To speak of a group of authors of South American descent, born or living in the United States, is to undertake no small task in disseminating the complexity of their literary worlds in diverse historical contexts that are often unknown or unrecognized by U.S. literary scholars. Yet, if one looks more closely at the commonalities as well as the differences that unite this disparate group of writers, one should consider a shared history of colonization and immigration to and from the South American homeland and heritage to the United States. In the nineteenth century, when colonial Spain lost the last of its colonies to the South American independence movements led by criollos, various republics were created: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In the case of Portugal, Brazil emerged. The political independence that these nation-states experienced from Spain and Portugal, however, did not translate into human freedom for all citizens within the national parameters because class differences, racial division, and gender inequality continued to plague each nation state. Furthermore, in the twentieth century, many South American nations underwent civil wars due to economic disparities that resulted in internal migrations, usually from the small towns and cities in the countryside to the greater metropolis. If economic and political strife continued, disempowered groups of people emigrated to the United States, not only for better economic opportunities, but also for human survival due to political violence. As will be discussed in this chapter, military governments, many of which were supported by U.S. intervention, swarmed various nations from the 1960s through the 1990s. This legacy of colonialism and neoliberal dictatorship extends into the twenty-first century not only in these ten nations of South America, but in the diasporas of these communities, many of which are found throughout the United States as a consequence of migrations.
As a result of geographic movements, be they economic migrations or political relocations from South America to the United States, people of these diasporic communities experienced various cultures and languages simultaneously. Some authors in this essay left their homeland in South America as adults, forming a new residence in the United States but longing for the familiarity of their South American culture through nostalgia. Others came as young children and could arguably pertain to a 1.5 generation, as Pérez-Firmat has observed for the Cuban exile experience in his Life on the Hyphen. Yet, another group can be said to be “in between” two cultures and two frames of mind, switching between Spanish and English and other languages with ease. This essay addresses diverse South American experiences and their points of contact between the homeland and the United States, or, the interstices of what it means to live and think at the border of two nations, two languages, and at least two cultures.
Another element that the writers in this chapter share is the notion of translation, be it linguistic, cultural, or social, as they cross transnationally between South America and the United States. Whether the authors are Spanish or Portuguese-dominant, they may be interpreting U.S. experiences in their fiction for a South America–based audience. Similarly, those authors who are trained formally in English may also be denizens of translating an “imaginary” homeland in South America for audiences in the United States, as Salman Rushdie has commented in reference to his India as a postcolonial subject.
The writers in this essay also reflect on the experience of trauma because many underwent physical or psychological torture as they experienced a dictatorship or a civil war that stripped them of their literary voices through censorship, exile, or immigration. In terms of gender, women and LGBTQ communities had to confront discriminatory treatment in theory and practice that have disabled them from participating as full citizens in their homeland or heritage of South America or as people of color in the United States. Trauma takes on the form of the emotional and psychological pain of the effects of war as well as the physical violence against women’s bodies, queers, youth, marginalized ethnic groups, and political groups contesting military dictatorships.
Many authors in this essay often present an alternative history of South America and its diaspora, due to periods of exile in response to dictatorship, dirty wars, and civil unrest of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay. At times, their works engage the relative class privilege of displaced intellectuals who landed positions in academic institutions in the United States. At other times the texts may speak to a position of negotiating marginality from the center. Some authors search for ways to convey the melancholy of tango, inexpressible longing of saudade, human trafficking for capital, Andean scenes of civil conflict, torture, or massacres, in which the U.S. government was often complicit. Due to the memory of these traumatic experiences, the writers in this essay find themselves as mediators between the United States and South America. In order to understand these transnational experiences, I outline a map in my discussion of the writers and their texts by nationality and national heritage.
In the case of Chile, texts by Isabel Allende, Marjorie Agosín, and Ariel Dorfman examine the role of language, culture, and literature as a response to repression and censorship. Originally writing in Spanish, these aforementioned authors seek refuge in the Spanish language and, through this medium, translate the horrors of violence they lived under a dictatorship. Relocating upon the arrival of the Pinochet dictatorship in her native Chile during the early 1970s, Isabel Allende and her family became exiled in Venezuela, where she began her career as a novelist and led the boom of Latin American women writers with her successful novel The House of the Spirits (1982), which was later translated into numerous languages, including English. This first novel covers three generations of women who struggle against patriarchal oppression, especially a dictatorship that alludes to the Pinochet regime. Her interest in the South American presence in the United States, however, became apparent when she published Daughter of Fortune (1999) and its sequel Portrait in Sepia (2000), which chronicle the presence of Chilean immigrants in contact with multiethnic California during the gold rush period in the mid nineteenth century, and in particular with Chinese immigrants. By employing the trope of genealogy, Allende reconfigures the role of women as central to these two novels in which the heroines must resist long-standing patriarchy. More recently, Allende takes a transnational perspective in her novel Maya’s Notebook (2011), which tracks the trials and tribulations of a Chilean-descent teenager caught in a whirlwind of misfortunes as she travels between Berkeley, California, and Chiloé, an island off the coast of Chile. While Allende began her career as a journalist, and then became an internationally acclaimed novelist, she never abandoned her chronicling of women’s perspectives on turbulent history or the pursuit of social justice in the face of human-rights violations.
Likewise, fellow Chilean native Marjorie Agosín and Argentine Chilean Ariel Dorfman have also committed themselves to seek social justice and to advocate for human rights in the face of dictatorships such as the Pinochet regime that affected Chile for sixteen years (1973–1989). In particular, they have confronted an additional oppression for their religious and cultural background as Jewish Latinas/os, be it in the United States or in South America. Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1999) has been hailed as a classic memoir of negotiating multiple displacements across generations between Chile, Europe, and the United States. After his family fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia in the early twentieth century, his parents escaped the dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s. A prolific scholar in the field of Latin American cultural and literary studies, Dorfman publishes another memoir called Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (2011) about the trauma of his exile experience from Chile and the consequences for his wife and children.
A prolific writer, scholar, and activist, Marjorie Agosín is considered one of the foremost champions of human rights, especially oppression affecting women, children, Jewish communities, and other marginalized groups. As a poet, Agosín has recuperated the silenced voices of victims of the Holocaust such as that of Anne Frank, of Chilean women artisans of arpilleras – brightly colored patchwork depictions of life of the oppressed under the dictatorship – and of women who have denounced femicides in Juárez. As an editor, she has participated in various collections dedicated to the struggles of Latin American and Latina women of Jewish descent of various generations. She is also interested in the motif of travel; she chronicles the voyages of Latin American women since the nineteenth century, especially those from South America. Through genealogy and gender, Agosín and her family suffered double migrations as her grandparents escaped the horrors of the Holocaust before and during the Second World War and then again when her parents were forced to migrate when the Pinochet dictatorship emerged in Chile in the 1970s. In “South American Latino/a Writers in the United States,” I explain that Agosín identifies as a Latina in the United States in her memoirs because she experiences discrimination based on language and ethnicity. While her earlier poetry and activist collections expressed her concern for human rights, her more recent young-adult novel I Lived on Butterfly Hill (2014) traces the emotional trauma of a young girl who must flee from Chile as the country enters a dictatorship that pursues intellectuals of dissent, something that directly affects the protagonist’s parents’ due to their leftist political position. This narrative also explores the dilemmas of a young Jewish girl who grows up in a predominantly Catholic community in Valparaíso, Chile, and who later becomes an immigrant, foreigner, and outsider; she is forced to live with her exiled aunt in a small town in Maine in the United States to escape torture and violence, psychological as well as physical, plaguing many Chilean exiles in the 1970s. At one point, the character’s aunt reminds her bilingually, “Oh, Celeste. Por eso, se llama exilio. That’s why they call it exile. You belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time” (280). Since the young protagonist has been displaced from her home due to political circumstances, she must reflect on what it means to be removed from her homeland temporarily, but eventually returns when political matters have stabilized.
The Dirty War in Argentina (1976–1983) sent many writers into exile from Argentina to the United States, particularly Luisa Valenzuela, María Negroni, and Sergio Waisman. Although this group varies generationally and stylistically, all have in common the experience of writing from the North to the South, as critic and writer Sergio Waisman points out in his essay, “Argentine Writers in the U.S.: Writing South, Living North,” particularly if they made their permanent residence in the United States. Argentine politics, history, and culture during the Dirty War have made these authors serve as translators of the trauma of censorship and violence in their literary texts, not only for an Argentine audience in Spanish but also for a U.S. readership in English as they cross nations through translations.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentine journalist and novelist Luisa Valenzuela has been hailed as a writer who denounces the military dictatorship in her country as well as an outspoken defender of human rights, especially crimes committed against women, globally. Earning fellowships such as a Fulbright, Valenzuela was able to travel to France to work as a journalist and translator and then to the United States to continue her education. Once the Dirty War began in the 1970s, Valenzuela moved as an exiled writer to New York City where she taught at Columbia University and New York University as a visiting professor. In her short fiction and novels she uses memory to recover the silenced voices of victims (i.e. women, opponents to the dictatorship) during internal civil conflicts in Argentina. In novels such as Como en la Guerra (1977) and The Lizard’s Tail (1983), Valenzuela critiques the patriarchal form of government during the civil conflict in Argentina, especially the gender inequality that led to the violent abuse and sexual exploitation against women. Known for her mixture of fantasy with reality, Valenzuela’s short fiction collection Other Weapons (1985) is especially attentive to the role of women whose bodies and minds were tortured during the military dictatorship. During her residency in the United States for almost a decade, Valenzuela developed an interest in crime fiction with her Black Novel with Argentines (1992). Situated in New York City, this narrative looks at Argentine exiles who are haunted by the violent past of the Dirty War.
A poet, essayist, novelist, and translator, Argentine María Negroni is concerned with displacement, nostalgia, and poetic experimentation in her reflection of the Dirty War in her works. She has made a career as a university professor and a home for herself in the United States after having received a doctoral degree in Latin American literature from Columbia University. In her essay “Cultura latinoamericana en Nueva York” in the collection Ciudad gótica (1994), Negroni calls attention to the need to be able to define one’s culture and its aesthetics rather than play into an exoticism dominated by U.S. standards. In Night Journey (2002), the poetic voice explores the topics of travel and exile as she searches for a home. Negroni has also created a Buenos Aires trilogy where she addresses Argentine history of the Dirty War in a variety of genres. In collaboration with Jorge Macchi in Buenos Aires Tour (2006), she provides a visual poetic guide to the capital, and to its internationally renowned dance form, tango. In the novel La anunciación (2007), Negroni examines the effects of the dictatorship of the 1970s on civilians. Finally in the poetry collection Andanza (2009), also translated in English as Tango Lyrics (2013), she experiments with the tango form in verse by taking the eight basic steps in the dance and translating them into eight stanzas in her poems. The poetic voice also explores the transnational aspect of living between cities as well as nations, especially between Buenos Aires and New York, having the music of tango as an instrumental symbol of nostalgia for the homeland. Negroni’s published works in Spanish have been well-received in Spanish-speaking nations, but the English translations of her works have broadened her readership in the United States.
Sergio Waisman, a critic, novelist, professor, and translator, offers a different perspective from the previous authors of Argentine background because he actually came of age in both Argentina and the United States. Born in New York City in 1967, he lived in France one year as a child learning basic French and then spent his earlier formative years in Buenos Aires, where he attended school until the age of nine and became familiar with Argentine culture and history and was completely immersed in the Spanish language. When the Dirty War broke out in 1976, Waisman and his family could no longer remain safe in Argentina under the military dictatorship and were forced to leave to the United States where he continued his formal education in English until he received his doctoral degree in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In his first novel, Leaving (2004), published originally in English, Waisman captures a semiautobiographical transnational genealogy that can be traced back to his grandparents, who escaped violent anti-Semitism in Poland in the 1930s by immigrating to Argentina, at a moment in time when a vibrant Yiddish community flourished culturally with newspapers and other cultural practices to preserve the Jewish heritage. Waisman’s novel also chronicles his parents’ assimilation to Argentine culture through involvement with leftist politics, the Spanish language, musical tastes in tango and folklore, and soccer fever. In the protagonist’s generation, he, himself, becomes a migrant in the United States when he travels numerous times as an adult from San Diego to Berkeley to Colorado and Rhode Island to name a few locales. In the Spanish version of this novel, Irse (2010), Waisman translates his own work and restores many characters to their original environs in Argentina.
Uruguay is another Southern Cone nation that suffered repression and migratory displacement under a dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1984. Of Uruguayan parentage and raised in the United States from the age of ten, Carolina De Robertis captures crucial events in Uruguayan history from European immigration and internal migration to the capital city of Montevideo in the early twentieth century, exile during Peronismo in the mid-twentieth century, and, finally, the turbulent period of the dictatorship in her internationally bestselling novel The Invisible Mountain (2009). A novelist, editor, and literary translator, she examines the effects of the Dirty War on the children of the disappeared victims of the dictatorship in her second novel Perla (2012). In her award-winning third novel, The Gods of Tango (2015), De Robertis depicts a multicultural Buenos Aires as her characters travel from there to Montevideo; the formation of ethnic communities and gender relationships in the early twentieth century contributes to the making of the revered musical and dance genre of tango on both sides of the River Plate border. An advocate of immigrant, LGBTQ, and women’s rights, De Robertis does not refrain from critiquing various forms of social injustice in her fiction and nonfiction. In 2017, she edited the epistolary collection Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times, bringing together a wide array of writers, many of whom are U.S. Latinas/os, to reflect on the past, current, and future political climate in the United States.
In texts by Peruvian and Peruvian American authors with residences and migrations to the United States during different periods in the twentieth century, diversity pervades as well. Immigration is a common factor for most authors in this group at different levels. Some moved with their families before the Immigration Act of 1965 while others left for the United States during the civil war that tore the nation into fragmented political factions and culminated with the Shining Path years (1980–1992). Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that a colonial mentality has existed in Peru since the Spanish Conquest until the twenty-first century. Walter Ventosilla and Fredy Roncalla, who were born and raised primarily in Peru, immigrated to the United States as young adults. The experiences they capture in their narratives reflect another complicated portrait of migration as they represent the social inequalities that affect Andean indigenous people who originate from the sierra (Peruvian Andes) and must often migrate to the capital of Lima and then, as immigrants to the United States, specifically to New York City.
A short-fiction writer, novelist, playwright, and theatre director/producer, Walter Ventosilla began his career in the arts as an actor at the age of fourteen with the theatre group Yego in Lima, Peru, his birthplace. As a young adult, he became a founder of his own theatre group, Septiembre, before studying literature formally at the Universidad Nacional de San Marcos in Lima. Prior to settling in New York City, he lived and studied in France while working with local theatre groups. He has published fiction extensively in Peru as well as directed and produced plays in New York City. The short-fiction collection Cuentos de tierra y eucaliptos (1999) takes place in the Andean region of Peru and critiques the neocolonial modes that still influence the native people in their everyday lives. By contrast, the collection of short fiction Asunción (1995) addresses relationships among Peruvians who must negotiate gender and race matters in urban as well as Andean contexts. While his novel Luis, Bandolero, Luis (2005) follows the trials and tribulations of an Andean protagonist resembling Robin Hood in search of social justice by helping the disempowered at the expense of the wealthy, his short-fiction collection A quien corresponda (2008) crosses national borders into the United States by demonstrating how Peruvian immigrants must confront an aggressive New York metropolis by trying to practice their art while facing discrimination from other immigrants. Ventosilla exemplifies a unique voice that spans internal migrations within Peru as well as the immigrant experiences that move from the Andes or Lima to the United States.
A cultural commentator, fiction writer, and scholar, Fredy Amilcar Roncalla represents a distinctive example of the Peruvian diaspora in the United States as a trilingual speaker who incorporates his three languages – Quechua, Spanish, and English – into his writing. Living in the United States from a young age, Roncalla has become a transnational ambassador across cultures, languages, and nations. In the autobiographical essay, “Fragments for a Story of Forgetting and Remembrance” (2000), Roncalla reveals his personal experiences in traveling between languages by learning a formal Spanish in school and an oral Quechua in the community of Chalhuanca, a small provincial capital and his birthplace in the Peruvian Andes. As a critic of Andean culture and literature, he engages the Quechua-speaking world in his scholarship with works such as Escritos mitimaes: hacia una poética andina postmoderna (1998) by emphasizing that the culture is constantly shifting and transforming. In Hawansuyo ukun words (2014), Roncalla demonstrates how Andean culture has been affected by modernization, globalization, and immigration. Whether it is economics or politics, many Andean people have been forced to leave their homes in Peru to travel not only to the United States, but globally to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Roncalla also views technology such as the Internet and Youtube as important resources in disseminating Andean cultural practices such as music (e.g., huayno) throughout the world. At the same time, Andean migrants and culture undergo their own transformations in their new places of residence. The trilingual Roncalla recuperates and remembers his mother tongue, Quechua, to theorize about Andean culture, exemplifying his role as a cultural activist.
In the twenty-first century, Peruvian American writers who were educated formally in English in U.S. institutions have intervened in U.S. national literary circles beginning in 2001 with the publication of Marie Arana’s memoir, American Chica and followed by two other important Peruvian American writers, Daniel Alarcón and Carmen Giménez Smith. These authors recover experiences within Peruvian and U.S. social and historical contexts to give their narratives, essays, and poetry a transnational quality by crossing as hybrid authors writing from the North to the South as others in this essay do as well. By doing so, they entertain a wider reading publics across nations and borders as cultural translators who render South American history in short direct English sentences, instead of as literary translations of texts marked by Spanish’s more effusive sentence structure and different grammar.
Critic, journalist, historian, and author Marie Arana was born and raised during her childhood in Peru and then moved with her family to the United States where she was educated. Due to these circumstances, she holds a unique position in bridging two very different cultures by writing in English about her Peruvian heritage. In her memoir American Chica (2001), Arana focuses on the coming of age of a bicultural female protagonist whose family migrated from Peru to the United States in 1959 when she was ten years old. In addition to mapping a transnational genealogy, Arana provides context on Peruvian history and U.S.–Peruvian relations that led to her Peruvian father’s academic studies and residence in the United States in the 1940s. During this time, he met her American mother before embarking on a decade-long journey back to his homeland in Peru, where their daughter/narrator Marisi Arana was born. This narrative vividly portrays the emotional trauma of living between two worlds, two languages, and two ways of thinking. The protagonist must also negotiate gender roles between her father’s Peruvian side and her mother’s American ways of fiercely practicing independence and asserting women’s rights. Arana has also published two novels: Cellophane (2006) and Lima Nights (2008), an award-winning historical biography Bolívar: American Liberator (2013), and scholarly introductions to various cultural books about Peru. While the novels focus on family relationships in various historical contexts from the rubber boom to the Shining Path period, it is in her biography of Simón Bolívar where Arana finds the heart and soul, not only of the liberator, but also of the geographical landscape of South America, a continent that gave birth to six republics, including Peru, and consequently, to the migrations and formations of diasporas in the United States. In this important biography, I suggest that Arana is translating South American history for an English readership. Furthermore, Arana’s role as an editor of “Book World” at The Washington Post has also enabled her to introduce other Latina/o authors since the 1990s.
Following in similar footsteps, the Peruvian-born author Daniel Alarcón emigrated with his family at the age of three to Birmingham, Alabama, at the dawn of the Shining Path civil war in 1980. Alarcón’s fiction originally written in English has been translated into Spanish and numerous languages. When his collection of short fiction War by Candlelight (2005) was published, he received praise in both the United States and Peru for representing the migratory experiences of Peruvians in the United States and Peru during the Shining Path years as is evidenced by his short stories, “July 28, 1980, Lima, Peru” and “War by Candlelight.” More poignantly, Alarcón captures the emotional trauma of civil war and its effects on the civilians caught in the crossfire of fighting enemies, be it in the Andean regions or in the coastal capital, Lima. Alarcón has developed a greater following after the publication of his novels, Lost City Radio (2007) and At Night They Walk in Circles (2013), both of which take place exclusively in Peru and translate the effects of war and migrations on the families of its victims within the Peruvian context. Since Alarcón publishes in English about Peruvian experiences that do not necessarily involve crossing national borders, Alarcon’s consciousness as a U.S. Latino author does. Alarcón has also developed an audio podcast called Radio Ambulante, launched in 2012, to continue with transnational and translational storytelling but on a greater scale. In this narrative form of social media, Alarcón and a team of journalists and translators collect stories predominantly from the Spanish-speaking world, including the United States, to transmit via podcast to a global audience. Essentially, anyone who has access to Internet can participate in listening to the stories and educate themselves on various cultural or social matters. The issues discussed range from immigration to transgender identity to nostalgia for the homeland exemplified in one story by the Peruvian waltz, “Todos vuelven.” In this last narrative innovation, Alarcón unites his training in journalism with fiction writing.
Another important author of the Peruvian diaspora in the United States, Carmen Giménez Smith adds a refreshing voice to the genres of poetry and the essay. She reconfigures questions of gender, place, and poetic aesthetics by challenging representations of women, be it in historical contexts or mythologies. Born in New York City in 1971, Giménez Smith advances a feminist consciousness that is in dialogue as much with American women’s poetry of the 1960s and 1970s as with Latin American vanguard poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. While her hybrid poetic voice jumps through various time periods and landscapes in her earlier poetry collections The City She Was (2011) and Goodbye, Flicker (2012), her memoir Bringing Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (2010) displays an unsentimental look at women’s roles in everyday life, especially negotiating the tasks of mothering and writing. She interrogates the myths, the glorification, and realities in an intimate voice by complicating the politics of being a mother, conscientious of the fact that gender does matter. Unapologetic and direct, Giménez Smith brings an unflinching perspective to her role as a woman poet who transcends various historical periods to incorporate female archetypes such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and Malinche in her collection Milk and Filth (2013). At one point, the poetic voice reflects, “I want my problems to be Wallace Stevens, but they’re Anne Sexton” (36). This confession shows that she is constantly reformulating her aesthetics and feminism. In the coedited anthology Angels of the Americlypse (2014), Giménez Smith and John Chávez present an array of new Latina/o texts that constitute an innovative direction in Latina/o poetry through global influences, genre crossings, and gender in the twenty-first century.
Similar to the civil war in Peru, Colombia also experienced a turbulent past of political violence in the 1980s that left an exodus of migrations to the United States. The writers of the Colombian diaspora reflect on how politics in public and in private can play a significant role in the everyday lives of individuals and their families. An essayist, novelist, and poet, Jaime Manrique is not only a pioneer author of Colombian American literature, but also at the vanguard of redefining gender roles and expectations in his historical fiction and autobiographies across transnational lines. In “South American Latino/a Authors,” I situated Manrique’s novels, Latin Moon in Manhattan (1992) and Twilight at the Equator (1997), as pioneer novels in understanding the Colombian diaspora in the United States, especially in New York City in the 1980s. In this chapter, I expand on Manrique as a significant voice for gay Latino writing who disrupts the patriarchal domination of the Latin American and Latino literary canons. In Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig and Me (1999), he examines the biographies of gay writers of the Spanish-speaking world such as Cuban Reinaldo Arenas, Argentine Manuel Puig, and Spaniard Federico García Lorca. Similar to Manrique, all of these writers lived at various times of their lives, as exiles or immigrants, in New York City. By constructing this literary tradition of gay writing in the Americas in relationship to himself, Manrique reveals his identity as a gay Latino writer who dialogues openly with other gay authors before him in letters and rejects any form of censorship and oppression against people of color’s sexual orientation. Manrique also provides an alternative perspective regarding gender roles and marginalized women in history when he recreates a fictional account of the Ecuadorian freedom fighter Manuela Sáenz in the novel Our Lives Are the Rivers (2006). Throughout South American history, official textbooks uniformly praise male figures such as the South American liberator Simón Bolívar of Venezuela. Manrique, however, recovers and credits Bolívar’s great love, Manuela Sáenz, who actually saved his life on many occasions during the liberation wars in the nineteenth century. Manrique revitalizes this great romance in South American history to demonstrate that women were thinkers and activists who fought for South American independence not with physical violence, but with their intelligence and resourcefulness. Yet, they have not always been recognized as such. Similar to his work on gay Latino writing, Manrique explores the possibilities of expanding literary history by focusing on marginal groups such as women who hardly receive their dues for their efforts, especially in South American culture, history, and politics.
Belonging to a younger generation of women writers in Colombian American literature, Patricia Engel was born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey. She received much critical acclaim for her first major literary work of fiction, Viva (2010), which crosses genres between a short-fiction collection and a novel. In this narrative, Engel subtly refers to Colombia’s civil war of the 1980s to understand the context behind drug dealers, prostitution transactions, and illicit deals that involve the governments of the United States as well as Colombia. More importantly, Engel excavates how patriarchal domination and censorship in these spaces have detrimental effects for individuals, especially immigrant women from Colombia, a significant number of whom are violently kidnapped and sold into prostitution as if they were commodities. Once again, women’s bodies and minds suffer torture and trauma beyond their control. Rather than entertain a melodrama of corruption and violence, Engel focuses on the intimacy of female friendship between two women, a Colombian immigrant and a Colombian American, to show that transnational alliances are possible at the grassroots levels among individuals to combat the physical and sexual violence against women enforced by drug dealers and corrupt officials. In her first novel, It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris (2013), Engel traverses national boundaries from the perspective of a female protagonist who is educated and raised in the United States by Colombian immigrant parents. Different from her first fiction, Engel’s protagonist travels to live abroad in Paris, France, for a year before settling back in the United States to return to her family. Instead of presenting the romance and idealization of Paris, Engel shows the complicated realities of living in this multiethnic global city of exiles and immigrants in the twenty-first century. In both works of fiction, Engel brings to the forefront the effects of civil wars and migration that the Colombian diaspora, especially women, experience in the United States and beyond.
Unlike Manrique and Engel, Colombian-Cuban American author Daisy Hernández engages a dual heritage from the Caribbean as well as South America to explore the interstices of gender/bisexuality, migration, and translation in her memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014). In this narrative, Hernández unsettles the representation of a single national heritage as the daughter of a Colombian mother and Cuban father as she unravels her bisexual/queer identity from the local home context of North Bergen, New Jersey, to the Americas. Hernández further demonstrates how Latinas of multiple cultures and sexual orientations seek community and a sense of belonging as they negotiate their situational identities. Even though Daisy Hernández was born in the United States in 1975, I suggest that she is a hybrid product of various national belongings, including Colombia and Cuba. While she learned spoken Spanish at home from her Colombian mother and Cuban father, she also became immersed in the English language in the U.S. school system at the age of five, making her a bilingual heritage speaker. Despite this gradual process of assimilation into U.S. culture, Hernández maintained cultural practices such as the Spanish language, storytelling, and spirituality of Santería from her national heritages. As the daughter of working-class South American and Caribbean immigrants who met in the United States, Hernandez also became a linguistic and cultural translator for her Spanish-speaking parents and the English-speaking bureaucracy of school, social services, and other institutions at various moments in her life. In the essay, “Las lesbianas are on the Other Side” (2000), Hernández reflects on the role of languages in her life: “English had given me freedom but it had also alienated me from my family …. I say very little in Spanish about my career, my dreams, my lovers …. For my parents there will always be sides of me that exist only in translation” (141). Upon learning English, Hernández’s world splits temporally/spatially between the past associated with Spanish and certain limitations concerning sexual orientation and goals and the present/future in English which brings her sexual independence but also causes emotional fragmentation between her and her parents. She realizes that she cannot share all the intimate parts of her life with them.
In conclusion, the South American-descent writers in this chapter unite in bringing a new vision to transnational American literature and contemporary world literature with stories/narratives to challenge the limited representation of South American culture, history, and politics and its diaspora that circulate via media in the United States. Within this tradition, I further suggest that South American Latina/o authors, those educated during their formative years in the United States, contest and revise authoritative perspectives from the government or patriarchal systems in both their homelands because they belong to multiple national belongings as they travel across nations. They are broadening the canon of North American literature from the United States to include a fuller version of their South American cultural heritage in English. In addition, some of their texts are also in dialogue with a South American readership if they are translated into Spanish, giving them a wider audience because their texts will serve as bridges across the Americas. As part of a larger tradition of the South American exile and im/migrant writings, these authors add another dimension of heterogeneity to the current Latina/o literary discourse.