Safeguarding El Salvador’s Transition To Peace And Democracy: A View From The Cultural And Political Magazine Tendencias (1991-2000)

This article examines the role that the cultural and political magazine Tendencias (1991-2000) played in El Salvador’s transition to peace. Specifically, it studies how Tendencias’s contributors tackled some of the key issues of the transition—the failure to reform the economy, the undermining of the peace process by economic and political elites, and the inability of the FMLN to respond to the new political situation—and argues that the magazine served as a counter to El Salvador’s culture of ideological entrenchment. By fostering democratic and rational-critical discussion, Tendencias opened up a new “public sphere” for El Salvador and gave voice to a vibrant and tenacious intellectual culture that has often been overlooked

Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El Material Humano And The Labyrinth Of Postwar Guatemala: On Ethics, Truth, And Justice

Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano (2009) grapples with the consequences of Guatemala’s violent past by probing into a once-secret police archive that brings into the present the sufferings of the past. This article demonstrates how the novel unsettles our easy assumptions regarding the relation between documentary truth and the notions of justice and reconciliation. By charting the protagonist’s intellectual and emotional conflicts, I argue that his crisis ultimately serves a homeopathic function that makes possible a special mode of ethical engagement, one which brings into fruitful tension two distinct modes of cognition—thought and affect—and is thus able to register the contradictions and nuances of the human reality of postwar Guatemala. By implication, I claim that the novel shows that an ethics based solely on documentary truths and simplistic conceptions of justice and reconciliation is insufficient, for it loses sight of the fact that such truths are always embedded in an ever-changing matrix of traumas, regrets, compassions, and enmities. El material humano, then, posits an ethics based not on historical truth but on the larger, more redemptive truth of the human predicament

La transición a la paz y la democracia en El Salvador: una mirada desde la revista cultural y política Tendencias (1991-2000)

This article examines the role that the cultural and political magazine Tendencias (1991-2000) played in El Salvador’s transition to peace. Specifically, it studies how Tendencias’s contributors tackled some of the key issues of the transition—the failure to reform the economy, the undermining of the peace process by economic and political elites, and the inability of the FMLN to respond to the new political situation—and argues that the magazineserved as a counter to El Salvador’s culture of ideological entrenchment. By fostering democratic and rational-critical discussion, Tendencias opened up a new “public sphere” for El Salvador and gave voice to a vibrant and tenacious intellectual culture that has often been overlooked.Este artículo analiza el papel que la revista cultural y política Tendencias (1991-2000) desempeñó durante la transición a la paz en El Salvador. En particular, estudia cómo los contribuyentes de la revista abordaron varios de los problemas principales de la transición —la falta de reforma económica, las socavaciones del proceso de paz por parte de la élite económica y política, la incapacidad del FMLN para adaptarse la nueva situación política— y argumenta que la revista ayudó a contrarrestar la ideologización de la cultura salvadoreña. Al promover la discusión crítica y democrática, Tendencias inauguró para El Salvador una nueva “esfera pública” y dio voz a una cultural intelectual enérgica y perseverante que tiende a quedar en el olvido

Crossing Mexico On La Bestia: The Central American Migrant Experience In The Documentary Films Which Way Home And Who Is Dayani Cristal?

This article examines two documentaries about the recent wave of Central American migrants who have attempted to reach the US by crossing Mexico atop the freight trains known as la Bestia. These films — Which Way Home (2009) by Rebecca Cammisa, and Who Is Dayani Cristal? (2013) by Marc Silver — reveal the human dimension of the Central American migration and bring to light the harsh realities that migrants encounter en route. Although these films are highly accomplished, their focus on the human dramas and immediate hazards of the journey gives little weight to the broader geopolitical issues and structural violence that have created the urgency to migrate. I contend that this is not a fault, but rather a virtue. For ultimately what these films aim to highlight is not so much the political as the tragic, that inscrutable and murky reality of human yearning and suffering. In doing so, these films help to recover aspects of the migrant experience that have been lost amid the cacophony of our present political culture

Trastornando La Jerarquía Humano-Animal: La Alienación De La Sociedad En La Obra De Claudia Hernández

Este artículo analiza cómo los cuentos de De fronteras (2007) de la escritora salvadoreña Claudia Hernández dan vida a una sociedad distópica que ha perdido su capacidad afectiva y que ha sido enajenada de su propia humanidad. El artículo argumenta que esto se logra a través de la incorporación de los animales como motivo literario. Como se mostrará, los cuentos ponen en práctica una inversión en la que los animales son humanizados y los seres humanos son deshumanizados. En esta inversión, los animales no solamente son más sensatos, compasivos y fieles que los humanos, sino que también son capaces de comprender y sentir el dolor de otros, aunque sean de otra especie. De esta forma, la obra de Hernández pone de relieve la alienación del individuo en una sociedad que padece de anemia afectiva y está anestesiada al sufrimiento ajeno

The Central American Novel

This chapter traces the development of the novel in Central America from the late nineteenth century to the present. It begins at the moment when romanticism and modernismo are on the wane and Central American writers begin to take up the tradition of social realism to engage with the region’s military regimes and agro-export dependency. From there, the chapter examines the rise of the testimonial novel and the literary transformations that took place from the 1960s to the 1980s, as writers grappled with the wave of state terror and left-wing insurrections that overtook the region. Lastly, the chapter surveys the key novels that address the aftermath of war and the profound social transformations ushered in by Central America’s entry into neoliberal modernity

The Ethical Question In Postwar Central America And The Mutilated Good In Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El Cojo Bueno

This article examines how the novel El cojo bueno (1996) by Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa posits an ethics that reconstellates the motifs and assumptions that have informed the revolutionary and transition-to-peace efforts of Central America. Through a careful reading of the text, I demonstrate how the novel pushes against the limits of the neoliberal ‘culture of peace’ and gives expression to an ethics that is attuned to the complex sociopolitical conditions of the postwar period. More specifically, I show how the novel develops a moral vision that registers but also resists the impunity, violence, and social disaffection that have devastated the region. The novel dramatizes what the moral life has come to mean in postwar Central America, namely, that it is a matter of grappling with the antinomies of freedom and unfreedom, of compassion and cold survivalism, and refusing to rest easy with either option. Ultimately, El cojo bueno marks a key moment when a new conception of ethics begins to take shape in postwar Central American literature

On Aesthetic Experience And Trauma In Postwar Central America: The Case Of Horacio Castellanos Moya\u27s El Asco And Claudia Hernández\u27s De Fronteras

This article examines what it means to write literature in postwar Central America, where conditions for its production and reception have been anything but favorable. Of particular interest is the problem of the collective trauma brought on by the region\u27s long history of war, violence, and economic precarity. The article argues that the literary works that have most resonated in the postwar context are those which not only accord with the psychically numbing experience of trauma, but also enable the reader to gain conscious, critical awareness of that experience. To illustrate this claim, the article studies Horacio Castellanos Moya\u27s El asco and Claudia Hernández\u27s De fronteras. It demonstrates how these works, through their seemingly anti-aesthetic form and style, manage to produce an aesthetic experience in a context where people\u27s capacity for emotional and reflective engagement has been severely diminished. Out of this analysis emerges a notion of the postwar aesthetic as being one which makes do with present forms of life—its traumas and anxieties, its violence and sordidness—and unlocks the emancipatory potential that lies within them