among others (“Universal” vii). 3 While such principles may not be inherently problematic, their enforcement in non-western cultures fails to sufficiently empower those who need it most: the victims of not just colonization but also its many legacies, including imperialism, war, and global capitalism. Not all of the witnesses within this dissertation claim to be indigenous, and none of them identify solely as victims. Yet, like the open-mouthed corpses within Moller’s photographs, this collection of artists and activists scream in ways that actually resist hegemonic modes of resistance, including human rights discourse and its imperatives of legal recognition and rectification. Rather than scream and be heard, these witnesses suggest their very inaudibility to be interruptive of neocolonial and neoliberal orders claiming to promote human rights and socio- economic progress worldwide. In addition to exacerbating violence in the name of seemingly benevolent ideals, these orders limit the possibility of political insurgency, often coopting it with bureaucracy. Yet, as an ambiguous yet exigent trope, “screaming as witnessing” shows “culture,” or “cultural production,” to be even more radical than Our Culture is Our Resistance acknowledges. 4 Within the multimedia and interdisciplinary testimonies analyzed throughout this 3 Multiple scholars address the ways in which the Enlightenment has influenced human rights discourse. Throughout this dissertation, I refer to the work of Elizabeth Anker, Fernando Rosenberg, Kate Jenckes, Wendy Brown, and Samuel Moyn, among others, in order to explain this influence in mostly philosophical terms. 4 Pierre Bourdieu refers to culture as “cultural production” in order to foreground the ways art and other forms of culture are imbedded in a field of social relations informing their production, circulation, and consumption (Bourdieu). 8 dissertation, witnesses scream without raising their voices, uncovering unexpected truths that might surprise the anthropologists and other human rights activists who claim to be looking for them. These truths include those of immaterial evidence, iterative time, post-human subjectivity, and affective solidarity, all of which refute their own reduction to singular, absolute, or legally verifiable meaning. II. Genealogy of Gritos Although most of this dissertation’s examples of screaming are from the 1980s and onward, they belong to an extended genealogy of screaming within Latin America. This history coincides with what Lynn Hunt calls “the invention of human rights,” referring to the processes of drafting the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). While these documents claim human rights to be “self-evident,” meaning based in nature, Lynn historicizes them as the result of changes in social thought and experience throughout the eighteenth century, or the European Age of Enlightenment (33). This age’s events, including the British and French Revolutions, also influenced Latin American populations, prompting many to revolt against Spanish viceroys (María Méndez 116). These nations’ revolts for independence were commonly called screams, or Gritos, and resounded throughout the continent from 1804 to 1902. 5 Such screams include El Grito de Dolores, which signifies the bell-ringing efforts of a priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who incited Mexico’s insurgent army into a decade of war. Similarly, El Grito de Ascencio marks the first armed uprising within Uruguay, during which a small group of criollos campaigned for the money and manpower necessary to create a 5 Latin America’s wars for independence started in Haiti and ended in Cuba (María Mendez 513). 9 revolutionary army. Differing slightly from these examples, Colombia’s Grito del 20 de Julio refers to an elaborate scheme involving the public denunciation of a viceroy who refused to lend out a flower vase (Pumar Martínez 311). Each of these Gritos likely involved literal screaming, both of rage and of terror, yet each example is also—perhaps surprisingly—primarily figurative. As Dulce María Méndez notes, “El grito tiene un simbolismo, pues su implosión se replica a través del tiempo” [Since the scream is symbolic, its pronouncement is replicated through time] (2805). Because Gritos symbolize national independence, countries continue to commemorate them in anniversary celebrations. Yet, noting how such commemorative cries have continued for over two centuries, María Méndez claims that their symbolic value has changed slightly. Though they still proclaim independence and fortify nationalism, they no longer oppose the same imperial powers. Since imperialism has shifted from colonial to economic means with the advent of global capitalism, María Méndez claims Gritos to now denounce “los empresarios más ricos, que siguen avasallando con su poderío e influencia cultural, despojándolos de identidad y de libertad” [“The richest businessmen, who continue overreaching with their power and cultural influence, stripping them [Latin American citizens] of identity and freedom”] (2810). As critical as María Méndez is of this “neocolonialismo económico” [economic neocolonialism], which causes many Latin American countries to depend on imperial economies for loans, trades, and remittances, she also acknowledges the nation-state’s own role in such repression (2829). Yet, while she understands Gritos as celebrations of independence that entail “el mito y la historia,… la realidad y la fantasia” [myth and history,… reality and fantasy], other scholars, activists, and artists are more intent on demythologizing such nationalism (2813). 10 Historian Eugenia López Velásquez asserts that El Salvador’s Grito, known as El Primer Grito de Independencia, was co-opted by criollos in the name of an exclusionary nationalism that persists today. While the country celebrates November 5, 1811 as a day on which José Matías Delgado and other criollos confiscated thousands of guns and funds from the royal treasury before occupying San Salvador’s government, she claims that the first screams of independence came from indigenous and ladino populations rioting for fairer taxes, less corruption, and the release of prisoners accused of sedition (López Velásquez). 6 Having consulted various testimonies, letters, and government documents from Central America’s General Archive and El Salvador’s National Archive, López Velásquez published her research alongside a revised version of Luis Vergara Ahumada’s painting of such events (Figure 3). In this digitally edited copy of “El Grito de Independencia” (1959), Father Delgado and fellow criollos are blurred out in order to foreground the indigenous and ladino crowd below them as “los verdaderos héroes” [the real heroes] (López Velásquez). Figure 3. Luis Vergara Ahumada’s “El Grito de Independencia.” 1957-1959. El Faro. <http://www.elfaro.net/es/201411/academico/16174/Los-verdaderos-h%C3%A9roes-del- llamado-Primer-Grito-de-Independencia.htm> As López Velásquez concludes, November 5, 1811 “fue el día en el que la elite criolla intervino para controlar y contener el movimiento popular” [was the day on which the elite criollo intervened in order to control and contain the popular movement] (López). In other words, it was the day state authorities replaced one scream with another, thereby colonizing an otherwise decolonial figure. 6 In the Central American context, ladino refers to people of mixed race, usually involving Spanish and indigenous ancestry. 11 In other attempts to reclaim Gritos as more critical than celebratory of nationalism, artists and activists have proposed the concept of “anti-gritos.” Rather than oppose economic neocolonialism in defense of the nation, these anti-gritos call into question the very status of the Latin American nation-state. While Mexico’s El Grito de Dolores remains the most iconic and celebrated of all cries for independence, it is also the most protested. Since Enrique Peña Nieto assumed presidency by what many Mexicans consider to be a fraudulent election, his annual reenactment of El Grito de Dolores, which includes exclamations of “¡Viva la independencia nacional! ¡Viva México!,” [“Long live national independence! Long live Mexico!”] has incited boos, jeers, and anti-gritos. After 43 students were disappeared from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, a crime that the state has been accused of committing, these anti-gritos started including interjections such as “¡Fue el estado!” [It was the state!] and “¡Fuera Peña!” [Oust Peña!] (García Hernández). Similar manifestations have surfaced among Latino populations in the United States, where Chicago residents executed a hunger strike to protest the corruption, violence, and poverty that dominates Mexico. As activist Salvador Zamora explains, “Queremos demostrar nuestro repudio y nuestra indignidad. Esto es nuestro grito el día de hoy, el 15 de Septiembre” [We want to show our repudiation and indignity. This is our scream today, the 15 th of September] (“El ‘anti grito’”). Adding that such protests apply not just to Mexico but Latin America at large, activist Esteban Burgoa states, “La independencia y la libertad latina tienes que celebrar cuando tu pueblo viva en una buenas condiciones. No haiga [sic] pobreza. No haiga golpes. No haiga secuestros. No haiga desaparición de estudiantes” [You have to celebrate Latin independence and freedom when your people live in good conditions. When there is no poverty, no coups, no kidnappings, no student 12 disappearances] (“El ‘anti grito’”). Until these conditions are met, there will be anti-gritos substituting for Gritos, and denunciations of nationalism instead of its commemoration. Like the original Gritos, the aforementioned anti-gritos are both literal and figurative. In addition to vocal denunciations, they involve symbolic actions such as public marches and hunger strikes. Yet, as critical as such anti-gritos are of the failing Latin American nation-state, many of the protestors who emit them exhibit a comparatively uncritical approach toward larger ideological paradigms such as human rights discourse. 7 In fact, such protestors often appeal to this discourse as a way of gaining outside legal leverage over domestic sovereignty and jurisdiction. As the parents of the Ayotzinapa students caravanned throughout Mexico and the U.S., for example, they urged international human rights organizations and governments to intervene into this crisis on their behalves (Lewis). Considering these parents’ distrust in the Mexican nation-state, as well as their primary aim of finding their children’s remains, this appeal is quite understandable. While desperately confiding in such human rights organizations and governments, however, these parents fail to realize that these parties remain trapped in a similarly violent logic. In fact, the failing Latin-American nation-state largely results from an international neoliberal and neocolonial order that prioritizes freedom, not justice, and privileges profit over people. In addition to drawing attention to what Michael Clark calls “the withering” of the Latin American nation-state through critiques of particular events and policies, I aim to show how anti-gritos make a more widespread intervention (Clark 34). In doing so, I appeal to anti-gritos’ figurative quality as more ethically powerful and politically promising than heretofore 7 As Horacio Legrás explains, “the historical failure of the Latin American nation-state is its failure to grant the condition of citizen to all of its inhabitants. While the nation-state proclaims its commitment to inclusive politics, the reality is everywhere a matter of sheer exclusion” (92). 13 considered. Reading screaming as a highly variable trope that resists its own interpretation, I claim it to interrupt hegemonic modes of representation, and even resistance. These modes include those upheld by the nation-state, as well as ostensibly antithetical discourses such as globalism, neoliberalism, and human rights. As nationalists continue to celebrate Gritos, and dissidents continue to assert anti-gritos, I argue for a radical rethinking of screaming as witnessing. Such rethinking appeals to examples of anti-gritos that are less pronounced, though no less potent, than the genealogy of Gritos to which they belong. This theoretical maneuver involves numerous Latin American national and regional cultures, since cries for independence are far from the only type of screaming that recurs throughout the continent. In Ecuador, painter Oswaldo Guayasamín has produced multiple visual screams, which he understands as responses to The Ecuadorian War of Independence (1820- 1822), Chile’s golpe de estado against President Salvador Allende (1973), and what the artist generally refers to as “La edad de la ira” [The Age of Rage] (Yingling 17, Figure 4). Describing his painting as the depiction of “dos mundos” [two worlds], one interior and the other exterior, he states, “De piel para adentro es un grito contra el racismo y la pobreza; de piel para fuera es la síntesis del tiempo que me ha tocado vivir¨ [“Inside the skin is a scream against racism and poverty; outside the skin is a synthesis of the time that I have lived”] (“Con el grito”). Figure 4. Oswaldo Guayasamín’s El Grito. 1983. Vanderbilt University and Georgetown University. <https://as.vanderbilt.edu/clas-resources/media/Guayasamin.pdf> In Mexico, performance artist Jesusa Rodríguez likewise collapses interior feelings and exterior conditions by connecting El Grito de Dolores with Edvard Munch’s iconic painting, The Scream of Nature (1893). On September 5, 2012, shortly after the re-election of President Enrique Peña Nieto, she and multiple activists dressed themselves in pale faces resembling the ghost-like figure within Munch’s painting (Figure 5). Rather than gather at the National Palace, where 14 government-sponsored Grito celebrations occur, they organized themselves on the steps of El Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, which housed Munch’s famous painting at the time. Figure 5. Jesusa Rodríguez’ “Grito de Munch.” 2012. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oK_zuzSIFs> After explaining the group’s disapproval of Peña Nieto’s likely fraudulent election and “el fraude continuo” [the continuous fraud] within Mexican politics, Rodríguez asserted that today “Munch se sale de Bellas Artes a dar el grito de terror, de no a la imposición, y el grito de ‘basta’” [Munch escapes the Bellas Artes in order to give a scream of terror, of no to imposition, the scream of ‘enough!’” (“Jesusa Rodríguez”). Following this claim, she and the group of protestors collectively moaned in a dreadful tone, suggesting the Mexican Grito to now be one of despair. In Argentina, visual artist Graciela Sacco created another public and performative intervention by posting photographs of open, screaming mouths on street buildings throughout Buenos Aires in 2013 (Figure 6). Titling this series Bocanada, she describes it as more of a political question than answer: “If somebody opens the mouth it’s because needs something [sic] and I like to stop the meaning of the action in that point […] It’s a question: what could we need? Could be a shout, could be somebody who needs food” (“América Latina”). Figure 6. Graciela Sacco’s Bocanada. 2013. <http://www.gracielasacco.com/bocanada> As open as this question may seem, Sacco frames such screaming as a response to political situations that are created by the current world order. In her words, “The idea is that people don’t look for hunger, hunger looks for the people, and it’s produced. It’s not something that [just] happens” (“América Latina”). Similarly, my point with anti-gritos is that figurative screaming in Latin America does not just happen. It is not random, nor is it simply nationalist or anti-nationalist. Rather, it is symptomatic of a neocolonial order, as well as the way this order limits the possibilities of 15 recognizable resistance. While the promulgation of global capitalism and human rights discourse has occurred simultaneously all over the world, this contradictory situation has been especially extreme in Central America. At the same time that the United Nations were drafting The Universal Declaration of Human Rights upholding the aforementioned ideals of “freedom, equality, and dignity,” the U.S. was initiating the Cold War through the Truman Doctrine, which likewise claimed to protect and defend humans worldwide (“Universal” vii). Authorizing the U.S. to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” this doctrine justified U.S. military intervention throughout Central America, including the overthrowing of Guatemala’s democratically-elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (“Truman”). 8 Additionally, while international human rights activists were helping convict an ex-dictator of genocide within a domestic court for the first time ever, Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina was supporting the development of mega-projects injuring indigenous villages in more clandestine, though no less brutal, ways (Lakhani). 9 Noting how this imperialism guised as humanitarianism dominates Central American politics, anthropologists Carlota McAllister and Diane Nelson have conceptualized an ongoing “war by other means,” which they claim to denote a military, political, economic, and spiritual project aimed at thwarting “hopes for structural transformation” (16). 10 This counterinsurgent project involves international policies such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (2005) and the Mérida 8 Other acts of U.S. intervention in Central America included direct financial and military assistance for the repressive right-wing regimes fighting in the civil wars of El Salvador (1979- 1992), Nicaragua (1962-1990), and Guatemala (1960-1996). 9 In 2013, José Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and other crimes against humanity. This decision was annulled as unconstitutional just ten days later (Castillo). 10 While McAllister and Nelson propose this term within their study of post-genocide Guatemala, they also suggest it to apply to Central America at large. Just as a majority of the region suffered from counterinsurgent violence throughout the 1980s, all of its countries have been negatively affected by the neoliberal and neocolonial policies enacted thereafter. 16 Initiative (2006), as well as domestic practices of state terrorism, structural racism, and institutional impunity, among others. 11 McAllister and Nelson suggest this “war by other means” to necessitate a witnessing beyond human rights discourse, claiming “the demands of testimony and the postwar organizing that takes place under its sign seem to exhaust the desires they once promised to fulfill” (23). Though postwar truth commissions and legal cases have gathered thousands of testimonies, such testimonies have been devalued by decades of impunity. Yet, despite this and other keen observations, McAllister and Nelson do not clarify what an alternative practice of witnessing might entail, prompting my conceptualization and investigation of “screaming as witnessing” within the particular context of postwar Central America. Following McAllister and Nelson, I do not understand the “post” in postwar to signify the end, or aftermath, of war. Instead, I use it to demarcate the ways in which war might be “posted,” or made visible, within a Central America still plagued by poverty, violence, and death. 12 Recognizing that anti-gritos appear throughout Latin America, as well as in the United States, I focus on postwar Central America and its diaspora as a region characterized by the corruption of nation-state sovereignty and dominance of neocolonial and neoliberal orders. This project addresses concrete, punctual events within porous national boundaries; however, its interventions are not merely historical nor regional. Rather, and more significantly, they respond to a theoretical, or philosophical, debate that has practical consequences and political implications that extend beyond the temporal and 11 CAFTA is a bilateral free trade agreement eliminating tariffs on trade between Central America and the United States. The Mérida Initiative is a security cooperation agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Central America, with the stated purpose of mitigating transnational drug trafficking and organized crime. 12 In Guatemala, death rates due to narcotrafficking and other criminal activity throughout late 2000s and early 2010s were reaching numbers comparable to those during the worst years of the country’s civil war (McAllister 7). 17 geographical bounds of the aesthetic and political examples I study. This debate involves questions about what constitutes truth and who has the authority to distinguish false from veridical testimony. Such questions include: Who gets to witness, and for what purposes? Additionally, what would it mean for witnessing to resist the epistemological standards and political imperatives of human rights discourse? My research contends that ostensibly deficient practices of witnessing, such as screaming, do not lack anything in themselves. Rather, we as readers, scholars, and potential witnesses lack the paradigms necessary for rethinking truth, justice, history, and politics. Influenced by ongoing efforts to provide such paradigms within the field of Latin American Studies, “Anti-Gritos: Screaming as Witnessing in Postwar Central America” aims to serve as a case study for related investigations worldwide. Even as a potential model, however, “screaming as witnessing” does not supply set answers about the definition and function of witnessing. Instead, it points to the possibility of a witnessing that exceeds human rights discourse, exposing this discourse as less exhaustive and effective than its hegemonic status suggests. Additionally, this project broadens our understandings of truth, as well as related concepts of time, subjectivity, and solidarity. By figuring these concepts in ways that are far more complex and uncertain than their occidental definitions acknowledge, “screaming as witnessing” prevents them from being co-opted or instrumentalized by any discourse, including that of human rights or its neocolonial and neoliberal companions. In this sense, “screaming as witnessing” is constitutively interruptive. III. Screaming as Witnessing In Central America, and broader Latin America, human rights activism followed insurgent movements as the primary discourse of resistance. This activism’s general acceptance 18 happened more gradually in certain countries than in others. In some cases, communist leaders forced into exile joined foreign leftist groups. Such was the case of Uruguayan exiles who refused to make “humanitarian laments” or “adopt purely informative activity,” instead insisting that “prisoners will be freed the day that the revolutionary fight […] forces the bourgeoisie and its armed tool to do so” (qtd. in Moyn, Last 141). Yet, as the continent’s last remaining revolutionary movements met their ends in brutal counterinsurgency, some leftists became more willing to accept human rights discourse as an extension of their struggles for justice. In countries such as Guatemala, where Argentine human rights experts arrived soon after the civil war’s end, guerrilla soldiers and organizers became witnesses in legal cases prosecuting state officials. Now identifying as innocent victims, not revolutionary nationalists, these witnesses and activists began appealing to the morality and jurisdiction of the same nation-state that they had fought, and failed, to overthrow. Rather than simply replace insurgent movements, human rights activism thus functioned to critique and contain them. Yet, while human rights since has become a hegemonic, and seemingly universal, discourse of resistance worldwide, historian Samuel Moyn reminds us that it is far from the only mode of political idealism. As he states, “Human rights emerged historically as the last utopia— one that became powerful and prominent because other visions imploded” (Last 4). As former revolutionaries dissociated from leftist movements in order to testify as human rights victims, such activism became more closely associated with anti-communism, not anti- capitalism (Last 71). Yet, more than depoliticize former political movements, forcing members to sacrifice their agency by identifying as victims, this form of activism commonly reduces multifarious claims for justice to an ostensibly universal claim for rights. While claims for justice demand the redistribution of wealth, resources, and power —that is, taking from some in order to 19 give to others— claims for rights avoid this zero sum situation by feigning universality. According to human rights discourse, all individuals have the right to rights, making equal rights infinitely possible, at least in theory. Noting “rights” to be the legal figure that replaces, but does not realize, the ideal of justice, legal scholar Drucilla Cornell states, “We need rights because we cannot have justice” (qtd. in Rosenberg 4). For while appeals to and defenses of human rights are often premised upon the ideal of justice, it is justice defined within a limited, and often retroactive, frame. When leftists within Guatemala began prosecuting the state army as guilty of human rights abuses, for example, they were prosecuting particular people for specific crimes. These cases uphold justice as juridical rectification, yet they do not address the causes and complexities of injustice on a macro level. In neglecting to do so, Wendy Brown claims human rights discourse to reduce “global problem[s]” to “terrible human suffering consequent to limited individual rights against abusive state powers” (453). This emphasis on individual rights either protected or violated by state powers fails to acknowledge what Brown describes as “the relatively unchecked globalization of capital, postcolonial political deformations, and superpower imperialism combining to disenfranchise peoples from the prospects of self- governance” (12). It fails, in other words, to account for how human rights have overshadowed “basic subsistence rights,” as well as “global socioeconomic justice” (Stites More 9). This negligence partially results from human rights discourse’s compliance with the ideologies now exacerbating global disparity and disempowerment. Though human rights discourse claims to uphold universal values and protections, thereby appearing unbound to any particular time or place, it is part of a genealogy dating back to the European Enlightenment (Balfour 282). 13 This genealogy 13 While language similar to that of human rights discourse did appear in texts around the world 20 prizes human reason, freedom and progress as morally universal and, as such, ironically justificatory of colonial and neocolonial violence against non-Western populations. Sometimes this violence takes the shape of a civilizing mission; other times it occurs through less overt, though no less devastating, economic policies. Noting the humanism, and inherent moralism, of human rights also to inform a neoliberal globalization that promotes Enlightenment ideals to the detriment of international equality and security, Samuel Moyn claims “the human rights revolution and the victory of market fundamentalism” to be convenient, if not causal, companions (“Human” 147). 14 While market fundamentalism—and the laissez-faire economics that characterize it— claim to favor the development of populations worldwide, they end up reifying colonial relations wherein indigenous populations depend upon imperial powers for their own rights, or lack thereof. Noting how “anticolonial” movements have refrained from appealing to human rights discourse, Moyn claims “colonial subjects” to be “painfully aware that Western ‘humanism’ had not been kind to them so far” (Last 87). Though this discourse may seem to shield them from the violence inherent to globalization, it instead reproduces their subjectivity as in need of, and falsely dependent upon, a certain kind of protection. This protection, as aforementioned, is mostly retroactive and individual, not protective and collective. Nevertheless, it is important to long before the Enlightenment, Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava claim “the consensus is that, for better or worse, human rights discourse takes its most recognizable shape in the early days of the French Revolution” (282). Furthermore, Balfour and Cadava note how the fact that human rights have a genealogy, and perhaps multiple possible genealogies, foregrounds how they are contextual “in their articulations, their codifications, and their applications” (282). 14 While Moyn does note a correlation between the promulgation of neoliberalism and human rights, he argues that it is “far too soon” to determine their exact relationship (“Human” 149). Likewise, Brown notes that human rights discourse “converges neatly with the requisites of liberal imperialism and global free trade, and legitimates both as well” (451). 21 acknowledge the ways human rights discourse has indeed helped combat violence and impunity worldwide. In Latin America, identifying instances of state terror as “crimes against humanity” has lifted state officials out of protection by national immunity laws, facilitating their prosecution (Rosenberg 6). Additionally, the increasingly frequent occurrence of truth commissions, mass grave exhumations, and international human rights alliances have helped raise awareness about otherwise ignored instances of violence and social exclusion. Yet, while postwar humanitarian efforts pose a far more nuanced threat than crusades and wars waged in the name of humanism, they remain ideologically violent insofar as they require all populations to conform to a discourse of resistance that is far from universal, or empowering. In doing so, this discourse also “forecloses the possibility of encountering the other beyond pre-established structures of knowledge,” meaning those established by the Enlightenment (Jenckes, Witnessing 7). Such foreclosure causes human rights discourse to repress many of the humans that it claims to represent. Acknowledging the problems inherent to human rights discourse, Jacques Derrida nevertheless reasserts its importance. For him, human rights merit critical attention precisely because they are historical, not universal, and therefore subject to change: Human rights are never sufficient. Which alone suffices to remind us that they are not natural. They have a history—one that is recent, complex, and unfinished. . . To take this historicity and this perfectibility into account in an affirmative way we must never prohibit the most radical questioning possible of all the concepts at work here. (qtd. in Borradori 132-133) As radical and rigorous as this questioning may be, Derrida claims it must not reject our dependence upon human rights as the possibility, though never quite reality, of resistance to global violence and injustice. Asserting that “we must (il faut) more than ever stand on the side of human rights,” he prevents any presumptive interpretations of his own terms, including “we,” 22 “side,” and “human.” For Derrida, these concepts, as well as “the very concept of rights or of law (droit), and even the concept of history” are still open interrogations, not “pre-established structures of knowledge” (Borradori 133, Jenckes 7). They include questions such as: What, or who, constitutes “human” and “nonhuman” living beings? Do juridical concepts like “crime against humanity” confound such categories? Additionally, how might human rights’ own history undermine itself? As critical as Derrida is of all the categories “at work” within human rights discourse, he distinguishes justice as “undeconstructible” insofar as it is a singular demand that resists its own systematization (Deconstruction 131). For this reason, Derrida situates “justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law,” thereby rejecting the way human rights discourse upholds the law as an instrument of justice (Deconstruction 131). Yet, while Derrida claims that “justice does not end with the law,” other scholars are more dismissive of human rights discourse as itself unjust (Borradori 133). Noting the ways American imperialism continues to employ human rights discourse to defend its more recent exploitations, including its Guantánamo Bay gulag, invasions of the Middle East, and continued support for Israeli occupation, Brown ponders the possibility of “other kinds of political projects, including other international justice projects” (461). More eager than Derrida to desert human rights discourse altogether, she states, “One wonders whether the project of more directly challenging such imperialism and supporting indigenous efforts to transform authoritarian, despotic, and corrupt postcolonial regimes might be at least as critical” (460). This type of project has preoccupied Latin American Studies since its formation in the 1960s, yet it took on new urgency and complexity with the development of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group throughout the 1980s and 90s. As the group’s founding statement notes, “the end of communism and the consequent displacement of revolutionary projects” as well as “the 23 processes of redemocratization” and “the new dynamics created by… mass media and transnational economic arrangements,” called for “new ways of thinking and acting politically” (Latin 110). Influenced by the original Subaltern Studies Group, which consisted of South Asian scholars interested in articulating subaltern histories, these Latin Americanists likewise sought to challenge hegemonic narratives and institutions, including elitist literature about indigenous populations. In South Asia, scholars debated whether Antonio Gramsci’s historical-materialist definition of subaltern as a person of inferior rank identified a political subject with any agency, including that of speaking and making its demands heard on its own terms. In Gayatri Spivak’s now famous article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” she revises Gramsci’s definition of the subaltern to mean not only subordinate but also “unrepresentable” (Spivak 80). In Latin America, extensions of this debate centered around testimonio, a literary genre intended to authorize subaltern histories. Vigilant of changing conceptualizations of truth, history, and the nation, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group also claimed to maintain a self-awareness about “the limits of the idea of ‘studying’ the subaltern,” acknowledging its own involvement with elite institutions and epistemic foreclosures (Latin 121). As the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group developed, it yielded numerous approaches to the question of the subaltern. At the risk of betraying the variety of these approaches, it is helpful to identify two prominent and influential arguments. One argument is to valorize subaltern, including indigenous, knowledge as essentially different from hegemonic counterparts. Examining how subaltern knowledge has been historically constructed as inferior, this approach aims to restore such knowledge as its own academic discipline, generally associated with Latin American Cultural Studies. In contrast, other scholars consider this valorization of difference to be essentialist in ways that replicate, not resist, hegemonic 24 paradigms and institutions, including those of the Western Enlightenment. Claiming that the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group should do more to uphold Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern is unrepresentable, this alternative approach situates such knowledge as “the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” (Guha 16). As such, it is precisely where hegemonic thought and hegemonic thinking end, unable to incorporate and subordinate that which resists its own intellectual and cultural capture. In accounting for the epistemological complexity, as well as elusiveness, of the subaltern, this approach claims to pursue the possibility of a more radical politics: one that favors interruption over institutionalization, and the unknown over known. Certain scholars identify this latter approach as “New Latin American Studies,” which they distinguish as less essentialist and more critical than the traditional field. Instead of defining Latin America simply as a continent, or region, comprised of countries sharing common histories, cultures, and politics, these scholars suggest Latin America to be an unstable and excessive entity. Analyzing how false understandings of a homogenous Latin America have informed exclusionary ideologies, as well as institutions, these scholars practice what Alberto Moreiras calls a “singular thinking of Latin America that thinks what thinking Latin America destroys” (Moreiras 268). For these scholars, reductions of Latin America to a singular identity miss the opportunity, and intellectual imperative, to think Latin America “as a site of absolute singularity that resists closure into any sense of identity, whether regional or global” (268). While this approach still considers meaning to be contextual insofar as it occurs in different times and places, its understanding of meaning as occurrence is precisely what renders it “absolute singularity” and as such, irreducible to “any sense of identity,” subaltern or not. According to this perspective, every instance of meaning is an instance of interruption that 25 differs from its other occurrences. In an alternative account of difference, therefore, New Latin American Studies suggests that such interruptions must not be reduced to meaning at all, at least not a meaning that can be archived and guarded as knowledge, but must rather be allowed to circulate and resonate with other irruptions, until our concept of the world— and together with other practices, the world itself—is forced to change. (Jenckes, ‘New’ 269) While New Latin American Studies developed out of a response to subaltern debates and the possibility of supporting indigenous voices, therefore, it is an intervention into many concepts, including not just “Latin America” but also “world,” “witnessing,” “human” and “rights.” For Kate Jenckes, New Latin American Studies is also an intervention into the Enlightenment and “its accompanying metaphysics of subjectivity, truth, communication, and teleology” (14). Connecting the subaltern question with post-dictator Chile and Argentina, Jenckes proposes “witnessing beyond the human” as a way of rethinking truth and testimony outside of humanist paradigms. Jenckes understands humanism as a structure of thought that forecloses the possibility of acknowledging alterity, or what remains necessarily other. Referencing philosopher Patricio Marchant, she claims that humanism positions humans as “in control over representation and truth, which is always in the first place the truth of themselves” (5). Against humanist attempts to reduce historical existence to an absolute meaning and teleology, Jenckes appeals to Derrida’s understanding of testimony as that which testifies to the truth of the other’s existence: a truth that is, by definition, beyond the control, representation, and knowledge of humans (Jenckes, Witnessing 4). Analyzing poetry, photography, and fiction as testimony, Jenckes frames “witnessing beyond the human” as a theoretical intervention into the humanism inherent to leftist national-popular ideologies, as well as human rights discourse, opening such political paradigms “to an otherness that exceeds certainty” (4). Jenckes 26 understands this intervention to entail a rethinking of not just the human but also truth, history, and justice, linking New Latin American Studies with other challenges to Enlightenment- informed discourses and world orders. My project and its proposed “screaming as witnessing” shares a similar methodology and theoretical intervention with Jenckes’ Witnessing Beyond the Human. Like Jenckes and other New Latin American Studies scholars, I aim to rethink Latin American and Latin Americanist concepts, including subaltern identities, in non-essentialist and irreducible ways. While Jenckes centralizes her intervention around the figure of the human and humanity, I focus on screaming as a mode of witnessing that resists comprehension, and thereby disturbs related concepts of truth, time, subjectivity, and solidarity. According to my analyses, this witnessing inheres in what Jenckes calls unconventional testimony, referring to modes of representation that appear markedly more aesthetic than legal testimony (Jenckes, Witnessing 4). Yet, more than Jenckes’ examples of “witnessing beyond the human,” my selected films, novels, photographs, and poetry do engage official juridical materials, including truth commission reports, forensic remains, and archival documentary footage. For this reason, I consider my project to make a more direct intervention into human rights discourse, engaging its theoretical and practical aspects within the context of postwar Central America. In this regard, my project more closely aligns with Fernando Rosenberg’s After Human Rights, which investigates the ways human rights narratives coincide with the “neoliberal marketization of every realm of life” in modern Latin America (1). Rosenberg discusses various legal and cultural materials, all of which concern the “problem of justice” and the relationships among rights, subjectivity, and subjection (2). His readings work toward a conceptualization of justice beyond institutionalized forums and processes, causing him to replace “national 27 jurisdiction as justice’s natural ground” with “the totality of the planet as a necessary horizon of any claim for justice” (210). For Rosenberg, this horizon “points back to what was central to human rights all along: its planetary dimension,” reframing its “universal humanism” to include human and nonhuman rights (209). In this sense, Rosenberg’s project diverges from more radical understandings of justice as a horizon without horizon, which Derrida calls “undeconstructible” insofar as it cannot be delimited nor dismissed (Deconstruction 131). Considering justice to be an open interrogation compelling the continual interruption of ideas, my project refrains from replacing human rights’ hegemonic narrative with another. Rather, it positions “screaming as witnessing” as a way of exposing human rights discourse’s compliance with neocolonial and neoliberal orders. In doing so, it exhibits a skepticism toward all ideas of totality, as well as comprehension, revealing truth, time, subjectivity and solidarity to be far les straightforward and transparent than human rights discourse suggests. While my argument may appear less ambitious than that of Rosenberg, it upholds aforementioned claims about the necessary imperfectability, or insufficiency, of human rights discourse. Rather than rework these concepts to become more inclusive, “screaming as witnessing” draws attention to what they exclude, as well as the need to rethink politics as an absolute openness to alterity. This project’s theoretical framework renders its central concepts to be far less stable than their literal meanings would suggest. Anti-gritos, or “anti-screams,” are not simply opposed to Gritos as iconic cries for independence throughout Latin America. Rather, the term anti-gritos implies a method of reading such screaming against its own history, revealing the ways this decolonial figure has been coopted by nation-states that are not nearly as sovereign or inclusive as they claim to be. Additionally, anti-gritos refer to examples of screaming that are less obviously related to histories of decolonization and nationalism. Many of these examples are 28 aesthetic and, in some ways, even more figurative than Gritos. They include literary, photographic, performative, and filmic screaming, much of which is inaudible. As a mode of witnessing, this screaming exceeds legal definitions of testimony as strictly narrative, comprehensible, and indeed veridical. Rather, this screaming shows witnessing to be an address to the other that resists legal imperatives of recognition and rectification. As regional as this project may appear, focusing on cultural production from postwar Central America, this screaming also exceeds reductive understandings of time and space. While the following chapters address issues of state terror, institutional impunity, mass migration, and transnational solidarity, for example, “screaming as witnessing” connects these issues to neocolonial and neoliberal orders, which exist on a global scale. In doing so, it suggests violence to be a universal problem that nevertheless requires a less than universal solution. “Screaming as witnessing” is not this solution, yet it points to the possibility of a politics beyond hegemonic paradigms of resistance. IV. Chapter Guide My first chapter, “‘Aquella Gran Gritazón’: Immaterial Evidence and Unclaimed Rights,” focuses on testimonies by witnesses and survivors of El Salvador and Guatemala’s respective civil wars. Noting how human rights activists Rufina Amaya and Rigoberta Menchú both employ screaming in their testimonies, I read this trope as indicative of the ways these witnesses’ own voices have been devalued as senseless, or less than evidentiary. Like war victims who screamed for their lives before being silenced by death, Amaya and Menchú appeal to human rights discourse as capable of recognizing their truths and granting them justice. Informed by the Western Enlightenment, however, this discourse privileges material evidence as more veridical than eyewitness testimony, enforcing an epistemological hierarchy that is neocolonial insofar as 29 it re-inscribes the inferiority and inaudibility of subaltern indigenous populations. I connect this hierarchy to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of “visuality,” which he defines as a complex that regulates what is “visible” and “sayable” in order to make certain powers and histories seem self- evidently “real” and “right” (7). According to Mirzoeff, “visuality” produces “countervisuality” when it reveals itself as less authoritative and just than it claims to be. By analyzing various accounts of state terror, including Uli Stelzner’s La Isla: Archivo de una Tragedia (2009), Menchú’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1985), and Pamela Yates’ When the Mountains Tremble (1983), I situate screaming as a figure for countervisuality and, as such, a challenge to human rights discourse. In different but complementary ways, these two documentaries and one testimonio illustrate how screaming haunts the institutionalization of truth and reality, exposing the need for extralegal avenues of pursuing justice. My second chapter, “‘Tengo que gritarlo’”: Historical Witnessing and Testimonio’s Moment, Again” revives debates on testimonio by redefining and repurposing the genre’s literariness. Whereas John Beverley first proposed testimonio to be a “novel or novella-length narrative” that contributes to “an international/popular-democratic subject,” I appeal to Jacques Derrida’s understanding of literature as a figurative and iterative logic inherent to all language (Beverley 31). By opening the genre to multimedia forms and nonlinear understandings of history, I challenge Beverley’s claim that testimonio’s political relevance ended with the defeat of leftist movements throughout Central America. My analyses focus on Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez (2005), Daniel Hernández-Salazar’s “Para que todos lo sepan” (1998), and Regina José Galindo’s Quién puede borrar las huellas? (2003), a novel, photo series, and performance series about ongoing violence in postwar Guatemala. Each of these works employs screaming in a repetitive yet inconclusive way that I associate with the logic of literature, as well 30 as an ongoing “war by other means” throughout Guatemala and greater Central America (McAllister 16). In arguing that these works refute Beverley’s aforementioned claim, as well as human rights discourse’s concept of history, I claim testimonio also to challenge a neoliberal order that insists upon forgetting past political struggles. Throughout my analyses, I support my readings with Derrida’s concept of testimonial madness, and Walter Benjamin’s of monadic time. While Insensatez, “Para que todos lo sepan,” and Quién puede borrar las huellas? differ in their allegiance to human rights epistemologies, their iterative usage of screaming represents truth, history, and politics in a way that resists closure. My third chapter, “Gritos Bestiales: Toward a Posthuman Migrant Politics,” first describes a caravan of mutilated migrants traveling to the U.S. in order to ask the government to start investing less in border control and more in the protection of international human rights. Differing from this caravan, I argue for the importance of a posthuman migrant subject, which better corresponds to migrants’ experiences of riding atop cargo trains, falling, and disfiguring their bodies. Rather than appeal to institutional recognition and protection on behalf of a whole, autonomous, and universal humanity, this political subject insists upon its own mutilation, or bestialization, as necessary to surviving the current neoliberal world order. In a related critique of how liberalism has defined and defended “humanity” since the Enlightenment era, Elizabeth Anker notes how “corporeal integrity” functions as a “baseline condition that precedes the ascription of dignity and rights to an individual” (4). Engaging this critique within the context of Central American migration northward, I propose gritos bestiales to be a trope that foregrounds migrants’ very lack of human rights, especially amid a global capitalism that facilitates the mobility of transnational companies and goods while restricting that of people. In doing so, I read Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign (2009) and Gabriel Giorgi’s Formas 31 comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (2014), two works of political philosophy, alongside Rodrigo Reyes’ Purgatorio (2013) and Óscar Martínez’ The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (2013), a documentary film and chronicle. Pointing to gritos bestiales as literal and figurative instances of screaming, I argue that the bestialization of migrants exposes nation-states and global capitalism to be the most beastly, or brutal, powers of all. While hegemonic philosophical and political discourse, including that of human rights, frames such powers as protective and progressive, migrants’ screaming figures a posthuman politics wherein the only right that certain people can claim is that of circulation. Mobilizing themselves not as humans but as beasts, and as capital, migrants point to a less anthropocentric, and more ambivalent, mode of critiquing neocolonial and neoliberal world orders. My fourth chapter, “El Grito del Epicentro: Traumatic Affect and Unbound Solidarity,” engages the genealogy of Gritos, or Latin American cries for independence, within a U.S. Latino context. In 1968, Mexican-born journalist Enriqueta Vasquez established El Grito del Norte, a monthly journal based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico that informed the public about the Chicano movement’s concerns, which ranged from farm workers’ unions to educational reform. While this journal and the Chicano movement claimed to advocate for the rights of all Latinos, it did not always account for the diversity of this immigrant population. Author and scholar Arturo Arias distinguishes Central American-Americans as repeatedly traumatized, having endured civil wars, natural disasters, and forced migration, among other effects of neocolonial and neoliberal violence. According to Arias, this trauma is more affective than psychoanalytic insofar as it entails the body being continually opened and undone by relational experience. Multiple Central American-American poets associate the instability and unlocatability of their traumatized bodies with that of an earthquake epicenter, prompting my conceptualization of El Grito del Epicentro. 32 In reading Maya Chinchilla’s The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (2014), Mario Escobar’s Gritos Interiores (2005), and Patricia Villalobos Echeverría’s “Grietas/Fissures” (1999), I illustrate the ways these poets employ screaming to figure experiences of trauma and solidarity that entail continual displacement and permutation. Accordingly, they show solidarity to be not only among bodies but within and without them, figured by a screaming that continually interrupts and extends contingent territories. Rejecting the possibility of cultural or national citizenship, which would require narrating their experiences of violence and subscribing to identitarian understandings of trauma, subjectivity and solidarity, these poets also challenge civic and human rights discourse. Engaging the ideas of multiple scholars and theorists, including Ann Cvetkovich, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Brian Massumi, I argue that El Grito del Epicentro shows solidarity itself to be a fault line: that is, a connection among populations that disallows them from ever settling into a stable, self-enclosed political identity. 33 Chapter 1: “Aquella Gran Gritazón”: Inaudible Evidence and Unclaimed Rights I. Introduction On December 11, 1981, army troops entered El Mozote, Salvador and fatally shot more than 800 of its inhabitants, many of them children (Urbina). The army, then at war, maintains that such victims were guerrilla supporters who threatened national security. According to the few survivors, however, this massacre was an act of state terrorism worthy of international recognition, humanitarian aid, and criminal conviction. Rufina Amaya, the most outspoken survivor and witness, shared her account of the event numerous times, starting months after its occurrence and ending with her own death in 2009. Though she also participated in a truth commission and protested domestic impunity, her testimony never appeared in court. Yet, it did feature in multiple international news articles. 15 In one of these articles, Amaya confronts human rights activists for not recognizing her testimony as sufficiently veridical. Upon the passing of El Salvador’s amnesty law in 1993, Mark Danner published “The Truth of El Mozote” in The New Yorker, as well as a book titled The Massacre at El Mozote (1994). Mysteriously, final versions of the article and the book omit one of Danner’s more provocative observations. In another draft of the article, published on the journalist’s website, he details Amaya’s interaction with Argentine forensic anthropologists who arrived to excavate mass graves in El Mozote in 1992, over a decade after she first reported the massacre. When these anthropologists informed Amaya of their initial findings, twenty-five corpses hastily buried 15 Two articles, one by New York Times reporter Raymond Bonner and another by renowned Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto, broke news of the massacre in January of 1982. Both articles cite Amaya, and both aroused backlash denying the brutality of El Salvador’s national army, which President Ronald Reagan’s administration helped fund (Bonner, Guillermoprieto). Such controversy gradually subsided until the passing of El Salvador’s amnesty law and Danner’s subsequent publications. 34 in the ruin of a local church, she was less than impressed. As Danner reports, “In some excitement, the Argentines told her what they had found that day. The woman listened silently, and when they had finished she paused, then spoke. ‘¿No les dije?’ she asked. ‘Si sólo se oía aquella gran gritazón’” (Danner). Here, “¿No les dije?” [“Didn’t I tell you?”] is less a question than an assertion, as if Amaya were saying, “I already have told you more than you will ever be able to tell me.” Likewise, “Si sólo se oía aquella gran gritazón” [“If only you had heard that great scream”] is less a lamentation than a denunciation of human rights’ valuation of juridical evidence, which privileges material proof over eyewitness testimony. In another compelling passage from “The Truth of El Mozote,” Danner further illustrates this epistemelogical hierarchy. Describing the forensic team’s initial findings, he states, On the third day, in the silence of the ruined hamlet of El Mozote, all the words and claims and counterclaims that had been loudly made for nearly eleven years abruptly gave way before the mute force of material fact. The bones were there, the cartridges were there; the sleeping reality of El Mozote had finally been awoken. (Danner) This passage is self-contradictory. First, Danner mentions the loud and lengthy debate that followed El Mozote’s questioned occurrence, no doubt referring to the way survivors’ complaints were countered by military and political denials. Having acknowledged the volume of such claims, the journalist nevertheless describes the reality of this massacre as having gone dormant, only to be “awoken” by the forensic anthropologists’ delayed discovery of “material fact.” For Danner, the anthropologists’ unearthing of bones and cartridges finally provided the concrete evidence necessary for closing, or indeed opening, El Mozote’s case. 16 It is the very 16 Though Amaya and other victims’ family members started pushing for a trial as early as 1990, El Salvador’s amnesty law absolved all military from persecution. After this law was repealed in 2016, Judge Jorge Alberto Guzman agreed to reopening the El Mozote case (“El Salvador”). 35 materiality and facticity of these objects that forces otherwise dubious claims to “give way,” forsaking their own authority to such “mute” master proof. Danner’s assertions also counter those made by Amaya. Yet, instead of relinquishing the truth value of her testimony, this stubborn witness reminds the anthropologists that she directed them to their scientific discoveries. Without her initial reporting of the massacre, as well as her detailed description of where and how the killing occurred, these bones and cartridges would be asignifying remains, not convincing evidence. Yet, though Danner appears attentive and sympathetic to Amaya’s contentions, his reporting nevertheless sides with human rights discourse in positioning material evidence as authoritative over testimony, eyewitness or not. In doing so, he frames Amaya as even more inaudible than speechless objects such as bones and cartridges. According to relentlessly vocal survivors like Amaya, the reality of this massacre was never “sleeping” but, on the contrary, obvious and urgent. As articulate and insistent as Amaya is about what she did see and hear, however, her testimonial claims nevertheless carry a “mute force” of instead foregrounding their own imperceptibility. She figures this force with “aquella gran gritazón,” which could refer to the massacre itself, as well as her original testimony about it. “¿No les dije?,” she asks the forensic anthropologists. “Si sólo se oía aquella gran gritazón.” In other words, if only you had heard what I told you, which was a story of mass terror and violence: a great scream. Unlike the “mute force of material fact,” Amaya’s testimonial silence is more de facto than de jure, for the narrative evidence that she provides has remained unrecognized as such, and, if only in this sense, indeed mute. Human rights discourse’s valuation of material evidence as more veridical than testimony results from its compliance with legal procedure and associated standards of truth, equality, and 36 justice. As forensic archivist Kate Doyle explains, “Testimonies are not sufficient to legally accuse a perpetrator; hard evidence is needed to build a case” (qtd. in Rosenberg 129). This is a stipulation of due process and its ostensible objective of fair and equal treatment for plaintiffs and defendants. Such due process is informed by the Western Enlightenment, which established law upon ideals of human reason as defined by philosophy and science. Yet, because of its occidental orientation, this legal system also institutionalizes colonialism as the privileging of European cultures and peoples over those indigeneous to the Americas. In his critique of the “judicialization of politics,” Fernando Rosenberg points out how legal standards of evidentiary truth create situations in which appeals to state authority result in further discrimination against historically oppressed, or subaltern, populations (61). These situations do not give voice to the voiceless, at least within the confines of judicial courts and their limited pathways to justice. Claiming the need for alternative responses to violence, Rosenberg investigates how forms of evidence, including testimony, can appeal to justice outside of such courts, “persisting as truth of which legal justice cannot speak, as it recalls a sense of justice transcending institutionalized forums and that is not exhausted by juridical evidence detection and decoding” (125). Indeed, legal justice cannot speak of this truth because it is the very truth that judicial institutions refuse to hear as such. Noting how evidence is, by definition, that which has the power to “speak for what is not visible,” Rosenberg positions the legal system’s epistemological hierarchy as deeply problematic (125). While I find his consequent insistence upon extra-legal modes of pursuing justice to be important in rethinking witnessing beyond Enlightenment paradigms, I read Amaya’s “aquella gran gritazón” as suggestive of a different critique of human rights discourse. Unlike this witness’ aforementioned confrontation with forensic anthropologists, a majority of human rights activists accept this discourse’s devaluation of their 37 eyewitness testimonies as a necessary part of obtaining justice. Concerned with how these activists’ preoccupation with justice prevents them from claiming the right to speak and be heard on their own terms, I investigate screaming as it also features in a variety of materials about Guatemala’s civil war. These materials involve Rigoberta Menchú, a witness who once spoke as audaciously as Amaya, yet since has turned into a more docile human rights activist. According to my analyses, Menchú’s screaming likewise evidences this witness’ own inaudibility, thereby foregrounding the way human rights discourse limits what counts as truth and reality. In order to demonstrate legal discourse’s compliance with neocolonial orders, I first turn to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s explanations of “visuality.” Defined as an attempt to control the common sensorium and conceal violence, including state terror, visuality is most obvious within the context of war. For this reason, I read Mirzoeff’s theoretical conceptualizations alongside documentary film footage of Guatemalan war victims screaming for their lives. These victims include Vicente Menchú, the father of Rigoberta Menchú and inspiration behind much of her human rights work. Like Amaya, Menchú incorporates screaming into her war testimony as symbolic of not only terror, but also her own inability to speak and be heard as evidential. While analyzing Menchú’s controversial Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1985), I suggest this screaming to figure a new reading of subaltern voices as inaudible within hegemonic paradigms for truth, or indeed visuality. Attending to this inaudibility as a subversive critique of epistemological hierarchies and the ways they are employed by academics, authors, and human rights activists alike, I next turn to Pamela Yates’ When the Mountains Tremble (1983). This documentary film features an audiovisual version of Menchú’s testimony that foregrounds the repression of her own impulse to scream. In its absence, Menchú’s screaming again functions as inaudible evidence for the rights that this witness leaves unclaimed, including 38 that which Mirzoeff calls “a right to look,” meaning a right to claim one’s own testimony as sufficiently veridical and, as such, not in need of additional verification. As Mirzoeff states, “it is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable” (5). Menchú sacrifices her claim to this right in conforming to human rights discourse’s legal paradigms, which I show to be problematic insofar as they enforce limited, and limiting, understandings of truth, as well as justice. Rather than propose a need to get beyond these frameworks, as Rosenberg does, I focus on the ways screaming interrupts these frameworks from the inside, exposing them as less authoritative than they claim to be. II. Visuality/Countervisuality in Uli Stelzner’s La Isla (2009) Mirzoeff’s concepts of visuality and countervisuality extend Jacques Rancière’s work on the common sensorium as a tool for hegemonic power, as well its resistance. Describing the common sensorium, Rancière identifies three “levels” in which sensoria superimpose each other and create “dissensus” or, stated otherwise, a conflict over what is able to be witnessed (56). Mirzoeff builds upon this claim in proposing “visuality” as a complex that regulates what is “visible” and “sayable” in order to make certain powers and histories seem self-evidently “real” and “right” (7). Citing Rancière, he argues that “Visuality sought to present authority as self- evident, that ‘division of the sensible whereby domination imposes the sensible evidence of its legitimacy’” (3). Visuality, in other words, is the means by which hegemonic power, including state and juridical power, legitimates itself, thus naming a process that entails not only “visual perceptions” but a whole “set of relations combining information, imagination, and insight into a rendition of physical and psychic space” (3). Noting how colonialism and its legacies rely upon visuality “to supplement its deployment by force,” Mirzoeff adds that “visuality sutures authority to power” and thereby attempts to render such force more “natural” (6). For this rendition of 39 history and reality to be perceived as natural and self-evident —or, to use Mirzoeff’s terms, “real” and “right”— it must remain imperceptible as what it actually is: one rendition among many and, as such, not as authoritative or absolute as it otherwise appears (7). Mirzoeff refrains from granting visuality any proper agency, instead calling it “a discursive practice that has material effects” (3). In a key example, however, he personifies it as police who say “Move on, there’s nothing to see here” (3). Especially in the case of cordoned off crime scenes, there is of course something to see. In Amaya’s account of El Mozote, for example, her mention of screaming interrupts anthropologists’ presumed control over the crime scene, reasserting the evidentiary value of her eyewitness testimony. Within the context of Central America and its history of state violence, the burning of Guatemala’s Spanish Embassy is another important crime scene. It was set aflame on January 31, 1980 with a group of indigenous and student protestors inside. None survived, yet their desperate screaming for help was captured in film footage of the event, which initially aired on Television Mexicana and continues to circulate in multiple documentary films. In Uli Stelzner’s La Isla: Archivo de una Tragedia (2009), a documentary film about the accidental discovery of Guatemala’s National Police Archive in 2005, such footage appears within two different frames: 1) reality according to police authorities and 2) reality according to archive investigators. This double framing exemplifies dissensus, or conflict over what is sensible, and shows screaming to foreground visuality and countervisuality together. La Isla’s sequence on the Spanish Embassy burning begins with a close-up of the notecard police used to record investigative reports of Máximo Cajal López, Spain’s former ambassador to Guatemala and one of the few survivors of the burning. According to the notecard, Cajal López’s injury and consequent hospitalization were due to the burning of 40 “un grupo de Terroristas” [a group of Terrorists] (Figure 7). Figure 7. A notecard from Guatemala’s National Police Archive. La Isla. 2009. Iska Cine. The camera zooms into those type-written words as one investigator reads them aloud, representing such terminology in a hyperbolic way that both foregrounds and starts to denaturalize it. Terroristas, with a capital T. According to a fellow investigator, Lo que se sabe de ese hecho es que murieron como treinta y seis personas y que fueron básicamente campesinos que vinieron del Quiché y que se reunieron con otros estudiantes aquí de la capital, y obreros […] y que tomaron la Embajada de España como protesta por las masacres que en ese entonces estaban empezando a guisar en las regiones del Quiché. What is known for a fact is that thirty-six people died and that they were basically peasants who came from Quiché and met with other students and workers here from the capital […] and that they took over the Spanish Embassy in protest of the massacres that were beginning to occur in the regions of Quiché. As the scene then cuts to footage of the embassy building in flames, viewers are likely to hear the screams of protestors inside as those belonging to victims, not perpetrators, of terror (Figure 8). That such victims were said to be Terroristas by the national police, one of multiple institutional conspirators in Guatemala’s genocidal civil war, however, at least partially explains the effective inaudibility and invisibility of such screaming. According to Mirzoeff, state terror works hand in hand with visuality in attempting to police what is seeable and sayable, thereby also determining which lives are indeed livable (11). Lives that are not livable are precisely those which are not recognized as visible nor audible, though they indeed are. As La Isla’s footage of the Spanish Embassy’s burning spans various façades of the incinerated structure, it juxtaposes loud screaming with the sight of multiple onlookers, some more disaffected than others. 41 Figures 8 and 9. Screams emanate from the burning Spanish Embassy while public officers turn their heads and leave the scene. La Isla. 2009. Iska Cine. Eventually, the camera zooms in on a small group of men, one yelling “¡Están quemando!” [“They’re burning!”] to another, presumably a public officer of some sort, as he refuses to look either at him or the building itself while walking away (Figure 9). Shortly thereafter, La Isla bookends such footage with its own rendition of a notecard: a title page describing the event as “Toma de la Embajada de España por la Policía Nacional. 39 campesinos y estudiantes desarmados son quemados vivos” [“Raid of the Spanish Embassy by the National Police. 39 unarmed peasants and students are burned alive”] in the police archive’s same typewriter font. “Hay muchas evidencias de que fue la misma policía quien les prendieron fuego” [“There is a lot of evidence that it was the police who set them on fire”], concludes one archive investigator. This scene is a concise yet complex portrayal of both visuality and countervisuality. As its name implies, Mirzoeff describes countervisuality as “dissensus with visuality,” or “a dispute over what is visible as an element of a situation, over which visible elements belong to what is common, over the capacity of subjects to designate this common and argue for it” (24). Both the police notecard and the public officer suggest “there’s nothing to see here” and, as such, become figures for visuality that refuse to acknowledge the embassy’s burning as a crime worthy of more attention. In contrast, the archive investigators and the eyewitness yelling “¡Están quemando!” insist that there is much to see, including the framing of visuality itself, which exposes police and other legal powers as less natural, and more fallible, than they present themselves (Mirzoeff). Exposure of this power’s error, often in the form of state terror, is critical to separating it from its authority and producing countervisuality. On January 19, 2015, ten years after the discovery of the National Police Archive, and over thirty years of legal efforts gathering sufficient evidence, the Guatemalan Supreme Court determined that Police Chief Pedro García Arredondo had 42 indeed given the order to set fire to the embassy so that, in his words, “no quede nadie vivo” [“nobody is left alive”] (Hernández). Arredondo’s error was a deployment of force that is now publicly denounced as unjust but, as La Isla’s video footage shows, was originally ignored by most firsthand witnesses. What witnesses within the trial remember about seeing such terror, however, is indeed hearing victims’ screaming. According to Spanish Embassy employee César Augusto Escalante Ávila, “Se oían los gritos de desesperación como pidiendo ayuda y la impotencia de no poder hacer nada, solo oír detrás de la puerta cuando mis compañeras estaban muriendo, quemadas vivas” [“The cries of despair were heard begging for help and the powerlessness of not being able to do anything, only to hear my companions behind the door dying, burnt alive”] (“MP”). Raúl Meoño, another legal witness in Arredondo’s trial, similarly states, “Los gritos de sufrimiento de las víctimas eran desgarradores” [“The victims’ cries of suffering were heartbreaking”] (Cano). Desgarradores commonly translates as “heartbreaking.” As a figure for state terror, however, screaming does not, in fact, break anything. Rather, the case of the Spanish Embassy shows how screaming exposes authority, including visuality, as always already broken. Because the authority that power claims and attempts to naturalize while policing the common sensorium is not indeed natural, Mirzoeff concludes that such power “produces its own resistance,” or countervisuality (13). As La Isla shows through its double framing, visuality is always torn into conflict or, stated otherwise, broken against itself. Having produced an archive meant to document its own regulation of the seeable and sayable, Guatemala’s national police effectively created the mass of evidence that eventually would be used against them. As Kristen Weld notes in Paper Cadavers, her study of Guatemala’s National Police Archive, “records once used in the service of state terror are repurposed by surviving reforms as building blocks for the rule of law 43 and tools of social reckoning” (237). The very same notecard that police used to label protestors as “Terroristas,” for example, features in La Isla as proof of the police’s own terrorism, which includes repressing non-violent protests with very violent counterinsurgency. Additionally, La Isla shows that while visuality can pretend not to hear or see what challenges the justness of its authority, it is not powerful enough to conceal everything from the common sensorium, including the visibility of its very pretending. In short, it always can be seen not seeing, and also heard not hearing. Such invisibility and inaudibility are provable not only through material evidence. Because legal systems, as well as human rights discourse, value material evidence as most convincing, however, they dismiss many testimonial denunciations of state authorities as less just than their power warrants. These denunciations include those of Rufina Amaya and Rigoberta Menchú, witnesses who seem to emulate La Isla in positioning screaming as central to scenes of state terror. While Amaya, like the aforementioned legal witnesses in Arredondo’s case, vaguely references screaming as symbolic of victims’ extreme suffering and desperation, Menchú describes a scene of screaming with greater detail. Menchú’s father was killed in the Spanish Embassy burning, yet her testimony’s longest description of screaming instead depicts her little brother’s murder, which likewise occurred at the hands of state authorities. For reasons I will soon explain, this description caused Menchú to be attacked as a “Marxist terrorist” and liar (Grandin). Though these claims have been largely discredited, they nevertheless left a lasting impression on the witness. By the time Arredondo was sentenced, for example, Menchú appears to have rescinded her bolder claims about these events or, stated otherwise, swallowed her own screaming. 44 As a witness in Arredondo’s aforementioned trial, Menchú describes Arredondo’s conviction with a sense of deference that is symptomatic of visuality. In a video interview with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman following the conviction, she asserts: Yo creo que lo más importante es la memoria de las víctimas, es la verdad. Teníamos que acreditar la verdad. Primero la verdad porque nos han dicho mentiras, han denigrado la memoria de las víctimas, han dicho que se han quemado. Y ahora queda en el tribunal, muy claro, la responsabilidad tanto de García Arredondo pero también del Estado de Guatemala. Hay una responsabilidad del Estado en esta masacre. (“Prometí”) I believe that the most important thing is the memory of the victims, it’s the truth. We had to prove the truth. First, the truth because they have told us lies, they have denigrated the memory of the victims, they have said that they have burned themselves. And now the court has made it very clear that the responsibility belongs to Garcia Arredondo and the the State of Guatemala. The State has responsibility in this massacre. Menchú both asserts and diminishes her own power as a witness within these statements. According to her, she gathers the truth until the court makes it “clear,” or indeed authoritative. Noting her father and community organizer Vincente Menchú to have been one of the protesters killed in the Spanish Embassy burning, she adds, “Yo prometí a mi padre, prometí a la memoria de Guatemala que lucharía contra la impunidad. Y es lo que he hecho precisamente año tras año, día tras día, me dediqué a juntar el expediente, a reservar las evidencias y a armar todo, la verdad de la gente” [“I promised my father, I promised the memory of Guatemala that I would fight against impunity. And it is what I have done year after year, day after day, I dedicated myself to gather the record, to guard the evidence and to put together everything, the truth of the people”] (“Prometí”). In this sense, her fight effectively entails consulting forensic anthropologists and 45 various legal experts about her people’s own truth: a truth that she cannot accredit, screaming or not, by herself. Having maintained that the Spanish Embassy burning was an act of state terror long before judicial authorities declared it as such, Menchú might seem capable of claiming some leverage over such authorities. Her own history as an internationally controversial witness, however, still limits what Menchú says and how she says it. Though she has become one of the most well-known Guatemalans alive today, she has not gained this recognition without simultaneously sacrificing her very right to look. Yet, in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, which was Menchú’s first widespread sharing of her testimony, the young witness presents reality according to her own standards, taking expressive liberties with her account of Guatemala’s civil war and genocide. Indeed, these very liberties are the ones that academics would later debate at length and she, in some sense, would rescind, likely for fear of more controversy. By now reviewing these debates, I show how even defenders of this witness, as well as the human rights for which she fights, fail to acknowledge Menchú’s testimony as sufficiently veridical. In doing so, they replicate visuality as a framework that claims authority over certain populations, legitimizing itself with appeals to strictly occidental understandings of truth, reason, and justice. While this instance of visuality is not as brutal as state terror, it shows how seemingly benign actors such as scholars and human rights activists can buttress neocolonial orders. By implementing and enforcing exclusionary notions of truth, reason, and justice, these actors reify Western epistemological hierarchies that exacerbate, not alleviate, colonial violence. After illustrating this, I revive and redirect subaltern studies toward a reading of subaltern voice as significant for its very inaudibility. III. Rigoberta Menchú’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú 46 Though Menchú informs readers of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú that she was not an eyewitness to all the events within her testimony, including the Spanish Embassy burning, her well-founded knowledge of this and other wartime events has been meticulously denigrated by American scholars, including anthropologist David Stoll. In Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, Stoll claims that the peasant and student protestors who marched into the embassy burned themselves to death in order to reinforce what he calls “the Guatemalan left’s cult of martyrdom” (qtd. in Grandin). This assertion grounds the critique Stoll wages against Menchú as a communist and liar, which also played into university debates about curricula and associated politics. As anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt explains, academic “culture wars” involved conflict over whether to teach European classics or more recent texts by underrepresented authors (Pratt 31). Yet, this battle over books was symptomatic of a larger war between conservative and progressive academics concerning issues such as affirmative action, faculty diversity, and the creation of fields such as Chicano Studies and Feminist Studies. At Stanford University, where Stoll completed graduate school, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú had been incorporated into syllabi shortly after its publication. The political left valorized Menchú’s acount as a way of generating debate about “the ‘representation’ of subalterns in academic inquiry, and the forms the decolonization of knowledge should take” (Pratt 36). At the same time, the political right demonized Menchú’s book “as an icon of a destructive and promiscuous multiculturalism” (Pratt 36). Describing Stoll’s vindictive criticism of Menchú as a reactionary response to academia’s trend toward the left, Pratt notes his primary concern to be “academic authority,” especially over subaltern subjects (41). Yet, instead of successfully diverting this trend toward the left, Stoll’s criticisms arguably strengthened it, for multiple scholars came to Menchú’s defense. 47 Asserting that Menchú received more formal education than she claimed and recounted events that she never eyewitnessed within Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, Stoll concedes that these contentions are beside the point or, rather, only part of a larger point. Ultimately confirming that Menchú’s testimonial accounts are “basically true” and still “can be considered factual,” he concludes that the Menchú family’s alliance with peasant movements and insurgent forces was not based on a legitimate attempt to overthrow Guatemala’s colonial system; rather, it was for their own economic and social benefit (Grandin). In making this argument, Stoll usurps Menchú’s right to look with his own, which he justifies with social science, material evidence, and his own right-wing politics. Echoing Stoll’s accusations, conservative pundit David Horowitz asserts, “The fact is that there was no social ground for the armed insurrection that these Castroists tried to force […] the source of the violence and ensuing misery that Rigoberta Menchú describes in her destructive little book is the left itself” (qtd. in Grandin). In one of Menchu’s many defenses, historian Greg Grandin appeals to his own academic research, which is informed by left-wing politics. Refuting Stoll’s claims against “the Guatemalan left’s cult of martyrdom,” he states, It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary this statement is, especially coming from a researcher who bases his legitimacy on championing his own fact-based, empirical argumentation over the deductions of a politicized left. There is no tradition of tactical suicide among Guatemalan leftists, and there is not one piece of evidence, not one witness, not even among those critical of the protesters, to support the possibility. (Grandin) Just as Stoll uses anthropological research to replace Menchú’s authority with his own, Grandin here claims authority over Stoll not by referring back to Menchú’s testimony but, instead, appealing to his own historical work. Throughout his extended critique of Stoll’s scholarship, Grandin refers to it as “speculation,” repeatedly diminishing it as less evidentiary than his own 48 (Grandin). As right or wrong as Grandin may be, he thus replicates Stoll’s troubling gesture, asserting his own authority instead of deferring to Menchú as herself authoritative. Stoll and Grandin’s reliance upon their own empirical research to support their respective claims about the veracity of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú might be explained, and justified, as in line with standards set by judicial proceedings. Yet, as aforementioned, these standards are more neocolonial than indeed equalizing. In Menchú’s case, appealing to judicial proceedings is also a way of overlooking the fact that Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú is not, in fact, legal testimony. Rather, it is testimonio, which John Beverley describes as a “first-person,” yet “protean,” “novel or novella-length narrative” (31). In testimonio, a survivor recounts historical events to a witness who transcribes and edits the testimony. While this narrative is “real” and “significant,” it is also “protean” insofar as it constitutes “a new form of literature… in which we can witness and be part of the emerging culture of an international/popular-democratic subject” (43). Beverley does not clearly define this “culture” or “subject,” yet he suggests it to be one in which “subaltern” histories are given voices (19). Whether these voices are their own, and are indeed truthful, are issues that Beverley broaches but never resolves. In addressing these unanswered questions, multiple scholars have elaborated on the interventions Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú makes into Subaltern Studies debates. These interventions center upon various readings of Menchú’s literal and figurative voice, yet none of them acknowledges her descriptions of screaming. I read these descriptions as critical of visuality, as well as they ways in which Menchú’s voice has been misunderstood as audible. In drawing attention to these misunderstandings, I conceptualize a new understandingof the subaltern voice as inaudible in ways that subvert hegemonic epistemes. Subaltern Studies has challenged Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies scholarship since the 1980s, when Gayatri Spivak published her highly influential article, “Can 49 the Subaltern Speak?” This article addresses the situation wherein a benevolent intellectual speaks on behalf of a subaltern subject in a way that further silences that subject. Spivak’s primary case study involves Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, “A Maoist” and “the workers’ struggle,” yet it closely resembles the situation between Menchú and her many interlocutors (66- 7). For Spivak, the “subaltern” is a witness who is excluded from history by definition; if this subject manages to speak and be heard on its own, it is no longer subaltern. In this sense, Spivak defines subalternity less by the incapacity for speech than by the incapacity to be seen or heard as an authority of history. As scholars have transferred Spivak’s provocative concept into other contexts, including debates around Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, however, they have reduced subalternity to a matter of locating the material voice. Within Latin American Studies, much postcolonial and decolonial criticism theorizes “the restitution of subaltern knowledge” to entail the reinstatement and recreation of certain “loci of enunciation” (Mignolo xxv, 13). According to Walter Mignolo, subaltern loci are ontologically and epistemologically different from those universalized by colonialism and modernity, as well as visuality, insofar as they are “dichotomous” or, in his words, “located at the borders (interiors or exteriors) of the modern/colonial world system” (Mignolo 85). Yet, as dichotomous as such loci may be, Mignolo essentializes them as evidentiary only insofar as they are embodied. For Mignolo, Menchú’s voice is significant because it is oral, spoken from her Amerindian body in order to convey likewise Amerindian knowledge, which he distinguishes from writing as a modern, colonial episteme. As he elaborates, “My interest here is on language and on signs and memories inscribed in the body rather than signs inscribed on paper” (252). In contrast, Guatemalan scholar Mario Roberto Morales understands this reification of “cultural otherness” as strictly embodied to be depoliticizing (Morales 483). According to him, discourse around Menchú has fallen into 50 either an “essentialized subaltern subject” or a “a self-referential discussion about the positionality of the academic subject,” neither of which acknowledge the unique evidentiary nature of her testimony (Morales 486). Aside from the aforementioned efforts to ground Menchú’s voice in empirical research, party politics, or her own material body, some readers of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú have furthered Spivak’s passing suggestion that the subaltern voice might be more figurative, referring to multiple forms of expression. 17 These scholars locate Menchú’s voice within her testimony’s own trope for that which remains necessarily unspoken and unheard: “los secretos.” According to Menchú, revealing these secrets would betray “mucha gente de nuestra raza” and her own “identidad como indígena” (27). Having shared many details of her life and culture within Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, she emphasizes that “ni siquiera un atropólogo, ni un intelectual, por más que tenga muchos libros, no saben distinguir nuestros secretos” [not even an anthropologist, nor an intellectual, no matter how many books the have, knows how to distinguish our secrets] (271). This claim, like Amaya’s “gran gritazón,” would seem to challenge the multiple anthropologists and intellectuals who have made authoritative claims about Menchú’s testimony. Doris Sommer, one of the first scholars to note Menchú’s trope of secrets, proposes them to be “incomprehensible” within Western epistemes due to the possibility that “our knowledge would lead to power over her community” (9). Taking up Sommer’s suggestion that readers should focus not on the possible contents of Menchú’s secrets but on her reticence as absolute, Brett Levinson readdresses Subaltern Studies debates by claiming that Menchú does not, in fact, 17 Attempting to extend speech beyond its literal meaning in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak analyzes the practice of widow suicide, as well as Jacques Derrida’s call for “rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us,” as possible instances of subaltern self- expression (104). 51 speak. As he explains, “more than a signifier that refers to a signified or hides content, the secret is speech that signals non-speech; and for Menchú non-speech, preserving silence, means both to guard the tradition and to guard her place within the tradition” (157). While Levinson privileges Menchú’s indigeneity as critical to the politics of her self-silencing text, he resists essentializing her subaltern body and “Amerindian knowledge” by proposing her voice to be beyond writing, orality, and the languages of all living bodies. Claiming that Menchú locates her “ideal locus of enunciation” within her deceased “ancestors” and, in this sense, “death” itself, Levinson instead suggests that Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú does not give voice to the voiceless or speech to the subaltern. Rather, he claims this account to put voicelessness to rest, supplying it with “a gravesite, an engraving, a name, an epigraph, a stone, and a burial” (164). If this voicelessness is audible or legible at all, therefore, it calls for the invention of a new hermeneutic: one that reads inaudibility and illegibility as themselves significant. As if answering this call, Abraham Acosta conceptualizes “illiteracy” as “irreducibly ambiguous semiosis” that nevertheless remains perceptible insofar as it disrupts “the field of intelligibility,” which otherwise excludes and nullifies it (9). This field of intelligibility is synonymous with Mirzoeff’s visuality, for both attempt to regulate what is seeable and sayable as truth. Building off of Levinson and Alberto Moreiras’ respective readings of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, Acosta states, What Levinson’s essay allows us to consider is whether, in her secrecy, […] Menchú acts not in the role of individual agent […] but from testimonio’s ‘unguarded’ possibility: the threshold of illiteracy where orality, the literal, and 52 the literary are revealed as refracted (artificial and contingent) relations generated from sheer relationally itself. (158) 18 Rather than read Menchú’s secrets, or reticence, as having to do with the authority of an oral voice over a literal and/or literary one, Acosta identifies all authority as likewise “artificial” and “contingent.” Unlike Mignolo and Levinson, as well as Grandin and Stoll, moreover, Acosta refrains from locating Menchú’s voice at all. Elaborating upon “illiteracy” as a critical method that “comes to register heterogeneous, literally unidentifiable, and hence unassignable speech,” he claims that such illiteracy “unseats not only congenital notions of identity, otherness, and difference but in effect reveals the breakdown in the very signifying structures that govern the intelligibility of speech” (12, 13). Put otherwise, illiteracy exposes such regulatory structures as limited and limiting, pointing to a hermeneutic beyond. In this sense, illiteracy functions like countervisuality, exposing the ways in which hegemonic power tries, and fails, to monopolize evidence, truth, and reality. In his reading of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, Acosta focuses on the book’s prologue, written by transcriber, editor, and anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos. Acosta is particularly attentive to Burgos’ “uneasy and catachrestic adherence” to her own claims about Menchú’s voice as materially evidentiary (143). Though Burgos privileges Menchú’s embodied voice as her locus of enunciation, she also notes having corrected some of her “gender mistakes” and other grammar, which would have made her look “picaresque” (qtd. in Acosta 145). According to Acosta, Burgos frames Menchú’s testimony as illiterate insofar as she presents her as an indigenous woman whose voice is authenticated by two paradoxical features: the embodied 18 In The Exhaustion of Difference, Moreiras claims Menchú’s secrecy to represent “whatever cannot and should not be reabsorbed into the literary-representational system” (127). Moreiras positions this “unguarded possibility” as testimonio’s possibility of withholding truth absolutely (127). 53 nature of her oral account, yet also the necessary editing and “literary appropriation” of that very account” (Acosta 147). She cannot write her own testimony, yet this incapacity is precisely what Burgos claims to make it so raw and real. In this sense, the truth value of Menchú’s testimony appears split between her body and the page, which Burgos claims to have made legible for her. Yet, because of Burgos’ contradictory claims, readers cannot easily locate Menchú’s voice as literal or literary, spoken or written, auditory or visual. While Burgos, like Mignolo, privileges the orality of Menchú’s voice as most truthful, she also foregrounds this voice’s very inaudibility. As she states, “Hay que escuchar la llamada de Rigoberta Menchú y dejarse guiar por esta voz tan singular que nos transmite su cadencia interna de modo tan poderoso que en ocasiones se tiene la impresión de estar oyendo su tono o sintiendo su aliento” [“We must listen to the call of Rigoberta Menchú and be guided by this unique voice that transmits its internal cadence so powerfully that sometimes one has the impression of hearing her tone or feeling her breath”] (10). To have the impression of hearing is not the same as actually hearing, for it entails perceiving a voice through imagination, not sound. The more Burgos attempts to validate Menchú’s voice with her own interpretation, the more she inadvertently exposes her very inability to do so. In this sense, she appears to anticipate the book’s ensuing controversy, which centers around a scene that is likewise rife with illiteracy. This scene is one in which Menchú recounts how the Guatemalan military tortured and murdered her little brother, as well as fellow guerrilla suspects. While Burgos aims to imbue Menchú’s voice with authority, much of this witness’ own testimony instead foregrounds her lack thereof. Yet, as Mirzoeff’s notions of visuality and countervisuality suggest, authority and veracity are not necessarily related; that is, lacking authority is not equivalent to lacking veracity. Within the scene of her brother’s murder, Menchú 54 does not represent herself as an expert or a liar: instead, she represents herself as a subaltern witness who is incapable of voicing her people’s history in a way that will be heard as such. Having found documents proving that Menchú could not have been present for the events she describes, Stoll launched his aforementioned criticisms against her as a false witness. Ménchu soon after confirmed that she was not there, insisting that her narration is collective and nevertheless well-informed by her mother, who was an eyewitness. Such insistence is part of Menchú’s own framing of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú as testimonio and, as such, more literary than literal. That Menchú’s truths are partial, figurative, and subject to interpretation, however, does not completely invalidate them. On the contrary, it arguably makes them more honest. Within her description of her brother’s murder, for example, this secondhand witness foregrounds her struggle to see, as well as claim the right to look. As she explains, Yo, no sé, cada vez que cuento esto, no puedo aguantar las lágrimas porque para mí es una realidad que no puedo olvidar y tampoco para mí es fácil contarlo. Mi madre estaba llorando. Miraba a su hijo. Mi hermanito casi no nos reconoció. O quizá […] Mi madre dice que sí, que todavía le dio una sonrisa, pero yo, ya no vi eso, pues. (203) I don’t know, every time I tell this, I cannot hold back the tears because for me it’s a reality that I cannot forget and it’s not easy for me to tell. My mother was crying. She was looking at her son. My brother almost did not recognize us. Or maybe […] My mother says he did, the he still gave her a smile, but I did not see that. Within this excerpt, looks crisscross without ever being reciprocal or simultaneous. Menchú’s mother looks at her brother, who “almost” does not recognize his family. Or, perhaps he does, but Menchú instead asserts a conflict over the sensible, stating “yo, ya no vi eso, pues.” This conflict is important because it shows how Menchú refrains from claiming her testimony as 55 absolute. While decolonial scholars, including Mignolo, appeal to Menchú’s material presence, or indigenous body, as what grants her authority as a witness, her depiction of the indigenous body within this scene is “heterogeneous,” “unidentifiable,” and indeed illiterate (Acosta 12). Describing fellow army captives and torture victims, she states, El caso de mi hermanito, estaba cortado en diferentes partes del cuerpo […] No tenía uñas. Estaba toda mordida la compañera. No tenía orejas. Todos no llevaban parte de la lengua o tenían partida la lengua en partes. Para mí no era posible concentrarme, de ver que pasaba eso. (203) The case of my little brother, his body was cut in different parts […] He had no nails. His companion was all chopped up. She had no ears. All of them were missing part of the tongue and had it slip into pieces. For me, it was not possible for concentrate, to see what was happening. In this scene, we do not know who is seeing whom, let alone speaking or hearing at all. Though Burgos asks readers of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú to imagine Menchú’s voice in a way that enables them “the impression of hearing her tone or feeling her breath,” Menchú depicts voices in a way that creates a sense of estrangement, not intimacy. As Burgos elaborates, “Escuchar su voz significa asimismo sumergirnos en nuestro propio interior, pues despierta en nosotros sensaciones y sentimientos que creíamos caducados, encerrados como estamos en nuestro universo inhumano y artificial” [“To listen to her voice also means to immerse ourselves in our own interior, because it awakens in us sensations and feelings that we believed to have expired, enclosed as we are in our inhuman and artificial universe”] (10). Yet, as Menchú listens to the voices —and lack thereof— within this massacre, she recounts the permanent loss of sensations and feelings, as well as humanity and indeed life. By narrating violence in this way, Menchú illustrates how state terror authorizes itself, effectively 56 scaring and scarring victims out of speaking. Regarding the spectacle of maimed bodies in the scene of her brother’s torture and murder, she states, “Era más que todo para cumplir sus objetivos de meter el terror en el pueblo y que nadie hablara” [“More than anything, it was to fulfill [the army’s] objectives of putting terror into the town so that nobody spoke”] (204). As the army captain proceeded to condemn the captives as enemies to Guatemala’s democracy, everybody remained silent, except those who were eventually set aflame. In Menchú’s words, Parecían que estaban medio muertos cuando estaban allí colocados, pero cuando empezaron a arder los cuerpos, empezaron a pedir auxilio. Unos gritaron todavía, muchos brincaron pero no les salía la voz. Claro, inmediatamente se les tapó la respiración. (204) They seemed to be half dead when they were placed there, but when the bodies began to burn, they began to cry for help. Some even screamed, many jumped, but their voice did not come out. Clearly, their breath was immediately blocked. Like in La Isla’s footage of the Spanish Embassy burning, screaming here figures the last sign of life before death, notably symptomatic of state terror in a way that exposes one sensorium’s imposition upon another. Describing state terror as both action and affect, Jon Beasley-Murray states, “Terror debilitates rational thought and language… [and is] immediately corporeal rather than signifying or linguistic. Terror's intensity leaves the tongue flailing, gabbling [...] language gives way to the scream, deformed, asignifying” (155). Indeed, screaming is “asignifying” precisely insofar as it does not conform to the signifying structures of Western epistemes, which privilege rational thought and language. While these victims, experiencing what Elaine Scarry calls the “unmaking of the tortured’s world,” indeed resort to screaming over speaking, it is important to note that this response, as well as those of fellow witnesses, is not due to an inherent 57 incapacity for speech (Scarry 41). Rather, it is due to the way that state terror, visuality, and human rights paradigms all similarly limit what can be spoken, heard, and even seen. Elaborating upon her and fellow onlookers’ subsequent impulse to also scream, Menchú underscores witnesses’ hesitancy to voice their own reality when that reality is, in fact, state terror. As the captives’ bodies finished burning, she wanted to speak but she could not even look, for terror and rage paralyzed her with conflict. In her words, “No podíamos ver [...] No podíamos seguir viendo a los muertos. No era tanto la cobardía de no verlos, sino que era una cólera [...] Parecíamos mudos, borrachos; a nadie le salía una palabra de la boca” [“We could not see [...] We could not continue looking at the dead. It was not so much the cowardice of not seeing them, it was an anger [...] We seemed dumb, drunk; nobody let a word out of his/her mouth”] (205). While she and her mother cannot bear the sight of such bodies, Menchú notes that other witnesses continued to look, many directly at the army and some with weapons in hand. According to her, “Hasta en los niños se veía una cólera, pero esa cólera no sabían como demostrarla” [“One could see rage even in the children, but they did not know how to show that rage”] (205). Here, Menchú is self-contradictory in a synesthetic way. Though her fellow witnesses were not speaking at all, she claims that even the army could see their rage and, in this sense, visibly hear them screaming inside. Holding her own tongue, Menchú concludes, “De todos modos, si hubiera un enfrentamiento con el ejército, el pueblo hubiera sido masacrado. Pero…Yo quería demostrar mi agresividad en ese tiempo” [“Anyway, if there was a clash with the army, the people would have been massacred. But [...] I wanted to show my aggressiveness at that time”] (205). Such reticence, like such synesthesia, thoroughly frustrates any facile understanding of Menchú’s voice, arguably attuning readers to what Menchú keeps mute, yet 58 visibly so. In doing so, it also shows Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú to be illiterate in an evidentiary way. As aforementioned, the “mute force” of Menchú’s testimony is different from that of “material fact” insofar as Menchú does indeed speak. As a human rights activist, Menchú’s primary motives for sharing her account of Guatemala’s civil war in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú were to end the war, and then bring war criminals to justice. While this witness has also reaped economic and social profit from the sharing of her story, as Stoll points out, such profit came with additional loss. 19 Upon agreeing to the first transcription and publication of her testimony, the young witness likely did not anticipate the ways her account would be devalued as false, rendering her voice effectively inaudible. In remaining unheard by a variety of scholars, some more sympathetic to Menchú’s cause than others, however, this testimony arguably repurposes inaudibility as evidence of visuality and countervisuality. In doing so, it also functions as a subversive critique of hegemonic paradigms of truth, including academic, legal, and human rights discourses. To witness this critique, however, one must listen to Menchú’s voice in the same way that she describes it: as a repressed scream. This hermeneutic shows Menchú’s testimony to be not only about state terror during Guatemala’s wartime, but also about the colonial and neocolonial orders that continue to dominate its postwar. Next turning to Pamela Yates’ When the Mountains Tremble, a documentary about the war that was later used as evidence in postwar criminal trials, I use this hermeneutic to illustrate how even human rights paradigms prevent Menchú from screaming and, in doing so, indeed claiming her right to look. In this audiovisual context, the subaltern voice acquires negative truth value, evidential not for what it makes audible but for what it shows to remain inaudible. 19 This profit includes Menchú’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. 59 IV. Pamela Yates’ When the Mountains Tremble Filmed mostly during 1982, one of the most fatal years of the war, directors Newton Thomas Sigel and Pamela Yates made When the Mountains Tremble in order to inform the American public about Guatemala’s civil war and encourage them to protest U.S. support of the Guatemalan military. Interviewing people on both sides of the battle, they conversed with high- ranking military generals such as José Efraín Ríos Montt; anonymous state army soldiers; guerrilla soldiers still in hiding; and indigenous victims already in mourning. To emphasize its evidentiary nature, the film begins with the message, “The story and characters you are about to see are all real.” Additionally, like Mignolo and Burgos, the film appeals to Menchú’s material presence as an index of truth. Filming her much like Burgos describes her, dressed in “vestido tradicional” [“traditional dress”], looking reservedly and innocently into the camera, and speaking with a rhythmic yet also repetitive voice, Yates claims such framing “to give her that storytelling quality… and to represent her as the voice of the Guatemalan people” (Burgos 12, Rosenthal 4). Considering documentary film as both audiovisual medium and non-fiction genre, one likely expects When the Mountains Tremble to clarify and authenticate some of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú’s more illiterate passages. Instead of confusedly encouraging readers to listen to Menchú’s tone and breath according to their own imaginations, for example, this film provides a recording that would seem to get viewers at least a little closer to Menchú’s material body. In capturing the orality of Menchú’s voice and allowing audiences to hear her more directly, however, When the Mountains Tremble shows such orality to be anything but natural and authoritative or, to use Mirzoeff’s phrasing once again, “real” and “right” (Mirzoeff 7). Figure 10. Menchú introduces herself in When the Mountains Tremble. 1983. Skylight Pictures. 60 From the film’s introductory sequence, Menchú’s voice sounds scripted, which it indeed is (Figure 10). The script, which Yates claims Menchú wrote herself, is a condensed and curated version of material in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú. Having memorized her lines before the camera, the voice that Burgos claims to awaken feelings of humanity instead foregrounds artifice. In addition to sounding robotic, this voice is synesthetic insofar as it is sometimes visibly inaudible. After briefly narrating the history of violence against indigenous populations within Guatemala, Menchú states that her people have organized “cooperativas pequeñas” [“small cooperatives”] and “comunidades Cristianas” [“Christian communities”] as a way of resisting such injustice, further noting that “Hemos recorrido tantos caminos y no hemos tenido respuesta.” “We have traveled so many roads and we have no answer” or, to rephrase her words in more Mirzoeff-like terms, “We have tried so many ways of looking and none of them have been seen.” When Menchú utters these lamentations, audiences instead see an absence of subtitles, for the very device that film producers use to privilege Menchú’s voice as authentic and authoritative here falters. While most of the film’s characters receive voice-over translations into English, Ménchu’s Spanish remains audible as such, thus foregrounding the embodied quality of her voice as an ostensible source of ontological and epistemological authority. When this voice fails to get subtitled, Menchú’s lack of autonomy, and thus also authority, gets revealed, thereby demonstrating a claim that one of her fellow witnesses within the film asserts. Speaking about the ways that indigenous culture has been made visible, yet also silenced, by state institutions, this woman asserts, “The government uses us when it’s in their interest. They exhibit us as though we were in a zoo [...] They consider us unskilled brutes who don’t know anything.” Though When the Mountains Tremble is a form of human rights activism meant to critique such 61 state institutions, it likewise undervalues Menchú’s knowledge and expressive freedom, reinscribing her subalternity and limiting her right to look. Considering the Menchú family’s involvement with the guerrilla cause, this witness’ mention of “cooperativas pequeñas” and “comunidades Cristianas” draws attention to the ways in which indigenous war victims stood up for themselves. Rather than being met with recognition and negotiation, however, such insurgency was silenced through state terror, including that of the Spanish Embassy burning. In her most direct critique of visuality as it functions to limit what is seeable and sayable as truth, as well as which lives are indeed livable, Menchú describes this burning as a silencing of indigenous voices. Noting the stealing of these populations’ lands in the Guatemalan highlands, she claims that “No fueron escuchados, ni por el gobierno, ni por los medios de comunicaciones. Así es como [...] se dicidieron a tomar la embajada de España para dar a conocer al mundo entero las injusticias y los atropellos del regimen. El resto es historia” [“They were not heard, neither by the government, nor by the media. This is how [...] they decided to occupy the Spanish Embassy and let the the entire world know about the injustices and abuses of the regime. The rest is history”]. Again, however, the film interrupts Menchú’s narration of such history, cutting to archival footage of the burning accompanied by the voiceover of an anonymous radio reporter. The reporter describes the protestors as “subversives” and “peasants,” demonstrating a narrative that is more in line with Guatemala’s colonial and counterinsurgent logic, not the film's purported defense of human rights. As sympathetic as When the Mountain Tremble is to indigenous rights, at times speaking out against systemic racism and violence within Guatemala, the film here undermines this history by coupling footage of Menchú’s testimony with archive footage contradicting her claims. Like Grandin, Yates and Nigel thus appear to be sympathetic and ignorant to Menchú’s cause at the 62 same time, appealing to additional evidence instead of listening to Menchú as herself authoritative. In this sense, Menchú only functions as “the voice of the Guatemalan people” insofar as her voice conforms to hegemonic, and indeed exclusionary, understandings of who “the Guatemalan people” are. When Menchú later narrates her brother’s burning, though in far less detail than she does in Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, for example, even her own appeal to human rights discourse similarly diminishes her people’s attempts to claim their own rights. Though her younger brother was an active member of the guerilla army, she claims “Su crimen era ser secretario de una pequeña cooperativa agrícola de mi aldea” [“His crime was to be secretary of a small agricultural cooperative in my village”]. As accurate as such euphemistic phrasing may be, some critics view Menchú’s language as dismissive of the right to revolution, meaning the right to demand justice outside of judicial proceedings. Regarding Rigoberta Menchú’s role in When the Mountains Tremble, Carlotta McAllister claims the human rights activist “ends up denying the power of the guerrilla experience” (“Granito”). According to her, “She says ‘I used to be a romantic but, after genocide, what’s the point of talking about that? Now I know that it was false hope’” (“Granito”). If Menchú had narrated her brother’s torture and murder as proof that Guatemala’s state terrorism was not only counterinsurgent but also genocidal, for example, she could have offered a stronger defense of the country’s guerrilla movement. Instead, she diminishes this movement as “a small cooperative” and, as such, a “crime” that was not, in fact, a crime at all. This framing allows her to position her brother and her people as innocent victims worthy of justice, at least in the form of postwar legal rectification. Rather than fault Menchú for diminishing her and her family’s involvement in the guerrilla insurgency, McAllister claims that human rights discourse “makes it hard to talk about 63 their history, which is a history of revolution” (“Granito”). Far from honoring the guerrilla movement as a legitimate response to ongoing colonial and neocolonial violence, this discourse diminishes insurgency as another form of terror. Such invalidation, according to McAllister, is problematic because “it invites them [indigenous populations] to take responsibility for their own victimization by saying I was a guerrilla or militant” (“Granito”). Because many of the state officials during the war still remain in power, identifying oneself as an enemy of the state is an especially risky maneuver. Yet, standing up for revolutionary rights in a way that closely corresponds to Mirzoeff’s defense of the right to look, McAllister affirms that “Revolutionary rights preceded human rights. They were the rights to rise up against injustice” (“Granito”). Similarly, Mirzoeff distinguishes the right to look as “not a right for declarations of human rights, or for advocacy, but a claim of the right to the real as the key to a democratic politics” (Mirzoeff 4). Indeed, the right to look is key to democratic politics because it empowers those who are otherwise voiceless and, in doing so, subverts epistemological hierarchies. Though Menchú refrains from claiming this right in both Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú and When the Mountains Tremble, her voice evidences its own repression in a way that shows even human rights discourse to comply with visuality. Such repression occurs through subtitles, voiceovers, and the witnesses’ noted reticence, all of which replace her impulse to scream with a depoliticized victim narrative. IV. Conclusion While Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú and When the Mountains Tremble have been key to ending Guatemala’s civil war, persecuting war criminals, and garnering international humanitarian aid, they are also important as critiques of the very discourses by which they appear to abide. As aforementioned, these discourses include academic, legal, and human rights 64 discourses that privilege material proof over eyewitness testimony, thereby reifying occidental epistemological hierarchies. Though Menchú is far less forthcoming than Amaya about the inaudibility of her own screaming, as well as that of Spanish Embassy protesters and her younger brother, she nevertheless exposes visuality as incapable of controlling the very common sensorium over which it claims authority. Just as screaming seems to haunt these witnesses, it also haunts the institutionalization of truth and reality, pointing out its exclusionary standards and an urgent need for alternatives. In order to further undermine colonialism and its legacies, witnesses such as Amaya and Menchú would have to make their voices audible as sufficiently veridical and, in this sense, just as authoritative as the very bones and cartridges to which they testify. In other words, they would have to scream in ways that claimed the right to look and, as such, the right to reframe human rights discourse’s understandings of truth, reason, and justice according to indigenous populations’ own standards. Rather than essentialize or silence subaltern voices, this reframing would show them to be illiterate in ways that force “a breakdown in the very signifying structures that govern the intelligibility of speech,” including visuality (Acosta 13). 65 Chapter 2: “Tengo que gritarlo”: Historical Witnessing and Testimonio, Again I. Introduction In colloquial Spanish, tengo que gritarlo [I must scream it] conveys urgency: the need to amplify one’s voice in order to be heard, understood, and solicit a desired response. A literal scream, after all, is both audible and legible to those who indeed respond. Yet, within the testimonio debates of postwar Guatemala, the first-person immediacy of tengo que gritarlo takes on layered, figurative meanings which are not as easily—as literally—legible as one might assume from their generic context: that of historical witnessing, or testimonio. Testimonio as a genre emerged near the end of Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war (1960-1996), during which President José Efraín Ríos Montt waged a scorched earth campaign against indigenous populations. Since then, the genre has come to be associated with human rights politics and their epistemological frameworks, the objective of which is to secure the legal recognition of past atrocities committed by abusive governments across Latin America, including genocide in Guatemala. Like legal testimony, testimonio is not a genre that accepts the intrusion of figurative language readily—before the law, a scream must be a literal scream, a horror of historical fact. But witnessing is never a simple transmission of the what-happened, of an abstract provable history. Within Guatemalan testimonio, tengo que gritarlo works at this intersection of the legal and the literary, the legible and the illegible, to open up new readings of testimonio’s representations of violence through literary, photographic, and performative metaphor. John Beverley, the first scholar to define testimonio as a genre, calls it a “novel or novella-length narrative,” further describing its contours as, “first-person,” “real,” “significant,” and yet “protean” (31). Regarding the literary quality of this genre, he remains undecided. In “The Margin at the Center,” he wavers between testimonio as “a new form of literature… in 66 which we can witness and be part of the emerging culture of an international/popular-democratic subject” and testimonio as necessarily non-literary insofar as “literature, even where it is infused with popular-democratic form and content… is not itself a popular-democratic cultural form” (43). Though Beverley recognizes literature’s capacity to give voice to victims of violence, sharing subaltern histories and promulgating related politics, he cannot ignore its own exclusionary history. Suspicious of literature as a bourgeois institution with hegemonic politics, he declares the end of testimonio in “The Real Thing,” insisting “that new forms of political imagination and organization are needed; that, as in everything else in life, we have to move on” (78). Toward where might readers and witnesses start moving? Contradicting himself, Beverley tries to offer some direction by deferring to Rigoberta Menchú, a Mayan survivor of Guatemala’s civil war who co-authored Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, which is Beverley’s choice model for testimonio. Paraphrasing an interview with her, he stresses how she has considered revising her own testimonio but, deciding it to be “beside the point,” now “has other things she needs or wants to do, which include writing conventionally literary poems in Spanish” (78). Menchú, in other words, is moving on, to literature. Rather than support Beverley’s assertion that testimonio’s historical and political relevance has expired, his reference to Menchú prompts a reconsideration of the genre’s literary quality. Why does Menchú, herself a genocide survivor and prominent human rights activist, still privilege literature as a viable form of witnessing? Beverley does not reveal Menchú’s reasoning, yet her commitment to literary modes of witnessing resists his imperative to “move on,” pointing to a practice of testimonio that is already beyond the confines of literature understood as a bourgeois, hegemonic institution. This practice does not rely upon the epistemological and temporal closure that Beverley proposes, 67 wishing to discard testimonio as now impertinent. In addition to preventing Beverley from making a satisfactory argument, Menchú’s turn toward poetry challenges human rights politics’ similar call for temporal progression. Like Beverley’s understanding of testimonio, these politics uphold literal truth and linear history as most important to witnessing past atrocities as indeed past. While these politics are critical to indicting perpetrators and securing legal justice, their practice of witnessing is limited by a call for closure that complies with neoliberal logic. Many postwar governments eager to implement neoliberal economic policies, for example, justify amnesty and impunity upon the same premise that epistemological and temporal closure is necessary to political development. For neoliberalism, such closure facilitates historical oblivion, not memory. Though Beverley, human rights discourse, and neoliberalism justify their calls to move on with varied politics, they commonly neglect the unresolved issue of testimonio’s literariness. Building off of Beverley’s groundbreaking work, however, multiple scholars have reopened this issue in order to defend the genre’s ongoing historical and political relevance. Louise Detwiler and Janis Breckenridge acknowledge the importance of Beverley’s initial definition of “testimonio as a distinctive genre worthy of literary attention,” yet suggest his understanding of literature to be too finite (41). As they state, “it is time for testimonio de jure of scholarship to move forward because testimonio de facto on the ground has undergone a profound metamorphosis” (1-2). For them, literature understood strictly as a historical institution does not account for the multimedia forms of witnessing that testimonio now includes. Rather than move away from the genre as indeed literary, Detwiler and Breckenridge expand such literariness, stretching it “from text to textiles, radio and graphic art; from transcribed to written to spoken, public and performative, and from nonfiction to fiction and film” (2). 68 In a similar vein, Cynthia Milton turns her attention to testimonio as art more broadly conceived, which she claims to be “less tethered” to literal truth (22). Noting how “literary, visual, oral, and performance arts” enact a witnessing that draws others “toward the unknown,” she distinguishes her project’s multimedia archive from that of human rights politics, which consists of testimonies collected through more “official” processes such as truth commissions and legal trials (3). Though this multimedia testimonio seems more available to interpretation, Milton claims it introduces the unknown in order to ultimately provide new knowledge, eliciting emotional and intellectual responses of “empathy” and “understanding” (22). As such, her project complements, not contradicts, human rights’ privileging of epistemological closure. Elsewhere, Hans Fernández Benítez affirms the need for “una episteme testimonial renovada… que no se agote en categorías y conceptos monolíticos de análisis” [“a renovated testimonial episteme… that is not exhausted by monolithic categories and concepts of analysis”] yet similarly insists that such an episteme “siga promoviendo una conciencia y solidaridad internacional a favor de los derechos humanos en el ‘Tercer Mundo’” [“continues promoting international consciousness and solidarity in support of human rights in the ‘Third World’”] (67). While these scholars do take seriously the additional forms that testimonio has taken, redefining its literariness to include multimedia art, none of them considers such redefinition’s radical implications. I maintain that accounting for literature as a multimedia logic inherent to all language, including the verbal and the visual, reveals interruptive understandings of truth and temporality, as well as history and politics. Literature, according to Jacques Derrida, does not belong to an exclusionary institution but to logics of figuration and iteration that continually expand meaning, as well as historical and political relevance. In “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” an interview between himself 69 and Derek Attridge, Derrida describes literature as “an institution which tends to overflow the institution” (36). A philosopher with a keen interest in literature, Derrida recalls asking himself “What is literature?” and realizing that literature is both “a historical institution with its conventions, rules, etc.” and an “institution of fiction” (37). The latter institution does not subject writers and readers to power but, on the contrary, “gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them” (37). Such power inheres not just in fiction but in all language as a system of figures, or what Derrida also calls traces and marks, that are never literal insofar as they never settle on a single definition or absolute context. As he explains, “The ‘power’ that language is capable of… is that a singular mark should also be repeatable, iterable, as mark. It then begins to differ from itself sufficiently” (43). A mark must be a repeatable mark in order to be legible at all, continually moving onto new contexts of reading and writing and, in doing so, also undergoing interpretive change. Nobody writes, reads, or witnesses in exactly the same way, which makes every mark so dynamic as to overflow its own meaning, becoming a metaphor of itself. This definition of literature as a figurative and iterative logic inherent to all language challenges Beverley’s understanding of testimonio, as well as his and human rights discourse’s insistence upon epistemological and temporal closure. Rather than partake of literal proof and linear progression within the context of historical witnessing, this logic renders all truth necessarily open to repeating itself and, in doing so, also differing from itself. Accordingly, truth is never simply provable, and the past is never entirely past. While this literary understanding of witnessing cannot convincingly evidence President José Efraín Ríos Montt’s intention to systematically kill Guatemala’s indigenous populations, it can redefine testimonio as a genre even more, rendering it historically and politically relevant insofar as it resists imperatives to 70 move on. Interrupting human rights politics and neoliberalism with representations of violence that cannot be remembered or forgotten absolutely, this literary iteration of testimonio instead demands to be read and re-read, witnessed and re-witnessed. Returning to Rigoberta Menchú as a survivor-witness and key influence upon Beverley’s conceptualization of the genre, for example, scholars re-read Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú with a focus on her figure of secrets. Throughout her testimonio, Menchú claims her “secretos” [“secrets”] to symbolize the truths that she cannot share, remaining necessarily unknown to her readers. 20 According to Alberto Moreiras, such secrecy represents “whatever cannot and should not be reabsorbed into the literary-representational system,” withholding truth absolutely (127). As such, her secrets function as a part of literature that is also beyond literature, thereby figuring Derrida’s understanding of literature as an institution that overflows itself. Likewise, Brett Levinson notes how Menchú uses the trope of secrecy to locate her “ideal locus of enunciation” in her deceased “ancestors,” representing voices that can no longer be spoken or heard in a literal way (164). Yet, as interesting and important as these literary readings of testimonio are, neither of them pays specific attention to the “repeatable, iterable” implications of the genre’s literariness (“Strange” 43). In the aftermath of testimonio’s alleged obsolescence, I recognize screaming as a literary figure that recontextualizes and repurposes the genre, showing it to entail multimedia witnessing that temporarily interrupts human rights politics and related calls to move on. Screaming, as 20 She ends Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú with the claim, “Sigo ocultando lo que yo considero que nadie sabe […] ni un intelectual, por más que tenga muchos libros, no sabe distinguir nuestros secretos” [I continue hiding that which I consider nobody shall know […] not even an intellectual, with his many books, knows how to distinguish our secrets” (271). 71 trope, throws into question the boundaries of testimonio, demanding that we re-open firm generic and institutional definitions in order to consider testimonio, again. I trace this trope through Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez [Senselessness] (2005), Daniel Hernández-Salazar’s “Para que todos lo sepan” [“So that all shall know”] (1998), and Regina José Galindo’s Quién puede borrar las huellas? [Who can erase the traces?] (2003), a novel, photo series, and performance series about violence in postwar Guatemala. Throughout my analyses, I scaffold my readings with Derrida’s concept of testimonial madness, and Walter Benjamin’s of monadic time. While Insensatez,“Para que todos lo sepan,” and Quién puede borrar las huellas? differ in their allegiance to human rights epistemologies, both involve figurative and iterative screaming that foregrounds testimonio’s literary logic, representing truth, history, and politics through repetition that resists closure. This witnessing beyond testimonio’s original boundaries refuses to substantiate itself in literal language or progressive notions of history. III. Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez As a novel, Insensatez is an overtly literary take on a historical and political moment: the time between the end of Guatemala’s civil war in 1996 and the assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi, the leader of the Archbishop’s Office of Human Rights (ODHA), in 1998. It was a time of fragile hope, largely dependent upon ODHA’s collection of testimonial and forensic evidence proving the Guatemalan state’s numerous human rights abuses during the war, including but not limited to its genocidal scorched earth campaign against indigenous populations. Setting up a situation almost diametrically opposed to Beverley’s resistance to read testimonio as indeed literary, Castellanos Moya writes Insensatez from the position of a copyeditor who cannot help but read more official testimonies as “estupendas literariamente” [“stupendously literary”] (43). As an employee for ODHA, this nameless protagonist is responsible for reading all of 72 Guatemala: Nunca Más [Guatemala: Never Again], a truth commission report containing thousands of testimonies, on the short deadline of three months (13). He is overwhelmed from the very beginning, but not simply from the workload. “Yo no estoy completo de la mente” [I’m not complete in the mind] is the first report excerpt to disturb him with its performative mention of madness, which he claims to characterize himself and the country at large. Though this editor was not a firsthand victim of violence, he often identifies with witnesses so closely that he even relives their memories with them. “Para mí recordar, siento que estoy viviendo otra vez” [“For me remembering, I feel that I am living again”] is another excerpt that strikes the copyeditor. Noting it to be grammatically incorrect, and thus illegible in a literal sense, he understands such illegibility as itself testimonial. As he states, “[la] sintaxis cortada era la constatación de que algo se había quebrado en la psiquis del sobreviviente que la había pronunciado” [“the cut syntax was proof that something had broken in the psyche of the survivor who had spoken”] (149). Rather than read the testimony’s words as providing epistemological certainty and closure, the editor appeals to such words’ disjunction as an opening onto more literary understandings of truth. For him, the most convincing example of figurative truth within Guatemala: Nunca Más is screaming, which he reads as a recurrent trope for violence that is likewise recurrent. Though the Guatemalan state signed peace accords ending civil war in 1996, he recognizes racial and political violence as still ongoing and, as such, still worthy of witnessing by screaming horror. Near the novel’s beginning, for example, he reads the testimony of a woman who was kidnapped and tortured by the state army during the civil war. This, like all of the testimonies within Insensatez, is an actual excerpt from Guatemala: Nunca Más. In it, the woman describes the experience of being raped by 73 numerous military officials in a room with a radio “so that no one would hear the screams” (Guatemala 153). While her own torture went unheard, she claims, years later, still to be hearing that of a fellow prisoner. Recounting the scene of this prisoner’s castration, she states, “That guy let out a scream that I have never forgotten, a terrible scream” (Guatemala 153). This scream links back into Insensatez, for the copyeditor cannot read this woman’s testimony without likewise hearing, or at least imagining, such a scream. Its intensity even makes him leave his office for a breath of fresh air, only to find out that the report’s witness is actually his very coworker, Teresa. Rather than keep seeing her as a “mujer guapa y misteriosa” [“beautiful and mysterious woman”], he views her as a torture survivor who is effectively screaming inside (107). Lamenting how the memory of this screaming “la despertaría en las noches por el resto de su vida, tal como aseguraba en su testimonio” [would awaken her at night for the rest of her life, as she asserted in her testimony], he resolves to avoid her at all costs, himself unable to bear the sight and sound that her presence arouses (99). Such resolve is part of the editor’s brief and unsuccessful attempt to escape the literary logic of testimonio, which instead compels him to read her account—and remember such screams—again and again. As the editor fixates on this and other excerpts from Guatemala: Nunca Más, he even copies choice lines into his own journal and repeats them compulsively, all the while showing a critical apathy toward ODHA’s human rights politics. Reciting some lines to his friend Toto, he specifies his objective not as “convencerlo de la bondad de una causa justa” [“to convince him of the goodness of a just cause”] but rather “mostrarle la riqueza de lenguaje de sus mal llamados compatriotas aborígenes, y ninguna otra cosa más” [“to show him the richness of the language of their damned aboriginal compatriots, and nothing else”] (32). The richness of this testimonial 74 language inheres in its literary qualities, not literal meanings. The more the editor reads and re- reads the testimonies, the more layered and varied their meanings become. Especially intrigued by the figures and syntax employed by survivor-witnesses speaking in Spanish as their second language, he describes such accounts with terms such as “frases sonoras” [“sonorous phrases”], “poesía” [“poetry”], and “musicalidad” [“musicality”] (33, 123, 152). This obsession with the auditory aspects of such accounts partially explains the editor’s sensitivity to Teresa’s memory of screaming, which he describes as “un aullido como si el despejo hubiera estado en sus cincos sentidos, el aullido más horrible que la chica hubiera escuchado jamás” [“a howl as if the victim had been fully conscious, the most horrendous howl the girl had ever heard”] (99). Though Castellanos Moya, by way of the editor, sometimes uses “grito” [“scream”] and “aullido” [howl] interchangeably, both figures mark the limits of verbal language, dissolving from words into seemingly senseless sound. Within Insensatez, such senselessness takes on manifold significance. The sound of screaming, at least as recounted by Teresa and re-imagined by the editor, is the sound of life before and after death. Originally emitted by the torture victim upon his castration, such screaming marks the final moments of his life, as well as that which survives him: his memory. This memory lives on in Teresa’s recounting of the what-happened, yet not as a literal and indeed audible scream. Even upon its first iteration—its first re-witnessing—such screaming transforms into the word “grito,” a figure for the sound, that wordless cry of excruciating pain. This figure, now literary, overflows with layered and varied meanings. In the editor’s witnessing of Teresa’s testimony, which is a witnessing of the castrate’s suffering, for example, screaming functions as a metaphor for the editor’s own horror: a horror that compels him to identify with Teresa’s memory so closely that he, like her, continues to hear “el aullido más horrible” [“the 75 most horrendous howl”] (99). Eventually, the editor even emits his own scream, or howl, which Castellanos Moya likewise figures beyond the limits of verbal language and literal sense. Fearful that his involvement with ODHA has put his own life in danger amid ongoing violence within postwar Guatemala, the editor flees the city for a rural retreat center, where he hopes to ease the anxiety that has heightened while reading the testimonies. Still fixating on particular lines and paranoid about his own persecution once there, however, he claims, “mi mente se me fue de las manos y no tuve ya momento de sosiego” [“my mind went out of control and I no longer had any relief”], thereafter exiting to a patio in order “aullar como un animal enfermo bajo el cielo estrellado” [“to howl like a sick animal under the starry sky”] (139). This is the the precise moment that multiple critics recognize as the copyeditor’s psychotic break. Nanci Buiza and Misha Kokotovic call it a moment of “trauma” and “edge of insanity,” respectively, while Christian Kroll-Bryce suggests it to demonstrate a “reasonable senselessness” appropriate for the chaotic violence still dominant within an increasingly neoliberal postwar Guatemala (Buiza 164, Kokotovic 560, Kroll-Bryce 392). That Teresa and the protagonist continue to hear the screaming of fellow victims who, unlike them, did not survive the war, also situates such screaming as a figure for what Derrida describes more generally as the “madness” inherent to all testimony and witnessing. In Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, a critical essay on Maurice Blanchot’s short story titled “The Instant of My Death,” Derrida explains how testimony is structured by the condition that one survives whatever experience to which one subsequently bears witness. Humans must live to tell, but such telling is always incomplete because one can only bear witness to death if one does not, in fact, experience it. This logic of survival situates truth beyond epistemological and temporal closure. 76 Reading Blanchot’s text as a semi-autobiographical account of his own encounter with death by a Nazi firing squad, Derrida claims “unexperienced experience” to make all testimony possible yet, as such, also inseparable from the possibility of fiction, or indeed literature (54). Pointing out how survivors only can testify to events that they did not fully experience and, as a result, might indeed recount erroneously, he states, The possibility of literary fiction haunts so-called truthful, responsible, serious, real testimony as its proper possibility. […] The testimony testifies to nothing less than the instant of an interruption of time and history, a second of interruption in which fiction and testimony find their common resource. (73) It testifies, in other words, to an interruption that simultaneously founds and incompletes time, history, and the possibility of witnessing. Arguing against institutional demands for testimonies to be articulate and coherent not only temporally, but also epistemologically, Derrida claims such standards to “rely on a naïve concept of testimony, requiring a narrative of common sense when its madness is put to the test of the impossible” (48). This madness is the constitutive possibility of literary fiction, which legal trials and associated human rights politics nevertheless put to the impossible test of provability. By foregrounding the literary quality of testimony, Derrida helps justify the editor’s rejection of ODHA’s human rights politics, as well as more general imperatives for literal legibility. By the scene in which the editor himself howls like a sick animal, however, most readers of Insensatez have given up on him as a reliable narrator and witness, instead considering him to be a paranoid drunk. Ignacio Sánchez-Prado, for example, claims that Insensatez demonstrates a recent “post-testimonial” tendency of Central American authors to reclaim writing, both fiction and non-fiction, from the stronghold of testimonio’s political and ethical “imperatives” (82). That the editor ultimately abandons his role with ODHA and associated 77 human rights efforts causes Sánchez-Prado to dismiss historical memory within Insensatez as not “redemptive” but “futile” (85). Sánchez-Prado considers historical memory to be futile insofar as it fails to witness past violence in a way that facilitates moving on, either from the part of the protagonist or Guatemala more generally. Yet, such failure, as I have been suggesting, also can be witnessed as evidential of testimonio’s ongoing historical and political relevance. Because Teresa and the editor do not situate memories of violence as indeed past, for example, their iterative screaming continually interrupts human rights politics, exposing the impossibility of epistemological or temporal closure. As truthful as the literary figure of screaming may be, it remains more commonly interpreted as senselessness, which upsets Insensatez’ copyeditor protagonist. In another reading of Guatemala: Nunca Más, he critiques a psychiatric doctor for being so “aséptico” [aseptic] that he diagnoses victims’ mental conditions without actually engaging the madness inherent to their testimonies (27). Such madness, according to the report’s editor, is in both form and content. In addition to recognizing testimonio as a genre structured by survival, and thus the impossibility of literal legibility, he understands screaming as an interruptive figure demanding more literary interpretations. Moved by the story of a mute-deaf who was tortured to death, for example, he questions the sanity and authority of “un sargento bastante bruto si consideramos que destazó al mudito sin darse cuenta de que esos gritos no eran sólo de dolor, sino de un mudito para quien ésa era su única forma de expression” [“a brute sergeant who murdered the little mute boy without realizing that those screams were not only of pain, but of a little mute boy’s only form of expression”] (29). In this instance, screaming stands in for language while also signifying beyond it. Here, screaming is the mute’s language, which he employs to confess his own truth while being tortured. Because this truth exceeds epistemological frameworks for truth, however, 78 the sergeant fails to witness it as such. Throughout Insensatez, the editor also critiques military leaders, leftist leaders, and human rights activists for failing to witness violence in an interruptive and politically relevant way. Disgusted by leftist poetry written on the walls of a Guatemalan bar-café, he claims that literary excerpts from Guatemala: Nunca Más should replace those “horribles versos de mediocres poetas izquierdistas vendedores de esperanza” [“horrible verses written by mediocre poets, sellers of hope”] (41). Though the editor’s dismissal of leftist and human rights politics may appear to be cynical, Castellanos Moya ultimately suggests this protagonist to be both paranoid and perceptive. Near the novel’s end, he receives an email informing him that Bishop Gerardi, the leader of ODHA, was brutally assassinated by state officials just three days after presenting a completed Guatemala: Nunca Más to the public, thereby partially justifying the copyeditor’s disillusionment with human rights discourse. For the editor, this discourse’s axiom that truth can guarantee justice is at odds with the figurative and iterative nature of testimonio, as well as ongoing violence within postwar Guatemala. As an actual, not fictional, employee for ODHA, however, photographer Daniel Hernández-Salazar is more committed to human rights politics’ cause than Insensatez’ protagonist. Rather than flee Guatemala, this witness insists upon the importance of Guatemala: Nunca Más in documenting, protesting, and ending his nation’s history of violence. Indeed, he maintains such insistence both before and long after Bishop Gerardi’s historical assassination. In this sense, he exhibits an unwavering belief in provable truth and linear history that his own work ends up undermining or, more specifically, that his own photos of screaming angels end up interrupting. Additionally, his angel-witnesses show seemingly non-literary modes of testimonio, such as photography, to be likewise iterative, overflowing with varied meanings. Against the 79 artist’s own human rights politics, such screaming furthers my claim that testimonio’s literariness entails a multimedia epistemology that resists imperatives for closure and progress. IV. Daniel Hernández-Salazar’s “Para que todos lo sepan” Working as a photojournalist and participant in mass grave exhumations when ODHA commissioned him to create its cover image, Hernández-Salazar combined bones from such exhumations with the more ambiguous figure of a screaming angel. At the time, however, the photographer did not understand such an image, titled “Esclarecimiento” [Clarification], as ambiguous at all. On the contrary, he saw it as evidence of the Guatemalan genocide that would prove the past in legal trials, thereby enabling historical progress. Indeed, it would replace amnesia with mourning, and impunity with justice. For this reason, “Esclarecimiento” consists of four images, each of the same angel as he covers his ears, eyes, and mouth before ultimately cupping his mouth and screaming (Figures 11 and 12). According to the artist, this screaming angel, which he calls “Para que todos lo sepan” [So that all shall know], “es justamente el angel que rompe el silencio que los otros tres [ángeles] denunciaban. Lo hice porque la ODHA con su informe acerca de las violaciones [de los derechos humanos] iba a romper el silencio” [“is precisely the angel that breaks the silence that the other three [angels] denounced. I made it because ODHA, with its reporting about the [human rights] violations was going to break the silence”] (Palabra). Figure 11. Esclarecimiento. 1998. Cover of Guatemala: Nunca Más. Guatemala City: Oficina Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala, 1998; Figure 12. Para que todos lo sepan. 1998. The New York Times. Web. <http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/angels-watch-over- memories-of-war/> Breaking such silence is necessary for curing the sickness with which Hernández-Salazar diagnoses Guatemala society: “esa misma sociedad a la que no le gusta ver y oír lo que sucede y que está acostumbrada a callar” [the same society that does not like to see or hear what happens 80 and that is accustomed to shutting up] (“Asi”). This sickness, according to the photographer, is one of “injusticia, intolerancia, violencia” [injustice, intolerance, violence] (Palabra). That Guatemala: Nunca Más “was going to break the silence,” however, renders such an action incomplete, bound to iteration. Even though Hernández-Salazar has recreated his screaming angel amid ongoing impunity for President José Efraín Ríos Montt and other state criminals within Guatemala, for example, none of his adaptations break silence in any resounding or progressive way. Instead, they resignify such screaming as silently shocking, iterative, and interruptive. The first adaptation of “Para que todos lo sepan” was not created by the artist himself but fellow witnesses. The day after Bishop Gerardi’s assassination, hundreds of Guatemalans silently marched through the capital city wielding enlarged posters of Hernández-Salazar’s “Esclarecimiento” and the titular, emphatically capitalized “GUATEMALA: NUNCA MÁS” (Figure 13). Figure 13. Silent march through Guatemala City after Bishop Gerardi’s assassination; Daniel Hernández-Salazar; 1998; “Angels Watch Over Memories of War”; <lens.blogs.nytimes.com> This message of “never again” was literally and figuratively muted in this context, for protestors were gathering to denounce yet another instance of state violence, this time nearly two years after the signing of civil war peace accords. Yet, instead of simply shutting up, these Guatemalan protestors were publicly refusing to cover their eyes, ears, and mouths. With “Para que todos lo sepan,” they were silently screaming in order to witness violence: violence, however, that clearly was not as past as their “never again” message proclaimed. Yet what, exactly, might the screaming make known this time? Yes, there was a murder? Yes, there is still impunity for genocide and and other human rights violations? Never again, again? Surprised to see such street protesters brandishing his work, Hernández-Salazar rushed home to retrieve his camera. In his 81 words, “When I saw that, I immediately understood that I had to take photos; I had to follow what could happen with the pictures” (Mackenzie 20). Indeed, he had to follow, as well as create, another series of screams. When the anniversary of the Bishop’s assassination approached with its perpetrators still benefitting from impunity, Hernández-Salazar again recreated “Para que todos lo sepan.” As he explains, “Los años pasan. Se apilan como páginas de un libro. Todo queda impune. Tengo que gritarlo” [“Years pass. They peel away like pages in a book. Everything remains unpunished. I must scream it”] (So that 1). The night before the assassination’s anniversary, Hernández-Salazar installed dozens of enlarged angels throughout Guatemala City. Installation sites included Bishop Gerardi’s parish, military intelligence facilities, army headquarters, military barracks, the presidential guard facilities, and a former military school. Some sites immediately recognized and removed the denunciatory angel. Others, including various military sites, did not understand the image’s significance until a local newspaper published an article explaining its connection to ODHA a few days later (Hoelscher 213). Figure 14. “Ángel Callejero” installed next to the Metropolitan Cathedral in Guatemala City; Daniel Hernández-Salazar; 1999; “Angels Watch Over Memories of War”; <lens.blogs.nytimes.com> Aside from being much larger and cut into squares in order to facilitate fast and clandestine mounting, this angel series is identical to “Para que todos lo sepan” (Figure 14). Appearing to intentionally differentiate it, however, Hernández-Salazar has referred to this series specifically as “Ángel callejero” [Street Angel] and “El ángel que grita justicia” [The angel that screams justice] (“Así”). While the photographer considers all his work to be part of human rights politics, he further distinguishes the screaming of “Ángel callejero” as more target- specific, and yet also more ambiguous. Noting his decision not to include the written message of 82 “Guatemala: Nunca Más” with these public installations, he states, “la imagen ya estaba muy fija en la mente del público a través de los libros y los periódicos que la publicaron. Se dejo mejor un poco ambiguo para que sea más misterioso y más cuestionadora a las personas” [“the image was already fixed in the public’s minds from the books and newspapers that published it. It was better to leave it a little ambiguous so that it would be more mysterious and interrogative for people”] (Palabra). Here, Hernández-Salazar acknowledges the reproduction, or indeed iteration, of his screaming angels to introduce varied meanings. In doing so, he also foregrounds the literariness of such photography, inadvertently suggesting it to be testimonio that resists epistemological and temporal closure. Though this resistance is at odds with the photographer’s commitment to ODHA and its political aims of proving truths and moving on, reading Hernández-Salazar’s screaming angel with Walter Benjamin’s concept of monadic time opens up a new way to consider the iterative temporality of the angel. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin uses Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” a painting of an angel likewise facing forward with an open mouth and eyes, in order to propose a mode of witnessing that is less progressive than that upheld by human rights politics. According to Benjamin, this “Angel of History” is facing the past, which he does not see as a linear “chain of events” but the repetition of “one single catastrophe,” namely violence committed by what he calls history’s “victor[s]” (256, 257). While this angel wishes to witness this violence as also part of the present, “progress” pulls him forward, urging him to focus exclusively on the future instead of witnessing a more monadic, and indeed truthful, understanding of time (256). Contrary to human rights efforts seeking to resolve the past as a way of righting the present and enabling a better future, Benjamin positions his open-mouthed angel as calling for an 83 understanding of history in which “time stands still and has come to a stop” (262). To witness this arrest of time, according to Benjamin and his philosophy of historical materialism, means “to take control of a memory” when it is at greatest risk of being appropriated by advocates of progress and instead recognize its internal “tensions” as “the sign of a messianic cessation of happening, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (262). For Benjamin, such cessation of happening is both messianic and revolutionary because it includes the past, present, and future all at once: compressed into a monad that challenges the very advancement of time, as well as the political movements either ruthlessly enforcing or more benevolently advocating it. While Hernández-Salazar’s “Ángel callejero” may seem to advance ODHA’s mission of proclaiming the particular truth of violence and impunity, its ambiguities simultaneously function like Benjamin’s temporal tensions insofar as they resist comprehension and, in this sense, any sort of restitution or progression. Benjamin’s “Angel of History” would like to “make whole what has been smashed,” yet he cannot precisely because it is still being smashed or, stated otherwise, the past is the present (257). To witness this history instead requires pause, which Hernández-Salazar elicits with his images. In addition to installing “Ángel callejero” in “lugares muy visibles y símbolicos” [“very visible and symbolic places”], the photographer sought sites “donde habían semáforos [y] la gente tiene que esperar unos minutos” [“where there were streetlights [and] people had to wait some minutes”] (Palabra). Indeed, they had to wait and contemplate these images just enough to experience a defamiliarizing retake, for they were once again being faced by the very angel that originally meant to end violence in Guatemala. Likewise recognizing a resonance between Hernández-Salazar’s photos and Benjamin’s ideas, historian Stephen Hoelscher claims the mechanical reproduction of “Para que todos lo 84 sepan” and “Ángel callejero” to enhance “the aura of the original,” suggesting iteration to bolster, not interrupt, the artist’s human rights politics (Hoelscher 213). Though Hoelscher perceptively observes Hernández-Salazar’s angels to foreground a political struggle over historical memory, he overlooks how “Ángel callejero” appears and disappears in a way that diminishes whatever auratic quality it, or any memory, may have once had. Pointing to an angel that he positioned under a highway underpass so that cars’ lights would hit it as they passed, Hernández-Salazar emphasizes the angel’s interruptive and fleeting presence as integral to its truth value. In his words, “Allá abajo es como un refugio: un lugar oscuro donde está escondido…esconderse, estar abajo, guarderse del peligro… [y] cuando lo veías, pasaba muy rápido… era muy fugaz” [“There, underneath, is like a refuge: a dark place where the angel hides… protecting himself from danger… [and] when you saw it, it passed very quickly… it was very fleeting”] (Palabra). Rather than measure the truth value of this angel based primarily upon presence, as art does with “aura” and human rights efforts do with material and testimonial evidence, Hernández-Salazar’s work connects truth value with shock value. Benjamin makes this same connection while situating his “Angel of History” as a figure for monadic time and associated historical materialism. Rejecting history that is written in the name of progress, Benjamin proposes one that is experienced as shock. Elaborating upon the aforementioned moment in which “thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions,” he claims “there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes as a monad” (263). This monad, containing “revolutionary” and “messianic” potential, can then “blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history” and, in doing so, reveal history as interruptive and inconclusive (263). While the continual iterations of Hernández-Salazar’s “Para que todos lo sepan” may suggest a certain inefficacy if measured in relation to their original 85 purpose of making the Guatemalan genocide known, both publicly and legally, they are accurate and necessary in this Benjaminian sense. As long as history remains at risk of being decided as indeed past, either in the name of neoliberal amnesia or legal justice, Hernández-Salazar’s screaming angels serve as politically urgent reminders of this very impossibility. Yet, later versions of “Ángel callejero” bear the explicit message, “Sí hubo genocidio.” Hernández-Salazar posted these installations in May of 2013, shortly after Guatemala’s congress overturned a brief court conviction of President José Efraín Ríos Montt for charges of genocide. Such a ruling would have been the first domestic conviction of a former Latin American dictator but, in a regressive change of events, Guatemala thereafter began debating whether genocide happened at all. As necessary as the public affirmation of “Sí hubo genocidio” may be, the claim’s preterit phrasing is still incongruous with the photograph’s iterative history. Though the original “Para que todos lo sepan” was created with the specific purpose of making genocide legally known and, in this sense, officially past, such a message appears both insufficient and inaccurate within the context of ongoing state violence, impunity, and human rights politics. Rather than work toward achieving Hernández-Salazar’s original mission, these screaming angels more convincingly display what Rebecca Schneider calls “the curious inadequacies of the copy” or, as Derrida explains, the curious way in which every mark “differ[s] from itself slightly” (Schneider 6, “Strange” 43). According to Schneider, the practice of reenacting “a precedent event, artwork, or act,” which Hernández-Salazar does with “Para que todos lo sepan” and “Ángel Callejero,” troubles investments in “straightforward linearity as the only way to mark time… and points to a politic in veering, revolving, turning around, reappearing” (182). This politic, as I have been arguing throughout my reconsideration of testimonio, acknowledges truth as literary and, as such, subject to figuration and iteration. Within Guatemalan testimonio, such 86 iteration also attests to the country’s historical logic wherein war-related violence, including the assassination of Bishop Gerardi, continues repeating in the postwar era. 21 As the work of performance artist Regina José Galindo shows, this violence involves not just institutional impunity but also feminicide, drug trafficking, and mass migration, which are largely symptomatic of neoliberal policies such as NAFTA and CAFTA. V. Regina José Galindo’s ¿Quien puede borrar las huellas? Like Hernández-Salazar, Galindo is both attentive and responsive to government politics and legal decisions. Before Ríos Montt was convicted for, and then shortly thereafter exonerated from, charges of genocide, he was part of another upsetting overruling. In 2003, he successfully challenged the constitutional ban on ex-dictators from presidential candidacy and was nominated by the party he founded, El Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG). Galindo, an advertising consultant, poet, and occasional performance artist at the time, recalls feeling especially upset about news of this candidacy. In her words, I was in my room, and I suffered an attack of panic and depression. I cried out, I kicked and stomped my feet, I cursed the system that rules us. How was it possible that a character as dark as this would have such power with which to bend everything to his will? I decided then and there that I would take to the streets with my shout and amplify it. I had to do it. (“Regina”) Experiencing the same mix of negative emotions as Hernández-Salazar amid so much impunity, Galindo describes her art as imperative and interruptive screaming. 22 In this sense, both Hernández-Salazar and Galindo effectively say, “Tengo que gritarlo.” Yet, rather than assert a 21 In 2001, three army officers were convicted of committing Gerardi’s assassination. This trial marked the first time that members of the Guatemalan military were tried in a civilian court. 22 This “shout” is likely synonymous with “scream,” presuming that Galindo used the word “grito” in this context. Unfortunately, I do not have access to an untranslated version of this interview. 87 claim as explicit as “Guatemala: Nunca Más” or “Sí hubo genocidio,” Galindo’s subsequent performance was just as interrogative as her title of it, ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? [Who can erase the traces?]. On the same day that Ríos Montt’s candidacy was announced, she quietly yet audaciously dipped her bare feet in a tub of human blood and marched from the Constitutional Court to the Presidential Palace. In doing so, she marked the ex-dictator’s political history with a trail of gore, suggesting that not even he can erase the traces of his own crimes (Figure 15). Also traversing a crowd of fellow protestors, many of whom faced police and military censorship, Galindo managed to complete her performance without any resistance. Such indifference was likely due to the performance’s very illegibility as a mode of protest, as well as testimonio. Figure 15. Quién puede borrar las huellas? 2003. Guatemala City. Web. <http://www.reginajosegalindo.com/> Unlike Hernández-Salazar, Galindo is a witness who does not appeal to the government for any recognition or response. While the ODHA photographer and self-identified human rights “artivist” maintains that his photos “buscan que la gente reaccione ante la realidad” [intend for people to react before reality] in a way that helps achieve justice and peace, Galindo reserves such goals for legal professionals (“Asi”). Stating that “artivism uses art for legal justice and the goal isn’t aesthetic,” Galindo insists that “art is more trivial… an artist cannot change the world but can produce an aesthetic moment” (“Central”). This moment, she adds, “reveals relationships and complexities” instead of “a clear, didactic message” (“Central”). Such “aesthetic moments” are Galindo’s responses to “moments of danger,” which Walter Benjamin describes as moments wherein “the danger is that the memory become a tool of the ruling classes” (255). As aforementioned, this maneuver often entails turning memory into oblivion. Rios Montt’s presidential run, though unsuccessful, and later exoneration from charges of genocide are two 88 obvious examples of such moments of danger. Yet while Hernández-Salazar’s work focuses on protecting the memory of genocide, Galindo’s oeuvre relates the genocide to ongoing practices of war within Guatemala and larger Central America. Though the Cold War has ended, Galindo qualifies that violence has worsened but it “has a new face” (“Central). Likewise observing that death tolls are now at rates comparable to the worst years of civil war, Carlota McAllister and Diane Nelson conceptualize a current “war by other means” in which counterinsurgent and insurgent forces continue to operate under “guises of their own,” including a variety of political, economic, humanitarian, and cultural practices (16). Rather than understand “postwar” as meaning “after war,” McAllister and Nelson claim the term to describe a “shift in frameworks for acting on and against the war” (10). This shift frames war as ongoing, thereby connecting the past with the present. Accordingly, “post” instead conveys the sense of “a place for displaying notices” and “a strong timber set upright, a point of attachment” (10). Like Insensatez and “Para que todos lo sepan,” many of Galindo’s performances reference Guatemala’s truth commission reports and particular instances of state brutality during the nation’s armed conflict. Yet, more intentionally than Castellanos Moya and Hernández- Salazar, Galindo repurposes such testimonies to produce a “shift in frameworks” that reveals war as iterative and ongoing. Some of Galindo’s performances are more obviously about war, as well as screaming, than others. In 279 Golpes [279 Blows], she enclosed herself in a cubicle and hit herself once for every woman murdered within Guatemala since the beginning of 2001, a total of 279 times. Throughout this process, she also screamed and moaned in pain (Barbosa). Within all of her performances, however, Galindo claims to emit the same figurative scream that inspired ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? Elaborating upon her resistance to political and ethical 89 imperatives such as those inherent to human rights discourse, this artist distinguishes her screaming as more natural and personal. As she states, No voy a suscribirme a la idea que el arte tenga que ser político o se enfoque en la defensa de ciertos derechos. El arte es una expresión completamente libre. Yo he elegido una línea que responde a mis preocupaciones. El arte es un grito, lo que se tiene adentro. (Chacon) I will not subscribe to the idea that art has to be political or focus on the defense of certain rights. Art is a completely free expression. I have chosen a trajectory that corresponds with my concerns. Art is a scream, it’s what one has inside. What emerges from Galindo and her own preoccupations is screaming that is nevertheless political insofar as it functions as another mode of testimonio. Explaining the autobiographical, and indeed testimonial, element of her work, she states, “I transform my own experiences and those of others into new images, new actions, where the order of the elements does affect the product” (“Experiences”). Such reordering, or reframing, also affects truth and history, showing both to be less certain and linear than hegemonic power acknowledges. Galindo claims to base her work upon an obsession with “relations of power” (“Central”). While many critics recognize this connection, most interpret her work as a performance of victimization wherein Galindo plays the role of the disempowered. Considering the harm she inflicts upon herself, as well as the various ways her body functions as synecdoche for whole populations, this interpretation would seem to make sense. Noting her work to entail “a triad of the victim, the victimizer, and the intellectual author,” however, Galindo adds, “it is very, very important to stress that I am the intellectual author” (“Central”). As the intellectual author, Galindo imbues herself with the capacity to reframe not only witnessing, or testimonio, but also war. Yet, with performances such as Lo voy a gritar al viento [I’m going to scream it to the 90 wind] (1999), wherein Galindo suspended herself from an urban archway and recited feminist poetry while dressed in a nightgown, the public failed to recognize her as anything but spectacle. Though Guatemalans passing by gathered below her to gawk and take photos, nobody took the performance seriously as a mode of screaming and witnessing. Galindo’s image even ended up on the front pages of the next day’s newspapers, as well as a headline claiming her to be a hysteric on the verge of committing suicide. As the artist confirms, “With this piece I was confident that I would be seen and analyzed from a general, popular perspective, not a formal, artistic one” (“Regina”). In eliciting this popular perspective, Galindo foregrounds what Judith Butler calls “normative conditions of recognizability” (4). Describing such conditions as “frames of war” that state and other authorities produce in order to regulate the public’s perception of war, Butler qualifies that “the technical conditions of reproduction and reproducibility themselves produce a critical shifting, if not a full deterioration of context, in relation to the frames deployed by dominant media sources during times of war” (9). As images of war circulate, according to Butler, they break with their original contexts in ways that expose and exceed their original frames, thereby making recognizable what was previously unrecognized or misrecognized. While Quién puede borrar las huellas? and Lo voy a gritar al viento did not appear as acts of witnessing war to their immediate audiences, for example, this reception revealed Guatemalans’ limited understandings of what constitutes war, as well as witnessing. Though many believe war to have ended with the country’s signing of peace accords, Galindo frames seemingly separate issues, such as misogyny, as integral to this war’s continuation. Being misrecognized as a female hysteric is far less brutal then being tortured, raped, and killed, yet Galindo connects them as two instances of truth beyond hegemonic frameworks, including public and legal ones. Rather than seek inclusion into these frameworks, 91 Galindo shows performative testimonio to open onto various historical contexts and thereby acquire layered, multi-temporal meanings. In Mientras ellos siguen libres [Meanwhile they remain free] (2007), she recreates the mass raping of indigenous women during the civil war’s scorched earth campaigns. Such staging is based off of two testimonies from Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio, another truth commission report, which she cites as stating, “Fui violada consecutivamente, aproximadamente unas 15 veces, tanto por los hombres que vestían de civil” [I was raped consecutively, approximately 15 times, by men from the state army] and “Me ataron y me vendaron los ojos, […] me golpearon y me violaron. Empecé a sangrar mucho, en ese momento perdí a mi bebé” [They tied me and bandaged my eyes […] they hit me and raped me. I began to bleed a lot, and in that moment I lost my baby] (Regina). In Mientras ellos siguen libres, Galindo tied her parted legs and clasped hands to a small bed frame with real umbilical cords from a local abortion clinic, positioning her naked body in a way that appears to anticipate this described violence, or at least the legacy of it (Figure 16). Figure 16. Mientras ellos siguen libres. 2007. Guatemala City. Web. <http://www.reginajosegalindo.com/> Explaining the aforementioned testimonies, Galindo notes that the mass raping of indigenous women was one the army’s generalized tactics (Regina). Indeed, she claims it was a genocidal practice aimed to eliminate “hasta el origen de la vida de los pueblos indígenas” [even the origin of life for indigenous peoples] (Regina). Because Galindo’s body is both visibly pregnant and non-indigenous in Mientras ellos siguen libres, her performance relates this civil war tactic to the more general violence now being waged against Guatemalan women. This violence is likewise sexual and often fatal: according to Guatemala’s National Police, there were 9.1 murders for every 100,000 women within Guatemala between 2007 and 2012 (Piette). In 2014, moreover, 846 women were murdered, the large majority by men, in a population of about 92 15 million (Piette). Yet, as Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano note, “rape as a tool of war” rarely receives the same recognition and condemnation as other modes of torture or declared warfare (9). According to their research, women’s rights advocates and female journalists still have to fight to make gender-based violence visible as not only “an integral and pervasive weapon of war” but also “crimes against humanity” (xv). Conceptualizing “feminicide” as “genocide against women,” Fregoso and Bejarano aim “to contribute to the political and legal process of defining and advancing a human rights framing of feminicide” (xvi, 8). Though Galindo likewise connects genocide and feminicide, she exceeds such framing insofar as she refuses to appeal to institutional recognition, as well as progressive notions history. In a later performance, titled Tierra [Land] (2007), the artist again engages a more official testimony, this time from a witness testifying in Ríos Montt’s trial over charges of genocide. After being asked how indigenous populations were killed during the war, the legal witness, presumably a member of the state army that Ríos Montt directed as general, answers, Primero ordenaban al operador de la máquina, al oficial García, que cavara un hoyo. Luego los camiones llenos de gente los parqueaban frente […] y uno por uno, iban pasando. No les disparaban. Muchas veces los puyaban con bayoneta. Les arrancaban el pecho con las bayonetas, y los llevaban a la fosa. Cuando se llenaba la fosa dejaban caer la pala mecánica sobre los cuerpos. (Regina) First they ordered the machine operator, Officer Garcia, to dig a hole. Then trucks full of people parked in front […] and one by one, they passed. They did not shoot them. Many times they were jabbed with a bayonet. They ripped open their chests with bayonets, and carried them to the pit. When the pit was filled, the mechanical shovel was dropped on the bodies. In her description of Tierra, a performance of this grave digging, Galindo also references the material evidence supporting such genocidal violence, noting how “Muchos cuerpos fueron 93 enterrados en fosas comunes que hoy forman parte de la larga lista de evidencias que confirman el hecho” [“Many bodies were buried in mass graves that today are part of the long list of evidence confirming the deed”] (Regina). Rather than further confirm the deed of genocide, however, Galindo again complicates it, connecting civil war violence to ongoing violence and, like Castellanos Moya and Hernández-Salazar, thereby reconfiguring truth in a way that also reconfigures history, as well as testimonio and its politics. In Tierra, Galindo stands naked on a small plot of land while a bulldozer digs all around her, forming an island around her highly vulnerable body. Meanwhile, Galindo stands completely still, staring straight ahead with a blank gaze that cannot be met and, as such, resistant to any sort of mutual recognition (Figure 17). Figure 17. “Tierra.” 2013. Les Moulins, Francia. Web. <http://www.reginajosegalindo.com/> Unlike most of her performances, Tierra had no live audience aside from the camera person, instead coming into public as an edited video. Additionally, the framing of this scene is especially decontextualized, leaving viewers guessing about its location, date, and historical relevance. Watching the video without the aforementioned description, for example, viewers simply see a body being encroached upon by heavy machinery. As such, the performance could appear to be about genocide or, more generally, modernization, colonization, and their neoliberal aftermath. Just like during the civil war, international corporations are now laying claim to Guatemalan land in a way that threatens, and even kills, whole indigenous populations. 23 Sharing her own optimistic interpretation of Tierra in an interview, however, Galindo states, “Esta obra para mí es mucho más utópica y esperanzadora porque todo destruye tu alrededor y tú permaneces en pie […] Es una historia de supervivencia […] La vida vale más que cualquiera 23 For example, Canada’s Goldcorp operates a mine, called Marlin, that has a history of environmental and human rights abuses. It is in Guatemala’s Western highlands and spans numerous Mayan settlements. 94 historia trágica. La vida es lo más valioso que hay” [“For me, this work is much more utopian and hopeful because everything destroys your surroundings and you remain standing [...] It is a story of survival [...] Life is worth more than any tragic story. Life is the most valuable thing there is.”] (“Tierra”). Yet, if histories of life are indeed more valuable than histories of tragedy and barbarity, then truth and witnessing also cannot be ended, for survival is precisely that: no ending. According to Schneider, as well as Butler, reenactment is an act of survival — “of keeping alive” — that both preserves and reanimates the past (Schneider 7). Galindo’s performances reanimate the past by showing it to be never quite past, instead informing and interrupting the present as also “never (only) present” (Schneider 7). For Galindo, this crisscrossing of time distinguishes her screaming as evidential of a war that likewise has no end. Such violence does, however, have many traces. VI. Conclusion As invested as Hernández-Salazar remains in human rights efforts to separate the present from the past, and postwar from war, in order to declare “Sí hubo genocidio,” Schneider’s reproduction of the “Nunca más” message resonates better with this photographer’s images, as well as Galindos’ performances. In Schneider’s words, “the time to protest is Now. It is Again. It is the necessary vigilance, the hard labor, of reiterating Nunca Más, Never Again. Never, Again. And, now, again” (186). This, effectively, is what Hernández-Salazar and Galindo’s screaming make known. The interrupted yet insistent repetition of “never again” is also reminiscent of Insensatez’ protagonist and his compulsive recitation of testimonial excerpts. Because performance, photography, and all languages are, as Derrida claims, “repeatable, iterable” in a way that causes them to differ from themselves, they are structured by the same possibility of non-truth or, more appropriately, a reconfigured type of truth (“Strange” 43). While Hernández- 95 Salazar does not intentionally participate in such reconfiguration, continually appealing to legal authorities for recognition based on their understandings of literal truth and linear history, his work functions as testimonio insofar as it indeed fails. By failing to achieve such recognition, instead being misunderstood or destroyed by state institutions, his screaming angels function more like Benjamin’s “Angel of History”: an angel that speaks in a screaming silence, and does so over and over again. While Hernández-Salazar inadvertently draws attention to institutional impunity as part of ongoing war, Galindo foregrounds a “war by other means” that necessitates witnessing by other means or, to use a likewise applicable name, testimonio. Distinguishing literary testimonio from legal testimony, I have shown the former to operate by an iterative and interruptive logic that resists closure, including that of time and war alike. Rather than partake of the very logic of moving on, which testimonio, neoliberalism, and human rights politics together uphold, Castellanos Moya’s novel, Hernández-Salazar’s images, and Galindo’s performances, with their iterations, alternatively work to reimagine history in a way that “loosen[s] the habit of linear time” (Schneider 19). Such imagination is not one of “the new forms of political imagination and organization” that Beverley anticipated, let alone acknowledged as possible, when foreclosing testimonio as a historically and politically relevant genre (78). While human rights politics continue appealing to the very institutions that refuse to verify their truths, screaming as witnessing foregrounds a testimonio that instead appeals to not deciding: not deciding on truth as provable, time as progressive, nor the testimonio genre as obsolete. 96 Chapter 3: Gritos Bestiales and Post-Human Migrant Politics In 2015, a caravan of Honduran migrants, all of whom had been mutilated during previous attempts to reach the United States by riding atop freight trains, tried again. Rather than travel with the goal of finding employment and sending remittances back to their families, they journeyed toward the White House in order to ask the U.S. government to stop investing so much in border control. As double amputee Geremia Gamez states, “We want President Barack Obama to see the truth of what happens to migrants, the consequences of his immigration policies… And all the money they’re spending to put weapons on the border” (Ollstein). Against the idea that sovereign power should protect itself, as well its borders, Gamez suggests that such power instead should protect human rights as universal rights. According to Wilfredo Garay, another caravanner, “Nosotros lo que andamos peleando es que todos los migrantes tenemos derechos, está en la constitución de todos los países” [“We are walking and fighting for the fact that all migrants have rights, it is in the constitution of all countries”] (Hinojo). 24 Garay is likely referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United Nations adopted after World War II in an effort to secure fundamental rights and freedoms, including “the freedom of movement,” for humans worldwide. 25 Many nations are failing to uphold this contract, producing a mass violation of human rights that critics deem a “humanitarian crisis”. 26 While the caravan is vocal about its mission of 25 Article 13 of the declaration asserts that citizens have the right to leave and return to their countries at any time, which many individuals and organizations interpret as a defense of international migration (“Universal”). 26 In 2014, President Obama declared a surge in migration between Central America and the U.S. to constitute “a humanitarian crisis” (Garden). In the introduction to Humanitarian Crises and Migration, which addresses the phenomenon on a global scale, editors define such crises as “any situation in which there is a widespread threat to life, physical safety, health or basic subsistence that is beyond the coping capacity of individuals and the communities in which they reside” (5). 97 making government officials and the general public aware of this crisis, photographs of their activism point to a related, though different, problem. Multiple newspaper articles contain images of its members boarding the train on one leg, sitting in front of city halls with two prostheses, and leaning against each other just to keep their variably disfigured bodies from falling to the ground (Figure 18). Figure 18. The caravan of mutilated migrants arrives to Apizaco, Mexico. 2015. E-Consulta Tlaxcala. Web. <http://e-tlaxcala.mx/nota/2015-04-05/tlaxcala/llega-caravana-de-migrantes- mutilados-apizaco> Though the caravan considers the striking sight of themselves to be instrumental in making President Obama “see the truth of what happens to migrants,” such images also expose migrants’ exclusion from who, or what, counts as “human” in the first place. In a thorough critique of how liberalism has defined and defended “humanity” since the Enlightenment era, Elizabeth Anker observes how “corporeal integrity” functions as a “baseline condition that precedes the ascription of dignity and rights to an individual” (4). 27 Noting the ongoing disavowal of physical vulnerability, as well as mutability, within human rights discourse, she claims liberalism to script the human rights subject as “a body that is whole, autonomous, and self-enclosed” (4). This limited definition of the human rights subject illustrates the need to consider migrant politics that differ from that of the caravan. Rather than appeal to institutional recognition, including that of President Obama, most migrants, mutilated and not, only insist upon continuing northward. In doing so, they identify not as humans protected by universal declarations, but as 27 Explaining her usage of the word “liberal,” Anker calls it a “placeholder through which to correlate broad ideological currents that, for better and for worse, regulate basic expectations about political existence” (5). She is most concerned with ideologies about “freedom,” “reason,” “self-possession,” and “autonomy,” among others, which she claims to be “Enlightenment based” yet still operative today (5). 98 post-humans desperate to move within a global capitalism that decides — or indeed denies — their rights. According to John Holloway, global capitalism exceeds borders in ways that put nation-state sovereignty into crisis and prevent it from providing citizens with fundamental human rights, including security and employment. 28 International industries such as gold mines and sweat shops compete with, and oftentimes directly destroy, local livelihoods, including agriculture, across Central America and Mexico. Holloway attempts to formulate a migrant politics that attests to this reality, yet his proposal exhibits another problematic humanism. Claiming that migrants who lack any opportunity for labor, let alone capital, break through national borders in an act that is inherently political, he states, “Faced with the mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal: NO” (1). Here, Holloway premises his notion of a migrant scream upon the presupposition that economic refugees willfully move away from mutilation, traveling as complete and free humans. Elaborating upon this process, he calls migration “a constant struggle to get away from capital, a struggle for space, for autonomy, a struggle to lengthen the leash, to intensify the dis-articulation of domination” (189). Lengthening the leash, of course, is not the same as ridding oneself of that leash. Likewise, getting closer to the center of global capitalism, the United States, does not exactly equate to fleeing capital. While Holloway’s insightful claims do inform my understanding of migration as a figurative mode of screaming, I consider his argument that migrants are able to disidentify with mutilation, as well as other modes of domination, to be anthropocentric and overly optimistic. Within this chapter, I propose gritos bestiales, or bestial screaming, to figure 28 Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment” (“Universal”). 99 an alternative, post-human migrant politics. This politics understands physical mutilation to be one of the multiple ways that Western philosophy, nation-state sovereignty, and global capitalism bestialize human bodies, especially within the context of mass migration. By discussing these ways, I will expose a “humanitarian crisis” in which the human rights subject is itself in crisis and, as such, in need of reformulation. Unlike the aforementioned caravan and other human rights activists, I argue for the importance of a post-human migrant subject. Rather than appeal to institutional recognition and protection on behalf of a whole, autonomous, and universal humanity, this political subject insists upon its own bestialization as necessary to surviving the current neoliberal world order. Gritos bestiales situate the political subject beyond liberalism’s definition of it as a speaking, rational, and contractually bound member of a political community. 29 This subject, which corresponds to that previously mentioned by Anker, is also “whole, autonomous, and self- enclosed” (Anker 4). In contrast, a post-human migrant subject makes claims through screaming that is both literal and figurative. Such screaming includes the audible cries of freight train passengers falling to their deaths, as well as the equally shocking sight of survivor amputees struggling to re-broad the trains. Though such behavior appears senseless and self-destructive, it evidences the post-human logic of a neoliberal world order that bestializes and capitalizes upon certain humans’ lives. According to Cary Wolfe, “posthumanism” is a theoretical discourse that opens ontological closures, “[forcing] us to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human 29 Discussing “the Lockean rights-bearing subject” as the political subject of classical liberalism, Alex Gourevitch describes a “rational, self-willing agent” who enters into contract with civil society “in order to better protect his freedom to exercise his rights” (304). Unlike Anker, Gourevitch distinguishes this subject from the human rights subject, claiming the latter to be more of a victim than a self-willing agent (302, 304). I follow Anker in treating the human rights subject as a liberal subject insofar as both are “whole, autonomous, and self-enclosed” (Anker 4). 100 experience” […] and consider other living beings’ “autopoetic ways of ‘bringing forth a world’” (What xxv). The world that migrants bring forth, both as dehumanized humans and self- identified beasts, is a world in which they do not actually “get away” from capital, nor appeal to human rights discourse. Rather, they inadvertently employ gritos bestiales that foreground their very lack of human rights, especially amid a global capitalism that facilitates the mobility of transnational companies and goods while restricting that of people. By challenging Western philosophy’s distinction between humans and animals, this screaming also disputes the political arguments that cause and justify much of the violence against migrants. For Wolfe, as long as humans continue distinguishing themselves as intellectually and morally superior to animals, they will devalue fellow humans as likewise exploitable and even killable (Animal 8). In The Beast and the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida makes a similar claim while explaining the connections among Western philosophy, nation-state sovereignty, and humanitarianism. Gabriel Giorgi extends Derrida’s critique of these discourse’s anthropocentrism in Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica, which focuses on how global capitalism produces a post-human neoliberal order. Throughout this chapter, I read Derrida and Giorgi’s texts alongside a documentary film and book-length chronicle about Central American migration through Mexico. In doing so, I argue that the bestialization of migrants exposes nation-states and global capitalism to be the most beastly, or brutal, powers of all. Though hegemonic philosophical and political discourse, including that about human rights, frames such powers as protective and progressive, Rodrigo Reyes’ Purgatorio [Purgatory] (2013) demonstrates the fabular, or fictitious, nature of these discourses. Building upon related critiques of nation-state sovereignty and global capitalism, Óscar Martínez’ The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (2013) describes how migrants sometimes 101 identify as the very beasts they are treated to be, ultimately suggesting gritos bestiales to be an appropriate figure for a post-human migrant subject. II. Rodrigo Reyes’ Purgatorio As a cinematic meditation on the establishment and defense of national borders, Purgatorio illustrates how human/animal hierarchies contribute to the moralization of nation- state sovereignty, even when those nation-states are clearly failing to guarantee their citizens basic human rights. Following Derrida’s critique of the ways in which Western philosophy relies on fable to justify state and imperial violence, I interpret this film as an exposé of the falsehoods contributing to the bestialization of migrants within their home countries, Mexico, and the United States. As the physical deformation of human bodies, mutilation by modern freight trains is the most literal mode of such bestialization; yet, it is not the first nor only mode. Starting with the earliest divisions of geographical territories, Reyes historicizes the advent of nation-states as inherently violent insofar as they separated humans from animals and, in doing so, set the theoretical model for treating certain humans as likewise non-human. Within Purgatorio, such historical background helps explain contemporary border control discourse, especially that which explicitly dehumanizes migrants as wild “game” who do not belong within the United States. For this chapter’s purposes, Purgatorio also prompts a reading of how nation-state sovereignty and global capitalism together have contributed to mass migration as an ongoing humanitarian crisis. In Purgatorio’s opening scene, Reyes encourages viewers to imagine a world without borders as a world without the humans who have invented and enforced them. As the film’s director and narrator, he states, “Close your eyes. Try to imagine what the world was like many years ago, when borders didn’t exist. It was a time of great fear and wonder, mystery.” Meanwhile, he shows footage of expansive natural landscapes, one with a cow slowly eating 102 grass on a windy cliff edge beside the ocean. There are no artificial divisions or hierarchies in sight, for Reyes notes how “there was no animal capable of transforming the world, and then we arrived” (Figure 19). Fig 19. Reyes narrates a brief history of modern nation-states. Purgatorio. 2013. RR Cinema. According to Reyes, humans’ capacity for transformation inheres in their “miracle of thought,” which he understands as the mastermind behind a world now rife with conflict and violence. Vaguely referencing the story of Babel, he states, “We had a dark secret crawling around at the bottom of our hearts. We lost our very first language that connected us all.” This loss engendered “madness…violence, hate, separation, [and] enemies,” as well as the eventual naturalization of modern nation-states as necessary to maintaining order and protecting citizens from harm. In its brief history of man-made borders, Purgatorio relates human brutality with language. This relation is at odds with Western philosophy’s overvaluation of humans as distinctly articulate, and thus exceptionally moral, political subjects. Analyzing animals’ simultaneous exclusion and inclusion within Western philosophy, ranging from that of Aristotle to Martin Heiddegger, Derrida notes that “what is attributed as ‘proper to man’ also belongs to other living beings if you look more closely, but also, conversely, that what is attributed as proper to man does not belong to him in all purity and all rigor” (56). Against Thomas Hobbes’ claim that animals exist outside of language and thus outside of law, Derrida describes situations of taming, organizing territory, and other non-verbal contractual behavior between animals and humans (56). These examples suggest animals to be no more “outside-the-law” than sovereign power, or power that at least claims to be sovereign. While Western philosophy commonly places animals below the law and God above the law, suggesting sovereign power to be proper to humans, Derrida situates this power as likewise beyond the law insofar as it does not necessarily 103 obey the very order it enforces. Rather, it appeals to its existence as law in order to except itself from this law. Observing sovereign power to be absolute by self-definition, Derrida notes how such absoluteness absolves it, “unbinds it from all duty of reciprocity,” and grants itself the power not to assume responsibility for its own actions (57). This observation prompts Derrida to turn the tables on philosophy, suggesting sovereign power to be even less contractually-bound than animals. In challenging the human/animal hierarchy, Derrida’s ideas also support Reyes’ critique of nation-states and nationalism as far less rational, as well as ethical, than they often claim to be. Sovereign power’s ostensible absoluteness permits it to operate with impunity, being held accountable to nobody but itself. In an effort to justify the sovereignty of nation-states, however, Western political philosophy curiously relies on fables, including those within Machiavelli’s Prince and Hobbes’ Leviathan. Reading philosophy’s usage of animal characters as internal contradictions that weaken its claims about sovereign power as proper to humans, Derrida develops the notion of “counter-fabulation.” He defines such “counter-fabulation” as an interpretive technique that entails “a slow and differentiated deconstruction of… the dominant, classic concept of nation-state sovereignty” (75). This deconstruction exposes “dishonest fiction[s]” in favor of more “honest” ones (75). Engaging the moral in La Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb,” a fable that critiques sovereign power, for example, Derrida shows how such power disguises its relationship to brute force as a relationship to justice, making its own transgressions seem more warranted than that of other law-breakers. Claiming La Fontaine’s wolf to represent such sovereign power, Derrida first notes how this wolf falsely accuses a lamb of transgressing the law. When the lamb defends itself with valid appeals to the very law it has supposedly disobeyed, the wolf hastily eats it, violently incorporating the lamb into its own 104 body. Dwelling upon the first line and moral of this fable, “The reason of the strongest is always best,” Derrida argues that nation-state sovereignty has to rationalize its bestiality by “making known” its own power, “i.e. giving the impression of knowing, giving the effect of knowledge, resembling knowing where there isn’t necessarily any knowing” (35). This connection between nation-state sovereignty and fable likewise plays out in Purgatorio. After illustrating how the establishment of nation-states rests upon a human/animal hierarchy, Reyes interviews an unidentified politician who follows Western philosophy in using fable to moralize obedience to a supposedly sovereign power. First, the politician notes how he is funding the construction of a massive metal X, which Reyes only identifies as somewhere along migrants’ routes northward. After years of construction, the X remains incomplete and, by the look of it, at least temporarily abandoned. According to the politician, people need icons inspiring them “to improve” as citizens. Since this X represents all Mexicans, he claims it to stir feelings of nationalism, which he supports with a fable about a bird. Indirectly alluding to the dire situation of many Mexicans, he states, “a bird once saw a giant fire and decided he must do all he could to help put it out. Thus, he wetted his wings and continually flew over the fire, risking his life just to drop little drops of water each time.” This fable is about risking one’s life out of commitment to a greater cause, even when that cause seems as futile as building a giant X in the middle of nowhere or, by extension, maintaining a sovereign nation-state amid an increasingly global economy. As an allegory for Mexican nationalism, the politician’s fable suggests that migrants should endure the country’s hardships of poverty, hunger, and endemic violence rather than try to find a better, or at least bearable, life elsewhere. To make his fable convincing, however, this politician would have to prove that the Mexican nation-state is still capable of protecting its citizens, especially its most vulnerable ones, as a reward for such 105 commitment. Because he does not do this, his role in Purgatorio instead provides a failed defense of nationalism and nation-state sovereignty. Upholding sovereign power in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes claims that such power ought to threaten and safeguard its citizens simultaneously, thereby scaring them into following its rules so to remain protected by, not subjected to, its own punitive power. When citizens fear death more than the repercussions of transgressing the law, however, fear motivates disobedience instead of obedience. This points to another internal contradiction within philosophical defenses of sovereignty: “sovereignty causes fear, and fear makes the sovereign,” unless the fear that sovereignty produces becomes more threatening than sovereignty itself (40). Such is the moral, or indeed counter-fable, of Derrida’s reading of Leviathan, which also applies to the situations of migrants who leave their home countries out of extreme fear and desperation. In many Latin American countries, including Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the nation-state is verifiably terroristic, having committed massacres and even genocides against its own citizens within recent history. 30 As drug and gang violence continue to increase within these same countries, many citizens refuse to rely on corrupt police, military, and politicians as their safeguards. Opting to migrate, they demonstrate Derrida’s observation that “if you take fear to the limit of the threat either exerted or felt, i.e. terror, then you have to conclude that terror is both what motivates respect for laws and the transgression of laws” (41). In migrants’ cases, terror cancels out the contract they would otherwise have with their nation-states, prompting them to place themselves beyond its law in ways that make them very susceptible to violence, including that committed by the nation-state itself, international gangs, and international border control forces. 30 Some examples of this state-sponsored terrorism include the Tlatelolco Massacre (1968) in Mexico, the El Mozote Massacre (1981) in El Salvador, and the genocide against Mayan populations in Guatemala (roughly 1981-1983). 106 Amid such vulnerability, migrants remain vocal about the fabled nature of nation-state sovereignty as justifiably powerful, and indeed humane. Reyes demonstrates this point in Purgatorio when he films two migrants standing before a different national monument (Figure 20). Staring at a concrete obelisk right on the U.S.- Mexico border, one reads its bronze plaque aloud: “Limit of the Mexican Republic. Treaty of 1853. 1882-1889. Tampering with this monument is a crime.” Unfazed by these words and the threat they pose, both migrants proceed to discuss the ways the Mexican Republic and other nation-states have failed them. One of the migrants, who is from El Salvador, mentions how the grave poverty across Latin America receives much less media attention than its tropical rainforests and pristine beaches. As he states, “On the shows, they show scenery, not the people [and] their houses.” Figure 20. Two migrants read a monument plaque marking the U.S.-Mexico border. Purgatorio. 2013. RR Cinema. Far from ignorant and inarticulate brutes, these migrants are perceptive of how mainstream media also participate in spreading fables, or what Derrida calls the “becoming-fabulous of political action and discourse, be it described as military or civil, warlike or terroristic” (36). 31 In other documentaries on Central American migration, including Uli Stelzner’s Asalto al Sueño (2006), migrants describe their home countries as having been “comprado[s]” [“bought out”] by the United States, leaving them with corrupt nation-states and highly volatile economies. Critiquing the homeland security and repatriation programs that fail to address these causes of 31 In the Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida discusses philosophical debates over how rational and intelligent animals may be while also contemplating the French word “bête,” which means animal, beast, and brute. I have only touched upon these debates, suggesting that bestialized migrants challenge Western philosophy’s argument that all animals are brute and brutal. 107 migration, moreover, a Nicaraguan states, “es tratado de los libres comercios y la globalicazión mundial… siempre el más fuerte va a tener superioridad sobre el mas débil” [“it is a matter of free trade and globalization… the stronger will always have superiority over the weaker”]. Here, a migrant unknowingly links the moral from La Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb” with global capitalism, suggesting that smaller and weaker countries cannot compete with world powers in an unregulated international economy. 32 Like the lamb, they simply cannot defend themselves, nor their citizens. Many proponents of border control fail to make this connection, remaining ignorant to the ways in which various countries, including the United States, directly contribute to the very migration that they blame on migrants’ home countries. In a scene filmed along Arizona’s portion of the U.S.-Mexico border, Purgatorio features a volunteer patroller who exhibits such ignorance while justifying the ways he hunts migrants “like game” (Figure 21). According with Derrida’s argument that nation-states often behave more beastly than the animals, as well as humans, that they situate beyond the law, this patroller demonstrates the brutality of uninformed nationalism. As a self-identified patriot who stereotypes all migrants as drug dealers and job stealers, he points out that border enforcement could be much crueler than it currently is. In his words, “We give them [migrants] water, a sack lunch, and a free ride home. What’s cruel about that? Gun towers or mining the border would be cruel.” Aiming to disorient migrants and thereby increase their chances of getting lost or captured while crossing the dessert, this patroller picks up trash that he believes to be left by migrants as markers for their walking routes. As he 32 This economy includes free trade agreements such as The North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (2004). Debates weighing the pros and cons of NAFTA and CAFTA remain undecided on their overall effect. Proponents claim that such agreements have provided jobs and lowered consumption costs while critics note how local industries, especially agriculture, have diminished. 108 explains, “They go through here like game. Some people hunt deer. If you hunt an individual that’s an even greater thrill.” This is a very explicit bestialization of humans, yet the hunter elaborates that he would prefer “to see the Mexican people build up their own country.” Noting their abundance of natural resources, he asks, “So what’s the problem? Why not overthrow their corrupt government?” Having just devalued migrants as law-breakers worthy of inhumane treatment, this patroller here hypocritically encourages them to disobey nation-state sovereignty even more. Such encouragement also reveals another historical oversight on his behalf, for part of the “problem” is that even when Latin Americans have attempted to overthrow their corrupt governments, the United States has intervened in order to protect its own political and economic interests. Figure 21. An interview with a volunteer border patroller in Arizona. Purgatorio. 2013. RR Cinema. During the 1980s, for example, the United States helped fund counter-insurgency campaigns in El Salvador and Guatemala. Such actions were part of larger continental plans including Operation Condor and Operation Charly, both of which the U.S. supported under the premise, or perhaps guise, of Cold War politics. These plans entailed removing socialist presidents from power by brute force, as well as stifling excitement about the success of Cuba’s Revolution. While the U.S. justified such violence with claims to protect humanity from communism’s spread, the most direct benefactor of Operation Condor was arguably the U.S. itself. Having replaced democratically-elected presidents with military dictators guided by U.S.- educated economists, such violence facilitated the spread of neoliberal policies from the 1980s onward. 33 These policies include free trade agreements such as The North American Free Trade 33 Many of these economists are known as “Chicago Boys” who studied libertarian economic models in the U.S., primarily at the University of Chicago, before returning to their home 109 Agreement (1994) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (2004), as well the general privatization of public services. Connecting his critique of nation-state sovereignty to the promulgation of global capitalism, Derrida draws on Carl Schmitt’s argument against “humanitarian wars,” which include the wars that the U.S. has supported throughout Latin America. According to Schmitt, “The ‘concept of humanity’ is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism” (72). Though Schmitt wrote this statement in the 1930s, long before the Cold War’s apex and the proliferation of global capitalism, Derrida claims that modern nation-states still invoke “humanity” as a “universal interest” that masks nefarious interests such as profit (72). Since the 1980s, Latin America’s civil wars have shifted into multi-national drug wars and border wars, yet proponents continue to wage such wars in defense of “humanity,” or at least certain humans. These proponents include politicians and businessmen involved with the military-industrial complex and prison-industrial complex, as well as naïve nationalists such as the aforementioned border patroller. Observing how nation-states invoke “humanity” as a “universal interest,” or at least the “interest of the proper of man in general” to treat certain men as non-men, Schmitt concludes that there “are no wars of humanity as such,” for humanity has no enemy but itself (72). This conclusion seems blatantly true, yet its implications are more difficult to discern. If humanity has become its own adversary, how can politics get beyond the limits of a human political subject that is already, by definition, imbricated in a history of ideological and physical violence? To be clear, this inquiry does not entirely dismiss the importance of human rights discourse, which has countries and implementing neoliberal reform. These economists were primarily Chilean and Argentinian but their influence reached across Latin America. 110 been key in bringing multiple Latin American military officials to justice. 34 It does, however, acknowledge this discourse’s compliance with the current neoliberal world order, which upholds liberalism’s definition of the political subject as whole, rational, and, most of all, free. While economists justify policies such as NAFTA and CAFTA with the argument that an unregulated market is the best market, they remain willfully ignorant of how these economic freedoms impinge upon those of certain individuals, namely citizens of smaller and weaker countries. Both this market and human rights discourse operate by the same pretense of a universal humanity, which migrants show to be neither theoretically nor practically true. When Reyes asks the aforementioned migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border about the value of life, for example, neither of them appeals to their inherent human dignity and associated liberties. After a short pause, one of them answers, “Well, for me, life is just work. If you don’t work, you don’t survive.” For migrants, obtaining work often entails bestializing themselves in a way that is quite different from birds carrying water. Rather, they have to step outside the law, board freight trains, and subject themselves to various types of violence. In doing so, they cross a border that Reyes shows to be far more than “just a line in the sand.” To end the film, he asks, “When will it disappear? When will the illusion fade away?” According to Derrida’s understanding of nation- state sovereignty and global capitalism as fundamentally fabular, one cannot expect authorities to dispose of such illusion anytime soon, even as mass migration northward continues to intensify worldwide. Though the neoliberal order is creating a humanitarian crisis, it does not hurt those in power, instead widening the gap between the rich and the poor, as well as humans and animals. Rather than rely on the fables of nation-state sovereignty, global capitalism, and 34 Aside form helping to convict officials in Guatemala, Argentina, and Chile as guilty of human rights abuses, this discourse also has worked to combat systemic violence worldwide. 111 humanitarianism, Derrida thus encourages counter-fabulation as a way of producing more honest, and perhaps less violent, fictions. Purgatorio contributes to such counter-fabulation by historicizing the ways a false human/animal hierarchy is central to these fabular discourses, including the United States’ border control discourse. Extending Purgatorio’s political critiques, Martinez’ The Beast shows how global capitalism effectively turns humans into animals, or what some scholars describe as “animal capital.” Migrants have their own counter-fable about this situation, which they suggest to be a humanitarian crisis necessitating a post-human migrant subject. This counter-fable centralizes around “The Beast,” migrants’ name for the freight trains they they they chance their lives upon. III. Óscar Martínez’ The Beast Investigative journalist Óscar Martínez has spent over a decade traveling the migratory route between Guatemala and the United States, as well as reporting on the violence within his home country of El Salvador. The Beast is one of the few book-length accounts examining how Central Americans survive various legs of their journeys. It is more descriptive than analytical, and much less contemplative than Purgatorio’s meditations on the history and symbolism of borders. As a compilation of short stories covering everything from human trafficking to migrant shelters, Martinez’ book extends my analyses of nation-state sovereignty and global capitalism by showing how migrants sometimes self-identify as beasts, usually vis-à-vis their identification with The Beast train. I read such identification alongside Gabriel Giorgi’s Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica [Common Forms: Animality, Culture, and Biopolitics], which offers additional philosophical and literary perspectives on how post-human subjects can reformulate migrant politics. Interpreting The Beast as a counter-fable exposing nation-states and 112 global capitalism as far more brutal than migrants themselves, I position gritos bestiales as representative of these migrants’ inescapable, as well as irreversible, dehumanization. The literal translation of Martinez’ original title, Los migrantes que no importan, is “The migrants who do not matter.” However, the English version of this book bears the moniker migrants give the freight trains that they illegally ride while traversing Mexico: The Beast. They use this name to reference the untamable and traitorous nature of such transportation, which offers them their best chance of crossing Mexico while simultaneously subjecting them to inhumane treatment, including physical mutilation. By capitalizing upon and deforming human life, The Beast turns many of its passengers also into beasts, though far less powerful ones than itself. Yet, as the materials within this chapter show, the bestialization of migrants is not simply an effect of these mechanical monsters. It is the result of a neoliberal world order that facilitates the mobility of capital, or cargo, while restricting that of human beings. According to this order, profit matters more than the protection of life, rendering human rights (as well as animal rights and environmental rights) irrelevant. Throughout many of Martínez’ short stories, The Beast functions as synecdoche for this world order, eliciting gritos bestiales that are sometimes figurative, and other times literal. Such screams include those of horror and excitement, as well as desperation and resilience. In every case, they are expressive of political subjects who are post-human insofar as they refuse to identify as a human rights subject who is whole, autonomous, and universal. While constitutions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights uphold this subject as worthy of employment, protection, and freedom to cross borders, migrants recognize themselves as lacking these rights and, as such, more like animals beyond the law. 113 In addition to “The Beast,” migrants refer to the freight trains as “the snake,” “the machine,” and “the monster” (53). They also mythologize them as pulsing with “Central American blood” and emitting the “squeaks and creaks of those who lost their lives under its wheels” (49). Yet, as much as migrants fear the train, as well as the violence they experience along its route, they almost unanimously consider life in their home countries to be even more dangerous. For this reason, they subject themselves to sexual violence, kidnapping, extortion, and other forms of abuse that they are statistically likely to suffer, oftentimes aboard or nearby The Beast. 35 Noting how a majority of female migrants experience sexual violence at least once, oftentimes in exchange for temporary physical protection, Martínez claims this capitalization of one’s own flesh to be part of “an entire system of logic” (xiv). Some women call this system “cuerpomátic,” or “bodymatic,” suggesting their body to function like “a credit card… which buys you a little safety… a more comfortable ride on the train” (73). According to this logic, the fact that migrants’ lives “do not matter” is different from them being completely worthless. In the migratory context, to “not matter” means that certain humans lack intrinsic value. Whatever value they do have, if only temporarily, they acquire through some sort of biopolitical exchange wherein a life becomes a service, an asset, or even a death. In this sense, migrants’ lives closely resemble those of animals, or what Nicole Shukin calls “animal capital.” Noting how the symbolic devaluation of animals in Western philosophy coincides with the economic valuation of such animals in capitalist markets, Shukin claims “animal capital” to designate “a tangle of biopolitical relations within which the economic and symbolic capital of animal life can no longer be sorted into binary distinction” (7). For Shukin, 35 Studies on the percentage of women who are raped along the migratory route claim it to range from 60 to 80 percent (McIntyre). 114 “animal” demarcates symbolic and economic capital that can be acquired by advertising companies and meat packing industries alike. Amid global capitalism, she claims that “animal” refers not to a singular type of being but to an amorphous idea that functions more like a fetish (3). 36 In Formas Comunes, Giorgi expands upon this understanding. Relating Shukin’s “tangle” to his own definition of “animality,” he affirms it as a “dispositivo donde se anudan, de modos quizá paradigmáticos, cuerpo y capital, y donde se piensa la capitalización de la vida y de la muerte” [a device where body and capital get tangled, in perhaps paradigmatic ways, and where one thinks about the capitalization of life and death” (Cápitulo 3). For Giorgi, the economic valorization of animal bodies is politically significant insofar as it exposes their exploitation by humans: humans who rationalize their own animality, or bestiality, by asserting animals’ very lack of humanity. In this sense, Giorgi situates “animality” as a biopolitical device that reveals both “animal” and “human” to be unstable ontological categories. Susceptible to deconstruction and counter-fabulation, such categories are also interpretable as post-human. Challenging the human/animal hierarchy within global capitalism, Giorgi turns to a variety of literary examples, including Martín Kohan’s “El Matadero,” a short story in which a cattle truck driver hears a whisper coming from his truck while en route to a slaughterhouse. When he stops and checks on the cattle, “No vio lo que imaginaba: un montón de animales con vida, sino otra cosa… Vio un puñado de animales a los que iban a matar muy pronto. Esa inminencia es lo que vio” [“He did not see what he imagined: a bunch of live animals, but something else… He saw a handful of animals that they were going kill very soon. That 36 Analyzing an ad for a Canadian magazine that represents Canada as a beaver, Shukin notes how the beaver functions as “Canada’s fetish insofar as it configures the nation as a life form that is born rather than made (obscuring recognition of the ongoing cultural and material history of its construction) and insofar as it stands in for an organic national unity that in actuality does not exist” (4). 115 imminence is what he saw”] (Kohan). In other words, he sees the very biopolitical logic that renders the cattle as capital and, as such, life subject to death. Summarizing this logic, Giorgi calls the animal body “una ‘cosa viviente’ en la que no se puede trazar ninguna distinción clara entre el vivir y el morir” [“A ‘living thing’ in which no clear distinction can be drawn between living and dying”] (Cápitulo 3). While traversing the migratory route, migrants’ bodies also function as “living things,” or “animal capital,” insofar as they are likewise subject to imminent death, and even consumption. Recognizing this reality as a reason to dissuade migrants from embarking on their travels northward, the U.S. Homeland Security department commissioned a popular song describing migrants as also cattle. The song’s lyrics include, “Colgados en sus vagones / De la serpiente de acero van migrantes como reses / en camino al matadero / por la ruta del infierno / entre humos de dolores” [Hanging on the railcars / on the steel snake migrants go as cattle / on their way to the slaughterhouse / taking hell’s route / between humes of pain] (Dickson). According to the song, much of migrants’ suffering occurs at the hands of “mara salvatrucha” and “coyotes” also atop the train. When a train passenger falls from the high-speed machine as it “whistles, roars, twists and turns,” however, it becomes victim to The Beast’s own “mortar” and “machete”: its iron wheels (Dickson). Despite such detailed descriptions, this anti- migration propaganda fails to reference global capitalism as the migrants’ gravest threat. It is difficult to represent such capitalism with a singular figure, yet Giorgi suggests the related logic of “animal capital” to become most visible as “‘un común’ entre animal y humano” [“a commonality between animal and human”] (Capítulo 3). For Giorgi, the figure that best collapses capitalist distinctions between “human” and “animal” is, in fact, screaming. Within his reading of Kohan’s “El Matadero,” he notes how the cattle driver becomes so unnerved by mysterious animal whispers that “puede que haya gritado” 116 [“he may have shouted”] (Capítulo 3). The existence, or vocalization, of this human scream is just as uncertain as that of the animal whispers. Does the driver actually scream? Is he really hearing the cattle murmur? Amid such ambiguity, Giorgi claims both the whispers and the scream, whether imaginary or not, to test the limits of language. In his words, they mark “lo que no se puede contar y lo que interrumpe la circulación y el flujo del relato” [what cannot be narrated and what interrupts the flow of the story] (Cápitulo 3). In addition to suspending the plot and disrupting the story’s narrative, such non-linguistic sounds figure a threshold, or “un común,” between “human” and “animal.” As such, they foreground the very commonality that Western philosophy and global capitalism try to repress. Within The Beast, screaming also assumes this function. Though Martínez never describes The Beast as a cattle-carrying truck on its way to the slaughterhouse, he does suggest “the shrill call of the rails” to vocalize global capitalism’s “cuerpomatic” logic wherein the worth of human bodies is reduced to their exchange value. Noting how migrants believe that the train “squeaks and creaks of those who lost their lives under its wheels,” Martínez first blurs the distinction between human and non- human sounds (49). Are the wheels truly screaming with the voices of past victims? Or, could it all just be imaginary, like in “El Matadero”? Such overlap between human and animal screaming becomes even more pronounced in the screams of migrants falling off The Beast train. In these moments of falling, human bodies transform into non-human bodies, becoming both animal and post-human. Recounting the story of Jaime, a Honduran farmer who lost part of his leg after falling between the boxcars, Martínez states, “Riiiiin! riiiiin! […] that was all he heard, the deafening riiiiin! riiiiin! riiiiin! It was the very last car that ran over his right leg… then spat him off the tracks, onto the hillside, like something regurgitated” (59). Also second-handedly relating the fall of an anonymous woman, 117 Martínez notes, “And then he was able to hear one last scream, quickly stifled by the impact of her body hitting the ground. In the distance, he saw something roll. ‘Like a ball with hair. Her head, I guess’” (60). Such a guess is likely accurate, for while mutilated migrants may become more difficult to recognize as humans, they paradoxically become easier to recognize as post- humans who have been rendered into beasts, some more literally and permanently than others. Indeed, mutilated migrants become animals precisely insofar as they no longer conform to human forms. Jaime only has one leg; the anonymous woman is now a headless corpse. Because The Beast represents a global capitalism that privileges the mobility of capital while restricting, and indeed punishing, that of humans, falls from the train may seem to mark a victorious sovereignty, be it that of capitalism itself or involved nation-states. Like the wolf in La Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb,” The Beast forcefully pulls migrant law breakers back into its maw. It is the stronger power that swallows weaker ones, using brute force so to assert its moral authority. Unlike in La Fontaine’s fable, however, many migrants survive “the bite of The Beast” (54). In doing so, they arguably exemplify Derrida’s connection between devourment and vociferation, showing gritos bestiales to be an auditory and visual figure of speech. After aligning sovereign power with “a power of devourment” in which the strong effectively swallow the weak, taking the other into itself in order to kill it, Derrida suggests such swallowing to produce an instance of speech or, indeed, screaming. As he states, What goes via interiorizing devourment, i.e. via orality, via the mouth, the maw, teeth, throat, glottis, and tongue -- which are also the sites of cry and speech, of language -- that very thing can also inhabit that other site of the visage or the face, i.e. the ears, the auricular attributes, the visible and therefore audiovisual forms of what allows one not only to speak but also to hear and listen. (23) That what gets eaten can nevertheless be heard and seen further complicates the animal/human hierarchy insofar as devourment and vociferation effectively collapse into the same action: a 118 simultaneous interiorization and exteriorization. Migrants scream when they are devoured, which can be heard as the voice of dehumanization. If a victim survives such dehumanization, however, the act of devourment becomes inscribed into their very bodies, which are no longer simply “human” or “animal.” Instead, amputees are visibly post-human and, as such, their bodies function as a visual mode of gritos bestiales. In these cases, gritos bestiales and the post-human subject become nearly synonymous, for amputees make obvious their own existence as animal capital simply by continuing to be them, in their bestialized bodies. When these bodies board The Beast once again, their existence at the threshold between human and animal, as well as life and death, becomes even more explicit. In his afterword to The Beast, Martínez describes what he claims to be the most revelatory and unforgettable image from the migrant trails: “A man missing his right leg, a crutch under each arm, stepping into the darkness toward the train tracks” (269). Noting how the train had sliced his leg off two years earlier, on a previous attempt northward, this man tells Martínez, “It has stolen so much from me, I don’t think there’s much more to take” (269). Indeed, it has stolen his very humanity, having replaced it with a bestiality that he refuses to recognize as inhibitory. For Martínez, this amputee’s remark succinctly conveys migration as an ambivalent action, entailing both surrender and a refusal against resignation. Listing off the measures the United States has taken to fortify and militarize its border, as well as the reasons Central America remains one of the most dangerous and uninhabitable regions in the world, Martínez claims the image of the mutilated man to be “a lot more powerful” in showing how “undocumented migration to the United States will not stop” (270). Indeed, it will not stop precisely because of the desperation that this image, and gritos bestiales in general, convey: a desperation that, in Martínez’ closing words, will continue “attempting to sneak into the trap of 119 the United States” (274). In this final case, Martinez’ phrasing is both highly appropriate and a bit misleading, for his book-length chronicle shows the trap of the United States actually to be a much more international threat. As synecdoche for global capitalism and the current neoliberal world order, The Beast compels migrants not to give up only by giving in – getting onboard – and chancing the devourment of their human bodies as also the vociferation of their bestialized bodies. In taking this chance, migrants do not claim human rights but, rather, a right to move, if only by way of a post-human political subjectivity. IV. Conclusion Though Purgatorio and The Beast are illustrative of why this subjectivity is important as a counter-fable to hegemonic political discourses about nation-state sovereignty, global capitalism, and humanitarianism, neither of them directly critiques human rights discourse. In Alejandro Hernández’ Amarás a Díos sobre todas las cosas, a semi-fictional account of a Honduran family’s struggle to cross Mexico, the migrant protagonist deliberately rejects identifying as a human rights subject. When Walter and his brothers are kidnapped and transported to a migratory station, he first realizes that migrants are fugitives of everything. As he elaborates, Las estaciones migratorias son tristes […] Encerrado entre rejas, te das cuenta de que mientras te subías el tren […] no eres un migrante sino un fugitivo. En eso nos convertimos apenas pisamos tierra ajena. Pero está uno tan adentrado en lo suyo, tan convencido de que lo que importa es el siguiente paso, que felizmente pierdes una conciencia básica: eres un prófugo de todo: de las miradas, del camino, de la migra, de las bandas, de vos mismo. (299) The migratory stations are sad […] Locked behind bars, you realize that while you were getting on the train […] you are not a migrant but a fugitive. We become that just by stepping on foreign land. But you are so deep in your own 120 reality, so convinced that what matters is the next step, that you happily lose a basic consciousness: you are a fugitive from everything: from looks, from the road, from the migration police, from gangs, from yourself. Here, Walter seems to verify the criminal identity created by anti-migratory political discourse, including that demonstrated by Purgatorio’s volunteer border patroller. To be a fugitive fleeing the law, however, does not necessarily mean that one does so out of fear of punishment for having broken it. As this passage points out, migrants are far from alone in their law-breaking, also fleeing gang members and corrupt police. Indeed, migrants are fleeing the law because they perceive this law as causing even more danger and terror than their perilous journey. Worse than being called a fugitive, therefore, is the possibility of appearing before the the law as a so-called human rights subject. When a journalist visits Walter in his cell at the migratory station, he is especially dismissive of human rights’ false promises and the non-governmental workers who had visited him earlier. Asked about migrants’ human rights, he affirms that “sí, tenemos derechos” [yes, we have rights] before elaborating, Tenemos derechos a ser [...] tenemos derecho a ser extorsionados, asaltados, insultados, perseguidos, humillados, golpeados, violados, secuestrados, amenazados por el MP, y al final tenemos derecho a ser entrevistados por un periodista para que le hablemos sobre nuestros derechos. (302) We have rights to be [...] we have the right to be extorted, assaulted, persecuted, humiliated, beaten, raped, abducted, threatened by the MP, and in the end we have the right to be interviewed by a journalist about our rights. In this extended critique of human rights as nonexistent for migrants, Walter describes non- governmental workers’ visits as more palliative than indeed political. He notes how they only arrive for twenty minutes, and only under permission of the very Mexican nation-state that is 121 committing many of the human rights abuses. As state-sanctioned aid for the stateless, such workers “ofrecen escribir a nuestros familiares, hablar con ellos, mantenerlos al tanto, nos preguntan qué queremos, ofrecen atención psicológica. Ninguno, desde luego, ofrece ayudarnos a escapar” [offer to write our relatives, talk to them, keep them informed, ask us what we want, offer psychological care. Nobody, of course, offers to help us escape] (304). To escape, however, is precisely what migrants want: not just to escape the sad migratory stations but to escape identification with a political subjectivity that does not serve them. For migrants such as Walter, the human rights subject does not adequately expose nation-state sovereignty and universal humanity as equally fictive, leaving such ideals “completely to be thought, merely promised” (Derrida 70). In articulating yet another critique of sovereignty as neither natural nor just, Walter likewise notes how the nation-state is more brute than just. As he states, “No hay duda de que los que abusan están tensando la cuerda demasiado […] Hoy, si hay ley, es pura mierda, pienso” [“There is no doubt that the abusers are tightening the rope too much [...] Today, if there is law, it is sheer shit, I think”] (307). Here, Walter suggests that there is, in fact, no law; there is only power pretending to be law. Unthreatened by the law’s performance of power, Walter eventually escapes the migratory station and resumes his own counter-fable, which he associates with gritos bestiales. Boarding The Beast once more, he states, Me alegro al sentir el movimiento del tren. Los migrantes gritan, sonríen, chocan las manos. Sólo quiere lo que todos queremos: ir avanzando. Por lo pronto, su ira se evapora en su sonrisa abierta, de dientes accidentados, sonrisa plena y llena de sueños infantiles. Va, pues, volando sobre su dragón de acero. (308) 37 37 The switch from first to third-person narrative voice within this passage is representative of Amarás a Dios’ style. Hernández does not use quotation marks to differentiate dialogue. 122 I am glad to feel the movement of the train. The migrants scream, smile, clap their hands. He [Walter] only wants what we all want: to continue advancing. For now, his anger dissipates into an open smile, with broken teeth, a smile full of childish dreams. There he goes, then, flying on his steel dragon. For now, Walter will continue fictionalizing The Beast as his own, knowing that he actually belongs to it, as well as the global capitalism that it represents. Such identification is the acceptance of his own bestialization: once aboard the train, he becomes animal capital at the threshold between “human” and “animal,” as well as life and death. Walter’s counter-fable is more honest than those about migrants as mere criminals or human rights subjects insofar as it accounts for a neoliberal order that renders such identities irrelevant. This order is one in which everyone breaks the law because the law itself is broken, having been destroyed by the pervasive power of an unregulated global capitalism. Exposing the complexity and difficulty of migrants’ situations as citizens not of sovereign nation-states, but of a socio-economic system that does not guarantee universal rights, gritos bestiales appear to be very cynical. Unlike Holloway’s “scream of refusal,” this screaming foregrounds migrants’ inability to escape mutilation or capital (Holloway 1). In subjecting themselves to the violence of the current neoliberal world order, however, migrants do at least reject the ostensibly natural, just, and absolute nature of borders themselves. These borders include those between humans and animals, legals and illegals, and every nation-state. Since these discourses justifying nation-state sovereignty, global capitalism, and humanitarianism all rely on a distinction between humans and animals, the fact that gritos bestiales point to a post-human “común” [commonality] between them is quite implicative. As Derrida and Giorgi suggest, this “común” exposes hegemonic political discourses as inherently violent, even when they seem to be humane, and thereby prompts the thinking of a post-human 123 migrant politics. To encourage this thinking as one beyond all borders, Giorgi situates the animal, or beast, as a figureless figure. In his words, El animal pierde la nitidez de su forma; pierde, se diría, contorno; fundamentalmente, el animal deja de ser la instancia de una “figura” disponible retóricamente, de un tropo [...] para volverse un cuerpo no figurativo, y no- figurable, un borde que nunca termina de formarse. (Introduccion) The animal loses the sharpness of its shape; it loses its outline; fundamentally, the animal ceases to be the instance of a rhetorically available “figure” or trope [...] it becomes a non-figurative and non-figurable body, an edge that never ends. If we think of the post-human political subject in this same way, the bestialization of migrants becomes an opening onto another world: a world in which honest fictions replace the current ones, gradually exposing the falsehood of all borders. This world does not belong to humans per se, but to beings who are far more diverse and dynamic. As post-human, migrants become just as unregulated as global capitalism itself, also living as “an edge that never ends.” 124 Chapter 4: El Grito del Epicentro: Traumatic Affect and Unbound Solidarity I. Introduction Internationally, Central America is most known for revolutionary movements, mass violence, and natural disasters. Consisting of three tectonic plates and bridging two continents, this small geographical region experiences an abnormal frequency of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Especially since the 1970s, such disasters have caused intensified migration northward, either to Mexico, the U.S., or Canada. This geographic volatility both unites and disunites Central America. Insofar as natural disasters are a uniform characteristic of the region, they cause the region to exceed itself, becoming less of a self-contained territory and more of a dynamic diaspora. Throughout this chapter, I analyze how such instability, and related traumatic experiences, inform U.S. Central Americans’ understandings of subjectivity and solidarity. I argue that these understandings differ from that of traditional psychoanalysis, as well as Chicano politics. While Chicano identity politics promote historical narration and transnational inclusion under the figure of El Grito del Norte, which they distinguish from Mexico’s El Grito de Dolores, I propose “El Grito del Epicentro” as symbolic of a more heterogeneous concept of Latino subjectivity and solidarity. This intervention redirects the genealogy of Latin American gritos, or screams, in a way that upends its reliance upon strict occidental paradigms, including those shared by civic and human rights. While previously detailing the history of Latin American gritos, I discussed the way these cries for national independence resounded across the continent throughout the 19 th century. Marking the gathering of anti-imperial armies and eventual constitution of republics, gritos have assumed a contradictory valence in the Latin American imaginary. Nationalists, including government officials, continue to celebrate gritos as symbols of unity and liberty, while 125 dissidents reclaim the gesture’s revolutionary denotation. 38 Such semantic conflict acquires additional complications among Latino populations in the United States. Mexican-Americans within the Chicano Movement, for example, resituate Mexico’s El Grito de Dolores as El Grito del Norte, which they deem a cry for cultural nationalism and civil rights. 39 Most active between the 1940s and 1970s, the Chicano Movement overlapped with the larger U.S. Civil Rights Movement, wherein activists worked to end racial discrimination through nation-wide protests and federal legislation. Yet, though the Chicano Movement also advocated on behalf of non- Mexican immigrants, it did not always account for the diversity of Latino populations. 40 Foregrounding the ways in which the Chicano grito differs from that of U.S. Central Americans, I call for a reconsideration of the latter immigrant group’s historical specificity. Author and scholar Arturo Arias distinguishes U.S. Central Americans as repeatedly traumatized, having endured civil wars, natural disasters, and forced migration, among other effects of neocolonial and neoliberal violence. 41 Throughout this chapter, I read the poetry of Maya Chinchilla, Mario Escobar, and Patricia Villalobos Echeverría in order to demonstrate how U.S. Central American understandings of subjectivity and solidarity exceed all borders, be they 38 For example, on September 15, the anniversary of Mexico’s colonial independence, elected officials throughout the country rehearse El Grito de Dolores, which was Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s cry for waging war against the Spanish viceroy. This cry includes exclamations of “¡Viva México!” and ¡Viva la Independencia Nacional!” Due to disillusionment with the country’s corrupt democracy and dominant Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), such celebrations often include manifestations of political dissent, including mass protests and booing. 39 While the Chicano Movement did not appeal to international jurisdiction, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it did exhibit a general concern for Latinos’ human rights. Due to its prominent concern with citizenship, both cultural and legal, I address it as a civil rights movement. 40 In 1968, for example, the Center for Autonomous Social Action organized legal and undocumented workers under the unifying motto of “sin fronteras.” 41 Though continual trauma is part of many Latin American countries’ histories of conflict, Arias suggests that Central American-Americans’ trauma is particularly diasporic, resulting from barely survivable conditions in their homeland and abroad. 126 corporeal, cultural, national, or continental. In doing so, I treat trauma as affective in ways that refute psychoanalysis’ positing of a singular and essential subject, which falsely claims the stability of one’s body and transparency of one’s feelings. While psychoanalysis’ subject shakes and splits only temporarily, the screaming Central American-American body knowingly undergoes continual displacement and transmutation, as if constituted by its very lack of constitution. Engaging the work of Arturo Arias, Ann Cvetkovich, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Brian Massumi, I focus on the ways that U.S. Central American poets resist the pathologization of trauma and the possibility of facile solidarity in favor of a more widespread deterritorialization. Such deterritorialization includes that of the voice, body, and relations among bodies, showing each to be more dynamic and unbound than Chicano authors and activists consider. Accordingly, these poets also refrain from appealing to civil rights or human rights discourses as capable of accounting for the volatility so inherent to their lives. Discrepancies between U.S. Central American and Chicano understandings of subjectivity and solidarity result, in part, from these communities’ different histories. Though both have migrated to the United States in waves since the 1850s, Mexican-Americans always have comprised the majority of Latinos (Gutiérrez, Gonzalez-Barrera). When this population began debating their collective identity decades before U.S. Central Americans, they turned to El Grito as that which united them across national borders: Mexicans with Mexican-Americans, and Latin Americans with Latinos. In 1968, Mexican-born journalist Enriqueta Vasquez established El Grito del Norte, a monthly journal based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico that informed the public about the Chicano movement’s concerns, which ranged from farm workers’ unions to educational reform. Explaining the journal’s title in relation to what many Mexican-Americans recognize as the original grito, El Grito de Dolores, Vasquez asks, “¿Por qué queremos celebrar 127 el 16 de septiembre? ¿Aún siente fe el méxicoamericano, el chicano, él de la raza hacia México?” (Enriqueta 44). Because El Grito de Dolores has transformed from a revolutionary to a reactionary figure under a notoriously corrupt Mexican nation-state, Vasquez clarifies that El Grito del Norte is nationalist in a more inclusive and transnational way. 42 Emphasizing how Mexicans and Chicanos still share cultural ties, she formulates a cultural nationalism based more on shared history than on shared territory, and meant to incite political action: Vemos a los ciudadanos [Mexicanos] como nuestros hermanos porque sabemos que en cultura somos la misma gente. Es respetar parte de nuestra herencia cultural. Es reconocer lo que es nuestro, la historia que nos pertenece tanto como la sangre que corre en nuestras venas. (44) Yet, though Vasquez here opens nationalism to a larger, trans-border population, she still appeals to a racialized and essentialist discourse based on blood. Locating El Grito del Norte squarely north of the border, moreover, she rejects the possibility that she would ever claim the Mexican president as her own. In her words, “Despierten, hermanos, es tiempo de que luchemos por nuestro modo de vivir tal como somos. Tenemos que empezar a escribir nuestra vidas, nuestras ideas y nuestra historia” (39). As part of the Chicano Movement’s fight for civil rights, this call to write history is also a call to make immigrants’ lives recognizable to U.S. culture, government, and law. 42 During President Enrique Peña Nieto’s celebrations of El Grito, crowds have consistently booed and criticized him as an inept leader. On September 15, 2016, many protestors in Mexico City proclaimed “Fue el estado” and “Fuera Peña” while accusing the Mexican government as responsible for the disappearances of 43 students from the Raul Isidro Burgos rural teaching school in Ayotzinapa, Mexico. 128 El Grito del Norte has continued to resonate since the 1960s, both within ongoing Chicano activism and related debates about Latino cultural production. 43 Discussing Vasquez’ legacy, Dionne Espinoza notes how her ideas on group identity, coalition, and solidarity are especially pertinent. As she states, “a revisiting of her work reminds us to continue the conversation about how to build a truly inclusive, egalitarian society” (227). In the 1980s and 90s, Chicana activists and authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga proposed “transfronteriza feminism” as a way of articulating “a broader communal ground among Latinas/os” and acknowledging Latin America’s shared history of U.S. imperialism (Anzaldúa 109). Yet, as transfronterista feminists reached out to their “Southern relatives” and tried to make the Chicano grito resonate on behalf of other cultures, as well as histories, they practiced an imperial version of identity politics wherein the Northern perspective remained dominant (Moraga 212). Discussing Chicana feminists who publicly denounced U.S. intervention in Central America and actively supported war refugees traveling northward throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ana Patricia Rodríguez argues that such solidarity is largely fictitious, both in form and in content. For example, novels such as Demetria Martínez’ Mother Tongue [1994] and films such as Lourdes Portillo and Nina Serrano’s After the Earthquake [1979] are stories about such activism that are nevertheless told from the Chicana viewpoint. 44 This viewpoint is problematic for Rodríguez because it assumes U.S. Central American subjectivities to be 43 Describing the Chicano Movement as part of a longer and larger struggle, Marc Simon Rodriguez states, “For much of the twentieth century, Mexican-ancestry people sought inclusion, equality, and human rights in the United States” (Rodríguez 24). 44 According to Rodríguez, the Chicana protagonist in Mother Tongue identifies too closely with an asylum-seeker from El Salvador. Her “empathic identification” thus functions as a cooptation of the Central American migrant’s own narrative (“Fiction” 218). In After the Earthquake, the film’s Nicaraguan protagonist gradually replaces her homeland’s revolutionary ideals with a subscription to Chicana notions of “differential consciousness” and “Latina emancipation” (“Fiction” 211). 129 identifiable in ways that ignore the possibility of these subjects feeling, seeing, and speaking in radically different ways. Furthermore, this viewpoint positions U.S. Central Americans as helpless victims, as if they were psychoanalytic subjects who needed to have their own stories told to them, for them. Conceptualizing “solidarity fictions” as a genre in which Chicana authors and activists “seek resolution to the plight of Central Americans through discursive acts of solidarity,” Rodríguez claims the need “to rethink transfronterista alliances and narratives in the Americas from a Central American subjective location” (“Fiction” 200). Multiple Central American-American authors and theorists engage critically with this legacy. As I previously mentioned, novelist and literary scholar Arturo Arias characterizes this population’s subjectivity as categorically “traumatized,” bearing the imprint of “originary terror” (“Central” 182). Yet, such “originary terror” is precisely what Arias understands as subjectivity that is also non-subjectivity, or subjective location that is also dislocation. 45 Elaborating upon how trauma is imprinted upon Central American bodies in destructive yet distinctive ways, he claims it to serve “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” (“Central” 185). In making this argument, Arias appeals to Ann Cvetkovich’s understanding of 45 Though I proceed to employ the term “subjectivity” throughout this chapter, “non- subjectivity” could likewise apply insofar as I understand both to exceed a singular, autonomous body. Despite my issues with “subjectivity” as it has been defined by psychoanalysis and the larger Western tradition, I prefer the term over non-subjectivity because of its positive, not negative, connotation. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Alberto Moreiras’ argument about a “non-subject” closely corresponds to my own about Central American-American subjectivity and solidarity. Defining the non-subject as “an excess to the subject of conscience,” Moreiras claims such excess to resist cooptation by global capitalism and identitarian politics “through a radical appeal to an epistemic outside” (“Infrapolitics,” Exhaustion 33). Against “epistemic solidarity,” or solidarity predicated upon recognition and knowledge, Moreiras proposes a “relación sin relación” as the possibility of a politics “‘más allá del sujeto’” (Línea 57). Despite these correspondences, I am wary of words such as “outside” and “beyond,” for they imply the very boundedness that I understand El Grito del Epicentro to challenge. 130 trauma as affective, meaning part of the physical and psychic feelings of everyday American life (“US Central” 132). While this trauma is still painful, Cvetkovich distinguishes traumatic affect as not simply pathological, nor strictly personal. For Arias, traumatic affect challenges the hegemonic Chicano imaginary, marking “an alternative itinerary in the migrant experience, one that also takes, as Cvetkovich has it, ‘an affective turn’” (“US Central” 143). 46 For Cvetkovich, “the affective turn” incudes a proliferation of scholarship on “how affect, emotion, and feeling… get historically constructed in a range of ways,” showing trauma to be socio-political in diverse and dynamic, not simply essentialist, ways (4). Because most Central American-Americans’ traumatic experiences result from global capitalism and associated issues of land dispossession, state violence, unfair trade, and gang warfare, Arias sides with Cvetkovich in positioning ““How do I feel?’ and ‘How does capitalism feel?’” as key questions in investigating how this trauma informs Central American-American experience (qtd. in “US Central” 143). Though such general questions may seem again to ignore the historical specificity of bodies and feelings, Arias claims that “the broader optic of globalized coloniality” can make Central American-American trauma more visible (“US Central” 143). This claim is not problematic in itself, yet Arias qualifies that such visibility also “would enable them to further their cultural practices, attaining a degree of cultural citizenship as they reshape US Latinoness as well” (“US Central” 143). Here, Arias replicates the Chicano presumption that Central- American Americans want to, and are capable of, belonging to a U.S.-based civil rights 46 In Depression: A Public Feeling, Cvetkovich acknowledges that there are various understandings of affect. Noting how Deleuze & Guattari separate affect from emotion, distinguishing the former as more physical and non-narrative, she understands the concept in a more “generic” sense, which lumps affect, emotion, feeling, impulse, and desire together as personal experiences that are also “historically constructed,” or indeed public (4). While Cvetkovich understands the “affective turn” as commonly referring to strictly Deleuzian theories of affect, I follow her and Arias in understanding affect as both physical and emotional. 131 imaginary. Such presumption is problematic, for it appeals to citizenship without accounting for how U.S. Central American trauma, or traumatic affect, thoroughly complicates the possibility of any belonging, be it corporeal, cultural, national, or continental. In this sense, Arias arguably fails to take his own engagement of the affective turn far enough. Elsewhere, however, Arias makes a contradictory and much more compelling claim. As he states, “‘Central American-American,’ underlines the fact that it is an identity which is not one, since it cannot be designated univocally as ‘Latino’ or as ‘Latin American,’ but is outside those two signifiers from the very start” (171). Here, Arias suggests Central American-American voices and bodies to be unlocatable, suspended among various territories. Reiterating this idea, he adds, “the US Central American body cannot properly – legally – have a visual or vocal locus for ‘America,’” referencing ‘America’ as a nation and continent (“US Central” 139). Yet, lacking a visual and vocal locus does not prevent this population from seeing and speaking in politically significant ways. Like earthquake epicenters, or epicentros, Central American-American bodies arguably displace not only themselves but also the discursive ground that surrounds and excludes them, including that delimited by the signifiers of “Latino,” “Latin American,” “Chicano,” and even “American.” In doing so, they reject the possibility of cultural or national citizenship, which would require narrating their experiences of violence and subscribing to identitarian, as well as psychoanalytic, understandings of trauma, subjectivity, and solidarity. 47 Instead appealing to traumatic affect, these Central American-Americans represent themselves as unbound and, as such, never actually belonging to anyone or anything. I contend that the 47 Following Theodor Adorno, I use the term “identitarian” to convey any ideology that pledges “no contradiction, no antagonism” and, in doing so, masks heterogeneity with a false homogeneity (149). 132 aforementioned poets — Chinchilla, Escobar, and Echeverría — figure this affect with El Grito del Epicentro, which is not as essentialist, homogenous, or civil rights-oriented as El Grito del Norte. As an alternative Latino grito, El Grito del Epicentro suggests solidarity itself to be a fault line: that is, a connection among populations that disallows such populations from ever settling into a stable, self-enclosed political identity. II. Maya Chinchilla’s The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética Guatemalan-American poet Maya Chinchilla coins the term “Central American- American” in The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética, where she relates this awkwardly hyphenated identity to Central America’s frequent earthquakes. This poet’s claim to be “del epicentro” has elicited much critical scholarship, most of which focuses on how Chinchilla and fellow Central American-Americans challenge simplistic understandings of the nation and national imaginary. Extending Américo Paredes’ concept of a transnational imaginary, Yajaira Padilla claims that Central American immigrants destabilize the notion of “nation” as a “territorial space and imagined community demarcated by fixed geographic boundaries and citizenry” (152). Likewise, Maritza Cárdenas situates the Central American-American imaginary as highly unstable. Elaborating upon Chinchilla’s “epicentro” identity, she notes how her and others’ poetry entails “a discursive fault line that decenters through multiplication” (127). This multiplication produces various cracks, yet also points of connection, all of which are subject to continual change. For Kency Cornejo, the term “Central American-American” is an unfixed category intended to provoke questions and “engage in collective efforts to document, historicize, and debate new epistemological and ontological bodies of knowledge” (208). Yet, despite this abundance of insightful scholarship on the meanings and implications of “Central American-American” as a geographical and sociopolitical territory, the U.S. Central American 133 body as itself a subjective territory remains comparatively unconsidered. Like Arias, the aforementioned scholars also avoid close engagement of traumatic affect as a theoretically and politically productive phenomenon, including within their readings of Chinchilla’s The Cha Cha Files. While Arias claims that the U.S. Central American body cannot have a visual or vocal locus within “America,” he does not question whether this seeing and speaking body can itself be a locus at all or, stated otherwise, a fixed center of epistemological and ontological knowledge. This is curious, especially considering the scholar’s aforementioned argument about Central American-Americans being unlocatable and, as such, interruptive of territorial and essentialist identities. 48 At stake in extending Arias’ appeal to traumatic affect, therefore, is a missing consideration of how affect reveals Central American-American bodies to be constitutively unstable, or always already shaken. Chinchilla’s The Cha Cha Files prompts this consideration by engaging in an indirect critique of psychoanalysis and pointing toward non- essentialist and non-identitarian understandings of subjectivity, and solidarity. Rather than treat trauma as mere pathology, Chinchilla and the other poets within this chapter suggest it to be an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the instability of all bodies, as well as the dynamic relationships among them. Chinchilla first proposes her subjective location to be “el epicentro” in a poem titled “Solidarity Baby.” As she states, “I’m just looking for my place / am I a CENTRAL American? / Sí pues, soy del epicentro” (4). Amid this interrogation of her own identity, Chinchilla also questions her capacity for understanding Central America as a place, history, and people. To begin, she states, “I’m just a solidarity baby / don’t know what it’s really like / played on fire 48 While some scholars do distinguish between identity and subjectivity, I am here using them interchangeably. 134 escapes / danced on rooftops,” attributing her ignorance to a comparatively idyllic childhood within California (3). Then situating her identity as both imaginary and indeed historical, however, she refers to her family lineage, stating, “I’m just a revolutionary honee / A product of an international relation / imaginary Guatemalan, porque Guate no existe / mistaken identity: / undercover gringa-chapina-alemana-mestiza / coming from a long line of resilience” (3). This “long line” is an inheritance from dictators and guerrillas, as well as witnesses and poets, all from whom Chinchilla nevertheless distances herself, claiming, “I’m just trying to stay away from / letting them impose their guru on me” (5). In this last instance, Chinchilla diverges from Vasquez’ valorization of blood inheritance and cultural nationalism, as well as the idea that being from a territory guarantees one’s belonging to it. Instead, she insists, “I’m just looking for my place.” Yet, the “just” in this poem is both emphatic and ironic, for she boldly claims not only to be from “el epicentro” but also to speak on behalf of it, however precarious her voice may be. As the poem concludes, “Unless we document ourselves we are invisible! / There is so much left to do, / I’m taking on telling the truth / I’m just a revolutionary mama, / Solidarity, baby” (6). In this sense, Chinchilla claims a visual and vocal locus that is not really a locus at all, for she never grounds her own understanding of “we” and “document” in a stable Central American-American viewpoint. In another poem, titled “What it’s like to be a Central American Unicorn for Those Who Aren’t,” she states, “What if I tell you that I am usually the only one of my kind? / That if I make up what it means to be Guatemalan-hyphen-American / No one in the room will be able to call me a liar?” (25). In claiming this capacity to define and redefine her Central American-American identity as she pleases, Chinchilla suggests her poetry to function as “solidarity fictions” of an epicentral sort. Unlike Chicano accounts of transnational solidarity and “facile identification,” her poems 135 describe the sharing of an epistemological and ontological wound or, indeed, traumatic affect (Rodríguez 222). In “Walking Wounded,” Chinchilla first defines wound as “an injury to living tissue caused by a cut, blow, or other impact, typically one in which the skin is cut or broken” (62). Mention of the skin emphasizes the physicality of a wound, yet Chinchilla’s following words reveal it also to be psychological, and in a way that extends beyond any singular body. As she elaborates, I open the wound and explore how you got it You tell me about all your tragedy and I want to heal you ‘cause I know I can if you. let. me. If I forget about me if I forget about me I don’t have to deal with me or my wounds my mistakes my fears my breaks and well I am the wound You are the wounded We are the walking wounded. (63) This wound is collective trauma, and this “walking” resembles a mode of talking or, more specifically, talking cure. To repeat Chinchilla, “You tell me about all your tragedy and I want to heal you / ‘cause I know I can.” As resistant as Chinchilla is toward the idea of a veridical and essential subjectivity, her vocabulary is nevertheless briefly reminiscent of psychoanalysis. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Sigmund Freud associates “traumatic neuroses” with “the factor of surprise, of fright,” as well as “a wound or injury inflicted simultaneously” (12). Noting the Greek trauma to have originally referred to bodily injury, Cathy Caruth emphasizes how Freud’s conceptualization of trauma is instead “the wound of the mind— the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (4). This wound is difficult to heal, for it is inflicted by an experience that overwhelms the subject so much that he/she cannot actually be 136 present to it, instead repressing it in a way that initiates a continuous, albeit indirect, reliving of it. According to Freud, the “wounded” are “obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past” (18). They are obliged, moreover, to mix their own subjectivity with another’s, relying on a “transference neurosis” that will enable the physician “to force as much as possible into the channel of memory and to allow as little as possible to emerge as repetition” (19). While Chinchilla is not a psychoanalyst, her collective identification in “Walking Wounded” alludes to this post-traumatic process, as well as the way it complicates psychoanalytic subjectivity and Chicano identity politics alike. Freud himself is aware of these complications, for though he generally understands the unconscious as the source and truth of one’s subjectivity, trauma causes him to question the integrity of this interior identity. Noting “trauma” to be a “break” in the unconscious’ “protective shield,” he concludes, There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of. (14, emphasis added) Unlike Freud, Chinchilla does not consider “the wound,” or break, to be a problem in need of “binding.” In fact, she suggests trauma to be a part of her subjectivity that is actually mobilizing, painful and disorienting as it may be. As she elaborates in “Walking Wounded,” I will be whole and happy and ready to fix the next problem- turned-project-turned-work-of-art but of course that isn’t how it is… i get lost in you. i don’t fix you… 137 and you get lost in me too. (62) This mutual loss corresponds with the mutual wounding Judith Butler recognizes as constitutive of all subjects, simultaneously distinguishing and undoing them. As Butler explains, humans’ vulnerability to each other, especially in violence, results from a fundamental connection in which “my very formation implicates the other in me” (46). For Butler, the fact that we cannot fully know ourselves corresponds with an openness, or woundedness, that necessitates a certain ethics. In her words, “I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control” (46). Similarly, Chinchilla depicts this lack of control as both constitutive and productive. For her, walking wounded is not a process of being mastered by a physician but, instead, a process of continual creation, with and without fellow Central American-American unicorns. Contrary to psychoanalysis, Chinchilla’s process of creation does not claim to be a solution that fixes and restores a broken subjectivity; rather, it shakes and unbinds it even more. While Freud is intent on mastering an unassimilated traumatic event through the interpretation and imposition of a psychoanalytic narrative, Chinchilla remains more concerned with turning “my wounds, my mistakes, my fears, my breaks” into a yet unwritten history, as well as solidarity. Such history and solidarity may seem to align with Chicano practices of Latino activism insofar as they acknowledge a common struggle to document and defend an otherwise subaltern population. Unlike Vasquez and other Chicanos, however, Chinchilla challenges solidarity understood as the transparent sharing of knowledge and feeling, instead suggesting it to be more of a mutual displacement, or dynamic opening and undoing of oneself. As she states, “i get lost in you… and you get lost in me too” (62). Far from corroborating a Chicano notion of cultural nationalism, this solidarity marks the transmission of traumatic affect among bodies who do not feel and speak simply as themselves and, as such, do not actually belong anywhere. 138 Yet, while Chinchilla uses epicentral imagery to distinguish Central American-American subjectivity and solidarity, she does not engage screaming as a historically relevant trope. Having situated gritos as in need of critical resignification, I now appeal to two additional U.S. Central American poets and conceptualize El Grito del Epicentro. As aforementioned, I propose El Grito del Epicentro to figure traumatic affect and unbound solidarity, showing U.S. Central American bodies, cultures, and nations to be far more heterogeneous and volatile than the Chicano imaginary acknowledges. Mario Escobar’s Gritos Interiores briefly bears witness to this Central American-American reality, yet the Salvadoran-American ultimately falls back into psychoanalytical ideas of individuation and desolation. In contrast, Patricia Villalobos Echeverría sustains an affective understanding of trauma, subjectivity, and solidarity throughout her “Grietas/Fissures” and “Reciprocity~Reciprocidad.” In doing so, she illustrates how El Grito del Epicentro also relates to a broader reconceptualization of global capitalism as productive in politically interruptive ways, creating diasporic populations who recognize themselves as likewise beyond all borders. Instead of relying on traditional, subject-centered understandings of psychoanalysis and trauma, I scaffold my respective readings of Escobar and Echeverría with related ideas by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari elaborate upon Baruch Spinoza’s definition of affect as “a capacity to affect or be affected” (xvii). They appeal to this definition in order to formulate a critique of psychoanalysis and capitalism as two discourses that attempt to regulate, and indeed repress, this affective capacity. For them, Freudian psychoanalysis turns perfectly normal physical affects, such as desire, into psychosis that needs to be talked over and treated. Likewise, they critique global capitalism for trying to reduce naturally occurring exchanges, or affections, into a commodity- 139 based economy. Against these two “apparatuses of capture,” or systematizations of otherwise productive phenomena, Deleuze and Guattari reclaim the body’s “capacity to affect or be affected” as a way of asserting rupture, excess, and what they call life’s inherent “power of deterritorialization” (427, 423). For Deleuze and Guattari, “to deterritorialize” is to expose territory, including the body, as always relational and unbound. Accordingly, they treat affect as that which multiplies connections among bodies, rendering them open, amorphous, and in the process of becoming new “lines of flight,” meaning unpredictable and uncontrollable “changes in nature” (21). These changes challenge static and reductive understandings of psychoanalysis and global capitalism, as well as subjectivity and solidarity. III. Mario Escobar’s Gritos Interiores For Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialization does not mean that borders no longer have historical and material effects. Rather, it resignifies these effects as traumatic in connective and creative, not simply divisive and destructive, ways. Such ways do not appeal to narration, recognition, or regulation but, on the contrary, the continual unbinding of bodies, subjectivities, and solidarities. Accordingly, deterritorialization refrains from working towards civil rights and human rights in a Chicano sense, instead challenging the very axiom that victims rely on institutional experts, be they psychoanalysts or governmental lawmakers, for their own survival. 49 As a child soldier originally from El Salvador, Escobar occasionally depicts his experience of trauma as in desperate need of a cure. Other times, however, he suggests this 49 Though this chapter challenges Chicano approaches to civic and human rights, it does not dismiss the value of such activism. Rather, it foregrounds the heterogeneity of Latino populations in order to propose alternative understandings of subjectivity, solidarity, and politics. 140 trauma to be a wound opening his body to the very solidarity that sustains him and his writing. Introducing Gritos Interiores, he states, Escribo estas palabras con un lenguaje sencillo y directo, dentro [sic] lo que podría llamarse mi realismo descriptivo, mostrando el meollo de mi dolor, un dolor universal de todo aquel que llora, inmigra, y a la vez se llena de esperanzas al dar ese brinco hacia el sueño americano. (13) Yet, while Escobar’s prose indeed illustrates his pain, this naïve appeal to “simple” and “direct” language proves itself impossible as Gritos Interiores progresses. Frustrated by his own incapacity to tell the truth in a way that explains and eases, if not heals, his suffering, this poet turns to screaming and depicts himself as increasingly alienated. Nevertheless, the crux of his pain remains both local and global, relevant for anybody who has experienced it, but especially for those who know the pain of struggling for the American Dream. Escobar positions his book as a poetic critique of this dream, noting how he wrote it in response to the passing of California’s Proposition 187, an initiative to prohibit undocumented immigrants from public services including health care and education. In this sense, his book appears to support the universalization of human rights, suggesting that people do not need to become citizens in order to afford access to public services. Instead of focusing on the right to claim these rights, however, he sides with Chinchilla’s aim to account for the many broken tongues and wounded bodies within the Central American diaspora. As he states, “Espero que mis letras les sea de su agrado y puedan encontrar en ellas una venda para las tantas heridas que nos han dado y nos siguen dando (13). This “venda” is not a covering or closing of wounds; rather, it is a making of more wounds, a wounding verse. As he states in “Carbonero,” Soy expresión de machete y pólvora. ¡Hijo de guerra! En mis palabras no cabe el verso dulce. 141 Con lágrimas mojo mi cuchillo de palo, Para herir en mis sueños, al político y al economista. Con balas de papel y de lengua les declaro la guerra a los sociólogos que no conocen de mi carne muerta y a los Blancos que pretenden adoptarme Les diré que yo también tengo mi historia. (17) In this poem, Escobar’s reasons for writing seem to resound with Vasquez’ aforementioned call for Chicanos to “escribir nuestras vidas, nuestras ideas y nuestra historia” in the fight for civil rights (39). Against dominant political, economic, and sociological discourses that only claim to include him, he wishes to assert his traumatic history. Yet, as militant as this poet here appears, his “balas de papel y de lengua” are not actually that accessible, for Escobar struggles more than Chinchilla to locate and amplify his voice. In effect, his Gritos Interiores illustrates the inadequacy of psychoanalysis and the need for an alternative understanding of subjectivity and solidarity: one, however, that also exceeds identitarian politics and shows screaming to be far from simply individual and internal. Escobar never finds the right figure for his voice. At first, he appears to want the very language that he cannot express. In “Amor a mi lengua,” he positions “el lenguaje” as an object of desire and engages psychoanalytical ideas of interiority, trauma, and necessary narration. Associating language with a calmness, sweetness, and hopefulness that characterize his deepest and truest self, he states, Quiero amar el lenguaje sobre todo El que me deja tranquilo después de la tormenta El que me llena de dulces esperanzas El que me hace cerrar los ojos para conocer mi existencia. (33) As aforementioned, Freud claims that once traumatic events interrupt a victim’s memory, behavior, and self-understanding, that individual must narrate such events in order to bind them 142 with sense and thereby restore one’s original subjectivity. Situating the voice as internal to his own body, only knowable by closing his eyes and shutting off external stimuli, Escobar seems to subscribe to this need for narration. In a later poem, “Mi subconsciente sale,” however, he depicts such interiority as inaccessible, beyond his own capacities for comprehension and narration. Here, he no longer views language as “simple” and “direct” but instead suggests it to be cursed rhetoric. Rather than fault himself or his trauma for his inability to express himself, Escobar blames the psychoanalytical and political discourses compelling him to speak in the essentialist and moralist ways that he cannot. Ultimately rejecting psychoanalysis, he states, La voz no me alcanza para decirte que estoy fregado, chero… Mi subconsciente está de malas, así es que se les voy a decir: al diablo con los sabios, al diablo con los políticos que hablan de la moral y del esencialismo ¡Todo es pura retórica fabricada! Discuplen… es que… hay veces que me lleno de rabia cuando me acuerdo que para la piel de adobe no existe la voz. (41) This passage illustrates how Escobar’s struggle to find his own voice ends in a dismissal of the very discourse that claims he must find that voice in the first place, supposedly buried deep beneath the disturbances and displacements characteristic of trauma, or at least trauma as understood by psychoanalysis. In addition to critiquing psychoanalysis’ conceptualization of interior subjectivity as exclusive to humans, thereby rendering objects such as “la piel de adobe” without psyche and voice, Escobar anticipates the insensitive response of an ineffective therapist. As he imagines, Humm… Pobre cipote-naciste medio muerto. Ya olvídate de la angustia y tomate un café, para que sudes la neurosis. (41) 143 “Naciste medio muerto” is a refrain throughout Gritos Interiores that conveys how Escobar feels as a survivor of Central American war now struggling to survive within the U.S. “Todos nacimos medio muertos en 1932 / Ser salvadoreño es ser medio muerto…,” he begins another poem, quoting Salvadoran poet and journalist Roque Dalton (61). In the poem “Sobrevivir,” however, Escobar distances his understanding of trauma from that of Freud’s even more, diagnosing a whole society, not simply his individual self, as pathological. “¿Cómo asimilar lo que te excluye? ¿Cómo mantenerme vivo en una sociedad de espectáculos?,” he asks (61). Considering Escobar’s positioning of his own voice as that which eludes him, this question of assimilation could be posed on both personal and collective levels. How to speak with a voice that is not his? And to a society to which he does not belong? Eventually giving up on locating his own voice, this poet instead figures trauma as screaming that enters him from the outside and interrupts his own history, as well as very body. In “Pesadillas,” he states, De las almohadas salen festejando el grito de sangre caminando por mi pecho hasta llegar a mi mejilla izquierda. Levantan el párpado asustado para meterse hasta el fondo Erizan la piel de mi cuerpo para violar mi historia. (65) This grito psychologically and physically intrudes upon Escobar’s body, wounding it in a way that will not allow him just to “olvidarse de angustia” and “sudar la neurosis,” as the aforementioned psychotherapist suggests. By this point in Gritos Interiores, Escobar instead has suggested his poetic memory, paper, and tongue to be so wounded that they remain permanently deformed and, as such, resistant to narration. “Ayúdame a cruzar el recuerdo herido,” he pleas of his own mirror image, only to then describe that image as “Asco como la herida de papel… / Joven destrozado de grito trágico / Cuya negra historia de sus labios la sonrisa arranca” (45, 53). Here claiming another grito to displace his “labios” and “sonrisa,” Escobar again situates 144 screaming at the very threshold between the inside and outside of his body. This screaming exposes the mouth itself to be an open wound, and traumatized subjectivity to be far from deeply interior and self-enclosed. Escobar’s rhetorical move is very similar to one Jacques Derrida interprets in Paul Celan’s poem, “Grosse, Glühende Wölbung.” Pointing to how this poem refrains from narrating and discernable truth, Derrida calls it “a wound whose lips will never close, will never draw together” (Sovereignties 153). By remaining open, the poem “appeals to the other without condition, in the language of a hospitality that can no longer be subject to a decision” (Sovereignties 153). This “appeal to the other” is very different from that of psychoanalysis, or any discourse of individuation and identification, because it does not exclude the unknowable and unlocatable as integral to subjectivity. For Deleuze and Guattari, who critique Freudian psychoanalysis as delimiting the body’s inherently otherness, or capacity to be affected, such exclusion is a form of territorialization. This territorialization lays claim to and divides the body against itself in a way that is reductive, not creative. Dismissing the authority with which psychoanalysts claim to interpret the narratives of traumatized patients, Deleuze and Guattari claim “signifiance and interpretosis” instead to be “humankind's fundamental neurosis” (114). Such practices are pathological insofar as they entail “a subjectification of affects” or, stated otherwise, a binding of the very forces that render bodies never singular nor self-enclosed (14). Accordingly, Deleuze and Guattari propose “deterritorialization,” which they also call “schizoanalysis,” as an alternative theory and practice: one that seeks to acknowledge trauma without reducing it to a personal pathology requiring linguistic narration and psychoanalytic interpretation or, stated otherwise, the closing of one’s wounds as also a closing off of the other. As Gritos Interiores switches from an emphasis on locating an interior language to instead 145 foregrounding an interior scream, such screaming surfaces upon Escobar’s face, not simply in the form of an open mouth but in a more persistent and pervasive permutation. This permutation is visible within the many portrait-like drawings that Escobar positions alongside his poems. Some are missing certain features, others appear to be double, and a few are fused with nearby objects. Figs 1, 2, and 3. “Angustia Nocturna,” “Nunca lo Olvides/Never Forget,” and “Converscación Intima,” and “Asco.” 2005. Gritos Interiores. For Deleuze and Guattari, defacement is necessary to exposing the body as an affective territory, meaning a territory that cannot be delimited because it consists only of constant change. 50 Understanding the face as another mode of “signifiance” seemingly immune to such ontological and epistemological rupture, they state, The face crystallizes all redundancies, it emits and receives, releases and recaptures signifying signs. It is a whole body unto itself: it is like the body of the center of signifiance to which all of the deterritorialized signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of their deterritorialization. (587) Crystallization occurs when humans identify with their faces, employing them to differentiate their bodies or, stated otherwise, claim their bodies as personal territory. Positioning the face as a metonym for his whole body, Escobar contrarily defaces himself as a means of escaping his body, or at least temporarily attempting to do so. As he states, “Hoy quiero salirme de mí / y buscar a través de la fábula el otro yo / el que se me perdió / cuando me puse el traje de soñador” (49). Here, Escobar suggests that his 50 Deleuze and Guattari sometimes call deterritorialized territory a “rhizome.” Describing A Thousand Plateaus as a book and body that is in open relation with the world, they advise readers to “always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight” (32). This way of reading entails an attentiveness to disfigurement and defacement, yielding “the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions” (32). 146 subscription to the American Dream, including its promises of universal public services and civil rights, caused him to lose “el otro yo.” This “otro yo” would seem to be the Salvadoran subjectivity he assumed before fleeing his home country, yet he also dismisses this identity as likewise unviable. Trying to dissociate himself from fellow Salvadoran poets in a poem titled “Confieso,” he states, Prisionero de mi propio pensamiento Cómo desertar de lo que he visto y he sentido? Tiernos esqueletos lloran en Centroamérica. Hoy me olvido de Roque, Aquino y Farabundo. Y que viva! Que viva esta infierno de vida, que llamamos globalización… (85) Roque, Aquino, and Farabundo are the names of Salvadoran political activists who, in different but complimentary ways, all resisted the spread of globalization and capitalism devastating their country. Roque Dalton, who Escobar mentions multiple times, was a poet and journalist who supported guerrilla efforts to overcome El Salvador’s military nation-state throughout the 1980s. 51 Suggesting his traumatic memories of having participated in this war to be too painful to bear any longer, Escobar ultimately confesses a desire to forget such memories and instead side with the very socioeconomic systems that contribute to such violence. He repeats this idea in “Himno Inmigrante,” claiming, culera patria, tu historia, es sangre derramada de indios y mestizo por hoy, pondré mis ojos en el horizonte azul y me comeré los recuerdos 51 This guerrilla coalition was called Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), named after Agustín Farabundo Martí Rodríguez, who lead the Partido Comunista Salvadoreño (PCS) in the 1930s. Anastasio Mártir Aquino was an indigenous leader who headed the Insurrection of the Nonualcos, which was a campesino uprising in the 1830s. 147 para poder inaugurar de nuevo mi vida mientras limosneo mi dignidad en estas calles Angelinas. (113) These are Gritos Interiores’ closing lines and, to the degree that they revert back to a singular and self-enclosed subjectivity, they serve to mark Escobar’s departure from Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of affect and unboundedness. As much as this traumatized survivor wants to escape the experiences that he cannot narrate, as well as the body with which he can no longer identify, he here falls back into psychoanalytic feelings of loss and lack, thus begging for his dignity in the very country that refuses to acknowledge it. Rather than feel empowered by his screaming as a deterritorializing practice, he claims to be “cargando un ignorado grito, y remando contra la brisa” (93). Though Escobar does figure screaming as the wounding and defacing of his subjectivity, he thus ultimately fails to tap into traumatic affect’s productive capacity. As such, his exclamation of “Que viva esta infierno de vida, que llamamos globalización…” is ironic without being politically interruptive. In fact, it sounds like an empty reiteration of El Grito de Dolores, which includes phrases such as “¡Viva la nación!” and “¡Viva la República!” (Escobar 85). IV. Patricia Villalobos Echeverría’s “Grietas/Fissures” For Deleuze and Guattari, Escobar’s need for individuation and recognition demonstrates a misunderstanding of traumatic affect as not only “composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual” but also “augmenting or diminishing its power to act” (256). Yet, affect only augments an individual’s power insofar as that individual opens onto everyone and everything, including the globalization that these theorists understand as likewise susceptible to deterritorialization. More than Escobar, Echeverría engages global capitalism and traumatic affect together while depicting her personal history. Co-opting global capitalism’s logics of exchange and excess in “Grietas/Fissures,” a series of autobiographical poems and images, she 148 figures subjectivity and solidarity as likewise operating across borders. Participating in an extended critique of borders as unnecessary delimitations imposed upon Latin American, and other diasporic, populations, Echeverría claims her multi-media work to complicate issues of “temporality and territory” in order to “embody a self less tied to locality and geography” (Noble). Such deterritorialization is similar to that which Deleuze and Guattari encourage, noting global capitalism to code and regulate international business while simultaneously producing its own surplus (226). This surplus is not only economic but affective, for such capitalism continually displaces people from their native territories and, in doing so, creates new and traumatic experiences of their bodies, cultures, and nations. Like Escobar, Echeverría figures traumatic affect with descriptions and images of screaming. Yet, instead of positioning such screaming as gritos interiores, as Escobar does, she presents her screaming as more liminal, for it happens in between bodies, spaces, and times, none of which are singular nor self-enclosed. Relating this screaming liminality to earthquake imagery, Echeverría suggests El Grito del Epicentro to figure Central American-American subjectivity and solidarity in ways that are even more borderless than capitalism itself. As the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants who was born in the U.S. but raised in Nicaragua, Echeverría also has endured experiences of Cold War violence, migration, and survivor guilt. In response to these experiences, she asks, “In an age of transnationalism, does the body become etherized by its myriad connections?” (Noble). Within the Central American- American context, these connections include those among internationally trained armies, tariff- free trade routes, interdependent national economies, and diasporic populations. Pointing to “a concurrent state of dissolution (dissociation) and hyper-embodiment” within this transnationalism, Echeverría answers convincingly against etherization (“Statement”). Rather 149 than become anesthetized by overwhelming sensory experience amid so many connections, the body according to this poet-artist willfully undergoes relational displacement and transmutation. Here, the implications of traumatic affect are twofold: 1) trauma, as an opening of the mind and body to otherness, is a global socio-political condition, and 2) capitalism, as a system of exchange among such minds and bodies, can be re-purposed in a way that is post-capitalist and post-psychoanalytic. While traumatic experiences can be painful and isolating, as Escobar demonstrates, Echeverría situates her own history within “a post-capitalist global economy,” which she suggests to be even more transnational and transcultural than capitalism and its ill- enforced regulations (Noble). For Echeverría, in-betweenness, or unboundedness, is not a condition that can be undone, escaped from, or cured. In “Grietas/Fissures,” she charts the process of coming to terms with her own history, as well as the connections and cracks that is has revealed and mobilized within her. Even when referencing her past, however, she resists narrating it as if she were a psychoanalytic subject trying to recover loss and thereby reconstitute an original, essential subjectivity. In “Nunca la Olvides/Never Forget,” she references her parents’ fleeing from El Salvador’s civil war, noting their feelings of desperation and guilt. She mentions how her mother reminds her of such tragedy, saying “Never forget - nunca lo olvides…/ Duele mucho el oir y recordar / que también nosotros fuimos / parte de los wet back refugiados” (“Grietas”). In emphasizing the traumatic history of Central American-Americans, Echeverría notes them also to fall under the derogatory term “wet back,” which typically applies to Mexicans living illegally in the United States. 52 Yet, rather than dwell on this identity as part of a larger U.S.-based civil rights 52 The term was made part of U.S. vernacular in the 1950s, when a mass deportation program called Operation Wetback was implemented. 150 imaginary, Echeverría mobilizes her own embodiment as both historic and dynamic, still unfolding both within and beyond her. As she states, “I, whose passage fue mas fácil, / diferentes tiempos, other circumstances / no longer teniendo que cambiar / but changing what I came to” (“Grietas”). This poem’s final line appears truncated, leaving the object (or subject) of Echeverría’s change unidentified. Is she changing the territory to which she came, or that which she came to be? “Yes,” Deleuze and Guattari would answer, for they premise their critique of psychoanalysis upon affirmation, formulating “schizoanalysis” as that which “rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it—divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syntagmatic” (13). In other words, schizoanalysis rejects fixed identification of everything, including corporeal, subjective, cultural and national territory alike (13). 53 For Deleuze and Guattari, emphasis on memory, especially as it is tied to a particular place, time, and body, is problematic insofar as it replicates psychoanalysis’ overvaluation of a singular viewpoint. As Deleuzean scholar Claire Colebrook explains, the psychoanalytic subject closes down thinking if he is seen as the point from which differences and relations unfold. Accordingly, space, seen as the field occupied, measured, and constituted by this man of consciousness, is a field of interiority— a space within which we think, a space reducible to perceptions of this specific organism. (n.p.) Space, in other words, becomes limited by the subject’s own body, as if it were categorically bound to fix and maintain that body’s particular culture, history, and territory, however exposed to otherness it may indeed be. Describing an encounter not between two “signifying subjectivities” but, instead, two bodies who know themselves to be unbound, Deleuze and 151 Guattari illustrate a sharing of feeling, or solidarity, that is strange and unlocatable. Rather than look into the other’s eyes, one body “swim[s] through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever... I have broken the wall” (171). Echeverría describes a similar encounter in “Piel con Piel/Skin to Skin.” First situating another’s face, presumably her mother’s, as what seems to be a temporal and territorial map, she states, “El suave rozo de tus pestañas con las mias nos transporta al pasado / Pestaña con pestaña / aquel tiempo cuando sobraba el tiempo” (“Grietas”). Yet, this transportation is cut short by Echeverría’s seeming inability to overcome her history of separation. As she continues, quisiera por un momento borrar mi presente para regresar a ese tiempo sin distinción barbilla con barbilla pero nos llega la realizacion de nuestros destinos diferentes al poner frente con frente (“Grietas”) What happens here is a simultaneous differentiation and unification. Echeverría cannot rejoin her mother, nor her past, but she also cannot escape her seemingly symmetrical proximity with such otherness. Chins and foreheads touch, though she is nevertheless facing a face that she cannot quite identify. As she states, “abro mis ojos y las lineas / de tu cara revelan los años de separación” (“Grietas”). This encounter is far less tragic than the facial disfiguration within Escobar’s poetry, which ends in desolation and alienation. Yet, maintaining her openness to otherness, Echeverría likewise figures traumatic affect with screaming. Alongside “Piel con Piel/Skin to Skin,” she includes an infrared portrait of herself with gaping eyes and a grinning open mouth. Similar 152 portraits appear next to the aforementioned “Nunca lo olvides” and “Borders/Edges,” another poem in the “Grietas/Fissures” series. Figs 4, 5, and 6. “Piel con Piel/Skin to Skin,” “Nunca lo Olvides/Never Forget,” and “Borders/Edges.” 1999. Standards: The International Journal of Multicultural Studies. Web. <http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V7N1/POETRY/echeverria10.html> Though all of this screaming is soundless, as it is within Escobar’s Gritos Interiores, it serves as a visual register for voice that “accelerate[s] the deterritorialization of the face” (Deleuze 546). Noting the voice to animate the face in ways that are both temporary and transitory, Deleuze and Guattari state, “The voice precedes the face, itself forms the face for an instant, and outlives it… on the condition that it is unarticulated, asignifying, asubjective” (546). Echeverría abides by this condition, herself stating, “A political voice can be borne out of subaltern identities— where strategies can be created to stimulate a new political voice whose effectiveness lies in an alternate way of defining the body” (Olson). Subaltern identities, such as those in “Piel con Piel/Skin to Skin,” are excluded from narrative history because they do not entail an easily locatable political voice. 54 For Echeverría, such exclusion prompts further reconsideration of her body as open to exchange that exceeds itself, ending neither in loss or gain but ongoing metamorphosis. Positioning the tongue as a metonym for her voice in “Borders/Edges,” she states, Deslizo mi lengua sobre bordes irregulares su forma cambia con cada pase revelando nuevas voces internas que cambian el tenor de mis palabras. (“Grietas”) Once again, the mouth is like an open wound and, as with Escobar, external stimuli enter 54 I explore Gayatri Spivak’s definition of subalternity in my first chapter, which considers the difficulty of witnessing civil war violence from a subaltern viewpoint. 153 Echeverría’s body, continually activating and revealing new voices. Unlike Freud’s pathologization of trauma, however, Echeverría does not feel the need to dispose of or master these stimuli in any way. Rather, she suggests that they should be welcomed over and over again, like the passing of unbound time, space, and desire. Echeverría’s depictions of the body closely resemble Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a “body without organs.” Differentiating this body from a psychoanalytic one, Deleuze and Guattari first mockingly state, “You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body— otherwise you’re just deprived” (159). On the contrary, a “body without organs” is not a demand, or even a concept, but “a practice”: the practice of working one’s own body out of its “organ-ization as an organic whole” (Deleuze 150, Bennett 24). According to Deleuze and Guattari, a body without organs “seeks always to disorganize and free itself from instincts and habits so as to experiment with new modes of perception and action, new modes of existence” (61). Echeverría suggests this disorganization to entail acknowledging the body as both constituted and continually undone by traumatic affect. In “Cuerpo/Body,” the poet again notes her traumatic inheritance by claiming that her body’s “bone structure hints of nimbleness through / forests, jungle, swamps / apartando matas” (“Grietas”). This nimbleness could come from past colonizers or guerillas, both of whom courageously traversed Latin American territory, yet Echeverría notes the contrasting softness of her own soles, “suave de carácter - watered down, / débil, deserter, traidora de cultura, / asimilada, americanizada” (“Grietas”). Though Echeverría calls herself a cultural traitor, she also positions herself as an “Americanized” mediator for the various nations, histories, and affects that surround her. According to Deleuzean scholar Brian Massumi, French poet Antonin Artaud likewise tried to mediate and intensify affect by packing “vast potentials for movement and meaning in a single gesture… becoming 154 like a scream of possibility, a babble of becoming, the body bursting out through an opening in expression” (Politics 44). Echeverría also figures this gesture with screaming, illustrating a subjectivity that breaks through all borders and becomes part of a larger body without organs. By claiming this borderless subjectivity within the context of her Central American- American background, Echeverría connects a particular region with a global condition, showing Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas to be more historical and political than critics commonly acknowledge. In “Conectada/Connected,” she includes another image of her screaming face, this time connected to three hearts that beat below it. Figs 7 and 8. “Corriente/Current” and “Piel de Culebra/ Snake Skin.” 1999. Standards: The International Journal of Multicultural Studies. Web. <http://www.colorado.edu/journals/standards/V7N1/POETRY/echeverria10.html> Within the poem, she describes a cosmic current, or affective force, that envelopes, mobilizes, and undoes her. As she states, A cosmic current envelops me en su movimiento estelar Backwards, forwards arriba, abajo me mece entre Mística y Lógica Past and Present Indio y Blanco (“Grietas”) Entre, or in between, she again places and displaces herself. In “Piel de Culebra/ Snake Skin,” moreover, she surrounds her own head with seven screaming mouths, copies of the very same one from “Corriente/Current.” Far from the psychoanalytic subject, as well as Chicano identity politics, the screaming voice here figures a threshold between various bodies, each without organs, organization, or territorialization. Such screaming points to a different politics of 155 solidarity. As Deleuze and Guattari state, “Here, the program, the slogan, of schizoanalysis is: …know your faces; it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight” (188). Know, in other words, what historical and political discourses attempt to arrest the body’s capacity to affect and be affected, and then break through them. For Massumi, the politics of affect is about interrupting late global capitalism precisely by exposing it as already broken, already deterritorialized. As he states, “All borders have become porous, and capitalism is feeding off that poracity and pushing it further and further — that’s what globalisation is all about” (Politics 29). According to Massumi, a politics of affect is a politics that pushes poracity further and further on subjective and intersubjective scales, thereby “expand[ing] the range of affective potential” (Politics 35). Similarly, for Echeverría, such affective potential becomes political insofar as it expands one’s range of relations, showing populations in solidarity to be even more intimately tied than commonly imagined. Rather than consist of imperial relations in which one population remains dominant over another, traumatic affect as unbound solidarity consists only of continual and mutual unbinding: that is, a sharing of wounds that replaces the closing of wounds. V. Conclusion While El Grito del Norte figures transnational relations that presume a locatable and identifiable subjectivity, El Grito del Epicentro proposes a subjectivity and solidarity consisting only of traversing fault lines. Explaining how Managua, Nicaragua’s 1972 earthquake influences her work, Echeverría states, “The earthquake serves as a backdrop to also speak of my own subjectivity… Sensing the self is a continuous process of regeneration/degeneration — like fissures — at once erasing and revealing” (“Statement”). She continues this process of “regeneration/degeneration” of “Grietas/Fissures” within “Reciprocity~Reciprocidad,” an 156 installation piece from the same year (1997) that consists of two more screaming portraits. In “Reciprocity~Reciprocidad,” she creates a highly distorted and disruptive mirror image, placing two enlarged editions of her screaming self obliquely facing each other. In one image, her eyes are closed and, in the other, her eyes are open. Though their gazes do not meet, they remain connected by a wire lodged within each image’s open mouth, scrawling the floor space between them and creating what appears to be a closed audio circuit. Fig 9. “Reciprocity~Reciprocidad.” 1997. Pittsburg, PA. <http://www.patriciavillalobos.com/reciprocityreciprocidad.html> Such a circuit, however, is indeed open, for installation viewers hear an 11-minute recording of a highly disorienting audioscape. This recording includes music, ocean waves, and fragmentary prose that address themes of identity, locality, and change, among others. “Falling down buses, polished shoes on broken pavement, brand new watches dando la misma hora, tecnología atrasada y adelantada por la necesidad,” Echeverría recites, describing the collapse of space and time into a multimedia dreamscape. “Everyday buscamos a nuestros mismos” she adds, soon after describing these selves as “transiency, ephemeral, mirage of what once was” (“Reciprocity”). There is no original subjectivity to recover here. To look for oneself, therefore, is to acknowledge that “siempre hemos sido vagabundos — intercambiando tierra por sueños, tenuous relationships to our surroundings” (“Reciprocity”). This exchange between land and dreams is more mutual, or indeed reciprocal, than that which Escobar describes. Rather than sacrifice a homeland for a chance at the American Dream, as well as the civic and human rights it implies, Echeverría instead turns territory, both geographical and subjective, into an illusion. At one point in “Reciprocity~Reciprocidad”’s audio recording, she includes a mash-up of salsa music, what appears to be the telling of her parents’ marriage, and a brief mention of “Patria libre o morir,” the slogan of Nicaraguan leftists. For Echeverría, to be part of a free 157 country does not entail a subscription to communist, capitalist, or Chicano ideologies; rather, it is to conceive of one’s body, culture, and country as limitless and, as such, not threatened by otherness. To break borders and become a body without organs, however, is not entirely without organization, including that of shared traumatic affect or, indeed, solidarity. Discussing Deleuze and Guattari’s own project as an “expansion of sense beyond its localization in man,” Colebrook notes a Deleuzean “potential to imagine other perceptions of the infinite, and the striving to think space positively: not the link between two points, but the power of life in its striving to create trajectories that open series or plateaus” (n.p.). This potential corresponds to a politics that accounts for affective encounters in a way that deterritorializes all of life and, in doing so, renders the discourses of psychoanalysis and Chicano identity politics insufficient, if not altogether obsolete. Though national borders, their regulation, and the mistreatment of immigrants do persist, the Central American-American body arguably understands itself “as the potential to imagine other perceptions of the infinite” or, stated otherwise, displacements of the epicentral. These perceptions and displacements are both inherent to, and even facilitated by, global capitalism as less regulated than it appears. When capitalism causes bodies to cross national borders and endure trauma, for example, such trauma enables the realization that borders themselves are likewise subject to displacement and permutation. As Central American- Americans keen on drawing their own lines of flight, or changes in nature, Chinchilla, Escobar, and Echeverría suggest that challenging external borders also requires undoing and surpassing internal borders, be they physical or psychical. Accordingly, they show solidarity to be not only among bodies but within and without them, figured by a screaming that continually interrupts and extends contingent territories. 158 159 Epilogue Figures 1 and 2. “I Exist” Collection. 2011-2013. Web. <http://juliosalgadoart.com/archive> Mexican-born “artivist” Julio Salgado uses graphic art to support various social causes, including the rights of queer and undocumented immigrant populations in the U.S. (Lopez). In 2011, he began his “I Exist” Collection as a response to the passing of anti-immigrant legislature, including HB 56, HB 87, and SB1070. Inspired by a group of undocumented college graduates who urged Senator John McCain to support the DREAM Act while dressed in their caps and gowns, Salgado employs similar symbolism in many of his “I Exist” portraits (Figure 1). 55 Explaining how these drawings counter the dehumanizing language of anti-immigrant policy and discourse, he states, “The language that anti-immigrant folks have used [aims to]… erase our identities or erase the fact that we exist here. So I wanted with my artwork kind of to say, ‘hey listen, I exist,’ [and] it’s almost like a scream” (Lopez). Salgado does not elaborate on how and why such portraits are “almost like a scream,” yet he does differentiate this declaration of existence from traditional identity politics and associated human rights activism. While the issue of undocumented immigration is most commonly associated with Latinos in the U.S., Salgado understands “I Exist” as a way of reaching out and encouraging people of all identities to “[come] out about their statuses” (Seif 305). Claiming that he can only speak for himself, yet in collaboration with others, he labels himself with the terms “migrant queerness,” as well as “undocuqueer” (Figure 2, Seif 302). Noting “undocumented” and “queer” to be historically pejorative terms, he elaborates, “Through art, I turn that [around] by showing ourselves in 55 The DREAM Act, named with the acronym of Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors, seeks to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as minors. It has not yet passed, yet the California DREAM Act was passed in 2010. The California DREAM Act allows eligible undocumented students access to public financial access. 160 dignified ways that embrace the terms that make us feel like we are less than human. At the end of the day, they are just words that do not define us as human beings” (qtd. in Seif 300). Here, Salgado identifies with and dissociates himself from human rights discourse simultaneously. Though he reclaims his humanity, and associated dignity, by resignfiying the terms that suggest him to be non-human, he concludes that such terms still do not define him, nor his fellow undocuqueers. This self-contradictory rhetoric frames Salgado’s identity as approximate to, yet also excessive of, humanity. He is “like a human,” which helps explain his “like a scream.” Rather than express his existence in literal and essentialist terms, this artivist uses a language of “like,” “kind of,” and “almost,” opening such terms to alterity. “Almost like a scream” appears synonymous with “screaming as witnessing” insofar as both resist their own recognition, thereby pointing to a politics beyond extant paradigms. Noting his “I Exist” Collection to coincide with other forms of DREAM activism, Salgado qualifies, “Not only are these students proud to scream, ‘Undocumented and unafraid,’ but some have challenged the status quo even further by coming out as queer, undocumented and unafraid” (Salgado). For Salgado, these students are making themselves known in historically unprecedented ways, leaving legal authorities, as well as fellow activists, unsure of how to respond. Yet, in queering this particular scream for human rights, Salgado overlooks the ways in which screaming is itself queer. 56 Defining “queerness” as a resistance to “logics of location, movement, and identification,” Jack Halberstam foregrounds a way of life that disrupts the ordering of time, place, and people (1). To be queer is to be beyond order. As the historical, juridical, and aesthetic examples of screaming throughout this dissertation show, it is an act of witnessing that is both 56 While I do not adequately address how “screaming as witnessing” might relate to a queer politics here, I am noting the correspondence and encouraging its exploration. 161 before and beside the law, as well as related logics, serving to interrupt them with seeming senselessness. Just as Salgado’s “almost like a scream” phrasing suggests, such senselessness inheres in this gesture’s figurative qualities, for screaming is never simply itself. Accordingly, its meaning is never absolute and always singular. More than secure certain identities and rights, “screaming as witnessing” destabilizes discourses that are informed by the Western Enlightenment and its epistemological foreclosures, as well as its privileging of reason, freedom, progress. These discourses include not only those of the law, but also those claiming to resist and rectify the law’s very injustices. As a critique of the ways in which human rights discourse complies with the same neocolonial and neoliberal order it tries to counter, this dissertation positions screaming as even more radical than most activists and artists, including Salgado, acknowledge. Indeed, it is more radical insofar as is resists other modes of resistance, disallowing testimony from settling into any predetermined knowledge or practical employment. Rather, it associates screaming with immaterial evidence, iterative time, post-human subjectivity, and affective solidarity, all of which are dynamic and incomplete by definition. Yet, as much as this project rejects any final understanding of screaming, equating its elusiveness with a politics of interruption, its continuation would necessitate further consideration of “almost like a scream.” How do other non-narrative political gestures, such as raised fists and collective silence, compare to screaming? What might a more global analysis of screaming reveal about its regional connotations? Finally, how might “screaming as witnessing” in postwar Central America change over time, especially as the violence of global capitalism becomes eclipsed by the problem of climate change? 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Creator Schauwecker, Lacey M. (author)

Core Title Anti-gritos: screaming as witnessing in postwar Central America

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 04/22/2020

Defense Date 12/11/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Central America,human rights,OAI-PMH Harvest,postwar,screaming,testimonio,testimony,Violence,War,witnessing

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Graff Zivin, Erin (committee chair), Gutierrez-Albilla, Julian (committee member), Steinberg, Samuel (committee member)

Creator Email lschauwe@usc.edu,lschauwecker@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-494016

Unique identifier UC11268432

Identifier etd-Schauwecke-6261.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-494016 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Schauwecke-6261.pdf

Dmrecord 494016

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Schauwecker, Lacey M.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA