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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
According to some chronicles of the Spanish Conquest, the violent arrival of the Conquerors to the Andes in the sixteenth century led to sex-dissident people who lived outside the dominant European cisheteropatriarchal model being burned at the stake. This act burned more than the flesh; it also charred practices, ways of life, and textualities, leaving an emptiness and a trauma that would mark the future literatures of the Andean region.
This book cannot repair those pre-sodomite texts and bodies. It seeks instead to reconsider the value of the ash, a metaphor that allows for a critical and contradictory reading of sexual dissidences in the Andean region in the twentieth century, beyond both multiculturalism and the wake of a globalized LGBTI movement. Through a comparative analysis, and drawing on theoretical perspectives such as anticoloniality, feminisms, and cuir (rather than queer) theories, the book aims to understand the value of a series of complex texts in which dissident subjectivities, practices, and desires help to broaden the understanding of the Andean.
Winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize, the book was praised by the jury for the paradoxical and provocative way that it struggles against the abyss of past destruction and reflects on the contribution of the Global South to the often uniformist thinking around the body and its intersections.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword – Joseph Pierce
From these flames another world
Ashen memories, future dreams
Faggotry, re-sent(i)ment, and
loca
-lized counter-canons
Sashaying through this book
Jaime Bayly’s discreet mestizaje
Puruma feminism and Julieta Paredes
Fernando Vallejo’s sub-Andeanity
Adalberto Ortiz and the Tunda
Instructions for Reading this Book: By Way of an Introduction
0.1 On those chronicles. On those sodomites. On those ashes.
0.2 On the range and contradiction of the Andes. On Cusco-centrism. On the deviation of sexual-dissident storytelling.
0.3 On gender and sexual dissidence in the Andes. On Andeansodomite time. On the (hungry) methodology of the ash.
0.4 On this edition. On language. On its smaller and greater limitations.
Notes
1 Re-sent(i)ment of the Andean Literary Canon: Proposal for a Heterofagcontradictory Reading through Pablo Palacio
1.1 Introduction: retelling the story of the literary canon through theory.
1.2
Loca
-lizing and re-sent(i)ment. A counter-canonical proposal.
1.3 Exemplifying the re-sent(i)ment of the canon: understandings between Hispan(oamerican)ism, gay and lesbian studies, and Latin Amercanisms.
1.4 Proposals for bodily readings of the canon.
1.4.1 The canon’s non-erection and the sabotaging of certain desires of the macho reader. Proposal for a bodily reading (1)
.
1.4.2 When the order of the text ought not to follow the order of the body. Proposal for a bodily reading (2)
.
1.4.3 A library of one’s own, or when texts have the properties of bodies. Proposal for a bodily reading (3)
.
1.5 The re-sent(i)ment of the Andean canon and sexual dissidence. Ash as yeast.
1.6 Sensorial geographies: the heterogenous and contradictory model of Antonio Cornejo Polar.
1.7 Strategic re-sent(i)ments. Pablo Palacio: a
camp
way into the canon of sexual dissidence.
1.8 The re-sent(i)ment of contradictory
hetero
geneity and the subjective carbon copy. A heterofagcontradictory proposal of the subject and Andean literatures.
1.9 After re-sent(i)memt: mirrors and suspension points.
Notes
2
Mestizaje
’s Back Door: Crossings in the Narrative of Jaime Bayly, from Homo to Gay to Bi
2.1 Authorial bipolarities: carrying Jaime Bayly to Andean land.
2.2 The invisibilities of Latin American
mestizaje
. The recovery of the non-hetero mestizo experience.
2.3 The butt cheeks and butthole of
mestizaje
, that impure place of intermediate speech
2.4
No se lo digas a nadie
: the pre-gay requirement to spread out in
mestizaje
.
2.5 Joaquín’s little ass: a story of homoerotic rupture.
2.6 Modes of discourse divided: understanding urban pre-gay reciprocity.
2.7 Narrative and authorial bisexuality: mestizo spirit and weakness in
La noche es virgen
.
2.8 Final notes: reconsidering sex-dissident
mestizaje
(with Bayly?).
Notes
3 Julieta Paredes: Rearranging the Lesbian Aymara Body through Devilish Writing
3.1 Entrées. Translations and textual prisons: reconsidering the flesh, the text, and the Aymara dust.
3.2 On divided writings and collective authorships: turning the gaze toward the devilish Julieta Paredes.
3.3 Simulacra and absences: the hiding places of words.
3.4 Ways of writing as lesbian and Aymara: writing poetry from the myth of
puruma
.
3.5 A shared
puruma
: Aymara women’s communal authorships.
3.6 The slippery reconstruction of the body in the text.
3.7 Epilogue, 2021. The problem of cyclical contemporary violence: forms of care for the feminist, Aymara, lesbian body.
Notes
4 Writing at the Andean Limits: Decadence, Migration, and AIDS-Reciprocity in the Writing of Fernando Vallejo’s Self
4.1 On sub-Andeaneity: a way of reading from the Andean margins.
4.2 The decadence of the Andean: the unbridgeable ravines of the sub-Andean homomestizo.
4.3 Discontinuous crossings of the gay: nomadic contradictory heterofaggeneity and the slip of the word.
4.4 Violence and inclination: navigating the abyss of AIDS in the Andes through reciprocity and careless care.
Notes
5 From Queer to
Cuy(r)
? The Bewitching Proposal to
Entundar
in the Literature of Adalberto Ortiz
5.1 The mess of queer/
cuir
theories. Circulation and Andean counter-geneaology: the case of
cuy(r)
.
5.2 In the interstices of skin and delight: Adalberto Ortiz and the possibility of thinking sexual dissidence.
5.3 The Tunda: on different meanings of the body and deliberately bad translation in the passage from orality to writing.
5.4 On childhood and its (no) future: trauma in Afro-Andean bodies of the Pacific north coast.
5.5 By way of an ending. The promise of
entundamiento
/bewitching: why
entundar(se)
/bewitching (one another) must come before
entender(se)
/understanding (one another).
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1
Table 2
List of Illustrations
Instructions for Reading this Book: By Way of an Introduction
Figures 1 and 2.
El infierno o las llamas infernales
[
Hell or the Infernal Flames
]. Hernando de la Cruz, 1620. Oil on canvas.
Figure 3.
Soy hueco (sobre el tiempo sodomitandino)
[
I Am a Hole (on Andeansodomite Time)
]. Stephano Espinoza, 2021. Oil on canvas.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Diego Falconí Trávez,
From Ashes to Text
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Karima Lazali,
Colonia Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Maboula Soumahoro,
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
From Ashes to Text
Andean Literature of Sexual Dissidence in the 20th Century
Diego Falconí Trávez
Translated by Carrie Hamilton
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in Spanish as De las cenizas al texto by Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2016
Copyright © Diego Falconí, 2022
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
This book was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize in 2016.
Excerpt from Antonio Cornejo Polar, Writing in the Air, trans. Lynda J. Jentsch. English translation copyright 2013, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the Publisher. www.dukeupress.edu
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5015-9 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5016-6 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930847
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Reinaldo Arenas
Acknowledgments
This book, a cherished child that was conceived between Barcelona, Quito, Poitiers, and Mexico City, and saw the light in Cuba, could not have been written without the support of a number of people. I want to thank Meri Torras, Rosemarie Terán, María Elena Porras, Antonia Carcelén, Santiago Castellanos, Beatriz Ferrús, Henri Billard, Rodrigo Andrés, Ma Amelia Viteri, and Joseph Pierce for their special contributions to bringing the text together. Thanks to Fernando Moreno, Teresa Trávez, and Edmondo Pezzopane for their material support, which allowed me to continue researching and writing. I thank Fernanda Bustamante, Nisleidys Flores, Megan Edwards, and Mirna Navarrete de Villalobos for their careful editing. Thanks as well to Sandra Lorenzano, Chiara Bolognese, Gabriela Ponce, Cristina Burneo, Aldemar Matías, Lucía Piedra, my students, and so many other much-loved people in the worlds of academia, activism, and art, for their generous support in delivering the first edition, despite the problems of distribution during these years due to the violent economic blockade imposed by the United States on Cuba.
For this second edition, published for the first time in English, I would especially like to thank Leticia Sabsay and Natalia Brizuela for finding a patron at Polity Books, and Carrie Hamilton for her painstaking and brave translation. Thank you as well to Stephano Espinoza for endeavoring to bring my ideas to light through their illustrations. And finally, thank you to Caridad Tamayo Fernández for providing the rights to the first edition.
Foreword
From these flames another world
From Ashes to Text refuses to settle. For the world as it is now. For History and Literature. For the insipid canonization of men whose words try and try again to create the world in their own image. In the fullest tradition of the essay, this book pressures the limits of reading and of attending to the complex realities of the human condition. It is about knowing the limits of knowledge itself. But this knowledge is bound up with the bodies that produce it, bodies in proliferating complexity, in a region (the Andes) that has so often been overlooked by the traditions of Latin American literary and cultural studies. It breathes life into archival and embodied memories, tending to the flows of desire rendered culture, or rendered ash. But this is also an immodest text, subjecting the organizing principles of culture – history, literature – to a series of deviations from pious norms that crumble under the weight of their own hypocrisy. Thus, the racist, Eurocentric, patriarchal, cisnormative, heterosexual imperatives that structure modern society are not just the backdrop for Diego Falconí Trávez’s interpretation of Andean life, but the axes through which his intervention seeks to undermine the security of knowledge of and through the body.
Audacious and incisive, Falconí Trávez’s career spans literary and cultural studies, law, queer studies, and decolonial thinking. This is evidenced most notably by the present book, which was awarded the 2016 Premio Casa de las Américas – one of Latin America’s most prestigious recognitions for literary criticism. But in addition to his own trajectory as a scholar, Falconí Trávez has been at the center of creating (and revolutionizing) an archive of Latin American queer/cuir/cuy(r) studies by connecting artists and activists across the globe, engaging in interdisciplinary editorial projects and community-based scholarship, and intervening in public debates on issues of migration, sexuality, gender, and race and racism. He is a practicing lawyer and an active participant in antiracist organizing in Spain, particularly with migrant communities. His work is thus theory and praxis.
Falconí Trávez is the editor of Me fui a volver: Narrativas, autorías y lecturas teorizadas de las migraciones ecuatorianas (I Left to Return: Narratives, Authorships, and Readings Theorized from Ecuadorian Migrations; Universidad Andina 2014) and Inflexión marica: Escrituras del descalabro gay en América Latina (Fag Inflection: Writing from the Gay Disaster in Latin America; Egales 2018), and coeditor of Resentir lo queer en América Latina: diálogos desde/con el Sur (Resenting the Queer in Latin America: Dialogues from with the South; Egales 2013) and the 2021 special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, “Cuir/Queer Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” Across more than a decade, his work has been rigorous in its ethical positioning toward marginalized communities and invested in pushing the boundaries of representation and theorization of bodies in their desirous movements across the imposed limitations of normativity, gender, sexuality, and the nation. Any discussion about queer studies in Latin America is incomplete without his voice. Better yet, because one of the tenets of coloniality is to center Euro-Western knowledge as a universal (and tautological) enterprise, with the concomitant cultural and ethnic hierarchization that this demands, any discussion of gender and sexuality at all is incomplete without Falconí Trávez’s contributions.
Ashen memories, future dreams
When Falconí Trávez writes about the fire of conquest, I feel myself lanced by the proposition that there are traces of a before that remain in the now, pushing toward the future. I know this to be true from my own experience as a Cherokee person. And yet, to think in this way about text and character, the construction of a corpus – itself a trace of other material forms – that comes to be known as Andean literature, is not something that many scholars have attempted. There is an innovation in method here, but there is also a generosity of meaning, which is to say, of residing in the contradictions of diverse meanings, rather than prescribing a direction or a value for the reading of place, time, body, and emotion.
A memory: I am going to a ceremony held around a central fire, starting at dusk. The people circle and circle, dancing slowly, shell-shaking and insistent, until the night becomes too thick to resist. I sleep in smoke – in my hair and on my clothes – and I go out the next day in the dewy morning to approach the charred circle ringed with warm stones. I reach out toward the ashen remnants, touching what had once been a living, breathing fire, and rub between my fingers the memory of a feeling like pine, like home. Stuck in the grooves of my looping fingerprints, this lingering trace, I remember hoping, would still be here, marking what would be this keyboard, the doorknob to this room, the body of a lover, a book, a page.
I remember imagining this fire, this ash, stretched across time and place. Ash brought into being the impossible memory of a life lived before the imposition of colonial gender norms, before sodomite, berdache, two-spirit, were words on the tongues of those who would never understand what it means to have a body like this. Ash is always haunting those of us whose were subjected to the law of a conquistador with a bible and a gun.
Yes, these words come from my body. A resentful Indian fag writing across screens and discarded paper, envelopes, and a black notebook, on a train late at night, vibrating. Daydreaming. Wandering. Also, between the sheets where thigh sweat sticks to my fingers, on my tongue. All writing is embodied, I mean to say, but how does embodiment matter in texts that figure bodies like mine as …
The ellipsis is the canon, of course. Eliding and erasing. Sensing the stench of dissident pleasures that linger and embed themselves in the crevices of a body like mine, like ash in the pores of my skin. I mean to say: what does faggotry have to do with the literary canon? It isn’t superfluous to ask, despite what the canon might say. So, I have to start in the past, in the present, in between perhaps, as a gesture toward the multiple temporalities that rub against each other and sigh midnight sighs. This past-present is also a way of marking this text as part of the interplay of systems that are the material, though not the object, of Falconí Trávez’s analysis in From Ashes to Text.
Faggotry, re-sent(i)ment, and loca-lized counter-canons
The canon is an illusion, but a powerful one. Of course, we are talking about the canon of Europe, the canon of Latin America, the canon of the Andes. They are one and the same, really. Canonicity shapes the possibilities of signification, of meaning itself. Thus, narrating the canon’s canonization becomes an introductory gambit through which Falconí Trávez aims “to tell the story of the canon in another way, through forms that have not yet been totally digested in the Andean academic tradition” (p. 25). One of the central issues that this questioning of the literary tradition brings up is the place of culture in a region where contradiction is the rule, where history is a malleable but ever-present resource for legitimizing certain bodies, not just certain discourses, as able to speak (and, more often, write) themselves into existence. The canon, thus, is not just an operation of literary tradition, but an ethical and political matrix through which the heterogeneity of Andean cultures becomes knowable in advance, rather than, as Falconí Trávez’s cuir/cuy(r) approach suggests, in relation and in contradiction.
And yet, Falconí does not propose to shed light on the exclusions of the canon so much as to inhabit the shadow-spaces, those recesses, affectively coded as re-sent(i)ments, that he develops in this book. Not a counter-canon, but a re-sent(i)mental one. This term means both to resent and feel again, and the folding of these two definitions allows Falconí Trávez to posit a decolonial praxis that is attuned to the vernacular realities of Andean life. These vernacular spaces serve as the proper loca-lization for those of us who have no place in this canon, that canon, or any other canon. Borrowing from Puerto Rican scholar Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Falconí Trávez insists that to loca-lize is both to locate and to make queer (loca here is at once crazy and slang for queer, i.e. faggot). We see here two operations deployed with great success. One is the folding of terms in on themselves, which highlights the instability of language and in the process reveals how time and matter (bodies) overlap. Thus we see loca-lization, re-sent(i)ment, and heterofaggeneity, terms that interweave affective histories with colonial imperatives to erase, delimit, or kill the meanings these terms bear. If coloniality is an exercise in fixing meaning, here, Falconí Trávez deploys a decolonial proliferation of meanings, contradictory at times, but always in vibrant resonance with the underside of modernity.
And yet, the situatedness of this reading and the specificity of this critical engagement allows Falconí Trávez to suggest that the praxis of decoloniality is not so much an effect of the exclusions of the canon, but an impulse toward other ways of knowing, sensing, and embodying the material realities that the canon takes for granted or directly excludes. What does it mean to speak against the canon, without – as Ángel Rama warned – returning to the primacy of the letter – that rarified domain of power, particularly in Latin America, particularly in the Andes – against which shadow-space-mind-bodies flourish in baroque exuberance, against the odds, always against the odds?
Perhaps it would mean sashaying through, rather than speaking against, the solidity of tradition. Sashay, as in moving like a loca, as in occupying the space that they are not afforded, and yet, which they make their own. This is a gestural repertoire, a bodily knowledge, that does not depend on binary limitations or normative taxonomies, but a desirous becoming, in the tradition of Argentine poet Néstor Perlongher, or perhaps, more to the point, the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, to whom the book is dedicated.
Sashaying through this book
Jaime Bayly’s discreet mestizaje
And then there is a writer like Jaime Bayly, whose erotic posturing has confounded literary critics and the public for decades. This is the subject of Chapter 2, which homes in on the symbolic use of non-normative sexuality in Bayly’s fiction. Falconí Trávez argues that, despite being a member of a minority group (pre-gay, gay, or bisexual), certain men (e.g., light-skinned mestizos), continue to operate as standard bearers of heteropatriarchal society. This is an important intervention because it demonstrates that the operating literary structure in Bayly’s fiction is not, as some have argued, an opening to greater sexual liberation, but, rather, in the end, a shoring up of longstanding colonial ideologies that rest on a tolerable proximity to alterity as well as a dependence on normative racial hierarchies.
Falconí Trávez’s approach to the intersection of sexuality and race in the Andes unearths the reluctant (or discreet, as Falconí Trávez posits) mestizo. Here, whiteness (or lighter-skinned privilege) and its correlating upper-class status allows Bayly (and his characters) to exploit what Falconí Trávez describes as the in-betweenness of gender and sexual difference, while never actually challenging the power structures through which that difference comes to matter in Peru. Thus, in his description of Bayly’s No se lo digas a nadie, Falconí Trávez asserts that the main character, Joaquín, “carries colonial relationships and their asymmetries, reactivating mestizaje as a place of legitimate international enunciation even though he does not want to be mestizo” (p. 69; emphasis original). Joaquín may not want to be mestizo, but he cannot bring himself to release the power that mestizaje bestows on him.
This is the power of coloniality, which burrows under the skin and stays, generation after generation, never quite relinquishing its hold on the bodies of those always on the darker underside of modernity. Perhaps I should say the backside of modernity, for it is in his delicious meditation on the role of the anus as a locus of colonial power that Falconí Trávez fully fleshes out the dimensions of an erotic sensibility that, while internationally intelligible as gay, nevertheless has particular valences for the Andean context. The ass of a young upper-class mestizo, while desirous, does not swish with the verve that would be required to undermine the patriarchal colonialism upon which the modern literary canon is founded.
Puruma feminism and Julieta Paredes
In contrast, the work of Aymara culture-bearer Julieta Paredes fractures the premise of an authorial voice as singularly constituted in the Western tradition, emerging in contrapuntal temporalities and subjectivities, and thus constituting an Indigenous feminist practice of writing in community. The subject of Chapter 3, Paredes has become one of the foremost voices in Indigenous feminism from Abiayala. However, as Falconí Trávez shows, her early poetic work, though mostly ignored by critics (and at times minimized by the author herself), carries with it an incantatory quality that is not the product of mestizaje, but rather the layering of Andean cosmogonic concepts over, under, and through Euro-Western poetics. By explicating the qualities of the Aymara worldview that are evident in Paredes’s poetry, Falconí Trávez grounds her work in a political and cultural context through which we can better understand the methods of resistance to colonial normativity that emerge, impure and contradictory, in her work.
This is the case of the puruma myth, which, Falconí Trávez explains “refers to the land that has not been cultivated or overly cultivated … it is associated with time and nature, with dusk … [and] the period before the configuration of the national community” (p. 100). However, by approaching this myth from the lens of Indigenous feminism, Falconí Trávez, through Paredes, explores the multiple layers of colonial imposition that have also rendered this term as applicable to a virgin woman, that is, the woman’s body as “uncultivated” (i.e., unpenetrated). In so doing, Falconí Trávez highlights the activation of ritual discourses in Paredes’s poetry that, while engaging the gendered dynamics of that myth, do not accept the patriarchal premise of the puruma concept. Paredes’s poetry harnesses the puruma as a figure not of dichotomous separation – not of the violent penetration of one body by another – but as a catalyst for cultural revitalization, an erotic potential that is multitemporal and mutually embodied. Thus, in Falconí Trávez’s words, “[t]hrough the political-linguistic use of myth, this potential allows for change in the rituals of certain Aymara women in Bolivia, a change that comes from the complex fusion of feminisms, anticolonialism, and Andean philosophy” (p. 109). This is another example of the contradictory heterogeneity at work, in this case in Bolivia, which allows Falconí Trávez to telescope out, offering a panoramic view of the historical work of Indigenous textual, oral, and embodied practices in the realm of art and politics.
The future folds back on itself, and contradictions are not only literary and theoretical, but interpersonal and structural. In an important epilogue to Chapter 3, Falconí Trávez updates the reader on some of the challenging accusations of physical, psychological, and political violence levied against Julieta Paredes in 2017. These accusations, yet to be resolved, have laid bare some of the enduring legacies of colonial violence, while at the same time pointing to the unrealized (and yet, always promising) project of communitarian feminism. Thus, Paredes, the Comunidad Mujeres Creando (Women Creating Community), and other figures in the Indigenous feminist movements across Abiayala are (as we all are) bound up with the structures of power that, nevertheless, we resist in our work, intimate relationships, and political commitments.
Fernando Vallejo’s sub-Andeanity
In the fourth chapter, Falconí Trávez turns to the well-known fiction writer Fernando Vallejo, but (as ever) with a twist. Rather than read a canonical writer for how he fits the Andean canon, Falconí Trávez expands the Andean zone via the concept of sub-Andeanity. Not quite Andean, or not Andean enough for those focused on the highland cultural purity of Cusco, the concept refers to the tropical influences that supposedly devolve the civilized aspects of the central highlands in the cultures of the peripheral Andes. To focus on these contradictions, Falconí Trávez takes a sweeping look at Vallejo’s fiction, paying attention to the role of migration (and tourism), place, and the discrepancies of embodiment and desire in topographical (and conceptual) motion. Vallejo’s narrative allows for an expansion of the traditional understanding of the Andean geography, and yet, a circumscription of the modes of racial intelligibility that are the product of colonial taxonomies.
Thus, we follow Fernando, Vallejo’s narrative “I,” from Medellín to Mexico City, Madrid, Rome, New York, and back again; from highland mountains to Roman ruins to Central Park cruising zones and Midtown gay saunas. Only certain bodies fit in these places, and though Vallejo’s work dwells on how bodily movements affect sexual desire, as Falconí Trávez points out, “New York and Medellín are united in a strange and circular frequency, perhaps that of (sub)Andeansodomite time, in order to show how international dialogues are as inevitable as they are discontinuous when it comes to the contemporary construction of sexual subjectivity” (p. 145). This sexual subjectivity is contingent on the mobility of bodies and concepts, including how different conceptions of race travel, and as we see, it’s complicated.
The approach here is to dwell on moments of gay displacement, in a counterpoint to Falconí Trávez’s ongoing treatment of loca-lization. In a particularly salient point of analysis, Falconí Trávez shows how the enduring reality of anti-Black racism emerges in the same spaces where the narrator, Fernando, is also rejected for not being white enough, fit enough, or modern enough. Fernando witnesses (and participates in) a sexual encounter in Central Park that involves two other Colombians and an African American man. Immediately after the encounter, however, the narrator’s thoughts devolve into a string of racist diatribes. His gayness, as Falconí Trávez points out, “is insufficient for defining sexual experiences and providing a unifying label for subjects that are fragmented by different identity traits” (p. 145). The upper-class Colombian mestizo, Fernando, falls back on a reliable discourse of anti-Black racism when faced with his own rejection by those who drape him in an alterity that he does not want to wear. This is a crucial lesson: expressing a dissident sexuality does not make one antiracist. We must heed this lesson over and over again.
Adalberto Ortiz and the Tunda
In the fifth and final chapter, Falconí Trávez turns to Afro-Ecuadorian writer Adalberto Ortiz, specifically his short story “La entundada,” and delivers a magisterial reading of the complex mythological oraliterary text. This dense analysis is more than simply an example of how to queer a text that, on the surface, may not offer evident sex-dissident themes. Of course, the queering (as a verb) of literary texts is one of the hallmarks of contemporary queer studies. But those exercises often dwell on psychoanalytic readings that fail to consider intersectional analyses and, moreover, the historical relationships between colonial domination and embodied forms of resistance. By writing with (rather than about) the Tunda, Falconí Trávez presents a dialectic engagement of the multiple temporalities, desires, and cultural specificities in this text.
In dialogue with the work of Lee Edelman and Anne Cvetkovitch, Falconí Trávez argues that the chimerical Tunda operationalizes normative ideologies through the collective desire to catch and destroy this figure. At the same time, the Tunda unravels the binary logics that sustain the performative disciplining of, in particular, young people. Thus we read: “The tunda, undefined in body, mutant, masculine, and feminine at the same time, expresses a defiant performativity that brings into maximum tension the possibilities of the body in the face of ideological norms” (p. 179). Through this analysis we see how the desire for a heteronormative future, in the case of Ortiz’s portrayal of Afro-descendant populations on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, cannot be understood simply as a desire to adhere to colonial gender and sexual mores, but rather as a contradictory locus of enunciation through which the historical trauma of enslavement is negotiated.
The Tunda is a queer figure, but also not necessarily queer. This is only contradictory if we imagine that queerness is knowable in advance as a set of prescriptive orientations that eschew loca-lized contexts. The question has never only been how to translate queer to “other” languages and contexts, which would reify the geopolitics of knowledge production, circulation, and reception. Not to mention that such an operation imagines the original context of the invention of queer studies as a central, originary site from which these translations could only ever become approximations. Not that. Rather, as Falconí Trávez argues, we must reckon with the oscillating potentials of divergent embodied practices; with the untranslatability of particular experiences in particular locations; with the bewitching possibilities of anti- and decolonial approaches that resist universalization in favor of grounded, and yet evanescent, modes of erotic expression.
This is the gift of Falconí Trávez’s writing: it shows how clusters of related concepts can align to offer a sense of queer synchronicity, while, at the same time, it demonstrates how such operations can also repeat the very structures of domination that they claim to resist. This bears repeating, for it is only through the continued engagement with the lingering traces, the ash, of history that we come to understand the future possibilities of our own bodies, in constant desirous becoming.
Joseph Pierce (Cherokee Nation), Stony Brook University
Instructions for Reading this Book: By Way of an Introduction
… for the vestiges and signs that there are in it,
in which much black sand and ash are found,
as if the earth had been burned in another time,
and this can be seen, when one digs the earth,
for which it is concluded that there they must have been burned.
Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, Historia de las Guerras Civiles del Perú (1544–1548) y de otros sucesos de las Indias
If you could come back. If you could
rise up from all the things that hold you
if you left a song of ash atop a rock.
Jorge Galán, “Al lado de todas las cosas” (“Beside all things”)
0.1 On those chronicles. On those sodomites. On those ashes.
Gabriel García Márquez, upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in the final stages of the twentieth century, declared that the Chronicles of the Indies were “the seeds of our present-day novels” (1982).1 His assertion is sexy; it creates an extensive genealogy of Latin American literature which, moreover, allows him to make a political claim for Latin American subjectivity in Europe. But his claim cannot be applied in the same way to all cases. I have no desire to enter into a debate about the effectiveness of the Latin American “boom” when it comes to exposing certain central aspects of the history of the region.2 But there are indeed certain themes, motifs, and topics, as well as specific subjectivities – especially in the case of the Andes – that make it impossible to draw a line between the chronicle and the novel, between colonial literature and the literature of the twentieth century, as direct as the line drawn by the distinguished author of magical realism.
Sodomites, for example, appear in some of the Andean chronicles,3 especially those referring to the early decades of the Conquest. It could be argued that they were revived in the area in the twentieth century, including as part of the popular and globalized boom.4 But such a claim would be too optimistic and naive. The reading proposed by this book – which is not based on sodomites, but does find significant value in their current absence – begins with a brief exploration of the complex and elusive nature of these characters, something that marks a discontinuity between the past and the present in the literature of the region.
The word sodomite, which originated in Europe and was “popularized” by the Inquisition, referred to an individual, almost always a man, who committed sodomy, “a forbidden act (usually anal penetration) which did not claim to say much more about the person [who committed it]” (Zubiaur, 2007: 7–8). The adjective sodomite, therefore, frequently became a noun, one that erased the identity of the accused, rebaptizing the person from the perspective of the sin/crime.
This has led to a debate over the past decades as to whether we can, in fact, think in terms of a sodomite character. Some authors argue that this is not feasible because this criminal classification was responsible for erasing “a past, a case history, and a childhood … a type of life, a life form” (Foucault, 1998a: 43). Furthermore, sodomy – a grave act against nature, probably “the worst of the era” (Garza, 2002: 25), with such a contagious potential that “it should not be uttered” (Horswell, 2005: 34) – had to take on other euphemisms, such as the abominable sin, a formula used to avoid reiterating in speech or writing the horror-invoking signifier. If the word could not even be pronounced, the logical question is: would it not be too audacious to speak of sodomite identities and characters?
Other authors have argued the opposite, claiming that despite the simplicity of the term sodomite, various writings in Christian theology outlined and later expanded its nature (Jordan, 1997; Goldberg, 2010). In fact, from an actantial perspective (Greimas, 1983: 206), sodomites can be understood as characters who fulfill a function in the medieval monarchical tale. Sodomy, a grave crime for the Crown, offered a challenge to the sovereign, forcing him to “go further than this atrocity … not in order to ground the ‘surplus power’ possessed by the person of the sovereign but in order to code the ‘lack of power’ … [T]he condemned man [the sodomite] represents the symmetrical, the inverted figure of the king” (Foucault, 1991: 56, 29; my emphasis).5
Sodomy and sodomite: profanities filled with “confusion and contradictions,” which abolish a subjectivity while at the same time articulating something approximating a new identity, perfect for an “oppressive and demagogic” (Jordan, 1997: 9) use by those who flaunted their power and sought to discipline certain bodily practices.
At this point, this quasi-character starts to make sense in Abya Yala,6 what is today Latin America. When the signifier sodomite disembarked in Abya Yala as a criminal classification, it brought with it characterizations of otherness from Spanish cultural and literary narratives. Instead of discovering an analogous and “aberrant” practice in other lands, these sought to conceal native people and cultures under preconceived ideas that had already been used to represent Africans and Asians as uncivilized others in the Spain of the Reconquest, as well as the early imperial project (Amodio, 1993: 165; Pease, 1999: 152; Taboada, 2000: 222).
With the Atlantic crossing, the ethnocentric contours of the sodomite continued to be drawn. The end result – in the best of cases – was a simple, flat, and secondary character. The verdict on sodomy, as described in various texts from Abya Yala, challenged the King, patriarch of patriarchs, to demonstrate his punitive force from the apex of power – and he did so with an unprecedented violence, through other characters at his service: the moralist, the priest, the Conquistador. It was, after all, guns, germs, and steel that decimated the native population (Diamond, 1998). This deployment of masculine violence conceded, through the epic, “much more power” to the sovereign and the political system he presided over, and “much less power” to the abominable person (even less than their thoroughly beaten sodomite counterpart overseas), thus articulating a gender hierarchy in which the Spanish new man (Garza, 2002: 36) erected himself as a symbol of the “dominant peninsular masculinity … the reverse face of the image of the ‘Indian sodomite’” (Molina, 2011: 186), a subjectivity that the Conquest both imagined and broke apart.
Thanks to the European powers’ exorbitant opportunity for acquiring wealth, the label sodomite made a good alibi for incriminating various Indigenous peoples (Federici, 2004: 291), and potentially entire populations, with the aim of labeling them as endemically savage and sinful (Molina, 2010: 50). Under the umbrella of just war, this made it possible for them to be suppressed and expropriated, their labor controlled. This colossal and commercialized designation provoked new characterizations, which in turn fed into this actant that presumed to become a character: the sodomite as cannibal (Amodio, 1993: 66); the gigantic, monstrous, and violent sodomite (Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, 1905: 118); the sodomite who perverted children (Domingo de Santo Tomás, cited in Cieza de León, 2005: 183); the effeminate and transvestite sodomite (Bertonio, 1984: 154). The sodomite: symbol of a misread flesh that exceeded the capacity of European understanding.
For the sodomites of the Andes, the outcome, which appears in some of the chronicles, could be deadly.7 Keeping faith with the original biblical story, in which the infidels were destroyed by fire so as to purify the whole area, the chronicler Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara describes their destiny: “burned in fire from heaven” (1905: 313). Moreover, this intertext leads us – with no small amount of horror – from the historical-fictional tale to the Spanish royal decrees, which were dictated by the Catholic monarchs and stipulated the punishment for the abominable sin: “to be burned alive in the place [where the crime had been committed]” (cited in Llamas, 2002 [1998]: 98). As a number of scholars have confirmed, this not only reinforces the Spanish antisodomite decree (Solórzano, 2012: 292–3); in my view it also, for the first time, globalizes the abominable sin and the punishment for it (“in the place” / “flames of fire”), bringing together an essential chapter in our understanding of the scope of colonial history.8
Thus, through the trope of fire, the Andes were configured as a much more ideal space than the Iberian Peninsula for representing the burning, punishment, and purging of the depraved of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Conquistadors had the power to act with the same vehemence as the God of the Old Testament. And they fulfilled, perhaps more than ever, that heteropatriarchal dream of uprooting the abominable crime – which was linked to certain populations that were condemned to be disciplined or to disappear.
That fantasy, which is found in the chronicles, resulted in a genocide9 – or, according to the strictest historiography, a proto-genocide – which operated from a sex-gender and racial perspective, and installed itself in Andean time and space.
Although the Andean sodomite quasi-characters therefore practiced the same vice as, for example, the sodomites of Valencia (Catalá Sanz and Pérez García, 2000: 31), they would never be the equals of their European counterparts. This was not just because they were “closer to the end” of the chain of command (the non-sovereign, the invert), but because their cultural alterity – ethnic, sexual, and political – was a sentence not only for the disappearance of the act of sodomy or the life tainted as sodomite; there was also the potential to condemn their entire population to extermination. By this virtue, the sodomite/abominable actant in the Andean zone is an intertextual straw doll covered with the power of the written word (Dussel, 1992), stripped of the signifiers of full humanity and of the diverse potential of the pre-Hispanic sex-dissident subject.
Thanks to the fire metaphor,10 and to the ideological embers made flesh, the body and the sin were carbonized in the text; subjectivity and the entire population were condemned. And since written memory erased both native vitality and resistance, there had to be a guarantee that the smoke from certain recurring practices (which seemed endemic to certain populations)11 would placate the annexed and conquered territories.
The antisodomy flame was not quenched following the tales of extreme disciplining recounted in the chronicles. It continued to burn with the desire for eternal vigilance in sentences and other texts, prescribing punishments so that new bodies that were declared sinful in the conquered territories (mestizo, Afro-Andean, and Indigenous bodies) would disappear, once again, from the face of the earth. In fact, not only was the legal-religious letter entrusted with the fate of the sodomite; written and visual texts were brought together with the aim of amplifying the record of condemnation.
In Hernando de la Cruz’s painting El infierno o las llamas infernales (Hell or the Infernal Flames, 1620),12 a kind of seventeenth-century graphic penal code, the crime NEFANDO (ABOMINABLE) appears written in golden letters, alongside a drawing of the punishment of the accused (a double rip in the chest at the level of the heart and an attack by demons, interpreted as eternal sexual harassment and assault, before the attentive gaze of one of the heads of Cerberus). The text not only testifies to the torture of the sex-dissident Andean body, but also to the complex construction of archives in a society with new embodiments and new cultures, in which writing had to mutate toward other forms of recording.
Figures 1 and 2.El infierno o las llamas infernales [Hell or the Infernal Flames]. Hernando de la Cruz, 1620. Oil on canvas.
Andean sodomy was, ironically, the only referent for the knowledge that certain bodily practices had existed, practices that were different from those imposed by colonization. This paradox – having to incarnate the typology that was exterminated in practice – has led us to collect fragments of identity that could not be completely assembled during the colonial, independence, and republican periods, or even in the era of regional construction, during which the sodomites (Indigenous, Afro-descendant, mestizo, and white) had no safe space in which to travel, either inside or outside the text.
Not even those written proposals that researched into ancestral cultures in the most dignifying way, such as Indigenism (for example, in the debates between Luis Valcárcel and Uriel García on how to guarantee native continuity from a mestizo perspective – see Funes, 2006: 146–53),13 were able to propose this pre-abominable re-composition, which is extinct in their radical demands and writings – a fact that demonstrates the force that certain destructive discourses had on certain bodies. Nor did those subjectivities that had been concealed by sodomy appear in the revisionist writings of the twentieth century,14 with their globalized LGBTI identities. These texts did not look backwards in order to call, through the expression of their pride, upon an entity whose stories are so far removed from their own demands.
After all, would anyone miss a being who was more fantastical than real and who, if they were to reappear, could once again lay bare the most brutal face of the Conquest – for being diametrically opposed to the sovereign, for being the face that opposed the conqueror’s cross? Was it worth thinking about the character of the sodomite, one grotesquely filled with the distorted signifiers of native peoples who spoke of non-power? Would it be of any use to consider those bodies of the past, uncertain and erased from collective memory in the era of the re-composition of a globalized LGBTI movement?
In the face of such questions, perhaps reflection is in order: the carbonized body has not disappeared altogether; its ashes remain as a powerful trope of absence. In the chronicles, in fact, this stain that is left by the remains of the abominable has been discreet but indelible for the region’s subsequent bodily and textual itinerary. In the case of the sodomite, the ash does not constitute a vital narrative opening, the seed that García Márquez spoke of, but rather the spoils of history, the trope of the solitude, affliction, and loss that remain after any annihilation. By symbolizing Andean sodomite trauma, the sodomite ash is a key element for understanding the colonial paranoias that are still repeated on the narrative templates of corporeal hierarchization, simplistic characterization, and extreme violence. But it also offers a key to the possibility of working on the past in order to refocus ways of considering texts and their possible incarnations.
In this book, which focuses on the literature of the complex twentieth century, I hold on to these chronicles – distant, imprecise, and troubling as they are – because they are located in a place where history makes its way through fiction (O’Gorman, 2002: 61), giving them a testimonial15 and creative value in which the person and the character come together; in which a particular mode of historicization is activated – one that ironically calls for the desacralization of history in order to allow for the reconstruction of memory; in which a certain ethical commotion forces us to acknowledge the pain of others (Sontag, 2003), which is also our own pain, although a fictional and fantastical lifeline protects us from succumbing to the horror.
From this, a product of catharsis, but also of debt – something fundamental to the (re)construction of any community (Baas, 2008: 11) – it is possible today to ask ourselves, in a less naive way: which structures of the colonial sodomite tale still remained in the twentieth century? Were any legacies of these abominable presences/absences from the chronicles to be found in more contemporary writings? Could the legal typology of the sodomite be replaced by more in-depth characterizations, so that those who came afterwards could again be characterized as subjects? Or were they also considered absurd characters in the region? What writerly tactics and strategies were used in the complex cultural field to overcome the colonial trauma that burned certain bodies and desires in the Andes? Did ancestral, Afro-Andean, and mestizo subjectivities attempt to revive those subjectivities that had been named as abominable? Could more recent writing, in a somewhat less virulent period, link together past lives and deaths in order to articulate a literary record of their own, as much Andean as it is sex-dissident?
To begin this book, which aims to put forward some answers to these questions, I situate myself in the relationship between writing and the abominable ash, final remnant of a faraway body, uncertain and buried by colonial discourses and practices. Through literary theory, comparative literature, and cultural studies, I seek to reevaluate certain transgressive subjectivities and practices in twentieth-century writings in the Andean zone that are linked to that powerful ancestral presence. I am conscious of the fact that the sodomite ash is a provocation that, rather than making a linear, opportunistic, and unproblematic connection with recent literature, should serve to underscore multiple forms of bodily disciplining and resistance, demonstrating the complexities of putting together sex-dissident characters, themes, and motifs in the last century. For this reason, from a critical standpoint that brings together gender and post/decolonial studies,16 critical-political articulations that reformulate ways of understanding representation, this book does not gather together literary points in order to assemble an accurate genealogy. Instead, it points to some incoherent, contradictory, and tactical settings-in-practice of the abominable sin-made-other, as well as its subsequent and possible variants. The aim is to bring to light an unstable Andean record of its own – fag, dyke, trans – that may help, extradiegetically as well, to retain the possibility for certain bodies and desires “to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death” (García Márquez, 1982). These bodies and desires deserve to replace the name fate with becoming.
The ash, that bodily waste that stains the pages of the past with a manifest power of interpellation toward the present, is the contradictory but inevitable way to begin this book – which, in spite of everything, is centered more on possibility and happening than on death.
0.2 On the range and contradiction of the Andes. On Cusco-centrism. On the deviation of sexual-dissident storytelling.
Marking out the contours of the Andean zone will never be a simple task. From a purely geographical conception, the zone refers to the area surrounding the mountain range, “South America’s topography par excellence” (Carpio Castillo, 1975: 14), which borders the Pacific Ocean and covers some 7,500 kilometers. This physical definition is twisted by history, since stories allow for the rearticulation of space.17 For this reason, without ignoring the fact that “the geographic setting of the ‘Andean’ is the ‘material’ condition or the essential breeding ground” (Estermann, 1998: 52), a couple of important points require discussion in order to understand the Andean culture and history presented in this work.
Stories about the area were created through a number of ancient processes, but the main historical tale about the Andes was the one told about the Inca people.18 The Inca, while not an empire (Rostorowski, 1988: 36), assembled a complex cultural system that dominated other cultures in much of South America, without erasing them. These advances meant that from the Spanish perspective the Incan system was the main culture “worth” historicizing. As the flipside of this vision, it was strategic for the peoples of the Americas to make the Inca the welcoming card of the Andes because this placed the Indigenous people and their culture at a level from which it was easier to respond (or, in the case of mestizos, to adapt differentially) to Spanish colonialism. Nevertheless, this Incanization19 (Marcos and Norton, 1984: 19) has been criticized because it did not allow for a “distinction between aboriginal cultures and Incan impositions” (Caillavet, 2001: 213), and for the Andes it resulted in a Europeanizing historicity that broke with the model of pre-Columbian Andean diversity.
In the twentieth century the area was historicized in a different way and a certain consensus was reached about the plurality of Andeaneity,20 one that recognizes the negotiations that led to the political expression of the region: Andean Community of Nations. This included, for example, defining the area as a pluricultural, polysemic, and diverse system (Ayala Mora, 1999), one that is not limited to the mountains but involves the interaction between the mountain range, the coast, and the jungle (see Salomon, 1983; Taussig, 1987; Cárdenas and Bray, 1998), that should not be limited to the Indigenous or Inca peoples (Flores Galindo, 2010), and that divides the zone into different interconnected sub-regions (Lumbreras, 1981). However, on the topic of sexual dissidence, we can still detect Cusco-centric elements that need to be updated.
To this end, I return for a moment to the sodomite chronicles. For example, Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara’s chronicle tells of the existence of an abominable native group that practiced “this diabolical and dreadful evil … in their rites and ceremonies and in their drunkenness” (1905: 317), leading to its extermination. Nevertheless, this successful burning of the sodomites was the second that had taken place; before the arrival of the Spanish, when the Inca had already arrived to control the area, giants originating from other islands in the south had settled in those lands and took part in “certain terrible sacrifices and using the abominable sin” (1905: 318). Thus was constructed, through the chronicle, a notion of persistent evil on the northern Andean coast, in the area of Puerto Viejo in what is today Ecuador, which was not well regarded either by the Spanish or the Inca – at least the Inca of the chronicles.21 In other tales about the same event, Pedro Cieza de León “distinguish[ed] the barbarian Puerto Viejo peoples from the more ‘civilized’ Incas” (Horswell, 2005: 98). Above all, Garcilaso de la Vega, without referring to the giants, “macho-izes” the Incas as persecutors and exterminators of the sodomites (1991: 248–50). This abominable intertexuality gives an account of the problematic historicization of the Andes, at least from a gender analysis.
Gary Urton stresses that because information about the Inca past was collected by privileged (cis and heterosexual) Spanish, mestizo, and Indigenous men, it “gives a decidedly elitist, masculine and Cusco-centric cast” (1999: 26). These three concepts – elitism, masculinism, and Cusco-centrism – which are intimately related in the region’s writing, signal some of the dangerous limits to assembling a history of sexual dissidences,22 which different authors (Silverblatt, 1987; Trexler, 2003; Horswell, 2005) have tried to demonstrate over the past decades. By this I do not mean to say that from the perspective of gender we should generate an absurd Cusco-phobia; after all, sex-dissident tropes and possibilities, which are fundamental to rethinking the cisheteropatriarchal23 binarism of the Andean zone, have been found in Inca culture. Nonetheless, various historical (and therefore territorial and cultural) detours are necessary in order for the sodomite ash to escape from its place of indifference, from the dialectical masculine battle between a dominant Spanish culture and an Incan culture of resistance, toward other forms of narrative resistance that do not fit into the traditional masculine dialectic – and are, therefore, less macho-ized.
Notes
1
Translator’s note
: The Chronicles of the Indies are a series of texts written by Europeans that chronicle the Spanish Conquest of the Americas.
2
Translator’s note
: The “boom” refers to the Latin American literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s during which the work of a number of authors from the region – García Márquez among them – gained international fame.
3
For example, in the chronicles of Pedro Cieza de León, Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Domingo de Santo Tomás.
4
For example, there were no famous fags or dykes in the Buendía family (though these days one or two characters could be dragged out of the closet). But certain characters did appear in the narratives of other Andean authors. Among the homosexuals penned by Mario Vargas Llosa are Mayta in
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta
and Roger Casement in
The Dream of the Celt
, both depicted as characters whose sexuality could never be articulated as anything other than an “embarrassing matter” (Thays, 2013: 9). The case of José Donoso’s
Hell Has no Limits
is unusual in its portrayal of the character of Manuela, who is presented as human in a complex way beyond the homo/hetero binary; but once again, no reference is made through this character to coloniality as a discourse linked to sexuality. Moving on to the theme of authorship, the boom did not include authors with homoerotic identities or practices. However, mention should be made of the book
Correr el tupido velo
(
Drawing Back the Heavy Veil
) by Pilar Donoso, which takes her father, the writer José Donoso, out of the closet, by revealing the secret that was kept in the home about certain “homosexual relations when [he] was young” (2009: 176), along with a few letters with homoerotic content that alter somewhat the heterocentered figure of the author (Nater, 2006). In any event, it would be excessive to believe that the boom as a literary phenomenon could have revived and given dignity to the descendants of the sodomites; to do so would be to ignore the patriarchal and heterosexist roots of that phenomenon. The work of Alejandra Vela (2018) demonstrates that fag writers who were contemporaries of the boom authors (Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo Arenas, and Manuel Puig) were not part of the Hispanic-French publishing circuit, with its high levels of publication; instead, these writers led precarious lives. In other words, this is evidence that the boom was a literary phenomenon underpinned by heteropatriarchal structures. [
Translator’s note
: The Buendías are the family at the center of García Márquez’s novel
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.]
5
This idea has been linked to Greimas’s proposal that the “relationship between actants … poses before us an actant seemingly charged with the power of acting and another actant seemingly invested with inertia” (1983: 151).
6
Decolonial discourse has reclaimed the continental name Abya Yala, proposed by the Kuna people, in place of the European name America, which was later accepted by the Creoles [
Translator’s note
: In the colonial period, Creoles were people of European descent who had been born in the Americas.] The Kuna proposal was used as a political premise for the Indigenous movement in spaces such as the First Meeting of Latin American Rural and Indigenous Organizations (Bogotá 1989) and the Second Continental Summit of the Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala (Quito 2004).
7
Antonio Herrera y Tordesillas writes: “Captains Pacheco and Olmos, when they governed these provinces, burned some
someticos
