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Solidarity, violence, and the political imagination: Chicana literary imaginings of the Central American civil wars, 1981-2005

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Solidarity, violence, and the political imagination: Chicana literary imaginings of the Central American civil wars, 1981-2005

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SOLIDARITY, VIOLENCE, AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION:
CHICANA LITERARY IMAGININGS OF THE CENTRAL AMERICAN CIVIL
WARS, 1981-2005

by

Araceli Esparza

________________________________________________________________________

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
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Araceli Esparza
ii
Acknowledgments
While working on this project I have received immense love, support, and advice
from the people in my life, some who I will undoubtedly forget to thank and others who I
cannot possibly thank enough. First, thanks are due to my family whose love and
patience has sustained me throughout this process. During the course of this project, my
sister Brenda gave birth to two beautiful and incredibly intelligent children, Arizbé and
Grecia, and my brother Jordan fathered an equally bright and beautiful daughter named
Liliana. My oldest niece Berlyn is now a teenager and continues to remind me of myself
when I was her age, making ambitious plans for the future and developing skills that will
allow nothing to stand in her way. My siblings’ children are constant reminders that life
is meant to be lived with joy, love, and intensity. While I have been in graduate school
my brothers, Jordan and Diego, have faced many obstacles of their own. Their
experiences help to remind me that one must face adversity with perseverance and
reaffirm the importance of the academic work I engage in. My sister made sure that I
was “still” okay when I disappeared into my office and called to keep me updated with all
the family news. She is a better sister than any I could have hoped for. I thank my father
for his love and generosity throughout my life; he has always been there during times of
need. My mother, Eva, has been a model of strength and determination in the face of
many odds. She has taught me that life is hard and that living with purpose is critical to
survival. She also taught me the skill of asking questions when things do not seem right,
regardless of how difficult. My partner, Justin, has loved and encouraged me throughout
iii
graduate school. He has listened as I worked through ideas and constantly reminded me
that I wanted to quite last time too. Justin has sustained me in everyway imaginable and I
am blessed to share my life with him.
I am also grateful for my dissertation committee, especially my friend, mentor,
advisor, and dissertation co-chair Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Without Ruthie, I cannot
imagine how I would have finished graduate school. Ruthie's belief that everybody
theorizes and that theory is presented in a multitude of ways allowed me to develop a
project that centers literature as a theoretical archive and as an example of political
activism. Over the past six years, Ruthie has never let me doubt that I could complete the
task at hand regardless of the circumstances that I faced and always pushed me to move
ahead. I am indebted to her for teaching me how to think about the world in
multidimensional ways that constantly take into account contradiction, interrelatedness,
and generosity.
My co-chair Teresa McKenna has been a generous teacher and mentor from the
beginning of my doctoral training. She taught me what it means to write a dissertation
focused on political texts while remaining engaged with the text as an archive of
evidence. Teresa’s commitment to and groundbreaking work in the field of Chicana/o
literary studies has been a constant inspiration to me. It has been an honor to have the
opportunity to work with her.
John Carlos Rowe, Macarena Gómez-Barris and Karen Tongson also read and
contributed to the development of this project. I thank John for always pushing me to
think about the historical details of my topic. No matter how busy he was, I could always
iv
count on John’s encyclopedic comments to arrive in my inbox just when I thought I could
not write another sentence. Macarena constantly encouraged me to think about the bigger
historical and theoretical context both through her feedback and by modeling that
approach to research and writing. I thank Maca for her candidness and friendship. As an
outside member, Karen Tongson generously read my work and pointed me toward some
exciting future directions. It has been intellectually challenging and satisfying to work
with my entire dissertation committee and I thank them all.
There are many people in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity that
I also want to thank. A number of teachers and mentors influenced my intellectual
development, including George Sánchez, David Román, Judith Halberstam, Lanita
Jacobs-Huey, Dorinne Kondo, and Jane Iwamura. Ms. Sandra, Kitty, Jujuana, and Sonia,
the wonderful office staff at ASE, have helped me navigate through administrative
requirements so that I would not miss a thing; their expertise has been indispensable. I
also thank my ASE colleagues and friends for their encouragement, camaraderie, and
political commitment. I thank them for dinners, conversations, dancing, writing dates,
protests, and organizing: Gretel Vera Rosas, Reina Prado, Michelle Commander, Micaela
Smith, Sionne Neely, Imani Kai Johnson, Nisha Kunte, Jesus Hernandez, Laura
Fugikawa, Carolyn Dunn, Perla Guerrero, Emily Hobson, Wendy Cheng, Anton Smith,
Mark Padoongpatt, Alvaro Marquez, Robert Eap, and all the rest. I am proud to have
learned with you and from you all.
Colleagues, teachers, and friends in other departments and universities have also
contributed greatly to the completion of this project. When I was an undergraduate
v
McNair scholar, Belinda Lum was one of the first people who helped me think about
graduate school as a tangible possibility; she has been a friend and advisor ever since. I
also thank the USC Center for Feminist Research, New Directions group, Ange-Marie
Hancock, Shafiqa Ahmadi, and Macarena Gómez-Barris, for their feedback on chapter
two. For archival research assistance, I thank the staff at the California Ethnic and
Multicultural Archive at University of California, Santa Barbara where I was granted
access to the Helena Maria Viramontes Papers as the collection was being processed as
well as the Ana Castillo Papers. Stanford University’s Department of Special Collections
and University Archives was helpful and accommodating during my time researching in
the Cherríe Moraga Papers.
My closest friends have kept me grounded throughout this process. My time off
with las nenas—Ana Rosales, Jeannette Villa, Lupe Mena, Azusena Mena, and Michelle
Salas—helped me garner the energy to keep writing as I neared the end of the project. I
am indebted to this wonderful group of women who I have grown up with for constantly
helping me keep graduate school in perspective. I am also happy to have shared many
important life moments—weddings, birthdays, and births—with Jennie Carreon and
Maricela Limas over the years. Mi comadre Gretel has shared her words, thoughts, and
many nights of dancing—nos comprendemos muy bien amiga, y te lo agradezco.
Michelle C. and I shared many long conversations during my most difficult and joyous
moments and I look forward to many more as our careers continue to develop.

vi
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

Abstract vii

Chapter One: Writing Politics and the Political Imagination: An Introduction 1

Chapter Two: Imagining Transnational Solidarity in This Bridge Called 23
My Back

Chapter Three: The Disappeared in Helena María Viramontes’ “The 56
Cariboo Cafe”

Chapter Four: Transforming Maternal Identities: Violence and Motherhood 98
in Graciela Limón’s In Search of Bernabé

Chapter Five: Torture and The Reappeared in Ana Castillo’s Psst…I Have 140
Something to Tell You, Mi Amor: The Case of Sister Dianna Ortiz

Conclusion 195

Bibliography 199

vii
Abstract
In Solidarity, Violence, and the Political Imagination: Chicana Literary
Imaginings of the Central American Civil Wars, 1981-2005, I examine Chicana literary
representations of political violence in the United States and Central America. I draw on
literary works by Helena María Viramontes, Cherríe Moraga, Graciela Limón, and Ana
Castillo as well as their personal papers in order to ask and answer the question: how and
for what purposes did Chicana creative writers imagine the Central American civil wars?
In answering this question, I trace these authors’ changing imaginaries of hemispheric
solidarity in the context of political violence. Taking an international and transnational
focus allows me to mark the multiple shifts in Chicana feminist epistemology through the
complex solidarities represented in my primary texts. Contrary to readings that find that
Chicana creative writing forges transnational solidarity and Latina/o community, I argue
that while my primary texts underscore these authors’ commitments to working for social
justice they do so without guaranteeing unity or mutual recognition between Chicanas
and Central Americans. My project contributes to interventions that focus on literature
and culture as central to theory making, political protest, and solidarity building within
several interdisciplinary frameworks, including Chicana/o studies, Latin/a American
studies, hemispheric American studies, feminist theory, and literary theory. I draw on
and contribute to these fields by focusing on the themes of solidarity, disappearance,
motherhood, and torture.
1
CHAPTER ONE
Writing Politics and the Political Imagination: An Introduction

[L]iterature is, of necessity, political.
1

[T]he emphasis in the literature of resistance is on the political as
the power to change the world. The theory of resistance literature
is in its politics.
2

We need to know where we live in order to imagine living
elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can
live there.
3

Imagination offers resolutions out of the conflict by dreaming
alternative ways of imaging/feeling/thinking. For positive social
change we need to envision a different reality, dream new
blueprints for it, formulate new strategies for coping in it.
4

The Geopolitics of Knowledge, Cultural Politics, and the Political Imagination
Like most doctoral students, while working on this project I have often been
asked by both academics and non-academics: What is your dissertation about? Over the
years, my response has taken on several versions of the short reply: My dissertation
examines Chicana literary imaginings of political violence in the United States and
Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. Often, the next question has been: Why

1
Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory," Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 54.

2
Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen & Co., 1987), 30.

3
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 5.

4
Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
of Color, Expanded and Revised 3rd ed. (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2002), xxxviii-xxxix.
2
Chicana depictions of Central American related violence instead of Central American
representations about the same topic? This second question reveals that, as Edward Said
argues, in the US,
We are still the inheritors of that style by which one is defined by the nation,
which in turn derives its authority from a supposedly unbroken tradition. In the
United Stares, this concern over cultural identity has of course yielded up the
contest over what books and authorities constitute “our” tradition.
5

Questions about my literary archive make clear that the contest over “authentic” national
representation is extended to literature from countries other than the US. The question
why not Central American literature betrays an investment in defining and defending
traditions that are bounded by traditional definitions of nation. However, as Said further
contends:
trying to say that this book is (or is not) part of “our” tradition is one of the most
debilitating exercises imaginable. Besides, its excesses are much more frequent
that its contributions to historical accuracy. For the record then, I have no
patience with the position that “we” should only or mainly be concerned with
what is “ours,” any more that I can condone reactions to such a view that require
Arabs to read Arab books, use Arab methods, and the like.”
6

I agree with Said that regulating the parameters of what is relevant to certain areas of
study along the boundaries of nation can become debilitating and excessive. However, I
also recognize that while it is important not be become encumbered by letting national
borders define what we can study it is also critical to acknowledge the unequal relations
of power and historical roots that underlie the suspicion implied in the question: “Why
not study Central American texts that represent the Central American civil wars?”

5
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xxv.

6
Ibid.
3
In part, this question is grounded in what Walter Mignolo calls the “geopolitics of
knowledge”; that is the grounding of knowledge production within local histories that
takes into account power differentials that shape ideas about who theorizes and what
constitutes theory and knowledge.
7
Mignolo argues that, within a Latin American
context, the production of knowledge about Latin America from afar can be traced to the
post-World War II formation of Latin American area studies “as an objectification of the
‘Third World’, as a producer of culture and not of knowledge.”
8
To this critique, Juan
Poblete adds,
Area studies had from its inception as its organizing principle the centrality of the
United States (and Western Europe)….knowledge of the United States (and
Western Europe) was endowed with a particular epistemological claim that in
many ways resembles the negative logic organizing ethnicity and ethnic studies: it
was supposed to be the unmarked center that produced unmarked knowledge and
cultural practices.
9

Poblete reminds readers that the US-based study of Latin America has historically
operated on the principle that Latin Americans lack the ability to produce knowledge and
that US scholars possess the capacity to produce objective knowledge. Taking Mignolo’s
and Poblete’s critiques seriously, I argue that rather than reaffirming an area studies
model that objectifies Latin America Chicana literary representations of political violence
across geopolitical borders help reveal the contradictions of forging transnational

7
Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

8
Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking (2000), 93.

9
Juan Poblete, ed., Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), xii.
4
cultural/literary politics while at the same time contributing to the production of such
politics.
I read Chicana texts because I am interested in the ways that women who witness
and experience the realities of transnational violence engage in the struggle over how
such violence is conceptualized while simultaneously attempting to produce solidarity
across geopolitical borders by drawing on the imagination as foundational to politics. My
understanding of literature as politics draws on the definition of cultural politics laid out
in Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures by Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and
Arturo Escobar where they define cultural politics as “enactive and relational.”
10
Their
definition is worth citing at length here:
We interpret cultural politics as the process enacted when sets of social actors
shaped by, and embodying, different cultural meaning and practices come into
conflict with each other. This definition of cultural politics assumes that
meanings and practices—particularly those theorized as marginal, oppositional,
minority, residual, emergent, alternative, dissident, and the like, all of them
conceived in relation to a given dominant cultural order—can be the source of
processes that must be accepted as political. That this is rarely seen as such is
more a reflection of entrenched definitions of the political, harbored in dominant
political cultures, than an indication of the social force, political efficacy, or
epistemological relevance of cultural politics. Culture is political because
meanings are constitutive of processes that, implicitly or explicitly, seek to
redefine social power. That is, when movements deploy alternative conceptions
of woman, nature, race, economy, democracy, or citizenship that unsettle
dominant cultural meanings, they enact a cultural politics.
11

This definition of cultural politics as the struggle over meaning and representation in
which non-dominant populations engage to transform social relations by contesting
dominant ways of understanding the world is central to my reading of the political

10
Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures:
Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 7.

11
Ibid.
5
imagination as enacted in Chicana creative writing. More specifically, I argue that the
authors I study imagine their creative writing as part of an effort to raise consciousness
about violence in Central America in order to move people to work for peace and justice
across geopolitical borders.
Thus, rather than understanding literature and other forms of cultural production
as straightforward illustrations of existing social relations I draw on scholars such as
Barbara Christian, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Harlow, and Avery Gordon who contend
that the imagination needed for creative practice is foundational to social change. As the
opening epigraphs to this chapter make clear, these scholars theorize the imagination as
central to understanding the world we live in and essential to producing the world we
want to live in by helping to build a politics for social justice. Following their thinking, I
argue that Chicana literature can be understood as a politics for liberation; where
struggles over meaning take place as opposed to representing an already established and
unchanging social reality.
12
Through literature, Chicanas who endure the everyday
violence of racism, sexism, homophobia, empire, and political alienation develop the
capacity to archive, creatively represent, and explore what might otherwise be unnamable
in order to inspire people to action with the goal of working toward social justice.
The Political Imagination and Chicana/o Literature
Chicana/o literary scholars have argued that in the context of US imperialism in
what is now the southwestern United States, Chicana/o literature and creative production
should be read as a form of resistance to colonial violence. For example, Ramon Saldívar

12
See also: John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American
Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), Said, Culture and Imperialism.
6
argues that the tradition of “symbolic resistance” by Mexicans and Mexican Americans in
the US can be traced at least as far back as the US/Mexico War (1846-1848) in which
Mexico ceded nearly one-third of its territory to the US in the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo (1848).
13
He notes that overnight Mexican citizens became a disenfranchised
ethnic population that suddenly found itself living on US territory without any legal
rights. Although the Treaty granted US citizenship to Mexican citizens who were
annexed with the land, often the extension of rights was limited and Mexicans faced
territorial displacement and rampant racist violence throughout Mexico’s former
territories. Saldívar argues that after 1848, Mexican and Mexican American populations
in the US represented the social world through oppositional creative expression in order
to preserve and foster historical memory in the context of widespread violence.
14

Approximately one hundred and fifty years later, the specter of US encroachment
on Mexican lands continues to loom large in Chicana/o representations of Mexicans,
Mexican Americans, and Central Americans navigating ongoing racist violence. In
particular, I focus on how Chicanas theorize US imperialism by drawing on the Central
American civil wars and related violence across geopolitical borders in ways that, as
Barbara Christian argues about black women’s writing, unmask and theorize “the power

13
Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1990), 16-17.

14
Ibid.
7
relations of their world.”
15
Chicanas rely on creative writing to try to make sense of the
wars and in order to figure out how to respond to the violence they increasingly
witnessed (through increased refugee flows) and heard about from survivors at rallies and
in some news stories. For Chicanas in particular, and women of color in general,
theorizing power relations and figuring out how to work for social justice is historically
linked to creative processes that are critical to daily survival. As Christian writes,
[P]eople of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the
Western form and abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing
(and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms,
in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since
dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. How else have we
managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social
institutions, countries, our very humanity?
16

Similarly, Sonia Saldívar-Hull argues,

we have to look in nontraditional places for our theories: in the prefaces to
anthologies, in the interstices of autobiographies, in our cultural artifacts (the
cuentos), and, if we are fortunate enough to have access to a good library, in the
essays published in marginalized journals.
17

Saldívar-Hull and Christian both contend that creative writing simultaneously theorizes
power relations and helps produce a site of struggle over who does theory and what

15
Christian, "The Race for Theory," 52.

16
Ibid.

17
Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 46.
8
theory looks like; two incredibly important interventions for communities that have not
had access to many educational or publishing opportunities.
Chicana literary imaginings that are informed by the Central American civil wars
also offer ways of understanding the violence of the wars in Central America beyond
national (ist) identities and across geopolitical borders. Interest among Chicana writers in
using the political imagination to speak out against the situation in Central America was a
deviation from Chicano cultural nationalism and toward transnational and international
ways of understanding the economic and social conditions of people of color in the US
that went beyond the US-Mexico border. This allowed Chicanas to contextualize the
social conditions they encountered within the history of US imperialism in Latin
America, with a knowledge that, as the English immigration activist slogan proclaims:
“We are here because you were there.” By imagining the violence of war in Central
America, Chicana Central American-centered fiction articulates social relations that
might otherwise not be easily linked, such as US imperialism in the US Southwest during
the mid-1800s and in Central America during the post-World War II era.
Chicana writing inspired by the political problems represented by the wars about
the wars also worked against the silence about violence in Central America that
permeated US society before the Sandinistas ousted the Somoza family dictatorship and
9
gained political power in Nicaragua.
18
As they began learning more about the Central
American civil wars, Chicana writers often expressed frustration regarding the lack of
access to information about the civil wars and drew on creative writing to make more
people aware about the ongoing situation in the region. By writing Central American
themed texts, Chicanas sought to inspire political engagement among readers that would
lead to protest over US military and economic policy in Central America.
The Political Imagination, Genre, and Social Movements
My primary texts include the multiple editions of Cherríe Moraga and Gloria
Anzaldúa’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back, Helena María Viramontes’s short
story “The Cariboo Cafe,” Graciela Limón’s novel In Search of Bernabé, and Ana
Castillo’s collection of plays Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor as well as her
poem “Like the people of Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories.”
19
This list of
texts indicates that Chicanas draw on multiple genres—the essay, novel, short story, play
and poetry—with an urgency that is inspired by Central American women who produced
testimonios about the atrocities they witnessed during the wars. Literary genres after all
are not mutually exclusive, are often inspired, and challenged by other genres. The texts

18
Rubén Martínez, The Other Side Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond (New York: Vintage
Departures, 1992; reprint, 1993).

19
Ana Castillo, "Like the People of Guatemala, I Want to Be Free of These Memories," in Psst...I Have
Something to Tell You, Mi Amor (San Antonio: Wings Press, 2005), Ana Castillo, Psst...I Have Something
to Tell You, Mi Amor (San Antonio: Wings Press, 2005), Graciela Limón, In Search of Bernabé (Houston:
Arte Público Press, 1993), Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, Helena María Viramontes, "The Cariboo Cafe," in The Moths and Other Stories
(Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995).
10
I read blur generic boundaries by bending traditional literary conventions, such as
expectations about linear plot development, clear narrative resolution and consistent
narrative voice.
In a Central American context, testimonio is the most recognizable example of the
articulation between politics and writing by producing a written record of political
violence in order to fight for social justice by challenging dominant understandings of the
wars. Testimonio is critically theorized as a genre that is driven by an urgent need to
speak about the continuing experience of terror that is told by a narrator who is assumed
to represent an economically and racially marginalized collectivity.
20
During and after
periods of mass violence, acts of telling about survival, witness, and erasure are means
through which people make sense of what has transpired while simultaneously
(re)imagining different ways of being in the world (not to be read as always already
revolutionary or progressive). Testimoniadoras/es (testimony givers) and critics
anticipate that the ideal audience will take action against the ongoing violence that is
represented in the testimonio narrative. Testimonio critics variously and contradictorily
understand the genre as subaltern ethnography,
21
as a literary genre,
22
as a mode of
“democratic” representation that gives voice to the voiceless and functions as an

20
John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999), Beverley and Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American
Revolutions, Román de la Campa, Latin Americanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),
Georg M. Gugelberger, ed., The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996), María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas in
the Age of Development (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

21
The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2001).

22
Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War"
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
11
“antiliterature,”
23
as a revolutionary politics,
24
as a way to (re)present collective
memory,
25
as an expression of solidarity with the subaltern,
26
and as a method for
feminist theorizing by Latina feminists.
27
Like testimonio literature, Chicana creative
writing about violence in Central America is invested in producing political engagement
by narrating ongoing violence in order to build solidarity across geopolitical borders.
Aside from testimonio, the list of political causes that cultural producers have put
their creative practice and imagination toward includes the struggle to end slavery in the
US during the 1800s, the worker’s rights movement of the 1930s, and the second wave of
the women’s rights movement. Since at least the 1970s, feminist artists have drawn on
the political imagination to produce art that is invested in building and maintaining a
movement for women’s rights. As Mary Jo Aagerstoun and Elissa Auther note, “feminist
art forms stressed performance and group reception and foregrounded the values of
collaboration, participation, empowerment, consciousness-raising, and the belief in art’s
ability to create change.”
28
Similarly, in The Cultural Front, Michael Denning argues
that during the 1930s, “working-class culture was…the foundation of the cultural front,

23
Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory.

24
Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas in the Age of Development.

25
Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War", The
Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios.

26
de la Campa, Latin Americanism, The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist
Testimonios.

27
Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, The Latina Feminist
Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios.

28
Mary Jo Aagerstoun and Elissa Auther, "Considering Feminist Activist Art," NWSA Journal 19, no. 1
(2007): viii.
12
nurturing many of its plebian writers and artists, and becoming subject and audience of
many of its works.”
29
A century earlier, the abolitionist movement encouraged former
slaves to lecture and publish eyewitness testimony about the horrors of slavery in order to
create awareness and empathy among the public who they hoped would recognize slavery
as a crime against humanity that must be abolished.
30

The importance of slave narratives within the abolitionist movement offers a
particularly relevant example for my project as it poses many of the questions and
challenges testimonio raises, such as the authority of the speaker’s voice, the speaker as a
witness to violence against a collectivity of people, the narrative as a record of what was
witnessed, and an urgent desire to move people to action. Like testimonio, slave
narratives were written in first person voice and attempted to constitute an empathetic
audience that would be moved to action. In “Eye Witness to Cruelty,” Jeannine
DeLombard argues that slave narratives functioned as testimony by representing slavery
as a crime where the slaveholder was the perpetrator and slaves were both victims and
witnesses.
31
However, DeLombard explains that slave narratives created a problem of
authority and authorial voice that reinforced and created power differences as former
slaves were charged with the task of describing their experiences while white audiences
were expected to interpret the information being presented and advocate against the
institution of slavery. As Saidiya V. Hartman contends through the example of Harriet

29
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture on the Twentieth Century
(London: Verso, 1997), 8.

30
Jeannine DeLombard, ""Eye-Witness to the Cruelty": Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in
Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative," American Literature 73, no. 2 (2001).

31
Ibid.: 249.
13
A. Jacobs, former slaves that gave testimony had to negotiate “the urgency of the effort to
keep the reader’s empathy” fully aware of the “the crisis of…authority” presented when
former slaves might challenge contemporaneous readers’ values.
32
This problem was
constantly present for former female slaves because their experience as chattel property
meant that they did not determine things such as who would have sexual rights over their
body. Therefore, Hazel V. Carby argues, female slave narratives often challenge
conventional standards of female behavior because they had to learn how to survive
under the constant threat of physical punishment, sexual violence, and even death.
33

Solidarity, Disappearance, Motherhood, and Torture
The desire for solidarity in the fight to end violence in Central America is a theme
that is carried throughout my dissertation as are the themes of motherhood,
disappearance, and torture. These key terms represent themes that have been central to
the study of political violence and cultural politics in Latin America in several fields and
disciplines, including Chicana/o studies, Latin/a American studies, American studies,
cultural studies, literary criticism, feminist theory, ethnic studies, and African American
studies. Further, focusing on these terms helps me underscore the necessity for studying
Chicana literature in a transnational context that takes into account histories and
discourses that circulate both outside and inside the US—however unevenly that
circulation occurs.

32
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 106.

33
Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), see chapter two.
14
In the context of perpetual war making in the Americas (as I describe below),
Chicana creative writers began theorizing solidarity between Chicanas and
Centroamericanas. Through creative writing, they were able to explore the contradictions
of working across different social positionalities and within unequal relations of power
(as I discuss in chapter two). By remaining open to the limits and promises of solidarity
work Chicanas participated in producing and theorizing solidarity in their fiction. Their
focus on solidarity reflects the interactions and connections Chicanas were making in
their everyday lives in the communities that they called home. For example, in the San
Francisco Bay Area Moraga worked on producing more inclusive anthologies, spoke at
events, and participated in political protests against US imperialism; she was even
arrested at a 1991 demonstration against the first US war in Iraq.
34
In Irvine, Ca and later
in Vancouver, Canada, Viramontes attended political rallies, inquired about solidarity
travel to Central America, and started speaking out against US policy in Central America
at literary readings.
35
Limón did volunteer work with Central American refugees at La
Placita Olvera in Los Angeles and traveled to El Salvador as part of a Jesuit organized
Loyola Marymount University delegation that sought to witness the investigation into the

34
Cherríe Moraga Papers, (M0905, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford
University).

35
Helena María Viramontes Papers, (CEMA 19, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries,
University of California, Santa Barbara).
15
much publicized 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter at
the University of Central America in El Salvador. Finally, over two decades after
Chicanas began publishing Central America-focused creative writing, Castillo wrote and
published a play about Sister Dianna Ortiz’s disappearance and torture in Guatemala.
Through the play, Castillo seeks to inform people about the injustices Sister Dianna
suffered at the hands of the US government and US trained and supported Guatemalan
troops and officials. The urgency of this play lies in both Sister Dianna’s case and in
contextualizing US torture practices against Arab prisoners of war in the War on Terror
within a longer history of US torture practices (as I discuss in chapter five).
The Context: Publishing and War
My primary literary texts were published between 1981 and 2005. During this
twenty-four year period, there were several developments in Chicana creative writing, the
Central American civil wars, and US war making both at home and abroad. In “Breaking
the Silence,” Edwina Barvosa-Carter traces Chicana publishing history from 1973 to
1998.
36
Barvosa-Carter notes that beginning in 1973 Chicanas began publishing a small
number of texts, often with limited distribution. This first generation of writers—
including Lucha Corpí, María Herrera-Sobek, Angela de Hoyos, Beverly Silva, and Alma
Villanueva—faced many obstacles to publication such as exclusion from male dominated

36
Edwina Barvosa-Carter, "Breaking the Silence: Developments in the Publication and Politics of Chicana
Writing, 1973-1998," in Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends, ed. David R. Maciel, Isidro
D. Ortiz, and María Herrera-Sobek (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000).
16
presses, lack of resources and support, and a preference among editors for publishing
overtly political literature that portrayed an essentialized Chicana/o identity.
37

Undeterred, during the 1970s Chicanas began self-publishing, as well as publishing with
small presses such as M & A Editions, and also began establishing their own presses. For
example, Margarita Cota-Cárdenas founded Scorpion Press and Lorna Dee Cervantes
established Mango Publications. Barvosa-Carter notes, “These and other writer owned
presses played a critical role in making Chicana writing available in print in the 1970s.”
38

As an audience began being constituted through the efforts of those making more
publications available opportunities began increasing for Chicanas writers during the
1980s.
During the early to mid 1980s, Chicanas began publishing with increasing
frequency at small, independent presses that specialized in literature by Chicana/o-
Latina/o and feminist writers, including Arte Público Press Bilingual Press, M & A
Editions, South End Press, Maize Press, Relámpago Press, West End Press,
Spinsters/Aunt Lute Press, Kitchen Table Press, and Third Woman Press. Notably, the
editors and founders at most of these presses expressed a political commitment to
amplifying the voices of Chicanas/os-Latinas/os and feminists of color. Barvosa-Carter
quotes Gary Keller, founder of Bilingual Press, who states, “[t]here was a tremendous
need for an outlet for Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American…and other Hispanic
citizens of the United States…[who] had no place to publish or very few places to

37
Ibid., 266-68.

38
Ibid., 269.
17
publish.”
39
She further notes that the founder of Aunt Lute Press, Joan Pinkvoss states
that Aunt Lute was founded with “the express purpose of publishing ‘multicultural,
feminist material’.”
40

By the 1990s, Chicanas such as Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Denise
Chávez enjoyed increased market success and began being published by major trade
presses including Anchor Books Vintage Books (both divisions of Random House),
W.W. Norton and Company, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux (a division of MacMillan).
Despite increased access to major trade presses, regardless of the year of publication,
small-specialized presses—Arte Público Press, Third Woman Press, Ism Press,
Persephone Press, Kitchen Table Press, and Wings Press—published all my primary
texts. Notably, the editors who managed some of these presses—Nicolás Kanellos,
Norma Alarcón, and Barbara Smith—recognized an audience for Chicana literature and
conveyed a political commitment to working for social justice by making this literature
available. However, the fact that texts that represent issues of transnational political
violence have not found support at major trade presses suggests a preference among
mainstream presses for stories about Chicanas/os that depict immigrants for whom the
“American Dream” seems obtainable as opposed to dystopic representations about US
imperialism, geographic displacement, and structural violence, including those I read
here. A 1994 Vanity Fair article titled “The Four Amigas: Latina Literature’s New
Doyennes” is indicative of the preference for optimistic Chicana/Latina narratives. In the

39
Ibid., 270, personal interview.

40
Ibid., 272.
18
article, Ana Castillo, Denise Chávez, Julia Alvarez, and Sandra Cisneros are depicted as
“girlfriends” who were “raised in America with strong Latino roots” and whose work is
“an attempt to come to terms with intertwined cultures” and eventually “making it” in the
US.
41
There is, however, no mention of the scathing critique of US imperialism that an
author such as Castillo provides in her work and no indication that the article’s author,
Michael Shnayerson, is aware of the political commitments expressed in Castillo’s work.
My literary archive can also be contextualized within three phases of armed
conflict in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. During the 1970s and 1980s, there
was widespread-armed combat and mass displacement in these three countries. After
living through years of violence, many Central Americans left their respective nations
and sought refuge in neighboring countries and many fled to the US. As Nora Hamilton
and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla write,
Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigration to Southern California during the 1980s
was part of a massive migration of Central Americans both within their respective
countries and across borders as a result of revolution and counterrevolution in
Nicaragua, civil war in El Salvador, and counterinsurgency in Guatemala. In
1979, following a protracted revolution against the Somoza dynasty, which had
controlled the government since the 1930s, the Sandinistas took power in
Nicaragua, only to face a U.S.-supported counterrevolutionary war that lasted for
most of the decade. In 1980, insurgent groups in El Salvador joined forces to
form the FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation), which
confronted both government forces and right-wing death squads in a civil war that
lasted into the 1990s. In Guatemala, a prolonged but relatively hidden war
between intermittent insurgent groups and successive military governments
intensified with the emergence of a new revolutionary movement in the 1970s and
the instigation of a brutal counterinsurgency campaign by the military that
decimated numerous indigenous communities in the northern altiplano.
42

41
Michael Shnayerson, "The Four Amigas: Latina Literature's New Doyennes," Vanity Fair 1994.

42
Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and
Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 1.
19
The electoral defeat of the National Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua and
the signing of peace accords in Guatemala and El Salvador followed this period of
widespread violence. The transition to a post-war period began in 1990 with the electoral
defeat of the FSLN in Nicaragua; the guerilla organization that successfully led a
revolution against the US-supported Somoza family dictatorship that had held power
from 1936 to 1979.
43
After the ouster of the Somoza regime, the Sandinista government
began implementing social reform programs including land redistribution, education, and
healthcare campaigns. However, social reforms were difficult to implement and maintain
due to the country’s existing debt and US military and economic support to
counterrevolutionaries that sought to overthrow the FSLN government, known as the
Contras.
44
In 1992, the Salvadoran government and the Farabundo Marti National
Liberation Front (FMLN) signed the Chapultepec Peace Accords, which called for
demilitarization, legalization of the FMLN as a political party, and land redistribution
programs.
45
Finally, after 36 years of civil war the Guatemalan National Revolutionary
Unity (URNG) and the Guatemalan government signed the Guatemalan Peace Accords in
1996, calling for constitutional reform, demilitarization, and recognition of indigenous
rights.
46

43
Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 2nd ed. (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1993).

44
Ibid.

45
Karen Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2004), Peace Agreement (United States Institute of Peace, 16 April 2001 1992
[cited 3 April 2007]); available from http://www.usip.org/library/pa/el_salvador/pa_es_01161992.html.

20
The signing of the peace accords in Guatemala and El Salvador has been followed
by a post-war period in which war related violence continues, including impunity for
those that committed war crimes, continued disappearances, and growing feminicide. As
Ana Patricia Rodríguez notes:
In the 1990s, Central America dealt not only with the lagging effects of the
previous conflicts but also with new crisis produced in an ambivalent time of
peace. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many Central Americans
experienced peace as a continuation of previous crisis. They found that peace did
not immediately or necessarily translate into democracy, liberty, and
development. For many, peacetime Central America translated into what I call
the f(r)ictions that continue to tear families apart; push people into deeper levels
of poverty, illiteracy, and hunger; foster drug trafficking and criminal activity;
induce migrations and scatter individuals throughout Central America and
elsewhere; and, finally, generate higher levels and new forms of violence.
47

As Rodríguez makes clear, achieving peace in a post-war society can be a long and
complicated process that is often illusive. Observing these developments from afar,
Chicana writers took on the task of trying to make sense of what was happening in
Central America while pushing for social justice by challenging dominant meanings and
representations of war related violence in ways that helped produce and theorize a
transnational feminist politics.
Between 1981 and 2005, Chicanas were also writing in the context of continuous
US war making both at home and abroad: from the cold war to the war on terror. Living
in a country that is engaged in endless war that often most negatively affects communities
of color, Chicanas’ preoccupation with US imperialism and militarization does not come

46
Acuerdo Sobre Cronograma Para La Implementación, Cumplimiento Y Verificación De Los Acuerdos
De Paz (United States Institute of Peace, 20 November 1998 1996 [cited 3 April 2007]); available from
http://www.usip.org/library/pa/guatemala/guat_961229.html.

47
Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures
and Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 201-02.
21
as a surprise. In “Cold War Redux,” Nikhil Pal Singh lists some of the wars that have
constituted the US’s endless state of war—both ideological and military—since the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989:
It is now clear that anyone who believed bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989
would bring a “peace-dividend” had made a sore mistake. We live in a state of
constant warfare and in a warfare state: from the cold war to the War on Poverty
to the Vietnam War, to the “police actions” and proxy wars in Central America, to
the War on Drugs to the Gulf War to the culture wars to the War on Terror, war
provides the general matrix for social and political life in the post-contemporary
United States and in the world that is its open frontier.
48

From the cold war to the war on terror, the US has waged ideological and military
warfare that professes a fight for freedom and democracy and against communism during
the cold war and (“Islamic”) terrorist extremists during the war on terror. As Ruth
Wilson Gilmore explains, there was not much of a break between the end of the cold war
in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, and 1991 when the first Gulf War began,
marking the first decade of the war on terror.
49
It is this constant state of US war making
that Chicanas respond to through their focus on Central America and the “second Cold
War,” a term that Jean Franco uses, “to define the civil wars in Central America.”
50

Conclusion
In the chapters that follow my readings of Chicana literary representations of
political violence in the US and Central America are constantly informed by the context
that I lay out above. Through a focus on solidarity, disappearance, motherhood, and

48
Nikhil Pal Singh, "Cold War Redux: On the "New Totalitarianism"," Radical History Review, no. 85
(2003): 178.

49
Personal comments.

50
Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 11.
22
torture, I explore the details of how Moraga, Viramontes, Limón and Castillo respectively
formulated ways of understanding the civil wars from a Chicana feminist perspective that
took international issues as central to imagining liberation and producing Chicana
feminist politics. Drawing on archival research, I discuss how each writer conceptualizes
the work her writing does within the social world and the context that each text was
produced within. While all four of my key terms constantly inform my dissertation, I
dedicate one chapter to each term. Chapter two explores changing conceptualizations of
solidarity in This Bridge Called My Back, particularly through the writings of Cherríe
Moraga. Chapter three focuses on disappearance in Helena María Viramontes’ “The
Cariboo Cafe” and is also informed by my discussion of solidarity in chapter one and
motherhood in chapter three. Representations of politicized motherhood in Graciela
Limón’s In Search of Bernabé are the main focus of chapter four. Finally, in chapter
five, I read Ana Castillo’s representation of torture in “Like the people of Guatemala, I
want to be free of these memories” and Psst...I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor.

23
CHAPTER TWO

Imagining Transnational Solidarity in This Bridge Called My Back

I define solidarity in terms of mutuality, accountability, and the
recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships
among diverse communities. Rather than assuming an enforced
commonality of oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds
communities of people who have chosen to fight together.
51

In order to wrestle with these questions [regarding the atrocities
people endure] we would need to adopt, as daily practice, ways of
being and of relating, modes of analyzing, and strategies of
organizing in which we constantly mobile identification and
solidarity, across all borders, as key elements in the repertoire of
risks we need to take to see ourselves as part of one another, even
in the context of difference. We would need to disappear the
idiocy of “us” and “them” and its cultural relativist underpinnings,
the belief that “it could never happen to us,” so that our very
consciousness would be shaped by multiple histories and events,
multiple geographies, multiple identifications.
52

Fictions of Solidarity?
In “The Fiction of Solidarity,” Ana Patricia Rodríguez analyzes the ways that
anti-imperialist Chicana narratives about the Central American civil wars of the 1970s
and 1980s create “a ‘fiction of solidarity’ predicated on Chicana/Mexicana
subjectivities.”
53
In her analysis, Rodríguez asks readers to consider the contradictions of
Chicana writers representing the meaning of violence, colonialism, and feminism in the
context of and in relationship to Central American struggles for liberation during the

51
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.

52
M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and
the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 265.

53
Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "The Fiction of Solidarity Transfronterista Feminisms and Anti-Imperialist
Struggles in Central American Transnational Narratives," Feminist Studies 34, no. 1/2 (2008): 200.
24
post-World War II era. Rodríquez cautions, “solidarity is not transparent or innocent, but
rather critically shaped by borders, power and unequal hierarchical relationships, even
within Latina/o feminist communities.”
54
With this in mind, she argues that Central
American-centered Chicana fiction attempts to produce solidarity by representing
Chicanas as protagonists in ways that appropriate the pain of Central Americans and elide
the specificity of Central American histories and identities. She suggests that this
problem can be remedied by centering narratives that are written by Central Americans
and convey Central American subjectivities. Taking up Rodríguez’s critique, in this
chapter I ask the question: can Chicana creative writers teach readers anything about
transnational solidarity? I further ask, is the solidarity imagined in Chicana creative
writing about Central America always already a fiction, as Rodríguez suggests? In order
to answer these questions, I trace the articulation between solidarity and the political
imagination theorized and imagined by Cherríe L. Moraga and other women of color in
the multiple editions of This Bridge Called My Back, including the Spanish language
edition Esta puente, mi espalda: voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los estados
unidos.
55
I argue that Moraga's work in This Bridge is central to understanding the
formation of a Chicana transnational political imagination that is constantly in the process

54
Ibid.: 221.

55
Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo, eds., Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundistas En
Los Estados Unidos (San Francisco: Ism Press, 1988), Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This
Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 1st ed. (Watertown: Persephone Press,
1981), Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, Expanded and Revised 3rd ed. (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 2002), Cherríe L. Moraga
and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed.
(New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983).
25
of being produced and reconceptualized since at least the late 1970s and into the new
millennium.
Since the 1981 publication of This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Moraga and
Gloria E. Anzaldúa, an increased number of Chicana creative writers have theorized and
developed the relationship between the imagination and transnational solidarity through
creative writing (both fiction and nonfiction) across multiple genres. In particular,
Chicana writers have drawn on the transnational imagination in order to oppose and raise
consciousness about United States economic aid and military intervention that helped
fuel the Central America civil wars. Faced with daily news about violence and terror in
Central America and witnessing a growing number of Central American refugees in the
US, Chicana authors relied on their activist imagination to express solidarity with the
people of Central America. I contend that their imaginings do not take solidarity for
granted, as Rodríguez suggests; instead, they propose a complicated understanding of the
conflict and contradictions produced in the process of, to borrow from Chandra Mohanty,
“choosing to fight together.” This Bridge allows Moraga and other contributors to
imagine solidarity as a contradictory process of recognition that is not guaranteed.
Solidarity and Recognition
In contrast to Rodríguez, Chicana/o literary critics have argued that Chicanas
conceptualize transnational solidarity, particularly the formation of alliances with other
women and people of color, in their creative writing. For example, in Feminism on the
Border literary critic Sonia Saldívar-Hull argues that Chicana creative writers theorize,
imagine, and articulate “political solidarity between Third World women in the United
26
States” and “Third World Latin American women” in their creative writing.
56
Further,
Saldívar-Hull contends that in the 1980s Chicana ways of thinking about the world
appeared in “nontraditional places” for theory, including prefaces, anthologies,
autobiographies, fiction, and testimonio.
57
Archived in these “nontraditional places,”
Saldívar-Hull finds that Chicana creative writing “propels feminism on the border into its
transnational trajectory” by “imagin[ing] encounters with women south of the U.S.
border and formulat[ing] politically nuanced global mestiza coalitions.”
58
Saldívar-Hull
explains that creative writing allowed Chicanas to articulate the experiences of poor
nonwhite women outside the US and women of color in the US through the themes
expressed in “literatures emerging from other Third World countries,” such as
testimonios by Rigoberta Menchú, Elvia Alvarado, and Domitila Barrios de Chungara.
59

She further notes that through creative writing Chicanas and other women of color
revealed the “similarities in our [women of color] histories under racism, class
exploitation, and cultural domination in the United States.”
60
Drawing on their own and
other women’s creative writing, Chicanas understood “woman of color” and “US third
world feminist” as political identities that expressed the recognition of common interests
and a desire to work in solidarity toward shared goals. In other words, working in
solidarity as women of color requires mutuality, reciprocity, accountability, and the

56
Ibid., 54-55.

57
Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), 46.

58
Ibid., 127 and 72.

59
Ibid., 46 and 47.

60
Ibid.
27
recognition of a common goal, rather than identical conditions of oppression. This
conceptualization of the formation of women of color as a political identity further
underscores that recognition is produced through contradictory processes of identification
that are provisional and allow for political action that might otherwise not be possible.
61

Discussing the risks of solidarity, in “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back,
Remembering Ourselves,” M. Jacqui Alexander argues that there are many challenges
heterogeneity poses to working in solidarity.
62
Alexander grapples with how to
strengthen solidarity between women of color in order to make their work for social
justice more effective. She imagines modes of working together in which:
we would need to adopt, as daily practice, ways of being and of relating, modes of
analyzing, and strategies of organizing in which we constantly mobilize
identification and solidarity, across all borders, as key elements in the repertoire
of risks we need to take to see ourselves as part of one another, even in the
context of difference.
63

Alexander poses solidarity as one of the “risks” women of color need to take in order to
work together for social justice in ways that communicate the wrongs experienced by
different women as interlinked, rather than identical. These articulations necessitate a
recognition that, as Alexander puts it:
We are not born women of color. We become women of color. In order to
become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each other’s
histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression, most-

61
For a concrete example of how women of color work in solidarity toward a common political goal see:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "You Have Dislodged a Boulder: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian
California Landscape," Transforming Anthropology 8, no. 1&2 (1999).

62
M. Jacqui Alexander, "Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves," in
Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005).

63
Ibid., 265.
28
devastating oppression, one-of-a-kind oppression, defying-comparison
oppression.
64

Alexander argues that (re)producing the hierarchies of oppression that attempt to silence
some and give voice to others creates obstacles to working together. Instead, she
envisions women of color working together on articulated projects for liberation from
multiple oppressions while recognizing and learning about each other’s diverse histories.
Similarly, in her 1981 “Foreword” to This Bridge Toni Cade Bambara imagines a
wide-range of women listening and communicating with each other through the
anthology in order to collectively speak of the past and envision a different future:
Blackfoot amiga Nisei hermana Down Home Up Souf Sistuh sister El Barrio
suburbia Korean The Bronx Lakota Menominee Cubana Chinese Puertoriqueña
reservation Chicana campañera…Sisters of the yam Sisters of the rice Sisters of
the corn Sisters of the plantain putting in telecalls to each other. And we’re all on
the line.
65

Even as she declares, “we’re all on the line,” Bambara cautions that the anthology is only
a beginning and that unity and the capacity to effect social change are not guaranteed:
it takes more than pique to unite our wrath...to wrest power from those who have
it and abuse it…. it takes more than self disclosure and the bold glimpse of each
others’ life documents to make the grand resolve to fearlessly work toward potent
meshings….We have got to know each other better and teach each other our
ways, our views, if we’re to remove the scales…and get the work [of revolution]
done.
66

Bambara further argues that it is not the foreword to This Bridge that matters most, but
the afterword, which she envisions as:

64
Ibid., 269.

65
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, xl.

66
Ibid., xli-xlii.
29
The coalitions of women determined to be a danger to our enemies….the
contracts we creative combatants will make to mutually care and cure each other
into wholesomeness….the blue-prints we will draw up of the new order we will
make manifest. And the personal unction we will discover in the mirror, in the
dreams, or on the path across This Bridge.
67

This Bridge inspired Bambara to pinpoint the conditions of possibility for revolutionary
solidarity that the anthology and its contributors aspired to by collaborating on a text by
women of color that focused on liberation from violence of every kind. However,
Bambara makes clear that fiction is not the most effective way to produce solidarity and
create revolution as she said during a 1980 interview, “The most effective way to do it, is
to do it.”
68
In other words, creative writing alone does not produce solidarity and social
change; instead, it helps people imagine ways of being in the world that radically deviate
from dominant expectations while remembering that action is the only way to change the
material conditions of existence.
Recognition and Difference
The process of building alliances between women of color, specifically Chicanas
and Centroamericanas, requires negotiating demands within unequal power relations and
diverse histories that may lead to the marginalization of some, even within Latina/o
collectivities, to paraphrase Rodríguez. Moraga also takes into account the difficulties of
building coalitional identities even within women of color collectivities:
I have seen Third World women activists tear ourselves apart over the fact that we
live in the nation of the greatest imperialism and as educated people we are

67
Ibid., xlii-xliii.

68
Ibid., xliii.

30
relatively privileged….Certainly among women of color we are some of the most
privileged on the globe.
69

In this passage, Moraga addresses the problem of privilege and voice that Rodríguez
identifies in her essay. As Chicanas and other women of color gained greater access to
educational and publishing opportunities the contradictions and obstacles to solidarity
intensified, particularly when contrasted with the opportunities available to women in the
global south. For example, Chicanas have had the relative “privilege” of residing in a
country where political violence is not an overt everyday problem, especially when
compared to the violence experienced in many Central American countries during the
1970s and 1980s. Further, as residents of the US, Chicanas have access to other
privileges however tenuous and inadequate. They have access to relatively better
infrastructure than women do in the global south, such as schools and medical facilities.
They also enjoy legal privileges such as holding a US passport and the ease of travel that
may allow. Even the privilege of putting together an anthology and having access to a
press that might print it, as Moraga and Anzaldúa did, can be seen as an area of
contestation because some voices are amplified through publication while others continue
to be left out, as Rodríguez’s concerns about the invisibility of Central American
subjectivity make clear. All these relative privileges may present obstacle to building
solidarity between women color, as Moraga notes in her 1983 foreword.
In Taking Their Word, Arturo Arias further elaborates on the obstacles to
recognition produced by differences and conflicts within Latina/o communities. He
argues that in the process of building collective identities multiplicity and discontinuity

69
Ibid.
31
are not typically accounted for in the very identities Latina/o, Central America(n), or
Latin American.
70
Arias contends that such terms and identities rely on grand narratives
that exclude some possibilities and foreclose others. Specifically, Arias points out that
diasporic Central Americans are invisible to most US citizens, Latinas/os and non-
Latinas/os alike. He gives at least two explanations for the invisibility of Central
American-Americans, including political stigmatization and racism. Arias notes that
often Central American refugees and immigrants are assumed to be leftists and that they
have avoided the potential stigma of this assumption by pretending they are not Central
American in order to avoid persecution.
71
Arias links this ‘instinct to preserve by
pretending to be what they are not’ to survival techniques that have been used and
developed since the Spanish conquest and continue to be useful in the context of
continuing imperial violence.
72
Racism also plays a role in the nonrecognition of Central
Americans. Arias contends that “[a] Latino identity is often constructed through the
abjection and erasure of the Central American-American….their invisible status, their
nonrecognition, generates a sense of nonbelonging, of nonbeing, a cruel invisibility that
was first imposed on them in their country of origin.”
73
He argues that this erasure is
rooted in the Latin American and Latino desire to produce an essentialized identity into
which Central Americans do not fit due to issues of racism and class elitism in the

70
Arturo Arias, Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2007), 190.

71
Ibid., 211.

72
Ibid., 188 and 89.

73
Ibid., 186.
32
Americas that do not allow for the recognition of indigenous peoples and create a deep
divide between rich and poor.
74

Similarly, in The Other Side, Ruben Martínez captures the political and
demographic context that Chicana third world feminists were working in during the
1980s and 1990s, underscoring the contradictory struggle to gain recognition while
struggling to avoid the potentially negative consequences of being the focus of
attention.
75
Martínez writes about the erasure of both Mexicans and Central Americans
in the United States:
Central America did not exist as far as L.A. was concerned until the Sandinista
Army rolled into Managua, the FMLN appeared close to achieving a similar
triumph in San Salvador, and hundreds of thousands of Central Americans
showed up on the streets of the barrio surrounding MacArthur Park, later
christened Pequeño Centroamérica (‘Little Central America’).”
76

This is precisely when Chicanas, such as Moraga, started taking up the topic of Central
America in their published creative writing. However, this development should be
understood within the history of Chicana publishing history, since it was not until shortly
after the Sandinistas victoriously rolled into Managua in 1979 that Chicanas began being
published in relatively larger numbers (as I discuss in the introduction). Like Martínez,
Chicana creative writers acknowledge that identity is contradictory and they set about
interrogating how their own political consciousness and understanding of solidarity was
challenged by the arrival of large numbers of Central American refugees during the late
1970s and 1980s. Chicana creative writers marked a shift in what it meant to be a

74
Ibid., 188.

75
Martínez, The Other Side Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond, 49.

76
Ibid.
33
Chicana feminist and/or a US feminist of color that paralleled increased refugee flows
from El Salvador and Guatemala.
77
Their feminist consciousness shifted as they
contrasted their own experiences with violence in the US with the circumstances of
displaced people from Central America. The arrival of Central American refugees and
immigrants changed how Chicanas conceptualized their own situation in the US as they
compared and contrasted their experiences to those of Central Americans in the US and
on the isthmus These demographic changes in turn contributed to the development of
Chicana hemispheric imaginaries of solidarity in the Americas that I trace through This
Bridge.
This Bridge Called My Back: Forewords, Prefaces, Introductions, and Responses
The prefaces, forewords, and introductions to each edition of This Bridge—1981,
1983, 1988 (Spanish language edition titled Esta puente, mi espalda) and 2001—function
as a conceptual map of how Chicana feminists theorized third world feminist solidarity
over the course of the two decades that ushered in tremendous growth among the Central
American population in the US. In the anthology, Moraga and other feminists of color,
including Anzaldúa, Bambara, and other contributors theorize and recognize the
contradictions and difficulties of forming alliances across the boundaries of race,
ethnicity, religion, and nation. Their political imagination allowed the contributors to
This Bridge to draw on a range of historical experiences to claim political solidarity with
diverse collectivities of women, including Latina/Chicana, Jewish, Asian American,

77
María Cristina García, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and
Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla,
Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2001).
34
Native American, and African American women. In addition, the Spanish language
edition of This Bridge includes contributions by women from Central America, helping to
make it a more hemispheric text both in focus and in terms of the contributors' countries
of origin. Their approach to solidarity relies on recognizing their shared (not identical)
experiences with economic poverty, racism, sexism and homophobia. Throughout the
multiple editions of This Bridge, in its prefaces, forewords, and in pieces by various
contributors, the anthology theorizes solidarity through both discourse and action, as
Saldívar-Hull argues Chicana writing does in general.
Like Moraga, other Chicana writers began being published during the 1970s and
1980s, periods marked by the emergence and consolidation of both the Chicano
movement and the second-wave feminist movement. During this period, Chicanas had
many contradictions to negotiate including sexism and homophobia in the Chicano
movement and racism in the women’s movement.
78
In the 2001 Foreword to This
Bridge, Moraga recalls, “My disillusionment in those movements marked my own
coming of age politically, for it required me, as it did for so many women of color, the
creation of a critical consciousness that had not been reflected in mass social
movements.”
79
In collaboration with other women of color, Moraga envisioned a critical
consciousness could be forged in order to respond theoretically and materially to the
exclusions they experienced within the social movements of the late 1960s and early

78
For discussion, see Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, Ch.
2.

79
Cherríe Moraga, "From inside the First World: Foreword, 2001," in This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Berkeley: Third
Woman Press, 2002). xvi.
35
1970s.
80
Ironically, the exclusions Chicanas experienced helped create the conditions of
possibility for the emergence of a particular woman of color politics that demonstrated an
interest in working for the liberation of all people, both nationally and internationally.
Informed by their own experiences, Chicanas worked to acknowledge the necessity of
working in solidarity within unequal relations of power while also acknowledging the
limitations of such work.
In February of 1979, such an experience sparked the initial idea for This Bridge
when Anzaldúa attended a women’s retreat just north of San Francisco led by feminist
scholar and artist Merlin Stone. While at the retreat, Anzaldúa recalls being treated like
an “outsider, the poor relative, the token woman of color,” because she received financial
assistance to attend from the organizers.
81
After the conference, Anzaldúa approached
Moraga about working on an anthology that addressed racism within the feminist
movement, an invitation that Moraga initially declined. In a 1986 interview with Norma
Alarcón, Moraga recalls that when Anzaldúa mentioned collaborating on a project she
was ‘unsure and said no for about four months’.
82
She finally agreed to work with
Anzaldúa on a project “that was gonna get the White girls right” and “was gonna say you
are racist in ‘x’ amount of ways, and we’ve had it.”
83
In other words, Moraga and

80
See for example the development of a critical consciousness laid out in, Combahee River Collective, "A
Black Feminist Statement," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed.
Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981). Audre Lorde, "The Master's
Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, ed. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981).

81
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, lii.

82
Norma Alarcón, "Interview with Cherríe Moraga," Third Woman 3, no. 1-2 (1986): 127.

83
Ibid.
36
Anzaldúa initially imagined a text that was going to talk back against racism and
homophobia within the second-wave feminist movement.
In the April 1979 letter of solicitation for This Bridge, Moraga and Anzaldúa
expressed their vision for an anthology they initially titled, Radical Third World
Feminists’ Anthology: A Woman to Woman Dialogue.
84
They detail the types of
contributions they sought for the proposed anthology:
We want to express to all women—especially to white middle-class women—the
experiences which divide us as feminists; we want to examine incidents of
intolerance, prejudice and denial of differences within the feminist movement.
We intend to explore the causes and sources of, and solutions to these divisions.
We want to create a definition that expands what ‘feminist’ means to us.
85

The letter also requested submissions by women of color that reflected their perspectives
of the feminist movement. It emphasized that submissions should consider the
differences between women in order to find ways of working together toward common
goals. Further, it specifically requested reflections on the exclusions feminists of color
experienced within the white feminist movement because their concerns about race, class,
and sexuality were marginalized in order to focus on gender oppression. In their letter,
Moraga and Anzaldúa also envisioned “compiling a list of Third World Women writers,
artists, scholars, performers, and political activists” in order to set up a network of
women of color that would help keep them in touch with each other and serve as a
directory for women’s studies departments and feminist organizations.
86
When the
anthology was published three years later it included a detailed list of contributors and a

84
Cherríe Moraga Papers 1970-1996, (Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries).

85
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, lii.

86
Cherríe Moraga Papers 1970-1996.
37
selected bibliography titled “Third World Women in the US—By and about us” compiled
by Moraga.
Nevertheless, by the time This Bridge came to fruition, it did much more than
illustrate the contradictions within the white feminist movement, it helped create the
conditions of possibility for feminists to learn about each others histories, which as
Alexander argues is critical to building solidarity. As Moraga writes, the anthology
became a “positive affirmation” of feminism by women of color in the US and created a
“feeling of greater solidarity with other feminists of color across the country.”
87

Responses to This Bridge in anthologies such as its 2002 sister anthology, this bridge we
call home, contain a number of testimonies about the importance of This Bridge to
women and men of color coming into consciousness about their oppression and
recognizing that others shared similar experiences and political goals. Many of the
contributors assert that This Bridge transformed and saved their lives.
88

Further, as set out in the original letter, This Bridge became a resource for
communication that helped put feminists of color in contact with each other and
amplified feminist of color theory. Moraga indicates that the anthology became a tool for
networking, organizing, and teaching precisely because as she put it, “books…can go
places that bodies can’t.”
89
As This Bridge brought women of color together, it also
circulated in white feminist circles that were interested in issues of racism and that

87
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, lii.

88
See for example Keating’s introduction: Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We
Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2002).

89
Alarcón, "Interview with Cherríe Moraga," 127.
38
circulation was facilitated because the first edition was published by a white women’s
press with already established networks.

Further, building on their interest in cultural
activism, shortly after the original publication of This Bridge in 1981 Anzaldúa and
Moraga organized readings of the text in the Bay area and on the East Coast where
women came together to listen and learn about the experiences of feminists of color.
90

In an interview with Gay Community News, Moraga noted the importance of organizing
such readings, “For many third world women….this will be the first time they’ve gotten
together in the name of third world feminism…and to organize [across racial and cultural
lines]….And when we leave, they’ll have the book to use as a tool.”
91
Indeed, the
reading in Boston on June 5, 1981 at the Arlington Street Church brought together a
diverse group of women of color, including Moraga, Anzaldúa, Barbara Cameron,
Rosario Morales, Aurora Morales Levine, Barbara Smith, Kate Rushin, Beverly Smith,
Nellie Wong, and hattie gossett. A small group of attendees was treated to readings from
This Bridge that were organized into four acts and accompanied by music.
92
The goal of
the reading as to draw on creative writing to help introduce readers to the issues women
of color faced in the US in order to facilitate and encourage women to organize across
racial and cultural difference.
While many of the concerns addressed in the first edition of This Bridge focuses
on US based issues, in her foreword to the second edition of This Bridge, “Refugees of a
World on Fire,” Moraga reflects on what the anthology might look like if produced in

90
Cherríe Moraga Papers.

91
Jill Clark, "A Book About Difference..." Gay Community News, June 27 1981, 6.

92
Ibid.
39
1983 and imagines it would have a more pronounced international focus. She argues that
a revised focus was necessary in 1983 due to demographic changes in the US that are
linked to US military and economic interventions around the world, and particularly in
Central America. Moraga writes:
the impetus to forge links with women of color from every region grows more and
more urgent as the number of recently immigrated people of color in the US
grows in enormous proportions, as we begin to see ourselves as refugees of a
world on fire:
The US is training troops in Honduras to overthrow the Nicaraguan
people’s government.
Human right violations are occurring on a massive scale in Guatemala and
El Salvador (and as in this country those more hard-hit are often the indigenous
people of those lands)….
And in the US? The Reagan administration daily drains us of nearly every
political gain made by the feminist, Third World, and anti-war work of the late
60’s and early 70’s.
93

In the face of continued and intensified attacks against the people of Central America and
people of color in the US, Moraga admits that in 1983 she was “feeling more defeated
than optimistic.”
94
This sentiment is evident in her changing perspective about whether
or not This Bridge had the potential to produce solidarity. In marked contrast to Moraga's
optimism in her 1981 interview with Gay Community News, in 1983 she wrote: “The idea
of Third World Feminism has proved much easier between the covers of a book than
between real live women.”
95
Remarkably within just two years, Moraga went from
thinking that This Bridge could help third world feminists forge solidarity with one
another to publicly reflecting on the difficulty of achieving such a goal.

93
Ibid., 347.

94
Ibid., 348.

95
Ibid.
40
The publication of the 1988 Spanish language edition, Esta puente, mi espalda
edited by Moraga and Ana Castillo and translated by Castillo and Norma Alarcón,
represents another attempt to create hemispheric bridges between women in the
Americas. Esta puente tracks changing conceptualizations about the transnational and
international potential of US third world feminism.
96
As early as 1981, Moraga and
Anzaldúa envision that the anthology would be translated and circulated outside the US
in order to “mak[e] a tangible link between Third World women in the US and
throughout the world.”
97
In their 1988 foreword to Esta puente, the translators, Castillo
and Alarcón, express similar hopes about Esta puente’s political potential:
A partir de la publicación de Esta puente, mi espalda la conciencia feminista en
todos los sectores culturales, economicos, y raciales es un intento de abrir camino
e inciar lazos entre nosotras, las mujeres de color estadounidenses y las mujeres
de hispanoamérica.

[Through the publication of This Bridge Called My Back, feminist consciousness
in all cultural, economic, and racial sectors is and attempts to open paths and
initiate ties between us, women of color in the US and women from Latin
America.]
98
(All translations mine.)

The editors and translators envision Esta puente as a way to initiate dialogue with
Spanish speaking women and feminists. Notably by 1988, Chicana creative writers
participated in conferences and cultural exchanges in Mexico and were often introduced
to Mexican audiences as examples of women drawing on the imagination to resist
oppressive social conditions, indicating that international audiences also recognized

96
Moraga and Castillo, eds., Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundistas En Los Estados
Unidos.

97
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, lvi.

98
Moraga and Castillo, eds., Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundistas En Los Estados
Unidos, 19i.
41
Chicana creative writing as a type of political intervention that sought to produce social
change.
99

The title that the translators selected for the Spanish language edition also reflects
a political stance. Castillo and Alarcón opted to pair the feminine adjective ‘esta’ (this)
with the masculine noun ‘puente’ (bridge) in order to disrupt the privileging of male
activists in narratives about the movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In so doing, they
emphasized the centrality of women in social movements that This Bridge and Esta
puente insist upon. Esta Puente also introduces a new subtitle, which translates to Voices
of Third World Women in the US in contrast to the original Writings by Radical Women
of Color. The new subtitle underscores the colonial histories of women of color both
within the US and outside the US, emphasizing that the legacies US colonialism continue
to be experienced by poor and dark-skinned women throughout the Americas. The
subtitle further gestures toward the inclusion of new contributors that reflect on the civil
wars and revolutionary struggles in Central America (El Salvador and Nicaragua). Most
important to this discussion are three new pieces of writing titled, “No podemos regresar:
un testimonio de una refugiada salvadoreña”/”We Cannot Return: A Salvadoran
Refugee’s Testimonio,” “Haciendo conexiones”/“Making Connections,” and Moraga’s
introduction to the text.
In Moraga's 1988 introduction, “En el sueño, siempre se me recibe en el río”/“In
the Dream, I Am Always Met at the River” (the same line that ends her preface to the

99
See for example: Federico Campbell, "La Literatura Chicana Femenina En Busca De Una Estetica
Propia, Mas Alta De La Denuncia," Proceso 600 (1988), Elena Poniatowska, "Puentes De Ida Y Vuelta,"
La Jornada Semanal 246 (1989).
42
1981 edition of This Bridge), she continues to reflect her commitment to establishing
connections and building coalitions through creative writing. She explains that the term
women of color was adopted by US women of Asian, Latin American, Native American,
and African descent in order to position themselves in opposition to dominant culture and
in alignment with colonized people throughout the world. Moraga writes directly to
Spanish speaking women in the closing section of her essay:
El reconocimiento de nuestra inter-dependencia progresiva como mujeres
tercermundistas dondequiera que vivamos en este planeta es finalmente lo que
incitó esta adaptación en español; ya que como mujeres de color que vivimos
dentro de las “entrañas del monstruo” nosotras tenemos algo que compartir con
las mujeres de color en otros países....
….Ofrecemos, entonces, este libro a nuestras hermanas latinoamericanas con las
esperanzas de que nuestra lucha pueda proveer algún sentido y apoyo a la lucha
de ustedes. Fundamentalmente, nosotras sufrimos en las manos del mismo
monstruo y aun sea que vivamos en sus entrañas o sintamos su pata inmensa sobre
el cuello de nuestro propio país amenazado, no podemos darnos el lujo de vernos
separadas la una de la otra….Cuando nos extendemos como puente entre las
diferencias nuestras, esta expresión mantiene la promesa de aliviar las heridas
causadas pos los siglos de nuestra separación.

[The recognition of our progressive inter-dependence as third world women
wherever we live on this planet is what incites this Spanish adaptation; since as
women of color living “in the belly of the beast” we have something to share with
women of color in other countries….
….Therefore, we offer this book to our sisters in Latin America with the hope that
our struggle can provide some direction and support to your struggle.
Fundamentally, we suffer at the hands of the same monster and even if we live in
its belly or if we feel its immense foot on our own country’s neck, we cannot
afford to see ourselves separated from one another….When we extend ourselves
like a bridge across our differences, this expression maintains the promise of
healing the wounds caused by centuries of our separation.]
100

In this passage, Moraga gestures toward the inter-dependence of third world women in
the global south and the US in order to argue that women must work in solidarity across

100
Ibid., 6.
43
geo-political borders. She offers the anthology as a document that highlights the
articulated oppressions that women in Latina America and women of color in the US
endure. In contrast to 1983, in 1988 Moraga appears to be more hopeful about the
connections Esta puente may create between women separated by geopolitical borders
and language. Yet, she once again delineates the limitations of the text:
El libro no refleja verdaderamente las corrientes actuales de immigración—la
Indochina, la haitiana, la centroamericana, la palestina (para nombrar solo
algunas)—que rápidamente están alterando el rostro de “América.” Estas son el
resultado de la política imperialista e intervecionista en los EEUU.

[The book does not truly reflect the present immigration flows—from Indochina,
Haiti, Central America, Palestine (to name a few)—that are quickly changing
America’s face. This is the result of US imperialist and interventionist policy.]
101

For Moraga, Esta puente represents an expression of political solidarity with Latin
American women struggling at the intersection of multiple oppressions, including the
legacies of US imperialism. However, her reflections also reveal that her theoretical
perspective is constantly in the process of being revised, much like her identity as a
woman of color is always in the process of becoming.
102
The inclusion of Latin
American focused texts by Latin American women in the Spanish language version of
This Bridge also reflects Moraga's growing investment in giving voice to issues of US
imperialism, particularly in relationship to Central America.
One new contribution to Esta puente is “No podemos regresar,” the testimony of a
Salvadoran refugee speaking under the pseudonym Morena de Martínez that focuses on
the political persecution she and her family experienced in El Salvador due to her

101
Ibid., 5.

102
Norma Alarcón, "Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of "the" Native Woman," in Living Chicana Theory,
ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1998).
44
husband’s union activism. Martínez’s testimony underscores the role the US sanctuary
movement played in saving Central American refugee lives. As detailed by Maria
Cristina Garcia as well as Nora Hamilton and Norma Chinchilla, during the 1980s
Central America solidarity organizations in the US provided shelter, social services, and
political support to thousands of Central American refugees.
103

Martínez's testimonio emphasizes the importance of solidarity organizations to
her family’s migration. After she and her family fled El Salvador and traveled to Mexico
they learned about the Comité de Refugiados de Centroamérica/Central America Refugee
Committee (CRECE), an organization that helped put refugees in contact with solidarity
organizations and sanctuary churches in the US. Once in Mexico, Martínez’s husband
crossed the border into the US with a friend and later Martínez was guided into the US by
a coyote. She recalls that her two children where driven into the US by a white woman
who assisted refugees by transporting their children into the US using her own children’s
birth documents. Upon arriving in the US, the family was given sanctuary at a Northern
California Catholic convent. Martínez recalls that international solidarity organizations
made it possible for her and her family to escape the persecution she experienced in El
Salvador and urges more people, particularly Latinas/os, to stand in solidarity with the
people of Latin America:
Nuestra meta aquí en los Estados Unidos y en cualquier lugar donde vayamos, es
hacerle ver a la gente lo que los dólares que manda el gobierno estadounidense a
El Salvador están haciendo. Quiero decirles a todos los latinos en este país que
despierten, que no se olviden de sus países que los necesitan. Que denuncien las

103
García, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada, Ch. 3,
Hamilton and Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los
Angeles, Ch.5, Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the
Central America Solidarity Movement (Oxford: Oxford Never Press, 2004).
45
injusticias, que protesten la ayuda militaria a El Salvador. Que sepan que el
pueblo salvadoreño quiere vivir en paz. Que no queremos que un día tengan que
ir a pelear en contra se sus propias gentes. Que se informen más de la guerra y de
la historia de nuestros países y así verán el porque de la guerra y también verán
que no somos comunistas.

[Our goal in the United States and in any place we go is to make people see what
the dollars that the US government sends to El Salvador are doing. I want to tell
all Latinos in this country to wake up, not to forget about their countries because
they need them. To denounce injustice, to protest military help to El Salvador.
Know that the Salvadoran people want to live in peace. We do not them to have
to go fight against there own people one day. They should inform themselves
more about the war and the history of our countries and they will see the reason
for the war and that we are not communists.]
104

Martínez’s words underscore the importance of solidarity work as she encourages
Latinas/os to fight against US intervention in El Salvador and to learn the history of US
military aid to Latin America. While Martínez's narration does not focus on Chicanas
working transnationally or internationally, by publishing her testimonio Moraga and
Castillo draw on the activist imagination to propose—through their editorial decisions—
that US third world feminism is a transnational formation that is constantly in the process
of transformation due to ongoing violence within and outside the US. By including
Martínez's testimonio in Esta puente, Moraga and Castillo actively engage in raising
consciousness about political violence in Central America.
Martínez’s testimonio helps emphasize that writing and testimony are central to
raising consciousness about struggles for liberation in Latin America.
105
By

104
Ibid.

105
For discussions of testimonio see: John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in
Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), Georg M. Gugelberger, ed., The Real Thing:
Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), María Josefina Saldaña-
Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas in the Age of Development (Durham: Duke
46
incorporating a testimonio narrative, Moraga and Castillo underscore the central role
testimonio played in helping disseminate information about political violence in Central
America during the 1980s. As discussed in my introduction the formation of the Chicana
transnational activist imagination echoes the urgency of testimonio writing as a political
act that attempts to raise consciousness about violence against persecuted populations,
such as Martínez and her family, in order to forge international solidarity. As Martínez
mentions, her goal was to raise awareness about the destructiveness of US military aid to
Central America. In the passage quoted above, she appeals to Latinas/os possible sense
of connection to Latin America by emphasizing that they should not forget about “their”
countries and people. By emphasizing a common origin and cultural background in her
use of the inclusive terms “their” and “our,” Martínez hopes to inspire solidarity among
Latinas/os in the US and avoids dividing the pain of Central Americans into a dichotomy
that excludes the compassion and empathy others may feel. Martínez focuses on
solidarity across geopolitical borders because she recognizes the political efficiency of
choosing to work together with others. Thus, like Moraga and other Chicanas, Martínez
conceptualizes solidarity as a process that can be produced and practiced through both
tangible action and discourse that may lead to action, which is precisely what Martínez
aimed to do by giving her testimony.
As if responding to Martínez’s call for solidarity, in “Haciendo Conexiones” a
Chicana activist named Elsa Granados reflects on how she came to learn about US
intervention abroad and her views on Central American solidarity work. Granados

University Press, 2003), The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
47
recalls learning about US intervention in Mexico, Central America, and South America
from her older sister who was a Catholic nun who worked in several Latin American
countries. Influenced by her sister, when Granados went to college she became involved
in several organizations that focused on women’s issues. However, she was dissatisfied
with the degree of transnational solidarity work those organizations were doing and
started working with the organization Somos Hermanas/We Are Sisters instead. In her
essay, Granados explains why she thinks such work is important, “veo que tenemos que
estar en solidaridad con la gente en Centroamérica porque compartimos las cargas del
militarismo y la Guerra, la pobreza, el sexismo y el racismo”/“I see that we have to be in
solidarity with the people of Central America because we share the weight of militarism,
poverty, sexism, and racism.”
106
Granados herself traveled to Nicaragua as part of a
Somos Hermanas delegation where she witnessed the devastation left behind by
counterrevolutionary forces and the enduring spirit of Nicaraguan women facing the daily
violence of hunger, disappearance, and death. As part of her solidarity work, she also
attended the 1987 Congress of the Latin American Federation of Associations of
Relatives of Detainees-Disappeared (FEDEFFAM) in El Salvador. Aside from
contributing an essay to Esta puente, upon her return to the US, Granados helped
organize an event named “Resisting Reagan’s War” at the Women’s Building in San
Francisco where members of the second Somos Hermanas delegation, which included
Barbara Cameron, shared what they witnessed in Nicaragua.
107
By including Granados’

106
Moraga and Castillo, eds., Esta Puente, Mi Espalda: Voces De Mujeres Tercermundistas En Los
Estados Unidos, 203.

107
Cherríe Moraga Papers.
48
essay in Esta puente, Moraga and Castillo articulate the activist potential of writing and
women's engagement in practices that are more readily identifiable as activist solidarity
work, such as solidarity travel, in order to raise consciousness about the plight of women
in Nicaragua after the US government launched a covert war against the Sandinista
government.
As a continuation of this work, almost thirteen years after the publication of Esta
puente, Moraga continued echoing the importance of forging transnational solidarity
through her articulation of activism, the imagination, and women of color feminism. In
the 2001 “Foreword” to the third English language edition of This Bridge, Moraga writes:
As “refugees of a world on fire,” the strategy for our liberation is not confined to
our state-imposed identity as residents of the United States. Instead our origins
oblige us to assume a position of a global women of color activism, while at the
same time remaining specific to our concerns as Native, Asian, African-originated
women living within specific nation-states.
108

The political focus and clarity Moraga expresses in her 2001 foreword represents her
shifting perspective on women of color feminism within a global context. In contrast to
1981, Moraga's assessment of women of color feminist praxis and geopolitics carried a
renewed and heightened urgency due to the post-September 11, 2001 race to war against
an ambiguous “terrorist” enemy. She recalls that September 11 helped her envision a
“future of radical activism” that was not centered on organizing within the US and
admits: “Stupidly with the ethnocentrism of an Amerikan, I had imagined that real radical
movement would arise from us, the US citizenry. I had not dreamed that the world would

108
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, xvii.
49
rise against Amerika and that we would have to take a side.”
109
While the multiple
editions of This Bridge make clear that Moraga’s thinking about women of color
feminism was much more dynamic and transnational than this impassioned statement
reveals, it allows a glimpse into the political urgency and frustration that Moraga wrote
from in 2001. Moraga’s statement also underscores that privileging radical movements
within the US creates a skewed perspective about the myriad of ways that people outside
the US organize against US imperialism. Such a statement echoes her earlier perspective
about the importance of knowing the histories of other women and people of color. Her
stance also seems to move away from prioritizing a hemispheric perspective to an
increasingly global perspective.
Taking this revised global outlook, Moraga poses the question, what is “A radical
woman of color response?” to which she replies, “Betray your country and save your
people.”
110
So, how does Moraga theorize and contextualize a radical woman of color
response in her 2001 introduction to This Bridge? She insists on remembering that the
September 11 attacks were five-hundred years in the making through genocide in the
Americas, the enslavement of African people, Palestinian displacement, US imperialism
around the world, and economic exploitation. Moraga’s vision refuses solidarity with
“US leaders (white or white-minded) who exercise genocide” and instead opts to
remember “the loss and death of human relatives across the globe”—again underscoring
a global perspective—and seeks to unite with them across geopolitical borders.
111
She

109
Ibid., xvii and xviii.

110
Ibid., xviii.

50
recognizes that “there is no safe place for any of us in revolutionary work” because “We
make and break political alliance as we continue to evolve and redefine what is our work
in this life.”
112
Like Alexander, Moraga reminds readers of the risk involved in solidarity
work as she argues that solidarity is not easy or stagnant; it is an ongoing process that
changes shape depending on the context and interests being addressed. She also
underscores that political alliances are forged and dissolved as peoples’ political
commitments are defined and redefined.
As Moraga suggests, the solidarity envisioned in This Bridge is not without limits
nor is the anthology meant to be a definitive text. The 2002 sister anthology to This
Bridge, this bridge we call home, represents a continuation of the project that This Bridge
has come to exemplify.
113
In the introduction to this bridge we call home, “Charting
Pathways, Marking Thresholds…A Warning, An Introduction,” Analouise Keating
recalls envisioning this bridge we call home as text that “marks Bridge’s importance,
celebrates its loud shout but goes further—measures its impact and assesses our next
step.”
114
At least one contribution does exactly that by assessing This Bridge’s
contributions and limitations, Deborah A. Miranda’s “What’s Wrong with a Little
Fantasy?”
115
Miranda reflects on the way Native American histories are represented in

111
Ibid., xxvi.

112
Ibid., xxviii.

113
Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for
Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2002).

114
Ibid., 9.

51
the collection as she confesses that like many other women of color she wanted to feel
like she owned the book, but could not because she did not see herself represented in the
anthology. While Miranda recognizes the “Indian voices in Bridge, a few poems or
personal narratives” she notes that they “barely began to represent our astonishingly
diverse Native communities.”
116
She recalls, “I felt that in order to have some claim to
the book’s power, I needed to become a generic woman of color, lose my Indianness.”
117

Miranda did not think that her identity as an Indian woman was represented in This
Bridge and felt guilty about her lack of identification. As she writes:
Even within the ‘us’ of the women-of-color community, I still feel like a ‘them’,
and there are historical, cultural reasons for this sense of alienation. Educated
within anti-Indian institutions and U.S. culture, women of color learn the same
deafness to Indian voices that white graduate students and professors absorb and
pass on. There is a particular relationship between women of color and Indian
women, with solidarity on the one hand, silence on the other.
118

Miranda’s critique of This Bridge centers on the lack of consciousness about indigenous
people, their literature, and their history of colonization in “America” that she sees
reflected in writings by the contributors to This Bridge While Miranda’s intense desire
to see her own history represented in a more nuanced manner is understandably linked to
the long history of subjugation indigenous people in the Americas have survived, there is
no indication in This Bridge that the contributors or editors advocated the formation of a

115
Deborah A. Miranda, ""What's Wrong with a Little Fantasy?" Storytelling from the (Still) Ivory Tower,"
in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise
Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002).

116
Ibid., 192.

117
Ibid.

118
Ibid., 199.
52
generic woman of color identity. Instead, Moraga and other contributors theorize the
importance of paying attention to the diverse histories of those who politically identify as
women of color, as exemplified by Bambara's preface to the first edition where she
insists, “We have got to know each other better and teach each other our ways, our
views.”
119

The sentiment behind Miranda’s critique of This Bridge is echoed by Rodríguez’s
critique of the privileging of Chicana subjectivity in Central America-centered fiction by
Chicanas. The problem both Miranda and Rodríguez identify is rooted in a desire for
voice and recognition. As Miranda contends: “The voices in Bridge are not inadequate
or inarticulate. Those voices helped save my life. But I craved the indigenous voice that
knew the paradox, pain, and deceit of a colonized homeland beneath my feet—and
beneath the feet of every American.”
120
Similarly, Rodríguez seems to crave the
centering of a Central American voice that can express the “authentic” pain and terror of
war and displacement. If that is the case, can Chicanas be expected to fulfill that desire?
Such an expectation is neither realistic nor necessary. I contend that we cannot and
should not. Instead, readers can focus on the theory and practice that texts such as This
Bridge represent by recognizing the incredibly diverse histories of women across the
Americas. The theory and practice This Bridge models reveals that in order to work
toward common political goals women of color must identify shared political objectives
that are in part identified by articulating the imagination and solidarity; all the while

119
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, vii.

120
Ibid., 193.
53
keeping in mind that solidarity between women of color is contradictory and at times not
successful.
Instead of foreclosing the possibility of solidarity, these tensions have the
potential of being productive sites of political engagement. They are sites where women
of color must actively try to learn about each other’s histories in order to avoid alienating
women that they see as potential political allies. It is worth restating that in her 1981
forward to This Bridge, Bambara shared a similar political vision arguing, that women of
color feminisms must create spaces for listening and learning: “[it] can coax us into the
habit of listening to each other and learning each other’s ways of seeing and being.”
121

This necessitates the willingness to learn about women of color histories and requires that
we engage in projects to uncover histories and knowledges that have not been heard.
Yet, the struggle to amplify more voices and histories should not pit women of color
against each other. Instead, the goal should be to listen and communicate in order to
create “the coalitions of women determined to be a danger to our enemies” that Bambara
thought possible; all the while recognizing that such coalitions may be temporary,
conditional, and at times not possible.
Conclusion: Solidarity and Contradiction
In the almost three decades since This Bridge was first published, Moraga and
other women of color have continuously assessed, sustained, and expanded the feminist
of color praxis the anthology envisioned and attempted to enact. Faced with changing
US demographics, due to US intervention in Central America and elsewhere, the Chicana

121
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, vii.
54
feminist imagination began articulating the struggles on the isthmus and in US inner
cities. This transnational and international connection helped transform the Chicana
activist imagination in both abstract and concrete ways. Moraga’s shifting
conceptualization of solidarity between women of color reflects a deep concern with the
political moment in which she writes, and at one point led her to assert that the solidarity
imagined in This Bridge was “easier between the covers of a book than in real life.”
However, the transformations that have taken place since 1981 also led women
such as Elsa Granados to become active in transnational solidarity work by participating
in delegations and conferences in Central America as well as actively protesting US
policies in Central America. Transnational solidarity among those protesting the violence
of the civil wars across geopolitical borders was key to pressuring the US government to
cut aid to repressive regimes that killed hundreds of thousands of people on the isthmus.
International solidarity also helped Central Americans flee political persecution and war
related violence, through efforts such as the sanctuary movement. However, as the
contributors to This Bridge and Esta puente recognize the contradictions and difficulties
of forming alliances across the boundaries of race, ethnicity, religion, and nation often
complicated organizing efforts.
While changing imaginaries of solidarity opened spaces for the incorporation of
Central American voices into the translated edition of This Bridge, the problem of
recognition reminded Chicana feminist writers that solidarity between Chicanas and
Central Americans could not be assumed or taken for granted, as illustrated by Moraga,
Castillo, and Granados. Instead, creative writing helped Chicanas imagine the conditions
55
of possibility for enacting ways of being in world that recognized the interconnections
between all people, particularly Chicanas/os and Central Americans, without assuming
identical oppressions, yet seeking to work together for social justice across geopolitical
borders. This in fact is what This Bridge teaches readers about solidarity; that it is
contradictory, temporary, risky, and without guarantees.
In the next chapter, I examine how Helena María Viramontes drew on and
contributed to the formation of the Chicana transnational political imagination in her
Central America focused “The Cariboo Cafe.” The chapter discusses Viramontes’
theorization of symbolic and physical disappearance across geopolitical borders, paying
particular attention to gender, race, class, and nationality. The problem of solidarity and
recognition between Chicanas and Centroamericanas is also discussed through the
relationship between of a young Chicana character and a Central American refugee
woman. This reading once again underscores that Chicanas understood solidarity as a
contradictory process that is not guaranteed. Chapter three also discusses the violence
that led Chicanas to draw on the political imagination to challenge dominant
understandings of what was happening in Central America during the 1980s, particularly
in relationship to the topic of disappearance.

56

CHAPTER THREE

The Disappeared in Helena María Viramontes’ “The Cariboo Cafe”

Disappearances are perhaps the cruelest form of government
abuse, causing agony not only to the detainees but to their relatives
as well. Detainees are cut off from the outside world, deprived of
any legal protection, and subject to the whim of their captors. Most
often they are tortured and then secretly killed. The relatives of
detainees, meanwhile, are unable to ascertain their fate-whether
and where they are being held, whether they are even dead or
alive.
122

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it
is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting
glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings,
themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything
and anything except for me.
123

Mapping the Social Relations of Disappearance
The two opening epigraphs respectively speak to the material and symbolic
aspects of disappearance illustrated in Helena María Viramontes’ 1985 short story, “The
Cariboo Cafe” from the collection The Moths and Other Stories.
124
As Reed Brody and
Felipe González suggest, scholars and activists interested in issues of disappearance in
Latin America often understand it as a tool of political terror in the context of the civil
wars and dirty wars that engulfed Central America and the Southern Cone during the

122
Reed Brody and Felipe González, "Nunca Más: An Analysis of International Instruments on
'Disappearances'," Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1997): 366.

123
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 3.

124
Helena María Viramontes, The Moths and Other Stories, 2nd ed. (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995).
57
second half of the twentieth century.
125
Brody and González further note that the Latin
American Federation of Associations of Relatives of Detainees-Disappeared
(FEDEFFAM) defines “forced disappearance” as,
any act or omission intended to hide the fate of an opponent or political dissident
whose whereabouts are unknown to his/her family, friends or associates,
undertaken with the intent to repress, ban or obstruct opposition or dissidence, by
persons exercising governmental functions or public agents of any kind or by
organized groups of private citizens acting with the support or tolerance from the
above mentioned persons.
126

As this definition reveals, the disappeared are often accused of dissent, abducted,
forcefully moved from place to place, tortured, raped, disfigured beyond recognition,
deprived of sustenance and rest, executed, then dumped onto a roadside, into mass
graves, into the sea, into a river, or perhaps into a volcanic crater. They are rounded up
from home in the middle of the night or taken off the street in broad daylight while
kicking and screaming as terrified witnesses look on. In most cases, the whereabouts of
the disappeared remain unknown, creating what Diana Taylor calls “the paradoxical
omnipresence of the disappeared,” because those left behind refuse to forget.
127

Sometimes, the body of a disappeared person reappears tortured and mutilated—most

125
Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), Brody and González, "Nunca Más: An Analysis of International
Instruments on 'Disappearances'.", Truth Commission, From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El
Salvador (1993 [cited September 2006]); available from
http://www.usip.org/library/tc/doc/reports/el_salvador/tc_es_03151993_toc.html, Jo Fisher, Mothers of the
Disappeared (Boston: South End Press, 1989), Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture
and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), Cecilia Menjívar and Nestor
Rodríguez, eds., When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S. And Technologies of Terror (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2005), Margaret Randall, "Disappearance," in When I Look into the Mirror and See You:
Women, Terror, and Resistance (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), Taylor, Disappearing
Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War".

126
Brody and González, "Nunca Más: An Analysis of International Instruments on 'Disappearances'," 370.

127
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), xvii.
58
often dead, fewer times alive—as a warning to others who might express political dissent.
Fear and intimidation are used to silence the families and friends of the disappeared,
although many continue to demand information about their disappeared loved ones.
Those who demand answers receive none and often there are no official records to help
them figure out what happened to their family members and friends. Many look for their
disappeared loved ones decade after decade making the search an all-consuming activity
that continues indefinitely. Family members hope that they will find the disappeared
alive or at the very least learn what happened to them in order to achieve a sense of
closure. Some get the finality of knowing the person they search for is buried in a mass
grave; at times DNA evidence proves it beyond doubt. Others have the satisfaction of
finding their disappeared children, grandchildren, nieces, or nephews grown-up and
living with adoptive families. Families that have raised disappeared children are often
military or bourgeois families unable to conceive biological children of their own or that
took it upon themselves to “(re)educate” the children of “dissidents” in the ways of
obedience and loyalty to the authoritarian state in order to “save” them from their
parents’ mistakes.
These historical conditions are what Viramontes responds to in “The Cariboo
Cafe” as she develops her unique transnational activist imagination and raises awareness
about the problem of symbolic and physical disappearance in the Americas. In fact, the
missing bodies of several children that are violently disappeared are the motivating force
around which Viramontes develops a narrative in three parts. By introducing multiple
narrators, Viramontes allows the contradictions of disappearance to come to the surface.
59
The narrative ruptures created by this mode of storytelling underscores the uncertainties
faced by the disappeared and their families, including the lack of clear answers and
multiple contradictions. Geraldo, the Central American refugee woman’s son, is
disappeared in an unnamed Central American country while on his way to a mango stand
down the street from his home. He is a victim of the US supported counter-revolutionary
wars waged in Central America in the post-World War II era.
128
The café owner’s son,
JoJo is disappeared on the battlefields of Vietnam where his father imagines his mangled
body lays; he is another victim of US military intervention abroad, this time in Southeast
Asia. On the streets of Los Angeles, the young boy Macky is symbolically disappeared
as his character substitutes for both Geraldo and JoJo in the refugee woman’s and café
owner’s imaginations and desires to have their own disappeared children back. Macky’s
sister Sonya is also symbolically disappeared because she is a poor, immigrant, female
child and the refugee woman and café owner fixate on Macky as the boy child
symbolically replaces their own sons.
The opening lines in Ellison’s Invisible Man best capture how I conceptualize
symbolic disappearance: “I am an invisible man….I am invisible, understand, simply
because people refuse to see me….When they approach me they see only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and
anything except me.”
129
Spoken by an unnamed narrator, these lines eerily describe
Sonya’s dilemma in “The Cariboo Cafe.” Sonya is symbolically disappeared when the

128
William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992
(University of North Carolina Press, 1998), Menjívar and Rodríguez, eds., When States Kill: Latin
America, the U.S. And Technologies of Terror.

129
Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.
60
other characters fail to see her because she is a girl, because she is the child of
immigrants, and because she is poor. My use of symbolic in this context relates primarily
to the ways social reality is (re)presented in the text through the ideological frameworks
used to “actively understand the world and place our actions in it.”
130
Particularly useful
in this context is Stuart Hall’s definition of ideology as, “the mental frameworks-the
languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of
representation-which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of,
define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works.”
131
In the cases of Sonya
and Ellison’s invisible man, the frameworks used to make the world intelligible (race,
class, gender, nation) do not allow for a young immigrant girl to be visible and make it
preferable for a young black man to imagine himself as invisible—therefore they are
symbolically disappeared because there is no way to make sense of them in the social
world that they inhabit. In both examples, each of the characters experiences the
materiality of symbolic disappearance through everyday violence, including
marginalization, social exclusion, surveillance, policing, physical assault, poverty, and
hunger. Considering the violence experienced by those who are symbolically
disappeared, and following Pierre Bourdieu, the use of the word symbolic should not be
understood “as the opposite of ‘real, actual’” as if it has no material effects.
132
For as

130
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 243.

131
Stuart Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees," The Journal of Communication
Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 26.

132
Pierre Bourdieu, "Gender and Symbolic Violence," in Violence in War and Peace, ed. Nancy Scheper-
Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
61
Avery Gordon argues, Ellison’s invisible man’s “unvisibility” also creates a
“hypervisibility” that produces material effects for the symbolically disappeared.
133

Viramontes underscores that everyday violence against immigrants, people of
color, women, and the working poor helps produce the conditions of possibility for
physical disappearance that are made possible in part through symbolic disappearance.
Linking the symbolic and the physical, Viramontes maps the social relations of
disappearance through the disappeared bodies of her characters in order to articulate
political violence in Central America and the US during the 1970s and 1980s. The
character that allows Viramontes to most visibly articulate violence across geopolitical
borders is the refugee woman as she is symbolically and physically disappeared because
of her social position as a working poor, mestiza/ladina, immigrant woman. Through the
refugee woman’s character, Viramontes also illustrates the aftermath of disappearance in
the Americas across space and time. She simultaneously draws on the iconographic
figures of La Llorona—in her five hundred plus year search for her missing children—
and Las Madres de los Desaparecidos who demand to know the whereabouts of the
children they lost to political violence in more recent decades.
Critical readings of “The Cariboo Cafe” focus on four general (though not
mutually exclusive) themes that speak to identity and subject formation under
colonialism, state violence, and capitalism in the Americas. For instance, scholars such
Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Barbara Harlow, Jose Davíd Saldívar, and Begoña Simal develop
readings that focus on the story’s intervention in border discourse and identity

133
Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 17.
62
formation.
134
In different ways, they argue that “The Cariboo Cafe” refuses the
universalizing tendencies of geopolitical borders, nationalism, white feminism, and
Chicano identity. Leticia Garza-Falcón, Grace Hong, Fatima Mujcinovic, and Michael
Murashige focus on the story’s production of counter-hegemonic discourses and
subjectivities, respectively revealing the production of dominant narratives through news
coverage, the constitution of migrant labor, the production of exilic identities, and the
“materiality and discursivity of capitalist spatial configurations.”
135
Feminist scholars
such as Roberta Fernandez, Ana Maria Carbonell, Deborah Owen Moore, Wendy Swyt,
and Ivonne Gordon Vailakis focus on Viramontes’ representation of the mythical figure
of La Llorona and through her character make arguments about motherhood, the family,
and solidarity in the Americas.
136
Other examinations by feminist literary critics,
including Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Debra Castillo, and Anna

134
Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano
Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), Carl Gutiérrez-Jones,
Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Discourse and Legal Discourse (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995), José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Begoña Simal, "'The Cariboo Cafe' as a Border Text: The
Holographic Model," in Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands, ed. Jesús Benito and Ana
María Manzanas (New York: Rodopi, 2002).

135
Leticia Garza-Falcon, Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1998), Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of
Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006),
Fatima Mujcinovic, Postmodern Cross-Culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana
Castillo to Julia Alvarez (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004), Michael Murashige, "Race, Resistance,
and Contestations of Urban Space" (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1995), 114.

136
Ana Maria Carbonell, "From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and
Cisneros," MELUS 24, no. 2 (1999), Roberta Fernandez, "The Cariboo Cafe: Helena Maria Viramontes
Discourses with Her Social and Cultural Contexts," Women's Studies 17 (1989), Deborah Owen Moore,
"La Llorona Dines at the Cariboo Cafe: Structure and Legend in the Work of Helena María Viramontes,"
Studies in Short Fiction 35 (1998), Wendy Swyt, "Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by
Helena María Viramontes," MELUS 23, no. 2 (1998), Ivonne Gordon Vailakis, "Wailing as a Mode of
Blurring Boundaries in Helena María Viramontes' 'The Cariboo Cafe'," in Chicana Literary and Artistic
Expressions: Culture and Society in Dialogue, ed. María Herrera-Sobek (Santa Barbara: Center for
Chicano Studies, 2000).
63
Sandoval, argue that “The Cariboo Cafe” represents a contestation of Euro-centric
feminisms and represents US third world feminist praxis.
137
Many of these readings
contribute to understanding the significance of the refugee woman and her experiences as
contestations to the universalizing strategies of the militaristic capitalist state.
The transnational map of symbolic and physical disappearance that Viramontes
draws links struggles against racism, sexism, imperialism, and class inequality in the US
and Central America, but without assuming solidarity between oppressed people across
geo-political borders (as I discuss in chapter two). Rather than assuming a seamless link
between the figure of La Llorona and The Mothers of the disappeared, this articulation
should be read as contradictory and full of conflict. To illustrate, while Viramontes, as
author and activist, expressed a personal investment in bringing attention to the plight of
Central American women, the lack of recognition between Sonya and the refugee woman
underscores the contradictions concealed by categories such as Chicana, Latina, and US
third world feminist. Sonya and the refugee woman occupy the same narrative space, just
as Mexicans, Chicanas, and Central Americans began occupying the same neighborhoods
in the early 1980s, yet their differences are stark.
138
Their inability to recognize each
other marks their specific local, regional, national, and anti-colonial struggles as well as
distinct race, class, and sexual subjectivities. A precondition for the story’s development

137
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998), Debra A. Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist
Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border:
Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, Anna Sandoval, Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas:
Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008).

138
Hamilton and Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los
Angeles.
64
is that the characters fail to recognize each other due to the constraints (re)produced
through categories such as nation, race, gender, and class. Considering this, Viramontes
draws a complicated map of how her characters make sense of each other and the world
around them in the context of mass disappearance and social injustice. More concretely,
the refugee woman cannot see Sonya, to paraphrase Ellison, ‘because she refuses to’ but
also because of the traumas she has endured and the ways that they constrain her capacity
to recognize Sonya at the same time that Macky/Geraldo enters her consciousness.
Viramontes’ Activist Imagination
I wanted to scream with this story too, to make readers part of it, witness
it, bring them in, I wanted readers to be active participants, make them
realize that they are bystanders in the end looking and accepting what is
going on with their silence. At the same time, I wanted them to
experience the pain of this woman losing a child senselessly—a fact that
was happening left and right. At times I cried as I was writing it. Other
times I had nightmares about it.
139

In the epigraph to this section from the interview “Praying for Knowledge,”
Viramontes reveals the activist imagination that drove her while writing the story. With
“The Cariboo Cafe,” she wanted to break the silence of acquiescence that pervaded US
discourses about political violence in Central America. By writing about children’s and
women’s experiences of violence across geo-political borders, Viramontes hoped for a
reaction that would lead people to protest US intervention in Central America. Shortly
after writing “The Cariboo Cafe,” Viramontes read the story at a literary conference and
told her audience, “[I wrote this story] after the [Ronald] Reagan landslide [in 1984],

139
Helena María Viramontes, "Praying for Knowledge: An Interview with Helena María Viramontes," in
Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers, ed. Bridget Kevane and Juanita
Heredia (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 146.
65
because I began to wonder how people could support a man who supports such
murderous regimes.”
140
It is an indication of Viramontes’ political commitments that her
objective with “The Cariboo Cafe” was to articulate her creative practice with material
action, that is her activist imagination. Her comments to the audience at the literary
conference make it clear that for Viramontes creative writing is a political act in and of
itself and provides a site for political critique that might move others to action. She
concluded that writing and activism could be articulated undertakings and like other
feminists of color came to understand her writing as a type of political work.
141
In “The
Writes Ofrenda,” Viramontes metaphorizes the imagined space she writes from, “I am a
maker in a landscape of charred wood and broken glass,” painting a dystopic vision of
devastation juxtaposed with the possibility of renewal and change through creative
practice.
142
As a “maker” in a dystopic landscape, Viramontes cannot reduce her writing
practice to the discursive realm because hers is a practice deeply embedded in struggling
for social justice and everyday survival.
143

140
Helena María Viramontes, Women's Literary Conference (Garden Grove: The Replay Co., January 19,
1985).

141
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1987),
Anzaldúa and Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Christian,
"The Race for Theory.", Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color.

142
Helena María Viramontes, "The Writes Ofrenda," in Mascaras, ed. Lucha Corpí (Berkeley: Third
Woman Press, 1997), 128.

143
See also Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency
of Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender
Politics and Literature, Raúl Homero Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature
and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
66
At a talk titled “Four Guiding Principles to a Lived Experience,” she delivered at
a Chicana writers' conference in Mexico City, Viramontes further explains how she
conceptualizes her writing practice:
In my corner of the world, we were going hungry for no reason at all and this
urgency forced activism. The metaphysical desire transformed into a real goal.
Consequently, I continued to write, even after my departure from the [MFA]
program, but this time in a delirium of responsibility. Writing well, then, was
necessary for survival.
144

Viramontes’ continued writing about her “corner of the world,” presumably East Los
Angeles, even after she left the MFA program at University of California, Irvine in 1981
after a racist response her advisor had about her focus on Chicanas/os. He commented on
her work as a “cheap imitation of Gabriel García Marquez” and added, “the trouble is that
you write about Chicanos. You should be writing about people.”
145
Her advisor’s
inability to recognize Chicanas/os as people, underscores that writing is a political act
that Chicanas/os struggle to participate in precisely because their humanness is often
questioned. Despite her decision to leave the UCI writing program, Viramontes found a
renewed sense of commitment to her activist imagination in order to continue the
political struggle to write and to have Chicanas/os be recognized as humans.
Viramontes’ activist imagination turned toward the violence in Central America
gradually, influenced by media coverage about the civil wars, her own political
commitments, and the encouragement of colleagues. In 1983, while living in Vancouver,
Canada, Viramontes began collecting news clippings about the wars that focused on

144
Helena María Viramontes, "Four Guiding Principles to a Lived Experience," in La Herencia/ the
Heritage: I Encuentro De Escritoras Chicanas (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
2003), 130.

145
Ibid., 128 and 29.
67
issues of mass violence, disappearance, refugee displacement, and activism against US
military intervention. Viramontes seems to have been particularly influenced by the
article, “Doctor tells of torturing in Guatemala,” which appeared in The Sun B.C. on
October 30, 1984.
146
The article relays Doctor Stephen Gray’s report that while visiting
hospitals in the Mexico-Guatemala border region. Gray recalled that survivors and
doctors often reported atrocities and gave testimony that “the cranium had been removed
from most of the bodies and the brains removed,” that “[i]t is not uncommon for
survivors to tell of cannibalism committed by Guatemalan soldiers,” that a “five-year-old
(boy, one of the victims) has been castrated before death,” and that “pregnant women
were raped and had their stomachs cut open for the troops’ amusement.” Echoing this
report, in “The Cariboo Cafe” Viramontes depicts the horrors of castration, rape, and the
cutting of fetuses out of women’s wombs to portray the proliferation of physical violence
against women and children in Central America during the 1980s. The activist
imagination allowed Viramontes to narrate and imagine situations for which little to no
evidence existed and to articulate what she imagined across multiple borders: Central
America, US, and Canada.
During the early to mid 1980s Viramontes also collected news clippings from
major US publications such as the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. However,
when she compared Canadian news coverage about Central America to US news
coverage about the region she began to wonder why the US media printed little and often
one-sided information about the wars. From Vancouver, she wrote a letter to journalist

146
Helena María Viramontes Papers.
68
Tom Wicker of the New York Times thanking him for his editorials on Nicaragua: “You
have provided insight, sensitivity and integrity in expressing the true heart of the
matter….no matter how many lackeys are put in the position of mouthing the President’s
jargon against Nicaragua, the real truth will be uncovered.”
147
Based on her response to
Wicker’s US-based coverage of Nicaragua, Viramontes seems to have wanted
information about Central America that was both more critical of the US government and
allowed the war experiences of Central Americans to emerge. The contrast between the
limited number of news reports in the US and the wider availability of Canadian news
about Central America also led Viramontes to “recognize that these [Central American]
women were very much silenced in the United States because people were not covering
this type of material” and countering this silence became a driving force in writing “The
Cariboo Cafe.”
148
Thus, the silences and limits of available news coverage influenced the
hemispheric turn in Viramontes’ activist imagination during the period in which she
articulated Central America and the US inner-city in her creative work.
During the 1980s, Viramontes was also engaged with Chicana/o-Latina/o, local,
and progressive publications that focused on the Central American civil wars. She
collected novelist Raymond Barrio’s weekly column, “Barrio’s Political Estuary,” which
focused on political violence in El Salvador in pieces such as “Saving El Salvador”
(1981) and the short story “Dr. Birdfoot’s Strange Odyssey of the Tree Girl” (1980).
149

Ginger Varney’s articles for the L.A. Weekly, where Varney covered the conflicts in

147
Ibid.

148
“Praying for Knowledge” 147.

149
Helena María Viramontes Papers.
69
Central America, also made it into Viramontes’ archive. She also saved Walter
LaFeber’s—the author of one of the best known books on the Central American wars,
Inevitable Revolutions—1984 essay for The Nation, “How We Make Revolution
Inevitable,” which focused on US military and economic aid to Central America during
the 1970s and 1980s.
150
Finally, Viramontes archived a copy of the February 1980
“America” special issue of XhismeArte a Chicana/o cultural journal where she served as a
literary editor during the 1980s. Although Viramontes is not listed as editor for the
“America” issue, notably it was dedicated to Latin American revolutionary struggles,
including those in Central America. Like Viramontes, the editors, including Victor
Manuel Valle, note the “informational void that needs to be filled by some sense of
historical perspective, whether in the case of Iran or El Salvador” (5).
151
With this in
mind, the editors set out to counter the “sensational headlines” and “tacit neglect”
reflected in the national media by selecting articles that focused on topics such as
testimonio and art, Nicaragua and popular culture, Chile and fascism , and a variety of
short stories, poetry, photographs, and drawings that depicted hemispheric struggles for
liberation (5).
152

While her own political commitments and the contemporaneous news coverage
she was reading (and noting a lack in) inspired Viramontes to write “The Cariboo Cafe,”
Professor Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano also encouraged her to think about her writing as

150
LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America.

151
Helena María Viramontes Papers.

152
Ibid.
70
activism and gestured toward the political importance of the wars in Central America. In
a 1983 letter to Viramontes, Yarbro-Bejarano writes:
I was very moved by your feelings about India and dissatisfaction with finding
yourself in a middle-class lifestyle….Just remember, your writing is important in
expressing the experience of so many working class men and women. Can you
see this as part of the struggle? Maybe it would help to become actively involved
in a community action group or political movement (Central America, nuclear
freeze).
153

The combination of cold war era politics and weariness about middle-class complacency
that Yarbro-Bejarano mentions in her letter seem to have had a profound influence on
Viramontes’ developing brand of literary activism. Early on, Viramontes’s literary focus
was on the social problems faced by Chicanas and Chicanos in the East Los Angeles
neighborhood where she grew up.
154
Yet, by 1983, she seems to have felt a growing
distance from her working-class upbringing due to increasing travel opportunities, her
responsibilities as a mother living in Irvine, California and later in Vancouver, Canada,
and other daily experiences that removed her from her upbringing in East Los Angeles.
During this period of personal reflection, Viramontes wrote two pieces of writing
on Central America and thought about traveling to the region with at least two different
organizations. In 1983, Viramontes wrote “The Cariboo Cafe” which she considers her
“most political text” to date.
155
She substituted the short story “Rain” with “The Cariboo
Cafe” in the mostly East Los Angeles focused collection The Moths and Other Stories,

153
Ibid.

154
Most of the stories in The Moths and Other Stories focus on life in East Los Angeles. The novel Under
the Feet of Jesus deals with migrant farm worker issues and in Their Dogs Came With Them Viramontes
returns to an East LA setting during the 1950s-1970s.

155
Helena María Viramontes, "Teresa McKenna’s Graduate Seminar" (University of Southern California,
March 11, 2008).
71
marking her developing internationalist political imagination.
156
In 1984, Viramontes
also began drafting an unfinished novel titled The Seeker.
157
In the novel, Ali, a young
Chicana living in Los Angeles makes plans to search for her boyfriend, Ignacio, who left
Los Angeles to join the Guatemalan revolutionary forces in the mountains of San Martín.
In Los Angeles, Ali waits to hear from Ignacio and after months of not receiving a letter
from him, she makes contact with her estranged father to ask if he will fund her trip to
Guatemala. When he refuses her request, it seems unlikely that she will make the trip.
The draft of the novel ends at the pivotal moment where Ali’s trip seems most unlikely.
Notably, during the mid-1980s Viramontes requested information about delegations to El
Salvador and Nicaragua from organizations such as U.S. Out of Central America and
Medical Aid for El Salvador.
158
However, her trip did not materialize and the question of
how this affected her progress on the Guatemalan section of her novel is left unanswered.
Nevertheless, Viramontes continued producing works that represent the need to continue
struggling for social justice, including the novels Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs
Came with Them.
159

The (Female) Subjects of Symbolic Disappearance
Literary scholars including Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Debra Castillo have
commented on Sonya’s semi-visibility in the story—what I interpret as her symbolic

156
Helena María Viramontes Papers. “Rain” is a story about a man who decides to live life to its fullest
and falls in love with a fellow teacher while waiting to find out if he inherited Huntington’s disease from
his mother.

157
Ibid.

158
Ibid.

159
Helena María Viramontes, Their Dogs Came with Them (New York: Atria Books, 2007), Helena María
Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (New York: Plume Books, 1995).
72
disappearance. Saldívar-Hull, for instance, expresses concern about how Sonya’s
character might be understood in a feminist reading of the story. In a May 1990 letter to
Viramontes, Saldívar-Hull remarks, “The final irony for me, is what happens to the
Sonya’s [sic] of the world?”
160
The simple answer to this question may be that her
marginalization indicates Sonya will likely remain unseen in a world that values her
brother more than her. In other words, the Sonyas of the world are symbolically
disappeared in the social world just as Sonya is in the story. Saldívar-Hull’s concern with
Sonya continues in Feminism on the Border where she asks, “How as feminists, do we
reconcile the [refugee] woman’s inability to see the boy’s sister, Sonya?” concluding,
“Viramontes explodes the boundaries of home, of safety, and of family but leaves the
question of Sonya unanswered.”
161
Similarly, Debra Castillo also finds that Sonya’s
character offers limited resolution to the story. She writes, “Sonya is the motivation [for
the story], but she has lost the key, and thus her tale, and implicitly the story titled ‘The
Cariboo Cafe,’ cannot be plotted through to its hermeneutically satisfying closure but
must rest, in the tortured dystopia of the zero zero place.”
162
However, closure is not
achieved in the story precisely because for Chicanas, like Sonya, and Centroamericanas,
like the refugee woman, the possibility of a “proper” resolution to the historical legacies
of colonialism in the Americas is foreclosed by their symbolic disappearance and the
continuing forms of violence they endure. Within this historical context, Sonya’s
ambiguity is precisely where a productive reading of the story might begin.

160
Helena María Viramontes Papers.

161
Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, 151.

162
Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism, 94.
73
In part, Viramontes answers the feminist question raised by Sonya’s character by
naming her; indeed, she is one of the few characters named in “The Cariboo Cafe.” Her
name is symbolically loaded, gesturing toward an alternative reading of the story that is
centered on Sonya’s character. Such a reading lays below the surface of the three
narratives and their narrators that are often privileged in critical readings—Macky’s, the
café owner’s, and the refugee woman’s.
163
The name Sonya is a variant of Sophia,
“Greek for ‘Wisdom’ and…the root for the words ‘philosophy’ (love of wisdom) and
‘theosophy,’ the Wisdom of God.”
164
In Jewish and Christian biblical traditions, Sophia
is a “goddess-like”
165
biblical figure that appears as “a divine quality, not distinct from
God, but not totally identified with God either” and exists prior to creation and is actively
involved in “creating and promoting justice.”
166
Her position as co-creator is later
disregarded in favor of a singular male creator: The Lord, Jesus Christ. The symbolic
citations that the name Sonya/Sophia produces place her within the history of women’s
marginality as well as centering her in conversations about knowledge and consciousness.
This reading of Sonya’s name is situated within Viramontes’ college education at

163
Carbonell, "From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.",
Fernandez, "The Cariboo Cafe: Helena Maria Viramontes Discourses with Her Social and Cultural
Contexts.", Moore, "La Llorona Dines at the Cariboo Cafe: Structure and Legend in the Work of Helena
María Viramontes.", Simal, "'The Cariboo Cafe' as a Border Text: The Holographic Model.", Swyt,
"Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena María Viramontes.", Vailakis, "Wailing
as a Mode of Blurring Boundaries in Helena María Viramontes' 'The Cariboo Cafe'."

164
Arthur Versluis, Wisdom's Book: The Sophia Anthology (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2000), 1.

165
Susan Cady, Marian Ronan, and Hal Taussig, eds., Sophia: The Future of Feminist Spirituality (New
York: Harper and Row, 1986), 10.

166
Anne M. Clifford, Introducing Feminist Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001), 105 and 06.
74
Immaculate Heart College where several feminist spirituality scholars taught.
167

Viramontes’ representation of Sonya/Sophia also echoes Chicana feminist reclamations
of pre-colonial female icons and goddesses such as Coatlicue, Tonantzin, and
Coyolxauhqui who were disappeared after the arrival of Europeans to the Americas much
like the Goddess Sophia was disappeared in Judeo-Christian narratives.
168
Sonya’s name
cites these histories of symbolic disappearance and ties them to the invisibility of
Chicanas within patriarchal and racist social hierarchies. In a sense, “The Cariboo Cafe”
is exemplary of Chicana feminist writing during the 1970s and early 1980s that critiqued
and highlighted the marginalization of Chicanas within male-centered Chicano
discourses.
169

In “The Cariboo Cafe,” Sonya is dealt a fate similar to Sophia and the pre-
Columbian goddesses who disappeared within imperialist narratives fueled by patriarchal
and racist ideas about indigenous people in the Americas. Sonya is repeatedly
disappeared from the ideological equation of the narrative in order to establish a holy

167
Cady, Ronan, and Taussig, eds., Sophia: The Future of Feminist Spirituality, 2.

168
For further discussion about Chicana understandings of female indigenous goddesses see: Alarcón,
"Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of "the" Native Woman.", Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The
New Mestiza, Adelaida R. Del Castillo, "Malintzín Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective,"
in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M. García (New York: Routledge,
1997), Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007). As Gloria Anzaldúa writes in her ground-breaking text Borderlands/La Frontera,
“The male-dominated Azteca-Mexica culture” had already started driving “the powerful female deities
underground by giving them monstrous attributes and by substituting male deities in their place” (27). She
adds, “After the conquest the Spaniards and their Church continued the split….[and] [t]hey went even
further; they made all Indian deities and religious practices the work of the devil” (27-28).

169
Lorna Dee Cervantes, Emplumada (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), Alma Gómez,
Cherríe Moraga, and Mariana Romo-Carmona, eds., Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (New York: Kitchen
Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End Press,
1983), Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, 1st ed. (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981).
75
trinity between the father/ the café owner, the son/Macky, and the holy spirit/the refugee
woman.
170
Sonya is not part of this patriarchal trinity anymore than Sophia, Coatlicue, or
Tonantzin are represented in the Catholic trinity. She also does not have a visible role in
the heteronormative family unit represented by the café owner, the refugee woman, and
Macky. Viramontes works against Sonya’s disappearance by naming her and in the
process brings her into being by insisting that she exists. In The Borderlands of Culture,
Ramón Saldívar notes, “What we cannot name, we cannot talk about. When we give a
name to something, as when we assign an identity, we may empower ourselves because
we can think and talk about what constitutes that identity.”
171
He draws on the naming
process in Américo Paredes’ novel George Washington Gómez to illustrate the
importance of naming by pointing out that various names are suggested for the child that
is the novel’s title character, “each option indicates an alternative narrative within which
the child’s destiny might unfold.”
172
In the end, he is named after “a great man,” George
Washington. Similarly, the name Sonya carries the weight of multiple histories that are
referenced as Viramontes brings her into being through the act of naming her.
The marginal status that Sonya’s name suggests should be read within specific
racial and gender histories. Her experience as a marginal subject can be traced through
her father’s, Popi, third cardinal rule: “keep your key with you at all times—the four
walls of the apartment were the only protection against the streets until Popi returned

170
Simal, "'The Cariboo Cafe' as a Border Text: The Holographic Model," 85 FN 3.

171
Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 156.

172
Ibid., 157.
76
home” (65). Understandably, Popi is interested in keeping Sonya safe from police and
immigration agents that might take her into state custody or deport her from the US.
Sonya witnesses the danger first-hand when she sees a man who she recognizes as a
classmate’s father being arrested, “Raoul’s father [is] putting keys and stuff from his
pockets onto the hood of the polie car. And it’s true, they’re putting him in the car and
taking him to Tijuana” (67). Popi’s lessons in survival are reinforced when Sonya
observes the police arresting Raoul’s father. As she witnesses the arrest, Sonya realizes
Popi has good reason for keeping her confined to the relative protection of their
apartment, since as he warned “The polie are men who get kids [and apparently their
parents] and send them to Tijuana” (67). The importance of her father’s third rule is
reinforced as she navigates her way through the streets with Macky.
However, it is important that Sonya’s Popi implements the rule instead of her
mother as Viramontes intended in an early version of the story: “There were two things
her mama warned her of. Never talk to strangers…and never, never lose the key.”
173
By
making Sonya’s father the enforcer of the three cardinal rules Viramontes underscores
patriarchal control within the Chicano family. While on one hand, Sonya’s spatial
confinement is linked to the racial and economic realities of living in a heavily policed
and criminalized working poor and immigrant community, it also has gendered aspects.
Beyond revealing his understandable fear of la migra, Popi’s third cardinal rule betrays
an investment in keeping his daughter within the “safety” of the domestic sphere by
regulating opportunities for negotiating identity and behaving outside the confines of

173
Helena María Viramontes Papers.
77
what he deems appropriate. However, as in Sonya’s case, economic conditions do not
always allow for the close regulation of Chicanas access to public space. Sonya’s parents
work long hours which means that Sonya must walk through the streets of her
neighborhood alone. As she does so, she is constantly confronted with ways of being a
woman that would likely not be acceptable to her parents. For instance, at the newsstand
she sees “magazines with naked girls holding beach balls” (66-67). The magazines make
such an impression on Sonya that she imagines the newspaper man “lived there with the
naked ladies” and is surprised to learn he does not when she sees the “little closet-like
shed with chains and locks” (67). In this example, outside the four walls of her apartment
Sonya is able to imagine relationships between men and women beyond the model set by
her parents within their apartment. She sees representations of women that do not
practice the type of sexual propriety that her mother expects from Sonya. This
expectation is revealed as Sonya sits outside her family’s apartment thinking about the
lost key:
Lalo wrestled her down so that he could see her underwear, and it probably fell
somewhere between the iron rings and the sandbox….she considered how to
explain the missing key without having to reveal what Lalo had seen, for she
wasn’t quite sure which offense carried the worse penalty (65).

Reading the subtext of Popi’s third cardinal rule, Sonya is unsure which breach will carry
a bigger punishment: her perceived violation of sexual propriety or losing the key. Popi’s
rule underscores that Sonya is policed in interrelated racial and gender specific ways that
are rooted in histories that aim to simultaneously disappear and control women’s bodies.
As if to reinforce that Popi’s rules are the key to survival, when Sonya leaves the
four walls of their apartment she is kidnapped by the refugee woman. Their first
78
encounter is ambiguously represented at the end of part one, when the refugee woman
kidnaps Sonya and Macky. The precise moment that the kidnapping happens is difficult
to establish due to the confusion it creates within the narrative. First, Viramontes writes
the scene of abduction in third person narrative voice from Sonya’s perspective:
“Ssssh. Mi’jo, when I say run, you run, okay?”…. she whispered “Now,” and
they scurried out from under the table and ran across the street, oblivious to the
horns./….Macky stumbled and she continued to drag him until he was crying, his
untied sneakers, and his raspy breathing finally forced her to stop….Tired, her
heart bursting, she leaned him against a tall chain-link fence…. /The shadows
stalked them, hovering like nightmares. Across the tracks, in the distance, was a
room with a yellow glow, like a beacon light at the end of a dark sea. She
pinched Macky’s nose with the corner of her dress, took hold of his sleeve. At
least the shadows will be gone she concluded, at the zero-zero place” (67-68).

Up to this point, the text is written in third person narrative voice that is focused on
Sonya’s experiences. However, Sonya’s story is disrupted when the refugee woman
spots Macky running across a busy intersection and mistakes him for Geraldo. A few
pages later, Viramontes rewrites the scene of abduction from the refugee woman’s
perspective:
Why would God play such a cruel joke, if he isn’t my son? I jumped the curb,
dashed out into the street….I’ve lost him once and can’t lose him again….I can’t
take my eyes off him because, you see, they are swift and cunning and can take
your life in the snap of a finger…./What if it isn’t Geraldo?.... His eyes look at me
in total bewilderment. I grab him because the earth is crumbling beneath us. We
both fall to the ground. / A hot meal is in store. A festival” (76).

As the refugee woman runs after Macky in order to avoid losing him again, Sonya runs
from “the polie [who] are men in black who get kids and send them to Tijuana” (67);
both Sonya and the refugee woman work against the same thing, disappearance at the
hands of the police. The contrast between the two passages is that the refugee woman’s
perspective is clearly her own while toward the end of the first passage it is unclear who
79
is cleaning Macky’s nose and leading him toward “the zero-zero place”; as it is unclear
who the “she” in the passage cited above references. The refugee woman’s voice does
not account for Sonya although Sonya is holding on to Macky’s hand and according to
the café owner “acts like she owns him” (70). Further, the omniscient narrator’s voice is
unclear about who takes Macky to the café, Sonya or the refugee woman. After the
kidnapping, Sonya is symbolically disappeared from the core of the narrative and she
remains outside of the refugee woman’s consciousness for the remainder of the story.
Sonya remains outside the refugee woman’s consciousness even when they share
the same objective (keeping Macky safe) and a similar positionality as symbolically
disappeared persons. As the refugee woman attends to Macky/Geraldo—bathing and
feeding him—Sonya watches: “All the while the young girl watches her brother sleeping.
She removes her sneakers, climbs into the bed, snuggles up to her brother, and soon her
breathing is raspy, her arms under her stomach” (76). Both the refugee woman and
Sonya watch Macky as he sleeps, as the refugee woman makes plans to return home and
Sonya lays next to Macky, Sonya remains outside the refugee woman’s consciousness.
Sonya’s erasure continues when the police show up at the café and the refugee woman
“jumps up from the table, grabs Geraldo by the wrist, his sister dragged along because,
[and] like her, she refuses to release his hand” (78).
The Male Subjects of (Physical) Disappearance
Those are the rooms where they round up the children and make them
work for their food. I saw them from the window. Their eyes like cut
glass, and not one looks for sympathy. They take turns, sorting out the
arms from the legs, heads from the torsos. Is that one your mother? one
guard asks, holding a mummified head with eyes shut tighter than coffins.
80
But the children no longer cry. They just continue sorting as if they were
salvaging cans from a heap of trash (72).

In “The Cariboo Cafe,” Geraldo, JoJo, and Macky are the three principle male
characters that are physically disappeared through the abandonment of poverty and war.
Their disappearance is represented through a living boy fetishized by the refugee woman
and the café owner who are haunted by the memory of their disappeared sons, Geraldo
and JoJo. Geraldo’s disappearance represents a critical rupture that characterizes
narratives of disappearance during the period of widespread civil war in Central America:
the routineness of abduction, widespread official denial, the terror produced among the
general population, and the never-ending search for disappeared loved ones. JoJo’s
disappearance occurs off the page and is deeply rooted in wars that parallel the civil wars
in Central America, including the war in Vietnam and the US war on drugs. Finally,
Macky’s disappearance/kidnapping highlights the structural violence (poverty, hunger,
police brutality) experienced by immigrants and inner-city residents in the US. Through
these three characters, Viramontes imagines how various manifestations of US supported
or perpetrated violence lead to physical and symbolic disappearance. By focusing on
these two articulated forms of disappearance, Viramontes contributes to the formation of
a transnational political consciousness that underscores how a number of articulated
policies impact poor people and people of color around the globe.
One character who contributes to Viramontes’ development of a transnational
political imagination is Geraldo, the five-year-old child of the washerwoman who will
soon be a refugee. In the washerwoman/refugee woman’s narrative about her son’s
disappearance, she underscores the culture of fear that exists in situations where
81
disappearance is a widespread government policy. As she explains, “they took Geraldo.
By mistake, of course. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have sent him to fetch me a mango”
(72). Contradictorily, the washerwoman/refugee woman is forced to ask for help in
finding her son from the very institution that disappeared him in the first place: a military
detention center. Further, she feels compelled to emphasize that Geraldo was taken “by
mistake,” as if to not provoke possible retribution. The exchange between the
washerwoman/refugee woman and the young soldier in charge at the detention center
underscores that poor people and those that do not actively support government policy
are assumed to be counter-government sympathizers. As she asks for his help, she
reminds herself “[h]e is not to be trusted” (73). She pleads with the soldier to help her
find her child, “Señor. I am a washerwoman. You yourself see I cannot read or write.
There is my X” (73). He interprets her illiteracy and poverty as an indication that she
will likely aid counter-government factions, as he reprimands:
We arrest spies. Criminals…. Anyone who so willfully supports the Contras in
any form must be arrested and punished without delay….Contras are tricksters.
They exploit the ignorance of people like you. Perhaps they convinced your son
to circulate pamphlets (73).

In the end, the soldier responds by declaring that everyone is a potential suspect in the
military’s search for spies and criminals, especially those who are illiterate and poor. The
washerwoman/refugee woman and her son’s poverty and lack of formal education lead
the soldier to assume that both of them are guilty or potentially guilty of counter-
government activities.
The language the soldier uses to refer to counter-government insurgents—
contras—has created some debate about the refugee woman’s country of origin, pointing
82
to the widespread use of disappearance in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s as
well as the importance of the hemispheric imagination to which Viramontes contributes.
Roberta Fernandez and Saldívar-Hull point out that Viramontes has stated publicly and in
private conversations that the refugee woman is from El Salvador.
174
On the other hand,
Leticia Garza-Falcon and Nicolás Kanellos suggest that the refugee woman is from
Nicaragua based on the reference to “Contras,” a word associated with the post-1979
counterrevolutionaries in that country.
175
However, as Caminero-Santangelo notes,
“contra…means ‘against’ in Spanish, and could refer to any rebel forces.”
176
Her
observation highlights the fact that revolution and counterrevolution are two sides of the
same coin, thus counterrevolutionary government forces in Guatemala and El Salvador
can conceivably be called “contras.”
177
Further still, in early notes for “The Cariboo
Cafe,” Viramontes clearly indicates the refugee woman is Guatemalan: “Guatemalan lady
finds them [the children] takes them to a restaurant.”
178
Yet, in the published version of
the story, the refugee woman is a countryless woman as she herself declares: “Without
Geraldo, this is not my home; the earth beneath it, not my country” (75). Viramontes’
personal copy of The Moths and Other Stories has the word contra crossed out and
"rebels" is written in its place, indicating that her own perspective on the situation in

174
Fernandez, "The Cariboo Cafe: Helena Maria Viramontes Discourses with Her Social and Cultural
Contexts," 78, Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, 182 n.81.

175
Garza-Falcon, Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance, Nicolas
Kanellos, ed., Hispanic-American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (New York: Longman
Publishing Group, 1995).

176
Caminero-Santangelo, The Madwoman Can't Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive, 160.

177
Ibid.

178
Helena María Viramontes Papers.
83
Central America continued to shift after “The Cariboo Cafe” was published in 1985.
179

Based on the large collection of news articles Viramontes archived, I suggest that the
noun “contra” refers to progressive revolutionary groups in El Salvador and Guatemala
that were contra/counter-government. Since the refugee woman pleads for her son at a
military detention center this suggests that she is in El Salvador or Guatemala where
counterrevolutionary forces controlled the government, as opposed to Nicaragua where
the Sandinistas defeated the Somoza regime in 1979.
Regardless of which Central American country he and his mother call home,
Geraldo can be read as a subject of symbolic disappearance that is eventually physically
disappeared like thousands of others that were disappeared in Guatemala and El
Salvador.
180
Geraldo’s symbolic disappearance is highlighted when the soldier that takes
the refugee woman’s missing persons report fails to remember his name, telling her, “We
will try to locate your Pedro” (74). His indifference both extends and exemplifies the
homogenization of the disappeared in a way that denies individual and organizational
accountability since names and records are of no importance to those responsible for
torture and disappearance. The impunity with which disappearance has been dealt with
in the post-war period (as I discuss in chapter five) serves to underscore this point.
181

The refugee woman receives no clear answers from the soldier and is not allowed to
search the detainers where disappeared children who no longer cry expressionlessly sort

179
Ibid.

180
Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, Guatemala: Never Again! (Maryknoll: Orbis
Books, 1999), Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodriguez, eds., When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and
Technologies of Terror (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

181
Menjívar and Rodriguez, eds., When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror.
84
through the dismembered bodies of people that have been murdered “as if they were
salvaging cans from a heap of trash” (72). She prays he is not among the children that
are treated like dispensable objects, accused of aiding the enemy, forced to sort through
bodies for a meal, desensitized to death and violence.
JoJo’s character exists only in the café owner’s memory; the father who is
haunted by visions of his disappeared son “crumbled up in [Vietnam]” (68). Attempting
to fill the void left by his son, the café owner adopts two son figures—Macky and
Paulie—as fetish objects that come to symbolize specters of JoJo after his disappearance.
Paulie in particular comes to represent what JoJo’s life might have become if he had not
disappeared in Vietnam. Like JoJo, Paulie is a Vietnam veteran who is “thirty-five, or
six. JoJo’s age if he were still alive” (68). Vacillating between paternal empathy and
judgmental disgust, the café owner describes Paulie’s drug and psychological problems,
“Paulie’s got too many stories and they all get jammed up in his mouth so I can’t make
out what he’s saying….[he acts] nervous, jumpy, his jaw all falling and his eyes bulgy
and dirt-yellow” (69). According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, of
the 131,000 veterans that are estimated to be homeless on any given night forty-six
percent (or 60,260) served during the war in Vietnam, forty-five percent (or 58,950)
suffer from mental illness, and seventy-percent (or 91,700) suffer from drug and alcohol
addiction.
182
According to these statistics, homelessness, mental illness, and alcohol and
drug addiction are problems that many Vietnam War veterans, such as the fictional
Paulie, experience. Steeped in this reality, in the café owners imagination Paulie comes

182
Overview of Homelessness (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, January 26, 2010 [cited January 26
2010]); available from http://www1.va.gov/HOMELESS/Overview.asp.
85
to represent what may have been of JoJo’s life if he had not disappeared somewhere in
Vietnam. Tragically, Paulie loses his life to Vietnam long after the war is over, when he
overdoses at the Cariboo Café—both JoJo’s and Paulie’s stories come to represent lives
not fully realized due to the violence of war. Through their characters, Viramontes
articulate the destruction caused by cold war battles in three regions: the US, Vietnam,
and Central America.
In a sense, JoJo’s character represents the story of thousands of Chicanos that
fought and died in Vietnam as detailed in works such as George Mariscal’s Aztlán and
Viet Nam and Lea Ybarra’s Vietnam Veteranos.
183
Both Mariscal and Ybarra argue that
stories about Chicanos in Vietnam have often been left out of histories and anthologies
about the war. Similarly, JoJo’s identity as a Chicano has been disappeared in readings
of the story. Referencing the café owner’s relative privilege (first person narration,
business ownership) and his racist attitudes toward his customers, literary critics such as
Saldívar-Hull and Jose David Saldívar have read him as a white character.
184
Yet, the
cafe owner’s ethnic and racial identity remains ambiguous throughout the story due to a
series of code-switching, identifications, and associations. For instance, he points out
that “the illegals” came running into the café from the immigration raid at a nearby
factory as he was “stirring the chili con carne” and then he “taste[s] the chile” (71). The
café owner’s code switching between English (chili, meat) and Spanish (chile, carne)

183
George Mariscal, Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), Lea Ybarra, Vietnam Veteranos: Chicanos Recall the War (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2004).

184
Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, 100, Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the
Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature, 148.
86
language words is significant as a representation of his linguistic based identification with
his Spanish speaking Latina/o costumers. There are other ambiguous signs that he shares
a certain kinship with Latinas/os. For example, after the INS catches the three women
that run into the restroom at the Cariboo Café, he thinks, “The older one, the one that
looked silly in the handcuffs on account of she’s old enough to be my grandma’s
grandma” (72). Within this set of linguistic and personal association, it seems the café
owner recognizes his great-grandmother in the immigrant woman not only because of her
age, but also because she is a brown immigrant woman like his great-grandmother.
While the café owner recognizes the similarities he shares with his costumers, his racist
attitudes toward them also undermine the notion of a homogenous Latina/o identity and
ruptures concept of ethnic solidarity some literary critiques have read in the story; again
reflecting the tolerance for contradiction that is constant throughout Viramontes’ activist
imagination.
Macky, who he affectionately nicknames Short Order, reminds the café owner of
JoJo. Although Macky is dirty and uncombed, the café owner attributes JoJo’s
characteristics to him, calling him “a sweetheart” and “a tough one” (70). The same
evening that Macky, Sonya, and the refugee woman visit the café, the café owner sees a
news bulletin about two missing children on television and he recognizes the two
children as the kids that were at his café earlier the same day. When they return to the
café the following day, he wishes they would go away so that he will not have to deal
with the consequences of calling the police. When they walk in, he goes to the kitchen
and “in some strange way he hopes they have disappeared, and he takes a quick look only
87
to see Short Order’s sister, still in the same dress, still holding her brother’s hand” (77).
The continuing presence of the children he wishes would disappear reminds him of his
disappeared son JoJo and conjures up the pain of not knowing “what part of Vietnam
JoJo is all crumbled up in” (77). Driven by this memory, he decides that families have to
be together and calls the police, forgetting that “cops ain’t exactly” his friends and will
drive business away from his café (71). Ironically, the same ideas about family that will
presumably help reunite Macky, Sonya, and their parents may also lead to their
deportation. Tragically, his need to help reunite the children with their parents also leads
to the refugee woman’s murder even though she also thought she was bringing her family
together by (re)claiming Macky/Geraldo.
Macky, whose name derives from the Gaelic Mac meaning “son of,” becomes a
fetish object for both the café owner and the refugee woman.
185
Both the refugee woman
and the café owner (re)name Macky in an attempt to fill the void left by their disappeared
sons. The refugee woman (mis)takes Macky for her son Geraldo, asking herself, “Why
would God play such a cruel joke, if he isn’t my son” (76). After reclaiming
Macky/Geraldo, the refugee woman performs a cleansing ritual that evokes a scene of
rebirth and baptism in which she symbolically (re)christens Macky as Geraldo. The
baptismal scene undoes what the refugee woman already knows: Macky is not her son.
She imagines,
It’s like birthing you again, mi’jo. My baby./ I bathe him. He flutters with
excitement, the water gray around him….he stands in front of the window,
shriveling and sucking milk from a carton, his hair shiny from the dampness./ He

185
Edward MacLysaght, A Guide to Irish Surnames (Baltimore: Genealogical Book Company, 1964), 9-10.
88
finally sleeps….She rubs his back with warm oil, each stroke making up for the
days of his absence (76).

She makes him hers by (re)birthing him, symbolically washing away his sins, anointing
him with healing oil, and nourishing him with milk; through these rituals she imagines
her son Geraldo is (re)born. Macky’s character becomes the vector through which
knowing and understanding are achieved in the story, because he ends the refugee
woman’s never-ending search for her disappeared son. However, in the end the fixation
on the boy child ultimately leads to the refugee woman’s own murder.
The Wailing Women Look for Their Children
It is the night of La Llorona. The women come up from the depths of
sorrow to search for their children. I join them, frantic, desperate, and our
eyes become scrutinizers, our bodies opiated with the scent of their smiles.
Descending from door to door, the wind wipes our faces. I hear the
wailing of the women and know it to be my own. Geraldo is nowhere to
be found (72-73).

The epigraph to this section gestures toward both La Llorona and the Mothers of
the Disappeared in order to set up motherhood as the site for potential coalition building
in the context of widespread violence (further discussed in chapter four). Within the
social relations of disappearance, motherhood operates as a potential site of oppositional
subjectivity that can be transformed into collective organizing against state terror—but,
as Ruth Wilson Gilmore cautions, “without guarantees that such sensibility might serve
as the basis for collective action.”
186
Viramontes herself wrote the story after becoming a
mother and realizing that in a world bursting with violence her first priority became

186
Up to this point, the discussion focuses on the negative force of power as experienced through the states’
role in disappearance. However, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains, power—defined as the capacity to
make people do things they would not do on their own—can also be produced and produces positive ends
(247-248). Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California,
222.
89
protecting her children.
187
Like Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo, Co-Madres in El
Salvador, the Mothers of East Los Angeles, and Mothers Reclaiming Our Children in Los
Angeles, Viramontes identifies motherhood as a site for organizing capacities against
state violence.
188
Viramontes illustrates the hope and potential despair of motherhood
through two archetypal mother figures: the colonial legend of La Llorona and Las Madres
de Los Desaparecidos (Mothers of the Disappeared) that organized in Southern Cone and
Central American countries during the 1980s—figures that stood in opposition to state
violence against their children. She represents the motherly will to oppose state violence
through the mythical figure of La Llorona and mothers’ contemporary activism
represented by the iconic group Las Madres de Los Desaparecidos.
While literary scholars argue that Viramontes forges solidarity between Chicanas
and the people of Central America by drawing on the figure of La Llorona, placing La
Llorona within a Central American context (where a similar figure known as La
Ciguanaba exists) also points to some of the problems with representing violence across
ethnic, cultural, and national difference.
189
La Llorona is a Mexicana/Chicana legend that

187
Viramontes, Women's Literary Conference.

188
On maternal activism see: Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons,
Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Chapter 5, Mary S. Pardo, Mexican American
Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998), Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in
Argentina’s “Dirtywar” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), María Teresa Tula, Hear My Testimony:
María Teresa Tula, Human Rights Activist from El Salvador, ed. Lynn Stephen, trans. Lynn Stephen
(Boston: South End Press, 1994).

189
See for instance Fernandez, "The Cariboo Cafe: Helena Maria Viramontes Discourses with Her Social
and Cultural Contexts.", Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, Saldívar-Hull,
Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature.. Carbonell, "From Llorona to Gritona:
Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros.", Vailakis, "Wailing as a Mode of Blurring
Boundaries in Helena María Viramontes' 'The Cariboo Cafe'."
90
represents both “maternal betrayal and maternal resistance.”
190
As Domino Renee Perez
explains in There Was a Woman,
La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) is one of the most famous figures in Mexican
and…Chican@ oral and literary traditions. According to a popular traditional
version of the legend, La Llorona is a woman abandoned by the man she loved
and left alone to raise their children. Grief or desire for revenge compels La
Llorona to murder her children and throw their bodies into the river. Despair
ultimately contributes to La Llorona’s death, and in the afterlife, she is
condemned to wander for all eternity until the bodies of the children are
recovered.
191

Often the man she loves is represented as financially well-off and of European descent
and he leaves La Llorona for a beautiful wealthy woman who is also European not
indigenous or mestiza like La Llorona. Another version tells of a woman who neglects
her children in order to enjoy the nightlife, in this version she is responsible for their
death due to her negligent ways. In yet another variant, her lament is not rooted in
having committed infanticide, it is caused by the colonial genocide of indigenous people
in the Americas.
192
In “Hungry Women,” Wendy Swyt adds further historical depth to
readers’ understating of La Llorona:
La Llorona dates back to the pre-Columbian period of Mexican history when the
Nahua Indians believed that women who died in childbirth were de-ified as
Cihuateteo (female gods). These spirits merged in legend with the monsters,
tzitzimime, that devoured children wandering outdoors at night (Nicholson 422).
In pre-Hispanic Mexico la Llorona's cries foretold death and destruction, while
later in the colonial period she was also associated with "crimes of passion"
(Enriquez and Mirande 32). As a mourning widow, dead virgin, and disgraced

190
Carbonell, "From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros," 54.

191
Domino Renee Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2008), 2.

192
Catrióna Rueda Esquibel, With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006), Ch. 2.
91
woman, her weeping is that of "betrayal, of a penitent traitoress" (Enriquez and
Mirande 33).
193

As underscored in this brief overview, La Llorona is a complicated and at times
contradictory figure that presents an opportunity for thinking about the horrors of
colonialism as well as a tale about women’s capacity to resist or betray, depending on the
reader’s perspective.
While the Central American legend of La Ciguanaba shares some similarities with
the Mexicana/Chicana legend, it also differs in some respects. According to Kelly
Ready, the legend of La Ciguanaba is the tale of a woman that breaks normative gender
expectations by neglecting her son in order to go dancing at night.
194
She is the most
beautiful woman in her village and is forced to marry a wealthy and/or noble man.
Eventually, they have a son named Cipitío, yet she continues neglecting her household
responsibilities. One day her son appeals to God who:
imediatamente mandó a que caer a la lluvia…/Entonces ella empezó a sentirse la
cara asi/ que se l’empezar hacer asi (gestos a su pelo)/ todo el pelo se l’empezó a
ruinar en pesar de que su pelo era muy lindo…/ Y se fue a ver en el AGUA
porque en el agua uno bien se ve/ Y empezó a verse ella que se veía bien FEA/ de
la cara/ Y empezó verse el pelo pur’ alambre

[immediately made the rain fall…/Then she started feeling her face like this/ And
she started going like this (gestures toward her hair)/ All her hair became ruined,
despite her hair being very beautiful…/ And she went to look at herself in the
water, because in water one can see oneself well/ And she started to see that she
looked very ugly/ From her face / And her hair was like wire] (translation
mine)
195

193
Swyt, "Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena María Viramontes," 191-92.

194
Kelly Ready, La História De La Ciguanaba: Un Analísis Estructural Y Etnográfico Del Texto (2000
[cited December 29 2008]); available from
http://hcentroamerica.fcs.ucr.ac.cr/cong/mesas/cong5/docs/Rgen5.pdf.

195
Ibid.
92

After suffering the trauma of seeing herself as an ugly person, she disappears into the
local hills where she is said to appear as a beautiful woman to drunken men that only see
her as an ugly woman after they are unfaithful to their wives with her. While both
legends are rooted in ideas about women’s proper role in society and within the home as
attentive mothers and wives, they also reach different conclusions. In the
Mexican/Chicana version, La Llorona’s children are dead, her punishment is eternal
mourning for not having been a good mother, and she threatens to take other women’s
children as her own (much like the refugee woman looks for her own child and takes
another’s child to fill the void). In the Central American version, La Ciguanaba is a
cautionary tale for women and men that might stray from home and Cipitío also gets lost
in the local hills and is said to appear to children that wonder away from home; not
necessarily a tale about the eternal search for a disappeared child. Nevertheless, as Ana
Patricia Rodríguez argues, both La Llorona and La Ciguanaba are “survivor[s] of
imperialist violence, transcultural mediator[s], and survivalist[s].”
196

Keeping this tradition of survival and resistance alive, in “The Cariboo Cafe,” La
Llorona is an icon used to move from the singular “I” to the collective “we” that the
Mothers of the Disappeared represent: “It is the night of La Llorona….I hear the wailing
of the women and know it to be my own.” This is a version of motherhood that is both
about biological mothering and the production of communities rooted in love.
197

196
Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "The Fiction of Solidarity Transfronterista Feminisms and Anti-Imperialist
Struggles in Central American Transnational Narratives," Feminist Studies 34, no. 1/2 (2008): 213.

197
Cynthia Bejarano, "Las Super Madres De Latino America: Transforming Motherhood by Challenging
Violence in Mexico, Argentina, and El Salvador," 23, no. 1 (2002).
93
Demands for political accountability by women activists are exemplified by the
organizing efforts of Las Madres de Los Desaparecidos, and other grassroots struggles.
As Cynthia Bejarano argues in “Las Super Madres de Latino America,” through
grassroots activism, women “lay claims to the nation and to their rights as citizens.”
198

Examples include the activism of the mothers of the disappeared in Central America,
Chile, Argentina, and more recently by the mothers of the murdered maquiladora workers
in Juarez, Mexico. Through the activism, they have engaged in the name of their
disappeared children and loved ones, activist mothers all over Latin America refuse to be
passive victims of state orchestrated disappearance. Activist mothers engage in
producing the spaces they both live in and imagine, even when their concerns and
demands are not legitimized by state agents as exemplified through the refugee woman’s
interactions with the soldier at the detention center. In this context, the passage where the
refugee woman recognizes other women’s mourning as her own is a profound moment of
recognition and love; one that she does not share with other female characters, such as
Sonya, her nephew’s wife, or her Central American friend Maria.
The refugee woman and her comrades search for their disappeared children
unified by their identities as mothers of disappeared children. Marching together, they
demand to know the whereabouts of their disappeared children even when it can lead to
their own disappearance. As the refugee woman learns, people are terrified to associate
with the families of the disappeared. After Geraldo disappears, she is ostracized: “At the
plaza, a group of people are whispering. They are quiet when I pass, turn to one another

198
Ibid.: 130.
94
and put their finger to their lips to cage their voices….To be associated with me is
condemnation” (74). Unlike the mothers of the disappeared, the people at the plaza are
not willing to ally with her in her struggle to find her son; instead, they avoid her in order
to prevent potential persecution. A conversation between Maria and the refugee woman
offers another example of the need and desire to avoid becoming suspect. As the refugee
woman prepares for her journey to the US, she and her friend Maria contemplate
“irrigation ditches clodded with bodies” and “men who rape women then rip their fetuses
from their bellies” (75). When Maria says, “these men are babes farted out from the
Devil’s ass” (75) they both “check to make sure no one has heard her say this” (75).
Geraldo’s disappearance and the events that follow underscore that anyone can be
disappeared at anytime without reason or answers and that even mothers searching for
their disappeared children can become targets.
Years later, in the US the refugee woman imagines that Central American soldiers
and US police are one in the same, underscoring that in her experience nation-state
borders do not confine the violence of disappearance. After the café owner calls the
police to report that the missing children are at his café, the cops walk into the café
“waving their guns like a flag” (78). The refugee woman echoes Maria’s words to
challenge US law enforcement officers, “I will fight you all because you’re all farted out
of the Devil’s ass, and you’ll not take us with you” (79). The refugee woman’s final
experience with police violence figuratively resembles the rape and dismemberment of
women in her home country. Upon seeing the police, “she crushes Geraldo against her,
so tight, as if she wants to conceal him in her body again, return him to her belly” (78).
95
The refugee woman’s desperate attempt to protect the child is futile as the police follow
“their guns taught [sic] like cold steel erections” (78). She fights to hold on to
Macky/Geraldo, yet she loses him again with the penetration of a single bullet that she
feels, “crunching like broken glass against my forehead and I am blinded by the liquid
darkness. But I hold onto his hand. That I can feel, you see, I’ll never let go. Because
we are going home. My son and I” (79). As the bullet penetrates her forehead and
Macky/Geraldo is pried out of her hands, the paradox is that the refugee woman sought
refuge in the US only to be murdered by the police. After she is murdered, the café
owner tries to disappear all traces of her from the café, as he says, “I tried scrubbing the
stains off the floor, so that my customers won’t be reminded of what happened” (68). His
attempt to erase her murder is unsuccessful as his former customers refuse to forget the
murder and “keep walking by as if…[the] cafe ain’t fit for lepers” (68).
Conclusion: Disappearance and the Activist Imagination
The refugee woman’s murder stretches the narrative space of the “The Cariboo
Cafe” from disappearance in Central America to state murder in the US inner city and
from symbolic disappearance to the total disappearance of those most vulnerable to
“premature death.”
199
Even as she slips into the “liquid darkness” of death, the refugee
woman is not forgotten as former patrons keep walking past the café. Similarly,
Viramontes refuses to forget the symbolically and physically disappeared and it is this
“insistence on existence” that allows Viramontes to participate in activism through her

199
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,"
Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002).
96
fictional work.
200
In “The Cariboo Cafe,” Viramontes draws on the activist imagination
in order to raise consciousness and move people to action by representing social relations
that may otherwise not be visible. Viramontes does what Avery Gordon argues Luisa
Valenzuela and Toni Morrison do in their creative writing:
They recover “the evidence of things not seen,” that paradoxical archive of
stammering memory and witnessing lost souls (Baldwin 1985: xiii). They recover
the evidence of things not seen and they show that ordinary people ascertain these
evidentiary things not also, but more often than professional seers. These women
possess a vision that can not only regard the seemingly not there, but can also see
that the not there is a seething prescence. Seething, it makes a striking
impression; seething, it makes everything we do see just as it is, charged with the
occluded and forgotten past. These women comprehend the living effects,
seething and lingering, of what seems over and done with, the endings that are not
over.
201

By drawing on fiction to represent the multiple ways in which disappearance takes place,
Viramontes participates in the project that Gordon describes: she sees things that many
do not, and grounds what she sees within the historical legacies of colonialism in the
Americas. Drawing on the material and apparitional force of the disappeared,
Viramontes underscores that symbolic disappearance works to conceal violence against
immigrants, people of color, women, and the working poor in ways that foster the
conditions of possibility for physical disappearance. Thus, Viramontes’ political
imagination is transnational as it travels between Los Angeles, Central America, Canada,
and even as far away as Vietnam. Yet, she also insists that the transnational activist
imagination exists within the contradictions and limits of working across the differences
of nation, race, gender, and class.

200
Viramontes, "Teresa McKenna’s Graduate Seminar".

201
Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 195.
97
In chapter three, I will further explore the concept of political motherhood that I
begin discussing here through a reading of Graciela Limón’s In Search of Bernabé.
Because when children and loved ones are disappeared, people and as we have seen
especially mothers, organize to demand the return of their friends and relatives. The will
to organize collectively for justice during moments of crises is central to understanding
how women have responded to political violence in Latin America and Limón’s novel
theorizes precisely this transformative experience through the character of Luz Delcano.
The question in the following chapter therefore might be, how do women respond to the
disappearance of their children?

98

CHAPTER FOUR

Transforming Maternal Identities: Violence and Motherhood in Graciela Limón’s
In Search of Bernabé

Feminist scholarship has long challenged monolithic notions of
family and motherhood that relegate women to the domestic arena
of private/public dichotomies and that rely on the ideological
conflation of family, woman, reproduction, and nurturance (Collier
and Yanagisako, 1987, p.36). “Rethinking the family” prompts the
rethinking of motherhood (Glenn 1994; Thorne and Yalom, 1992),
allowing us to see that the glorification and exaltation of
isolationist, privatized mothering is historically and culturally
specific.
202

In the beginning of our [the relatives of the disappeared] struggle
[for justice], it was an individual problem. But one began to
discover that there were others in the same situation, and we
realized we couldn’t be isolated, that our struggle has to be
collective. It had to be a group of people who participated in the
same fight, in the same search, trying to discover the truth….All of
our [CoMadres] committees [in Latin America] have arisen from
this necessity: to seek out our relatives from repression and to
demand peace with justice!
203

Politicized Motherhood and Violence
Graciela Limón’s In Search of Bernabé represents motherhood as a social identity
that is constantly being negotiated and transformed in the context of authoritarian,

202
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, ""I'm Here, but I'm There": The Meanings of Latina
Transnational Motherhood," in Gender and U.S. Immigration, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 319.

203
Jennifer Schirmer, "The Seeking of Truth and the Gendering of Consciousness: The CoMadres of El
Salvador and the Conavigua Widows of Guatemala," in 'Viva': Women and Popular Protest in Latin
America, ed. Sarah A. Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood (London: Routledge, 1993), 32. Radcliffe and
Westwood, 32.
99
patriarchal, colonial, and racist violence.
204
Through Luz Delcano’s character, Limón
explores traditional conceptions of motherhood as well as motherhood as a social identity
from which to demand justice and social change. Further, Luz’s character allows Limón
to illustrate how disparately positioned people experience maternal identity in the context
of widespread violence. As she confronts the brutal conditions that shape her maternal
experiences, Luz is transformed from a “traditional mother” who is relatively disengaged
from a critique of social violence to a maternal figure who opposes and resists the
violence she witnesses and experiences in order to protect her children. The losses Luz
experiences, prompt her to counter the violence she witnesses by deploying and
reinterpreting what it means to be a mother in the context of political, racist, and class-
based violence that make it impossible for her to take care of her children the way women
are expected to do within traditional Salvadoran (and more generally Latin American)
culture, as I discuss. Through Luz’s character, Limón theorizes the political
transformation that allows immigrant poor women of color and immigrant women to
redefine how maternal identity is practiced in the context mass violence.
By developing distinct relationships between Luz and each of her three sons,
Limón weaves together various representations of motherhood in the context of
widespread violence that echo how women have dealt with the realities of having their
children kidnapped, disappeared, and murdered in Latin America and the US. Luz’s
character is a woman who experiences the loss of three male children (biological and
otherwise) to patriarchal violence, civil war, and transnational violence. First, her son

204
Limón, In Search of Bernabé.
100
Lucio Delcano is forcefully taken from her by his father’s (who is also her grandfather)
family. Years later, her son Bernabé Delcano disappears in the chaos following the
military attack at Archbishop Oscar A. Romero’s funeral procession and after searching
for him for nine years she finally finds his lifeless body at El Playón. After Luz and
Bernabé are separated at the funeral procession, she decides to travel to Mexico City then
Los Angeles in search of her son. While she is not successful in her international search,
by the time Luz gets to Los Angeles, she and Arturo respectively embody a mother and
son figure for each other, representing her changing conceptualization of motherhood. In
Los Angeles, Luz suffers Arturo’s loss when El Escuadrón de la Muerte, Salvadoran
military death squad, murders him in their Los Angeles apartment.
Throughout the novel, Limón contextualizes Luz’s grief over the loss of each of
her sons within a history of violence that spans across El Salvador and the US. Most of
the story focuses on the period between 1980, one year after the civil war began in El
Salvador, and 1992, when peace accords were signed in Mexico City between Salvadoran
revolutionary factions known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN)
and the Salvadoran government led by President Alfredo Cristiani. Limón adds another
layer of historical significance by opening the novel in 1940, which offers a glimpse at
the social relations that led Salvadorans to fight for the redistribution of resources and
democratization in their country, including tremendous economic inequalities and the
dire need for land redistribution. These are some of the historical and social conditions
that moved Limón to draw on the activist imagination to raise awareness about the plight
of Salvadorans and Central American refugees in the US. Limón’s interest in history
101
inspired her to frame the narrative within key historical events from El Salvador’s
twelve-year long civil war, such as the beginning and end of the war, Archbishop Oscar
A. Romero’s murder, and the major battles that took place in 1989.
Limón’s Activist Imagination?
Limón first became interested in creative writing at a young age, but did not fully
pursue her creative writing practice until after she completed her doctorate in Latin
American Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1975 and became a
tenured professor of U.S. Hispanic Literature and Chicana/ Studies at Loyola Marymount
University. Her first novel is María de Belén: The Autobiography of an Indian Woman in
1990, which is now out of print and has since been revised and republished as Song of the
Hummingbird.
205
In a 2009 interview, Limón recalls that she had a difficult time finding
a publisher for her second novel, In Search of Bernabé, and was ready to quit fiction
when she was awarded third place in the University of California, Irvine Chicano/Latino
Literary contest.
206
At the award reception, she met María Herrera-Sobek who suggested
she contact Nicolás Kanellos at Arte Público Press where she later published seven
novels three of which have been translated into Spanish: In Search of Bernabé (1993)/ En
busca de Bernabé (1997), The Memories of Ana Calderón (1994), Song of the
Hummingbird (1996)/ La Cancion Del Colibri (2006), The Day of the Moon (1999)/ Dia
de la luna (2004), Erased Faces (2001), Left Alive (2005), and her latest novel The River

205
Graciela Limón, María De Belén: The Autobiography of an Indian Woman (New York: Vantage, 1990).
Graciela Limón, Song of the Hummingbird (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).

206
Gabriela Baeza Ventura, "Storytelling with Intellectual Honesty: A Conversation with Graciela Limón,"
Literal: Latin American Voices 2009.
102
Flows North (2009).
207
Her struggle to become a published creative writer underscores
how difficult it is for Chicanas to sustain a creative writing career and the commitment it
takes to continue drawing on the imagination as a central way to participate in activist
work.
Limón gives a great deal of attention to historical issues throughout her body of
work and strives to read and write fiction that inspires an understanding of how people’s
everyday lives are affected by history, as she revealed during a 2009 interview:
I’m always attracted to books with historical backgrounds regardless of country or
time. I don’t read history books; I read novels, biographies that deal with
historical background. I really like it, because if anybody reads my books they’ll
see, that they all have a history component to them. And I think it is so interesting
how history affects people.
208

In part, her interest in history drives Limón’s activist imagination throughout her body of
work. This perspective embraces the idea that literature has the potential to represent
histories for which there may be little concrete evidence because, for instance, physical
documentation is not preserved in traditional archives, partially because it runs counter to
dominant meanings and representations.
While Limón is interested in the historical context of the situations she depicts in
her novels, her perspective on the relationship between literature and politics differs from
the overtly political stance of the writers I discuss in other chapters of my dissertation.

207
Graciela Limón, The Day of the Moon (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1999), Graciela Limón, Erased
Faces (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002), Limón, In Search of Bernabé, Graciela Limón, Left Alive
(Houston: Arte Público Press, 2005), Graciela Limón, The Memories of Ana Calderón (Houston: Arte
Público Press, 1994), Graciela Limón, A River Flows North (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2009), Limón,
Song of the Hummingbird, Ventura, "Storytelling with Intellectual Honesty: A Conversation with Graciela
Limón," 33.

208
Ventura, "Storytelling with Intellectual Honesty: A Conversation with Graciela Limón," 35.
103
On one hand, Moraga, Viramontes, and Castillo all take an unambiguous position about
their creative writing being part of their social activism. Limón on the other hand,
presents a complicated and at times contradictory perspective on the relationship between
creative writing and politics:
I’ve never felt compelled…to take a position whether it’s political or ideological.
However, I know that because of who I am, what I am, this will come out. I am a
woman, so therefore my writing will be about strong women. Because I am the
person I am, the women will be very much along my lines and think the way I
think, so to speak. It’s hard for me to write about marginal women. I don’t even
know what that feels like.
209

While she does not strive to take a political position in her creative writing, Limón
acknowledges that “this will come out” because of who she is as the daughter of Mexican
immigrant parents living within patriarchal society. Despite arguing, “It’s hard for me to
write about marginal women,” most of Limón’s novels focus on women whose identities
are shaped by the historical realities of colonialism and patriarchy in the Americas; who
she clearly does not regard as “marginal,” which I take to mean without agency. While
Limón may claim not to know what it feels like to be a “marginal woman” she uses her
imagination to create female characters that are strong despite being marginalized within
patriarchal and racist societies.
Further, on one hand Limón claims that she does not feel compelled to “take a
position whether it’s political or ideological,” while on the other she aims to change her
readers’ worldview by writing with “intellectual honesty”:
My highest goal is to have intellectual honesty, to write as honestly as I can, to
steer away from gimmicks, from what is trendy or fashionable, to be as true to
myself as I am, to be honest, to say what I believe, not what is accepted.

209
Ibid.
104
Therefore, I have fallen into severe criticism. As I’m writing, I’m very concerned
that what I’m saying will somehow enhance my reader, make them a better
person, to contribute to their enhancement, their growth, so that when they finish
reading they may say, ‘I didn’t know this’, or ‘I like this’, or ‘I really hate this’.
To get some sort of transformation in the reader, some sort of evolution.
210

Therefore, while Limón contends that she does not feel required to take a political stance
in her writing, she simultaneously strives to change her readers’ understanding of the
world, writing with the kind of “intellectual honesty” that will push readers to think
critically about what they learn from her novels. Thus, she positions fiction as a
legitimate place for knowledge production and dissemination, particularly for
marginalized histories whether or not she recognizes that, regardless of intention, such
work is inevitably political.
In a 2009 KUHF radio interview with Eric Ladau, Limón states that her
perspective on Salvadoran history was facilitated by her work with Central American
refugees in Los Angeles during the mid-1980s.
211
She began doing volunteer work
through Loyola Marymount University where she taught for thirty-five years and is now
professor emeritus. Limón recalls that after Father Luis Olivares declared Our Lady
Queen of Angels Church a sanctuary for refugees and immigrants with no other place to
go, Loyola Marymount organized volunteers to help at the church, which is located on
Olvera Street, the historic center of Los Angeles.
212
She recalls that as a volunteer, she
had the opportunity to talk with Salvadoran refugees as she poured coffee or helped in

210
Ibid., 34.

211
Eric Ladau, "Kuhf-Arte Público Press Author of the Month: Graciela Limón," (USA: kuhf.org, 2009).

212
Nora and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla Hamilton, Seeking Community in a Global City Guatemalans and
Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
105
other ways. She and other Spanish-speaking volunteers at the church would listen to
refugees that spoke about the horrific violence they witnessed and experienced in their
home countries. Limón credits her volunteer work with helping her learn about the wars
in Central America and the experiences of refugees that would later facilitate her creative
process while writing In Search of Bernabé.
In 1990, Limón had the opportunity to travel to El Salvador as part of a delegation
sent to witness the official investigation into the murder of six Jesuit priests, their
housekeeper, and her daughter that made international headlines at the University of
Central America in El Salvador.
213
She recalls that after the murders the Jesuits
organized “delegations to gather information” and to witness the government
investigation underway in El Salvador.
214
Limón recalls having been selected as part of
the delegations that Loyola Marymount sent to El Salvador, “I had the privilege. I mean I
was truly honored” to be selected as one of the three members of the Loyola
delegation.
215
She also recalls that when she was in El Salvador, her delegation was
among thousands of others arriving to witness the investigation into the murders. She
notes that the Salvadoran government “proceeded to intimidate those that went to
witness” and that everywhere she looked she saw checkpoints guarded by soldiers
carrying machine guns.
216
When she returned to the US, Limón recalls, “it clicked in me

213
Ladau, "Kuhf-Arte Público Press Author of the Month: Graciela Limón.", LaFeber, Inevitable
Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 357.

214
Ladau, "Kuhf-Arte Público Press Author of the Month: Graciela Limón."

215
Ibid.

216
Ibid.
106
that I should do something with all of this. Write about it. But what? An essay? An
article? What about a novel? That is when I started writing Bernabé.”
217
In her interview
with Ladau, Limón further recounts:
…when I came back, that’s when I resolved to write that first novel…In Search of
Bernabé. And of course…I was very happy to have the cooperation, the
information, on top of all that, with refugees right there on Olvera Street….at the
church there I gathered information, interviews, that lead to the novel In Search of
Bernabé, which was published in ‘93.
218

While Limón may not recognize her writing as an overtly political act, her activist
imagination was inspired by her travel to El Salvador and also rooted in her interactions
with Salvadoran refugees in Los Angeles. Thus, like the other writers I read, Limón’s
representation of violence in Central America must be understood within the context of a
growing Central American population in Los Angeles and Chicanas attempting to
understand US imperialism across political borders. Like the other writers whose work I
examine, Limón grapples with the meaning of solidarity, taking into account the differing
situations of Chicanas and Central Americans during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Reception: Where is Bernabé in the Chicana/o Literary Canon?
As Victoria Bañales notes in her doctoral dissertation, Twentieth-Century Latin
American and U.S. Latina Women's Literature and the Paradox of Dictatorship and
Democracy, little has been written about In Search of Bernabé, although the novel won
the 1994 Before Columbus American Book Award, was named Critic’s Choice for the
New York Times Book Review, was third place winner of the University of California

217
Ventura, "Storytelling with Intellectual Honesty: A Conversation with Graciela Limón," 33.

218
Ladau, "Kuhf-Arte Público Press Author of the Month: Graciela Limón."
107
Irvine’s Chicano/Latino Literary award, and was translated into Spanish in 1997.
219

Bañales notes that only four critical essays have been published that focus on the novel
and hypothesizes that the critical silence about Limón’s novel may have to do with its
focus on the US as an unwelcoming and violent country as opposed to more popular
Latina authored novels that represent a type of celebratory multiculturalism, indicating
that regardless of intention her work has political implications.
220
Bañales argues that In
Search of Bernabé does not deal with “‘recognizable models of Chicana/o fiction,”
departing from issues or character types that are common in Chicana/o fiction.
221

Bañales further notes that “there are no Chicana/o characters in the text” and that “most
of the narrative takes place in El Salvador,” thus it does not easily fit into the Chicana/o
literary repertoire.
222

Limón’s own assessment of critical readings of her work seem to agree with
Bañales’ understanding about the critical silence on In Search of Bernabé. Limón has
responded to criticism about her work by asking: “Does it make me less of a Chicana
than the one that writes about the campesinos? No, I’m just as much a Chicana. I get
testy on this one as well because I am somehow also challenged because I write about

219
Victoria M. Bañales, "Twentieth-Century Latin American and U.S. Latina Women's Literature and the
Paradox of Dictatorship and Democracy" (University of California, Santa Cruz, 2005).

220
Shane Martin and Ernesto Colín, "The Novels of Graciela Limón: Narrative, Theology and the Search
for Mestiza/O Identity," Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 7, no. 1 (1999), Ellen McCracken, New
Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1999), Fatima Mujcinovic, "In Search of Bernabé: Politicized Motherhood," Ethnic Studies Review 24, no.
1-3 (2001), Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "Refugees of the South: Central Americans in the U.S. Latino
Imaginary," American Literature 73, no. 2 (2001).

221
Bañales, "Twentieth-Century Latin American and U.S. Latina Women's Literature and the Paradox of
Dictatorship and Democracy", 324.

222
Ibid., 323.
108
other topics. I write of my world.”
223
Limón has also countered critics that argue her
creative writing reproduces stereotypical characters by pointing out that she writes about
“what is.” She recalls that when she was working on In Search of Bernabé:
The editor of Bernabé and I got into it a lot about Luz Delcano, the protagonist, in
the part where she migrates from El Salvador to Los Angeles. She is all luchona,
making tortas, making a living. She comes to Los Angeles and starts cleaning
houses, making food for La Placita, etc. and the editor took issue saying that I was
perpetuating a stereotype. My response was: ‘Would you like me to make her a
neurosurgeon? How do you think women like her make a living in Los Angeles?
Are all the people that we see walking around the streets of Los Angeles
stereotypes?’ That infuriates me. In other words, let us deny what is there. When
they say: ‘This is a stereotype,’ they might as well be saying: ‘No, this type does
not exist’. Okay, well, who’s cleaning your house, baby?
224

In this passage, Limón defends the politics of representation in her novel by arguing that
Luz represents the reality of many Salvadoran refugees. While the editor read Luz
Delcano as a stereotypical character, Limón argues that she was writing with “intellectual
honesty” and representing what she observed through travel, interviews, volunteering,
and living in Los Angeles during the mid-1980s and early 1990s. From Limón’s
perspective, representing Salvadoran refugee women as fighters who survive by creating
opportunities for themselves in the informal economy is not a stereotype, it depicts ‘what
was there’. Limón’s attentiveness to remaining grounded in the political conditions in
which she writes lead her to pay attention to the material conditions that the characters
she develops might face. Similarly, as she theorizes the transformation of Luz’s maternal
identity, Limón pays particular attention to the material conditions that lead to that
transformation.

223
Ventura, "Storytelling with Intellectual Honesty: A Conversation with Graciela Limón," 35.

224
Ibid., 34.
109
Chicana, Latin/a American, Women of Color and Politicized Motherhood
In Chicana, Latin/a Americanist, and women of color discourses, the
politicization of mothering by women contesting political violence against vulnerable
communities, such as Luz, has garnered significant critical attention.
225
Scholars in these
fields have theorized motherhood in a myriad of ways that free the construct from
traditional notions of mothers as passive caretakers that separately perform care work in
the privacy of their homes. Instead, maternal identities are expanded to encompass a
range of activities that include diverse mother types: good mother, bad mother,
politicized mother, other mother, collective mother, feminist mother, liberated mother,
lesbian mother, grieving mother, insane mother, homebound mother, working mother,
transnational mother, combinations of these, and completely different manifestations all
together. There has also been a particular focus on the transformation of motherhood as a
traditionally passive identity that is practiced within the private sphere into motherhood
as a politicized identity that women produce in order to oppose political violence, social
violence and racist violence. As Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila write,
“Motherhood is not biologically predetermined in any fixed way but is historically and

225
Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo
(Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1994), Patricia Hill Collins, "Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and
Feminist Theorizing," in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle
Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), Ruth Feldstein, "'I Wanted the Whole World to
See': Race, Gender, and Constructions of Motherhood in the Death of Emmett Till," in Mothers and
Motherhood: Readings in American History, ed. Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1997), Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Mothers Reclaiming
Our Children," in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and
Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities, Ileana Rodríguez, Women, Guerrillas, and Love:
Understanding War in Central America, trans. Ileana Rodríguez and Robert Carr (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in
Argentina's "Dirty War", Tula, Hear My Testimony: María Teresa Tula, Human Rights Activist from El
Salvador.
110
socially constructed.”
226
They further contend, “While mothering is generally understood
as practice that involves the preservation, nurturance, and training of children for adult
life (Ruddick, 1989), there are many contemporary variants distinguished by race, class,
and culture (Collins, 1994; Dill, 1988; Glenn, 1994).”
227
In other words, motherhood and
mothering is produced and reproduced differently depending on people’s circumstances
and the context in which they engage in care work and sometimes that care work can
become overtly politicized.
One of the most commonly cited examples of politicized motherhood is that of
Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo.
228
In 1977, Las Madres took to the symbolic center of
power in Argentina, La Plaza de Mayo, to demand information regarding the
whereabouts of their children after they were disappeared by the military junta that held
power between 1976 and 1983. In the process, Las Madres redefined motherhood as a
collective endeavor leading them to conceive of themselves as “Mothers of all the
oppressed” and challenging patriarchal images of women being apolitical and
homebound (Boletín Informativo Madres de la Plaza de Mayo cited in Bouvard).
229

226
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, 317.

227
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, 319.

228
Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo, Jean Bethke Elshtain, "The
Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal Action," in Representations of Motherhood,
ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994),
Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, Gisela Norat, "Women Staging Coups through Mothering: Depictions
in Hispanic Contemporary Literature," in Feminist Mothering, ed. Andrea O'Reilly (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2008), Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in
Argentina's "Dirty War", Celia Valiente, "Mobilizing for Recognition and Redistribution on Behalf of
Others? The Case of Mothers Against," in Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested
Identities, Agency and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

229
Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo, 185.
111
However, it is also important to note, as Taylor writes in Disappearing Acts,
“motherhood—as a role—had already been socialized and politicized through
patriarchy.”
230
That is to say, decisions to fulfill traditional motherly expectations,
support the military junta, or take to the streets demanding justice for the disappeared are
all political in some way—whether the option taken is to go on with life as usual, to
support the junta, or to confront the junta’s violence by demanding accountability and
justice. For the most part, Las Madres’ activism is recognized as a form of politicized
motherhood, precisely because “the women consciously decided to protest and agitate as
mothers.”
231
Taylor continues, “the role of mother was attractive, not because of its
‘natural’ or essentialist qualities, but because it was viable and practical. It offered the
women a certain legitimacy and authority in a society that values mothers almost to the
exclusion of all other women.”
232
Las Madres, thus, made a strategic political choice to
coalesce as mothers and took to the streets highlighting the gendered significance of that
decision.
Similarly, women of Latin American origin in the US have drawn on their social
identities as mothers to organize collectively for social justice. For example, The
Mothers of East Los Angeles strategically drew on traditional conceptions of motherhood
and extended them to organize in defense of their community. Mary Pardo notes that in
their struggles against the State of California’s plans to build a prison in their community,
The Mothers creatively extended their social identities as mothers, “express[ing] their

230
Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War", 194.

231
Ibid.

232
Ibid., 195.
112
individual concerns as collective concerns.”
233
In the process, they redefined community
activism as part of women’s traditional work, centering activism as part of their everyday
life rather than something that men did in the realm of electoral politics.
234
However,
while The Mothers positioned “mother[s] as protector[s] of the community” they also
refused to portray themselves as “madres abnegadas” (abnegated mothers).
235
Instead,
they positioned themselves as well-informed and politically perceptive women that could
change and influence public policies that negatively affect their children and community.
The Mothers also came to understand motherhood beyond an identity determined by
biological reproduction and developed a worldview in which caring and doing for
children are understood as part of what makes someone a mother, regardless of biological
reproduction.
236

By mobilizing motherhood as a political identity, Las Madres and The Mothers
spoke outside “their” traditional sphere, the home, exposing the fallacy of private/ public
dichotomies. Both groups of activists began preparing themselves, each other, their
children and other young people for survival by drawing on a growing political
consciousness through which the separation of private and public activities made no
sense because their “private” activities as mothers collided with their “public” demands.
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, by declaring that “children are not alienable” and

233
Pardo, Mexican American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities,
107.

234
Ibid., 230.

235
Ibid., 114.

236
Ibid., 115.
113
thrusting their “private” roles as mothers into the realm of collective activism, activist
mothers make visible the stretching of relations that are traditionally divided into
“public” or “private” and in the process make evident the fallacy of such divisions.
237

This dichotomy was particularly called into question by Las Madres and The Mothers
when they emphasized their identities as mothers (a traditionally private role that initially
worked to keep them out of harms way) in order to legitimize their public demands to
know the whereabouts of their children in the context of mass censorship and political
repression and to counter unwanted land use in their already disproportionately burdened
community.
Beyond Chicana and Latin/a American research on motherhood, recognizing the
fallacy of the private/ public dichotomy is necessary for the everyday survival of poor
women and women of color as well as to the survival of their children. More
specifically, scholars have argued that Black women must prepare their children to
survive in a hostile society in which the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching live
on in public policies that criminalize and exclude entire categories of people from
justice.
238
As Gilmore notes about women organizing against being alienated from their
children by the prison industrial complex, black women have developed forms of “social

237
Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

238
Collins, "Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing.", Feldstein, "'I Wanted the Whole
World to See': Race, Gender, and Constructions of Motherhood in the Death of Emmett Till.", Gilmore,
"Mothers Reclaiming Our Children.", Dorothy Roberts, "Feminism, Race, and Adoption Policy," in Color
of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge: South
End Press, 2006), Loretta J. Ross, "The Color of Choice: White Supremacy and Reproductive Justice," in
Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge:
South End Press, 2006), Stephanie J. Shaw, "Mothering under Slavery in the Antebellum South," in
Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History, ed. Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1997), Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
114
mothering” by drawing on “techniques developed over generations on behalf of Black
children and families in terror-demarcated, racially defined enclaves.”
239
To this
discussion, Patricia Hill Collins adds that in the context of “racial domination and
economic exploitation” Black children’s survival is not solely about “individual survival,
empowerment, and identity” it is about “group survival, empowerment, and identity.”
240

In this context, Black mothers understand that they must come together in formal and
informal ways to increase the possibility of survival for their own biological children as
well as other women’s children in order to ensure the survival of their community.
The question of reproductive rights is also central to discussions about Black
motherhood as well as motherhood for Native American women and Latinas.
241
In the
US, studies focused on the experiences of poor women of color show that they face many
obstacles to becoming and being mothers within “structures of white supremacy and class
privilege that (re)produce ways of thinking that question their ability to be ‘good
mothers’.”
242
Historical, economic, legal, and medical inequalities create conditions that
stand in the way of their daily survival and position them as non-normative mothers
subject to constant surveillance and separation from their children. Forced sterilization

239
Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, 236.

240
Collins, "Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing," 59.

241
Roberts, "Feminism, Race, and Adoption Policy.", Loretta J. Ross, "African American Women and
Abortion, 1800-1970," in Mothers and Motherhood: Readings in American History, ed. Rima D. Apple and
Janet Golden (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), Ross, "The Color of Choice: White
Supremacy and Reproductive Justice.", Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian
Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005).

242
Lisa C. Ikemoto, "Lessons from the Titanic: Starts with the People in Steerage, Women and Children
First," in Mother Troubles: Rethinking Contemporary Maternal Dilemmas, ed. Julia E. Hanigsberg and
Sara Ruddick (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
115
and lack of access to abortion and birth control have historically been obstacles for
women of color that seek to determine for themselves whether or not they want to
become biological mothers.
243
These issues become central in Luz’s relationship with
her son Lucio, who is taken from her to be raised in a family that is deemed as “fit” to
raise a child because they are wealthy and of European ancestry.
Generally, the literature on motherhood reveals that in the context of war,
colonialism, economic exploitation, and racial violence the contradictions of traditional
notions of motherhood come to the surface and maternal identity is transformed. Such
conditions require what Ileana Rodríguez calls a type of “revolutionary motherhood” that
leaves the idea of individual maternity behind and replaces it with a notion of collective
maternity….[where] family is no longer defined by blood ties alone.”
244
While
Rodríguez writes specifically about the production and reproduction of maternal identity
within a Central American revolutionary context, as the activism of women of color in
the US shows, the reconceptualization of motherhood beyond the biological and as a
collective endeavor extends beyond a Central American or a Latin American context.
Rather, revolutionary motherhood can be found in many places where the traces of
colonialism and slavery live on as part of everyday experience, stretching from US inner
cities to war-torn Central American countries and beyond. Revolutionary motherhood,
Rodríguez asserts, seeks to reconceptualize maternity as “the collectivity of men and
women within social situations” and “explodes bourgeois ideas of maternity” that call for

243
Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.

244
Rodríguez, Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America, 163.
116
isolated child-rearing, monogamy, and abnegation, making bourgeois ideas of maternity
both undesirable and impossible for those struggling to survive in the face of seemingly
insurmountable violence.
245
Through Luz’s character, Limón traces the transformation of
maternal experience into a collective endeavor that, while innovative, continues to be
fraught with some of the ideals of what Rodríguez calls bourgeois maternity.
Transforming Maternal Identity
The theorization of motherhood by Chicanas, other US women of color, and
Latin/a Americanists informs my discussion of Limón’s representation of motherhood
through Luz’s character. The politicization of motherhood described above is
represented as a process of transformation in In Search of Bernabé. Luz’s character
offers a complicated understanding of motherhood that goes beyond the stereotypical
madre abnegada/abnegated mother of Latin/a American and Chicana culture while still
being bound to its expectations. Luz’s relationships with her sons represent a
complicated web that weaves together the social construction of Latin/a American
maternal identity beyond traditional dichotomies. Lynn Stephen explains how the
virgin/whore dichotomy contributes to the formation of traditional motherhood in a Latin
American context:
Writers have analyzed the “motherist” movements (Fisher 1989, 1993; M.
Navarro 1989; Schirmer 1993a, 1993b) have all pointed out the links between
Catholic images of femininity and their use by repressive states to control women.
Images of the various incarnations of the Virgin Mary portray an idealized woman
who is an obedient, self-sacrificing mother, subordinating her needs to those of
her children….
The counterpart to the image of the Virgin Mary is that of the Whore, as
Manifested in the story of Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who is counseled by

245
Ibid., 163 and 73.
117
Christ. As a Virgin Mary opposite, the Whore is seen as aggressive, impure,
disconnected from motherhood, and a male sexual object. Her sexuality is
constructed to service men, and her personhood (if she is granted any) if focused
through this role….
As discussed by Schirmer (begin 36), another aspect of the traditional
Catholic view of women is that “women are naturally culpable for men’s
transgressions and those of their children” (1993a: 54). As Family caretakers and
citizens, Salvadoran women—like women in Argentina, Chile Paraguay,
Guatemala, and elsewhere in Latin America—were responsible for ensuring that
their family members did not become a threat to national security.
246

While Luz’s maternal identity is transformed throughout the novel, it is also often framed
within the virgin/whore binary that Stephen describes while simultaneously presenting a
critique of that dichotomy. In fact, each of her sons seems to understand their
relationship to their mother through these archetypes and even Luz positions herself as
the ideal “obedient, self-sacrificing mother, subordinating her needs to those of her
children.”
Lucio
The kidnapping of Luz’s first-born son, Lucio, by the Delcano family can be
understood within the history of colonialism and slavery, the traces of which poor women
of color continue to experience in the present through the perilous conditions they endure
in their struggle to care for and protect their children. Luz becomes pregnant with Lucio
after being raped by her grandfather, Don Lucio Delcano. In contrast to Luz, who has
brown skin and dark eyes like her Indian grandmother and African mother, Lucio has
white skin, blue-eyes, and blonde hair like his father/great-grandfather. Echoing the
separation of black female slaves and their biological offspring, Luz and her son Lucio

246
Lynn Stephen, Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from Below (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1997), 35-36.
118
are separated by the Delcano family, who owns the finca where Luz was born and raised
only to be raped by the man who fathered her own father. By forcefully taking the
newborn Lucio from Luz, the Delcano family reasserts symbolic ownership over the
children Don Delcano fathers with the women on his finca, replicating patriarchal
property relations during slavery. From Luz’s perspective, the Delcanos were interested
in Lucio being raised to be a “proper man” within the dominant system, as Luz reveals in
her confession with Father Hugh Joyce years later, “They were afraid of what my son
might have become if he remained with those of us who are poor” (112). By taking
Lucio, the Delcanos also maintain their capacity to decide the futures of the peasants that
live on their land by controlling if they will have the right to raise their own children.
Within this logic, Luz’s capacity to be a proper mother is called into question because she
is a poor mixed race woman as opposed to wealthy and of European descent.
While Luz explains that the Delcanos took Lucio from her because she is poor,
his Aunt Hortensia, who becomes his primary caretaker, tells him that his “mother was a
worthless opportunist from Spain who presumed that she could worm herself into [the]
our family by having a Delcano child” (38). Hortensia simultaneously maintains her
family’s economic and racial superiority by creating a myth about the racial purity of the
Delcanos, including Lucio who is actually a mestizo. In Hortensia’s story, Colonel
Delcano’s mother, presumably like the rest of the Delcanos, is from Spain rather than a
mixed race woman like Luz. Further, Hortensia claims, “The old man [Don Delcano]
would never permit such a marriage” between one of his sons and an opportunist from a
“worthless” social background (38). By kidnapping Lucio, the Delcano’s break the
119
bonds of kinship between their family and Luz. Hortensia’s genealogy works to deny the
reality of incest and rape through which Colonel Delcano was conceived and maintains
the myth of the Delcano’s racial superiority.
Throughout his childhood, Colonel Delcano questions the authenticity of his
aunt’s story and constantly wonders why his mother abandoned him. Hortensia finally
tells him over dinner one night, “letting out her hatred against” (42) him along with the
truth about his conception she shouts “‘You’re not my nephew’…. ‘You’re my brother!’”
(41). She continues,
‘You’re the brat of a filthy mother who sprang from a litter of African slaves,
animals who grovel in dirt, fornicating and spawning without knowing who or
what they are! You might look like an angel, but on the inside, you’re nothing but
a black devil!....
‘You despicable worm, it’s time you realized that your mother was just like you!
A pervert!....Your mother fornicated with her own grandfather!....
‘Why did the family take you from the bitch that was your mother? Because we
couldn’t tolerate her bragging that she had given birth to a Delcano. That’s why!
It was easy. All we had to do was jingle a few colones under her nose, and there
it was we never saw her again! Ha! Money! It’s magic!’ (42).

With these words, Hortensia reveals the racial and class logic by which her family lives:
black people are sub-human and amoral and their children can be purchased for “a few
colones.” Within this logic, it becomes impossible for her to admit the depravity of her
own grandfather and the fact that her family kidnapped a child. Luz is dispossessed of
her capacity to determine if and when she will biologically reproduce and how she will
raise her children. She becomes part of a long line of poor nonwhite women who have
been alienated from their children. In this passage, her alienation is clearly linked to her
race as the daughter of a Ladino and a black woman who are both peasants on Don
120
Delcano’s finca, marking the ways that the legacies of slavery and colonialism continue
to be experienced in the present.
Limón allows Luz to fill-in the details Hortensia fails to mention in her retelling
of Lucio’s kidnapping. Luz recalls that she was in her hut the day Damián Delcano came
to steal her son:
I was just a girl myself, but don’t think that it was easy for him. No, Señor, no
fue fácil para él. [No sir, it was not easy for him.] I ran after him as he walked
away with my baby in his arms. I screamed and pulled at Damián’s sleeves. I
was even able to scratch his face, and once I bit his hand. I begged but he did it
anyway (113).

Through Luz’s words, the reader gets a sense of Luz as a loving mother who ferociously
fights to keep her son, a perspective very different from Hortensia’s damning tale about a
defeated mother who sold her son for a few coins. In the end, the Delcanos keep Lucio
and Luz is forced to leave the finca.
His separation from his mother creates deep self-doubt and self-hatred in Lucio
and he later blames his mother for all his shortcomings. When Colonel Delcano realizes
that he is the product of incest he tells himself that he is “indeed a monster” and this self-
hatred leads him to a life of murder and self-loathing. This disposition serves him well
upon entering the military academy when he is fourteen years old and he “plunged into
his new career with vengeance and spite” (45). Fatima Mujcinovic reads this passage
through a psychoanalytic lens and argues that as is typical in psychoanalysis, Lucio’s
downfall is traced to his mother’s failures rather than to the social norms and
circumstances that he learned throughout this life.
247
Despite having been raised by

247
Mujcinovic, "In Search of Bernabé: Politicized Motherhood."
121
Hortensia, Lucio believes that his mother is to blame for the choices and circumstance
that he faces in life.
While Colonel Delcano (Luz’s son) feels a sense of shame, hatred, and
vengefulness, Luz also feels guilty for having tempted her grandfather to sin. When she
returns to El Salvador after being deported from the US, Luz meets Father Hugh Joyce at
the Cathedral where they both wait for fighting to cease between the guerrillas and the
military. As the battle continues, Luz reveals her sense of shame in her confession with
Father Hugh: “When I was a child, just thirteen years old, I caused my grandfather to
commit a grave sin. It was my fault. Of that I have always been certain, because you
see, at the time he was old and past the time of temptation. I’ve been paying ever since
then” (98). Like Colonel Delcano, Luz traces all she has endured in life to the incestuous
abuse her grandfather committed, but blames herself for her hardships. Luz makes sense
of the tremendous losses she experiences by thinking of them as a punishment for her
sins as she explains, “‘inside of me is a lake of black, stinking mud, just like someone
already in Hell!’” (98). Drawing on this logic, she thinks she deserves the loss of her sons
because they were conceived in sin. Luz’s idea that women who practice non-normative
sexual behavior deserve to be punished and are unfit to be mothers follows the line of
reasoning laid out by Stephen in the passage cited above, revealing that Luz’s process of
transformation remains contradictory.
Colonel Delcano has a similar explanation for his own hardships in life, blaming
Luz for his murderous pursuits. As Delcano tells his brother Bernabé after he is captured
in battle, “‘I’m your brother. Your mother conceived me when she fornicated with her
122
grandfather’….‘The two of them made me what I am! Then she wound up selling me,
abandoning me so she could lead the life of a slut” (143). With those words, Colonel
Delcano simultaneously categorizes Luz as a bad mother and a promiscuous woman,
making her a bad woman within traditional Latin American cultural norms; a
promiscuous woman that abandons her children is beyond redemption in a society that, as
Taylor writes in an Argentinean context, “values mothers almost to the exclusion of other
women.”
248
In the meantime, Luz also thinks about Lucio and “wonders what he looks
like. Is he a good man? Surely he is. And even though he doesn’t know me, he must
think of me just as I think of him” (66). Luz seems to accept the logic that her son
became a good man because a wealthy family raised him. She does not imagine that her
son has grown into a hate-filled person that targets political dissidents and one day will
murder his own brother.
Despite his self-loathing and hatred for others, once he completes military
intelligence training in the US, Colonel Delcano begins his search for Luz. His search
references the history of US military intervention in Latin America through the military
training he receives in the US, presumably at the School of the Americas, where “their
method of gathering, sorting, and cataloging useful information for later review” was
“especially appealing to him” (46). Relying on his training in the US, his search for Luz
begins with one piece of information that Hortensia provides about her: “She is a
common servant in one of the homes in Escalón” (47). At the beginning of his search,
Colonel Delcano observes women at bus stops and then goes to marketplaces to ask if

248
Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War", 195.
123
anyone knows a woman named Luz. When he finally finds a driver that is able to
provide information, he learns that Luz moved to Carasucia (Dirty Face) after her
employer learns that she is having an affair with her husband. After finding out Luz’s
whereabouts, “He wept as he realized that he had searched for his mother not because he
hated her, as he had told himself from the beginning, but because he loved her, and he
could not deny that he had secretly hoped that she, too, would love him” (49). Fearing
rejection, instead of approaching Luz, Colonel Delcano begins gathering information
about her and Bernabé, amassing details about every aspect of their life and jealously
obsessing about them from a distance. Lucio resents the sheltered and happy life Luz
provides Bernabé as a child and takes to “compulsively staring at frayed, faded snapshots
of his mother cuddling the child or of her pointing at an unseen object while the baby
laughed” (50). In his mind, Luz represents two mothers: the one who abandoned him and
the devoted mother who raised Bernabé, setting him on a vengeful path. Throughout the
novel, Colonel Delcano can only imagine Luz within traditional concepts of Latin
American motherhood that are not only impossible, but make it difficult for women
(especially nonwhite women) to determine their own future.
Bernabé
Luz’s relationship with Bernabé departs dramatically from her relationship with
Lucio and represents yet another way poor women of color engage in motherhood in the
context of political violence. After the Delcano’s kidnap Lucio, she is forced to leave the
finca where she has lived all her life and she travels to San Salvador where she finds
employment as a domestic worker at a house in Escalón, one of the capital city’s most
124
exclusive neighborhoods. Luz arrives at Escalón when she is fourteen years old and as
she matures into womanhood her patrón, Señor Grijalva, eventually takes a sexual
interest in her and a sexual relationship begins between them. After Señora Grijalva
discovers her husband and Luz having sex, Luz knows that she must leave the house and
takes only her “clothes, and Bernabé, who by that time was in” her womb (116). Luz is
determined to make a life for herself and Bernabé and moves to the border town of
Carasucia where she cleans houses, cooks, and sells food. As a single mother, Luz does
everything she can to create a life for herself and Bernabé and one of her main concerns
is holding on to her son. It is at this point that Luz’s maternal identity begins to shift
from being the mother of a kidnapped child to trying to care for and shelter Bernabé to an
extent he will later resent.
After Luz and Bernabé return to San Salvador, Bernabé decides to enter the
seminary, a decision that places him and Luz at Archbishop Romero’s funeral procession
in 1980. Luz and Bernabé lead what appears to be a common life until the day they are
separated at the Archbishop’s funeral in San Salvador when Bernabé is twenty years old.
At the funeral procession, Bernabé walks within Luz’s view and mother and son
constantly glance at each other for reassurance. As the procession continues, Luz and
Bernabé are separated by a sea of campesinos and urban workers mourning the death of
the Archbishop. Luz and Bernabé’s separation becomes greater after “A grenade
exploded in the midst of the surging crowd at the edge of the Plaza Barrios facing the
Cathedral. The blast was followed by machine gun fire and rifle shots that came from
several directions making the mass of people panic” (23). During the attack, people run
125
to find protection as both soldiers and guerrillas fire into the crowd. Bernabé stands in
the middle of the chaos and yells for his mother to no avail. After his initial panic,
Bernabé runs home and pounds on the locked door until a soldier finds him there and
threatens to kill him if he does not go into hiding. In the mean time, Luz searches for
Bernabé among the dead bodies on the plaza until military troops tell everyone still there
to go home. As she searches for Bernabé, Luz thinks about the loss of her son Lucio
years earlier and “Desperation began to overcome her. In her fears she remembered the
loss of her first son Lucio. Now Bernabé, her second born, was also gone” (25). This
moment emphasizes the desperation that people of color, such as Luz, endure in the face
of massive political repression that alienates them from their children. This second loss
pushes Luz one-step closer to politicized motherhood, though not necessarily following
the model of Las Madres and The Mothers.
Bernabé’s and Luz’s lives diverge dramatically after they are separated, even as
Luz continues searching for her son and Bernabé continues to draw on his bond with his
mother for strength during the most difficult moments after he is separated from her.
After the attacks at the funeral procession, Bernabé flees to the mountains where he is
taken in and nursed back to health by the guerrillas who mistakenly think Bernabé
purposefully went to the mountains with the intention of becoming a guerrilla. After one
month of guerilla training, Bernabé is assigned to his first mission, escorting Salvadoran
refugees across a river, presumably the Sumpul River where there was a massacre in
1980, into Honduras. When military troops begin firing on the guerrillas and refugees,
Bernabé calls on his mother to help him survive the situation, “¡Mamá! ¡Ayúdame!” (35).
126
While Luz is not physically present to help Bernabé, after he calls out to her, he suddenly
finds the strength and courage to guide himself and the refugees across the river and into
Honduras. Once he makes it to the Honduran side of the river, he keeps running until he
loses consciousness and wakes up after three days in a hut where two women who have
been caring for him tell him that he has been crying out for his mother: “¿Mamá, mamá,
dónde estás? [Mother, mother, where are you?]” (36). The women tell Bernabé that his
mother has answered his call by delivering him to them. In this symbolic scene, Bernabé
is mothered by other maternal figures, while Luz (on her way to the US) mothers Arturo
who has also lost his mother to political violence. Through these maternal figures, Limón
begins to introduce the idea that maternal identity goes beyond biological reproduction
and can be extended to women that participate in relations of care, protection, and
nurturance, known as social motherhood.
Bernabé and Arturo, an activist Bernabé meets at the guerrilla camp in the
mountains after the military attack at Romero’s funeral, both picture Luz as a politicized
figure before she has the courage to imagine herself as such. Bernabé begins thinking of
his mother as a politicized woman when he meets the guerrilla women at the camp where
he is sheltered in the mountains. He imagines his mother as one of the women at the
camp:
You would be right there, Madre, welcoming me and the other new
people….you’d like the ammunition belt that everyone wears here. Your arms
would be folded over your chest as if to let everyone know that you were capable
of being a dangerous person. Sí, mama. You would be a good guerrilla! (30).

Similarly, after Luz and Arturo meet, he is able to picture her at a march that he and his
compañeros organized, telling her “I think I know you would have joined us. It was
127
beautiful” (62). Luz herself admits that she heard about the protest but did not go
because she was afraid, representing the contradictory quality of her character (62).
Bernabé’s and Arturo’s perception of Luz stands in contrast to her self-perception as well
as her lack of action when it comes to engaging in political protest. However, her
strength and determination in other areas of her life are evident as she struggles to care
for Bernabé and herself as a single mother.
Despite her struggle to provide a good life for Bernabé, his changing perception
of Luz reveals both the ways that Bernabé places her on a pedestal and the simultaneous
resentment he feels about her sheltering him from the injustices faced by poor people in
El Salvador. During one of the internal dialogues that Bernabé has with his mother, he
reveals his self-doubt and links it to her being overly protective:
I am not them. And you made me this way, Madre. I don’t know what it is to be
pushed away from my land, to see my sisters attacked like Nestor’s, or to see
babies burned and killed. Around here, they all talk of el Escuadrón, of being
tortured by government agents. I had never even been in a demonstration. All I
ever saw was what happened the day the Archbishop was buried (32).

The longer Bernabé stays in the mountains the more he realizes that he is different from
everyone else and he grows resentful toward Luz because she sheltered him from social
injustice. Sadly, even though Luz attempts to protect her son from the injustices she
herself endured, in the end, as in Lucio’s case, Bernabé blames his mother for not
exposing him to El Salvador’s injustices.
Arturo
In the second section of the novel, Luz and Arturo meet on the bus ride north
from El Salvador to Mexico City where they each plan to continue on to Los Angeles.
128
Their relationship represents the development of Luz’s practice of social mothering as
she engages in taking care of children whether or not they are biologically her own.
What Luz does not know is that in a fateful turn of events, Bernabé and Arturo briefly
met at a guerrilla camp the night before Arturo leaves for the US, which is also the first
night that Bernabé arrives at the camp. The next morning Arturo leaves the camp and
catches a bus to Mexico City, during the bus ride he meets Luz. Although Luz tells
Arturo she is traveling north in search of Bernabé, he cannot tell her that Bernabé is still
in El Salvador because he did not ask Bernabé his name when they met. Sadly, the same
anonymity that protects guerrillas from being named if their comrades are captured also
means that Arturo does not know Bernabé’s name and is unable to identify him when she
talks about him. Bernabé explains,
No one here has ever asked me my name, Madre. When I marched into the
compound wearing my long coat, everyone thought that I was priest, and ever
since, I’ve been known as Cura. Well, I could do nothing else but accept my new
name, just like the rest of the compañeros (31).

Having been renamed symbolizes the beginning of a personal transformation from
seminary student to guerrilla for Bernabé; just as his mother’s maternal identity is also in
the process of being transformed.
Luz and Arturo meet at an immigration checkpoint in Talismán, Mexico after she
protects him from a Mexican immigration officer who is pointing a gun to his head.
Limón writes,
When Luz saw the barrel of the revolver gleaming in the dark, and when she
realized that it was pointed at the young man’s head she could not restrain herself.
In her mind, Arturo could have been Bernabé. Both young men were about the
same age and height, and they both had the same look in their eyes. An
excruciating heat arose from Luz’s belly up to her neck. Something like hot
129
vomit filled her mouth forcing her to open it wide. A terrifying wail escaped from
her throat.
‘¡No! ¡No!’ she shouted over and over. ‘¡No tiene derecho!’ (58).

In this scene, the thought of her own son being accosted and the physical similarities she
perceives between Arturo and Bernabé move Luz to action as she jumps to Arturo’s
rescue. On one hand, Luz protects Arturo because she can imagine him as Bernabé. As
Fatima Mujcinovic argues, “the Salvadoran refugee [Arturo] comes to embody the lost
son for Luz….Luz relives the moment of separation from Bernabé…as she realizes that
‘Arturo could have been Bernabé’ (58).”
249
While Luz’s initial reaction is motivated by
thoughts of Bernabé, in the end, she seems to link her desire to protect her son and others
like him to what is “right.” By asserting that the soldier “No tiene derecho [Has no
right]” to attack Arturo she simultaneously articulates human rights and the plight of
refugees that face massive abuses at the hands of government officials. The Mexican
immigration officer has no “right” to rob, physically assault, and possibly even murder
Arturo, yet Luz was the only person on the bus that came forward in his defense. Before
Luz intervenes, the officer accuses Arturo of being “a deserter,” “a coward,” and “a
communist,” making him a legitimate target for the Mexican official (58). As in El
Salvador, Arturo becomes a target of persecution because of his political beliefs and his
life is once again in danger. While a busload of terrified onlookers witness the
confrontation, Luz refuses to stand by as Arturo is assaulted. She physically battles the
officer until another soldier “convinced her that she and Arturo Escutia would be safe”
(59). In Talisman, Arturo symbolically finds protection in the form of a woman that is

249
Mujcinovic 4.
130
motivated by her political commitment to what she believes is right. In Talisman, Luz
begins a profound transformation from participating in care work only for her biological
child to caring for the child of another in order to fight for justice and survival.
Remarkably, Luz is safe from retribution after she attacks the official because by
protecting Arturo she fulfills a recognizable female role by caring for and protecting a
figurative son. Since women are expected to be passive within patriarchal society, the
guards and refugees do not know what to make of Luz’s attack: “For a moment, everyone
was shocked” (58). Then “A circle formed” (58) and “they all cheered for Luz, even the
Mexicans in uniform” (59). This circle echoes the circle formed by Las Madres after
soldiers and police told them they could not stand in the Plaza de Mayo and commanded
that they “circulate.” Las Madres quickly followed orders and began marching in a
circle, creating a symbolic “circle of love over death” as they literally circled the Plaza.
250

The circle of support formed by the refugees in Talísman represents the increased
possibilities for social change when people work together toward that end.
After the incident with Mexican immigration, Luz and Arturo continue on their
bus ride to Mexico City, getting to know each other and revealing the details of why they
decided to leave El Salvador. Luz tells Arturo she is migrating north in search of her son,
Bernabé. As she shares her story, a shift in her maternal identity begins to emerge as
Arturo starts to embody Bernabé in Luz’s consciousness. She tells Arturo, “‘I’m looking
for my son. But I don’t know where to search. I thought that I would begin by heading
north’” because she heard that she might find her son there among thousands of other

250
Matilde Mellibovsky, Circle of Love over Death: Testimonies of the Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo
(Willimantic: Curbstone Press, 1997).
131
young men migrating north (65). In a scene that represents a moment of profound
maternal transformation, Luz tells Arturo,
when I began this trip I really didn’t know where I was going. All I knew was
that I was looking for my son. Why did I head for Mexico City? I wasn’t sure of
that either. Perhaps it was because in my heart I hoped he would be doing what
you are doing: heading north (68-69).

Luz adds, “‘Hijo, I want to go to Los Angeles. I think that maybe I’ll find Bernabé there.
Let me go with you’” (69). By migrating north, Luz hoped to find her son and instead
she finds another young man that comes to represent a son, or as she calls him un hijo.
This passage indicates that Luz’s idea of motherhood is in the process of being
transformed from being understood as a biological relationship to a relationship that is
socially constructed. When Luz asks Arturo to let her travel with him to Los Angeles,
she also reveals her desire for a mother son bond between them. Toward the end of the
novel, after Arturo is murdered in Los Angeles, he comes to embody Bernabé so
profoundly in Luz’s consciousness that she is unsure which of her sons was murdered,
“‘Bernabé, where are you, my son?....Was it Arturo they killed, or was it you?’” (86).
After Arturo’s murder, Luz suffers a new trauma and feels her soul has left her body in
order to join Arturo and Bernabé.
Arturo begins his story by telling Luz that he is a former university student that
“helped out the poor people of the barrios,” “ventured out of the city to assist
campesinos,” and helped organize the masses and factory workers (60). After suffering
months of harassment, threats, and assaults by soldiers not wearing uniforms, Arturo and
his compañeros organized a protest where soldiers began shooting at marchers from
rooftops. Arturo escaped with his life and made it back to his family home where his
132
parents and two brothers awaited. After four days of waiting to see what would happen
next, El Escuadrón de La Muerte broke down the door to their apartment and killed his
family. They left him alive to tell his “friends what happens to filthy communists” and
promised that they would kill him some day (64). Before they left, one of the murderers,
“put his hand into the blood that was covering the table, and he printed a name on the
wall” ‘El Escuadrón’,” echoing the scene of Arturo’s death in Los Angeles (64). El
Escuadrón then beat Arturo unconscious and dumped him at El Playón and from there he
is rescued and nurtured back to health by the guerillas until he leaves for the US. El
Playón is the same place where Luz later finds Bernabé’s lifeless body when she is
deported back to El Salvador from Los Angeles.
Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Luz and Arturo move out of Casa Andrade (a
Catholic Sanctuary that their coyote/human smuggler takes them to) and into their own
apartment where members of El Escuadrón de la Muerte find Arturo and fulfill their
promise to kill him someday. This is a scene foreshadowed be Petra Traslaviña—the
coyota that Luz and Arturo hire in Tijuana after they have saved enough money to
continue on their journey to the US—when she warns Arturo, “‘Take care of yourself,
Muchacho. I’ve known a few like you who have gotten themselves killed out there’”
(78). Though she is not specific about the dangers that Arturo faces, her warning
conjures images of gang violence and death squad activity that threatened refugees in the
US during the 1980s.
251
Arturo’s murder recalls the day El Escuadrón broke down the
door of Arturo’s family apartment in El Salvador, “the front door suddenly crashed open,

251
Hamilton and Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los
Angeles.
133
and five men burst into the apartment….two of them had handkerchiefs over their faces.
The others wore Halloween masks, rubbery, and grotesque visages” (84). It took a
second for Luz and Arturo to realize what was happening and by that time, “The men
grabbed his arms and legs, twisting and pulling each limb. Luz heard the crunch of bones
and moaning that spilled from Arturo’s lips” (84). Then, “they pumped death into
Arturo’s body” and left a bloody hand print on the wall mimicking the insignia they left
at his family’s apartment (85). Luz rushed to Arturo’s lifeless body, “Her elbows dripped
with blood, and she moaned and wept, as she rocked back and forth on her haunches.
Momentarily stunned out of her mind, Luz let out a lament, a mournful cradle song for a
dead son” (85). When the police arrive, all Luz can respond to their questions is, “They
took my son” (86). While the priests and volunteers of Casa Andrade insist that the
murder is not gang-related, the police can conceive of no other explanation for the
murder and record it as a gang related homicide. In this scene, violence comes full circle
as people seeking refuge in the US are confronted with political violence that reaches
across geo-political borders. However, in the US, the police can only make sense of what
happens to Arturo by citing the inner-city gang violence they encounter on a regular
basis. Thus, Limón’s transnational activist imagination links violence across geo-
political borders, underscoring the complexity of the violence that political mothers such
as Luz must deal with as they work against murder, displacement, and alienation from
their children.

134
Bernabé, Lucio, and Luz
Part three of the novel introduces one of the major guerrilla offensives of the
Salvadoran civil war with an epigraph from the November 13, 1989 edition of the Los
Angeles Times: “…guerrillas and army troops battled in the capital on the second day of a
guerrilla offensive that has left hundreds of dead and wounded…The weekend fighting
between army troops and an estimated 1,000 guerrillas was the worst in 10 years of civil
war.” After Arturo’s death, Luz is deported to Tijuana and she decides to make her way
back to El Salvador, arriving during the a major 1989 guerrilla offensive. During the
offensive, Bernabé is captured by government soldiers and Colonel Delcano orders his
execution. Before his execution, Bernabé is escorted into Colonel Delcano’s office and
Colonel Delcano tells him the truth about each of their parentage,
I’m your brother. Your mother conceived me when she fornicated with her
grandfather….she wound up selling me, abandoning me so she could lead the life
of a slut. That’s how she got you. I’ll tell you how. By betraying the woman
who took her into her house, by fornicating with that woman’s husband. That’s
how! Yes! That’s you, just another bastard…like me (143).

While Colonel Delcano expects this information to horrify Bernabé, his younger brother
simply glares at him defiantly. Looking into his brother’s face, Colonel Delcano is not
able to carry out his plan “to crush Bernabé’s spirit by telling of their mother’s depravity”
using the information he had amassed over the years (143). Could it be that Colonel
Delcano’s love for his brother is greater than his desire for revenge? In the end, the
answer to this question is no for both personal and political reasons and he has Bernabé
executed and disposed of at El Playón.
135
The literal and symbolic war between these two brothers is only resolved through
murder and their fraught relationship becomes a metaphor for the civil war that only one
side can brutally “win.” On one hand, after Bernabé’s murder, Colonel Delcano feels
numbness and dissatisfaction after his “obsession had been fulfilled....Like everything
else in his life, even the anticipated elation of vengeance had been denied him” (161). On
the other, as a guerrilla Bernabé feels guilty about his participation in the war, thinking
“that the victims were his brothers, Salvadorans just like him, and that each time he
killed, he became less human” (134). Colonel Delcano’s inability to feel satisfaction
even after he murders his brother lies in his life long emotional emptiness as well as his
constant dissatisfaction with life. In contrast, Bernabé is more concerned with his
Salvadoran brothers and sisters as well as his own humanity.
As the war rages on, Luz takes refuge at the Cathedral near the plaza where she
last saw Bernabé at the Archbishop’s funeral procession. In the darkness of the
Cathedral, Luz declares that her motherly duty is to look for her son, because “my son
might be waiting for me. I’m his mother and I must look for him. I feel it here.’ She
pointed to her heart. ‘I know in here I’ll find Bernabé’” (96). As if in a filmic montage,
Bernabé simultaneously yearns for his mother as he waits for the directive to attack the
military’s central command where the brother he has never met has an office. As Luz
waits for the fighting to stop and Bernabé waits to be called into battle, he thinks of her:
He didn’t ever wonder if he would recognize her if he were to see her after so
many years. Nor did he consider that she would have difficulty recognizing him.
His face, once joyful, had become gloomy….The eyes he inherited from his
mother had long before dulled, betraying cynicism and dejection (135).

136
Despite the physical changes they both experience since their separation ten years earlier,
Luz is able to identify Bernabé’s lifeless body after her comadre tells her that she can find
her son at El Playón. Luz asks Father Hugh to accompany her to El Playón and as they
make their way up the hill through garbage heaps, Father Hugh realizes that bodies and
body parts are mixed with the garbage. Finally, Luz and Father Hugh come to “The
naked, castrated body of a man [that] lay sprawled on a heap of smoldering garbage, and
even though vultures had ripped at parts of his face, Hugh recognized the corpse. It was
the man he had seen taken from the High Command” (155). Upon seeing Bernabé’s dead
body,
Luz slowly dropped to her knees, contemplating the remains of the person in front
of her. Slowly she rolled on her haunches, and pulled the body onto her lap. She
caressed the mutilated face with her hands, kissing the bloodied cheeks and
forehead as she swayed back and fourth, moaning softly….from the mountain of
slime where Luz now wailed, her mouth agape, her face distorted with pain. Her
lament expressed all the anguish she had suffered during her years of futile
search. It echoed her disbelief and dispair [sic] at finding her son only to lose him
again on the spot. It was more than her body and soul could bear (155).

Luz finally finds Bernabé only to lose him all over again and her sadness becomes more
than she feels she can endure as she experiences the loss of a third son, the one she raises
and tried to keep out of harms way.
Her wailing becomes more than Father Hugh can bear and as he tries to block out
her crying a dialogue that focuses on biblical maternal figures that echo Luz’s story
begins between himself and his conscience:
‘Hugh, who is crying?’
He tried not to answer, but he heard his voice stammering in response.
‘Eve!’
‘Why is she sobbing?’
‘Because her son murdered his brother!’
137
‘Why? Why would anybody kill his brother?’....
‘Are you sorry, Hugh?’....
‘Hugh, who is sobbing?’
The priest answered. His voice quivered, it was almost a whisper.
‘It is the cry of Rachel of Ramah.’
‘Why is she crying. Hugh?’
‘Because her children were slaughtered!’
‘Who would slaughter children?’....
‘Hugh, who is weeping?’
‘Mary of Bethlehem.’
‘No! It is Luz Delcano that you hear! It is her pain that’s tearing at your guts.
Her grief, and that of thousands of others just like her, is now your hurt. Mine
too. I want to know, Hugh. Why is she weeping?’
‘Because her son was sacrificed!’ (155-156).

In this exchange, Luz is linked to three biblical grieving mothers, placing her, Bernabé,
and Lucio within a long history of political, social, and familial violence. As this passage
indicates, Eve saw her son murder his brother, Rachel of Ramah’s children were
slaughtered, and Mary of Bethlehem’s son was sacrificed. Notably, the original title for
In Search of Bernabé was A Voice in Ramah, presumably to represent the self-sacrifice of
Rachel of Ramah who died in child birth and was buried on the road to Bethlehem so that
she could guide the exiled people of Israel home.
252
Susan Sered writes that according to
biblical teachings, Rachel the Matriarch (also known as Rachel of Ramah) died giving
birth to her second son Benjamin. Her husband decided to bury her on the road to
Bethlehem and she became a “mythic image, that of a weeping mother” who suffered,
self-sacrificed, practiced self-abnegation, and endured symbolic exile for her children.
253

Her self-sacrifice was politically motivated, as Sered writes,

252
Ventura, "Storytelling with Intellectual Honesty: A Conversation with Graciela Limón," 33.

253
Susan Starr Sered, "Women Pilgrims and Woman Saints: Gendered Icons and the Iconization of Gender
at Israeli Shrines," NWSA Journal 11, no. 2 (1999): 53.
138
Rachel’s death [is] as a metaphor for God’s promise to return the people of Israel
from exile in Babylonia to the land of Zion.
Thus says the Lord: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter
weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children. She refused to be comforted
for her children, because they are not [here]. Thus says the Lord: Keep
your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears, for your acts shall be
rewarded, says the Lord; and they shall come back again from the land of
the enemy. And there is hope for the future, says the Lord, and your
children shall come back again to their own border.
254

Thus, while Rachel, like Luz, weeps for her children her sacrifice becomes the promise
for a better future where her “acts shall be rewarded,” like those of the political mothers
who sacrifice for the survival of entire communities. In a symbolic twist, In Search of
Bernabé presents a son who is buried in a shallow grave instead of a dead mother. After
Luz finds Bernabé’s lifeless body, “two campesinos had helped her carry Bernabé’s body
from the mount to a secluded place. There, she and the strangers scratched out a hole
deep enough to bury his body” (Epilogue). Once again a childless mother, Luz attempts
to recreate her life in the mountains of Chalatenango after the signing of the Peace
Accords in 1992.
Conclusion
Luz’s character allows Limón to theorize motherhood as a social construct that
must be reimagined in the context of widespread violence. Tracing how the social
identity of “mother” changes in the context of mass violence, Limón shows that it is an
identity—like all identities—that is constantly in the process of becoming and
transformation through everyday interactions. As she confronts the brutal conditions that
shape her maternal experiences, Luz is transformed from a “traditional mother” who

254
Ibid.: 52.
139
seems to be relatively disengaged from a critique of social violence to politicized mother
who opposes and resists the violence she witnesses and experiences in order to protect
her children and fight for what is “right.” Each time Luz is displaced, she is forced to
rethink her maternal identity in response to the crisis that she is living through. The
losses Luz experiences as a mother prompt her to counter the violence she is confronted
with in the context of war as well as racist, gender, and class-based violence. For this
reason, Luz’s character offers a point of entry for exploring traditional conceptions of
motherhood as well as motherhood as a site from which to demand justice and social
change.
In the following chapter, I draw on Ana Castillo’s poem “Like the people of
Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories” and the collection of plays Psst…I Have
Something to Tell You, Mi Amor as well as Sister Dianna’s testimonio The Blindfold’s
Eyes in order trace the how Castillo articulates anti-torture work and the political
imagination. With the exception of the poem, all these texts were written in the post-
September 11, 2001 era and encourage an understanding of US torture policies during the
war on terror within a historical context that remembers US complicity in Guatemalan
torture practices during that country’s thirty-six year civil war. With this in mind, I
briefly trace the history of torture from Greek and Roman times into the present.

140
CHAPTER FIVE

Torture and The Reappeared in Ana Castillo’s Psst…I Have Something to Tell You,
Mi Amor: The Case of Sister Dianna Ortiz

In Guatemala now, years after the war has ended, torture is
accepted as part of society. Many people who have tortured others
are working as soldiers and police officers still. And torture
continues, although the guerillas no longer exist. Torture is used to
oppress and terrorize people into conforming with the
government’s agenda. That’s the risk of allowing torture to be
used, ever, for any reason. It doesn’t go away.
255

The United States has both the oldest written constitution in the
world and a long history of ignoring it in times of national crisis.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were adopted less than a decade after
the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The writ of habeas corpus was
suspended during the Civil War and more than 30,000 people were
imprisoned without charges or trial. Thousands of people were
jailed for opposing U.S. participation in World War I….More than
120,000 Japanese Americans were ‘interned’ in domestic
concentration camps during World War II. And untold numbers of
lives were ruined by witch-hunts and blacklists during the Cold
War.
256

Torture and Empire
The case of Sister Dianna Ortiz’s disappearance lets us think through the
complexity of representational and material relations concerning torture and empire. In
1989, Sister Ortiz, was disappeared for a twenty-four hour period and tortured in
Guatemala only to be rescued by an American from a clandestine detention center where
she was held during her disappearance. The facts of her torture, however, are far more

255
Sister Dianna Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth (Maryknoll: Orbis Books,
2002), 476.

256
Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to
Abu Ghraib and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), ix.
141
complicated as the multiple representations of her disappearance reveal. In order to
explore the complexity of Sister Dianna’s torture and disappearance I draw on Sister
Dianna’s testimonio The Blindfold’s Eyes, Ana Castillo’s 1996 poem “Like the people of
Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories” and her 2005 collection of plays Psst…I
Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor.
257
Centering multiple accounts of Sister Dianna’s
disappearance, I explore what these representations teach readers about torture at a
moment when discussions of torture and empire have been renewed in the US.
The fact of US involvement in torture became, though not for the first time,
apparent on April 28, 2004, when CBS’s 60 Minutes II aired photographs of prisoners
being tortured by US service men and women.
258
While, as Ilene Feinman writes, “there
remains a long, documented history of U.S. military training and involvement in torture,”
at first the official response to evidence of US torture practices at Abu Ghraib and other
US detention sites was that it was an aberration.
259
When more evidence surfaced
indicating that, in fact, Bush administration officials had authorized the use of torture for
the purposes of interrogation, officials defended their stance by arguing that they had a
responsibility to protect US citizens from terrorists seeking to hurt the US populace. In
January 2009, one of President Barack Obama’s first actions as president symbolically

257
Ana Castillo, I Ask the Impossible (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My
Journey from Torture to Truth.

258
For a detailed reading of Abu Ghraib and US torture see: Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America,
Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), Lisa Hajjar, "Human
Rights Law, Executive Power, and Torture in the Post-9/11 Era," in Human Rights in Crisis, ed. Alice
Bullard (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), Jaffer and Singh, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record
from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, Kristian Williams, American Methods: Torture and the Logic
of Domination (Cambridge: South End Press, 2006).

259
Ilene Feinman, "Shock and Awe: Abu Ghraib, Women Soldiers, and Racially Gendered Torture," in One
of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers, ed. Tara McKelvey (Emeryville: Seal Press, 2007), 59.
142
sought to restore the US’s international place as a nation that does not torture by ordering
that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay be closed and that permissive interrogation
techniques be abandoned.
260
Such symbolic actions work to elide the history of US
involvement in torture and reassert that the US is an exemplary nation and that US
involvement in torture is indeed an aberration. Since the Abu Ghraib photographs were
released in 2004, more information has surfaced about the use of torture by US
interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and other detention facilities; however, this evidence
must also be linked to the long history of US involvement in torture. Representations of
Sister Dianna’s torture and disappearance challenge dominant meanings and
understandings of US involvement in torture practices. In their narratives about Sister
Dianna’s disappearance both Castillo and Sister Dianna draw on the political imagination
in order to work against the notion that US torture practices are an aberration.
Is US Involvement in Torture an Aberration?
The history of US torture goes back much further than Abu Ghraib. As John
Conroy points out in Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, US torture practices have a
history that goes back to colonial times when Quakers were branded with an H for
Heresy, blasphemy was punished by piercing the tongue with a heated bodkin, flogging
was widespread, and slaves were commonly tortured.
261
Colin Dayan’s The Story of
Cruel and Unusual also traces the roots of US torture to laws regulating the corporal
punishment of slaves in colonial society, as she writes laws, “at once offered protection

260
Mark Mazzetti and William Glaberson, Obama Issues Directive to Shut Down Guantánamo (January 21
2009 [cited May 21 2009]); available from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/us/politics/22gitmo.html.

261
John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2000), 32.
143
and normalized abuse [against those “considered less than human”].”
262
The targeting of
religious minorities and slaves makes evident that the religious, racial, and class
underpinnings of who could or would be tortured in the US were established early on.
Page Dubois and Edward Peters each examine the history of torture, tracing it to the legal
torture of slaves under Greek and Roman law where it was determined that only slaves
could be legally tortured to elicit confessions.
263
Dubois explains that it was assumed
that the best and most truthful evidence could only be gained by torturing because truth
was held in the slave’s body.
264
Soon, however, the categories of people that could be
legally tortured were expanded to include a growing number of the populace and
eventually everyone could be legally tortured.
265
The widespread use of torture against
heretics and witches by the Inquisition continued between the thirteenth and nineteenth
centuries, until in the 1700s with the presumed triumph of “enlightenment” and “reason”
outlawed by many European countries.
266
Idelber Avelar further argues, “[Torture] was,
in fact, part and parcel of the establishment of democracy in Ancient Greece and was
universally used by Western democracies in their colonial and neocolonial
enterprises.”
267
Histories of torture often pick back up in the 1920s and 1930s with Nazi

262
Colin Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 10, bracketed text pg
8.

263
Page DuBois, Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World (New York: Routledge, 1991), Edward
Peters, Torture, Expanded Edition ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), see chapter
one.

264
DuBois, Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World.

265
Peters, Torture, 32.

266
Ibid., see chapter three.

144
Germany and the fascist Soviet Union, a few carry through to the authoritarian regimes of
Latin America and Asia in the post-WWII era, and in the last few years to US torture
practices during the War on Terror.
After 2004, US torture practices at Abu Ghraib captured national attention and the
Bush administration felt compelled to respond. First, Bush administration officials
responded to public outrage by claiming that the soldiers pictured in the photographs
represented a “small number” of personnel rather than a widespread problem of abuse in
the US military.
268
Bush administration officials also issued statements that US military
interrogation techniques were guided by the Constitution of the United States of America
and international conventions regulating wartime engagement and human rights, later
adding that the Geneva Convention did not apply to Taliban or al Qaeda detainees
because they were state actors they were enemy combatants.
269
President Bush himself
proclaimed the spiritual and moral rectitude of the country stating, “Let me make clear
the position of my government and our country. We do not condone torture. I have
never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that
torture is not a part of our soul and our being.”
270
The administration claimed that those
pictured in the photographs were not following US policy, but instead that the photos

267
Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, 26.

268
Jaffer and Singh, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib
and Beyond, 2.

269
Karen J. Greenberg, "Introduction: The Rule of Law Finds Its Golem: Judicial Torture Then and Now,"
in The Torture Debate in America, ed. Karen J. Greenberg (New York: Cambridge Never Press, 2006).

270
Cited in Jaffer and Singh, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu
Ghraib and Beyond, 2.
145
represented the work of a few “cruel and disgraceful” soldiers.
271
In other words, the
problem of torture should be understood as the misconduct of individual soldiers rather
than as a systematic problem that revealed one of the ways the US governs at home and
intervenes abroad. After more evidence emerged, proving “senior officials…constructed
a legal framework that would permit the abuse and torture of prisoners,” they admitted
that if extreme interrogation techniques were used it was only in an effort to keep US
citizens safe.
272
Contradicting themselves and each other, Bush administration officials
made a point of mentioning that the prisoners where “terrorists” who had time sensitive
information that could be gained by using “special interrogation” methods, ignoring
expert opinion that information gathered using torture is not credible.
273
Interrogation
techniques seen at Guantánamo and later at Abu Ghraib, included intimidation, isolation,
extended interrogation sessions, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, stress positions,
exposure to extreme temperature conditions, culturally specific (gender and religious
taboos) and phobia (dogs) specific torture, among other practices.
274
It is now apparent
that Bush administration officials sanctioned torture practices, including those outlined in

271
Ibid.

272
Ibid., 10.

273
David Luban, "Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb," in The Torture Debate in America, ed.
Karen J. Greenberg (New York: Cambridge Never Press, 2006), Richard Mattews, The Absolute Violation:
Torture Must Be Prohibited (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008), William F. Schulz, ed.,
The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007), see readings in chapter 6.

274
Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, Jaffer and Singh,
Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond.
146
the CIA’s training manual.
275
On one hand, the administration claimed the pictured
soldiers were “cruel and disgraceful,” and on the other, they suggested that the tortured
men deserved the treatment they endured because they were members of terrorist
organizations such as Al Qaeda. This logic implies that while torture was not official
policy, if some of the prisoners were tortured they deserved it because they represented a
threat to US national security. The Bush administration’s defense relied heavily on the
idea that the US is an exceptional nation that must use all means necessary to protect its
domestic and foreign interests from terrorist threats.
In an effort to reposition the US as a responsible world leader, one of Barack
Obama’s first actions as president was to sign a directive to close the Guantánamo
detention center.
276
Obama understood Guantánamo as a “damaging symbol to the
world” and by closing it, he wanted to reassert the message that the US is a nation that
follows the rule of law and would not torture under any circumstances.
277
The discourse
of US exceptionalism was continued under Obama’s leadership, touting US moral
superiority and placing the rule of law above all else—even if those being questioned
were suspected terrorists with pertinent information. As would become increasingly
evident, Obama’s actions were heavy with contradiction. In April 2009, almost five
years to the day that the Abu Ghraib photographs were first broadcast, Obama made clear
that the individuals responsible for torturing prisoners would not be prosecuted precisely

275
For documentary representation see: Alex Gibney, "Taxi to the Dark Side," (Jigsaw Productions/Think
Film, 2007).

276
Mazzetti and Glaberson, Obama Issues Directive to Shut Down Guantánamo.

277
Ibid.
147
because they were following what they thought was the law as detailed in what are
known as the torture memos.
278
In contrast to the Bush administration’s, “cruel and
disgraceful” rationale, Obama recognized that torture had become policy under the Bush
administration and despite this recognition he maintained that the torturers would not be
tried because they were following legal doctrine. Obama’s decision to overlook the
crimes committed by US personnel, echoes a much longer history of impunity under
which those guilty of torture are granted pardons, amnesty, and absolved of responsibility
for the atrocities they commit under the shield of law.
279

US personnel do not always directly carry out the torture practices that serve US
empire-building interests in the Americas and have resulted in unimaginable violence.
Since at least 1946, the US has also been involved in providing military training to over
sixty thousand soldiers, including training in interrogation techniques, at the School of
the Americas (renamed Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation in
2001).
280
Such training must be contextualized within the history of empire building in
the Americas. As Lesley Gill points out, the school’s motto is “One for all and all for
one,” a slogan that comes from James Monroe’s 1923 message to congress, known as the
Monroe Doctrine, “articulating the nascent imperial ambitions of the United States by
seeking the exclusion of its European rivals from the Americas.”
281
In addition, Walter

278
Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror.

279
See for example: William J. Aceves, United States of America: A Safe Haven for Torturers (New York:
Amnesty International USA Publications, 2002).
280
Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 6.

281
Ibid., 23.
148
LaFeber argues that a desire to “tighten the hemisphere’s links” led the US Congress to
pass the Military Defense Assistance Act (MDA) in 1951 in order to provide more
funding to “build[ing] Latin American armies under US direction.”
282
These same armies
waged war on civilian populations in Guatemala and other Central American countries in
the post-World War II era. Guatemala’s post-WWII political instability is often marked
by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) orchestrated coup against President Jacobo
Arbenz who was spearheading land distribution efforts that negatively impacted the
United Fruit Company.
283
After Arbenz’s ouster, Guatemala saw a thirty-six year civil
war that officially lasted from 1960 until 1996 when peace accords were signed. During
that period, well over 200,000 people were killed or disappeared under the direction of
military leaders who were trained at the School of the Americas.
284
US military aid in the
form of money, training, and equipment, as LaFeber puts it, “inundated small economies”
and “it proved only a short step to controlling dissent through sophisticated methods of
torture.”
285

Sister Dianna’s case reveals US complicity in torture as well as a policy of
impunity for those who are guilty of torture. In “United States of America: A Safe Haven
for Torturers,” Amnesty International reveals that “perpetrators of human rights abuses

282
LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 110.

283
Alan McPherson, Intimate Ties, Bitter Struggles: The United States and Latin America since 1945
(Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc, 2006), 36-39.

284
Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, Victoria
Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
6.

285
LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 153.
149
from around the world live in the United States.”
286
The US has dealt with torturers
living within its borders with impunity, refusing to prosecute those who tortured Sister
Dianna and other victims of human rights abuses and torture survivors around the world.
As I discuss below, Sister Dianna’s case underscores that by failing to hold those guilty
of violating national and international laws and conventions that ban torture under all
circumstances, the US becomes complicit in those abuses.
287
Reading textual
representations about Sister Dianna’s disappearance published in the post-September 11
period also allows me to examine how Chicana transnational imaginaries of torture and
disappearance in Guatemala change across space and time.
Sister Dianna Ortiz’s Disappearance
After details about Sister Dianna’s torture emerged, US government officials
denied any knowledge of or involvement in her disappearance and reappearance.
However, in her testimonio The Blindfold’s Eye, Sister Dianna tells a different story
about US involvement in her torture.
288
Sister Dianna recalls that on November 2, 1989
she was disappeared by Guatemalan security forces and taken to La Escuela Politécnica,
a military training academy in Guatemala City. During the twenty-four hour period that
Sister Dianna was held at the detention center, she was questioned, tortured, raped,
burned, and forced to murder another woman with a machete while standing in a mass

286
Aceves, United States of America: A Safe Haven for Torturers, 3.

287
For instance the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Geneva Conventions (1949), the UN
Convention on Torture (1984), the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture (1985), the
Eight and Thirteenth Amendments of the US Constitution (1776) , and the American Convention on
Human Rights (1969). J. Herman Burgers and Hans Danelius, The United Nations Convention against
Torture: A Handbook on the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1988).

288
Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth.
150
grave. At the time of her abduction, she had been keeping out of sight after receiving
death threats demanding she leave Guatemala and stop her “subversive” activities. While
she was accused of aiding guerrilla fighters, Sister Dianna’s activities in Guatemala
mainly consisted of teaching Maya children how to read and write Spanish and trying to
learn Spanish herself in order to better serve the population she was working with.
Instead of leaving Guatemala after she received death threats, she retreated to the relative
“safety” of a convent in Antigua, Guatemala waiting for the threats to subside. Shortly
after she arrived at the convent, she was disappeared for a twenty-four hour period,
during which several international organizations mobilized to demand her reappearance.
Sister Dianna believes that international demands are one of the reasons she is still alive,
as she recalls a “North American” whom her torturers called Alejandro, reprimanded
them for having disappeared her, “You idiots! Leave her alone. She’s a North American,
and it’s all over the news.”
289

The day after her disappearance, Alejandro took Sister Dianna from La Escuela
Politécnica and as he was transporting her through Guatemala City she escaped from his
vehicle. Sister Dianna recalls that Alejandro seemed to have some authority at the
detention center, based on him admonishing her torturers before he took her away. As
Alejandro escorted her out of the detention center and drove her through the streets of
Guatemala City he apologized for what happened to her, claiming that her torturers
confused her with another woman. When she reminded him about the threats she
received prior to her abduction he tried to blackmail her into silence by telling her that

289
Ibid., 31.
151
they had videotape of her killing another woman. Alejandro threatened, “If you live to
tell about this, if you somehow manage to survive, no one will believe you.”
290
Despite
these threats, Sister Dianna refused to be silent after promising her “tortured sisters and
brothers” that if she survived she would tell the world what she had seen.
291

As a testament to the impunity under which torture occurs, both the Guatemalan
and the US governments denied involvement in the crimes committed against Sister
Dianna. Both governments accused her of being a guerrilla operative, having a lesbian
affair, being uncooperative in their investigations, and/or telling inconsistent versions
about what happened during the time she was disappeared. The investigation she pursued
in Guatemala was not given priority by the Guatemalan officials in charge of the case and
it came to a stand still after her case file was “lost” by the prosecutor’s office. Despite
later declassified US government documents and testimony from survivors and witnesses
to the contrary, US government officials denied the involvement of US operatives in
torture activities or knowledge of clandestine torture centers.
Her personal knowledge about the impunity with which torture is practiced, led
Sister Dianna to recognize her exceptionalist view of US citizenship and the US
government leading her to stop pursuing justice in a legal setting. After years of
struggling to get answers and justice from the US government, she concluded:
My family must have brought me up very patriotically. In spite of the
conditioning of the torture, in spite of losing my memory and being reborn, in a
sense, and taught to mistrust authority, I had a deep need to believe in and trust
the government of the United States.
292

290
Ibid., 39.

291
Dianna Ortiz, "Spokes in the Wheel: An Account of Torture," Tikkun 22 (2007).

152

In 1997, Sister Dianna realized there would be no reasonable answers for her or for the
200,000 Guatemalans disappeared during the civil war and decided “she would no longer
participate in the flawed investigation” on the event that ‘blew her life apart’.
293
After
years of investigation she realized, “I was dealing with people who were investigating
me, not the torturers, and who, if anything, were on the torturers’ side.”
294
Although she
had pushed her case through the Guatemalan court system, the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights, US Federal Civil Court, congressional hearings, and continued speaking
to the media, Sister Dianna decided not to pursue her case any further in order to give
priority to her own well-being. She made this decision after the Inter-American Court
granted her a hearing and the Guatemalan government responded by accusing her of
interfering with their investigation on multiple occasions.
Today Sister Dianna is director of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support
Coalition International (TASSC) in Washington, DC. Her journey to becoming an anti-
torture activist was a difficult one including learning to cope with the aftermath of her
own torture and disappearance. Her commitment to other tortured people was central to
her survival as she constantly kept in mind that there was a reason she made it out of the
detention center alive. A year after her abduction Sister Dianna began speaking publicly
about her disappearance when she agreed to be interviewed by Diane Sawyer for ABC’s
Prime Time Live. Underscoring the continued danger of violence against Sister Dianna,

292
Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, 356.

293
Ibid., 72.

294
Ibid., 421.
153
after the interview she received a telephone message that threatened: “Tell Sister Dianna
to stop talking about Guatemala or else.”
295
The interview and subsequent phone call
triggered intense fear and physical illness in Sister Dianna, yet she persisted with her
process of recovery and her anti-torture work. At a keynote address she gave at Amnesty
Internationals’ annual meeting, she recalled, “The anger was leading me to look beyond
my case and beyond Guatemala and to call for more than I would normally dare,” leading
her to assert, “We must demand an accounting of U.S. actions in all of Latin America.”
296

Genre and the Activist Imagination
Castillo’s decision to write about Sister Dianna’s disappearance is from the start a
political act. In a 1997 interview with Elsa Saeta, Castillo expresses an acute awareness
about the relationship between everyday life choices and politics:
I believe that you cannot not be political. Even stating that you’re not political is
a political act. Refusing to participate is a political act. What you’re doing is not
that you’re not participating, it’s that you’re joining in with the mainstream or
you’re joining in with the status quo. And that is a political act. So, we are
political by virtue of the decisions we make in participating in society. The kind
of political person that I am, of course, is one who does challenge racism in
society, who does challenge sexism and economic inequality for the majority of
the people. I do that in my work and I do that by the way that I live my life,
too.
297

Like Viramontes and Moraga, Castillo understands everyday life, politics, and creative
writing as inseparable. In Castillo’s estimation, life is politics and in recognizing that,
she made a decision to introduce “particular dilemmas of what it is to be Chicana, a

295
Ibid., 108.

296
Ibid., 427.

297
Elsa Saeta, "A MELUS Interview: Ana Castillo," MELUS 22, no. 3 (1997): 142.
154
brown person” in her writing, seeking to give voice to the experiences of Chicanas.
298

Castillo has given voice to those experiences via a variety of genres, including poetry,
short stories, novels, essays, journalism, and theatre.
Beyond voicing the experiences of Chicanas, Castillo’s creative writing more
broadly reveals a recurring interest in the violence Latinas/os and Central Americans
endure both within and outside the US. Castillo touches on the topic of political violence
in Central America in several texts, including the unpublished 1984 poem “Margo del
Salvador,” the novel Sapagonia, “Righteous White Boyz” from Watercolor Women
Opaque Men, “Like the people of Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories…”
from the poetry collection I Ask the Impossible, and the collection Psst…I Have
Something to Tell You, Mi Amor.
299
Race, gender, and class-based violence are dominant
themes in Castillo’s writing about Central America. For instance, the poem “Margo del
Salvador” critiques an economic system that forces poor women of color, such as Margo,
to care for the white children of others while their own brown children remain invisible
and neglected. This is one of Castillo’s earliest representations of Central Americans in
the US and Margo is reminiscent of thousands of immigrant women who leave their
children at home (sometimes in another country) to care for children that are not their

298
Ibid.: 143.

299
Ana Castillo Papers, (CEMA 2, Department of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of
California, Santa Barbara). Castillo, I Ask the Impossible, Castillo, Psst...I Have Something to Tell You, Mi
Amor, Ana Castillo, "Righteous White Boyz," in Watercolor Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse
(Willimantic: Curbstone Press, 2005), Ana Castillo, Sapagonia: An Anti-Romance in 3/8 Meter (New York:
Anchor Books, 1990).
155
own.
300
In Sapagonia, Castillo delves further into the topic of political violence in
Central America through the representation of a fictional Central American country
where political repression and civil war force many into exile. Sapagonia is also meant to
represent a place “where,” according to Castillo, “all mestizos reside, regardless of
nationality, individual racial composition, or legal residential status.”
301
The protagonist
Máximo Madrigal flees from Sapagonia to Europe and later to the US after many of his
university peers are murdered by the military in an effort to crack down on political
dissent. However, Máximo is represented as a womanizer that does not pay much
attention to politics. In contrast, Pastora Velásquez Aké, the Chicana protagonist in the
novel, is represented as a politically engaged artist interested in the violence faced by
Sapagons. Pastora is incarcerated for two years after she is caught transporting Sapagon
refugees from one safe house to another. In Sapagonia, Castillo continues with the theme
of violence and immigration reflected in “Margo del Salvador.” This is most evident
when she raises concerns about the dangers refugees, not recognized as such under US
law, face when they are deported back to the very countries they left in order to escape
persecution and violence.
302
In contrast, “Righteous White Boyz” focuses on white men
who can freely travel to “third world” and (ex)communist countries, such as Honduras, El

300
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of
Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine
Avila, "'I'm Here, but I'm There': The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood," in Gender and U.S.
Immigration: Contemporary Trends, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003).

301
Castillo, Sapagonia: An Anti-Romance in 3/8 Meter, 1.

302
María Cristina García, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and
Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), Hamilton and Chinchilla, Seeking Community in
a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles.
156
Salvador, Nicaragua, Viet Nam, Russia, and China, in search of human rights issues to
write about and “oppressed” brown and black women to have sexual relationships with.
The freedom with which they travel south raises questions about white and US privilege
that are taken up in Castillo’s poem and both versions of her text, “Like the people of
Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories” and Psst…I Have Something to Tell You,
Mi Amor.
Continuing with Castillo’s focus on creative writing as a political act, Psst…I
Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor can be contextualized within the histories of two
genres of political writing, testimonio and Chicana/o theatre. In general, both genres
have at their core the urgency of representing an ongoing struggle against widespread
violence and social injustice. Castillo attempts to raise consciousness about torture and
empire by writing Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor in a testimonial mode
(though not in first person) that represents the details of Sister Dianna’s torture as I
discuss below. She also draws on Chicana/o political theatre traditions that aim to bring
about social change.
The slippage between fiction and truth that is raised by the silences in the texts
also works to preempt questions about authenticity that have been raised about testimonio
writing.
303
While, the telling and retelling of Sister Dianna’s story creates multiple
narratives that attempt to get at the “truth” of what happened, differently narrativized
versions of her story underscore the impossibility of knowing or telling the “real” story.
As in Helena Maria Viramontes’ “The Cariboo Cafe,” there is a consciousness that what

303
Doris Sommer, "No Secrets," in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, ed. Georg
M. Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
157
happened is not fully known precisely because of the trauma and censorship produced
under conditions of mass political repression and simply because the testimoniadora
(testimony giver) refuses to reveal the whole experience. Instead, each of Castillo’s texts
(the poem and the two plays) fills in knowledge that is left out by the other two pieces.
On the dedicatory page of Psst…I Have Something to Tell you, Mi Amor, Castillo briefly
expresses her view about the relationship between “truth” and “fiction”: “These plays are
fictionalized accounts of a true story, truth often being the most illusive of realities.”
304

On one hand, in their respective texts both Sister Dianna and Castillo refuse to reveal all
the details of Sister Dianna’s torture, representing the impossibility of accessing the
entirety of what she endured. While on the other, such a refusal can be and has been
interpreted as an indication that she was not telling the truth to government officials
conducting the investigation in her case.
305
Instead, she was accused of aiding guerrillas
by faking her own abduction in order to gain international support for Guatemalan
revolutionaries. The case of Rigoberta Menchú reminds readers that Sister Dianna is not
the first testimoniadora whose authenticity and truthfulness have been questioned in order
to minimize the political impact of their narrative and the narrative interventions made by
nonwhite women.
306

Testimoniadoras/es and critics anticipate that the ideal audience will take action
against the ongoing violence that is represented in the testimonio narrative. For example,

304
Castillo, Psst...I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor.

305
Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth.

306
Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, trans. Ann Wright (London:
Verso, 1989).
158
by revealing the terror that Sister Dianna survived in order to make audiences aware of
torture and impunity, Castillo seeks to move people to action. In an interview with
Norma Cantú, Castillo notes, “The poem that I wrote first—because I did write a very
graphic narrative of her experiences—was natural for me. Another thing that I have
tended to do is share, I go from one genre to the next because I’m driven by this sense of
urgency that I want many people to know about it.”
307
The urgency of the telling places
Castillo’s version of Sister Dianna’s story within the testimonio tradition that aims to
move people into action. This call to action and resistance has been taken up
theoretically by literary critics and presented through what Alberto Moreiras calls a
“poetics of solidarity” that fetishizes testimonio to the point of incorporating it into the
canon and defeating the potential for producing mutual collaboration that it might
otherwise have.
308
Testimonio criticism, understood this way, expresses a “desire for
solidarity” that may not exist, underscoring the complexity of solidarity work that I
discuss in chapter two.
Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor can also be contextualized within
the political genealogy of Chicano theater. From its modern inception, marked by the
establishment of El Teatro Campesino in 1965, Chicana/o theatre has been recognized as
a political theatre that offers a “living testament” to Chicana/o struggles against class and
racial injustice.
309
As Jorge Huerta argues, “Chicano theatre groups attempt to produce

307
Norma E Cantú, "A Conversation with Ana Castillo," World Literature Today 82, no. 2 (2008): 61.

308
Alberto Moreiras, "The Aura of Testimonio," in The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin
America, ed. Georg M. Gugelberger (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 198.

159
works that speak to the immediate issues affecting the barrio,” which in Castillo’s case
means dealing with issues of political violence across geo-political borders.
310
Echoing
the political goals of testimonio, Huerta adds that Chicano theatre aims to “educate the
public in order to bring about change.”
311
This is precisely what Castillo aimed to do
with this collection of plays. As she wrote in her blog on November 7, 2010, “More
relevant than ever is the subject of what we think about torture as a valid means to obtain
information from 'enemies.'”
312
She also contemplated the topic on November 13, 2007
before a staging of Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor at Cornell University,
“I hope [the play] will allow students, faculty and others to [think about] the ethical,
moral and political value or lack thereof of the practice of torturing enemies or suspected
enemies.”
313
In these two blogs Castillo clearly states her political stance and grounds
her work in the immediacy and relevance of post-September 11 debates about the use of
torture.
Castillo’s plays fit well within the aims of Chicano theatre, however, as Huerta’s
use of the masculine Chicano underscores, Chicano theatre often (re)produced gender
inequalities. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Yolanda Broyles-González, Elizabeth C.
Ramírez, and Huerta himself later noted Chicana theatre greatly expanded in the 1970s

309
Jorge A. Huerta, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti: Bilingual Press/ Editorial Bilingue,
1982), 9.

310
Ibid., 103.

311
Ibid., 118.

312
Ana Castillo, Anacastilloblog (11/13/2007 [cited 4/9 2010]); available from
http://anacastillo.com/ac/blog/archives/2007_11_01_index.shtml.

313
Ibid.
160
and 1980s as a critique of male dominated Chicano teatro.
314
Yarbro-Bejarano notes that
Chicanas began developing teatropoesía as a way of overcoming limited resources and
training by bringing prolific poetry production by Chicanas to the stage.
315
Similarly, the
seed for Castillo’s plays about Sister Dianna’s torture developed from a poem that she
wrote after first learning about Sister Dianna’s disappearance. Further, by forming
Chicana theatre groups, Chicanas took visible leadership positions and took the stage in
roles they developed themselves to reflect concerns about labor rights as well as issues of
gender, (hetero and homo)sexuality, family, sexism, and liberation struggles abroad.
316

Through these themes, Chicana theatre expanded the commitment to political struggle
onto stage representations that aimed to create social change but with an additional
emphasis on gender relations and hemispheric struggles for liberation.
Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor’s connection to the traditions of
Chicana/o theatre can more specifically be linked to the centrality of both actos and
teatropoesía. Initially, teatropoesía helped Chicanas bridge the creative practices of
poetry and performance.
317
For Chicanas, their poetry became the script they performed

314
Yolanda Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1994), Yolanda Broyles-González, "The Living Legacy of Chicana Performers:
Preserving History through Oral Testimony," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 11, no. 1 (1990),
Jorge A. Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), Elizabeth C. Ramírez, Chicanas/Latinas in American Theatre: A History of Performance
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, "The Female Subject in Chicano
Theatre: Sexuality, "Race," and Class," Theatre Journal 38, no. 4 (1986).

315
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, "Teatropoesía by Chicanas in the Bay Area: Tongues on Fire," Revista
Chicano-Riqueña XI, no. 1 (1983): 78.

316
Laura E. Garcia, Sandra M. Gutierrez, and Felicitas Nuñez, eds., Teatro Chicana: A Collective Memoir
and Selected Plays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008).

317
Yarbro-Bejarano, "Teatropoesía by Chicanas in the Bay Area: Tongues on Fire," 78.
161
on stage as they negotiated their lack of formal theatre training and scarce resources.
Actos became another means by which a lack of resources and formal training were
overcome by Chicanas. First popularized by El Teatro Campesino, actos are short
improvisational sketches that could be performed anywhere and carried a political
message, often through satire.
318
In El Teatro Campesino, Broyles-González argues that
actos,
enacted the physical sociocultural memory of that [working-class farmworker]
community’s experience. Memory indeed was the prime conduit for all
performance work within El Teatro Campesino. And the power and
instrumentality of memory, rooted in the community and in the body, made
possible the immediacy, authenticity, and vitality characteristic of the ensemble’s
work
319

and I would argue this is characteristic of Castillo’s plays as well. However, indicative of
the professionalization trend in contemporary Chicano theatre, Castillo’s collection is
more formal than most actos and teatropoesía performances: it is available in print, offers
stage direction, and is not necessarily improvisational.
320

Castillo’s work continues to be inspired by early Chicana/o theatre, particularly
the use of minimal production and the desire to deliver an urgent political message. For
example, the one act version of Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor calls for
few stage production requirements, making it possible to stage it at informal venues and
with a minimal budget. Props are kept to a minimum, calling for a garden bench and a

318
Nicolás Kanellos, Mexican American Theatre: Legacy and Reality (Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary
Review Press, 1987).

319
Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement, 22-23.

320
Marcos Martínez, "Still Treading Water: Recent Currents in Chicano Theater," in The State of Latino
Theatre in the United States, ed. Luis A. Ramos-García (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17.
162
gate in the background. The one act version of Psst...I Have Something to Tell consists of
a dialogue between Sister Dianna and The Other that takes place on a garden bench. The
setting is a garden, but most importantly Sister Dianna is in the “nether space of the
perpetual torture chamber of her mind” (3). Sister Dianna is described as “deceptively
fragile” and “[i]n each scene she looks worse—especially physically” (3). She copes
with the memory of her torture throughout the play, underscoring that while it is a written
text memory continues to be a central. Costume needs are also minimal: Sister Dianna
dresses in modest secondhand clothing and at the end of the play wears a “native” style
dress. The Other slips into multiple roles from scene to scene, playing a nun, Sister
Dianna’s Mother Superior, Sister Dianna’s Mother, a Guatemalan anchorwoman, the
woman Sister Dianna is forced to murder in the pit who she calls The Friend, and a US
reporter. The Other assumes various costume changes as she transitions from role to role.
However, the play can be staged with even fewer costumes and props. For example, in
July 2007 Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor was staged at 6
th
@ Penn
Theatre in San Diego, California. The production was minimal and required few props
and no costume changes. Instead, of a bench the actors sat on a black box and different
head covers represented The Other’s transitions from one character to another. This
staging illustrates the flexibility that is possible in a play that could otherwise require
much more production, yet allows for basic production requirements in order to reach as
many people as possible, which was one of Castillo’s political intentions.

163
“Like the people of Guatemala I want to be free of these memories…”
Castillo’s first published piece of writing on Sister Dianna’s disappearance was
the poem, “Like the people of Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories…” from
the collection I Ask the Impossible and also included in Psst…I Have Something to Tell
You, Mi Amor.
321
Castillo wrote the poem in 1996, the same year that Sister Dianna held
a six-week candlelight vigil outside the White House demanding, as Sister Dianna wrote
in a letter to President Bill Clinton, the “declassification of US documents pertaining to
my case and all human rights violations in Guatemala.”
322
Sister Dianna’s own
testimonio gives the context for the events the plays and the poem deal with prior to,
during, and in the aftermath of her disappearance. As well as highlighting the
impossibility of telling the full story, the telling and retelling Sister Dianna’s story by
both her and Castillo defies the misogynist and homophobic dismissal with which the US
and Guatemalan governments responded to her disappearance.
In “Like the people of Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories…,” the
speaker critiques the hollowness of US exceptionalist claims about democracy, freedom,
and justice by focusing on the accusations made against Sister Dianna in Guatemala and
the US. The poem focuses on the treatment Sister Dianna endured as she pushed her
legal case forward. As Sister Dianna sat outside the White House with one hundred and
eleven cigarette marks on her back, government officials accused her of being a political
strategist who staged her own kidnapping to protest US intervention in Guatemala.

321
Castillo, I Ask the Impossible.

322
Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, 337.
164
Instead of dealing with the available evidence, Guatemalan and US government officials
claimed it was a sadistic lesbian lover who burned her back in the throes of passion.
Sister Dianna was accused of being a lesbian, in part, because she is a woman who
traveled alone to be in the company of her Ursuline Roman Catholic Sisters. These
accusations underscore the heteronormative and patriarchal underpinnings of US torture
practices, the denial of such practices, and the desire to keep torture survivors quiet
through fear and intimidation.
The leap between women’s religious devotion and nonnormative sexuality is not
new, as Catrióna Rueda Esquibel writes, “discussions of women’s religious communities
have [historically] been tied to warnings against carnal emotions and relationships
between women.”
323
The case of Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz, a sister at the convent of
Saint Jerónimo in colonial Mexico City—an order dedicated to penance, contemplation,
and study—is instructive because she was persecuted for her intellectual activities and
defense of women’s educational rights.
324
Sor Juana was eventually ordered to redirect
her energies to nonacademic pursuits, an order that she complied with while noting that
although she was not engaged with books she was engaged in learning about the order of
the universe.
325
In Sor Juana’s case, it was her devotion to intellectual pursuits that led to
her disciplining, it was only later that scholars explored the possibility of a romantic

323
Esquibel, With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians, 69.

324
Tey Diana Rebolledo, The Chronicles of Panchita Villa and Other Guerrilleras (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2005), 56 and 210.

325
Ibid.
165
relationship between her and the Vicereina Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara. Margaret
Sayer Peden argues that speculation about Sor Juana’s life,
has resulted in amazing extremes of interpretation: Sor Juana was a true mystic;
Sor Juana was a scheming hypocrite who artfully duped the Inquisition; Sor Juana
became a nun because she was rejected by a lover; Sor Juana was a narcissist with
strongly masculine tendencies; Sor Juana’s tragedy was to have been born a
woman; Sor Juana’s greatness was the gentleness of a feminine heart.
326

Among those who have traced Sor Juana’s sexual orientation are Chicana feminist
scholars who seek to reposition Sor Juana within a queer Chicana feminist history.
327

Reading Sor Juana’s relationship with Manrique de Lara against the grain of previous
histories that suggest she may have had an amorous affair with a man, some Chicana
feminists have suggested that Sor Juana is indeed a lesbian historical figure. They argue
that that the passionate poems she dedicated to her friend and patron Manrique de Lara
are proof of her romantic love for another woman. The distance between the
homophobic denial of nonheterosexual love between women and the reclamation of Sor
Juana as a “queer cultural hero,” to echo Esquibel, produces many contradictions. The
point, however, is that Sor Juana’s sexuality has been the subject of much speculation
precisely because she was a nun who had many close female friends and wrote poems
dedicated to some of them. However, this alone did not draw the wrath of the Church
hierarchy, rather it was her defense of women’s rights and her intellectual pursuits that
motivated her persecution.

326
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz: Poems, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Tempe:
Bilingual Press/ Editorial Bilingue, 1985), 2.

327
Esquibel, With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Sor
Juana's Second Dream (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), chapter four.
166
“Like the people of Guatemala, I want to be free of these memories…” also
reflects on the privileged, yet false, sense of safety of people in “Minnesota, Chicago,/
Los Angeles, perhaps,/ wrapped in the security of/ our flag, secure in the dream/ that we
are and always will be safe./ We have simply to rise and work hard,/ if only the world
took our example” (ix). Here the speaker puts into motion several concepts that are
central to a critique of US exceptionalism. She points to the symbolic demonstration of
nationalist patriotism, “wrapped in our flag,” as central to enjoying the protection of the
US, implying that those not wrapped in the flag are not guaranteed safety. The speaker
dispels this false sense of safety by pointing to US complicity in human rights abuses in
Latin America against those who might simply express “a wish for peace,” “disdain for a
government,” and “might end up like Sister Dianna Ortiz,/ whose crime was to be an
American citizen,/a school teacher” for a “dispensable population” (ix). In these lines,
the sense of safety that US citizens enjoy wherever they may travel is called into
question, using Sister Dianna’s case an example. For Sister Dianna also symbolically
wrapped herself in the US flag for protection only to find out that she could not expect
the US to protect her.
Further, these lines make clear that protection from violence is not available to
those who are not wrapped in the symbolic safety of a flag or those who align themselves
with them. For example, the Maya children of Guatemala who are described as being
part of a “dispensable race” live in a country whose flag they cannot claim and enduring
centuries of genocidal violence. In part, Sister Dianna’s crime was her willingness to
teach “a dispensable race,” a people with no flag. Sister Dianna’s only offense was that
167
she challenged the logic of genocidal violence against the indigenous peoples of
Guatemala by teaching them how to read and write. The speaker notes, “she did not
commit a crime. /No government ever accused her of any./ The official report is that
nothing happened” (ix). However, the reader must keep in mind that justice and truth do
not go hand in hand with criminalization and torture. Thus, it does not matter that Sister
Dianna was not charged with and did not commit a crime, since in 1989 Guatemala it was
military officials who decided what was considered a crime and how the accused should
be punished, dispensing with legal doctrine and any sort of proceedings.
328

In “Like the people of Guatemala I want to be free of these memories,” Castillo
twice reproduces the scene where Sister Dianna is thrown into a mass grave and a soldier
puts a machete in her hand and forces her to kill another woman. When the soldier jumps
into the grave with Sister Dianna she thinks to herself: “Yes, it is time/ to die….let me
die.” Her prayer for death is not answered and with “the soldier’s hands around
hers/….swung it [the machete] forward and instead she slashed/ another woman/…felt
the woman’s blood still warm with heartbeat” (xi). Together, Sister Dianna and the
woman begin to scream and a question echoed in Castillo’s writings about Sister
Dianna’s disappearance is posed: “Who was shouting loudest? / Sister Dianna Ortiz did/
not know. / She did not know” (xi-xii). What is it that Sister Dianna does not know?
Who was shouting loudest? That she would be forced to kill? Who she had killed? Is
the speaker performing Sister Dianna’s remorseful conscience because she did not know

328
My thanks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore for helping me formulate this conclusion by pointing out that, “the
issue of not having been accused of a crime” raises a question “given that criminalization is a slippery slope
rather than a different category of relation with the state” and that “individuals (rather than the system)
blamed for the Abu Ghraib torture were led by former US prison guards where torture is common.”
168
that the blade would be used against another person instead of against herself? Sister
Dianna was ready to die, in fact, praying to die. However, Castillo’s writing defies a
clear accounting of what transpired in the mass grave. This can be read as a political
move that displaces the privileged US reader whom the speaker assumes in the opening
lines of the poem. After all, Sister Dianna does not have answers to many of her
questions and it is likely that she never will. The lack of answers and accusatory replies
from US officials to Sister Dianna’s questions, led her to realize that in fact the US
government was not on her side.
The repetitive representation of the murder scene is significant not only in a
fictional sense but also for Sister Dianna, the person. In the “Preface” to Psst I Have
Something to Tell You, Mi Amor, Sister Dianna writes, “Once tortured, that act—those
acts—become part of your being, your essence. From that moment on, you always speak
as one who was/is tortured” (xv). Sister Dianna’s assertion that having been tortured
lives on in her present and future echoes Elaine Scarry’s description of the body’s
memory of pain, “What is remembered in the body is well remembered; the bodies of
massive numbers of [war] participants [people that might also be called survivors or
victims] are deeply altered; those new alterations are carried forward into peace.”
329

Thus, even though the event of torture is over for Sister Dianna, that event will stay with
her into the future. In Where Memory Dwells, Macarena Gómez-Barris further
illuminates the way memory works after violence by identifying what she calls the
afterlife of political violence. Gómez-Barris defines “the afterlife of political violence as

329
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 113.
169
the original event of violence on people’s daily lives, their social and psychic identities,
and their ongoing wrestling with the past in the present.”
330
It is not only the victims or
survivors of political violence that must deal with the afterlife of violence, but their loved
ones and all members of society. The repetitive way the murder is represented in
Castillo’s poem and collection of plays, captures the sensibility Sister Dianna expresses
as a torture survivor who experiences that moment of rupture as something that continues
to be played out “in the present.”
Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor: A Play in One Act
While “Like the people of Guatemala I want to be free of these memories”
focuses on Sister Dianna’s demand for justice and answers about her disappearance, both
versions of Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor underscore the significant
impact her torture had on her everyday life, or the “afterlife” of torture, as Gómez-Barris
puts it. Castillo negotiates the politics of representing violence by capturing the horror
that state terror produces. She does not reduce the violence experienced by Sister Dianna
to a commodified spectacle, instead she writes with political urgency. Castillo represents
the trauma produced by Sister Dianna’s torture by drawing on the activist imagination in
order simultaneously tell a history that might otherwise not be known while also hoping
to move people to action in the context of ongoing torture practices.
The one act version of the play opens with an ambiguous representation of the day
Sister Dianna was abducted from the convent where she was staying for her own safety.
A nun enters a garden and finds a shawl near a garden bench, “she picks it up and looks

330
Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, 6.
170
around” (5). To viewers not familiar with the details of Sister Dianna’s abduction the
relevance of this scene is not immediately apparent and does not become entirely clear
until the last scene of the play. In the last scene, Sister Dianna sits in the garden wearing
the shawl that the nun in the first scene finds near the garden bench. As she sits on the
garden bench reading her Bible she hears the voice of a man coming from the bushes,
speaking the words, “Psst…I have something to tell you, mi amor” (16). These are the
last words Sister Dianna hears before she is abducted and the last words the viewer/reader
hears before the play closes. Within this narrative, the words “Psst…I have something to
tell you, mi amor” are the foundation on which Sister Dianna later learns about the US
government’s complicity in torture in Guatemala and they also function as a reminder of
the afterlife of torture.
Sister Dianna’s character is first introduced twelve years after her torture and she
is described as being in “the nether space of the perpetual torture chamber of her mind”
as she talks about the government’s response to her disappearance (3). In the opening
lines, Sister Dianna self-consciously confesses to a reporter, “Language is not my
gift….between shyness and language shortcomings words have never been my strongest
suit for expressing myself” (5). Initially, she speaks these words in order to fight back
against her torturers’ threats that, “No one will[/would] ever believe you[/her]” (5).
Despite these threats, Sister Dianna continued to tell her story because as she states, “I
was sure my country—democratic and based on freedom—would find justice for me”
(5). However, the US government’s response to Sister Dianna’s torture shatters her
perception of the US as a democratic and free nation: “They said I was lying. They still
171
say that I lied. About everything. Just like the torturers said they would” (5). In the end,
government officials make her torturers’ threats a reality and violate Sister Dianna a
second time by refusing to grant her legal recourse and failing to believe that she was
tortured by the Guatemalan military: “I cannot believe that my country would not protect
me, that they won’t even believe me” (6). This response leads Sister Dianna to assert that
the US government worked to protect those responsible rather than prosecuting the
perpetrators.
The Other as Mother Superior interjects as Sister Dianna tells about the shattered
faith she once had in the US as a country in order to confirm the veracity of Sister
Dianna’s story. The Mother Superior launches a critique of US military aid to Guatemala
and the violence against civilians such aid funds. She also points to the contradiction of
funding a war in the name of “freedom” and “democracy” while “secret wars are declared
on civilians” that are imagined to be “enemies of the state” (7). The Mother Superior
also points out that the Guatemalan military targeted nuns for aiding marginalized
communities: “I know what we have been accused of here, for coming to work with the
poor. I don’t need proof about what happened to her…if she says it then that’s enough
for me” (7). This statement echoes the history of accusations against nuns that I
discussed previously. The Mother Superior also underscores that the “freedom” and
“democracy” promised by US intervention is not extend to poor or indigenous
populations or to the people who serve them.
Sister Dianna’s disappearance is again linked to teaching and knowledge,
recalling that she had to go into the city to take Spanish classes because she needed to
172
improve her Spanish in order to serve better the children she was working with. Sister
Dianna recalls that she was in Guatemala City attending classes when she saw a gathering
of people and approached to find out what was happening, “There was a teachers’ strike
going on at the time. I saw people protesting in front of a building….I didn’t know what
was going on so I drew close” (8). After that incident she begins receiving death threats
that read, “We know who you are,” “Get out of the country while you still can,” “Madre
Dianna: Be Careful. People want to hurt you,” “Dianna, Assassinate, Decapitate, Rape”
(8). Significantly, Sister Dianna is in Guatemala City to attend Spanish classes when she
stops to see what is happening at a teachers strike. The positionalities both of these
activities suggest—student, teacher, protestor—are enough to make her a target of the
Guatemalan military. Through her own position as a student and teacher working with
indigenous populations she occupies roles that the state actively targeted as sites of
subversion and dissent during the civil war.
331
In so doing, the military revealed its fears
that access to education would grant indigenous populations increased means by which to
recognize and name the inequalities that they live and to oppose the systems that oppress
them. While the military argued that it was fighting for freedom and democracy, the
targeting of teachers and students makes clear that the promises represented by gaining
literacy were too great to be left unchallenged. This logic recalls Paolo Freire’s work on
the importance of education in people name the conditions of their oppression. As Freire
writes, if people are not able to clearly identify the reasons for their oppression “they
confuse freedom with the maintenance of the status quo” and do not oppose the way

331
Archdiocese of Guatemala, Guatemala: Never Again!
173
things are.
332
Freire further writes, “if conscientização [conscientization] threatens to
place that status quo in question, it thereby seems to constitute a threat to freedom
itself.”
333
Recognizing a threat to the status quo, the military had a vested interest in
preventing indigenous communities from becoming literate and decided to put an end to
Sister Dianna’s work by disappearing her.
Sister Dianna occupies two other precarious positions as a foreigner and as a
religious worker; Guatemalan and US officials use these positions to discredit Sister
Dianna’s account about her abduction. In order to represent this process to the
viewer/reader the Other plays a Guatemalan television reporter and explains, “[the US
embassy and the Guatemala Defense Minister said] Sister Dianna was covering up her
involvement in a violent lesbian tryst and that she has most certainly been used to
pressure the United States to cut off pending aid” (10). Her position as a foreign
religious worker creates a situation where the government feels compelled to makes a
statement about Sister Dianna’s disappearance but can simultaneously explain her
disappearance as am attempt to cover up a “lesbian tryst” and a “slanderous” conspiracy
against the US and Guatemalan governments (10). According to this normative logic, the
only explanation for a woman that breaks social conventions by traveling alone and
living in the company of other women is that she is a lesbian and by extension should not
be trusted. By accusing her of sexual transgressions Guatemalan and US officials attempt
to control her willingness to talk about her torture and disappearance. And if she insists

332
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: The Seabury Press,
1970), 21.

333
Ibid.
174
on talking anyway, such accusations work to discredit her story for those disposed to
question it in the first place.
The specter of communism and revolution also loomed large in the military’s
attempt to control the Guatemalan population, as The Friend’s disappearance makes
clear. The Friend recalls,
They came to my house we would hide—where? Where could we hide from
them really, but that is what we told ourselves when they did not insist on
breaking in, pushing my son aside or my old mother to get my husband and I!
They said we were communists! They said we were organizing the others in our
pueblo against the government...! (11).

The Friend’s account of the moment she and her husband were disappeared makes clear
that in a country where it is easy to become suspect of subversive activities there is
nowhere to hide from the military. The Friends surprise at the accusations against both
she and her husband make clear that she does not identify herself as a communist or an
activist. However, whether or not she was a political activist does not matter because that
is the reason that she found herself at the detention center. Like Sister Dianna, The
Friend is perceived as a threat to the Guatemalan government and that is enough to make
her a target of disappearance.
To symbolize the interconnectedness of Sister Dianna’s and The Friend’s
experiences with torture and disappearance, Castillo imagines a dialogue in which each
woman finishes the other’s thoughts. In fast sequence, Sister Dianna is put in a cell with
The Friend, they comfort each other, they pray, and they are thrown into a mass grave as
the guards record them. Sister Dianna first sees The Friend when she regains
consciousness after she is raped by multiple soldiers. When she regains consciousness,
175
Sister Dianna experiences a moment of profound recognition that will guide her after she
escapes. She recalls, “When I came to, the blindfold was off. I realized there was
another woman in the room who had also been interrogated. The other woman in the
room was weeping, weeping, such inconsolable weeping! I was not crying. I could not
cry. I went and put my arms around her” (12). In this scene, Sister Dianna’s blindfold is
both literally and figuratively off and she can see that what is happening to her has
happened to thousands of people, including the woman in the room. She can see that she
is not the only person to endure torture in Guatemala and that if she survives she must tell
what she knows and keep the memory of The Friend (and thousands of others like her)
alive. From here The Friend continues telling the sequence of events, they “…took us
outside, naked, burned, violated, from body to soul. All shame, all dignity, all desire to
live wrung from us. At least I speak for myself” (13). Notably, while The Friend speaks
in plural for herself and Sister Dianna at the end of this passage she qualifies her story by
stating that she is speaking for herself. In contrast, Sister Dianna makes a conscious
decision to speak out for all victims and survivors of torture if she survives.
After Sister Dianna and The Friend are thrown into a mass grave their prayers
while still unified become more personal as they prepare to die. The Friend prays for her
husband and two children and asks that they never forget about her disappearance and
torture. Sister Dianna thinks about the dead and almost dead bodies that fill the grave she
now stands in, closes her eyes, and prays to God, “Let me die” (14). Then a guard jumps
into the grave and forces Sister Dianna to hold a machete, she thinks it is time to die.
However, instead of the blade entering Sister Dianna’s body the soldier forces her to
176
plunge it into The Friend as both women begin to scream. This scene raises the
unanswerable question once again, “Who was shouting loudest?” Was it Sister Dianna or
The Friend? The Friend wanted to say, “STOP! You are hurting me! You are hurting
me! But she couldn’t hear or maybe I wasn’t speaking anymore” (14). Sister Dianna
was also screaming, “I screamed and screamed until no sound was coming out of my
mouth and the laughter above and the woman’s bloodied, mutilated body long gone limp
on the other bodies!” (15). Neither Sister Dianna or the Friend know who was screaming
loudest, who protested loudest, as they both lose the ability to scream in the midst of the
trauma torture produces. The shock of what has transpired renders them unable to
distinguish between each others voices as one dies and the other prays for her own death.
The trauma of telling of retelling the details about The Friend’s death takes Sister
Dianna back to the temporal space of her abduction, which takes place twelve years
before the setting of the play. As each of the scenes described above is acted out on
stage, the characters deliver their lines even though the context for the retelling is Sister
Dianna’s interview with a North American reporter. However, after Sister Dianna shares
the details about The Friends murder there is a rupture in the story because Sister Dianna
has a mental break. Sister Dianna demands to know who the reporter and her cameraman
are and asks to be left alone. She explains to the reporter: “She was my friend! That is
how I live with it now, for twelve years! Every day I see her in my mind! I talk to
her….I ask her to forgive me! I can live now with everything…everything but that!”
(15). The reporter vacillates between compassion and insensitivity, “ Okay, okay!
Please don’t upset yourself, Sister Dianna!....This vigil and fasting has taken a lot out of
177
you, no doubt” (15). Even after listening to the details of Sister Dianna’s disappearance
and torture, the reporter relates Sister Dianna’s flashback to the vigil and fast rather than
linking it to the afterlife of torture. The news reporter does not understand, as Sister
Dianna (the person) puts it in the “Preface” to the play, “Once tortured, that act—those
acts—become part of your being, your very essence. From that moment on, you always
speak as one who was/is tortured” (xv). Sister Dianna, the character, makes a similar
point on the bench with the reporter, “Testimonies I have had to give again and again.
How do I begin to tell it? Can you understand that each time I repeat, I relive it? Each
time I am asked to tell it again I relive the interrogation?” (11). Yet, the reporter does not
realize that Sister Dianna is having a flashback while retelling what happened in the mass
grave while the news camera light continues to shine in her face, recalling the use of a
video recorder during her torture. For the reporter, only the immediate impact of the vigil
and fast are important, rather than recognizing that torture has ramifications that are felt
long after the torture has ended. The reporter continues with her coverage of the story as
she thoughtlessly lights a cigarette, again recalling that cigarettes were used as
instruments of torture against Sister Dianna. She continues with her news story recalling
a conversation she had with the former US ambassador to Guatemala as his voice
replaces hers offstage:
I have no reason to disbelieve that the nun in question suffered some horrible,
traumatic experience. I saw her with my own eyes, discolored, scarred…As the
father of a daughter, I have prayed for Sister Dianna out of personal compassion.
But if you insist on writing a story that says it happened, you will be in very hot
water, Miss. There’s not one shred of evidence that says... (16).

178
As the ambassador launches threats and denials, Sister Dianna sits in the garden
appearing healthy and peaceful as she was before her disappearance. However, this
moment of tranquility is disrupted by an off-stage voice that reminds viewers/readers
about the afterlife of torture: “Psst…I have something to tell you, mi amor” (16).
Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor: A Play in Two Acts
Memory
The two act version of Psst…I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor takes
viewers/readers from the garden bench in the one act version of the play to a medical
facility for torture survivors in the US. In the opening scene, Sister Dianna is curled up
on the floor while her family, several nuns, and a therapist stand around a bed discussing
her condition. Castillo’s interest in representing the afterlife of torture continues as the
impact of Sister Dianna’s disappearance on her family and community are examined.
Sister Dianna’s mother highlights the way that her daughter’s torture continues into the
present and how it is felt by her family:
But she doesn’t even know who I am—her own mother! She doesn’t recognize
any of us, not her father neither or her brother and sisters who have all come to
see her! None of us. (MOTHER is clearly distressed.) What does this mean? Is
she ever gonna be all right, doctor? Can anybody tell us that much, at least? (21).

This passage reveals that Sister Dianna’s trauma is so severe that she does not recollect
anything about her life before her disappearance. Her inability to remember even her
family becomes a source of consternation for her mother who wants to know if Sister
Dianna is ever “gonna be all right.” Like the reporter in the one act version of the play,
Sister Dianna’s mother cannot comprehend the deep psychological wounds that torture
has left on her daughter and that, as Sister Dianna (the person) writes, “once
179
tortured…you always speak as on who was/is tortured.” In other words, Sister Dianna
will survive but she will never be just “all right” (read: as she was before her torture).
This passage underscores both the effects torture has on memory and the effects torture
has on the loved ones of those who are torture survivors.
In the next passage, it seems that Sister Marcelle recognizes that Sister Dianna’s
trauma induced amnesia is a protection mechanism that helps her go on living after her
torture. In an attempt to give The Mother hope, Sister Marcelle responds, “I think, why I
believe she seemed to recognize us yesterday. Yes, faintly but something. I know her,
we know her too well. She can’t hide from us. Somewhere behind that face of
impenetrability, that mask that she has surely constructed to protect her from…” (22).
However, Sister Marcelle is not allowed to finish her thought because she is interrupted
by Sister Ramona who interjects, “Her demons. Well, we all have them” (22). While
Sister Marcelle is trying to understand Sister Dianna’s fragile psychological and physical
state, Sister Ramona reduces Sister Dianna’s condition to something “we all have.” This
lack of sensitivity is also apparent in Sister Dianna’s exchange with The Reporter in the
one act version of the play. The other characters’ inability to understand that Sister
Dianna’s torture cannot be reduced to something “we all have” to endure points to the
lack of support that torture survivors face on a daily basis. Castillo calls attention to the
reality that even those who are closest to torture survivors lack the capacity to understand
fully the experience of torture.
The Father’s contribution to this scene reveals that perhaps he understands that
Sister Dianna’s torture will be with her for the rest of her life. The Father situates Sister
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Dianna’s disappearance within his ancestors’ experiences with US imperialism. In the
process, the Father participates in what T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa
Yoneyama call “critical remembering” by “denaturaliz[ing] and dismember[ing] those
memories that have become dominant and often officialized.”
334
In his process of critical
remembering, the Father links the Guatemalan government’s denial of what happened to
his daughter to the injustices his family suffered after the US annexed Mexican territory
through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the US-Mexico War in 1848. These
ties are revealed in a telling exchange:
Mother
But the authorities in Guatemala they’re still denying everything, aren’t they?
Father
What do you expect? That’s how governments are! My familia, los Ortíz used to
have hundreds of acres down in Grants, New Mexico…where we live. Now,
because of the government and their swindling lawyers…
Mother
Hon’, por favor. That was all a long time ago, back after the war with the U.S.
and Mexico!
Father
¿Y qué? They still took our land, my familia’s land…a people’s memory doesn’t
keep count of calendar time.
Mother
Family memory. Blood memory. That’s true. The Indian people there, they
really lost everything…I think that’s why Dianna felt so good about Guatemala,
so at home there right away. She loved the people there. Especially los
niños…the little ones (24-25).

The Mother and the Father’s conversation reveals that what is remembered and how it is
remembered is complicated by political commitments and, as Fujitani, White, and
Yoneyama argue, the continual “figure[ing] and refigure[ing] of the past as a method for

334
T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(S)
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 2.
181
present purposes.”
335
The Father attempts to understand the Guatemalan government’s
response to Sister Dianna’s torture by recalling the injustices suffered by his family and
resigning himself to the idea that “That’s how governments are!” While the Father
recalls his own family losing their land, the Mother’s historical memory includes
indigenous peoples in the Americas. The Mother complicates her husband’s personal
memories by recalling, “the Indian people…really lost everything.” The Mother’s
rationale, simultaneously draws a connection between indigenous peoples and seems to
homogenize their historical experiences, presumably “Dianna felt so good in Guatemala”
because the Maya people reminded her of New Mexico’s American Indian populations.
The Mother also complicates Chicano—the father—memories of displacement by
reminding readers that indigenous people throughout the Americas “really lost
everything.” Thus, while the father recalls his own family’s losses as an example of
ultimate government oppression, the Mother relativizes his memories by comparing it to
the displacement of indigenous people in the Americas. In this example, it becomes
evident that memory is constantly being negotiated through the complicated processes of
(re)producing political identification and solidarity. In the end, both the Father and the
Mother attempt to understand Sister Dianna’s torture through their own memories of
colonialism in the Americas for the political purpose of historically contextualizing what
happened to their daughter as something other than an aberration.

335
Ibid., 1.
182
The Tortured
After all visitors exit Sister Dianna’s room in scene one, the physical
manifestations of her torture become evident. Sister Dianna is curled up on the floor
wearing a long brown tunic and a large wood cross hangs around her neck. Stage
directions indicate that her hair is cut unevenly and she looks nervous and fragile as she
chews on her cross. When she stands up she moves around the room pressed against the
wall as she gets ready to go for a walk in the snow. Helen returns and tells Sister Dianna
that it is too cold outside for her to take a walk and instead suggests that she get some
sleep. When Helen reaches out to touch Sister Dianna, she backs away from Helen and
sits on her bed as she stares ahead and begins to chew on her cross again. The
psychological marks of her torture are most evident in this scene, as Sister Dianna
nervously chews on her cross and strategically avoids any kind of human touch. While
these are the most visible psychological markers of Sister Dianna’s torture, there are also
physical reminders such as the cigarette burns on her back and the bite marks on her
breasts. By paying close attention to both the physical and psychological manifestations
of her torture, Castillo underscores that torture is experienced as a permanent wound that
impacts survivors both corporeally and psychically.
Act one scene two also introduces viewers/readers to The Friend, a woman that
can be indigenous or ladina, and wears a huipil (a traditional embroidered Maya blouse).
Later it is revealed that The Friend is the woman that Sister Dianna was forced to kill in
the mass grave. The Friend accompanies Sister Dianna, she talks to her throughout the
night, rocks her to sleep when she is afraid, supports her when she must confront José,
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and is a constant part of Sister Dianna’s consciousness. However, as Castillo’s stage
directions indicate, there is a question about The Friend’s role in the play: “Is her
‘presence’ to protect the nun or is it because she has unfinished business with the former
soldier?” (40). Based on the scenes that follow, it seems The Friend both protects Sister
Dianna and wants José to answer for his crimes. In act two scene one, The Friend
simultaneously serves as judge and victim in her own murder trial, in which Sister
Dianna is the defendant. The Friend is also represented as a guiding light for Sister
Dianna who calls The Friend “my guardian angel, my beacon” (57). By creating these
multiple roles for The Friend, Castillo imagines that the torturers will be brought to
justice by those they have tortured; in contrast to the impunity with which Sister Dianna’s
torturers were treated.
To underscore that Sister Dianna and her companion, The Friend, are not victims,
but survivors (even though one of them is dead), Castillo stages a confrontation between
José, one of the men that participated in Sister Dianna’s torture, and the two women.
While Sister Dianna is terrified at the initial encounter, The Friend threatens José,
detailing the torture she would like to subject him to,
I would love nothing more than to pull apart your despicable legs and wrap your
balls with battery jumpers…as…you did…to my husband....Stick an electric prod
up your ass!...Or pull out each tooth one by one. Or maybe I should just lock you
in a dark room, whispering in your ear about all the things I’ve done to your
children, to your wife, to your saintly mother? Ha! As if a monster like you
could have been born of a woman! (33).

As all this transpires, Sister Dianna struggles to understand whether or not José is a
figment of her imagination. Emboldened by The Friend’s verbal attack against José,
Sister Dianna approaches and sniffs him to determine if he is really in the room. In
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solidarity, the two women—one Chicana and one Guatemalan—confront one of their
torturers and speak out against the Guatemalan military’s systematic use of torture to
combat revolutionary demands for social reform during the country’s thirty-six year civil
war.
The Logics of Torture
Through Jose’s character, Castillo reveals the logics of torture as well as the
social conditions that make torture possible and the psychological scars that those who
inflict torture carry. José’s story allows Castillo to critique the military’s targeted efforts
to disappear and silence indigenous people, students, teachers, and Church workers.
Further, the complacent way that some of the characters respond to José make it clear that
apathy and impunity are key to making disappearance and torture possible. The very fact
that Castillo places José, a former torturer, as an employing at a facility for torture
survivors underscores the impunity that tortures enjoy in the US. An Amnesty
International report titled “United States of America: A Safe Haven for Torturers” that
many former torturers reside in the US without fear of prosecution.
336
As a result, torture
survivors such as Sister Dianna are forced to wonder how they can “circulate without
worry” if their former torturers are allowed to do the same.
337
Amnesty International
further notes, “Impunity sends the message to tortures that they will get away with it and
undermines attempts to end torture.
338

336
Aceves, United States of America: A Safe Haven for Torturers.

337
Ibid., 49.

338
Ibid., 6.
185
Through José’s character, Castillo reveals the logics that make torture possible,
including ensuring the economic survival of one’s family regardless of the costs to other
people. For example, Jose explains that he joined the military because he needed a way
to provide for his mother and sisters in the absence of their father. Like many military
recruits, José did not have much formal education and few employment options when he
was forcefully conscripted into the military.
339
Throughout the play, he argues that his
decision to remain in the military was guided by his interest in the well-being of his
family, his instinct for self-improvement, and his patriotism. José declares, “The army
was the best thing that happened to me….I worked very hard to do my best by my
superiors” (50). José was the ideal recruit precisely because of his desire to please those
in positions of authority, his interest in rising through the military ranks, and his patriotic
ideas. José’s character recalls Ronald D. Crelinsten’s discussion of how people are
recruited to become torturers in the essay “In Their Own Words.”
340
Crelinsten identifies
three major processes: career advancement in a police or military organization, direct
conscription into a specialized unit of the armed forces, and serendipitously through
requests for transfers from one unit to another for personal convenience. Fitting into two
of Crelinsten’s categories, in the play José is a depicted as a conscript who sought to
please his superiors in order to gain recognition from them to improve his chance of
having a prosperous military career.

339
Archdiocese of Guatemala, Guatemala: Never Again!

340
Ronald D. Crelinsten, "In Their Own Words: The World of the Torturer," in The Politics of Pain:
Torturers and Their Masters, ed. Ronald D. Crelinsten and Alex P. Schmid (Boulder: Westview Press,
1995).
186
Despite José’s troubling defense of his role in military campaigns, at times he
seems to be tormented by what he did to Sister Dianna. He attempts to convince Sister
Dianna that he is not a bad person:
If I were a malo as you both say, would they have given me permission to leave
Guate and come to this great country? This is the center of hope and freedom
everywhere. Everyone knows that. They only have to work hard. And I know
how to word hard. That’s why I was allowed to come here! I have proven to my
country that I am a good man. I served as a soldier. I was even awarded a medal
for bravery… (36).

Sister Dianna does not respond, but the friend kicks him and points out that “a rifle blow
to a child’s head” is far from an act of bravery. After Sister Dianna challenges his claims
José’s apologetic tone changes to one of vengeful self-righteousness. He insults both
women,
Está bien. Two bitches protecting each other, eh? Par de putas. What are you
going to do?...I was protecting my country—from criminals like you two! From
putas like you, communists, propagandists. I am a hero! Otherwise, do you think
I’d have been given a visa to come here? I didn’t come hiding in a car trunk like
a stowaway rat like all the traitors and trash have to do (36).

From one passage to the next, José goes from being apologetic to revealing the cruelty
with which he regards those he thinks he is superior to: women, undocumented
immigrants, and communists. In his misogynist rant, Jose legitimizes the use of torture
against people that are perceived as a threat to the nation-state he has been trained to
protect. By representing the logic that torturers draw on, Castillo makes clear that within
this line of reasoning an ever larger number of people can be construed as subjects under
suspicion who can be tortured, recalling the use of torture against ever growing categories
of people during Greek and Roman times.
187
From José’s point of view, people that enter the US illegally are instantly
classified as enemies of the Guatemalan state, or as “traitors and trash.” He distinguishes
his legal status from that of refugees who enter the US in the trunks of cars like
“stowaway rat[s].” José imagines that he is superior to his “illegal” compatriots precisely
because he served the military without any questions, “because I wanted my country to
get out of its hellhole and become closer to this [the US]—to all that you have here…that
is what our superiors told us again and again” (50). However, José’s warped worldview
is irreconcilable with his reality as an immigrant to the US. His position as a janitor
reminds readers/viewers that regardless of his aggrandizing self-image, he is not that
different from other immigrants when it comes to the employment opportunities available
to him. He is still hired to clean up after other people who do not recognize the
difference between him and undocumented workers.
José further reveals the logics of torture when he accuses Sister Dianna and The
Friend of being criminals, communists, propagandists, and links their alleged political
views to their sexual behavior, calling them putas/whores. With a single stroke, women’s
sexual behavior and their political attitudes are articulated in order to justify torture. Of
course, the contradiction is that what makes Sister Dianna and The Friend whores in
José’s view is that military personnel raped each of them. In Sister Dianna’s case, having
the right to violate her body served as a form of bonding among those who participated in
her rape. As Sister Dianna’s character narrates hearing her Guatemalan torturers invite a
man with a “gringo accent,” “‘Join in on the fun, jefe’, one says—maybe you? Inviting
him to my body as if I were a roasted turkey on the table” (60). However, he orders them
188
to stop, “‘No’, the gringo says. ‘I must take her. Her name was released to the media.
She is an American nun’” (60). At this point in her disappearance, her torturers have
already flipped a coin to decide who will rape her first—they think whoever rapes her
first is getting a prize since she is a virgin and a nun—Sister Dianna is raped multiple
times as her torturers bond over her violated body. Despite the news coverage her
disappearance received, after she escapes from Alejandro’s custody, Sister Dianna’s
disappearance is called into question and she continues to be accused of being a sexually
promiscuous lesbian. The Minister of Defense claims her injuries and disappearance
were “the result of an ‘amorous’ affair!” and that he was “weary of all these lesbian nuns
invading our country [Guatemala]” (54). Further, José reproaches, “Perhaps there should
be some investigation of your convent, among your own people back there. The church
is not exactly filled with saints alone. And stories of perversion among your clergy
abound” (62). The articulation between sexual behavior and political views emerges as
José accuses the same “Church people” he claims are communists of being sexual
deviants as well.
At the end of the mock trial in act two scene two, Castillo underscores that the
logic of torture necessitates a degree of complacency among the general population. In a
shocking turn of events, Sister Dianna identifies José as the man who forced her to kill
The Friend and Helen responds by telling him to clean the cafeteria. Helen then turns to
Sister Dianna and tells her, “It’s been a long day, Dianna. Whatever it is you are having
to live with, I hope some day you’ll find peace with it” (63). As in the play’s opening
scenes, Sister Dianna is expected to carry on with her life, to find peace even as she
189
continuously (re)lives the torture she survived. The scene is a reminder that in the
context of mass torture and disappearance, life may go on as usual for other people but
that is not the case for the survivors of torture.
On Trial
In act two scene two, a mock trial is staged with The Friend acting as judge in the
trial for her own assassination: Sister Dianna is the defendant, Helen is the jury, and José
is the witness. While it is Sister Dianna who is on trial for murdering The Friend, much
of the trial focuses on the atrocities committed against Sister Dianna. In the end, it is
José, the Guatemalan military, and the US government’s involvement in torture that are
on trial. In the trial scenes, Castillo imagines that Sister Dianna will get the answers and
justice she demanded while sitting in vigil outside the White House. Tellingly, as
occurred in the government’s actual response to her demands, it is Sister Dianna who is
on trail in the play. However, Castillo’s interpretation of the events turns the tables and it
is José, the witness, who is put on trial by the jury and the judge.
At the trial José argues that any atrocities he committed were in the name of
securing democracy and freedom in Guatemala. As he shamelessly admits:
We processed hundreds, maybe thousands like you. We burned down villages of
subversives. Church people? Ha! Nothing but Communists, all of them. They
wanted to take our country and turn it upside down, into a dictatorship, another
Cuba. Take away democracy and freedom (45).

In these lines, José articulates the demonization of Catholic aid workers and the Cuban
revolution that in part led the US to step-up intervention in Guatemala during the cold
war, visibly marked by the US supported coup against President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954
who was spearheading social and land reform programs. It is precisely the social
190
conditions that Arbenz was interested in remedying that most disgust José when he
characterizes Guatemala as a “hellhole” with a hungry, illiterate population, that is born
with “skin [that bears]—the Mark of Cain…or so the missionaries who went into… [the]
village[s] said” (42). He believes that the “subversives” in the villages bear the Mark of
Cain and that “Church people” deserve to be targeted for their alleged subversive
activities. José argues that indigenous people—born with skin as dark as his—bear the
Mark of Cain on their skin and are condemned to a life of displacement, illiteracy, and
food scarcity.
Like José, US officials are not interested in taking responsibility for the atrocities
committed against Sister Dianna. Alejandro’s dismissal of what happened to Sister
Dianna is a striking example of the negation of US involvement in torture and
disappearance. As Alejandro takes Sister Dianna from the torture center he threatens:
“‘Don’t blame anyone for this’…[she thinks] Is it an order? Have I suddenly been
recruited into this secret war? All of us, he says, are fighting the evils of communism.
‘These kinds of things happen, sometimes. No one’s fault.’” (60). His warning seeks to
reaffirm the idea that US intervention in Guatemala was a benevolent task that at times
required a degree of “collateral damage”: “These kinds of things happen, sometimes.”
Sister Dianna actively questions, whether she has been “recruited into this secret war”
against the threat of communism, making her wonder if she has become complicit in her
own torture.
Despite her self-doubt, with the support of both The Friend and Helen, Sister
Dianna confronts José during the mock trial. As the trial opens, it takes an interesting
191
twist with The Friend (playing the judge) asking Helen (playing the jury) to say a few
words in support of Sister Dianna (playing the defendant). José (playing the witness)
declares Sister Dianna’s guilt. An accusation that Helen responds to by pointing out that
he is contradicting his own claim, “that no crime was committed” (53). The Friend and
Helen turn the tables on José echoing accusations similar to those used to discredit Sister
Dianna. The Friend echoes accusations that the cigarette marks on Sister Dianna’s back
“were most likely the result of an ‘amorous’ affair!’” adding, “Or so reported the
Minister of Defense to the media. It was all over the news! ‘Oh, I am so weary of all
these lesbian nuns invading our country’, he said” (54). Then Helen questions him, “Or
was it that for every answer that did not please you, it was you who dug a lit cigarette on
her flesh?” (54). The Friend and Helen set the stage for Sister Dianna to confront José in
the pages that follow she does so while struggling through her trauma. First, Sister
Dianna reminds José of his participation in her torture, “All the things you and your men
did to me? The burns. My nipples nearly bitten off. I stunk of you for so long. I reeked
of your semen, your sweat, your shit-fetid ass-holes, your pubic hair, like nettles digging
against my skin. And I could not bear it.” (56). As José continues to deny his guilt, The
Friend feels compelled to break with her role as judge in the trial and becomes a witness.
In a cathartic scene, Sister Dianna and The Friend begin testifying together, the first
recalling what happened in the mass grave and the other praying:
Dianna
I thought as they threw me in the pit again, amongst the cadavers and the rats that
it was I who was destined to die….that we were both going to die when they
threw us in together. Hail Mary, Full of Grace...do you remember how I linked
your fingers with mine and said, ‘Don’t be afraid’?”
The Friend
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(On her knees) The Lord is with Thee…
Sister Dianna
And then he…(She is indicating JOSÉ) jumped into the pit with us/ Of course he
was fully clothed, wearing boots. He was not forced to feel the flesh of those
quivering with last breathed beneath our feet…
The Friend
Blessed art Thou amongst women…
Sister Dianna
Then you put the machete in my hand…
The Friend
Blessed is the fruit of Thy womb Jesus…
Sister Dianna
Tightly, your two hands on mine. He wants me to die, I thought. Finally, he is
helping me to die. And together we drew the blade back over my head…
The Friend
Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners…
Sister Dianna
But instead of drawing the blade toward my own body, it went forward instead…!
Warm blood spurt out like the blood of a pig….
(THE FRIEND begins to scream as she is being “axed.” DIANNA cries as she
continues to act out the drama.)
And again the blade fell on her before me and the spray of warm blood on my
face, on my teeth and the screams continued, mine or hers, I did not know.
NOW AND IN THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH…And those hands tight on mine
on the handle and again and again we let it fall in the life before me until it was
wracked and fell at my feet (58-60).

Within the intensity of the telling, the reader/viewer is reminded that the most
traumatizing event that occurred during Sister Dianna’s disappearance was that she was
forced to kill another woman. As in the poem and the one act version of the play, Sister
Dianna cannot reconcile having been forced to kill the woman that she calls The Friend
in the play. Even while The Friend represents a guardian angel in the two act play, she
also comes to embody the afterlife of torture for Sister Dianna. The Friend serves as a
constant reminder of what happened during the twenty-four hours of Sister Dianna’s
disappearance and of the thousands of others that were disappeared and never reappeared.
193
She reminds Sister Dianna that neither faith nor country can erase the torture that she
experiences in the present.
Conclusion
While the fictional Sister Dianna that Castillo imagines in “Like the people of
Guatemala I want to be free of these memories” and both versions of Psst…I Have
Something to Tell You, Mi Amor seems caught in the afterlife of torture, Sister Dianna the
person draws strength from the fact that she survived in order to engage in activist work
that calls for the abolition of torture. Castillo’s telling and retelling of Sister Dianna’s
story participates in anti-torture politics by disseminating information about Sister
Dianna’s torture and US involvement in training and supporting the military personnel
who tortured Sister Dianna. Both Castillo and Sister Dianna work to end torture and seek
justice for torture survivors, yet they do so through diverse means. Castillo draws on the
political imagination in order to engage in activist work. While Sister Dianna takes a
more traditional activist route—lobbying, testifying, working with nonprofits—to call for
a change in US policies that covertly and overtly (re)produce torture and create the
conditions for impunity. Sister Dianna’s activist work and Castillo’s activist imagination
work together to demand US accountability for its participation in past and present
torture and the end to future complicity.
In the post-September 11 era, Castillo and Sister Dianna open new possibilities
for solidarity building through imaginative work that seeks to join a global politics
against torture and impunity from a Chicana perspective. They seek to constitute a broad
194
audience and inspire solidarity by disseminating Sister Dianna’s story through a variety
of genres, including a testimonial text by Sister Dianna and Castillo’s poem and plays.
When Castillo was commissioned to write a play by the Goodman Theatre’s 2003 Latino
Theatre Festival she opted to retell Sister Dianna’s story. By converting the poem into a
play, Castillo sought to constitute a broader audience for Sister Dianna’s story in order to
make people conscious of past and present US torture practices and to inspire people to
action. Castillo’s consideration of the differences in consumption and dissemination of
poetry and drama underscore the diverse political capacities different genres allow.
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Conclusion

Imagining and representing violence across geopolitical borders is a complicated
process that can be contradictory and fraught with unequal relations of power. Yet, it
holds the promise of raising consciousness about what is happening in other countries
and communities of color in order to inspire people to demand justice for all. This is a
challenge that Chicana writers take on in relationship to Central America during and in
the decades following the wars. Through creative writing, Moraga, Viramontes, Limón,
and Castillo form a politics that imagines and names the “stretching of social relations
across space and time” with the intent of producing international solidarity and moving
US readers to action.
341
Clearly, stating concrete statistics about the number of people
who were influenced by these texts is not the goal of this project. The point is that in
each of their texts, the authors I read produce representations that speak to the histories of
US empire and the violent formation of race, class, and gender hierarchies in order to
participate in the struggle over how the wars are conceptualized and understood by
readers. In the process, Chicana creative writers imagine and produce a Chicana feminist
politics that goes beyond nationalist ideologies, especially those proposed during the
Chicano movement.
I read Chicana texts because I am interested in the ways that women who witness
and experience the realities of international and transnational violence engage in the
struggle over how such violence is conceptualized while expanding and transforming
understandings of Chicana feminist struggle across geopolitical borders through the

341
Massey, Space, Place, and Gender.
196
political imagination. As I discuss, Chicana creative writers marked a shift in what it
meant to be a Chicana feminist and/or a US feminist of color that paralleled increased
refugee flows from El Salvador and Guatemala.
342
Their feminist consciousness shifted
as they contrasted their own experiences with violence in the US with the circumstances
of displaced people from Central America. The arrival of Central American refugees and
immigrants changed how Chicanas conceptualized their own situation in the US as they
compared and contrasted their experiences to those of Central Americans in the US and
on the isthmus. The authors I draw on take little for granted, as they interrogate the
contradictions of solidarity, disappearance, motherhood, and torture.
As my chapters explain, these key terms represent themes that have been central
to the study of political violence and cultural politics in Latin America and the US in
several fields and disciplines, including Chicana/o studies, Latin/a American studies,
American studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, feminist theory, and ethnic studies.
Through a focus on solidarity, disappearance, motherhood, and torture, I explore the
details of how Moraga, Viramontes, Limón and Castillo respectively formulated ways of
understanding the civil wars from a Chicana feminist perspective that took international
issues as central to imagining liberation not only for Chicanas but for women confronting
articulated oppressions in the US and abroad. Through readings of Moraga, Viramontes,
Limón, and Castillo, I argue that Chicana literature theorizes and enacts a politics for

342
María Cristina García, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and
Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), Nora Hamilton and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla,
Seeking Community in a Global City: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2001).
197
liberation, where struggles over meaning take place as opposed to representing an already
established and unchanging social reality.
As they participate in the struggle over the meaning and representation of the civil
wars, Chicana creative writers envision alternatives to the repressive conditions that they
imagine in their work. They draw on the political imagination to “dream new
blueprints”
343
and develop a “vision of what it means to fully realize our humanity”
344
in
the context of incredible violence. Chicana creative writers imagine that by working in
solidarity across national borders, justice can be found for the families of the disappeared
and that those who have been tortured will find ethical answers to their demands. They
imagine that women can work together toward common goals across political borders
even when there are many risks and contradictions in that work.
By theorizing the political formation of the subjects of disappearance,
motherhood, and torture, Chicanas propose that the struggle for social justice requires
that they speak about the atrocities endured by others in ways that reveal that violence
which appears to be unrelated may actually be articulated and must be theorized as such
if liberation is to be achieved. Their writing goes beyond denouncement and seeks to
reimagine how the wars are understood with the intention that their reading audience will
by moved to take material action. As I discuss, Chicana feminists and political mothers
have done exactly that by engaging in a process of transformation that allows those who
claim these identities to demand and conceive of justice beyond individualized demands.

343
Moraga and Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, xxxviii-
xxxix.

344
Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 198.
198
In turn, this creates the conditions of possibility for finding common ground in the
struggle to end all forms of violence. These political imaginings are only one part of
understanding the cultural politics of the Central American civil wars. Vast amounts of
creative work was produced in the struggle over the meaning of the wars and the texts I
center here are only one piece of a much larger archive, which would be a productive site
for future research.
199
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Asset Metadata

Creator Esparza, Araceli (author)

Core Title Solidarity, violence, and the political imagination: Chicana literary imaginings of the Central American civil wars, 1981-2005

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2010-08

Publication Date 08/05/2010

Defense Date 05/18/2010

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

Tag Central America,Chicana feminism,Chicana/o literature,motherhood,OAI-PMH Harvest,political imagination,solidarity,torture

Place Name Central America (region), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee chair), McKenna, Teresa (committee chair), Gómez-Barris, Macarena (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member), Tongson, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email araceliesparza@gmail.com,esparza@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3293

Unique identifier UC1295601

Identifier etd-Esparza-3940 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-370738 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3293 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Esparza-3940.pdf

Dmrecord 370738

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Esparza, Araceli

Type texts

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

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu