Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination: Re-reading History

Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination

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Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination Re-reading History Rudyard J. Alcocer

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TIME TRAVEL IN THE LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN IMAGINATION

Copyright © Rudyard J. Alcocer, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11798–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alcocer, Rudyard J. Time travel in the Latin American and Caribbean imagination : re-reading history / Rudyard J. Alcocer. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–11798–3 (alk. paper) 1. Latin American literature—History and criticism. 2. Caribbean fiction—History and criticism. 3. Time travel in literature. 4. Time perception in literature. I. Title. PQ7081.A528 2011 860.8⬘15—dc22

2011010534

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Dedicated to my beloved mother, Isabel Cessa de Alcocer; to my cherished wife, Jeanine; and to our wonderful children, Carmen and Joel. Past, present, and future.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Prologue: Time Out of Joint

xi

Introduction: Time and Narrative in the Americas

1

1 2

Continuing Encounters: Journeys to (and From) the “Discovery” and Conquest of the Americas

23

On Island Time? Temporal Displacement and the Caribbean

67

3

The Ghost of La Malinche: Time Travel and Feminism

113

4

Not Just Kids’ Stuff: Time Travel as Pedagogy in the Americas

151

Afterword: Time Travel Fact and Fiction

187

Notes

199

Bibliography

215

Index

233

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Acknowledgments

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ime Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination could never have come to fruition without the generous input, editorial assistance, and friendly encouragement of many people. These include my students and colleagues at Georgia State University. Among the latter, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Fernando Reati, Germán Torres, Bill Nichols, Leslie Marsh, Elena del Río Parra, Tim Jansa, Deb Loden, Melissa Skye, and Patricia Coloma have been particularly helpful. Colleagues at other institutions have also lent their support: Michael Janis of Morehouse College provided invaluable feedback on early drafts of the study, as did Kimberle López of the University of New Mexico. I would also like to thank Georgia State University’s College of Arts and Sciences and its Center for Latin American and Latino Studies for their generous summer research stipends and travel grants, as well as the university’s Interlibrary Loan Office, which on every occasion has procured even the most obscure of texts. I am also deeply grateful to the expert editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan and to the anonymous reviewers they enlisted. On a more personal note, I would like to thank the following people for their ongoing friendship and support: Randal Affolder, Ben and Vickie Kelley, Rich and Penny Leake, John Erstling, Jim and Eunice Veeder, Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Thomas P. Carney, Kristi Gregory, James Pfuntner, Patricia Altavena, Juan Carlos Galeano, David Thompson, Miguel López Lozano, Juan José Daneri, Jennifer Valko, Richard Tschiderer, and my brothers and sisters (particularly my brother Kelly, who read through an early version of the study and

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made countless helpful comments). The warmest thank-you goes to Jeanine Alcocer, whose love, encouragement, and organizational skills know no bounds. Sections of chapter 3 appeared in slightly modified form as “The Ghosts of La Malinche: Trees and Treason in Gioconda Belli’s La mujer habitada.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (Oxford University Press). doi: 10.1093/isle/isq118 (November 2010); pp. 1–19. I express gratitude to ISLE for kindly granting me permission to reuse this material.

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PROLOGUE

Time Out of Joint

No sé hasta que punto los jóvenes latinoamericanos de hoy se complacen en el estudio sistemático, científico, de su propia historia. Es probable que la estudien muy bien y sepan sacar fecundas enseñanzas de un pasado mucho más presente de lo que suele creerse, en este continente, donde ciertos hechos lamentables suelen repetirse, más al norte, más al sur, con cíclica insistencia. Alejo Carpentier, “Conciencia e identidad de América,” 1975 [I don’t know to what extent today’s Latin American youth take pleasure in the systematic, scientific study of their own history. It is probable that they study it very well and that they are able to draw fertile lessons from a past that is much more present than commonly thought, on this continent, where certain unfortunate events tend to repeat themselves, in the North and in the South, with cyclical insistence.] Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. George Orwell, 1984, 1949 What’s past is prologue William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1610

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hat if you could travel back in time several centuries to pivotal moments in the history of the Americas? The Conquest, for instance. What if, furthermore, you could intervene in these moments? What would you do and why? What if you could prevent the advent of the slave trade? Conversely, what if people from those long-past moments visited our epoch? Why would they come to us and what would they tell us? In recent fictions from and about Latin America and the Caribbean, such encounters describe a trend. *

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Flashback: April 29, 2009. On this day, President Barack Obama held a press conference that addressed his first one hundred days in office. One of the urgent topics of discussion was the so-called swine flu, or H1N1, a deadly disease that had apparently originated in Mexico. James C. McKinley, Jr., of the New York Times, reported the following day on the first fatality from the disease in the United States: a little boy who had traveled with his family from Mexico. Another boy, McKinley wrote, “was listed in critical condition at a San Antonio hospital, suffering from swine flu, the potentially deadly form of influenza that began in Mexico City . . . ” (McKinley, see bibliography). The debate soon arose regarding whether or not to keep the Mexico/ US border open. Obama and his secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, were of one mind: keep it open. The latter explained that closing the border “would be a very, very heavy cost for what epidemiologists tell us would be marginal benefit” (McNeil). Obama, similarly, told a reporter that closing the border would be “akin to closing the barn door after the horse is out” (McNeil). Nonetheless, the president urged caution: “Wash your hands when you shake hands, cover your mouth when you cough . . . If you are feeling certain flu symptoms, don’t get on an airplane” (Grady). Although Mexico City has made positive strides in recent years in the fight against environmental degradation, reports that a potential global pandemic originated in this city seemed to surprise very few in the United States and instead triggered knee-jerk reactions about travel across the Mexico/US border, alongside the corresponding threat of viral infections working their way north.

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In fact, Mexico City has been a source of concern not only for North Americans, but for Mexicans as well. The poet and novelist Homero Aridjis, for example, decried the environmental conditions of Mexico City as early as 1993 in his La leyenda de los soles (The Legend of the Suns). The solution the novel proposes to the city’s problems is telling in its relative lack of pragmatism: in Aridjis’s novel the fate of Mexico City does not depend on new vaccines, government policies, or global political relations. It depends, instead, on the outcome of a battle between pre-Columbian “immortals.” These time travelers have reappeared in contemporary Mexico City to settle a conflict initiated more than five centuries ago. The present study is about these and other fictional time travelers in Latin America and the Caribbean. While often I found myself rooting for these characters in their assorted missions, I also saw the need to analyze their actions in all their implications. As such, Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination is premised on the notion that an investigation into time travel provides meaningful new perspectives on several issues of ongoing hemispheric importance. Time and how we understand it are crucial in both Aridjis’s novel and in the H1N1 threat. With the latter, people were particularly fearful of the possibility that at any given moment flu symptoms could arise that had taken weeks or even months to germinate. Once the first few cases of the virus were confirmed both in Mexico and beyond its borders, the global hysteria spread like wildfire: instantaneously, almost, on account of modern communications systems. In the case of La leyenda de los soles, “time” is also at work: the immortals traverse the centuries only to surface in a Mexico City that is at once pre- and postmodern, both provincial and global. Ultimately, however, Aridjis’s novel is symptomatic of the widely held notion that the issues currently facing not just Mexico but the Americas as a whole— issues that include but that are not limited to the heritage of conquest (to borrow an expression by Sol Tax) and the legacy of slavery—are unfinished business from the past, not unlike the ghost who visits Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is not just the past, however, that sends emissaries to the present, whether in the form of science fictional time travelers, immortals, extraordinarily old people and creatures, or through reincarnations. Time travel can occur in the opposite direction, that is, fictional

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characters from the present and, indeed, the future, also travel to the past. This is the case, for example, in Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch (1996), in which scientists from the twenty-second century seek to intervene in Columbus’s voyage to keep the “discovery” of America from happening. In Time Travel, I argue that this dream of making a surgical intervention in the hemisphere’s past in order to redirect its history is alive and well, whether the author be Mexican, North American, Caribbean, and so on. Similarly, the dream or desire for contact between past and present can be expressed in a variety of artistic media, including narrative, poetry, drama, painting, and film. Indeed, the texts featured in Time Travel take one step further George Orwell’s well-known axiom about controlling time: what better way to control the past, for example, than to travel to it and change it? This question leads to many others, all of which are addressed in this study: why the interest in the past among recent cultural production from or about the Americas, particularly a past that involves the initial encounters between indigenous Americans and outsiders? Can time travel—a phenomenon often associated with escapism and “relegated” to the realm of science fiction—have any bearing on crucial, real-life hemispheric issues involving expressions of cultural identity? Ultimately, what is the relationship between unlikely—if not impossible—fictional events and the prospects for real, practical changes in the nonfictional world? Time travel, perhaps better than any other kind of fictional device, underscores the tension between what happened and what could have happened, between what went wrong in the past and how it could be made right. If, that is, it could be made right: my contention in this study is that fictional time travel within Latin American and Caribbean contexts is motivated largely because of a lack or a perceived lack of practical, political agency in the present day. Fictional time travel is, in many instances, the final recourse of those seeking radical change, including several of the literary characters I describe in the pages ahead. Given its focus on time travel in fiction from and about the Americas, this study is the setting for a number of unexpected encounters: between different time periods, obviously, but also between what might otherwise be considered disparate disciplines and discourses, including Latin American and Caribbean literature and

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philosophy, science fiction, history, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, ecocriticism, and several others. In addition, Time Travel brings a variety of writers, artists, and historical figures from different regions and different generations into unexpected dialogues, even when their viewpoints seem either unrelated or opposed: the Cuban poets Nancy Morejón and José Martí, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, the Italian writer Umberto Eco, the Colombian filmmaker Jorge Alí Triana, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the Mexica/Aztec emperor Moctezuma, and the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo—to name just a few—all contribute (whether directly or indirectly, willingly or inadvertently) valuable insights in the pages ahead. In the midst of this interdisciplinarity and heterogeneity, the focus throughout this study is on the extraordinary, imaginary temporal journeys that have occurred in recent cultural production from or about the Americas. *

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Citations of texts written in Spanish are given first in Spanish, followed by the English translation. However, this order is inverted when I integrate the English translation into the prose of the manuscript. I use published translations when available. Otherwise, translations are my own. I capitalize the word “conquest” when referring to the specific series of events that led to the dominance of Spaniards over indigenous American groups. This is so particularly when the word is preceded by the definitive article (“the Conquest”) and is not followed by any modifiers. When using the term in a broader, more generalized way, I use the lowercase. I do so, as well, when the term is followed by modifiers (“the conquest of Mexico”). Although the term generally encompasses a much larger area, I occasionally employ “the Americas” in this study. The term, unless otherwise specified, is shorthand for Latin America and the Caribbean. Similarly, “American” refers to the same geographical grouping. Finally, although “Taíno” is often spelled without the accent in English usage, I maintain this accent except when quoting others. Atlanta, Georgia May 2011

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INTRODUCTION

Time and Narrative in the Americas

All memory is present Novalis, Poeticismen 1798 Vi la posibilidad de establecer ciertos sincronismos posibles, americanos, recurrentes, por encima del tiempo, relacionando esto con aquello, el ayer con el presente. Alejo Carpentier, “De lo real maravilloso americano,” 1949 [I saw the possibility of establishing certain possible synchronisms: American, recurring, beyond time, relating this with that, yesterday with the present.]

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panish American, Caribbean, and North American fiction; Hollywood films; Mexican paintings; board games; children’s literature: all in one study? How is this possible? The short answer is that it is possible: as possible, in fact, as a fictional voyage across time. The long answer lies in the pages ahead. Read on . . . the answer is of no small importance. *

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My purposes in writing Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination are on the one hand to trace occurrences of

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time travel involving figures from literary writings and other cultural production that treat the European arrival and colonization of the Americas. On the other hand, my aim is also to analyze these temporal (i.e., relating to time) journeys in terms of their relevance to ongoing issues of hemispheric cultural identity. This is so particularly in light of the fact that several of the texts I discuss (many of which were, perhaps not coincidentally, published within a few years of the controversial 1992 quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas1), establish a counterpoint between past and present, broadly stated, and more particularly between the colonial and precolonial past of the region and its present (and sometimes, too, its future). In simple language, in this study I explore why so much relatively recent cultural production from and about the Americas involves time travel. In doing so, I focus primarily on several (though by no means all) relevant texts that treat cultural production from Latin America and the Caribbean (mostly the Spanish-speaking areas in both cases). My argument throughout is that time travel within the context of cultural production from and about the Americas must be understood as a strategy to envision a different reality by groups who might find the painful legacy of the past in the Americas otherwise insurmountable. Because I find it doubtful—given the study’s broad geographical and thematic scope—that readers will be familiar with most of the texts I analyze, I occasionally integrate—where relevant—direct textual citations in developing my argument. In light of the ways it develops this argument, Time Travel has become—not unlike my previous study, Narrative Mutations—an interdisciplinary, comparative project. Rather than lamenting or theorizing the decline and demise of comparative literature, Time Travel simply and, perhaps unreflexively, practices this discipline. It is, in a way, a work of comparative literature although not necessarily one about comparative literature. The results of the study will, I hope, be beneficial to comparatists of American and trans-Atlantic literatures, as well as to those interested in issues of identity involving Latin America and the Caribbean, not to mention readers interested in the nexuses between literatures of the Americas and time, literatures of the Americas and science, and science (or speculative) fiction more specifically stated.

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Introduction

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While the geographical focus of this study may be Latin America and the Caribbean, I also comment on works written in languages other than Spanish (e.g., English and Italian) and by authors from other areas who have written stories set in these two overlapping regions. For this reason, I employ the terms “the Americas” and, occasionally, “New World” as shorthand for the geographical settings and thematic interests of the works I discuss, regardless of either their initial language of publication or their respective authors’ nationalities. In using these terms, I am following scholars like J. Michael Dash, Gordon Brotherston, and Lúcia de Sá, all of whom have explained their functionality and limitations. For Dash, the use of the term “New World,” for example, has become “an unavoidable compromise,” and he adds that “the only reasonable alternatives, American studies or American literature, would not normally include South American or Caribbean writing . . . ” (1). It should be noted, however, that in the dozen years since Dash published his study, the term “literature of the Americas” has gained currency in North American academia, and I employ it often in this study. Furthermore, as Brotherston and De Sá explain, the term “American” can also have unintended, pejorative connotations inasmuch as for them–implicitly, at least—the term “normally points back to the Old World in language and culture” (8). This is so, apparently, given the occasional misconception that anything of merit in the Americas is of European origin, as well as the fact that the former was named after a European cartographer and adventurer (Amerigo Vespucci). Along these lines, the term “New World” would seem to invoke the Old World even more and thereby, albeit unintentionally, reify the perceived dependence of the New World on the Old. In the particular case of Time Travel one could argue that the Italian Umberto Eco (see chapter 1) is by no means a New World or “American” author. Nonetheless, the short story of his I discuss in chapter 1 is in many ways a tale of the Americas or a trans-Atlantic tale. This is so, in geographical terms at least, inasmuch as it addresses Columbus’s 1492 voyage. Conversely, in other cases my geographical boundaries with regard to the Americas reveal a further limitation to works about Latin America and the Caribbean. For example, in Kindred (1979), a novel by Octavia Butler, a modern-day African American woman travels backward in time to the era of slavery in the

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Southern United States and in so doing meets her ancestors. Because it is a story largely about the United States, and because it registers historical and cultural contexts that are not equal (although undoubtedly linked) to those of Latin America and the Caribbean, Kindred lies mostly2 beyond the scope of Time Travel. Similarly, although some Brazilian cultural production could very well have been included in the study (Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma [1928] comes to mind), in the interest of brevity and in an effort not to challenge my own disciplinary and linguistic limitations, I have chosen not to include texts pertaining to Brazil in this study. While in following common parlance I refer to “Latin” America, a designation that is not without its share of ambiguities,3 it is fair to say that most of these references are to Spanish America (the Spanish-speaking portion encompassed by Latin America). Apropos geography and “Spanish” America in particular, this study also strives to draw productive links between this region and the Caribbean. Over the last several hundred years, for instance, the Caribbean and Spanish America—due to many complex reasons involving language, geography, economics, and other differences stemming from their colonial formations—have followed divergent trajectories. Nonetheless, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean region (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and some coastal areas of South and Central America) occupy both worlds, and to varying degrees, other parts of the Caribbean do as well. This is all the more the case when we remember that both Spanish America and much of the Caribbean were thrust into the modern era by Spanish explorers and conquerors. Indeed, we shall see that time travelers from the era of “discovery” and conquest make little distinction between, for instance, Mexico City and Trinidad: both constitute, quite interestingly, territories familiar to them. In some respects, Time Travel is a continuation of Narrative Mutations. In the latter study I endeavored to show how heredity functions as a guiding motif in many Caribbean writings, oftentimes manifesting itself in unlikely ways. Heredity, both as a scientific concept and as a literary trope, cannot be understood without taking into consideration the ways it operates within a linear temporal framework; in other words, the offspring necessarily follows the parents and a mutation necessarily transforms a preexisting gene. Time

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Travel, obviously perhaps, shares this interest in temporality. Rather than analyzing mutations and other genetic transactions, however, this study is peopled with ghosts and time travelers who journey back and forth between the distant past, the present, and sometimes the future. While these travelers may be fictional characters, presences, or voices, they also invoke a broad range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and physics. Let us return to the example from the prologue: when an ageless Mexica/Aztec4 scribe surfaces on the streets of modern Mexico City, as is the case in Homero Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles, the event seems to require the kind of interdisciplinary explanation and analysis that the previously mentioned fields of study can provide. Even just in terms of the various literary genres, La leyenda de los soles can be approached from multiple generic and thematic perspectives insofar as it is at once a novel that addresses environmental concerns while also employing techniques most commonly associated with science fiction or fantasy fiction. As its title suggests, time is a unifying trope in this study: it is, at once, a study on writings and other cultural production about time and also one that examines the kinds of time portals that one might find in science fiction. There have been, undoubtedly, countless methodological and disciplinary approaches to understanding and describing all the workings of time, or at least attempting to do so. Time Travel could never fully encompass all these approaches, which began—in the Western tradition, at least—with the pre-Socratics. There are, however, some disciplines that seem particularly useful to my project. In the field of narratology, for instance, Ursula Heise’s Chronoschisms (1997) comments on a broad range of fiction writers, including Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges: two Argentinean writers who have attained “cross-over” appeal in North American academia. In doing so, she traces the links between the culture of time posited by postmodernity and changes in the structure of the novel. For his part, Peter Brooks assigns to time a central role across all narratives by arguing that the “meaning dealt with by narrative, and thus perhaps narrative’s raison d’être, is of and in time” (10). Elsewhere, Paul Ricoeur distinguishes between tales of time and tales about time. The former includes all fictional narratives “inasmuch as the structural transformations that affect the situations and characters take time,” while in the latter “it is the very experience of

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time that is at stake in these structural transformations” (101). Mark Currie agrees by asserting that “time is a universal feature of narrative, but it is the topic of only a few” (2). Inasmuch as many of the texts I treat in this study involve time travel and similar types of temporal dislocation, it seems fair to say that these texts are, following Ricoeur, tales about time. If, as mentioned previously, heredity involves a conventional linear chronology, fictional time travel can break the laws of physics and the material world. Although he refers primarily to recent Latin American novels, Fernando Aínsa’s observations about time and the novel are applicable to many other works of narrative fiction and, perhaps, to other forms of artistic expression or cultural production that involve the passage of time. According to Aínsa, there is “a novelistic time—the historical present of the narration—in which other times coincide. The interferences can be from the past, but also from the future in the form of deliberate anachronisms” [“Hay un tiempo novelesco—presente histórico de la narración—sobre el cual inciden otros tiempos. Las interferencias pueden ser del pasado, pero también del futuro en forma de anacronías deliberadas” 96–97]. As useful as narratological concepts are to this study, they cannot in themselves provide a complete conceptual framework for gaining an understanding of the representation of time travel in cultural production from the Americas. One must also take into account the social and intellectual history or histories of the region. With reference to how these histories are constructed in the Americas, Lois Parkinson Zamora, in The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (1997), challenges the notion that the residents of this area are free of the burdens of history because they are free to create their own. On the contrary, they dramatize the fact that history may be more burdensome—and more meaningful—when one must create it, a circumstance as likely in the New World as inheriting a history from a known family or community. It is when cultural traditions are disjunctive or destroyed, and the potential for historical projection apparently endless, that history becomes problematic and literature instrumental. (4–5)

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Elsewhere, Rubén Dri makes a similar argument and registers a similar mood by pointing out that residents of the Americas, as they attempt to construct their histories and cultural identities, continuously create and recreate [these histories] in order to nourish their hopes, encourage their battles, project their future and also console themselves in light of their unbearable situation. The master’s task is to provoke a “forgetting” in the dominated peoples . . . these peoples, unconsciously, respond with a counter-reading [of history] which is oftentimes shameful, but that in one way or another flourishes in key moments in history. [crean y recrean continuamente para alimentar sus esperanzas, animar sus luchas, proyectar su futuro y también consolarse de lo insoportable de su situación. Es tarea del dominador el provocar el “olvido” en los pueblos dominados . . . los pueblos, de manera inconsciente, le van oponiendo una contralectura muchas veces vergonzante, pero que de una u otra manera aflora en momentos claves de la historia.] (56) One might ask what accounts for this “unbearable situation” Dri mentions, or the “problematic” history (and the consequent instrumentality of literature) outlined by Zamora. In an essay published in 1989, “12 de octubre de 1492: ¿Descubrimiento o encubrimiento?” [“October 12, 1492: Discovery or Cover-up?”], the noted Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea asserts that both Spain and Latin America, on account of the Conquest and a colonial period that for many centuries retarded development in the region, have been forced to overcome a past that should have already been relegated to the past (“obligadas a rebasar un pasado que debería ser definitivamente pasado” 203). In other words, rather than living in the present with an eye toward the future and its hopes, Spain and its former colonies, according to Zea, have been stuck in the sixteenth century, unable to keep up with North America and the rest of Europe. Zea had advanced similar claims in a much earlier study, translated as The Latin American Mind (Dos etapas del Pensamiento en Hispanoamérica, 1949). In this study, he argues—with specific reference

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to Spanish American political and economic stagnation—that the past, if it is not completely assimilated, always makes itself felt as present. In each gesture, in every act carried out by the Hispanic-American man, the past becomes evident . . . Meanwhile the rest of the world marched forward, progressed, and made history. Hispanic America continued to be a continent without history, without a past, because the past was always present. (10) While there is much in this passage that merits unpacking (how, for example, does one assimilate the past? Who is this “HispanicAmerican man”? What about women? How does one “make” history? How does one define “progress”? etc.), Zea’s basic idea is that Latin Americans have a different rapport with historical processes than residents of other regions. This is so primarily due to the tragedy that was the Conquest and its aftermath. Similarly, in his seminal The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), Octavio Paz advances a (highly generalizing) claim not unlike Zea’s by arguing that Mexicans “carry about with them, in rags, a still-living past” (65) [“arrastran en andrajos un pasado todavía vivo”] (88). Not surprisingly, in both the Caribbean and Latin America during the colonial era, “progress” was seen as something that came from elsewhere, and the regions themselves were often seen as backwaters existing for the benefit of the metropolis. In light of these historical trends, my contention in this study—one that will be presented in different ways in the chapters that constitute it—is that the time travel that occurs in much of the cultural production from the Americas can be linked to Zea’s and Paz’s views on a different engagement with time, history, and memory in the region. In other words, it seems but a short step from these views to fictional responses that seek somehow to resist and/or overcome them. Such fictional responses—that is, occurrences of time travel that include the Conquest and the modern era—suggest that the time travelers I discuss are somehow attempting to rewind the clock and undo the Conquest and its effects. In so doing they seek to reconfigure human activity in the region so that in it, history can begin to move forward. This rewinding of the clock can be linked, in turn—insofar as literature is concerned—to an idea expressed first by Octavio Paz

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Introduction

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in 1969 and expanded upon later by Roberto González Echevarría. The latter explains that in Latin America there prevails a “literature of foundations” (an expression he borrows from Paz) because of the “lack of self-assurance” in the region and doubts about its sociocultural legitimacy (“Latin American and Comparative Literatures” 96). These doubts must stem, at least in part, from the debilitating effects of the Conquest. Consequently, any time travelers to the Conquest (i.e., the “foundation”—or, to use a more current phrasing, the “Ground Zero”—of hemispheric anxieties) seek to undermine and reverse this event. There is unanimity in this regard: as concerns time travelers to the Conquest—whether in the writings of Eco, Aridjis, Zea, and so on—this epoch is a source of ongoing dissatisfaction and must be altered (even if in the fictional realm) or reinvisioned. No one writing in recent decades (to a wide audience, at least) approves and celebrates the Conquest. This is the case regardless of whether the writer can be said to belong to a group that mostly benefitted or suffered from the events of the Conquest and early colonial period in the Americas. These notions of “rewinding” the clock, reversing events, and moving freely across temporal continuums may, quite correctly, remind readers of pre-Columbian and/or Mesoamerican temporalities, in which time is not necessarily understood as flowing in linear fashion but instead as following circular and repetitive trajectories. In Maya Conquistador, the anthropologist Matthew Restall discusses—as Tzvetan Todorov and Sandra M. Cypess had also done in The Conquest of America and La Malinche in Mexican Literature, respectively—how the events of the Conquest disrupted what had become a common way for pre-Columbian societies to engage with temporality: If dramatic and violent episodes in the Conquest punctuated what was otherwise a gradual process that may have been perceived by Mayas as characterized more by continuity than change, there are hints in the Maya accounts that Mesoamerican conceptions of time may have bolstered the impression of continuity . . . The Nahuas, for example, also used notions of temporal cyclicity, of the past’s prediction of the present, and of meaningful continuities from preConquest times to de-emphasize change and to counter the potential trauma of disjuncture with the prehispanic past. (41–42)

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This type of temporality does not necessarily mean that time travel per se existed for Mesoamerican and/or pre-Columbian civilizations, or that it was a common feature of their imagination. In many respects, recent fictional time travel involving these civilizations can be said to combine pre-Hispanic temporalities and the teleological, progress-driven temporal schemes more characteristic of Europeanderived societies. Nonetheless, it is worth recognizing that several of the texts in this study, inasmuch as they recall and/or depict the eras of the “discovery” and Conquest (and Mesoamerican civilizations broadly stated), can be associated with the field of anthropology and its nuanced–if not uncontroversial—ways of describing human diversity. This discipline, which has been described as “the mediating element in modern Latin American narrative” (González Echevarría, Myth and Archive 13), has had a profound influence not only on literary writings from the region, but also on other forms of cultural expression from this and other regions. Indeed, the proverbial “first contact” between modern outsiders and isolated indigenous groups, and the process whereby the former “go native” while the latter are seen as embodiments of earlier stages of human development, are recurring themes in many novels from the last few decades. These include Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965; also a 1991 film), Mario Vargas Llosa’s El hablador (1987), and films such as The Emerald Forest (1985) and Medicine Man (1992). If the aforementioned works, all of which seem inspired by or at least related to anthropological discourses, involve a return to prehistoric origins or to primordial human moments, for González Echevarría much the same can be said about the intellectual trajectories of other writers who are not necessarily anthropologists: “Freud, Frazer, Jung, and Heidegger sketch a return to, or a retention of, these origins” (Myth and Archive 14). It is worth pursuing what some of these writers have written about memory and constructions of the past, particularly given that many of the texts I comment on in this study pertain to these matters. Keeping in mind Zea’s contention that the past is something that some Latin Americans are doomed to revisit again and again, Sigmund Freud wrote in 1896 that people in general never entirely solidify their constructions of the past. For him, memory traces are subjected to “a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—to a retranscription . . . memory is present

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not once but several times over” (Quoted in Doidge 224). To what extent, however, is psychoanalysis helpful in shedding light on the more extreme processes of remembering the past, namely when this past invades or seems to invade the present? Carl Jung’s description of the uncanny matches the temporal dislocations that occur in several of the texts I analyze in Time Travel and merits a lengthy citation. Although Jung was neither the first (Ernst Jentsch 1906) nor the last (among others, Sigmund Freud 1919) to make important pronouncements on the uncanny, in an essay from 1912 he describes the phenomenon cogently. According to him, the uncanny is the feeling which would steal over us if, amid the noise and bustle of a modern city street, we were suddenly to come upon an ancient relic—say the Corinthian capital of a long-immured column, or a fragment of an inscription. A moment ago, and we were completely absorbed in the hectic, ephemeral life of the present; then, the next moment, something very remote and strange flashes upon us, which directs our gaze to a different order of things. We turn away from the vast confusion of the present to glimpse the higher continuity of history. Suddenly we remember that on this spot where we now hasten to and fro about our business a similar scene of life and activity prevailed two thousand years ago in slightly different forms; similar passions moved mankind, and people were just as convinced as we are of the uniqueness of their lives. (8) Undoubtedly, Jung’s description of the uncanny is one way to think about temporal dislocation in the way I intend in this study. Although temporal dislocations or ambiguities broadly writ are not identical to instances of time travel, the two phenomena are related: the latter phenomenon cannot be fully understood in isolation from the former ones. Staying within the context of psychoanalytic theory, we can turn to an observation Stuart Hall makes about the desire among Caribbean peoples to recover or return5 to lost origins: a desire that could be linked to fictional time travel. According to him, this desire “is like the imaginary in Lacan—it can neither be fulfilled nor requited, and hence is the beginning of the symbolic, or representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery . . . ”

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(“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 402). Hall’s observation aside, other perspectives and paradigms beyond or alongside those offered by psychoanalysis may be needed to provide a fuller picture of the different kinds of time travel that occur in Time Travel. Science fiction (and science fiction studies; see chapter 1), for example, may provide an additional point of reference for commenting on cases in which characters literally travel in time. In the case of the uncanny, in contrast, the temporal dislocation that occurs seems shrouded in mystery: it may or may not be (as in Jorge Luis Borges’s 1953 short story, “El sur”) a figment of the imagination, designed, perhaps, to elevate the person encountering the uncanny toward an epiphany and/or a higher state of consciousness through which she or he may, perhaps, better empathize with others. Science fiction, however, should not be seen as the primary or exclusive reference point for the literary writings and other cultural texts this study explores. Certain instances of time travel involving fiction from the Americas, for example, seem more closely related to activities that could be variously categorized under spiritism, sorcery, magic, religion, and the fantastic than to either the uncanny or science fiction. Occasionally, however, these categorizations can get blurry: although I attempt not to dwell on this sort of distinction, it is fair to say that there is sometimes very little “science” or scientific plausibility in texts that receive the label “science fiction.” They may best be described as works of speculative fiction. What exist instead in many such works are violations or interruptions in the “natural” order of reality. Although these phenomena may be unexplained, they are to me oftentimes no less interesting. Here, the distinction Bud Foote identifies between science fiction and fantasy is helpful: because it runs counter to the known laws of physics, time travel belongs more closely to fantasy than to science fiction. According to Foote, “a degree of credibility . . . is at the heart of science fiction, just as implausibility is at the core of fantasy” (3). Returning specifically to the uncanny, Jung’s observations on this phenomenon carry heuristic and optimistic overtones. We know, however, at least from Zea, that these adjectives are not always appropriate in describing how the past is constructed in the Americas. Is there, then, a way to think about memory, psychoanalysis, and the uncanny in such a way that seems more relevant in light of the history of the Americas? Norman Doidge, a North American psychoanalyst,

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recalls a curious dream one of his patients had: a dream that “implied that the loss was happening now. Past and present were being mixed up together, and a transference was being activated” (230). If we can accurately rename this patient’s loss as a kind of trauma, then the following observation by Cathy Caruth about the psychologically traumatized also makes sense with regard to the history of Latin America and the Caribbean and the cultural production from the region. For her, the traumatized “carry within them, or they become themselves the symptom of, a history that they cannot entirely possess” (5). One might add that because the traumatized are unable to possess this history entirely, they are also unable—in terms reminiscent of Zea—to overcome it. In her Usable Past, Zamora registers many of these concerns involving psychoanalysis and constructions of memory to address literary trends in the Americas. Rather than using the term “uncanny,” however, she writes of “ghosts” that continuously resurface in literary writings from the region. According to her, the “manifestations of ancient gods that irrupt into Carlos Fuentes’s fictions—Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcóatl, Chac-Mool—are also [i.e., among other examples she describes] ghosts . . . ” (78). What are these “ghosts”—or “revenants,” as Cypess calls them (La Malinche 123)—that haunt at least some of Fuentes’s fictions about Mesoamerica’s pre-Columbian past, and what purpose do they serve? Zamora suggests that ghosts, in fact, play multiple roles in literary writings from the Americas. In a way that happens to synthesize many of my earlier comments with regard to psychoanalysis and history and society in the Americas, she states that ghosts may serve as carriers of metaphysical truths, as visible or audible signs of atemporal, transhistorical Spirit. Or, they may carry historical burdens of tradition and collective memory: ghosts often act as correctives to the insularities of individuality, as links to lost families and communities, or as reminders of communal crimes, crises, and cruelties . . . They, too, are often bearers of cultural and historical burdens, for they represent the dangers, anxieties, and passional forces that civilization banishes. They may signal primal and primordial experience, the return of the repressed, or the externalization of internalized terrors. (76–77)

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Although Time Travel encompasses several other forms of time travel besides the kind described earlier, the notion of ghosts is a useful one, particularly in light of traumas in the hemisphere’s past that have led either to incomplete historical narratives that unwittingly leave behind ghostly subalterns (as has also been the case, according to Erika Johnson, in the Caribbean) or to types of collective repression. Through such notions we can better contextualize, although not necessarily entirely explain, the complex temporalities at work in the cultural production from the region. Could it be that literary writings about ghosts are, knowingly or not, a way for literary expression in particular or artistic creation in general to substitute for psychoanalysis? After all, Doidge quite interestingly explains that psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors . . . We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243) It may come as no surprise that at least two characters in the stories I discuss in Time Travel undergo psychotherapy. How have writers and others involved in cultural production sought to “work through” the past of the Americas, and in what ways has time travel figured into this process? Alejo Carpentier’s fictional narratives, for instance, in many ways begin to provide an answer to these questions insofar as several of them treat the passage of time in creative ways. His short story “Viaje a la semilla” (1958) is a narrative told in reverse chronological order while keeping a curious and at times profound sense of causality. Although the title of the story can be translated literally as “Journey to the Seed,” the published English translation is “Journey Back to the Source.” A journey back to a type of source, in effect, is also what occurs in what many consider Carpentier’s masterpiece, Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps, 1956). In this novel, a nameless narrator travels deep into the Amazon rainforest in search of ancient musical instruments; his journey is in many respects a voyage to a long-forgotten, primeval epoch. Carpentier’s final novel may, however, most closely approximate the type of temporal convergence of interest to my study. In this

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novel, El arpa y la sombra (1979; The Harp and the Shadow, 1990), the Catholic Church decides, during the late nineteenth century, to hold a referendum on the beatification of Christopher Columbus. The narrative shifts back and forth between the elaborate proceedings of the beatification tribunal at the Vatican and the experiences of the admiral during the era of his voyages to the Americas. Throughout the tribunal, Columbus is present in spirit and able to hear both the arguments and counterarguments regarding his beatification: Columbus, in effect, is “invisible—without weight, without dimension, casting no shadow, an errant transparency who had lost all sense of the vulgar notions of hot and cold, day and night, good and evil . . . ” (133) [“El Invisible—sin peso, sin dimensión, sin sombra, errante transparencia para quien habían dejado de tener un sentido de las vulgares nociones de frío o calor, día o noche, bueno o malo . . . ” 171]. Ultimately, because the evidence is weighted toward not canonizing him (particularly, according to the tribunal, because he helped usher in the era of slavery in the Americas), Columbus’s nineteenth-century candidacy for sainthood is denied. In the final sentence of the novel, we find the admiral’s ghost vanishing into thin air, “haciéndose uno con la transparencia del éter” (204) [“ . . . the Invisible One evaporated into the air that enveloped and passed through him, and he became one with the transparent ether” 159]. As compelling as Carpentier’s Columbus may be, he will receive no further attention in Time Travel. In this study I instead focus primarily on texts in which the temporal displacement becomes materialized; that is, texts in which fictional characters literally travel across time and make their marks on epochs that are not their own. These characters need not step through time portals or enter technologically advanced time machines in order to undertake their voyages (although some do). They may, instead, draw their time-traveling powers from ancient, non-European traditions. Furthermore, when I state that these characters “literally travel across time,” this does not always mean that they leap over time periods. It does mean, however, that these characters engage with time in supernatural ways, whether as “immortals,” reincarnated beings, visitors to alternate realities that exist simultaneously to our own but that happen to be in an earlier stage of technological development, or as people who live inordinately long lives.6 It is worth underscoring that the subjects of Time Travel

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are able to engage directly with people from other time periods and thereby put themselves in a position to alter the flow of events. Conversely, for the preceding reasons anachronisms such as those that pervade many of Abel Posse’s novels (in the Dogs of Paradise, for instance, a group of fifteenth-century academicians ask the king for patronage and for funds for the 1940 Congress of Hispanic Culture; 13) fall outside the purview of this study, as does Alejandro Paternain’s Crónica del descubrimiento (1980), which imagines a parodic scenario whereby indigenous Americans sailed to Spain in the late fifteenth century in the hopes of discovering a “new world.”7 Similarly, the purview of this study does not extend to fictional accounts of lost civilizations that have—through accidents of history—followed a trajectory beyond the knowledge of mainstream civilizations, even if both sides inhabit the same conventional “reality.” This is the case, for example, in the Chilean Manuel Rojas’s La ciudad de los Césares (1936), a novel about the descendants of Spanish conquistadors who survive in Patagonia into the twentieth century, as well as in a Hollywood film that is thematically similar: The Last of the Dogmen (1995). *

*

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In her seminal study, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), Mary Louise Pratt advances the notion of a “contact zone”: a theme relevant both to texts central to this study as well as to those that fall slightly beyond its parameters. A contact zone is, according to her, the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, racial inequality, and intractable conflict . . . “contact zone” is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. (6) The present study makes use of this concept, the primary difference being that through literal time travel Pratt’s contact zone gains an added dimension, as if the texts I analyze are engaged in a timeless

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rehearsal (or re-rehearsal) of the encounters or contacts that occurred centuries ago. The link Pratt traces between seeing (i.e., vision or the visual) and power relations is also of relevance to the present study, as well as, perhaps, to science fiction studies in general. Although I would hesitate to label Time Travel under the category of science fiction studies, there must be a connection (even if only a small one) between science fictional time travel and vision. After all, the ability to travel to a different time enables the traveler (and the reader or viewer) to see or envision a different era, one to which she or he could never have gained access to otherwise.8 Seeing, of course, can lead to understanding, which, in turn, can lead to change: a change that could very well also occur in the fictional traveler’s original or “home” time period. Fernando Reati, for instance, shows that recent Argentine narrative works do not have to travel to the past in order to comment on—and perhaps subvert—the present; the hypothetical future will also do: in these works, “ . . . se trata de un desplazamiento cronológico que nos lleva hacia el porvenir y nos hace ver el mundo real reflejado en el espejo levemente deformante de futuros hipotéticos para producir un comentario irónico sobre el presente” (15, emphasis added) [“ . . . the issue involves a chronological displacement that takes us toward the future and makes us see the real world reflected in the slightly distorting mirror of hypothetical futures in order to produce an ironic commentary about the present”; emphasis added]. Finally, in the current era of globalization and high-speed transportation, vision and the desire to see new “worlds” can also be linked to tourism (see the afterword to this study). My focus in Time Travel is limited mostly to texts of many varieties that depict time travel involving Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly those that have received limited critical attention.9 Both Kimberle López and Carrie Chorba, for instance, have written superb studies on recent novels and other forms of cultural production that are set during the Conquest and that attempt in a number of ways to rewrite or reenvision it. Chorba, for instance, comments on Carmen Boullosa’s Llanto: Novelas imposibles (1992) in which Moctezuma reappears in 1989 to a group of women in Mexico City. Although this novel would have been logical for the present study, I instead yield to the analysis Chorba has given it. Furthermore, while there may be some general overlap between the writers these scholars and I treat

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(particularly in terms of the interest I share with both Kimberle López and Miguel López-Lozano in the Mexican author Homero Aridjis), not to mention a shared methodological approach that seeks to contextualize an ongoing literary interest in the Conquest, the similarities end there. Because of my narrow scope on creative depictions of literal time travel involving Latin America and the Caribbean, I have been able to use a large canvas in other respects. The usual suspects are present (poetry and drama, as well as novels and short stories by authors both from these regions and from elsewhere). The visual arts (film and painting, for instance) also yield productive samples, as do examples from what might broadly be described as popular culture (music, comic books, and other artifacts less easily found in university libraries). I also examine material from academic or pedagogical writing: namely, juvenile literature and foreign language “readers” written with the express purpose of teaching students a second language. *

*

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Beginning with a review of the Columbus myth (or “jinx” as it has been called with regard to the case of the Columbus lighthouse in the Dominican Republic), the first chapter of Time Travel examines writings about the “discovery” and conquest of the Americas, an era— perhaps more than any other—to which storytellers hearken in their narratives about time travel in the region. Texts as diverse as the North American Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch (1996), Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles (my principal example in the chapter), and Fuentes’s short story, “The Two Americas” (1993) are some works that, in Doidge’s phrasing, attempt to “work through” the agony and ambivalence that remain from this era. Card’s novel, for example, employs conventions commonly found in science fiction to describe the efforts of space travelers from the future to intervene in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Mesoamerican societies in order for them to present a more effective resistance to the Spaniards. Given the fact that this novel as well as several other texts from this chapter are what one might consider works of science (or speculative) fiction, chapter 1 outlines a history of this genre, particularly in its Latin American manifestations. Although several of the texts I discuss in later chapters might also be

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considered works of science fiction (indeed, the various chapters in Time Travel do not constitute mutually exclusive and hermetic divisions), it is in this chapter that we can most readily engage with the desire on the part of writers from the Americas to grapple with and to imagine alternative scenarios to the Conquest. Not unlike the proverbial flying saucers said to have been etched long ago on the walls of ancient Mesoamerican archaeological sites, many of these alternative scenarios juxtapose science fictional technology with elements from pre-Columbian epochs. In so doing, the scenarios these texts construct often engage, quite interestingly, with new scientific understandings of time while maintaining their focus on societal issues and concerns that have existed for eons. My analysis in chapter 2 turns to cultural production from the Caribbean region, the setting—not counting the Scandinavian voyages early in the second millennium—of the initial encounters between indigenous Americans and Europeans: encounters that predated European advancement onto the American mainland. While chapters 1 and 2 have much in common, the principal difference is that the works I examine in the latter chapter—which includes an initial survey of relevant theoretical writings by prominent Caribbean intellectuals such as Carpentier, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and José Quiroga—all address and interrogate the history, cultural identities, and fate of the Caribbean. This is so both in terms of the visions these works offer of the region as a whole as well as of its constitutive parts. While any given text may prioritize one or the other of these, it has been the case in the Caribbean that the “region” itself, broadly stated, and the places that comprise the region, have shared a sometimes uneasy coexistence. We see this strained coexistence quite clearly in Kevin Baldeosingh’s The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (2005), a novel that encompasses the whole of the Caribbean’s modern history and, while focusing on the island of Trinidad, weaves a narrative thread across several other areas of the Caribbean. In addition, if Spanish served as the lingua franca during Columbus’s voyages and Cortés’s and Pizarro’s raids, the history of colonialism in the Caribbean has been, relatively speaking (and in terms of European languages), a multilingual affair, with many of its communities (including, occasionally, parts of individual islands) changing colonial masters numerous times and at rates that—in historical hindsight, at

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least—seem dizzying. While Baldeosingh’s novel and several of the other texts covered in this chapter were written in English (the colonial language in much of the Caribbean), Daína Chaviano writes in Spanish about her native Cuba in El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (1998). Interestingly, despite their differences, both Baldeosingh’s and Chaviano’s novels depict characters that travel through time, including, incidentally, characters of African heritage who travel to the present from the era of slavery in the Caribbean. Chapter 3 pursues a set of concerns that also inform, even if tangentially, several texts in the earlier chapters: namely, those involving feminism, or—more broadly stated—discourses that address the historically changing role (or roles) of women in American societies. After all, it is by no means the case that feminist concerns are absent from a novel like Chaviano’s. In this chapter, however, texts (both written and visual) by and about women take center stage. More specifically, in this chapter I survey the various critical permutations involving La Malinche, aka Doña Marina, Malinali, and Malintzin: a sixteenthcentury Mesoamerican woman who served as Hernán Cortés’s interpreter during the conquest of Mexico. In addition, the two had a child, Martín, who has often been considered (albeit erroneously10) by Mexicans to be the first Mexican mestizo. As such, La Malinche has been viewed (often in pejorative terms, especially until recent decades) as the symbolic mother of modern Mexico. La Malinche, then, has a powerful and intricate relationship with historical and temporal discourses in the New World: she participated in (and for some, enabled) the conquest of Mexico, one of the pivotal events in all of recorded history. Furthermore, history’s “assessment” of her has been a dynamic process: so dynamic and disputed, in fact, that it has become unclear who she actually “was.” Lastly, many of the texts I discuss in chapter 3 reveal that when La Malinche appears in narratives, plays, and visual media, “time” begins to behave in unconventional ways. I am particularly interested in a novel, La mujer habitada (1988), by the Nicaraguan writer, revolutionary, and politician Gioconda Belli. In La mujer habitada, time travel occurs in the form of a creature that witnessed both the conquest of the Americas and events during the twentieth century. Interestingly, this creature (or character) has a very subtle relationship with La Malinche.

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In chapter 4 my focus turns to a different kind of textual tradition involving the Americas, but one, nonetheless, in which time travel has played a played a vital role. The texts in previous chapters are of the type that have often served as objects of study in academic writing: with few exceptions, they are “serious” literary or visual artifacts, that is, they are geared for adults and they represent, supposedly, the “best” in writing, filmmaking, drama, and so on. However, time travel involving the Americas has surfaced as an interest in other kinds of texts: ones associated with what has come to be known as “popular culture.” It is not my intention in chapter 4 to launch a detailed critique of how popular culture is defined and where the dividing line rests between “high” and “low” culture. Indeed, some could argue—convincingly, perhaps—that some of the texts featured in earlier chapters are in fact “popular” texts. Ultimately, I have little interest in distinguishing between the popular and the refined, or the high and the low. What the texts in chapter 4 have in common (beyond the fact that they are not the kinds of texts one readily finds in university libraries) is that they are geared toward beginning readers, whether they be young children learning how to read for the first time, or older readers striving to master a second language (i.e., Spanish). In either scenario, time travel has proven an irresistible (albeit not unproblematic) tool for introducing readers to the Spanish language, to the history and cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America, and to the act of reading itself. Now, onward (or backward) to October 12, 1492 . . . a date that refuses to fade into oblivion.

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CHAPTER 1

Continuing Encounters: Journeys to (and From) the “Discovery” and Conquest of the Americas

Things could have always happened exactly opposite to the way the chronicle records them. Always. Carlos Fuentes, “The Two Shores,” The Orange Tree, 1994 The past is never dead; it’s not even past. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951 What would America look like today if things had been different? Fuser (Che Guevara’s travel companion), overlooking the ruins of Machu Picchu, The Motorcycle Diaries, 2005

O

ne of the more vivid and powerful images in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is that of the decrepit but nonetheless still quite present Spanish galleon resting in the jungle. In broad terms, my focus in this chapter involves this sort of temporal coexistence in the Americas. Indeed, to affirm that the past is present in the Americas is tantamount almost to a tautology. Alongside García Márquez’s epic novel are numerous

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other literary examples that seek to draw analogies between the past and the present in the Americas. Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El señor presidente (1946), for instance: here, the protagonist—in flight from a murderous Latin American despot—is haunted by dreams of Tohil, who in Maya mythology provides fire in exchange for human sacrifices. An earlier version of this novel, in fact, was titled Tohil in homage to the pre-Columbian deity. Such hauntings or temporal conflations, however, are not limited to literature. In his 1997 study on Caribbean society, The Haunting Past, Alvin Thompson describes what has been referred to “as the ‘curse of Columbus’ or ‘the Columbus jinx’ in the mythology of the people of the Dominican Republic” (xiv). According to him, although most Dominicans do not believe in the myth, it has nonetheless gained new currency at the inauguration of a new Columbian memorial lighthouse. The death of President Balaguer’s sister just before the inauguration, and only two weeks after touring the lighthouse, was perceived by some Dominicans as yet another evil omen associated with the structure (xiv). What if, however, García Márquez’s Spanish galleon were suddenly to regain its original form and set sail over the seas to present-day Colombia and Venezuela? What if its crew reappeared and somehow began an actual dialogue with twentieth- or twenty-first-century inhabitants of the Americas? Such stories involving time travel between the present and the age of “discovery” and conquest will be my focus in this chapter. In terms of the Columbus lighthouse outside of Santo Domingo, it would be as if the admiral himself appeared and began to address the crowd gathered at the inauguration. Columbus and the “Discovery” Revisited

The figure of Columbus is important in this chapter, as are—in general terms—the ways writers have sought to make sense of the present in the Americas in light of the “discovery” and conquest of the region. Referring in general terms to the contemporary Latin American novel that depicts this era, Viviana Plotnik argues that this genre “distorts official history through the use of hyperbole and anachronism, and revises the past from an ironic or parodic perspective, indicating a mistrust of historiography” (36–37). Another scholar explains why

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recent Latin American narratives have a strong temporal bent: with reference, in particular, to recent Mexican and Chicano narrative, Miguel López-Lozano argues that because Latin America’s official history legitimizes projects of development that erase indigenous peoples, women, and nature from the discourse of modernity, presenting them as merely the backdrop of efforts toward progress, contemporary writers excavate the past in order to revisit some of the discourses that generated this marginalization. (2) Perhaps no other historical figure has exerted as great a force on the literary imagination involving the Americas as Columbus. Umberto Eco’s short story “The Discovery of America” provides one of the earliest rewritings of Columbus and his era, well before the controversy surrounding the quincentennial commemoration. Originally published in Italian shortly after the 1969 NASA moon landing, Eco’s story recalls and revises the other great “discovery” that occurred almost five centuries earlier. In several important respects, the historical Columbus remains shrouded in mystery: his ethnicity and preferred language are not currently known with any precision; the degree to which he had attained mastery of sailing techniques is also the subject of debate, as is the exact location of San Salvador (the island where he first made landfall in the Americas); even the whereabouts of his physical remains is disputed. What if, however, Columbus’s voyage had been the object of a media blitz like the kind that occur today? Would our knowledge of and attitudes toward the admiral and his activities be any different? In “The Discovery of America,” Eco manages to link past and present by imagining a scenario in which a modern media crew is on hand with all its technological apparatuses to report on Columbus’s first landing in the Americas: in effect, this modern media crew has journeyed backward to the time of Columbus. Dan, the news anchorman reports: “Good evening, folks. Here it’s 7 p.m. on the 11th of October 1492, and we’re linked directly with the flagship of the Columbus expedition, which by 7 a.m. tomorrow should” make landfall (135). The newscasters are also linked “with Sforza TV in Milan, and the Universities of Salamanca and of Wittenberg” (135). The journalistic

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discourse is clearly meant to parallel the media coverage surrounding the space missions of the 1960s; indeed, it is a type of discourse familiar to readers today: the “news” as it happens.1 Furthermore, in contrast to the sketchiness of Columbus’s actual journey, the modern media attention would seem to ensure a detailed, multifaceted perspective on this journey. Eco’s selection of the universities at Salamanca and Wittenberg is not accidental, given that they were involved to varying degrees in the most vital intellectual debates surrounding Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. As Dan explains, “Some claim that this land is the Indies, reached from the West rather than from the East; others say it’s actually a whole new continent, enormous and unexplored” (135). Amid the excitement and pandemonium in the newsroom, Dan’s colleague Jim explains that everyone’s holding their breath while we follow this adventure, the most daring exploit of all time. It’s the beginning of a new age, which some columnists have already suggested calling The Modern Era. Man is emerging from the Middle Ages and is making a major breakthrough in his intellectual evolution. (136) Obviously, such precision in defining the historical significance of Columbus’s voyage would take intellectuals years to reach; Columbus himself apparently believed—to his dying day—that he had reached Asia. In contrast, in Eco’s revisionist parody there are no such limitations: historical analysis and contextualization are the order of the day. After some zany “color” commentary by the first guest expert, Leonardo da Vinci, who explains some of the hydraulic principles Columbus is employing to reach his destination, a third newsman interviews the president of the University of Salamanca. The president dryly explains—by appealing to Ptolemy’s ideas (ones that Columbus actually did need to address in mustering support for his project)—why the admiral’s project is doomed to fail: “Most people are quite aware that the Earth ends beyond the pillars of Hercules. The survival of the three vessels after that boundary is due to a simple televisual effect . . . ” (139–40). Lest one mistake this scholar’s a priori rejection of the discovery of America with present-day conspiracy

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theories denying human activities in space, he is quick to clarify that such special effects are not the work of NASA and Hollywood, but rather, “the work of the devil,” as any self-respecting fifteenth-century Christian theologian would have argued (140). The news crew then shifts to Columbus’s landfall and the admiral’s first words: “A small step for a sailor, a giant step for His Catholic Majesty” (144). Noble words indeed . . . worthy of Neil Armstrong. In his next breath, however, the admiral looks around him and notices an important detail about the indigenous population: “Hey, what’s that they’re wearing around their necks? Holy shit, that’s gold! Gold!” (144). By story’s end, the Spaniards are taking the “natives’ ” gold. In a scene that parodies the lunar landing (“Now the natives are also making great leaps, to get away” 144), a newsman explains that the lesser gravity in the environment would cause these “natives” to fly off; consequently, the Spanish sailors undertake in this fictional parody of the “discovery” of America an activity that would ultimately be repeated continuously until the “natives” were exterminated: the sailors “are fastening them to the ground with heavy chains” to keep them from “floating away” (144). Ultimately, “the natives are all neatly lined up in a civilized way, while the sailors head for the ships with the heavy bags filled with the local mineral” (144). In many ways, Eco’s playful and anachronistic depiction of Columbus’s voyage nonetheless manages a not-so-subtle critique of so-called cultural and technological progress. Simultaneously, the story clearly and unequivocally references— via a modern news crew reporting at the scene—the newcomers’ unabashed greed as well as the initial phase of a regimen of brutality the Europeans visited upon the indigenous Americans. The brutality of the “discovery” and conquest, it turns out, is frequently a focal point in fictional representations of these epochs, perhaps because many of the issues that derive from them have remained unresolved. On the one hand, Eco’s playful sarcasm with regard to the oppression of the indigenous population could suggest a subtle distance on this issue: a distance afforded to him by his Italian nationality. On the other hand, although his nationality and ethnicity are the subjects of debate, Columbus is typically considered Italian (or Genoese). As such, because of their common nationalities one could also argue that Eco sees himself more closely implicated than Europeans of other nationalities in debates surrounding the legacy of Columbus.

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Another writer—this one from the Americas—who has taken up the Columbus myth is Carlos Fuentes. He may be unsurpassed in contemporary Latin American letters in terms of the scope of his writings on literature, history, and, more specifically, the ways Latin Americans construct a collective past. With respect specifically to Mexican ways of negotiating between past, present, and future, he has argued that Mexico is a place “where each step toward the future is accompanied by the steps of a past simultaneous to our present.”2 In other words, Mexico—not only for him but for many other intellectuals—is a place that has not fully entered a modern temporality governed by what might be considered a “conventional” chronology. Moreover, not only is Mexican temporality characterized, according to Fuentes, by the coexistence of past, present, and future, the very ontological status of historical events could also be in doubt, particularly if we believe one of his characters. In “Las dos orillas,” a short story from his 1993 collection El naranjo (“The Two Shores” from The Orange Tree, 1994), the deceased conquistador Jerónimo de Aguilar observes (posthumously) that “things could have always happened exactly opposite to the way the chronicle records them. Always” (5) [“Siempre pudo ocurrir exactamente lo contrario de lo que la crónica consigna. Siempre” 13]. One way of looking at this assertion is that historical events for Fuentes may always be accompanied—in deconstructionist fashion—by their negation or opposite. For instance, if Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, it is just as plausible theoretically that he did not arrive then (or that he arrived elsewhere at some other time, etc.). A less abstract possibility is that hindsight may restrict our ability to fathom the multiple directions “reality” might have taken from a given point in time: as David McCullough explains, “Because the outcome of great events becomes so well established in our minds, there is a tendency to think things had to go as they did. But there is nothing inevitable about history” (214). Finally, Carrie Chorba3 suggests an additional way of reading the fictionalized Aguilar’s contention, one based on Fuentes’s own idea that literature, “specifically the manner in which one narrates the past or the future, contributes to our reality—whether or not the narrated events ever actually take place” (Chorba 106). In this sense, fictional writing creates an alternative space that could—if it is timely and forceful enough—have a concrete impact on the world, even when it contradicts the established

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account of historical events. Indeed, for those of us grappling with the heritage of conquest, it is impossible to overestimate or overappreciate fiction’s ability to imagine alternative scenarios to an otherwise discouraging past. “Las dos Américas,” a short story by Fuentes in the same collection, is certainly contradictory to established accounts of historical events. The title of the story, one could argue, is suggestive both of Frida Kahlo’s painting “Las dos Fridas” (1939) and the affirmation by Fuentes’s character Jerónimo de Aguilar from “Las dos orillas” regarding—in Jekyll and Hyde fashion—the “other side” or sides of historical events. In “Las dos Américas” Fuentes imagines a Columbus who decided to stay in what he calls Antilia and to withhold from Europeans any information about his discovery (unlike the historical Columbus, the one in Fuentes’s story was the only survivor of the voyage). Having found (and settled in) what he considers paradise, he grows accustomed to the pedestal on which his indigenous hosts have placed him and discards his only written account of Antilia by throwing it out to sea in a bottle. Five hundred years later, while still enjoying his earthly paradise, an ageless Columbus and his fellow Antilians receive their first visitor: out of what looks to the admiral like a huge bird steps a “yellow man . . . He’s wearing glasses that add to the glare and is dressed in a strange fashion: he carries a small black case in one hand and wears crocodile-skin shoes” (221) [“un hombre amarillo . . . con espejuelos que añaden al conflicto del brillo, vestido de manera extraña, con una maletita negra en la mano y zapatos de piel de cocodrilo” 251]. Columbus then discovers “the terrible truth: I hadn’t reached Japan. Japan had reached me” (221) [“supe la terrible verdad: Yo no había llegado a Japón. Japón había llegado a mí” 252]. What he calls “Japan,” in fact, reaches him in the person of a twentieth-century Japanese businessman named Mr. Nomura who had somehow found Columbus’s message in a bottle. Mr. Nomura arrives prepared with a grand vision of a modern Japanese-led multinational tourism project for the island. Columbus, in a daze, signs “the various contracts, including clauses relating to fried chicken and soda water, gas stations, motels, pizzerias,” and several other things that would have been unimaginable in the fifteenth century (224) [“Firmé, aturdido, los diversos contratos con expendios de pollo frito y aguas gaseosas, gasolineras,

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moteles, pizzerías . . . ” 255]. The only demand placed on the admiral is to have a team spirit and to—every twelfth of October—dress in his fifteenth-century clothes and parade around on a carnival float. Only when it is too late does Columbus learn that in handing over Antilia to the Japanese he has, in effect, spoiled the only remaining place undisturbed by modernity and all its ills. As a German tourist explains to him, by developing Antilia he has fulfilled his destiny: he has “enslaved and exterminated [his] people” (227) [“has cumplido tu destino, has esclavizado y exterminado a tu pueblo” 257]. It is worth asking, in light of Chorba’s earlier comment regarding fiction’s power to shape reality, what kind of Latin American reality or vision Fuentes’s story is positing. In effect, in both versions of the Americas—as different as they may be—Columbus can be held accountable for not only the extermination of the indigenous population that welcomed him, but also for any disarray or bleakness that accompanies modernity. The only significant difference is the chronological moment in which he triggers the cataclysm (a cataclysm to some extent akin to the one Homero Aridjis depicts later). Interestingly, having sold Antilia and sealed its fate, Columbus recovers his mortality and returns to Spain to die. In both “realities,” America is ravaged and Columbus is condemned. This suggests that redemption, revenge, and liberation are not the only possible outcomes in revisionist narratives involving the Conquest: a deterministic and pessimistic status quo can also be upheld. Interestingly, such a reading seems to run counter to his assertion in “Las dos orillas.” In other words, maybe “things”—even when recast—can also essentially confirm the historical record. Conversely, one could also argue in light of “Las dos Américas” that it may be futile to keep revisiting or reconceptualizing the Conquest through fiction; if this is so, more practical measures could be necessary in bringing about any potential social improvement. *

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Most of us know the story of Columbus as it has been handed down to us by historians and other writers, a “story” or myth—it must be said—that has varied in accordance with these writers’ differing points of views and ideologies. As fanciful a revision of the

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Columbus myth as Fuentes offers in “Las dos Américas,” this short story nonetheless follows the conventional trajectory of a Genoese navigator who (barely) reaches territory previously unexplored by Europeans and who, through his activities, is largely responsible for the “fall” of a continent. What, however, would the Americas have been like had Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic at the end of the fifteenth century been radically different or—to take the matter one step further—if he had never even undertaken said voyage? Several writings,4 including the playful short story “De navegantes” (1979) by the Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer, imagine such a scenario. Gorodischer’s story is part of Trafalgar, a collection of stories centered around the figure of Trafalgar Medrano: a technologically advanced intergalactic voyager intent on sharing his life story with an Argentinean woman who will one day write his biography. Their conversations, one might argue, are akin to the narrative formula of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516): in both texts a stranger speaks of another, strange world; indeed, Raphael5 Hythloday, the central figure in Utopia, affirms having accompanied Amerigo Vespucci during his voyages (Utopia 12). In “De navegantes,” Trafalgar reveals to his interlocutor that in Ferdinand and Isabella’s court there were no cats. When pressed on how he would know such trivia, he explains, “Vengo de allá” (288) [“I have just returned from there”]. He then clarifies that he did not travel through time: “ . . . el viaje por el tiempo es imposible” (289). Instead, during one of his interstellar adventures he came upon a portal to a nearly identical alternate universe in which life parallels ours except that it is approximately 500 years behind. In other words, in the alternate universe, Columbus is still in the preparatory stages of his initial voyage and is in the process of outfitting not three but four caravels: “la Santa María, la Pinta, la Niña, y la Alondra [the Lark]” (302). Although they are still in a state of shock upon seeing a vessel descend from the heavens, Columbus (who according to Trafalgar is “loco” [302]) and his crew allow the visitor to lead them across the ocean. Remembering the hardships the crew endured while making the voyage in the first reality, Trafalgar takes pity on them and zips them over to America in less than an hour. Although Trafalgar insists that he did not travel through time and that he had instead visited an alternate America, this insistence seems

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more like a playful technicality insofar as it involves personages from what seem to be two distinct and identifiable epochs in the timeline of the Americas. What of this “alternate” colonization whose seeds he planted? This is where we can begin to see—in the midst of its humor—the gravity or seriousness of Gorodischer’s vision. Suffice it to say that the colonization of the alternate America would be led by colonists rather than conquerors and soldiers (“. . . colonos; no conquistadores, fijate bien, colonos . . . soldados, los menos posibles” 306–7). Clearly, “De navegantes” expresses—albeit in a playful and satirical manner—a yearning for a new America that might have been had the initial conquest been of a different nature or, perhaps, not a “conquest” at all. In the alternate world, “nadie iba a matar y hacerse matar buscando El Dorado” (310) [“no one would kill or be killed searching for El Dorado”]. Furthermore, the new America would be an unfragmented one, with Spanish as the only language (“ . . . toda América iba a hablar español algún día” 310). Such utopian expressions would probably not withstand scrutiny: for instance, can a homogenous, Spanish-speaking society be imposed by Europeans (or by anyone) on a region as socially diverse and politically complex as the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century without resorting to brute force and violence? Perhaps not. It is worth remembering, nonetheless, the contention of scholars like López-Lozano and Chorba that revisiting and reevaluating through fictions what may be in all practicality an “immutable” past can effect positive transformations in the present and future, even if such transformations begin at the personal and, indeed, psychological level and are rooted in a pessimistic view of the present. Indeed, it may be this very pessimism about the present that inspires returns to the past. North American Voyages to the Era of “Discovery” and Conquest

North American writers have also crafted fictional representations of time travel to the era of the Conquest. How do their stories and ideological visions compare with those of writers we have already seen? Do they bring a North American “can do” spirit to stories involving regions negatively affected during the Conquest? In Conquistador: A Novel of Alternate History (2003), by the North American S. M. Stirling, there is, just as in other fictional accounts, an America colonized by

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Europeans. This time, however, said colonization occurs without the help of Columbus. One could argue, in fact, that in Conquistador there is no Columbus, or better stated, he would have been irrelevant because in this novel, the history of the world diverged (for reasons unexplained in the novel, although—perhaps—in other novels by the author) in two very different directions in 323 bce, the year of Alexander the Great’s death. One direction followed the historical trajectory we are familiar with, while another direction (thus creating an alternate, parallel reality) went elsewhere, with Alexander surviving to extend his empire all the way to China. In this alternate reality, Western Europe never developed beyond isolated, warring clans and, consequently, Europeans never reached a point where they needed to find a quicker way to the Indies, let alone succeeded in doing so. The two realities remained separate until 1946, when a World War II veteran in our reality (the “FirstSide”6) accidentally discovered, through the use of a transistor radio, a portal into the other reality. The portal is not unlike the kind one might find in Hollywood films like Stargate (1994) or in the various permutations of the Star Trek television series: it was a “sheet of something silvery, something that rippled very slightly, like the surface of a body of water set on its side, staying there in defiance of gravity” (4). Conquistador might best be described as a science fiction adventure thriller with a noticeable Hollywood Western bent, complete with gunfights and various factions of mostly white European-American FirstSiders struggling for supremacy over the environmentally pristine New Virginia, the name they gave the Southwestern United States in the alternate reality. One faction, it so happens, wants to conquer the world of the alternate reality “and rule all the natives as slaves, more or less” (181). It is, in effect, a tale about how the alternative American frontier was domesticated by competing factions of modern FirstSide immigrants to New Virginia, who employed all the military and technological advantages of the FirstSide. What makes Conquistador of interest to us is the temporal interplay created between the two realities, an interplay that involves contact between twenty-first-century “FirstSiders” from San Francisco and Mesoamerican inhabitants of the alternate reality. For example, when the protagonist, Tom Christiansen, a wildlife ranger on the FirstSide, discovers exotic animals at a San Francisco warehouse (where the portal is located), his investigations also uncover some anachronistic

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photographs of what appear to be ceremonies involving human sacrifice: “ ‘I think those are supposed to be Aztec priests,’ he said dubiously. ‘Some sort of re-creation, or a movie. But it doesn’t look quite right” (12). We soon learn that “above their loincloths, the ‘priests’ were all wearing T-shirts, black ones, showing a dancing skeleton with a chaplet of red roses” (13). It is only later that it becomes clear that the subjects of the photograph are indeed Mesoamerican priests from the alternate reality and that they are also, startlingly, wearing Grateful Dead T-shirts courtesy of New Virginia’s contacts with the FirstSide. A long, strange trip indeed! The Mesoamericans in the present of the alternate reality differ from those in pre-Columbian FirstSide reality. The Aztecs are no longer a force, for example; instead, in the present era of the SecondSide, the central valley of Mexico has become “a mess of little city-states” (191). There are nevertheless some similarities: the Mesoamericans in the alternate reality speak, as did the Nahuas, with a language “full of hissing, guttural sounds . . . impossible combinations of letters, tz and zl and rr” (185); and they also, as evidenced by the photograph, practice ritualistic human sacrifice. Furthermore, there exist gripping parallels between the broader fates of the Mesoamericans in each reality: in New Virginia, the menial labor is performed by “contract workers, braceros, mostly from Mexico” (193). Such parallels suggest, unfortunately, that Mexicans would be menial laborers in what is now the United States, regardless of the reality in which they may find themselves. As menial laborers, they remain lesser players in the narrative and are the objects or recipients of judgment with respect to their cultural practices and the sounds of their language. As such, Conquistador suggests—for the Mesoamericans, at least—a negative determinism not unlike Fuentes’s in “Las dos Américas.” Nonetheless, it is the preceding kind of supernatural, science fictional, temporal dislocation involving themes and personalities—most notably Columbus—from the era of the “discovery” and conquest that I will now explore in greater detail with respect to other, similar texts. *

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Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by the North American Orson Scott Card, lies squarely within conventional

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definitions of the genre of science fiction; it may, however, be categorized more accurately as historical science fiction given the ways the narrative shifts back and forth between a distant, apocalyptic future and the era of Columbus. It could also be labeled speculative science fiction or even fantasy (in line with Bud Foote’s delineations; see introduction) insofar as time travel to the past is a theoretical absurdity. Throughout, the aim of the novel is, on the one hand, to understand the history of the American hemisphere in light of the events surrounding its conquest following the arrival of Columbus; this aim, one might add, is echoed in many crucial texts from and about the region, several of which are the object of this study. On the other hand, however, Pastwatch enters the realm of science (or speculative) fiction in its dramatic attempt to imagine a scenario in which humans from the future are able to travel back in time and alter the historical record. Card states that it was after reading Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America that he was inspired to write a novel about Columbus. According to him, Todorov’s “analysis of the conflicting cultures, the mindsets on both sides that led to the European conquest of America—and most particularly his view of Columbus, Cortés, and Moctezuma—rang true” and illuminated “much that had been mysterious” to him about the hemisphere’s past (351). Not unlike other works of fiction about Columbus, Pastwatch sets out to create a history of the world in which the conquest of the Americas never took place. Although the scientific or technological explanations are never outlined within any standard of plausibility (and thus, for Foote, would bring the novel closer to the realm of fantasy), we learn that the fictional characters in Pastwatch live in the twenty-second century and are trying desperately to save humanity from imminent extinction, an extinction that is quickly approaching on account of all the evils and environmental mistakes perpetrated by earlier generations; eventually, several travel to the time of Columbus in an effort to sabotage or at least redirect his mission. The novel, in fact, amounts on the one hand to a study that combines fact and conjecture of Columbus and his motivations, and on the other to the attempts by the twentysecond-century characters to alter his actions after attaining a greater understanding of him.

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Why Columbus? Tagiri, an African researcher on the “Pastwatch” project, determines by using machines that peer into precise moments of the past that had it not been for Columbus, the use of African slaves in the Americas would never have happened. In some respects, it would be quite difficult to assess the accuracy of this claim. By the time of Columbus’s voyage of 1492, the trade in African slaves was already an important one for Europeans: it had been started decades earlier by the Portuguese. If not Columbus, then perhaps some other explorer would have eventually reached America and triggered the events that led to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. That stated, it bears mentioning that Tagiri’s interest in both Columbus and slavery in the Americas suggests the links between the two, even if in this study they are treated in separate chapters. The first step for Tagiri toward an understanding of Columbus came when she determined with her “Tempoview” historical scanner that a young Columbus became ambitious after he saw his father in a subservient position to Genoese gentlemen. The second step came several years later when Tagiri’s daughter Diko—who had also become involved in the Pastwatch project—used more advanced technology to isolate the moment when Columbus first got the idea to travel west to reach Asia: after being shipwrecked off the Portuguese coast, he was visited by the “Holy Trinity” and told to turn his interest away from the liberation of Constantinople and Jerusalem, and instead “carry the cross to lands much farther east, so far to the east that they can be reached only by sailing westward into the Atlantic” (110). What is clear to the twenty-second-century observers but not to Columbus is that the divine vision Columbus had on the beach was actually produced by other time travelers from an era well beyond Columbus’s; the “Trinity” was nothing more than a motion picture sent to Columbus by researchers using technologies akin to those of Pastwatch, but who had honed their machines so as to be able to make themselves appear in the past and thereby intervene there. As Kemal—one of the Pastwatch scholars—observes, those who sent Columbus the vision on the beach “played God. The Trinity, to be exact. The dove was such a nice touch” (113). It seems that the representatives from the other, future generation were keen on sending Columbus to the West (and thereby to the Americas), as opposed to in the direction of Constantinople and Jerusalem: an enterprise that

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apparently—in an alternate reality—spelled such disaster to global society that some future observers were willing to do anything to alter the past, even at the cost of producing a different past that would automatically eliminate them and their reality. In effect, in Pastwatch, it seems easier to alter the past than the present. By the time the reality spawned by Columbus’s vision on the beach and his consequent arrival in the Americas produces Diko and Kemal’s generation, the earth has once again become imperiled. These two, and another colleague7—a young, modern Maya named Hunahpu—decide to make an intervention of their own into the past. Not surprisingly, they, too, choose for their intervention the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well as the figure of Columbus himself. To a significant extent, Columbus is seen by historical fiction of a variety of stripes as the figure who initiated the historical epoch we now live in; if anyone wants to alter, replace, or undo this epoch, what better place is there for an intervention than in the life of the Genoese admiral? This fixation seems to me, at least on one level, a simplification of history, that is, a “great man” conceptualization of history that accords to Columbus more significance than he may deserve; on a different level, the desire to travel back in time in order to redirect Columbus is certainly a recipe for entertaining science fiction, and also attests to the spell the admiral has had on anyone interested in the history (or fictional alternate histories) of the Americas: a region whose problems during the past five centuries many attribute to the activities of the Genoese admiral. In this light, it bears mentioning that some readers familiar with the history of the Americas may identify a related discourse at play both in this novel and in Stirling’s: the so-called leyenda negra or Black Legend, a discourse of denunciation popularized during the late sixteenth century in Northern Europe that used Bartolomé de las Casas’s condemnations of Spanish atrocities as a basic template. The Black Legend sought to smear (with good justification at times, no doubt) the entire Spanish enterprise in the New World, including Columbus’s voyages, thereby justifying forays by the English and Dutch—among others—into the Americas. Although Stirling’s and Card’s novels make no mention of the Black Legend, one could argue that it is present as a subtext. After all, rather than choosing to focus, for instance, on the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Landing in what become

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one of the first English colonies in the Americas, their foci as sites of conquest are Mesoamerica and, particularly with Pastwatch, the figure of Columbus. Granted, one could argue that the very size of the Mesoamerican indigenous populations lent itself to the kind of dramatic conflicts that ensued during the initial years of conquest (ones that in some ways remain unresolved)—dramatic conflicts, moreover, that may be irresistible material to fiction writers of any nationality. In contrast, the relatively sparse indigenous populations of the northern American landmass (i.e., the present-day United States) were either decimated or pushed aside by the British colonists,(which is not to suggest that these decimations and expulsions have not inspired their own stories. Nonetheless, in their choice of subject matter, Card’s and Stirling’s novels seem to share ideological affinities with the Black Legend. The plan the characters in Card’s novel devise in their efforts to alter and improve the fate of the world is not a simple one (that is, simply eliminating Columbus would be insufficient): the three (Diko, Kemal, and Hunahpu) agree on a three-pronged intervention. Hunahpu, named for one of the hero twins of the Maya Popol Vuh, travels to the Chiapas of 1475 and introduces the local indigenous groups, by having them believe he is a deity, to more modern technologies involving metallurgy and weaponry on a par with that of the Spaniards they would later encounter. He also veers them away from human sacrifices (a practice that Pastwatch members deem detrimental to the development of a globally competitive society) and encourages them to forge alliances with other indigenous societies, particularly those that were dabbling in seafaring activities; Hunahpu’s broader plan is to form a league of technologically advanced and unified indigenous groups that would undermine the dominance of the imperious but—in terms of the Spanish invaders, at least—socially counterproductive and militarily inferior Mexica/Aztec civilization. Diko, meanwhile, arrives in Haiti in 1488, just a few years before Columbus’s arrival. Her mandate on this island is not unlike Hunahpu’s in Chiapas (fostering allegiances, introducing technologies), but with a marked feminist bent: she and Putukam, an Amerindian woman she befriends, are, for instance, “the only women to have houses of their own [in Haiti], and ever since the first time Diko had taken in a woman whose husband was angry at her and threatened to beat her,

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Putukam had joined her in making her house available as a refuge for women” (275). Encouraging the islanders to recognize the value and equality of women is crucial to Diko’s plan to mount a strong resistance to the Spaniards who would eventually make landfall and attempt to dominate their societies. Kemal also travels to Haiti, but in 1492. This is just in time for him to sacrifice himself to the intervention by blowing himself up near Columbus’s only remaining caravels. This ensures that the Spanish expedition would have to spend more time than expected on Haiti: long enough for Diko and her new followers to convince Columbus in particular (and his crew by extension) of the humanity of the islanders and of the evils of subjugating them. Thus, the subtitle of Card’s novel: the (peaceful, it should be stated) Redemption of Christopher Columbus.8 The intervention goes according to plan, and eventually Diko (who has by this time married Columbus and begun having children with him) is joined on the island by Hunahpu and his league of technologically advanced seafarers from the Mexican mainland. In 1520—nearly three decades after the Columbus expedition had first left Puerto de Palos in Spain for their voyage west—Diko and a much older Columbus arrive in Spain, where the latter’s “failed” voyage had long since slipped first into infamy and later into obscurity.9 The new, alternate reality is ensured (while the other reality, characterized by conquest, extermination, and colonization, is preempted) when the American voyagers in their turn establish—on the Spanish coast—La Ciudad de los Caribianos as a showcase to the enlightenment and benevolence of these voyagers. Ultimately, there would no longer be—as in the actual historical record—a conquest followed by centuries of often brutal colonization and the trafficking of slaves. In retrospect, the historical narrative involving Columbus’s arrival in the Americas seems, perhaps, an orderly and tidy one. While the characters in Pastwatch devise a complicated scheme to alter the fate of the hemisphere, the narrative hinges on the importance of Columbus. Although the first intervention into the past recounted in the novel (i.e., the one that inspired Columbus to sail west) ultimately proved faulty, the second one was successful in reorienting the Americas toward a happier fate. As such, the novel ends on a positive note, with no mention of unpleasant, unintended consequences in the new reality the protagonists produce. Along these lines, while fiction is one

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abode of the imagination, one could argue—conversely—that sometimes, and in some respects, too much imagination is undesirable in fiction. Pastwatch ends, perhaps, where it should: at the dawn of an untroubled and uncomplicated new reality much more optimistic about the Americas than Stirling’s vision in Conquistador. Imagining potential problems in this new reality would amount to the stuff of sequels; in addition, it would also run counter to Card’s aim of envisioning an alternative to the results of the Conquest. By factoring in Card’s explicitly moralistic agenda, it may be possible for us to imagine Diko and an ageing Columbus creating—based on the latter’s redemption—a new America and a new trans-Atlantic order: an act that we (or Card, at least) may want to believe Columbus was capable of all along. The actual historical record notwithstanding, Pastwatch suggests that if we can imagine the admiral marrying an African and radically altering how he saw and behaved toward indigenous Americans, we can begin to forgive the atrocities often attributed to him and those that came in his wake. For others, this act of forgiveness seems to remain elusive judging by the titles of two edited volumes that were published to commemorate (or deplore) Columbus’s arrival in the Americas: 1492–1992: La interminable Conquista (1991; “The Endless Conquest”) and 1492–1992: Me cago en el quinto centenario (1992; “I Shit on the Fifth Centennial”). Hispanic Science Fiction and the Perpetual Conquest of the Americas

While both Conquistador and Pastwatch are texts about the Americas authored by North American writers, I would like now to focus on science fiction written in Spanish.10 According to Rachel HaywoodFerreira, the earliest (that is, nineteenth-century) Latin American science fictional texts (or those that were later relabeled as such) were written during periods of political change or unrest in their nations of origin, but when, at the same time, processes of national consolidation, economic development, and/or advances in science also made for optimism regarding the future . . . In short, there was promise for Latin-American nations to move into more prominent positions on the world stage. (355)

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Such texts, then, would—in their optimism—run counter to the urgent tone of many of the texts I discuss in this study. How did Latin American science fiction evolve during the twentieth century? In their introduction to Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain, Andrea Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán outline three broad characteristics of more recent science fiction in the Hispanic world: “Latin American and Spanish SF’ generally ‘soft’ nature and social sciences orientation; its examination of Christian symbols and motifs; and its uses of humor” (14). They argue, meanwhile, that this “softness” or lack of scientific rigor is attributed “to the regional countries’ role as consumers rather than producers of technology” (14). In terms of the reputed social sciences orientation of science fiction written in Spanish, this corpus of writing seems less interested in science than in advancing a social agenda; one of these agendas, tellingly, involves a “narrative that is central to Latin America’s imagination: the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas” (16–17). In this regard, one could make an argument (perhaps less convincing in the case of Stirling’s novel) that, except for being written in English, both Conquistador and Pastwatch are representative of Latin American science fiction, or at least express some of its major themes. Both of these novels and, obliquely perhaps, the stories by Eco and Fuentes as well, involve time travel—one of the principal motifs in science (or speculative) fiction. Although H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) are widely considered the first novels about time travel (whether or not they are considered science fiction or fantasy), others claim this distinction for El anacronópete (1887), a novel written by the Spaniard Enrique Gaspar in which characters visit—among other destinations—China during the third century and, earlier, the time of Noah.11 Patrizia Campana, in her introduction to Gaspar’s novel, makes general observations about time travel that are in many ways relevant to the present study: El viaje en el tiempo es una de las aspiraciones del ser humano y uno de los recursos más antiguos de la literatura. En lengua castellana se pueden rastrear los primeros vestigios en el siglo XIV con el conocido ejemplo XI de El conde Lucanor, pero fue en el

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siglo XIX cuando proliferaron novelas, cuentos y relatos en las que el viaje temporal constituía el elemento esencial de la trama. Por citar sólo algunas de las más conocidas, se puede mencionar Cuento de Navidad de Charles Dickens (1843), “Un cuento de las Montañas Escabrosas” de Edgar Allan Poe (1844) o Lumen de Camille Flammarion (1872). En todas estas obras se utilizan métodos muy variados para viajar en el tiempo: el sueño, la hibernación, la magia, la hipnosis, las drogas; y muchas veces los protagonistas se ven abocados a realizar el viaje de forma involuntaria o se precipitan al futuro o al pasado sin tener consciencia de embarcarse en una aventura temporal. (5) [Time travel is one of humanity’s aspirations and is one of the oldest tools in literature. In the Spanish language one can find the first traces of time travel in the fourteenth century with the well-known example XI from El conde Lucanor, but it was during the nineteenth century when novels, stories, and tales proliferated in which time travel constituted the essential element of the plot. To cite just a few of the better known instances, we can mention Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (1844), or Camille Flammarion’s Lumen (1872). These works use varied methods to achieve time travel: dreams, hibernation, magic, hypnosis, drugs; and very often the protagonists happen upon time travel against their will, or they travel toward the future or the past without knowing that they have embarked on a temporal adventure.] By way of attempting to synthesize or at least process the preceding commentaries by Bell and Molina-Gavilán and Campana, it may be profitable to inquire as to why time travel in Latin American writing is often accompanied by an interest in a social agenda involving the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas. This discussion should be prefaced by my contention that of this triad, the centuries-long colonization of the Americas is probably the epoch least “visited” by time travelers, and out of which spring the fewest travelers. There are, however, some exceptions involving, first of all, the African diasporic population in the Americas (see chapter 2): this population arrived into their American bondage during what might generally be considered the colonial period (i.e., after the results of the Conquest

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were—in most areas, at least—no longer in doubt and during the time the various European kingdoms and nations—beginning with Spain and Portugal—began installing and solidifying instruments of governance and domination in the Americas). Quite interestingly, however, this diasporic community as it appears in literary texts in some ways continues to reenact initial encounters. These initial encounters, meanwhile, rather than being those between Europeans and indigenous Americans, are often in these cases those between slaves and their masters or traffickers. In sum, with the grand exception of the African diasporic community, the colonial period (because during this time external control over the Americas is, or seems, entrenched) may offer more limited opportunities than the discovery and conquest periods for fictional time travelers to make strategic, decisive interventions that would lead the history of the Americas in a different direction.12 Another (quite clever) exception regarding the lack of time travel in and out of the colonial period13 is the film Bolívar soy yo (2002, “Bolívar I am”) by the Colombian director Jorge Alí Triana. In this humorous, postmodern look at El Libertador, the actor Robinson Díaz plays Santiago Miranda, who is in turn an actor portraying Simón Bolívar in a melodramatic soap opera (or telenovela) loosely based on the life of the South American historical figure. Disagreeing with the sensationalized way in which the soap opera producers decide to have Bolívar executed, Miranda snaps and decides not only to refuse any sort of deviation from the historical record in the soap’s treatment of Bolívar’s biography, but also becomes—or decides to try to become— Bolívar himself; in a sense, Bolívar soy yo is less about time travel than it is about a comically deranged conflation between time periods two centuries apart. Since he is fresh off the soap opera set, Miranda looks the part of Bolívar; his only problem is that he must convince twenty-firstcentury South Americans that he is Bolívar and that he has returned to lead the continent in a Bolivarian revolution, one that failed nearly two centuries ago (or—depending on one’s vantage point—one that has remained unfinished). What ensues in the film is an often humorous and sometimes pathetic look at what can happen when corrupt governments try to appropriate the Bolívar myth, a myth embodied in the passionate but mentally disturbed Miranda (indeed, in his guise as Bolívar, he undergoes a round of modern psychotherapy).

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Miranda’s melancholy can be linked, in some respects, to the Libertador’s negative view of South America’s hopes following independence: in Eduardo Galeano’s Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1970; The Open Veins of Latin America, 1973) a book that Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, gave to his North American counterpart Barack Obama at a 2009 summit, Bolívar is quoted as follows: “Nunca seremos dichosos, ¡Nunca!” (Galeano 335) [“We will never be happy, Never!”]. According to Galeano, the reason for this prediction involves the almost instantaneous political fragmentation of the continent after independence. Along these lines, one could argue that the Bolivarian revolution (which has included Chávez’s exhumation of Bolívar in July 2010) involves in part the effort to rescue the image of El Libertador from his own pessimism. It bears repeating, however that in Bolívar soy yo, there is no actual time travel. The only time travel is of the symbolic or mental variety—in Miranda’s mind as well as in the minds of everyone who played along with his farce. The Conquest, meanwhile, seems to be a different matter, not only in terms of examples of time travel that may or may not fall under the category of “science fiction,” but also in terms of the abundant examples of critical observations that writers have made over the years to the effect that the Conquest is somehow ongoing.14 The examples are so numerous that I will limit myself to a handful. In their preface to Alejo Carpentier’s The Harp and the Shadow: The Beatification of Christopher Columbus, Thomas and Carol Christensen assert—in ways that reveal, quite curiously, what could be considered an envy toward Latin Americans—that in Latin America the conquest remains a part of daily life, and signs of it are everywhere: In Mexico, Christian churches rise on the foundations of Aztec temples; in Central America, Mayan people praise the hero Tecún Umán, defeater of the villainous Pedro de Alvarado, and remain largely unconquered; in South America, Inca gold, melted and recast in the form of saints, adorns the most glorious cathedral altars . . . in North America, by contrast, the conquest is an abstraction,15 obscured by Hallmark images of Mayflower landings and blunderbuss-and-buckle-bedecked forefathers dining thankfully with feathered, moccasined savages who have stepped from the pages of Lamartine and Cooper. We have forgotten our

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origins, rejected and expunged our native heritage; our imagination only takes hold centuries later, with the pioneer movement west. (xi–xii) Meanwhile, in his influential Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (1985), Alan Riding states with particular reference to Mexico, that “more than 460 years after the Conquest, neither the triumph of Cortés nor the defeat of Cuauhtémoc has been properly assimilated, and the repercussions of that bloody afternoon in Tlatelolco continue to be felt” (3). According to him, one possible “explanation for this constant reliving of the past is that honor and glory must somehow be extracted from the dizzying array of defeats and humiliations suffered by the Mexicans since the Conquest. So often, those who fought on the side of ‘good’ were vanquished, but their principles can be vindicated decades or centuries later” (16). The defeated, then, either disappear through genocide and intermarriage (as is, presumably, the case with much of the indigenous population in the Caribbean; see the afterword), or they are seemingly destined to repeatedly (and perhaps infinitely) reenact their own myth of Sisyphus, constantly struggling in vain to reinscribe a victory over a defeat that took place centuries ago. It is fair to ask, however, whether (or to what degree) this apparent obsession with the past (accompanied, undoubtedly, by strong racial and class components) is a cause or a result of the region’s relative underdevelopment. Although it may be neither, it is probably some sort of combination: both cause and effect. In any event, it only seems fitting that in a region where in some ways the present seems to many to be contemporaneous with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that there would be stories involving travel between the two periods. If the Christensens and Riding constitute an external perspective on Mexico and Latin America, the noted Mexican philosopher Antonio Caso offers a parallel internal perspective: “We have not yet resolved the problem that Spain bequeathed to us with the conquest . . . ” [“Todavía no resolvemos el problema que nos legó España con la conquista . . . ” quoted in Zea “12 de octubre de 1492,” 201]. Last, Noam Chomsky also draws parallels between the two eras by affirming, with respect to Latin America, that “what happened 500 years ago is, of course, still happening now” (3).

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Echoes of the Conquest abound, too, in recent cinema: in Gustavo Loza’s Al otro lado/To the Other Side (2004), a Mexican film with vignettes set in Cuba, Spain, Morocco, and Mexico, the mythical Eréndira returns from the past. This Amerindian princess from what is now the Mexican state of Michoacán supposedly committed suicide by drowning during the Conquest era. The film has her resurfacing in the present day to save a Mexican boy from drowning in the same lake. Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tú mamá también (2001) in some ways also registers the Conquest era: although most characters have the last names of former Mexican political leaders (e.g., Huerta, Calles, Madero, Iturbide) and twentieth-century revolutionary leaders (e.g., Zapata), two of the principal characters have names strongly suggestive of the Conquest (Tenoch, as in Tenochtitlán, and Luisa Cortés, a Spaniard in Mexico and the film’s lead female character). Even a recent Hollywood film, The Fountain (2006), taps into this notion of the ongoing conquest of the Americas by conflating past and present. In the film, Tom Creo,16 a North American character in the present era, is also a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador named Tomás. In the many temporal conflations or juxtapositions the film makes, Tom/Tomás is at one moment battling a Maya priest, only to be called “my conquistador” by his present-era wife Izzi, who is also in her own turn the Spanish Isabel during the time of the Conquest.17 Similarly, Mauricio-José Schwarz, one of the leading Mexican science fiction writers, uses time travel to address the persistence of the Conquest in his short story “Seguir a los príncipes” (1993). Interestingly, nearly a decade before “Seguir a los príncipes” was published, Gordon B. Chamberlain described common elements in much science fiction writing. This description can serve to preface my discussion of Schwarz’s story. According to Chamberlain, in science fiction changing history is often attempted by a time-traveler and . . . may be repressed by some sort of time police; alternatively the supposed change may turn out to have been part of history all along . . . [this] paradox, in which time doubles back and the future causally affects the past, may end with a time-traveler actually taking on the identity of a historical individual—Cyrus or Leonardo or Hitler, Thor or Quetzalcoatl or Christ. (282)

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The dynamic that Chamberlain outlines (the part about Quetzalcoatl is especially prescient) is clearly visible in “Seguir a los príncipes.” This story alternates between paragraphs devoted, respectively, to the modern-day activities of an oceanographer named Aurelio, who is attempting to decipher the linguistic codes of dolphins off the coast of Baja California, and Olín, a character who seems at first a solitary, brooding figure, veiled in mystery. The former is a brilliant, ambitious researcher whose knowledge of the seas amazes those around him and compels them to follow his lead, no matter how unorthodox his plans may seem: “En alta mar, la figura de Aurelio se agigantaba. No era capitán, pero los hombres lo obedecían como si lo fuera. El propio capitán no solía cuestionar sus decisiones” (28) [“In the open ocean, the figure of Aurelio would become immense. He wasn’t the captain, but the men would obey him as if he were. The captain himself would not question his decisions”]. We know little about Olín except that he is on some sort of journey, that he avoids planes when possible (probably because they are a symptom of the globalization he despises), that he has a long scar across his back, and that he enjoys visiting preColumbian ruins when no one else is there. It is during one such visit to Tula, the archaeological site in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, that he encounters a woman named Paulina: a fellow wanderer who would later be Olín’s accomplice in his mission to stop Aurelio. Although Aurelio’s work with dolphins appears innocent, we soon learn his hidden objective: he wants—in a way perhaps reminiscent of the Star Trek films of the mid 1980s—to establish clear communication with the dolphins and thereby “develop a single culture alongside human beings” [“Había que establecer la comunicación y desarrollar una sola cultura con los seres humanos” 23]. For him, doing so would—tellingly—be tantamount to the “conquest of a mystery” [“. . . la conquista de un misterio . . .” 23]. Clearly, neither Aurelio nor Olín are ordinary people. In fact, they are nearly immortal time travelers: akin to the “highlanders” of the eponymous 1980s Hollywood films, and probably inspired by them. Aurelio was, in essence, what we might call the agent of world order and unity who, during the last several centuries had made occasional appearances in his efforts to create a unified, interconnected human population, even if this led to vast disparities and hierarchies within this unity. During the Middle Ages he had surfaced as an Italian

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merchant named Marco Polo and traveled to China “to unite East and West in a solid and unique culture” [“. . . para unir Oriente y Occidente en una cultura sólida y única” 39]. In a subsequent appearance, he left the Spanish port of Puerto Palos in 1492 “to integrate the vast, nameless continent . . . to the flow of progress and unity” [“. . . para integrar al vasto continente sin nombre . . . a la corriente del progreso y la unidad” 39]. Quite cleverly, Aurelio was able to hide behind Columbus’s (paradoxically well-documented) sketchy past. Olín is Aurelio’s opposite. Rather than seeking order and uniformity, Olín has sought to foment diversity, variety, and chaos in ways that prevent any human group from imposing its will over others. Not unlike Aurelio, he has lived for several thousand years and is the person whom some know as Quetzalcoatl. Throughout his long life he has attempted to perform acts that would help isolated communities survive, often acting behind the scenes at the service of the reigning monarch. Thus, his idea, echoed in the title of the story, that it is important to know how to follow “the princes,” even if from afar and in absolute solitude (“Hay que saber seguir a los príncipes, aunque sea de lejos y en absoluta soledad” 38). To a certain extent it is unclear in the story how Olín’s obeisance to monarchical hierarchies can be reconciled with his aversion to unifying projects. For example, he regrets having told the ancient Mexicas that he (as Quetzalcoatl) would return someday,18 because later they thought the arrival of the Spaniards was a herald of his return. Consequently, this misunderstanding gave the Spaniards easy access to Tenochtitlán. That stated, the Mexicas were in their own right an imperial, unifying force in the central valley of Mexico, an empire much despised by many of their subordinate communities. Olín also regrets not having foiled Columbus’s voyage; this would have given the strong but isolated civilizations in the Americas enough time to mount a stronger resistance against the Europeans, whose arrival was only a matter of time. Shortly after Aurelio cracks the dolphins’ linguistic code and has them communicate the word “hello,” he feels ready to share his results with others in the scientific community and in so doing inaugurate a new era of humanity: one in which, Olín fears, a group of New York executives would be the new “Cortés y Pizarro” (43), dominating innocent dolphins who would be forced to learn human history

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and purchase hamburgers in underwater restaurants (47): they would be “slaves at one point, then clients, laborers, workers, caricatures of human beings” [“Serán esclavos un tiempo, clientes después, obreros, trabajadores, caricaturas de los seres humanos” 47]. Indeed, according to Olín, the conquest of America would be “nothing in comparison” with what Aurelio has in mind with the dolphins [“La conquista de América será un acontecimiento menor en comparación con qué podría pasar ahora” 43]. In its fantastic, indeed far-fetched, premise involving the subjugation of dolphins, “Seguir a los príncipes” offers an allegory on the ills of postconquest modernity in which the conquest of America serves as a point of comparison. Before Aurelio’s pivotal scientific demonstration takes place, Olín (carrying his ancient saber) and Paulina arrive at his doorstep: “What happened here still hurts you, doesn’t it?” [“Te duele todavía lo que pasó aquí, ¿verdad?” 46], Aurelio asks Olín during their climactic encounter, referring to the conquest of the Americas. Then he explains that such is the price of knowledge [“A veces tenemos que pagar precios altos por el conocimiento” 47], and that the past cannot be changed, to which Olín replies, raising his saber, that the future can. As Aurelio laughs at the ancient sword and brandishes a pistol, Paulina stabs him with a knife, an act that sufficiently disorients Aurelio to allow Olín to decapitate him. Although the story ends here, we can surmise that Aurelio’s death marks a heuristic turning point in history. Olín is pleased to know, in particular, that not only has he defeated Marco/Cristóbal/Aurelio, but that he has a new comrade in the person of Paulina: “Era un complemento inesperado, una energía femenina y poderosa largamente requerida sin que él lo supiera” (48) [“It was an unexpected complement, a powerful feminine energy that had, unbeknownst to him, been necessary for a long time”]. Is Paulina also an immortal? Who will their next foe be and to what purpose will their combined strengths be put? The story does not answer these questions, although it is worth noting that—in this fiction, at least—the protagonists are able to turn the page on the tragic era the conquest initiated. Indeed, rather than answering the previous questions (and thereby describing a hypothetical sequel), the story’s most important accomplishment of the imagination may lie in the very fact that Aurelio—inasmuch as he embodies the Conquest—is

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finally defeated. Furthermore, one could argue that this and other stories’ similarities to popular North American cinema and television may be no accident: first, such media is readily accessible throughout much of Latin America; in addition, North America is often admired (or reviled but well known) by Latin Americans (among others) on account of its many strengths (military, political, cultural, scientific, etc.). What better way to solve, albeit fictitiously, the problems of Latin Americans—problems that originate in the time of the Conquest—than to imitate the science fictional strategies and weapons popularized by North American cultural production? After all, such strategies and weapons seem always to meet with success. In the final analysis, however, it is worth emphasizing that even though Schwarz’s story references Hollywood and the strategies of science fiction, it is at bottom a story about Latin America and its unresolved social issues; furthermore, the story would make no sense if the region in which it is set were highly and comfortably developed, self assured, and oblivious of its past. *

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Alternative visions of the results of the Conquest notwithstanding, could it be that this tragedy—as Chomsky and others attest—is somehow still occurring? Similarly, is it possible that ancient preColumbian forces could remain in place despite the consequences of the Spanish victory over the Aztecs during the sixteenth century? One could do worse than consider Julio Cortázar’s classic short story, “La noche boca arriba” (1956, “The Night Face Up”) and Fuentes’s equally powerful “Chac Mool” (1954) in order to see that, in fictional writing, at least, the weight of the Conquest has pressed heavily on authors from the Americas. Although both stories have been widely anthologized and have occasioned copious analysis, it bears mentioning that in the former story, which stems from a motorcycle accident Cortázar had in France in 1952 (Stavans: Julio Cortázar, 39), a man who has just suffered a similar accident in a modern urban setting is actually, within the confines of the story, the subject of a hallucination (projected toward the future) by a pre-Columbian “moteca” tribesman who is ultimately sacrificed by the Aztecs. Fuentes’s story, meanwhile, was inspired by his reading of a 1952 Mexican exhibit in

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Europe during which the statue of Chac Mool, the Mesoamerican rain god, apparently brought on rains. Fuentes explains that the data from the sensational, journalistic account of the art exhibit focused my attention on a fact evident to all Mexicans: the living presence of old cosmological forms from a Mexico lost forever but which, nevertheless, refuses to die and manifests itself from time to time through a mystery, an apparition, a reflection. (Quoted in Leal 5)19 “Chac Mool” seems, incidentally, reminiscent—especially based on Fuentes’s own remarks—of Jung’s description of the uncanny (see introduction). In the story, Filiberto, the modern-day protagonist, is slowly led to his demise by a sculpture of Chac Mool that not only imposes its will on Filiberto but also gradually comes to life, eventually emerging as a kitsch figure20 made of flesh and bone: as the narrator enters the deceased Filiberto’s house so as to finalize his funeral arrangements, he is surprised by a “yellow Indian, in a house robe, wearing a scarf” [“Apareció un indio amarillo, en bata de casa, con bufanda” 548]. In essence, a pre-Columbian deity thought to have been vanquished by the Conquest, or at least relegated to the realm of myth, resurfaces to walk the streets of twentieth-century Mexico City. La leyenda de los soles and Mexico City’s New Dawn

I will now turn to a more recent story, Homero Aridjis’s novel La leyenda de los soles (“The Legend of the Suns”), which dramatizes a similar conflation between pre-Columbian, Conquest eras and the present day (in fact, a time slightly in the future). Interestingly, La leyenda follows the example of the stories by Schwarz, Cortázar, and Fuentes in its representation of returned and surviving figures from the Conquest. Aridjis’s novel was published in 1993, the year following the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. As such, it is possible that the passage of time in general and, more particularly, the notion of two different epochs being somehow linked was fresh in Aridjis’s mind as he wrote it. That stated, “time” has been a central concern for Aridjis throughout his extensive body of work.

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La leyenda has a bit of everything: time travel, a character who can walk through walls, and an undercurrent of eroticism seemingly oriented toward a male audience. There seems to be, in a nearly disorienting way, an absence of limits: characters die and then reappear, for example. David Lodge makes the following observation about Salman Rushdie’s personal brand of magical realism in The Satanic Verses, although he could just as well have been referring to what might be considered a zaniness in La leyenda: The combination of the exploding jumbo jet, as real and topical as yesterday’s newsreel, and the miraculous survival and mythical metamorphosis of the leading characters, is typical of fabulation. It aims to entertain us with the humorous extravagance and inventiveness of its story while offering this as a kind of metaphor . . . for the extreme contrasts and conflicts of modern experience. (Lodge 7) With regard to Lodge’s mention of the extreme contrasts and conflicts of modern experience, there are also in La leyenda—in ways that can be closely linked to Aridjis’s involvement in the Grupo de los Cien (The Group of One Hundred), a leading Mexican environmental group that he founded21—repeated references to Mexico City’s terrible air quality, lack of water, and general deterioration, all due to overpopulation, governmental corruption, and public apathy. It is possible, in fact, to read the novel, and especially its sequel, ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? (1996), from an ecocritical perspective, as Miguel López-Lozano does in Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares (2008). Indeed, if the epicenter of the recent swine flu scare were going to be located anywhere, Mexico City would be as good a place as any, particularly if Aridjis’s depiction from 1993 is at all accurate: it is a city perched between the modern and the archaic, and both of these—oddly enough—constitute a constant threat. As a way of contextualizing Aridjis’s novel, it is worth surveying how other writers saw Mexico City at around the time La leyenda was published. In an essay that appeared the preceding year, for example, Alma Guillermoprieto paints an unflattering (and at times disturbing) portrait of the city: “Progress has hit Mexico City in the form of devastation, some of it ecological, much of it aesthetic. Life is rushed, the water may be poisoned, and the new industrial tortillas taste terrible”

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(42). Meanwhile, in an essay from 1997 Joel Simon described the city in terms of a broader, ominous socioeconomic context, one linked to its pre-Columbian past: By the mid-1950s, Mexico City was no longer merely the capital of the country. It had become, like Tenochtitlán, an imperial city that demanded tribute from the hinterlands. The tribute was brought in various forms—campesinos provided cheap corn, the rural migrants provided their labor, raw materials from throughout the country were channeled to Mexico City. Like Tenochtitlán, the ever-larger Mexico City embarked on an era of expansion in which it subdued its neighbors and took their water. (523) The journalist Roberto Vallarino expressed equally alarming views in 1982 upon visiting Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a relatively recently established Mexico City suburb named in honor of the famed poet who ruled over Texcoco a few decades before the arrival of Europeans: “This is a vision from the Apocalypse, I think. An idea occurs to me: end of the century. Correction: end of the millennium, beginning of the end of civilization . . . ” (537). Vallarino’s befuddlement before Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl seems only barely within the reach of words and language. With the preceding descriptions in mind, Alan Riding’s chapter on Mexico City in his 1985 study on Mexico, Distant Neighbors, seems aptly titled: “Mexico City: Magnet and Monster.” La leyenda can also be considered in light of its author’s other writings. Many of the environmental themes of interest to the Grupo de los Cien, for instance, are also addressed in a poem Aridjis published in 1975 in a collection titled Quemar las naves, which refers to Cortés’s burning of his fleet prior to victory over the Aztecs; this act, in effect, made his Spanish crew captive to his ambitions. Aridjis’s poem, meanwhile, is titled “Carta de México” [“Letter from Mexico”]. The title seems to work on at least a couple of levels, given that it could suggest the location in which the poem was written, but is also suggestive of the possibility that its contents are somehow emblematic or allegorical of the condition of the Mexican nation, almost as if to say that if “Mexico” were to write a poem, this is the one it would write. As a preface to further discussion of the poem, it is worth considering Vallarino’s impressions upon visiting the scant remains of Mexico

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City’s Lake Texcoco: “Reflected in the gray surface of the lake are the pillars that mark the existence of the Ancient Avenue of los Remedios, now known as Xochiaca. This is the place that must be haunted by the ghost of the Indian poet [i.e., Nezahualcóyotl], the spirits of old hunters and beautiful women with olive skin who once bathed naked in its waters” (539). In its environmental degradation, then, Mexico City has remained for observers a poetic and suggestive place, where ancient spirits cohabit with—or at least continue to inspire—the city’s modern denizens. From Vallarino’s words, however, it remains unclear if these spirits surface because of or despite Mexico City’s dire conditions.22 Similarly, in “Carta de México,” the speaker affirms that “Invisible ancestors / walk with us / through these back streets” [“Por estas callejuelas / ancestros invisibles / caminan con nosotros” ln. 1–3]. Here we see another conflation between modern and ancient Mexico, a conflation embodied by the invisible ancestors who traverse modern Mexico City; in doing so, they link the city to an earlier time when it was they who walked the streets: “car-noises / the stares of children / young girls’ bodies / cross through them” [“ruidos de coches / miradas de niños / y cuerpos de muchachas / los traspasan” ln. 4–7]. While the phenomena of modernity pass harmlessly through the “invisible ancestors,” on the one hand suggesting their immunity from or superiority over these mundane elements of the present, there is nonetheless an ambivalence stemming from the ancestors’ condition as ghosts, or the undead. Could it be, on the other hand, that Mexico City is so contaminated that it somehow manages to pollute the past? As if to further the link between the ancestors and modern inhabitants of the city, the speaker affirms at poem’s end that “we too / move toward transparency” [“nosotros vamos también / hacia la transparencia” ln. 12–15]. Even though the environmentalism of “Carta de México” is at most suggested, it is clear that the poem posits a present inhabited by elements from the past and that modern-day residents of the city will someday share in the fate of the ancestors. Ultimately, the poem is in some ways ambiguous because it remains unclear if Mexicans—when faced with the prospect of joining the state of the ancestors (i.e., a posthumous transparency)—should rejoice or be alarmed. Meanwhile, the alarms sounded in other writings23 by Aridjis are much less ambiguous, particularly in his La leyenda. By 2027, the year

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in which this novel is set, forty million people inhabit Mexico City: nearly double the present population and many times larger than the population of the city soon after the Conquest, an epoch to which the novel makes numerous references. The prevailing condition in this futuristic Mexico City is one of decay: the city seems trapped in an unstoppable process of deterioration. Juan de Góngora, the protagonist, sees this deterioration all around him: “La colonia donde él había crecido, durante su no tan terriblemente vieja vida había sido una y otra vez desfigurada. Aún ahora, las máquinas de construcción hacían agujeros, hacían demoliciones, levantaban edificios baratos, altos y flacos” (16) [“The neighborhood where he grew up had during his not terribly long life been disfigured over and over. Even now, construction equipment dug holes, demolished and constructed cheap, skinny and tall buildings”]. Alongside this physical decay of the city there is also the constant presence of death; it is, no less, a death characterized by a certain permanence that does not seem to want to let go its grasp on the living. The smell of death, for example, pervades a subway car, onto which “women boarded carrying bags with beheaded birds. The smell of mummified meat, of decomposed vegetables . . . invaded the car” [“subieron mujeres con bolsas de pájaros descabezados. El olor a carne momia, a verduras descompuestas . . . invadió el vagón” 32]. In addition, the sinister General Carlos Tezcatlipoca makes his debut in the novel while lying dead in a coffin at a funeral home. Shortly thereafter he opens his eyes and, to the amazement of his cronies, springs back to life. He seems, according to one character, to have the nine lives of a cat: “Parecía un felino humano. No de este mundo. No de este tiempo. De un tiempo pasado, de uno por venir” (140) [“He looked like a human feline. Not of this world. Not of this time. From a past time, from a time to come”]. Tezcatlipoca’s father had similarly reappeared from the afterlife in the kitchen of a Cuban restaurant in Miami, two weeks after being gunned down in a Tijuana brothel (25). It should be made clear that these characters are not zombified “walking dead”: they return to life every bit as alive as they had been previously. The joint presence in the novel of life and death, the living and the dead, could be understood in light of ancient, pre-Columbian visions of the dialogue between the two “states” of existence. Anthropologists have observed that several pre-Columbian civilizations held a view

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on the afterlife sharply different from the one that prevails in many modern societies. In her study Living with the Ancestors, for example, Patricia McAnany observes that for the Maya, at least, communing with deceased ancestors was not a religious experience divorced from political and economic realities (as another antiquated term, “ancestor worship,” leads us to believe); rather, it was a practice grounded in pragmatism that drew power from the past, legitimated the current state of affairs (including all the inequities in rights and privileges), and charted a course for the future, and their presence both materially and symbolically lent weight to the claims of their more mortal descendants. (1) Meanwhile, in their study on how Incan views on the afterlife informed state ideologies, Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest provide a brilliant dramatization of how an Inca king may have held court over his followers: An old man sits unmoving in a dimly lighted room. Everything about him attests to his wealth and power. The clothing he wears and the room’s furnishings are of the finest quality. Servants come and go, attending to his wishes. Several aides are conferring with him, their voices subdued and postures deferential. One of them asks questions and the others answer; the old man himself does not speak aloud. The interrogation concerns the crops growing on his farmlands and the preparations under way at one of his country estates, where he plans to spend the summer. Everyone can sense that he is deeply pleased, even though he does not smile or shift his gaze as he listens. Instead, he remains aloof and dignified, the perfect image of lordliness . . . This aged and incestuous ruler, presently conducting a normal day’s business, has been dead for thirtyfive years. His son, who succeeded him and will dine with him tonight, died three years ago. (1–2) Finally, with particular reference to how both material and symbolic remnants from an archaic past persist among today’s inhabitants of remote Amazonian regions, the archaeologist Michael Heckenberger

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observes that everywhere in some villages “you can see the past in the present.”24 In La leyenda, such conflations between the past and the present, and indeed between the living and the dead, are the order of the day. In addition, they anticipate and help contextualize the instances of time travel in the novel: for Góngora, the decaying buildings that surrounded him were “contemporary ruins. He and his past, he thought, had been repeatedly expelled from a city without memory, in which the automobile owned the streets and the present” [“ . . . ruinas contemporáneas. Él y su pasado, pensaba, eran expulsados sin cesar de una ciudad sin memoria, en la que el automóvil era el dueño de las calles y del presente” 16]. There are, undoubtedly, differences between the fictional Mexico City of 2027 and the city that existed there in either the sixteenth century or the early 1990s, but the era of the Conquest is hard to overlook during the time period of the story; for the journalist Joel Simon, such temporal parallels spell trouble for the actual Mexico City of the late 1990s: Mexico City must live under the weight of its history and with the consequences of poor decisions made long ago . . . Despite nearly four and a half centuries of progress, despite an enormous investment in monumental infrastructure projects, the city cannot escape the destiny ascribed to it by the Aztecs. Mexico City is condemned forever to be a city on the brink. (534–35) A quite recent (2010) assessment by The Economist of the city’s prospects confirms Simon’s pessimistic view: “The 20m inhabitants of Mexico City and its surrounding area, for example, draw over 70% of their water from an aquifer that will run dry, at current extraction rates, within 200 years, maybe much sooner. Already the city is sinking as a result.”25 In the novel, there is also the pervasive feeling that the proverbial towel might as well be thrown in: there can be no escape because the era of the Conquest is threatening an invasion on the city’s present. The national currency, for example, is no longer the peso, but the azteca, and many of the city’s important boulevards and landmarks have been renamed for important Conquest-era figures: la Avenida Bartolomé de las Casas, la Plaza Bernal Díaz del Castillo, el Paseo

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de la Malinche (which had been called Paseo de la Reforma), and the barrio de Tocitlán. In addition, the previously mentioned General Tezcatlipoca adorned his hilltop palace (which is likened to an Aztec sacrificial temple) with jewels recovered from the tombs of well-known Mesoamerican archaeological ruins (25). Early in the novel, Góngora reflects on this temporal confluence characteristic of life in twentyfirst-century Mexico City, particularly inasmuch as the present is not solely the present, when he says the following to Bernarda Ramírez, his love interest: Nosotros y nuestras cosas seremos objeto de estudio para los arqueólogos del futuro, quienes, con nuestros retratos y jirones, podrán reconstruir la vida cotidiana del siglo veintiuno. Otros excavadores del pasado, más imaginativos, más creadores que ellos, podrán elaborar un orbe verbal o la metáfora del desastre. Y mi cadáver, conservado junto al tuyo, en la vitrina de un museo del hombre, nunca te podrá decir: “Te amo.” (23) [We and our things will be objects of study for archaeologists from the future who, with our portraits and tattered clothing, will be able to reconstruct the daily life of the twenty-first century. Other—more imaginative and creative— diggers of the past will be able to elaborate a verbal world or the metaphor of the disaster. And my cadaver, preserved next to yours, in the display of a museum of man, will never be able to say: “I love you.”] Indeed, Góngora is quite simply unable to see his city without imagining the distant past: Paseó su mirada por el espacio desarbolado del Zócalo y sus ojos se llenaron de nostalgia. Su fantasía pobló de gentes la vieja Plaza Mayor, preguntándose si de aquí a unos años él no sería como esas figuras del pasado (descubridores, evangelizadores, pobladores, y naturales) . . . A su derecha avistó el palacio, sumergido en el suelo como un barco de piedra. Imaginó al virrey español presidiendo las ceremonias de la muerte, los autos de fe, sentado en una almohada de terciopelo . . . En su imaginación vio los lagos, los canales, los puentes, las calles de agua de esa Venecia abolida que un día fue México Tenochtitlán. (94)

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[He scanned the treeless space of the Zócalo and his eyes were filled with nostalgia. His fantasy peopled the old Plaza Mayor, asking himself whether he too—in a few years—would be like some of those figures from the past (discovers, evangelizers, colonists, and natives) . . . To his right he sighted the place, submerged in the ground like a stone ship. He imagined the Spanish viceroy presiding over death ceremonies and autos-da-fé while seated on his velvet cushion . . . In his imagination he saw lakes, canals, bridges, and waterways of that abolished Venice that used to be MexicoTenochtitlán.] The atmosphere of the novel, then, is a disconcerting one: general environmental and physical decay and signs of impending ecological disaster evidenced, most notably, by the almost complete absence of water in a city that—ironically—was initially built over a lake and whose waterways at one point drew favorable comparisons with Venice. There is, moreover, a continuous counterpoint (examples of which are too numerous in the novel to exhaust) in the minds of the characters between this unstable present (leading to an even more uncertain future) and a mythical, dead (but not entirely so) past that seems impossible to ignore, let alone transcend. The novel’s construction of this mythical past, punctuated with images from Mexico’s Aztec and Conquest eras, can in turn be related, generally speaking, to pre-Columbian ways of understanding the slipperiness between life and death and past, present, and future. La leyenda does not end here, however. There is one character I have yet to mention who best synthesizes the novel’s temporal dynamism and who in many ways initiates its dénouement. Góngora may very well be the protagonist, but he is a reluctant protagonist in the sense that he is unaware of the role he will play in averting the city’s doom. It is not until the arrival of one Cristóbal Cuahtli (the name evokes conquest and transculturation), a diminutive indigenous man who seems about forty years old and speaks imperfect Spanish, that Góngora learns his destiny. Shortly after appearing before Góngora, Cuahtli announces that he has come “from yesterday, from a few centuries in the past” [“ . . . de ayer, de unos cuantos siglos atrás” 37]; he is, in fact, about seven hundred years old and has lived through multiple incarnations, all in an effort to be present during the unstable,

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precarious era at the end of the fifth sun of the Aztec calendar (thus, the title of novel). In fact, an ancient Toltec poem whose title is translated into Spanish as “Los cinco soles” warns of how the doom of the fifth sun era (i.e., the Conquest) had been foretold. According to the Toltec community elders, during the fifth sun there will be “movements of the earth, hunger, and thus we will die” [“ . . . habrá movimientos de tierra / habrá hambre / y así pereceremos”] (“Los cinco soles”; see bibliography). In order for a smooth transition to occur between the fifth and sixth suns, Cuahtli has to recover the other half of an ancient parchment he carries with him. General Tezcatlipoca, he explains, is another time traveler who stole the other half, and Cuahtli has come to recruit Góngora to help recover the stolen half. Failure in this recovery would mean victory for Tezcatlipoca, which would be tantamount to the complete collapse of Mexican civilization: according to Cuahtli, if Góngora is unsuccessful, the tzitzimime will appear. Cuahtli describes the tzitzimime as “monsters of the dusk who will come to earth to devour men when the Fifth Sun dies” [“ . . . monstruos del crepúsculo que han de venir a la Tierra para devorar a los hombres cuando muera el Quinto Sol” 39]. If Góngora succeeds and Tezcatlipoca dies, “the blue goddess, who lives near the Iztac Cíhuatl [a volcano near Mexico City], will be the goddess of the Sixth Sun, the Sun of Nature” [“ . . . la diosa azul, que vive en el Iztac Cíhuatl, será la diosa del Sexto Sol, el Sol de la Naturaleza” 40]. Thus, success hinges on the results of an epic battle set in the present but between elements of the past; victory would restore the ecologically harmonious, natural order of things in the region. Stated otherwise, the fate of the region rests on a contest between ancient oppositional forces that have resurfaced from Mexico’s past to take its future in one of two dichotomous directions. In some ways, the novel could be critiqued for its Manicheism: there is little doubt about which side is the correct one to root for. Cuahtli—like a good superhero—has special powers at his disposal. Not only is he several hundred years old, but he can see the past alive in the city in ways that regular humans cannot. A market that, according to Góngora, no longer exists is still, in fact, there. It exists, Cuahtli explains, invisibly, “like the Acolman dog market, de Otumba bird market, the Azcapotzalco slave market,” and other relics of long-lost eras [“Existe, invisible, como el mercado de perros de

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Acolman, el mercado de pájaros de Otumba, el mercado de esclavos de Azcapotzalco . . . ” 39]. Simply stated, for Cuahtli, chronological order and a standard conception of historical flow are mere abstractions: “Visiono a la persona que viene por la calle antes de que se presente, oigo sus pasos de adiós antes de que se haya ido, y la escucho morirse cuando apenas nace. Nacimiento y muerte suceden al mismo tiempo” (104) [“I see those who approach on the street before they appear, I hear their farewell steps before they have left, and I hear them die before they are born. Birth and death happen at the same time”]. To his own amazement, Góngora, too, discovers that he has a special power that will aid him in his quest to recover the stolen document: he can walk through walls. This gift proves useful as he enters the general’s closely guarded compound, and it also lends the novel the carnivalesque, limitless flavor I described earlier. There are certain issues involving logical plausibility that could be raised involving the characters’ paranormal abilities: for example, if Cuahtli is as clairvoyant as he claims, then he would have anticipated the presence of the thugs who killed him (or at least stripped him of the particular life he was leading in the story), not to mention the possibility that his philosophy on the equivalence of death and life could lead to a pessimism and inertia that would work counter to his mission. La leyenda is not, however, logically ambitious or consistent in this way; instead, it is a fanciful imagining of the battle between good and evil, set in a Mexico City that is haunted by its past as it grapples with new and potentially catastrophic environmental challenges. As Góngora continues (now alone) in his quest to overcome the general’s forces and recover the parchment, he finds that conditions in the city are reverting—in anticipation of the story’s climax—to an earlier, premodern state: “Se fue la luz. La ciudad se quedó a oscuras, como si hubiera retrocedido a un tiempo anterior al de los hachones coloniales, los faroles de aceite, el alumbrado de gas y las lámparas eléctricas” (141) [“The power went out. The city was left in darkness, as if it had reverted to a time before the colonial torches, oil lamps, gas lights, and electric bulbs”]. It seems, then, that the climactic, apocalyptic battle to restore harmony in modern Mexico City will take place under technological conditions more proper to the city’s distant, mythical past, and quite possibly to a time completely removed from conventional chronology. The implications of such a battle are

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intriguing: there are no foreigners in the story, and those who were foreigners in a different era to the central valley of Mexico (i.e., the conquistadors and evangelizers referenced earlier) are—until novel’s end—mentioned only in passing. One might ask why Cuahtli chose Góngora for the mission. The latter is one of the few characters in the novel without a preColumbian surname. Although he is clearly a modern chilango, or resident of Mexico City, he is cognizant of the environmental depths to which the city has fallen over the years. Also, in ways that recall the Aztec scribes who documented visually the fall of Tenochtitlán to the Spaniards, he is a painter. Before becoming implicated in Cuahtli’s project, his sole artistic project was to “paint the portrait of my life, the portrait of myself, the view of the Valley of Mexico. Painting that abolished dream will be my final project . . . I will paint the red skirt, white blouse, and blank eyes of the woman who comes down from the volcanoes” [“. . . pintar el cuadro de mi vida, el cuadro de mí mismo, la vista del Valle de México. Pintar ese sueño abolido será mi ultima obra . . . pintaré la falda roja, la blusa blanca, los ojos sin mirada de la joven que baja de los volcanes” 20]. His aim, then (and by extension, possibly, Aridjis’s as well), is to artistically capture a vision of Mexico City utterly unlike its present reality and more akin to a scene from a timeless, idealized past. His ethnic identity notwithstanding, Góngora can be seen as embodying a vision for the future of Mexico, a future in which everyone can participate (or take sides) in ongoing clashes between ancient pre-Columbian forces. What is this future of Mexico according to La leyenda? Following Cuahtli’s death, all hell breaks loose: earthquakes cripple the city, the nearby volcanoes begin to erupt, and the populace descends into chaos. Furthermore, General Tezcatlipoca assumes command of the national government after assassinating the president, and we learn that he had been the Tlaloc, both an Aztec deity and the mastermind in the disappearance of dozens of teenage girls who, apparently, had served as offerings to the netherworld. As if to signal the transition from the Fifth Sun to a reign of darkness, the dreaded tzitzimime begin appearing: monstrous flying creatures that prey on anything remaining alive and who can transform themselves into all manner of ghostly figures, including “Spanish soldiers, ghostly imitations of those who participated in the conquest of Mexico” [“. . . soldados

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españoles, remedos fantasmales de aquellos que participaron en la conquista de México” 169]. Moreover, out of the physical destruction of the city, ancient Tenochtitlán begins to rise again: “. . . unos visionarios habían visto la arquitectura sagrada de la vieja ciudad en el lugar mismo que ocupaba cuando la llegada de los españoles y . . . los dioses [pre-hispanos] se podían ver difusos, pero se podían ver” (160) [“. . . some visionaries had seen the sacred buildings of the old city in the same place they occupied when the Spaniards arrived, and . . . the (prehispanic) gods could be seen faintly, but they could be seen”]. A witness to this disastrous and bizarre transformation taking place in his city, Góngora remarks, “El futuro se ha ido, el pasado está aquí” (166) [“The future is gone, the past is here”]. In effect, rather than Mexico City suffering through another earthquake like the one that rocked the city in 1985 or the Mexican drug gangs whose turf battles have made headlines in more recent years, the calamity this time is not a natural disaster but rather its very past that has returned as an invading force. The locus of the turmoil becomes the Zócalo, the symbolic heart of both modern and ancient Mexico City, and the site, incidentally, where the remains of the Aztec Templo Mayor were found in 1978 by—in a curious irony, perhaps— city electrical workers. It is here in the Zócalo that the tzitzimime and the reborn Aztec gods converge in anticipation of the terrifying beginning of a new era. It appears, then, that this new era would be characterized by the literal manifestation of the historical conflicts that, according to commentators like Octavio Paz, have troubled the Mexican psyche since the days of the Conquest: the metaphorical presence of the past in this psyche has gained a physical presence as the living relics of the Conquest and preconquest eras assert their dominion over the city. This, perhaps, is Aridjis’s vision of the apocalypse, Mexican style: Tenochtitlán resurfacing again only to rehearse ad infinitum the bloodbath that was the Conquest. The historical past, in large part, remains in the novel a negative force that must be suppressed at all costs. Aridjis’s novel seems to suggest that if residents of Mexico City do not make their city more hospitable ecologically, they will need to contend with the worst possible adversary: the city’s past. And then . . . the miracle. Police gun down Tezcatlipoca (who had recently gained the presidency), and the beginning of a new, literal

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dawn becomes apparent. As the tzitzimime and ancient deities begin celebrating—prematurely—what they assume would be their reign of darkness, they fail to take cover from the sun’s rays, and hence they perish: “El jefe de [los tzitzimime], Mixcóatl, se esfumó en el Zócalo . . . Los dioses prehispánicos que habían cobrado movimiento cayeron en las tumbas de piedra de su propio cuerpo” (197) [“The leader (of the tzitzimime), Mixcóatl, vanished in the Zócalo . . . The prehispanic gods that had come alive fell in the stone tombs that their bodies had become”]. The desperation Góngora had felt throughout the story to finish his painting of an idealized, mythical Mexican landscape was now pointless, because with the beginning of a peaceful and harmonious Sixth Sun, such a painting would no longer need to be a mere idealization: the Popocatépetl and Iztac Cíhuatl volcanoes “became visible in the distance with their original clarity. Older than time and than the gods, the volcanoes floated in the present, indifferent to human eras and calendars” [“se precisaron en la distancia con su limpidez original. Más viejos que el tiempo y que los dioses, los volcanes flotaban en el presente indiferentes a las eras y a los calendarios humanos” 198]. Ultimately, La leyenda provides a glimmer of hope with regard to the problems that beset modern Mexico: the environmental degradation, the corruption, the violence, and the weight of the past (to name only the salient ones both depicted in the novel and mentioned in our survey of writings about Mexico City). In some ways, the novel suggests that before a new and prosperous age can arrive, the present-day demons (especially violence, corruption, and environmental degradation) that remain from or are linked to the Mexican past need to be confronted somehow in explicit terms. How to do this beyond the realm of imaginative literary writing is a different question and probably entails the sustained environmental efforts of the Grupo de los Cien and that such practical (but weighty) issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) be addressed adequately (see López-Lozano). If nothing else, those seeking positive changes in Mexico City can take solace in the fact that the obstacles before them can be no more daunting than the dreaded, mythical tzitzimime: interestingly, the new age for Mexico would resemble quite closely (in environmental terms, at least) the clarity and tranquility often ascribed to premodern and, indeed, prehispanic Mexico.26 If Mexico

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City can overcome, at the level of fiction, at least, its demons from the past, why could it not—the novel may be seen to suggest—overcome its real, present ones? *

*

*

An author who also imagined such clarity and tranquility from a vantage point overlooking the valleys of Mexico, albeit nearly two centuries before Aridjis, was José María Heredia. In his poem “En el teocalli de Cholula” (1820) the speaker sits atop the eponymous preColumbian pyramid and surveys his surroundings while taking stock both of Mexican history and of his own emotions. It is important to note that this particular pyramid was at the site of a bloodbath the Spaniards inflicted upon the Aztecs (later chronicled by Bernal Díaz del Castillo), a pyramid that, after the Conquest, was quickly replaced or—better stated—crowned by a Christian church. It was also the site, at least according to the poem, where Aztec priests “without pity nor fear removed the bleeding hearts” of sacrificial victims (translation my own; [“ . . . el sacerdote, sin piedad ni espanto, les arrancaba el corazón sangriento . . . ”] ln. 131–32). In many respects, the poem is a meditation on the fleetingness of power and the brevity of life. Just as the Aztecs fell even though they once ruled, so, too, will others, including—perhaps—even the massive Popocatépetl volcano visible to the speaker. Significantly, after falling into slumber, the speaker sees, “amid the silent multitude of plumed leaders, the savage [Aztec] despot on his rich throne, adorned with feathers, pearls, and gold” (translation by Keen; his is a partial translation) [“Veía / entre la muchedumbre silenciosa / de emplumados caudillos levantarse / el déspota salvaje en rico trono, / de oro, perlas y plumas recamado” ln. 107–11]. In this dream, the Aztec past and the speaker’s present merge. Clearly, temporality is a crucial element in the poem. In addition, the poem is, in many ways, strongly informed by Heredia’s personal circumstances. The author of “En el teocalli de Cholula”— arguably one of the finest poems ever written about Mexico and perhaps the paragon of Latin American Romantic letters27—was not Mexican, as one might assume, but Cuban: a Cuban exiled from his own land after falling out of favor with the ruling colonial regime.28 In chapter 2, my focus turns to Heredia’s native Cuba and the rest of

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the Caribbean in an effort to explore how cultural production from or about this region has also thematized time travel in ways that can be linked to related formations of cultural identity. The Caribbean was, after all, the Europeans’ first stop in their project of “discovery” and conquest, and it bears the mark of the many who have been active there throughout the centuries.

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CHAPTER 2

On Island Time? Temporal Displacement and the Caribbean

Ancestor on the auction block / Across the years your eyes seek mine . . . Vera Bell (Jamaica), “Ancestor on the Auction Block,” 1948 The new nation never really gained its footing. Almost from the start, it suffered political turmoil characterized by extreme brutality—a legacy of inhuman slave-discipline measures under colonial rule that haunts Haiti to this day. Bill Steiden, “Despair defines history of Haiti,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 17, 2010

W

hile my focus in the previous chapter revolved around a historical time period or historical process, that is, the socalled discovery and conquest of the Americas, in the present chapter my focus is primarily a geographical one: the Caribbean. This region has been characterized in writings from the last several decades as possessing a highly charged and sometimes peculiar relationship with temporality. Whether it is—to name just a handful of possible discourses—publicity campaigns in the United States inviting tourists to slow down and get away from it all in the Caribbean, North American televangelists describing a 1791 Haitian pact with the devil, or journalists writing about the region (as is the case in Bill

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Steiden’s remarks following the horrific 2010 Haiti earthquake), all agree that time has a unique significance here. This is particularly so in the way Caribbean time seems to flout the linear “clock time” associated with modernity, thereby allowing the past and the present to commingle. The statement regarding the notion of “getting away from it all,” as fanciful and appealing as it may sound to sun-deprived, overworked tourists, relates to two important conceptual undercurrents informing Caribbean thought, particularly as it pertains to temporality. An idea put forth by Barbara Webb encapsulates both undercurrents: in Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant (1992), she argues that among Caribbean writers the quest for origins—the central problem inscribed in myth—arises precisely when their societies are faced with the transition from the colonial past to independence. This transition is complicated by a multiple heritage that is often interpreted as a lack of tradition since it does not fit the mold of Old World patterns. (62) Although both conceptual undercurrents—namely, the quest for origins and an apparent lack of tradition in the region—are inextricably linked in Caribbean thought, we shall attempt to examine them here separately. In terms of the apparent lack of tradition in the Caribbean, there has been a long-standing polemic questioning the very existence of history in the region, a polemic countered by Edouard Glissant and Edward Baugh, among others. Similarly, matters have not been made any easier for intellectuals from the region given that some writers with a Caribbean background—V. S. Naipaul, for instance, in The Middle Passage (1962)—have employed a condescending “Old World” lens in their critiques of the region. If through the intellectual projects of Glissant and Baugh we no longer have to entertain challenges to the very existence of history in the region, it remains fair to ask how this history is characterized in Caribbean writing. This brings us to the other conceptual undercurrent, the quest for origins. The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier is one writer who—in works like the novel Los pasos perdidos (1953; The Lost Steps, 1956) and the short story “Viaje a la semilla” (1958)—rehearses

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this quest. One might ask, however, what correlation exists between such quests (in which the clock seems somehow to run backward) and broader notions involving Caribbean temporality. Carpentier’s best-known and most succinct single pronouncement on the notions of temporality that characterize not just the Caribbean but the Americas in general is the following one from his landmark essay “De lo real maravilloso americano” (1949; “On American Marvelous Realism”). In the essay he reports at first on his travels throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. It was in Haiti, however, and amid the ruins of Cap Français in particular, that he reports having had an epiphany. This epiphany would inspire him to write El reino de este mundo (1949; The Kingdom of this World, 1957), a novel whose preface in its first edition was “De lo real maravilloso americano” and one whose subject matter involves, in a nutshell, the ways in which slaves used their religious beliefs to mount a rebellion during the final days of French rule in Saint-Domingue. According to Carpentier, he first saw in Cap Français “the possibility of establishing certain possible—American and recurring—synchronisms on top of time, of relating this with that, yesterday with the present” [“Vi la posibilidad de establecer ciertos sincronismos posibles, americanos, recurrentes, por encima del tiempo, relacionando esto con aquello, el ayer con el presente” (“De lo real maravilloso americano” 114)]. In other words, for Carpentier, at least (although the list of Latin American writers he influenced is not a short one), there is something about the cultural fusions that have taken place in the Americas that lends itself to understandings and uses of time that differ from those elsewhere. Moreover, according to Carpentier, what is peculiar and/or special about the Americas pertains, first and foremost, to temporality. As such, Carpentier’s ideas on the “marvelous realism” that prevails on this continent are worth remembering as tools—alongside science fiction and other pertinent discourses—through which to understand instances of time travel and alternative synchronisms in cultural production from the region. Others have also theorized on the relationship between the Caribbean and temporality. The historian David Lowenthal speaks for many others in stating—in ways that recall Carpentier’s synchronisms—that “in the Caribbean the past is a living presence” (West Indian Societies, 68). In his The Past Is a Foreign Country, Lowenthal

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reports that “West Indian small-islanders have spoken to [him] of eighteenth-century progenitors as if they were still living or had only recently died, ‘remembering’ them in no less intimate detail than grandparents” (250). Such observations beg the question of why it is that time seems to function differently in the Caribbean. According to the late Cuban scholar and novelist Antonio Benítez Rojo, much about Caribbean temporality has to do with the fragmented and insular physical reality of the region. In his La isla que se repite (1989; The Repeating Island, 1992) he argues, for instance, that “the culture of the Caribbean, at least in its most distinctive aspect, is not terrestrial but aquatic, a sinuous culture where time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar” (11) [“. . . la cultura del Caribe, al menos el aspecto de ella que más la diferencia, no es terrestre sino acuática; una cultura sinuosa donde el tiempo se despliega irregularmente y se resiste a ser capturado por el ciclo del reloj o del calendario” (xiv)]. Time in the Caribbean, then, does not follow for Benítez Rojo the rigidity and linearity of land (think of the temporality of the landlocked Swiss, perhaps, who are known—among other things—for the quality and precision of their clocks), but rather the amorphousness and slipperiness of water. Granted, one could make a friendly objection to Benítez Rojo’s observation with similar generalizations: the Japanese, for example, are an insular people and makers of fine timepieces. Furthermore, it should go without saying that the Caribbean is not composed exclusively of islands, but includes as well some of the coastal regions of Central America and northern South America (and, some would argue, parts of the United States’ Gulf Coast). It must be stated, however, that throughout The Repeating Island Benítez-Rojo adds layers of complexity to his ideas on the characteristics of Caribbean culture (framing it in relation to plantation society, cultural syncretism, and postmodernism—in other words, concepts applicable to the other regions of the Caribbean). There are other (in many ways complementary) ways to think about time within a Caribbean context. For instance, José Quiroga’s insightful study Cuban Palimpsests (2005) investigates the complexities involved in understanding how time works in conjunction with memory. His geographical focus in his study is on the one hand a narrower, Cuban one; on the other hand, he considers time and memory within both an insular and exilic Cuban context. By examining

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a wide range of cultural sites of memory, Quiroga demonstrates that remembering does not entail a simple plotting of points or moments along a chronology; instead, the palimpsest (i.e., a document that over the course of time has been written over, repeatedly perhaps) offers a better metaphor for the ways memory works: memory is a palimpsest that is continually being written over, but never perfectly so. This is because the newer writings or memories never completely conceal the older ones, and several layers of memory can coexist simultaneously. In his description of a Havana streetscape, Quiroga writes: For the foreign observer, as well as for many habaneros, walking around central Havana as late as 2002 invited the stroller, or flâneur, to apprehend different temporalities within the same structure— the colonial or nineteenth-century, prerevolutionary capitalist use of the building in the advertising and signs that still remained— neon lights with no neon, or the practically intact counter of what used to be a Woolworth’s soda fountain counter—and then also the third stratum: the use that the revolutionary government gave to that structure. This last skin of the building had no relationship with what the building itself had housed in the past, but it allowed the perception of discontinuity to guide all vision . . . Looking at the city that way, foreign observers found themselves within a palimpsest, thus the kind of temporal and spatial dislocations that are present in many images [of Havana]. (32) Sometimes the palimpsest is suggested in a more poetic manner. For instance, in Gareth Jenkins’s book, Havana in My Heart: 75 Years of Cuban Photography, a picture by Constantino Arias of the Paseo del Prado in the 1950s is, according to Quiroga, accompanied by text that places it in a different time frame: “A vibrant night life is returning to the streets of the old town. Prado, the elegant boulevard that runs from the Castillo de la Punta, at the mouth of the harbor, past the Central Park and the Capitolio, is being restored to its former glory.” Viewers do not get a picture of the present; instead, the picture of the past helps them imagine, in the present, what the future might be. (106)

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This temporal shifting and flux, Quiroga argues, lies at the heart of what it means to experience the flow of time through a Cuban prism, particularly in the days during and since the particularly difficult “Special Period for Times of Peace” [“El período especial en tiempos de paz”] following the Soviet collapse. The present, in effect, is seldom if ever solely the present, in that several layers of time can coexist at any given moment in a given artifact. The palimpsest is a helpful metaphor for considering the ways time and memory advance and retreat within a broader Caribbean (and, indeed, hemispheric) context. The past, in particular, seems impossible to dislodge from the present and from imaginings on the future. One can turn for examples to two recent documentaries about Cuba, each of which illustrates how several eras coexist—or can be seen as coexisting—in a single moment: early in Wim Wenders’s popular (albeit controversial: see Quiroga’s Cuban Palimpsests for a lengthier discussion of this controversy) Buena Vista Social Club (1999), the filmmakers, with the help of one of the starring musicians, Compay Segundo, search Havana for the location of the eponymous dance hall. In a city where the political situation and the accompanying lack of economic progress—a stagnation represented on a visual level quite forcefully by the ubiquitous presence of preblockade North American cars—creates the impression that time, somehow, has left the city by; the dance hall must still be around. The documentary, in effect, constitutes an effort to resurrect and/or salvage for the present the music and musicians from 1950s Cuba. Generally speaking, the revolution at the close of that decade marks a turning point with all manner of reverberations, including temporal ones: for the journalist Ron Base, this moment marks the point “at which the clocks stopped and time began standing still here” (2).1 A second, more recent documentary explores and in many ways also seeks to salvage for the present a 1964 film, Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba. The latter film, which was a collaborative venture between Soviet and Cuban cinema, is composed of a series of vignettes that show the social polarization that existed in prerevolutionary Cuba. It follows, then, that the vignettes are, taken collectively, also meant to serve as a justification for the 1959 revolution. I Am Cuba—before being “rediscovered” by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese, who lauded its innovative cinematography—had fallen into oblivion

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even in Cuba, where it never received much acclaim in the first place. In the recent documentary I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth (2005), the Brazilian filmmaker Vicente Ferraz tells the story of the Kalatozov film’s slow descent into obscurity and its recent resurrection. In ways that recall Wenders’s methods in Buena Vista Social Club, Ferraz embarks on what is, in effect, an archaeological investigation (“paleontological” could be a better word to describe the process of unearthing the “mammoth” in the title): he tracks down and interviews many of the participants in I Am Cuba, both Cuban and Russian, and takes viewers to several of the Havana locations that appeared in the film, most of which—quite sadly—are only shadows of their former selves. In contrast, Ernest Hemingway’s house—not surprisingly—has been meticulously preserved. Base recalls his impressions during a recent visit to the house: “His ghost, like many ghosts in Cuba, lingered so close. His glasses lay on the bed beside the local papers. His slippers were under the bed. Surely, he would be back in a few moments” (2). Havana, in effect, can be characterized by a curious if not impossible mixture of deterioration and stagnation. The Cuban writer Abilio Estévez shares Base’s and these filmmakers’ interest in Havana’s temporality. His short story “Tosca” (1998) is—in its attention to architectural detail and in the backward flow of time—also reminiscent of Carpentier’s “Viaje a la semilla.” In “Tosca,” Ana, an habanera housewife, discovers that her husband Adolfo, a history lecturer at the university, has become obsessed with clocks. By way of an explanation to Ana, he states that he shares Proust’s passion, presumably in undertaking an extraordinary investigation of the past. Gradually, Adolfo amasses a large collection of clocks and begins taking them apart. Ana later discovers that he has been sneaking into the “ruins” of Havana’s Teatro Principal and singing a Puccini aria over and over. In addition, he has somehow rigged all the clocks in the house to move backward, going “from the after to the before, as if, instead of serving to observe the present on its way to the future, they pointed the way to the past” (230) [“los relojes marchaban hacia atrás, iban del después hacia el antes, como si en lugar de servir para observar el presente, y de paso el camino al futuro, marcaran el paso al pasado” (75)]. Although it is only Adolfo who participates (or performs) in this backward temporality, as he leads his worried employer (who

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is also the narrator of the story) through the debris of the old Teatro, his performance as an inhabitant of a past only he can see becomes so convincing to his guest that the story at this moment seems to enter the realm of the fantastic. In very Carpentierian fashion, Adolfo—in recounting the history of the Teatro— slid back to the very day in 1908 upon which the mayor set the first stone on land . . . Before my eyes, and thanks to Adolfo’s narrative gifts, the building shed its present decay, recovered the artisan’s woodworkings, erected its statues intact and its velvet curtain, and radiated an enormous floodlight. (232) [se fue deslizando hasta el mismo día de 1908 en que el alcalde puso la primera Piedra . . . Ante mis ojos, y gracias al don narrativo de Adolfo, el edificio perdió la actual pudrición, recobró las maderas del artesonado, se levantaron las estatuas intactas y el telón de terciopelo, y brilló una araña gigantesca. (78) “Tosca,” like other Cuban cultural productions of the 1990s, can be read in relation to the Special Period as it enacts the search for a more prosperous past that seems irretrievable except in fiction and in nostalgia-driven documentaries. In broader, Caribbean terms as well, “Tosca” is a story from a region characterized by competing temporalities: a forward-moving, conventional clock time that stands in contrast to Adolfo’s backward temporality. While it is never clear in the story if Adolfo’s time travels occur only in his imagination, “Tosca” shares with other works of fiction from or about the Caribbean an interest in time travel and alternative temporalities. Although the Caribbean is not typically a point of origin or a destination in most popular, mass-market North American science fictional texts,2 there are exceptions. In Diana Gabaldon’s Voyager (1994), for instance, a modern British woman travels through a time portal and arrives first in seventeenth-century Scotland. During her lengthy sojourn in the past, her travels (she is actually chasing after pirates who kidnapped a nephew) take her to several Caribbean islands. Meanwhile, in Gene Wolfe’s Pirate Freedom (2007), a Catholic priest in a futuristic, postcommunist Cuba reveals that he was at one time a seventeenth-century pirate. Although the novel does not explain

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how or why Father Christopher has been able to leap back and forth across time (which tends to render it, in effect, a work of fantasy), it is worth noting that Wolfe’s novel uses the Caribbean as a backdrop for time travel. While both this novel and Gabaldon’s Voyager may appeal to North American readers’ views of a Caribbean timelessness or quaintness (as such the region seems the ideal setting for stories about modern characters who travel to the past), these stories—albeit for very different reasons—share with Estévez’s “Tosca” an interest in Caribbean temporality or at the very least an interest in temporality and the Caribbean. Time Travel and the Legacy of Slavery in the Caribbean

Early in Wolfe’s Pirate Freedom, Father Christopher recalls a visit to a busy Caribbean port during the seventeenth century. He recalls, in particular, noticing the striking social divisions in the port: as opposed to himself and the other free laborers, for example, “the slaves were not going to get paid, or even get enough to eat. They were chained together in gangs because they were going to run away the first time they got a chance and everybody knew it” (34). The long historical presence of slavery in the Caribbean adds a layer of complexity to considerations of alternative Caribbean temporalities. This is so for two basic reasons: first, because nearly all slaves in the Caribbean— discounting, for example, the indigenous groups enslaved during the first few decades of the sixteenth century and Yucatec Mayas sent to Cuba during the nineteenth century—were either African or of African heritage; and second, because of the severity of slavery. With regard to the first reason, ways of conceptualizing time among Caribbean peoples of African heritage have long been linked to prevailing temporal schemes that are African in origin. In his Main Currents in Caribbean Thought, for instance, Gordon K. Lewis identifies contrasting “white” (Cartesian) and “black” (African-derived) engagements with what might broadly be termed “reality” in the Caribbean. While the white or European approach is characterized by detachment and abstraction, in the black approach, “life and experience are unified in one domain of knowledge and understanding in which past, present, and future fuse into the awful mystery of things” (196; emphasis added). As generalizing and sweeping as Lewis’s distinction seems nearly thirty years

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after the publication of his book in 1983, one could argue in turn that slavery, in its brutality, was a generalizing force that attempted to erase the varying cultural traditions the slaves brought with them from numerous places in Africa. “Attempted” may be the operative word in the previous sentence because, without a doubt, the slaves held on—sometimes in syncretic manner—to African traditions and ways of understanding the world. In Elio Ruiz’s short story, “The Little White Girl,” for instance, we are witness to a Santería ceremony in Cuba in which Orishas, or Afro-Cuban deities made the uncontrollable drums, cowbells, and chequerés sound. Their horses, as the possessed ones were called, sweated copiously, jumped about, fell on their knees, rolled around in the mud, climbed trees, flew, swallowed burning embers, and spat out truths with sounds from their innermost recesses, capable of passing through the time and distance that separated them from Africa. (516) Here, it seems that as powerful as the African-derived forces inspiring the ceremony may be, they may be no more powerful than the very urge or desire the children of the African diaspora have to reconnect with their mythical homeland. As a way of giving this discussion on slavery and its consequences some theoretical contextualization, it is worth considering a seminal essay titled “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in which Stuart Hall interrogates this desire among Caribbean peoples to reconnect with Africa. According to him, Africa for many embodies a oneness “underlying all the other, more superficial differences, [it] is the truth, the essence, of ‘Caribbeanness,’ of the black identity” (393). Hall juxtaposes this reifying impulse to rediscover and reveal an obscured but timeless homeland with an equally compelling feature of Caribbean thought: to wit, he argues that we cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about “one experience, one identity,” without acknowledging its other side— the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute, precisely, the Caribbean’s “uniqueness.” Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of “becoming” as well as of “being.” It belongs to the

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future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. (394) After arguing in favor of the second sense or approach toward understanding Caribbean cultural identity, Hall affirms the preeminence of “the Antillean as the prototype of the modern or postmodern New World Nomad . . .” (401). The Caribbean, in sum, is unique because it has served, during the last several hundred years, as the setting of multiple, often overlapping diasporas, and it is the site where a constantly evolving cultural fusion has been taking place; it is, in addition, a place of which it can be said that almost none of its current inhabitants occupy their original ancestral homeland (see afterword for further discussion on this statement). This is so, according to Hall, despite “the endless desire” in the region “to return to ‘lost origins,’ to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning” (402). In fact, Hall affirms, the “original ‘Africa’ is no longer there. It too has been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible” (399). For all practical purposes, Hall is right. Strange things, however, can happen in fiction. Returning to the subject of slavery, we find that there are, for instance, stories on the subject—set in both the Caribbean and elsewhere—that describe improbable temporal reversals and returns to times otherwise irrecoverable. The voyages described in these stories may involve either a return to an Africa from a distant time and/or a return to the “scene of the crime” that slavery constitutes. Furthermore, these fictions in several respects combine Hall’s two categories by both depicting a “return” to a remote place and time and simultaneously positing or suggesting new and evolving constructions of cultural identity. We can turn briefly now to one such story: Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), a novel about a contemporary African American woman’s time travels back to the era of slavery in the United States. In his introduction to the novel, Robert Crossley argues that there is a good reason for the absence of any “time machines” or scientific explanations to account for the time travel in the novel: the only time machine in Kindred “is the vehicle that looms behind every American slave narrative, the grim death-ship of the Middle Passage from Africa to the slave markets of the New World” (xi). Another writer suggests that the Middle Passage is by its very nature already science

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fictional: “. . . the entire history of black people in the west can be described as a case of abduction by aliens.”3 Significantly, the abduction perpetrated on what Crossley describes as a “death-ship” was in many ways successful in transporting to the Americas common African ways of thinking about time: ways, one might argue, that informed the cyclical temporal dynamics of Butler’s novel. In addition, Crossley’s observation underscores the second element concerning the relationship between slavery and temporality in the Caribbean: the grimness or severity of slavery in the region; it is, one might argue, a severity that carries a significant temporal dimension on account of the residual traces slavery has left. Naipaul, for example, wrote famously and controversially in 1962 that “so many things in these West Indian territories . . . speak of slavery. There is slavery in the vegetation. In the sugarcane, brought by Columbus . . . in the food . . . in the absence of family life . . . in the fondness for terms of racial abuse . . .” (200–1). Slavery, in effect, has amounted to a force in the Caribbean capable of blurring a distinction as seemingly simple as the one between past and present. In 1971, for instance, Fidel Castro criticized his subjects in highly peculiar terms after they failed to produce the ten million tons of sugar the Cuban leader had demanded. “The Revolution,” he argued, will only attain its moral zenith when men who are free will be capable of equaling the production of those who were forced to do so as slaves . . . Slavery has disappeared, but there is no proof that a rational free man is capable of surpassing the production of a slave society without being coerced to! In the final analysis, that’s the problem we’re debating now . . . I am convinced that you still have people about the place who need a certain degree of coercion.4 As Carlos Moore points out with regard to Castro’s words, underperforming Cuban workers—just as Cuban slaves had in the past— apparently still “needed the whip” (319–20). In broader terms, it is interesting to note that, unfortunately, as recently as 2007 (the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain), the Organization of American States (OAS) found it necessary to pass a resolution “urging member states to continue implementing measures

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to eradicate the effects and consequences of the slave trade and slavery” (OAS 2007, n.p.). José Miguel Insulza, the OAS secretary general, vowed that his organization would confront “the practices and policies that may be perpetuating the continued suffering of the descendants of those Africans who survived the horrors of the middle passage and the brutality of the plantation system” (OAS 2007, n.p.). A final (and quite curious) example of the enduring legacy of slavery in the Caribbean can be found in Stephan Palmié’s study on AfroCuban society, Wizards and Scientists (2002). The author describes the reactions he received from two Cubans (“who did not know each other”) when he explained to them that he was conducting research on Afro-Cuban religion. They saw, he states, “the presence of Tomás: the spirit of an elderly African slave who had lived and died in nineteenthcentury Cuba and had come to attach himself to [his] person, hovering behind [him], in the way the dead are wont to do” (2). Tomás, then, is in this instance the startling embodiment or concretization of the legacy of African slavery in the Caribbean. Slavery and Modern Caribbean Cultural Production

Cultural production from the region has certainly registered the intricate relationship between the legacy of domination in general (slavery in particular) and the temporality intellectuals described earlier. Looking just at poetry and verse from the Hispanic Caribbean, for example, there are copious examples of such cultural production. “Futuro” (Poemas de transición, 1927–31), a poem by Nicolás Guillén, perhaps the leading twentieth-century Afro-Cuban poet, imagines a world in which other men (“otros hombres”) arrive in the present day (in this case, the first third of the twentieth century) to impose their truth (“nos impongan su verdad”). Who the men are, specifically, or what their ethnicity is make no difference. All that matters is that they wield sufficient power to dominate all those around them, including North Americans, who until the arrival of the newcomers had been the rulers (the poem, as such, is in line with common Latin American views on US imperialism). With the newcomers, however, the North Americans in the poem are transformed into “modernos incas, nuevos aztecas.” Like the Incas and Aztecs, the North Americans in “Futuro” will go from rulers to ruled: “Como los viejos indios trabajarían para

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el nuevo español” [“Like the old Indians (i.e., Amerindians) they would work in the mines for the new Spaniard”]; to add insult to injury, the North Americans would chauffeur the newcomers around in Rolls-Royces, thus recalling the ways Spaniards lorded over the Amerindians in land that had previously belonged to the latter. A later poem by Guillén, “Vine en un barco negrero . . .” (Tengo, 1964), addresses more directly the legacy of slavery in the Caribbean, no doubt influenced by the optimism for racial reconciliation and openness that characterized the years shortly following the Castroite revolution. The speaker in the poem affirms, as the poem’s title indicates, having arrived in Cuba on a slave ship. After recounting the hardships of slave life in the sugar mill, the speaker then reports having listened to a smiling man named Aponte. The Aponte in question is José Antonio Aponte, the Afro-Cuban leader of a failed 1812 uprising against Spain, an uprising known as the Aponte Rebellion. The speaker then recounts his encounters with other luminaries of Cuban history, including Jesús Menéndez, an Afro-Cuban labor leader who was martyred in 1947. Even though Menéndez is dead, his eyes are looking at the speaker. Indeed, in ways that recall Mackandal’s survival in Carpentier’s Kingdom of this World, Menéndez lives (“Vive el muerto”), at least according to the speaker in the poem. If we do the math, we see that the speaker was an active participant in events separated by at least 135 years, not counting the possible additional lapse between his initial arrival to Cuba on a slave ship and his encounter with Aponte. Undoubtedly, the poem traces a figurative temporality impossible for a real person, a kind of poetic time travel that recurs in poems by other writers. At poem’s end, the speaker makes three brief but powerful statements: “Libre estoy, vine de lejos. / Soy un negro.” He is free, he came from afar, and he is black (or a black man). He thus affirms his hard-earned freedom while acknowledging the fact that he in some ways remains a foreigner (or the descendant of foreigners, i.e., slaves brought from Africa). Because, perhaps, of this uneasy status between foreigner and Cuban (he calls Cuba mía, or “mine”), he concludes by affirming his racial or color identification as a black man. Ultimately, the poem’s stretching of the temporal dimension allows the speaker to link two widely separated points in time in such a way as to affirm an enduring black identity: an identity derived, undoubtedly, from the residual psychological and social effects or scars of slavery.

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Guillén’s protégée, the Afro-Cuban poet Nancy Morejón, has also explored issues involving the legacy of slavery in her country, albeit from a feminist perspective. In her introduction to a recent compilation of Morejon’s poetry, Juanamaría Cordones-Cook argues the following: As an essential quality of her identity, Africanness emerges from the core of her poetry as a fundamental, unifying, and universalizing component of the African diaspora. Like repressed experiences of one’s consciousness, the distant ancestral world of slavery does not fade away but rather returns from the unconscious, projecting its shadow over the present. (In Morejón’s Looking Within / Mirar adentro, 47) We see a vivid example of the Africanness Cordones-Cook describes and the ways it projects “its shadow over the present” in Morejón’s “Mujer negra” (1975).5 The speaker in the poem still smells “the foam of the sea they made [her] cross” during the Middle Passage [“Todavía huelo la espuma del mar que me hicieron atravesar”]. With a strong memory of her “lost coast” and her “ancestral” African language, her life then follows the trajectory of a composite brutal slave experience here in the Americas. She “worked like an animal,” for example; then she was resold in a public square to a master who impregnated her (she did not give her son a name). It soon becomes evident that the poetic voice speaks for a collectivity, given that this “I” in the poem also rode “with the troops of Maceo” in the latter half of the nineteenth century and then descended from the Sierra Maestra (with Fidel and el Che, presumably) in the 1950s “to put an end to capital and usurer, / to generals and to the bourgeoisie” [“para acabar con capitales y usureros, / con generales y burgueses”]. Ultimately, the poem is ambiguous: in the present, there is an affirmation not of Africa and Africanness, but rather of communism: “My equals, here I see you dance / around the tree we are planting for communism” [“Iguales míos, aquí los veo bailar / alrededor del árbol que plantamos para el comunismo”]. The dancing, however, and the fact that this tree’s “prodigal wood resounds” [“Su pródiga madera ya resuena”] suggests that a subtle Africanness (i.e., the sound of drumbeats) underlies or can at least be linked to what is ostensibly an enthusiastic, patriotic celebration

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of Castro’s political system. This apparent tightrope walk between an acceptance of communism and a camouflaged affirmation of an Afro-Cuban cultural identity can be understood, perhaps, in light of the pointed interrogations Morejón and several other prominent Afro-Cuban writers underwent at the hands of communist party officials prior to the 1968 World Cultural Congress in Havana. After the group was warned against casting a negative light on race relations in Cuba, Morejón “never again involved herself in ethnic protest” and thereafter “turned her attention exclusively to literary matters” (Moore 311, 313). Lest one think that a poetic interest in Caribbean slavery is limited to Cuban authors in particular and Spanish-speaking authors in general, we should recall the epigraph to this chapter, taken from a Vera Bell poem in which the speaker and her enslaved distant ancestor6 establish a connection despite the temporal distance that separates them. Similarly, in her poem “The Plantation” (1978), the New York City–based Surinamese poet Eugenie Eersel describes another crosstemporal connection. Here, the speaker is “haunted” by a story her mother told her about the days of slavery in Suriname, a country with a Caribbean coast. According to the speaker, when the Dutch would inaugurate a new machine for the processing of sugar, they would do so “by picking out and crushing / the most beautiful young Negress / as offer to the God of Profit.” This young female slave did not exit without a trace, however: according to the speaker, “it’s her scream / resounding from times long past / that’s curdling my blood . . .” In “The Last Child . . . Sold” (1995), a poem by the Jamaican Delores McAnuff-Gauntlett, the speaker has a similar experience: “Ancestors whisper / through the weeping wind / their tongues / too heavy for screams, / and the nothingness / within their souls / weighted torment on their hearts.” Finally, in “Slave Driver,” a Bob Marley song from 1973, the speaker is haunted by the distant past: “I remember on the slave ship, how they brutalized my very soul.” 7 Slavery, then, has left a profound mark on the Caribbean: a mark that carries with it distinctly important and often palpable temporal dimensions. These dimensions are felt, for instance, in Haile Gerima’s 1993 film, Sankofa, which in the Akan language of Ghana means, “One must return to the past in order to move forward.”8 In this film, Mona, an African American fashion model taking part in a photo

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shoot in what used to be a slave fortress on the Ghanaian coast (the Cape Coast Castle) is sent back to the time when her ancestors were enslaved in the very same fortress. She then lives the life of a slave on the Lafayette sugar plantation, ostensibly located somewhere in the Caribbean sometime in the nineteenth century. Beyond mounting a strong critique of slavery during the colonial era, Sankofa offers a more general assessment of how Christianity and the results of racial mixing have, for the Ethiopian-born filmmaker, blurred critical issues of power, race, and oppression involving elements of certain pan-Africanist ideologies: issues that—in the eyes of Gerima—should not be worthy of nuance and have no “gray” area. Interestingly, in its effort to transport its audience, as well, to the era of slavery, Sankofa robs Mona of her memory: Mona, who as a slave is called Shola, seems psychologically disconnected and, for all intents and purposes, unaware of her “past” as a fashion model. This rupture, it could be argued, reflects the one Africans endured as they embarked on the Middle Passage. A recent memoir by the Ghanaian-born English writer Ekow Eshun recounts a visit to another of Ghana’s infamous slave forts: Elmina. Eshun’s account is particularly striking in its grammatical conflation between the present moment and a distant past, and in the manner it reiterates the kind of question that also interested Stuart Hall. The account of his visit begins with an imaginative observation or re-creation expressed in what could be termed the historical present: “They clamp a ring around your neck, thread a chain through it and tug you all in line to a narrow exit at the far end of the courtyard. It is called the ‘Door of No Return’ ” (109). Eshun then transitions to a present-day contextualization of the very same door: “Periodically, Elmina stages a ‘homecoming’ ceremony where African Americans, Caribbeans and black Europeans are invited back through the Door of No Return to the land of their origins. Is it possible to reclaim the past? Or do we remain wanderers after our return?” (110). The remainder of the book suggests the latter possibility as the most viable, for him at least. As a visitor to his homeland, he remains, nonetheless, in the grip of a narrative about the region’s unfortunate past participation in the slave trade. This is the case for him even though the one ancestor of whom he has knowledge was actually on the wrong side of history: he was a slave trader on the Ghanaian coast.

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The Caribbean Avatar: Kevin Baldeosingh and the Fate of the Caribbean

Slavery’s palpable temporal dimensions are also evident in a novel by an Anglo-Caribbean writer who shares Gerima’s and Eshun’s interest in the legacy of slavery, albeit one who arrives at different conclusions (especially in relation to Gerima) about this legacy: In his The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (2005; no relation to James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar), Kevin Baldeosingh, through the mechanism of time travel, offers a compelling perspective on the past, present, and future of the Americas, a perspective that, although informed by East Indian belief systems, affirms the unique position of the Caribbean with particular respect to modernity. This is especially so—the novel affirms—in light of this region’s history, which is at once rich and tumultuous on account of its legacies of conquest, exploitation, and cultural plurality. Baldeosingh’s novel tells the story—perhaps reminiscent of Butler’s Kindred or Anne Rice’s vampire sagas9 —of a person whose multiple incarnations comprise the latest 500 years in the history of the Caribbean. It is worth noting that Baldeosingh, a Trinidadian journalist and novelist, describes his ethnic identity in slippery, satirical terms: “And what about my identity? Well, don’t tell anyone, but I’m actually a Dizzle from the planet Karklebon” (“My Secret Identity”; n.p.; see bibliography). This postethnic attitude toward cultural identity in general and Trinidadian identity in particular yields important clues about the trajectory of Ten Incarnations. The protagonist in this novel, which has received virtually no critical attention, lives each life until age fifty (thus, ten lives equal 500 years), at which point he is bludgeoned to death by a mysterious “Shadowman,” only to return as a newborn in a next life. Through these incarnations10 (mostly male, but not always; the only constant is each character’s green eyes) we are witnesses to several fictionalized events that serve as a composite of the Caribbean region’s historical record. The central questions, in my opinion, that the novel poses are by no means original to Ten Incarnations: First, what, if anything, is the nature of the Caribbean and its diverse population? Second, what are Caribbean peoples to do in light of the area’s tumultuous past, a past that nonetheless in many ways instilled certain commonalities in the area? Although the second question is also hardly original,

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the answers the novel offers and the ways it poses the questions are compelling. At the novel’s core is an effort to blur the distinction between fact and fiction: each of the ten incarnations is punctuated by the reports of a modern psychiatrist in Trinidad, with whom the titular character is undergoing therapy. The use of a psychiatrist’s notes seems to serve several purposes. First, by using a counterpoint between the accounts of the several lives and a modern scientific style of writing, Baldeosingh strives to provide—through the modern psychiatric discourse—a frame of reference for contemporary readers to use in synthesizing the ten accounts, many of which vary greatly in style and content. Second, the interspersed psychiatric discourse, which often consists of a transcription of the dialogues between doctor and patient, serves to heighten the novel’s sense of drama. Following Avatar’s (the name of the final incarnation) account of his fifth life, for instance, we read the following exchange, which is very representative of the psychiatrist’s notes in the novel, as well as, perhaps, the exchanges typical of a real psychiatric evaluation: [Dr. Sankar]: “Adam, I must tell you that I have no reason to believe that any of what you tell me is objective fact. I think you have put a lot of work into making your beliefs tenable. But the sooner you accept that they aren’t, the sooner you’ll be on the road to true healing.” [Avatar]: “Well, doc, I’m afraid you haven’t offered me any proof that what I believe isn’t objective fact. But maybe the next account will help us decide the issue one way or the next.” (255) Not surprisingly, the account that follows leaves Dr. Sankar equally unconvinced and even more perplexed about the type of psychiatric ailment that seems to afflict Avatar, who describes himself as having an ethnic ancestry of “European, African, Indian, Amerindian and other meaningless terms . . . Human, mostly” (150–51). Although Avatar never in the course of his conversations with the psychiatrist sways from his conviction regarding the factual existence of his previous lives, we learn ultimately that his visits to Dr. Sankar serve as a means for him to officially “document” his story (or stories) while

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doing so in the presence of someone compelled by his profession to protect his privacy. The final purpose of the psychiatrist’s notes is more subtle and is never stated explicitly in the novel: it seems telling that an exploration into the meanings of several Caribbean lives as well as into the history of the region would take place in a psychiatrist’s office; it is, in some regards, as if to suggest that the Caribbean and its peoples are mentally ill and in need of therapy. Stated less stridently, the novel underscores the potentially problematic fluidity of identity often associated with the Caribbean. Indeed, based on some of the atrocities they committed during their lives, some of Avatar’s previous incarnations might have benefitted from psychiatric therapy (not that this medical tool was even in existence during the sixteenth century); in reading the accounts of the incarnations, readers are taken through a whirlwind of (often tragic and depressing) historical events in the Caribbean. The first such incarnation we encounter is that of a young Taíno boy named Guaikan who lived in Haiti during the time of the first arrival of the Spanish guamikinas (the covered men). Much of this account reads like an anthropological or archaeological description of Taíno life in that it explains Taíno tools and cultural practices to readers who are more than likely unfamiliar with this culture. Indeed, Baldeosingh’s knowledge of the Taíno may have come from his readings on archaeological studies in the Caribbean. Guaikan, whose name means “precious crossing” in Taíno (9) and who is modeled after a Taíno boy of the same name who became Christopher Columbus’s adoptive son, is characterized from an early age by his uniqueness with respect to everyone else in his community. Unlike his fellow Taínos, he has—inexplicably—green eyes, and tells us in his first-person narrative (common to the accounts of all the incarnations) that he learned at an early age that he was unusual: “I always felt that other people were less brave than I. I was not afraid of anything” (12). Indeed, many in his village view him with skepticism because he does not work or play with the other children, and instead spends much of his time alone or with another boy who is also considered an outcast. It is shortly before the arrival of the Spaniards that the village holds a meeting during which a medicine woman pronounces a double prophecy, with the first part addressing the Taíno community’s chances of resisting the guamikinas, and the second

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directly referring to Guaikan: “Brief shall be the enjoyment of life. But he shall preserve the Tainos” (27). In a narrative turn that recalls the way other fictions (the Hollywood films Forrest Gump [1994] and Being Human [1994] come to mind) involve their protagonists in pivotal historical events, Guaikan travels from Haiti to Guanahan’ (later known as San Salvador) and becomes the first Amerindian to spot Christopher Columbus’s caravels: “It was while we were in Guanahan’ that the covered men sailed into our world. I saw them first” (34). In accordance with the meaning of his name (“precious crossing”), Guaikan travels to Spain with Columbus and becomes a trusted sidekick who quickly masters Spanish and helps mediate between the Amerindians and the Europeans; he is later baptized “Diego Colón,” and in effect becomes like another son to the admiral, who already has a son with that name. However, having grown dissatisfied with the admiral’s greed, ruthlessness, and hypocrisy, Guaikan’s attitude toward Columbus shifts from adulation to ambivalence and, in the end, to unadulterated hatred. He ultimately poisons his adoptive father, not long before the former in turn is killed by the “Shadowman” on his fiftieth birthday. The deterioration in the relationship between Guaikan and Columbus is symbolic of the extent to which the European presence in the Caribbean started off on the wrong foot. The Shadowman merits a closer look. He is described by Guaikan as “a man with skin so black it seemed like stone” (51) and by a later incarnation as “a Negro who stood half-hidden in the forest . . . whose stonelike presence gave me pause . . . He was taller, and far stockier, than the others of his race. He was bald and wore a brown tunic and strapped leather sandals” (87). However much the ten incarnations varied in physique, the Shadowman remains fairly constant in his minimalist but imposing manner (reminiscent, perhaps, of a character from the popular 1980s movie series The Beastmaster). He is also punctual: without fail, he arrives at each incarnation’s fiftieth birthday, in effect to “escort” (albeit not so kindly) that person to the next incarnation. It must be noted, however, that oftentimes he hovers in the background before the time arrives for him to kill an incarnation, and at one point (during the ninth incarnation) he keeps the protagonist alive during World War II, lest he die too soon. In another way the Shadowman could personify Baldeosingh’s idea of what the

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embodiment of the “subaltern” would look like: black, silent, deadly. The Shadowman never speaks, so it is difficult to ascertain what his motivations are or whose—if anyone’s—instructions he is carrying out. Ultimately, it becomes clear that the Shadowman is basically a narrative tool meant to ensure the arrival of Adam Avatar, the final incarnation. In any case, even if answers are elusive, it is worth asking why the Shadowman is black and why he is always male, particularly when such traits do indeed vary with respect to the incarnations. At a very basic level, the constancy of the Shadowman could work in the attempt to provide some coherence to the narrative amid the flux of the incarnations; similarly, the Shadowman’s regular returns help augment the suspense in the narrative, not unlike the way someone might fear the return of a nightmare. Still, it seems significant that one of the few constants (i.e., the Shadowman) in this epic narrative is in the form of a black man; this could be taken to suggest that Africa (presumably the place most closely associated with the Shadowman’s phenotype) is the place to look for purity or coherence, despite the fact that Amerindians and Europeans figure most prominently in the first few incarnations. At a more literal level, the Shadowman could also be interpreted quite simply as the inverse or shadow of the incarnations: a necessary double or alter ego, without whom the incarnations could not flow toward their destiny. At a pause in the narrative shortly following the account of Guaikan’s death, the tenth incarnation (Adam Avatar) returns nearly five centuries later to his Taíno predecessor’s birthplace and notices the decline of the land he once knew intimately: “The shape of the mountains had not changed in five hundred years, but where once there had been thick trees and abundant grasses, there is now only sparse bush and naked earth” (51–52). It is thus that the novel begins to weave an account of (cultural and otherwise) change in the Caribbean. One of the interesting features of Ten Incarnations is that each of the incarnations that follows Guaikan’s is able, to varying degrees, to recall the previous lives; some, like the final incarnation, recall all the lives in great detail (Avatar, in fact, becomes an archivist of his previous lives), while others start the process of recollection only just before they reach their fiftieth birthday. In either case, the link the novel establishes between the fate of the Caribbean in general and the importance of a historical memory is a strong one.

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The incarnation that follows Guaikan is that of Adam Colón de Espanola (sic), a diabolical and murderous mid-sixteenth-century conquistador who, not unlike Guaikan, is of mysterious parentage and is raised in an orphanage; the Franciscans named him Adam because this was the name of the “first man” (a name, presumably, appropriate for an orphan of uncertain or hidden origins); in addition, the surname Colón is in honor of the admiral (65). That the tenth incarnation is also named Adam suggests on the one hand the link between the two characters (they are, in fact, the same “self”), and could be reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster (who says to his creator: “I ought to be thy Adam” [Shelley 77]). The name could, on the other hand, also suggest the Caribbean region’s importance as the cauldron of a new, modern person: the result of ethnic mixtures never before seen anywhere else, an ethnogenesis.11 It is only late during the account of this incarnation that we learn that the name Adam has yet another level of meaning. During the course of his allotted five decades, Adam Colón is a sexual victim (as a young boy at the hands of a priest) and sexual assailant to many (sexuality and sexual indulgence become, not surprisingly, prominent themes in many of the later incarnations). He also massacres countless Amerindians, and is “the first colonist to write, and receive permission, to bring African slaves to the island” (79). The turning point in this particular incarnation arrives when he learns that the Amerindian woman he has just executed as punishment for having masterminded revolts is, in fact, his mother; evidently, Adam Colón not only contributed to the genocide committed against the Taínos and launched the trade of African slaves, but he is also in this fiction the first mestizo of the Americas. The third incarnation is named Antam Gonçalves, who lived during the early seventeenth century. Adam Avatar, the final incarnation, notes during his stay in modern Lisbon (Avatar makes it a hobby to visit each of the settings of his prior incarnations) that “four centuries after making their fortune from the slave trade . . . the Gonçalves are still among the wealthiest families in Portugal” (108). Indeed, one of the motifs the novel develops, particularly as it explores later incarnations, is the past’s weight on the present (and future) social dynamics in the Caribbean, even when this weight goes unnoticed by characters. Readers may have already guessed Antam’s

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profession: trader in African slaves. He is ruthless—one might add—in this profession, until his doomed final voyage, when the slaves (led by the Shadowman) mutiny and he and his crew are made to suffer the same captivity and afflictions he had for so long made his slave cargo suffer. It is then that he begins to hallucinate of having once been a happy, innocent Taíno boy, and even begins to darken in complexion despite his confinement within the ship’s belly. The fourth incarnation, a young indentured servant named Sarah Wiltshire, sketches the then-growing British involvement in the Caribbean as it occurs in Barbados during the middle of the seventeenth century. Wiltshire, the first female incarnation, uses her cunning and her body to develop a profitable prostitution ring on the island. Her involvement in this activity ultimately allows her to create her own fiefdom, which she uses to bring many men to their knees, with the notable exception of the Shadowman, her executioner. The fifth incarnation, Mary-Anne Rackham, is the daughter of a wealthy Jamaican planter, and is born in 1679. In this segment, Avatar once again emphasizes the (in this case, dark) commonalities between the late-seventeenth-century Caribbean and the present Caribbean: The most constant element runs deeper than even the landscape: it is a latent violence, an alert savagery, a primal spirit that seems to permeate the very air. It is there in the faces of the people today, black, brown, pink and other, and it was there three hundred years ago. You hear it in the people’s dialect, with its listen-to-me accents, and in the bloodbeat pulse of reggae music. (204) Lest one might fall into the common perception of climate having a determining influence on character, Avatar is quick to point out that “this age-old savagery was not there when I lived on the island as Guiakan. Landscape shapes an economy and an economy is shaped by people making their history. None is separate; all determine the outlook of a people” (204). These assertions are very much in line with what seems to me to be one of the central agendas of the novel, namely to show how the Caribbean came to be what it is today: a result of interwoven and consequential, though often inhumane, human activities.

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The Rackham incarnation allows us to delve into a particularly important one of these activities: piracy, an activity that, by its very nature, functioned as a series of loosely organized, often covert ventures, yet was also a significant and often royally sanctioned means through which the British chipped away at Spanish interests in the region. This incarnation also continues the novel’s interest in showing the fluidity of identity as a hallmark of the Caribbean character: Rackham may have been born into Jamaica’s privileged elite, but— because of her previous selves, no doubt—always yearned for something more daring. To satisfy this yearning, she pursues the affection of a mysterious and elusive young British socialite named Edward, who is actually a pirate. She sends her personal slave, Anne-Marie, on several missions to drop off love letters for Edward, which consistently go unanswered. In an interesting twist, Anne-Marie, although Rackham is unaware of this, is actually her half-sister; Rackham learns eventually that she (i.e., Rackham herself) is actually a mulatto who happens to have been born with very light skin. Of further interest in this incarnation is the fact that it is the slave Anne-Marie (and not Rackham) who knows how to read and write, so she is the one who drafts Rackham’s (Mary-Anne’s) letters, thus adding to the blurring of identity taking place consistently in the novel. Upon hearing of the imminent departure of Edward’s pirate ship for one of its plunderous adventures, Rackham disguises herself as a male sailor and is enlisted as a shipmate. Not surprisingly, she is quickly able to draw on the sailing skills accumulated during her previous lives. Ultimately, she becomes so adept at piracy that she goes into business by herself, leading her own pirate ship. She approaches piracy in a distinctive manner, however, no doubt motivated by the intimate knowledge she had gained of slavery in previous lives as well as by her conviction of the immorality of slavery, an activity or social system of which she, as a mulatto, was a product: She “attacked slave ships, and . . . always killed the captain and crew. No white man who dealt in that trade was spared; and [she] always left the captain nailed to his mast” (244). Rackham’s antislavery crusade was not (and could not have been, given the historical record) entirely successful. Slavery persisted, and in the sixth incarnation we witness a manifestation of this persistence in the person of Legba Falunbi, a female slave in

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mid-to-late-eighteenth-century Jamaica who would later travel to several Caribbean islands fomenting rebellion against white domination. This segment of the novel is written in accordance with the spoken English dialect Baldeosingh imagines slaves of that time and place would have used. The trend toward a racial creolization and away from the appearance of characters who identify themselves as white has by the sixth incarnation become fairly entrenched; Legba, for instance, attributes her immortality and her knowledge of and interest in her ancestors to her African heritage, her European heritage (or previous incarnations) notwithstanding: “The whiteman measure time in im lifetime, maybe im chirrun [children’s] lifetime. The African know im ancestors from back to Time creation and so im know im descendants till Time destruction. The African know time doan move in a tick-tock-tick-tock” (278–79). In a way, Legba’s identification with things African parallels the move throughout much of Caribbean society whereby the African continent became a unifying, imaginative force for many of the region’s inhabitants (though not all, as seen, for instance, in the case of the Dominican Republic, whose inhabitants have historically seen themselves in contradistinction with Haitians). Legba’s celebration of her African ancestry can also be linked to the increasing slave population in some Caribbean areas during the eighteenth century, a population that quickly outpaced the white one: a demographic imbalance that did not, incidentally, occur on the much smaller plantations in Barbados during the seventeenth century. Lastly, even though Legba had very firm conceptual categories that differentiated the various ethnic groups in her orbit (in this respect she is not unlike, perhaps, several of her prior incarnations), she is all the while a product of the creolization occurring throughout the region during this time. Adam Chardonbois, the seventh incarnation, is a prosperous Trinidadian merchant who was born in approximately 1788. He is a torn man because even though he can quote all the French philosophes at length and aspires to their level of intellect and refinement, he knows that this path is blocked for him on account of his status as a mulatto. At best, the white planters see him “as a credit to [his] race,” given that, by his own admission, “nearly every man of [his] race is either a slave or a savage” (290). It is clear that for him and for Trinidadian society as a whole during this time period, being a

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mulatto is in most respects tantamount to being permanently marked as nonwhite. Indeed, in Ten Incarnations, formations of ethnic identity seem to be weighted with the oppressive certainty that nonwhite ancestry would probably have held in actual Caribbean society during this era. Writing, for instance, in terms of a Jamaican cultural context, the sociologist Fernando Henriques made the following observation in 1951: If, as often happens, children are of different shades of color in a family, the most lightly colored will be favored at the expense of the others. In adolescence, and until marriage, the darker members of the family will be kept out of the way when friends of the fair or fairer members of the family are being entertained. The fair child is regarded as raising the color of the family and nothing must be put in the way of its success, that is in the way of a marriage which will still further raise the color status of the family. A fair person will try to sever social relations he may have with darker relatives . . . the darker members of a Negro family will encourage the efforts of a very fair relative to “pass” for White. The practices of intra-family relations lay the foundation for the public manifestation of color prejudice.12 Although Henriques is writing about a different Caribbean island and in (and about) a different historical period (mid-twentieth century), the parallels between what he describes and Chardonbois’s conflicted racial identity are striking. Interestingly, formations of racial identity function in the novel in marked contrast, for instance, with formations of gender and sexual identity, which seem to work in a much more arbitrary manner and more or less with fifty-fifty odds; in other words, although of the ten lives six are male and four female, the ratio—in genetic terms—could have been balanced in the other direction; meanwhile, racial identity in the novel—as expressed in many of the later incarnations—is a much more slippery affair and is subject to a variety of sometimes unpredictable and apparently contradictory societal norms. Not unlike the previous incarnation of Legba, Chardonbois’s perspective—quite ironically, one might add—gives noticeable preeminence to the African side of his ancestry. Even though he sees

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himself through the white man’s intolerant prism and thereby falls victim to feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness (a condition that would be articulated very forcefully by writers who would come later, e.g., Du Bois, Henriques, and Fanon), for him, the Other has white skin: this Other constitutes for him the desirable but unobtainable. At one point he imagines, for instance, that the island of Trinidad “has returned to a more pristine era when the white man was still on the far side of the world” (292). In other words, he is in the process of recovering Guaikan’s vision (and not, significantly, the conquistador’s or the slave trader’s): a prelapsarian Caribbean that has not yet been “contaminated” by the arrival of white men. Alongside his troubled racial identity, Chardonbois experiences further turmoil on account of his seemingly inexhaustible, sadistic sexual appetite. Even though he is a mulatto and is therefore not in the upper echelon of early-nineteenth-century Trinidadian society, Chardonbois nonetheless fancies himself a successful planter and owns several slaves to boot. He outbids several white planters for a particularly beautiful young mulatto woman named Ophelia, and then proceeds to sexually torment her in every conceivable way during a series of encounters/rapes, only to be surprised that she’d abandon him rather than marry him upon receiving her freedom.13 The eighth incarnation is in the form of a female Trinidadian stickfighter named Elegba (later shortened to Legba). Legba, whose name means “divine messenger” in Yoruba (351), trains at her craft assiduously and, by accessing the skills gained during her previous lives, achieves remarkable victories only to succumb later to the Shadowman. During this incarnation the novel introduces new social groups that arrived in the Caribbean beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century: Asian laborers, best exemplified by Indian Mary, Legba’s nemesis in stickfighting, and who was of East Indian extraction; according to Legba, East Indians are “a skinny set a people who the English people bring to work on the estates after Emancipation,” which took place in 1834 in the case of Trinidad (369). In addition, Legba’s stickfighting trainer, Li the Chinaman, had escaped China “by selling himself as an indentured servant to the British government, which was looking for labour for the West Indies after Emancipation” (379). Legba adds that the martial skills she “had acquired as Guiakan, Adam Colon, Antam

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Gonçalves, Mary-Ann Rackham, and Elegba Cudjoe were child-like compared to Li’s gung fu,” which in turn proved futile against the Shadowman (379). By the ninth incarnation all the social groups and processes that describe the modern Caribbean (or at least one segment of it: the British Caribbean) are in place: the marked African cultural presence, a waning European heritage, the arrival and growth of the Asian communities, not to mention the cultural and racial creolization that had been taking place for centuries but that only during the twentieth century came to be a process that many Caribbeans used in describing and/or affirming their cultural identity. The ninth incarnation is titled “Indian,” which is an interesting title insofar as it underscores the societal transformations that have occurred in the Caribbean in the last five centuries: although both Guaikan and Krishna Singh, the ninth incarnation, may be “Indian,” they are so—needless to say—in very different ways. Indeed, it is only after the arrival in the Caribbean of Krishna’s people that Columbus’s erroneous designation of the local inhabitants (i.e., calling Guaikan’s Taínos “Indians”) begins to gain a measure of accuracy. The name “Krishna” also merits additional commentary, as it is in Hinduism the name of the eighth and principal avatar of Vishnu, who is in turn one of the principal Hindu deities and known as “the protector and preserver of worlds,” a designation that evokes Guaikan in particular (The American Heritage Dictionary). The very concept of an avatar also requires a closer look, given that it is the name of the final incarnation, who gives the novel its title. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, an avatar is “the incarnation of a Hindu deity, especially Vishnu, in human or animal form.” It is also, however, “an embodiment, as of a quality or concept; an archetype.” Meanwhile, in Eastern Religions, Vasudha Narayanan explains that Vishnu is portrayed as having a multiplicity of incarnations (Sanskrit avatara, “descent”). It is believed that over the ages he has descended to earth several times in various animal and human forms to overthrow evil and establish dharma, or righteousness. Hindus generally consider ten incarnations to be the most important. (35–36)

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After a brief description of Vishnu’s incarnations, which include, among others, a fish, a tortoise, and a human warrior, Narayanan adds that Vishnu’s ninth incarnation, “Krishna (‘the Dark One’), is one of the most popular Hindu gods. He is widely celebrated in folksongs, narratives . . . sculpture, painting, and performance” (36). Finally, according to Narayanan, it is believed that the tenth incarnation will come at the end of the present world age, which according to some reckonings began ca. 3102 bce and will last 432,000 years . . . The progression of the incarnations from fish to full human is understood by some Hindus today as anticipating evolutionary theory. But the most prevalent explanation is that Vishnu takes the form most suited for the crisis on hand. (36) With the preceding religious contextualization, we can pursue not only the ninth but also the tenth incarnation in the novel. It may be worth pondering the fact that Baldeosingh is—in part, at least—of East Indian heritage and that he hails—as already noted— from Trinidad, an island with a substantial East Indian population. As such, his vision of what it means to be Caribbean might differ from, for example, a Cuban’s or Martinican’s, who inhabit islands with an East Indian population that is much smaller in both number and proportion. Furthermore, although the novel is set initially in other Caribbean islands (and follows, as such, the way the major historical trends were distributed geographically in the region), the series of incarnations leans in the direction of Guyana and especially Trinidad (both of which have large East Indian populations), with several of the final incarnations living primarily in the latter country. Speaking in very general terms (and also not as a scholar in comparative religion), a rebirth or reincarnation is a concept foreign to both European and African religious beliefs. One might say, for instance, that someone appears to possess characteristics associated with the African deity Changó, or perhaps to be possessed by this deity. Unlike in Hinduism, however, one does not trace in African religions a series of discrete reincarnations by the same deity in a given number of different but closely connected people. Furthermore, although Christianity affirms that Jesus is God “incarnate,” the incarnations

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stop there. Along these lines, one could argue that the novel suggests that East Indian belief systems offer the best (and perhaps only) way of understanding and accounting for both the social diversity (or fragmentation) and the social coherence of the Caribbean. One could also argue, however, that the novel allows for a democratic plurality of visions and that the ten incarnations comprise a framework that is no more and no less valid than several other possibilities. In other words, if this second possibility were indeed the case, it is only accidentally that the two final incarnations—like Baldeosingh—are of East Indian extraction. Ultimately, there is truth in both interpretations, depending on which incarnation we are dealing with. While the final incarnation supports the second interpretation, the words of Krishna, the ninth incarnation, work in favor of affirming the first by crediting, for example, Hinduism for his immortality: “. . . it is because I am Indian now that, for the first time, I understand who and what I am. The Hindu religion, the Hindu philosophy, explains all that has happened to me” (412). His adherence to Hinduism, however, is not total. Here it may be worth pursuing some ideas on religion and ethnicity that Baldeosingh has published in newspaper columns. With regard to religion, he states (in ways that reveal his affinity for the philosophy of Bertrand Russell): The primary purpose of most religions has never been to promote spirituality, but to exert psychological and political control. In a modern society, that kind of control can only have deleterious effects. It is for these reasons that combating religion is, as far as I am concerned, a moral duty. (“Is Religion Any Good” n.p.; see bibliography) Thus, he calls on Trinidadians to transcend religion and the social divisions it has fomented. What about the fate of Trinidadians in terms of their ethnic identities and allegiances? Baldeosingh has written, in ways reminiscent of Stuart Hall’s ideas, that viewing oneself as Trinidadian requires the self-confidence to admit one’s shortcomings. Constructing an African or Indian past allows you to fool yourself into believing that your ancestors, and

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by extension yourself, were perfect. But, if we are going to construct, why not construct a Trinidadian identity? That is, a set of cultural traits relevant to survival and progress in the environment we are born into. (“Still a True Trini”; n.p. see bibliography) In sum, not only must Trinidadians move beyond religion and toward atheism, they must also move beyond traditional cultural and ethnic classifications in mapping out a new national identity. The road is now better paved for an understanding of the novel’s conclusion. Returning to the character of Krishna, we learn in the novel that he was born in Guyana at the beginning of the twentieth century. In describing his family, he states that “all were born in Guiana [sic], yet all believe that India is our true home” (402). It is only after a violent encounter he had as a youth with the Shadowman that he experienced an epiphany: “I felt for the first time that I was truly part of Guiana, I knew its earth, air and water. I knew that the Negro people were also part of this land, and that all our ancestors, Indian and African, were far away and indifferent” (404). As an immortal, Krishna is unable to follow the customs of his people and leaves his East Indian wife for a Black Guyanese woman named Emily, who according to Avatar, is “the love of my lives” (389). Krishna thus chooses interracial love over tradition, an action that prefigures the arrival of the final incarnation, Adam Avatar, who arrives into the world by design: Krishna kills himself shortly before his inevitable encounter with the Shadowman and guides his soul into the womb of Emily’s daughter, Adaku, who had been raped by a British soldier. It was Krishna’s hope that Adaku would not hate the child if she knew that Krishna’s soul had inhabited it. This child, the tenth and final incarnation, is Adam Avatar. In a chapter titled “Human,” Avatar simultaneously spells out (not unlike Tolstoy at the end of War and Peace) the moral views his previous incarnations have been paving the way for. Avatar offers, for instance, this description of himself: I am, genetically and otherwise, a “true Trini.” My café-au-lait complexion, my tight cap of curly hair, my slanted green eyes mark a mixed ancestry that fits me into any company. Triniafricans see me

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as black, Trinindians as brown. And, since I am wealthy, Whites and Chinese also find me acceptable. (442) After thus affirming his privileged vantage point as a “true Trini” who is the result of centuries of ethnic mixing, he argues that in the past humanity lacked both the knowledge and the moral will to live in harmony; despite having made great strides in the acquisition of knowledge, the moral will remains deficient. As such, he asserts that his challenge and purpose in life is “to strengthen humankind’s moral will” by his existence (434). In a world that seems to have become increasingly forgetful and uninterested in history, his many incarnations over half a millennium offer an alternative resource available to those who would open their eyes. He is able to see, for instance, that the various transformations Trinidad’s black population has undergone in recent decades are only minor ripples in the sea of history: the leaders of an uprising during the 1970s “wore their dashikis and Afro hairstyles and took Yoruba names and called themselves African, but they had only lately exchanged their ties and jackets—and the next generation would still wear Levis and follow African Americans’ fashions and call it identity” (444). In other words, it is time for the people of the Caribbean to take note of their uniqueness; there are, after all, an “unusual number of high achievers coming out of the Caribbean” (440). Rather than copy others (e.g., African Americans), residents of the Caribbean should understand that they have a privileged position as “a laboratory of the world: where we succeed is where the human race shall succeed, and where we fail is where the species shall fail” (444). In many ways, then, the tenth incarnation has dropped what one might call the sense of religious superiority the previous incarnation had found in Hinduism, espousing instead a mystical pan-Caribbeanism. As an individual, however, Avatar asserts no moral superiority of any kind and is the first to acknowledge the heinous actions of his past lives: “In setting down this record, I have done nothing more than tell about my lives and my times. It is for better minds than my own to draw conclusions” (435). At novel’s end, just shy of his fiftieth birthday, Avatar disappears and leaves the psychiatrist (and readers) wondering if he succumbed to the Shadowman or if in this incarnation he was finally able to overcome his executioner. One could argue

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convincingly that he did succeed, particularly if we accept the premise that in the tenth incarnation (thus paralleling Hindu dogma as well as, perhaps, Nietzschean philosophy) he had finally become something qualitatively different and superior, that is, human, as opposed to prior incarnations that were characterized by ethnicities or occupations. Now that he is finally able to be he may stand a chance against the Shadowman. By way of concluding I would like to underscore the sense of hope for both the Caribbean and for humanity in general that the novel offers: a hope achieved by the possibility of overcoming ethnicity (as unlikely as this may be anytime soon) as well as the pain and violence of the past. One could, however, posit the opposite based on the same indicators (in other words, the proverbial glass half-empty and halffull quandary): where there is a need to identify a hope, perhaps there is trouble to begin with. Of the presence of this ambivalence there can be no doubt, and Baldeosingh would probably be the first to admit it, despite his novel’s celebration of the Caribbean people’s achievements and singularity. One could also ask, however, whether the novel’s (and—based on his online comments—the author’s) postethnic paradigm is the optimal one for Caribbean societies: these societies are characterized, after all, by diversity and complexity. Shouldn’t such qualities be celebrated rather than “overcome”? Does the novel’s postethnic stance allow a mutated form of ethnic purity in through the back door? Such questions aside, what I would most like to emphasize are the ways through which Ten Incarnations offers an understanding of (and a vision for) the Caribbean that is rooted in the flow (and fissures) of history, a history that must be remembered and embraced even at the cost of pain. Its radical move away from ethnicity notwithstanding, the novel affirms the value of the creolization that characterizes much of modern Caribbean society; conceptually, creolization (although not necessarily a transcendent, postethnic view of racial relations) invokes historical processes and as such runs counter to paradigms structured around notions of purity. The contrast, for instance, between Baldeosingh’s novel and Gerima’s Sankofa is striking: while the latter amounts to a full-blown attack on the history of racial mixture in the Caribbean, Ten Incarnations finds in this very mixture the region’s most defining and redeeming qualities.

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The historical understanding and identity formulations the novel provides are, moreover, provided by a time traveler: a single being (varying in both major and minor characteristics) who is witness to 500 years in the history of the Caribbean by virtue of his many reincarnations. Although the ninth incarnation interprets this supernatural phenomenon through the lens of Hinduism, the final incarnation reinforces the centrality of the Caribbean and its unique cultural processes to the narrative. What we are finding, in effect, is a pattern of temporal dislocation and flux in cultural production from the Americas: a temporal flux that in the novel both conceptually informs and involves a time traveler and his or her activities, even if in this particular case the conceptual framework for the time travel is largely provided by an Asian religion. Lastly, the novel’s historically panoramic vision of the Caribbean attests to its author’s sense that what might otherwise be considered a broken and pained set of communities is in need of a corrective interpretation. The Hispanic Caribbean Novel and Time Travel: The Curious Case of Daína Chaviano’s El hombre, la hembra y el hambre

Novels from the Hispanic Caribbean have not been immune to the patterns of temporal dislocation and flux that inform Baldeosingh’s novel. At one moment in Daína Chaviano’s El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (1998; a literal translation of the title would be: “Man, Woman, and Hunger”), for instance, Claudia—the protagonist— decries her unfortunate circumstances. In doing so, she wonders if she, too, could benefit from reincarnations like those that occur in Baldeosingh’s novel: “Si todo cambiara, visitaría al Dalai Lama y le pediría, de socio a socio, que me dijera la verdad sobre eso de la reencarnación para ver si es que hice algo malo en otra vida, y averiguar si la que viene me toca más suave” (98) [“If everything changed, I would visit the Dalai Lama and ask him, from one person to another, for the truth about reincarnation to see if I did something wrong in another life, and to find out if in the next one I’ll have it easier”]. By way of context, it bears mentioning that other novelists from the Hispanic Caribbean have used themes involving temporal flux to express similar misgivings. For example, Reinaldo Arenas’s novel,

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El color del verano (1991; The Color of Summer, 2000) opens with what is actually a play, a “light comedy in one act (of repudiation)” (3) [“obra ligera en un acto (de repudio)” 11]. This arresting and whimsical little drama is titled “The Flight of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda” [“La fuga de la Avellaneda”]. The setting for the drama is manifold yet distinctly Caribbean: The Antilles and their surrounding waters (the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, Key West, and the Malecón [or waterfront] in Havana). The setting, then, is hardly a surprise as it comprises much of what would have been part of Gómez de Avellaneda’s world, either literally or figuratively. A bit more disconcerting, however, is the time frame listed for the events of the drama: July 1999. We know, for example, that the Cuban author, most famous, perhaps, for penning the abolitionist novel Sab, lived between 1814 and 1873. Arenas himself died in 1990, nearly a decade prior to the events of the drama. In the opening pages of the novel, before even “The Flight of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda,” there is a brief letter of warning titled “To the Judge.” In it, Arenas explains that he “wrote this novel in 1990 and set it in 1999. I mean think about it—how fair would it be to haul me into court for a bunch of fictitious stuff that when it was written down hadn’t even happened yet?” (vii) [“No olvides además que la novela se desarrolla en 1999. Sería injusto encausarme por un hecho ficticio que cuando se narró ni siquiera había sucedido” 9]. The reasons for this caveat become clear, given the drama’s irreverent, iconoclastic stance. Avellaneda does, somehow, reappear during the late twentieth century. What is more, she is joined by a number of improbable, anachronistic (largely but not entirely literary) figures from Cuba. Some appear under their real names, like Avellaneda, José Martí, Virgilio Piñera, and José Lezama Lima (the latter two are, according to his autobiography Before Night Falls, writers Arenas admired). Others appear using names slightly altered from their real ones, like Nicolás Guillotina (i.e., Guillén; no admiration there, obviously), Dulce María Leynaz (i.e., Loynaz), and Cynthio Métier (i.e., Cintio Vitier). Arenas describes best the reasons for this strange and carnivalesque gathering in his stage directions: Avellaneda, it seems, has been brought back to life on Fifo’s [i.e., Fidel Castro’s] orders so that she will be able to take part in the festivities honoring Fifo’s

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fiftieth [sic] year in power, escapes in a little fishing boat and heads for Florida. Learning instantly about the escape, Fifo sends out orders for her arrest, but realizing almost in the same breath that an arrest would cause an international scandal, he orders the people of Cuba to stage an act of repudiation against the poetess, while secretly ordering his trained sharks and diligent midgets to do everything in their power to block her flight. The act of repudiation begins with the appearance of a group of eminent poets who are still on the Island, some of whom have been brought back to life especially for this event. The idea is that all these poets will be able to persuade Avellaneda not to leave the country. (5) [La acción tiene lugar cuando la Avellaneda, que ha sido resucitada por orden de Fifo para que participe en los festejos de sus cincuenta años en el poder, escapa en una lancha al parecer rumbo a la Florida. Enterado inmediatamente de la fuga, Fifo manda a que la arresten, pero comprendiendo al instante que eso sería un escándalo internacional, ordena para cubrir la forma un acto de repudio popular, mientras secretamente conmina a los tiburones y a los enanos para que hagan todo lo posible por impedir su fuga. El acto de repudio comienza con la participación de un grupo de poetas relevantes que aún están en la isla, algunos de ellos también han sido resucitados para este evento. Se supone que todos estos poetas deben convencer a la Avellaneda para que no se vaya del país. 15] In the ensuing act of repudiation, Avellaneda is pelted several times with rotten eggs (the throwers aim at her “backside”). When Martí arrives on the scene on a stick horse—a romantic, idealistic, even quixotic figure—he and Avellaneda weigh the pros and cons of exile (much as Arenas must have done), while occasionally engaging in sexually suggestive banter (she, for example, “can’t keep her hands off” his flamethrower and remarks on its length (52) [Avellaneda “aprieta la punta del lanzallamas” 59]). Ultimately, Martí rides off toward his proverbial battles, and Avellaneda goes down in her boat, which has been set aflame accidentally by the flamethrower. The anachronistic presence of these figures from Cuban history are suggestive of how, for Arenas at least, the political situation in Cuba during the late 1980s and early 1990s was as unsettling and

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senseless as the thought of Avellaneda and Martí—two giants of Cuban letters—making sexual innuendos toward each other in the way of adolescents. The drama is also a strong commentary on the degree to which Castro seemed intent (particularly to a dissident like Arenas) on controlling every aspect of life in Cuba, willing to go as far as raising the dead to parade around in his honor. The dead, we may recall, have at times been used—quite literally—for political purposes in the Americas (see introduction). Martí and other figures from Cuba’s past also resurface in El hombre. Chaviano, who left Cuba for Miami in 1991, distinguished herself during the 1980s with stories with pronounced science fictional and fantastic elements. One could argue that El hombre, which won Spain’s Azorín Prize for best novel in 1998, contains some of these elements. Intertextually, the novel also pays homage to another text about the undead and in which “the time is out joint”14: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is so on account of the frequent dilemmas it describes, dilemmas akin to Shakespeare’s play in their ontological urgency (“to whore or not to whore?” [“¿putear o no putear?” 124], “to defect or not to defect?” etc.). A broader and more salient theme in the novel, however, is Havana’s economic deterioration during the so-called Special Period, which came about as a result of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a collapse that set the fragile island nation adrift and further exacerbated the ill effects of the United States embargo set in place in the early 1960s. Being the third of four in a series of novels called “The Occult Side of Havana,” El hombre continues an intense and nuanced examination of life, both past and present, in the Cuban capital. Writing specifically about this novel, Venko Kanev argues that its protagonist is none other than the city of Havana itself (“La protagonista es La Habana . . .” 834). The novel’s characters are, from Kanev’s perspective, pieces or hues of the larger kaleidoscope or cityscape that Havana encompasses: characters who, without exception, are struggling to survive in the midst of the chaos and squalor that Havana has become in the 1990s. For her part, the critic Sonia Behar considers this very squalor—manifested most poignantly in a prevailing hunger—the novel’s principal protagonist: “. . . el personaje principal de esta novela es El Hambre” (72). In either case (i.e., whether we follow Kanev’s or Behar’s interpretations), Havana’s past glory (as in

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Estévez’s short story mentioned earlier) has long since disappeared, although—quite significantly—the echoes and traces of this glory remain; one only needs to know where, how, and, most importantly, when to look. In the pages ahead, my purpose is to detail the dialogue Chaviano’s novel establishes between the past, present, and future in Cuba, with particular emphasis on the ways the novel’s time travelers suggest a critique of the island’s predicament in light of its Special Period context. Returning to Behar’s assessment, for example, it is worth noting that the hunger in the novel is expressed in curious ways: Claudia, the protagonist, feels a “millenarian” hunger (“Siento un hambre milenaria . . .” 44). Later she exclaims, “It’s been centuries since I’ve eaten spaghetti . . . for centuries I’ve barely eaten” [“Hace siglos que no como espaguetis . . . Hace siglos que no como casi nada” 76). Hunger, then, is often given a marked temporal dimension in the novel. In order to understand Claudia’s and others’ laments in El hombre, it is worth considering issues relevant to the story’s early-1990s historical context: a context sharply informed by the Special Period. In 1992, Andres Oppenheimer, a correspondent with The Miami Herald, published a lengthy and detailed study of the social and political climate in Cuba: a study Chaviano may very well have read. Although the title he gave the study may have been premature (Castro’s Final Hour: The Secret Story Behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba), it nonetheless can serve as a useful survey of conditions on the island during the Special Period. According to Oppenheimer, as early as 1989 Cuban exiles in Miami were already anticipating Castro’s fall from grace: “ ‘For Sale’ signs began popping up everywhere in Miami: many exiles, fearing a sharp drop in real estate once the revolution started in Cuba, rushed to sell their homes ahead of the pack” (105). However, with political upheavals brewing in Eastern Europe, and with turmoil in Nicaragua and Panama, the US State Department had its mind elsewhere. Oppenheimer explains that “Cuba was not on the front burner” (105). The Cuban leadership, meanwhile, was unfazed: The Socialist bloc was crumbling. The Third World was embracing free-market policies. The whole world was changing. Life in Cuba was deteriorating by the day, and the Castro brothers—surrounded

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by yes men—were sticking to old Stalinist policies that had proven to be a failure. (124) Indeed, as Cuba was set adrift by its struggling Soviet patron during the early 1990s, the Special Period was instituted, which imposed brutal economic austerity measures couched within the framework of an increasingly outdated ideology: “Orthodox Marxism and military discipline would be preserved in Cuba at any cost” (Oppenheimer 129). There would be no alternative. Although the island was not threatened militarily (thus the name of the government’s measure, “Special Period in Time of Peace”), Cubans were asked to compromise and sacrifice as if it were. By 1991 (the year Chaviano fled the island), the term “Special Period” had become “the most widely used expression in Cuba” (Oppenheimer 246). Apparently, people would utter it “with a resigned smile or shrug—a catchword for anything they couldn’t obtain or deliver” (Oppenheimer 246). Food and energy shortages led to rationing and to long lines at the previously Soviet-supplied grocery stores. In place of food and other basic necessities, Castro introduced a new official slogan, “Socialism or Death.” In his visits to the island, Oppenheimer noticed that there were among the Cuban populace a number of new unofficial slogans, including “resolver” (to make do): “a code word for procuring things outside the legal system” (142). Another popular term became “inventar,” as in the rigging of illegal water lines or the fabrication (from dish detergent) of brake fluid for cars (Oppenheimer 142). In “The New Cuban Capitalist,” an essay from a more recent collection, Capitalism, God, and a Good Cigar (2005), we are able to see that the new terminology Oppenheimer encountered was not limited to his investigations on the island. In the essay, Juliana Barbassa quotes a Cuban named Fernando, who left his job as an engineer to instead earn dollars by renting out a room in his house. Speaking during the Special Period, Fernando explains that as Cubans transition from communism to an improvised protocapitalism, “incredible things happen every day so that people can go on. People invent” (19, emphasis added). Meanwhile, William, a sculptor, sells tourists figurines of Cuban peasants and mulatas at an open-air market in Havana. He, too, improvises a living.

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In their lifestyles, occupations, and attitudes, these real-life people from Havana could very well be characters in Chaviano’s El hombre. In the novel, Claudia is an art historian who resorts to walking the streets as a jinetera15 and selling sexual services to tourists; Rubén has been tossed out of his teaching position at an art school and now (like the real-life William) sells arts and crafts on the street; Gilberto is a trained economist but finds being a butcher a more lucrative profession; Sissy, like Claudia, has abandoned an academic career for a life as a prostitute.16 Of these characters, Claudia is undoubtedly the most important and is in many ways Chaviano’s alter ego, particularly in the way she bemoans Havana’s decadence and misery; through Claudia’s criticisms of Castro’s government, it quickly becomes obvious that the novel could only have been written outside of the island (it was, in fact, written in Miami). As a character, however, Claudia operates on many levels and is more than just an anti-Castro mouthpiece. As a jinetera, she calls herself “La mora.” While Rubén falls in love with Claudia, his good friend Gilberto falls in love with La mora; in a curious irony (not unlike the fifth incarnation in Baldeosingh’s novel), throughout El hombre the two men compare notes on their presumably different girlfriends. In this sense, one could argue—in existential or postmodern terms—that the very notion of a stable, personal identity cannot be taken for granted in Special Period Cuba and, perhaps, in the Caribbean in general. If Claudia’s identity is characterized by instability (at least with respect to how other characters perceive her), the same could be said for the novel’s setting: the city of Havana. That stated, it is not the case that the city finds itself in Chaviano’s novel all of a sudden on a fault line, or that it grows gigantic legs and moves around the island like a spider. Instead, the Havana in El hombre is a city where past and present coexist. This is not just so in the sense that the city’s past is present via its surviving edifices or folklore or anything of this sort (i.e., things that could be said about a lot of places). In the novel, the past literally reemerges: at least it does for Claudia, who has had mystical powers since her childhood. El hombre establishes from the very start a subtle counterpoint between past and present. Chaviano dedicates her novel to Hildegard von Bingen, a German nun during the medieval era who, like Claudia, had mystical powers. A New Age musical adaptation of Hildegard’s

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verses (one that really exists) is one of the few sources of pleasure and fortitude for the increasingly destitute Claudia (who, it merits mentioning, had previously sought to preserve her country’s cultural heritage through her work as an art historian and museum curator: the reader of this study may notice the parallel between her former profession and Góngora’s in La leyenda de los soles [chapter 1]; both involve their respective countries’ visual culture and its documentation). In addition, Chaviano’s novel, which uses a variety of narrative styles (including Claudia’s perspective as well as dialogue between Gilberto and Rubén), occasionally uses a third-person omniscient narrator to underscore the palimpsestic history of places: “. . . the shadow of El Patio restaurant—formerly house of the Marquis of Aguas Claras— caressed the front of the grabado workshop—the erstwhile house of the Marquis de Arcos . . .” [“. . . la sombra . . . que cobijaba el restaurante El Patio—otrora casa del marqués de Aguas Claras—lamía los portales del taller de grabado—antaño casa del marqués de Arcos . . .” 23]. The novel also juxtaposes the “true” and hidden history of Havana with the tourism-driven kitschy commercialism that pervades the so-called historic center of the city: the babalaos or Afro-Cuban priests who come to Old Havana to read the tourists’ fortunes are little more than government employees (24). One of the recurring complaints issued by both the characters in the novel and the third-person narrative voices is how the residents of Havana are forgetting their history and ancestry on account of the misery that characterizes their existence (“era tanta la miseria que la gente se olvidó hasta de sus antepasados” 26). The third-person narrator argues, in fact, that life was better in prehistorical times (“. . . era mejor cuando los seres humanos vivían en cuevas” 54). At least then no one was asked to vote in sham elections and forced to attend political rallies. In short, a basic premise of the novel is that history pervades Havana, but people are too hungry or jaded to pay it any attention. Moreover, without a past, how can one have a future? [“¿Cómo se puede tener futuro cuando no se tiene un pasado?” (165)]. Through this question (asked by the third-person narrator), the novel reiterates many of the concerns expressed by the Mexican pensadores (see chapter 1). Because of, perhaps, her mystical powers,17 Claudia is able to interact with inhabitants of the distant past. The first of these is Muba, a female slave who lived in Havana during the eighteenth century and

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who first appears to Claudia (and only to Claudia) at La Bodeguita del Medio, a bar that has passed into Cuba’s lore as one of Ernest Hemingway’s watering holes. Muba is, in effect, Claudia’s “Virgil” (in Spanish, her lazarillo: someone who leads the blind) through their city’s past. Having been born in Africa, Muba embodies one of the principal sources of the modern Cuban cultural identity and serves, in many respects, through her knowledge and wisdom, as Claudia’s conscience.18 In ways reminiscent of how time is turned back by Carpentier and Estévez, Muba takes Claudia to a Havana with muddy streets and rudimentary houses, a Havana “she had never known, despite having walked through it so often. She showed her half-completed streets, and orchards that occupied large plots. Where later large old mansions would rise . . .” [“Y Muba le enseñó su ciudad; esa que nunca había conocido, pese a haberla caminado tanto. Le mostró sus calles a medio hacer y las huertas que ocupaban grandes extensiones. Donde más tarde se alzarían mansiones antiguas . . .” 275]. The heuristic, benevolent education Claudia receives through Muba is counterbalanced with other, more portentous visitors from the past. El Indio, for instance, is a sixteenth-century native Cuban man who appears to Claudia as an ethereal image whenever someone she knows is about to die. Upon visiting him during his epoch, before the first visitors (or invaders) from the Old World arrived, Claudia learns from him that the place they inhabit is called Aihvana and that only bad things come from the sea. The character of Onolorio, meanwhile, registers a later period on the island, that is, after the arrival of both African slaves and Chinese indentured servants. Onolorio is a mulatto with Chinese features (“un mulato achinado” 122) who—in contradistinction with el Indio’s apparent innocence and benignity— has an insatiable sexual appetite, one he satisfies by raping prostitutes. Being a probable product of undesired sexual contact (the novel only suggests this), Onolorio appears to Claudia whenever she engages in prostitution, although his involvement is limited to that of a voyeur. When Claudia visits a nineteenth-century Havana carnival (i.e., Onolorio’s epoch), his level of involvement increases: the two have a sexual encounter at an orgy. In this regard, it bears stating that in an otherwise outstanding novel, it is unfortunate that the figure who seems to embody or account for the ways in which Cuba has compromised itself and lost its direction be none other than Onolorio: an

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Asian-African mulatto—akin in the anguish attached to him to the mulatto in Sankofa—who stands in contrast with el Indio and Muba, characters who are presumably racially “pure,” have experienced less cultural turmoil, and are more benevolent.19 The fourth visitor from Cuba’s past in Chaviano’s novel has celebrity status: José Martí, who is accurately described as a little man with worn clothing and a thick mustache (“. . . un hombrecito de ropas raídas y grueso bigote” 316). He first appears to Claudia when she is walking the streets of Havana as a prostitute. Unlike, Onolorio, Martí seeks not to be a voyeur, but rather to ward off her potential clients: “He’d like to strike at them, but he knows he’d never reach them. He is only a translucent shadow, a presence from another century.” [“Quisiera golpearlos, pero sabe que nunca logrará llegar a ellos. Él es sólo una sombra traslúcida, una presencia de otro siglo” 158]. In a playful moment in the narrative, the Martí visiting the 1990s is inspired, upon seeing Claudia walk the streets, to write verses (verses that the real Martí published in the 1889 volume Los zapaticos de Rosa) that seem applicable to (and critical of) events from both centuries. Claudia and Martí never speak or have any other significant contact. Nicolás Guillén is also present in the novel through one of his poems. This 1946 poem, “Tengo” (I Have; see bibliography), in many ways serves inadvertently to mock Claudia’s (and her fellow Cubans’) travails during the Special Period. The poem was written to celebrate the achievements of Castro’s revolution by listing all the goods and services previously unknown to a “black, working-class man” like Guillén (Oppenheimer 419). One of its verses, for example, reads as follows: “Tengo, vamos a ver / que tengo el gusto de andar por mi país / dueño de cuanto hay en él . . .” [“I have, let’s see / I have the pleasure of going around my country / owning whatever there is in it . . .”] (translation by Oppenheimer). Writing in the early 1990s, Oppenheimer offers that “today, Guillén’s verses, and even Cuba’s constitution, sound subversive—a mocking portrait of what Cuba has turned into” (419). Chaviano’s novel quotes the very same lines from Guillén’s poem. In accordance with Oppenheimer’s assessment of the poem in its new (and sharply different) historical context, Claudia had verses from “Tengo” floating in her mind, and she wanted to scream, “Guillén, me cago en tu madre” [“Guillén, I shit on your mother”].

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She thought better of it, however, reasoning that perhaps the old man (Guillén) could never have imagined what Cuba would turn into or that his “damned” poem would eventually be banned on the island (“A lo mejor el viejo nunca imaginó lo que vendría después . . . Hasta su maldito poema estaba prohibido ahora por subversivo” 293).20 Martí, meanwhile, remains throughout the narrative a distant but powerful image, a reminder to Claudia (as well as, perhaps, to readers of the novel) of the noble, irreproachable nationalist values he espoused in his short, heroic life. At novel’s end, Martí is joined at Havana’s waterfront by Muba and el Indio to bid Claudia farewell as she flees21 the island in an improvised raft. Pervading this finale is the unmistakable sense of loss and imminent nostalgia for both sides: for the visitors from the past, the departures by Claudia and her fellow emigrants would represent yet another blow to their island’s future prospects; for Claudia, seeing Martí and the others on the increasingly distant shoreline would represent, in idealized form, a break with her country’s past, its cultural essence, and, in many ways, with a significant part of herself. Ultimately, the time travelers on that shoreline underscore the ways, for Chaviano and others, the Cuban Special Period betrayed and corrupted not just Castro’s revolution, but the island’s spirit and history as well. However, with the visions these time travelers—Muba, in particular—bring of Cuba’s past, the possibility remains of hope for the future: for Claudia, in particular, “knowing that Havana existed as it once did produced in her a warm joy in her heart, as if it were still possible to dream about the future” [“Saber que existió una Habana así le producía un tibio alborozo en el pecho, como si aún fuera posible soñar con el futuro” 210]. Such dreaming, however, may need to occur—for both Claudia and Chaviano—in places other than the island. *

*

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While Chaviano’s novel (not to mention several of the other texts we saw in this chapter) uses the mechanism of time travel to explore issues of cultural and geographic identity within the Caribbean, it is undoubtedly the case that questions of gender and sexuality also play a significant role. After all, largely because she is a single mother who must find a way to support her son, Claudia is forced into

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prostitution: an activity in which she is constantly victimized and objectified by dollar-wielding male tourists. My focus in chapter 3 turns to stories and other cultural discourses by women (or about women). Chapter 3 can also be seen as related to the preceding chapter about the Conquest. This is so, in the words of Laura Barbas-Rhoden, inasmuch as “. . . the story of the Spanish Conquest is that of the conquerors, and little mention is made of the women that peopled the world they left and the continent they sought to dominate” (Writing Women 114). While my geographical focus in the next chapter will broaden to include works from throughout Latin America, thematically my interest remains in works that treat time travel.

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CHAPTER 3

The Ghost of La Malinche: Time Travel and Feminism

Ni tu edad, ni la fecha de tu muerte, ni dónde reposan tus restos podemos saber. Pobre Malinche sin rostro y sin edad, con razón anda por ahí todavía tu alma penando desesperada en las fuentes de Chapultepec y la laguna de Texcoco. Fernanda Núñez Becerra. La Malinche: de la historia al mito (1996) [We know not your age, nor the date of your death, nor the resting place of your remains. Poor Malinche without a face and ageless, this explains why your soul sulks by the fountains of Chapultepec and the Texcoco lagoon.] We live in . . . the past, because it is itself alive . . . Nothing ever dies. Ivy Compton-Burnett, A Father and His Fate, 1957

I

n “Yania Tierra” (1981), a poem by the Dominican writer Aída Cartagena Portalatín (1918–94), Yania is a woman who has been a witness to the history of Hispaniola. Indeed, one might argue that she embodies this history, sometimes in very graphic ways. Early in the poem, like a figure out of Eduardo Galeano’s Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971), she “vomits gold / blood / sugar” (57) [“Yania

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vomita oro / sangre / azúcar” 56]: in sum, she ejects from her body the material substances that most forcefully shaped the destiny of her island and that served as pretext for its colonization, substances that were probably imposed on her in the first place. Later, after observing John Hawkins and Francis Drake plunder her island, she watches as sugar mills are established. “Yania Tierra,” in effect, is a poem—not unlike Nancy Morejón’s “Mujer negra” (see previous chapter) and Tony Croatto’s folk song, “Nuestra sangre” (see my Narrative Mutations)—that paints a sweeping panorama of the history of a Caribbean island. While they center on different islands (“Nuestra sangre” is about Puerto Rico), the message in each text is similar in structure: a lengthy colonial period dominated by acts of brutality is followed by a fledging but hopeful celebration of each island’s uniqueness. As Yania observes, for instance, the introduction of the sugar plantation onto her island (which is also her own person), her “womb is penetrated” (79) [“se penetra su vientre” 78]. The violent act perpetrated on this woman/nation—who according to M. J. Fenwick is “both a victim and a relentless hero” (13)—vividly reflects the focus of this chapter: while “Yania Tierra” may describe historical events within the Caribbean, what is probably a more powerful interest in the poem is the complex historical plight of women. At the poem’s conclusion, the focus shifts away from Yania toward a broad appeal to all women: “¡Ea! ¡Mujeres! / ¡Soltad los pájaros de la esperanza!” (172) [“Come on! Women! / Release the birds of hope!” 173]. Quite significantly, the poem makes this appeal not just to Dominican or Caribbean women, but to all women. This general interest in issues surrounding women, particularly insofar as such issues intersect with stories of time travel, is the focus of the present chapter. Occasionally, feminist1 interests bond—in ways that seem to collapse vast temporal distances—women from different epochs. In Yxta Maya Murray’s The Conquest (2002), for instance, a woman who restores rare manuscripts at a museum in contemporary Los Angeles forges a connection with a sixteenth-century Aztec princess who authored a book detailing the annihilation of her people. During the course of the story, the experiences and psyches of the two women in many respects become as one.

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Such feminist solidarity is taken to a higher level in “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas” (1964), a well-studied short story by the late Mexican author Elena Garro. In this story, the female protagonist, one Laura Aldama, alternates between her life in modern, twentieth-century Mexico City and a life in which she and her fellow Mexicas are faced with decimation by Spaniards and their Mesoamerican allies during the sixteenth century. As such, and as Cynthia Duncan explains, “the past and present co-exist on the same plane of mythical time and vie for the loyalties of” Aldama (107). Not surprisingly, Aldama is a modern woman with curious interests—as Sandra M. Cypess observes—in books about the Conquest, not to mention a fascination with “the theme of the fall of Tenochtitlán . . .” (129). Having once been married to Octavio Paz, Garro shares with the famed Nobel Laureate an interest in the psychological and existential components of Mexican history and culture. In “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas,”2 there is no time machine per se, and Aldama appears to have little control over her movements between the twentieth and sixteenth centuries. Instead, the time travel in the novel is triggered by sensual, atmospheric changes in which an ethereal whiteness gradually envelops the scene. One could argue convincingly that the story expresses a (perhaps romanticized) nostalgia for the situation of women during the preConquest era. As Cypess explains, the story privileges Aldama’s perspective rather than Pablo’s, her modern husband: Pablo is viewed negatively in the story, unlike Aldama’s Indian husband. The latter resurfaces during the twentieth century and “is tender and gentle toward her” (Cypess 130). Interestingly, it is not the case that Aldama is the very same woman in both epochs: in her modern and upscale Mexico City environment, there is no mention of her ethnicity, which is presumably as white as the haze that occasions her time travel. This omission is all the more curious when we consider that her Aztec husband, who is suspected by the twentieth-century police of stalking her, is described in a news report as a “sinister, Indian-looking man” (83) [“. . . el siniestro individuo de aspecto indígena . . .” 348], and by Pablo as a “filthy Indian” (84) [“el indio asqueroso” 348]. Beyond serving to register and also critique some of the stereotypes about the indigenous population commonly held by the Mexican upper classes,

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what matters most, perhaps, is that in the story, this “filthy Indian” is, in fact, Aldama’s true love. It is only in the modern era, however, that she can approach him in a proper, confident way: “Antes nunca me hubiera atrevido a besarlo, pero ahora he aprendido a no tenerle respeto al hombre, y me abracé a su cuello y lo besé en la boca” (341) [“I would never have dared to embrace him before, but now I’ve learned I don’t have to be respectful of the man, so I embraced his neck and kissed him on the mouth” 77]. The villain in the story is Pablo, a controlling man who is both verbally and physically abusive toward Aldama. As such, he represents the worst in terms of how some (Hispanic, at least) men have treated women, even well into the modern era. In contrast, Aldama’s first husband—despite her love toward him—is little more than an apparition from the past: a past, moreover, that has been subject to numerous reinscriptions. Enter La Malinche

Another figure from the past that has been the subject of continuous debate and who in many respects remains alive in the Mexican imaginary is Hernán Cortés’s interpreter and lover, La Malinche.3 The parallels between her and Garro’s Aldama are—as Cypess observes—unmistakable: in both “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas” and her acclaimed novel Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963), Garro “shows that [Mexican] women have been labeled with a pattern of behavior so that they are seen to forever repeat the same story—that of La Malinche” (120). According to Cypess, the short story’s very title “begins the transformation of the myth of La Malinche by broadening the concept of culpability. It is not La Malinche who alone is guilty . . .” (128). If any doubt remains with regard to the similarities between the two women, an additional comparison by Cypess should put the matter to rest: Like La Malinche, who also gained status and recognition because of her relationships with two different men, Laura also changes identities depending on the man she is with. There are no fixed signs, just as there is no fixed chronology. The geographical loci

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of Mexico are also considered as signs with multiple signification. For example, when Laura gets lost in Chapultepec Park the area is simultaneously filled with the battle of the Conquest and the cars and passersby of the contemporary period. (129–30) One need only a passing familiarity with Mexican culture and letters (the best-known example probably being Paz’s chapter about her in his The Labyrinth of Solitude) to understand the ongoing significance of La Malinche in modern cultural polemics. In 1939, that is, more than a decade before the publication of The Labyrinth of Solitude, Antonio Ruiz (1897–1964), a Mexican surrealist artist and part-time cartographer, crafted “El sueño de La Malinche” (“The Dream of La Malinche”). In the painting,4 La Malinche lies in rest on a bed in a humble room while on the creases of the blanket that covers her body rises a vision of a rugged, mountainous Mexican landscape and the colonial society (complete with a plaza de toros) that develops following the Conquest and, probably, well after her own epoch. Atop the hill created by her hips lies a colonial church not unlike the one erected in Cholula, Mexico, at the site of a pre-Columbian pyramid.5 As Jacqueline Barnitz observes, the “equation of Malinche’s female form with the earth6 makes her both an earth mother and the generatrix of the colonial town” (109). It is worth underlining in Barnitz’s observation how in the painting the division between past and present is a problematized and slippery one: La Malinche, in effect, continues to exist; in the words of Rosa María Zúñiga, she is the “ausente siempre presente” (45) [“the absent one who is always present”]. The Malinche in the painting, at the very least, embodies—and could be seen as having given birth to—Mexico’s present. This maternal role would be, undoubtedly, a heavy burden to bear, no matter how successful Mexico’s society might become (instead, she has often received blame for the country’s ills). Meanwhile, according to Edward Lucie-Smith, the implication in Ruiz’s painting is “that Mexico’s Indian past still slumbers beneath the trappings of the European present” (102). The European present or presence is, based on this view, an unnatural, incomplete, and artificial one. Interestingly, Lucie-Smith’s interpretation can itself be the object of interpretation.

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Does, for example, the notion that Mexico’s Indian past still slumbers beneath the present register negative stereotypes about the Mexican work ethic? Or is it, rather, the case that the indigenous Mexican population was seen in the late 1930s as being on the verge of a rebirth: an awakening from its slumber? For Rita Eder, La Malinche is not even asleep: “ella reflexiona con los ojos cerrados” (93) [“she contemplates [or meditates] with eyes closed”]. While this interpretation is undoubtedly subject to debate, Eder makes what is perhaps a more interesting observation in discussing the potential, ominous consequences should La Malinche—asleep or otherwise—suddenly rise: “Esa figura acostada . . . podría . . . despertar y levantarse, y así desordenar el minucioso paisaje, descolocar el caserío y tirarlo por el suelo . . .” (93) [“That figure in repose could awaken and rise, and in so doing disrupt the careful landscape, displace the dwellings and toss them on the ground”]. Ultimately, La Malinche’s slumber (or dream, or moment of contemplation) as seen in the painting seems a fitful one, a nightmare, perhaps: one from which she is unsure whether or not to wake. The long, bifurcated crack on the wall points threateningly, like a bolt of lightning, toward her head. La Malinche Lives On

There is an interesting moment (labeled “Interdiscursos”) in Zúñiga’s study on La Malinche when writers who span the centuries since the Conquest, but who have all written about the famous Mexican, engage in an occasionally heated discussion with regard to her identity and legacy. Let us suppose, Zúñiga writes, that Bernal Díaz del Castillo (the sixteenth-century conquistador-turned-chronicler) were to greet Manuel Orozco y Berra (a late-nineteenth-century Mexican encyclopedist). In imagining such an encounter, Zúñiga quotes the former’s first mention of La Malinche in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain, in which he describes her as the outstanding one in a group of twenty women who were given as an offering to Cortés (Zúñiga 48). Zúñiga quotes an 1897 text by Orozco y Berra that coincides with the initial assessment: “Sí, ‘una joven de talle elegante, de extraordinaria hermosura y delicadas formas, de raros talentos . . .” (Zúñiga 48) [“Yes, ‘a youth of elegant figure, of extraordinary beauty and delicate

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form, of rare talents . . .”].7 Next, writing in the late 1970s, Jane Brant Lewis adds commentary that closely parallels Orozco y Berra’s, to which Cecilio Robelo—“enthused” (Zúñiga 48)—intervenes with a lengthier and more detailed description of La Malinche. Such is the pattern Zúñiga establishes in her fictitious dialogue among intellectuals, mostly through their own words. Zúñiga limits her own contributions—beyond, of course, her selection and ordering of writings about La Malinche—to editorial descriptions of the varying tones that might color the numerous points of view. Preceding an excerpt from her 1987 essay, for example, Nadine Vinot-Postry has become “bothered” with the dialogue (Zúñiga 49). Linda Henderson, with her limited Spanish (“con su poco español” Zúñiga 49), begins her 1978 contribution (or rather, Zúñiga “begins” it for her) as follows: “¡Sorry! Yo no estoy tan de acuerdo . . .” The remaining dialogue quotes primarily twentieth-century writers, including Paz and Tzvetan Todorov. Before Díaz del Castillo reenters the dialogue as it nears its conclusion by wondering what all this fuss has been about (“¿Para qué todo este debate? Yo la conocí . . .” Zúñiga 55), Zúñiga quotes the critic Fernanda Núñez Becerra, who writes, in a book published in 1996: “¡Pobre Malinche!, sin rostro y sin edad, con razón anda por ahí todavía tu alma penando en las fuentes de Chapultepec y la laguna de Texcoco”8 [“Poor Malinche! without a face and ageless, this explains why your soul sulks by the fountains of Chapultepec and the Texcoco lagoon”]. Tellingly, La Malinche’s transhistorical existence lies on at least two planes in the preceding “Interdiscourse”: first, by virtue of how critical observations drawn from various epochs—observations that in turn register or respond to popular discourse—keep her memory alive. Furthermore, we can see in writers like Núñez an impulse to ascribe to the transhistorical Malinche the qualities of a living, albeit ethereal, person. The last half-century has seen numerous reinterpretations of the Malinche myth, including plays by Celestino Gorostiza (La Malinche o La leña está verde, 1958), Rodolfo Usigli (Corona de fuego, 1960), Salvador Novo (Cuauhtémoc, 1962), Carlos Fuentes (Todos los gatos son pardos, 1970), Rosario Castellanos (El eterno femenino, 1975), and Willebaldo López (Malinche Show, 1977). More recently, Laura Esquivel has published a novel, Malinche (2006), that seeks to cast a

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more favorable light on La Malinche’s legacy. Furthermore, some of these works have pronounced cross-temporal components: Fuentes’s Todos los gatos son pardos, for instance, draws parallels between the Conquest and the 1968 student massacre in Tlatelolco, a Mexico City district. In the final scene of the play, Conquest-era figures appear on stage in modern attire. Cypess points out that these characters “take on new roles as recognizable contemporary figures—soldiers, police, workers, beggars, university students” (La Malinche 120–21). She adds that, for Fuentes, such parallels suggest that “though covered by the clothes of modernity, the roles of exploitation and oppression enacted by the conquest have not changed” (La Malinche 121). Meanwhile, in both Castellanos’s El eterno femenino and López’s Malinche Show, La Malinche and other Conquest-era figures reemerge in the present as “revenants,” a term Cypess uses to describe figures brought back from the dead (123). El sueño de La Malinche (2002), a relatively recent postmodern play by the critically acclaimed Mexican writer Marcela del Río (Mexico City, 1932), has several interesting points of contact with the critical tradition sketched earlier, going so far as to share a title with Ruiz’s painting. That stated, any intentional connection on the part of Del Río between the painting and her play seems unlikely: although the two works share an interest in time travel, the Malinche who appears in Del Río’s play is far from being a silent presence with her back turned toward her audience. She is, instead, a self-confident, talkative woman intent on setting the record straight about her involvement in the conquest of Mexico. Her dream (which has remained unfulfilled since Cortés abandoned her) was for a radical love to reign over Mexico: a love unfettered by color, religion, caste, and so on (171). Of particular interest is the way Del Río combines past and present in the play: the action begins on the set of a contemporary film production, but the stage directions indicate that changes in lighting (reminiscent of Garro’s short story) signal leaps between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries (115). When the dialogue suggests early in the play—in accordance with the traditional view—that La Malinche was primarily in a submissive role with respect to Cortés, the “real,” sixteenth-century Malinche appears on stage in flesh and bones, and protests, “¡No, no fue así, señor director! . . . las cosas

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no son tan simples como las pintas” (123) [“No, it wasn’t like that, Mr. Director! . . . things are not as simple as you show them to be”]. La Malinche proceeds to usher off the stage the modern-day actress who was playing her and then slowly takes command over the set, first by playing herself in the drama but also by usurping the director’s duties and powers. She objects, for example, when the director calls for a cut in the action: “No, director, no hay ‘corte’ . . . La historia no la hacen los directores de cine, ni los historiadores, ni los intelectuales que la retuercen a su modo, sino los actores que la viven . . .” (128) [“No, director, there is no ‘cut’ . . . History is not made by film directors, nor by historians, nor by intellectuals who twist it to their liking, but rather by the actors who live it . . .”]. In the play within the play (or film production), she plays herself, and the audience—in much the same way as viewers of Walter Cronkite’s 1950s TV series You Are There—is privy to historical events just as they occurred nearly half a millennium ago. Del Río’s Malinche was a protagonist in the Conquest, actively guiding Cortés’s decisions. Rather than having been forced by him into service as an interpreter and sexual object, La Malinche was in full control the entire time. Aurora, the actress who began the play in the role of La Malinche, eventually begins rooting for the real Malinche: she, too, corrects the director by indicating—through historical analysis—that La Malinche was not raped but instead gave herself to Cortés for love (“. . . la Malinche no fue violada, se entregó por amor . . .” 150). The Mexican nation, then, is not founded—as Paz held—on what were perceived to be treasonous acts by La Malinche against fellow members of the indigenous population; when she is accused of betraying her Indian race, she retorts sharply: “¿Raza india? En mi época no existían la palabra ‘raza’ ni la palabra ‘indio.’ Sólo había pueblos y familias . . . Yo no era mexicana. No existía entonces una nación llamada México” (134) [“Indian race? In my time neither the word ‘race’ nor the word ‘Indian’ existed. There were only towns and families . . . I was not Mexican. A nation called Mexico did not exist then”]. Similarly, Cypess asserts that La Malinche’s ability to have patriotic feelings or to identify herself as an ally of the Aztecs did not fit within the worldview of her epoch; therefore, we should not fault her for not having acted in line with a system of modern behavior

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[(“La posibilidad de sentir una ‘emoción patriótica’ o de identificarse con los cholultecas no cabía dentro de la cosmovisión de su época, y así no debemos culparla por no haber actuado dentro de un sistema de comportamiento moderno”) (Cypess, “El sueño de la Malinche por Marcela del Río”) 109]. As such, the accusations against her that came later could be understood in terms of Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” that may not necessarily have “existed”; only in this case it is patriarchal elements in the Mexican society that come later, imagining—retrospectively—this Edenic, pre-Columbian social cohesiveness that could only have been disturbed by La Malinche’s treachery. Nor was the Mexican nation symbolically founded in Del Río’s play on Cortés’s presumed act of sexual violation against La Malinche. It was, instead, founded on the love that existed between La Malinche and Cortés (as such, Cortés’s abandonment of La Malinche might have, based on this interpretation, taken place against his will). Aurora’s name could, like the new dawn heralded at the end of La leyenda de los soles, suggest a new dawn in Mexican society given that the “official” account of its origins has been corrected. Ultimately, Del Río’s El sueño de la Malinche purports to correct misconceptions surrounding the title character. In so doing, the play on numerous occasions cites Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s sixteenth-century chronicle, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. Nonetheless, it is fair to ask if the play has revealed a hidden, historical truth about Cortés’s interpreter, or if in the end all that remains is a palimpsestic series of reinscriptions and reinterpretations (ranging in degrees of fictionality), all bringing us back to Núñez Becerra’s contentions regarding La Malinche’s inscrutability. Cypess, too, questions our capacity to arrive at the “real” Malinche given that we have nothing on record written by this sixteenth-century woman (“Puesto que sólo tenemos las crónicas de los conquistadores y el lienzo de Tlaxcala y ningún documento escrito por ella, no es posible precisar la variedad o la complejidad de sus contribuciones a Cortés”) (“El sueño de la Malinche por Marcela del Río”) 109]. One thing is clear, however, from both the play and Cypess’s contention (110): La Malinche probably acted admirably and in good faith given her situation at the time and she could not have foreseen the suffering among

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the indigenous populations (many of whom were not necessarily her allies or kin) to which her actions may have contributed. Furthermore, that the modern-day Aurora grows in assertiveness throughout the play’s production suggests an alternative angle on Del Río’s play, an angle informed by Carrie Chorba’s contention (applied originally to Fuentes’s short story “Las dos orillas”—see chapter 1). In her reading of “Las dos orillas,” Chorba proposes that “the manner in which one narrates [or dramatizes] the past or the future, contributes to our reality—whether or not the narrated events ever actually take place” (106). Along these lines, Del Río’s play is intended not only to rescue the image of La Malinche but also to empower women anywhere and especially Mexican women. The latter, who are attempting to make inroads in patriarchal Mexican society, have been the unfortunate inheritors of oppressive gender imbalances that have been in place since the time of the Conquest. The Ghost of La Malinche: Trees and Treason in Gioconda Belli’s La mujer habitada

La Malinche, it must be stated, can also make her presence felt in the unlikeliest of ways and places, including Gioconda Belli’s first novel. Published in 1988, La mujer habitada (The Inhabited Woman, 1994) takes as its backdrop a thinly veiled version of the author’s native Nicaragua (which becomes Faguas) during the early-to-mid 1970s, and examines the links between gender, political opposition movements, and broad historical trends. These trends are first suggested even before the opening lines of the novel: its epigraph is taken from Eduardo Galeano’s chronological mosaic on Latin American history, Memoria del Fuego (1982), which in turn quotes the foundation myth of the Marikitare, an indigenous group in Venezuela: “Rompo este huevo y nace la mujer y nace el hombre. Y juntos vivirán y morirán. Pero nacerán nuevamente. Nacerán y volverán a morir y otra vez nacerán. Y nunca dejarán de nacer, porque la muerte es mentira.”9 This myth merits a closer look: significantly, the woman is mentioned first in the order of birth, unlike the Judeo-Christian creation myth. She and the man then live together and participate jointly in the cycle of life and death that envelops them. While this myth resembles

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indigenous Americans’ cyclical view of time discussed earlier, it also anticipates several features of Belli’s novel and the intellectual and artistic context surrounding it. La mujer habitada received wide popular and critical acclaim upon being published by Nicaragua’s Editorial Vanguardia. Since then, it has been translated into eleven languages and has received numerous literary prizes, including Germany’s Academy of Arts Anna Seghers Prize. It bears keeping in mind that in 1979, that is, less than a decade before the novel’s publication and following nearly a decade of fighting, the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) and the UDEL (Democratic Liberation Union) finally toppled Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last in a series of Somoza family members who despotically controlled Nicaragua from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Sandinista movement appears in the novel as El Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, or quite simply, El Movimiento. Belli herself was a Sandinista and participated in events similar to those recounted in the novel. La mujer habitada’s climactic Operación Eureka is patterned on the 1974 assault on the home of a Nicaraguan diplomat, an event that—on account of her being privy to it—forced Belli to remain out of her country in the wake of a European vacation.10 Afterward, she lived in exile in Costa Rica and Mexico until the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution. At a very basic level, as Ileana Rodríguez explains, La mujer habitada “is a novel plotting the participation of women in the armed struggles constituting revolutionary nations.”11 Lavinia, the protagonist and in many respects Belli’s alter ego, is a young, newly minted architect from an upper-crust Faguas family. According to Timothy A. B. Richards, Lavinia’s profession has a special significance in that “the themes of construction and destruction are understandably recurrent in resistance literature.”12 She encounters condescension from her fellow architects (all male) at the stuffy and patriarchal firm where she works and an aloofness from her fellow women at the firm (all in subordinate, clerical positions). Eventually she develops a romantic relationship with Felipe, another architect at her firm who, while being no less chauvinistic than the other architects, maintains an intriguing air of mysteriousness. It was he who earlier had indoctrinated her to the complexities of Latin American architecture: he assigned her

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the task of surveying a shantytown where a modern shopping center would be built. Lavinia lives alone in a house she inherited from her Aunt Inés, a free-spirited, independent woman who doted on Lavinia as if she were her child and who in many respects served as a mentor and role model. Later Lavinia would use the code name “Inés” during the Movimiento’s covert operations. Not surprisingly, Lavinia is estranged from her socially pretentious parents, who cannot understand why a wealthy and beautiful young woman like her would rather not simply find a suitable husband and quietly assume her place among the country’s elite. She is not entirely on her own in the house, however: Lucrecia, a maid, comes three times a week to tidy up because Lavinia “estaba acostumbrada a la vida acomodada y fácil” (13) [“. . . Lavinia was used to the comfortable, easy life” 11]. Someone (or something) else, we shall see, also keeps Lavinia company at home. To Lavinia’s surprise, one evening Felipe comes to her house accompanied by a man bleeding from a serious gunshot wound. Stunned and seeing little choice but to allow the use of her house as a hiding place and to help care for Sebastián, the wounded man, she becomes at first a sympathizer with the liberation movement and later an active participant. When her firm commissions her with the task of designing an opulent home for el general Vela, one of the country’s most powerful (and most wretched) military generals, she is at first reluctant to put her architectural skills to such dubious use. It is only after some coaxing by Sebastián that she realizes the valuable position she would be in, given that she would be called on to draft the blueprint that would later result in the general’s home, with its trapdoors and secret arsenals. Needless to say, Lavinia (in terms both of her physical involvement and her mastery of the blueprint) would eventually play a pivotal role in the liberation movement’s assault on the general’s house during a lavish party, an event that serves as the novel’s climax. Felipe, Lavinia, and several other characters lead a double life and participate in clandestine activities. In addition, General Vela wears a graceful façade with which he conceals his bloody “counterinsurgency” activities; we know, also, that he was agreeable to Lavinia’s proposal that his new home have trapdoors and hidden chambers. The novel, thus, gradually establishes what one might label a counterpoint

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between the visible and the hidden, or the true and the false: a counterpoint that begins as early as the Marikitare myth found in the epigraph, in which death is said to be a lie. There is also, not surprisingly, the counterpoint between rich and poor: two worlds whose dividing line Lavinia notices only after starting her work as an architect. The third-person narrator states, for example, that Lavinia “podía escoger vivir en el mundo paralelo en que había nacido. No ver el otro mundo más que de paso . . .” (123) [“She could choose to live in the world parallel to the one in which she had been born. Not see the other world except from the car as she passed . . .” 127]. Perhaps, however, the most striking of these counterpoints is the one that exists between Lavinia and an orange tree on her property: a counterpoint that also establishes an important dialectic between past and present in the novel. According to Linda Craft, the important role of this particular tree in the novel attests to Belli’s desire to link “feminine consciousness with the earth and nature . . .” (158). That the tree in Lavinia’s yard is an orange tree prefigures Carlos Fuentes’s view, expressed in El naranjo, a collection of short stories published in 1993, that the orange tree is emblematic of mestizaje in the Americas: it is a tree that originated in the Eastern Hemisphere but that has thrived in the Americas.13 In La mujer habitada, this tree not only lives and breathes, but it has a consciousness and a memory. It also has a name: Itzá. In the novel’s opening pages we learn that Itzá, a Nahuatl woman,14 died at the hands of Spanish invaders during the sixteenth century. Later, her spirit and physical remains mysteriously and fantastically take possession of (or inhabit) an orange tree, which, according to her, “fue de las pocas cosas buenas que trajeron los españoles” (43) [“. . . was one of the few good things the Spaniards brought” 43]. Centuries later, Lavinia’s house was built; eventually, Lavinia moved into the house, at which point Itzá began to observe her, to try to understand her, and— ultimately—to try to forge a spiritual bond with her. Indeed, as Laura Barbas-Rhoden points out,15 observation or—broadly stated—vision is one of the overarching motifs in the novel. Itzá observes Lavinia; Lavinia oversees the construction of the general’s house; and there are continuous references in the novel to eyes, sightlines, gazes, teardrops, and other matters pertaining to vision. Because vision plays a significant role in the narrative and because Itzá is a Conquest-era figure,

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La mujer habitada is in some ways reminiscent of the strong perspectivisim in Miguel León Portilla’s Visión de los vencidos, a twentiethcentury compilation of sixteenth-century indigenous chronicles of the Conquest. Consider, for instance, the opening stanza in “Icnocuícatl 6,” a poem in León Portilla’s compilation that describes the aftermath of the conquistadors’ arrival: “Y todo esto pasó con nosotros. / Nosotros lo vimos, / nosotros lo admiramos. / Con esta lamentosa y triste suerte / nos vimos angustiados” [“And all of this happened to us. / We saw it / We beheld it. / With this lamentable and sad luck / We found ourselves anguished”].16 Gradually, Itzá and Lavinia grow closer spiritually as the latter immerses herself more deeply in the liberation movement and after she begins, quite literally, to drink juice from the former’s fruit. The third-person narrator describes this subtle rapprochement between the two: as Lavinia observes a blue-eyed doll sitting atop her closet, she realizes that the doll is the only material survivor of her privileged upbringing. Significantly, the doll’s “glass eyes reflected the window where the orange tree held out its branches” (125) [“Sus ojos de cristal reflejaban la ventana donde el naranjo extendía sus ramas” 121]. Seemingly as a result of this visual triangulation among Lavinia, Itzá, and the doll, the last of these, “leaning to one side . . . looked indecently limp” (125) [“Inclinada hacia un lado, lucía impúdicamente desmadejada” 121]. Lavinia does not entirely disown her old doll, however; she uses its hollow chest to hide the liberation movement’s membership manual: “ ‘ahora tendrá corazón,’ pensó” (117) [“ ‘Now it’ll have a heart,’ she thought” 122]. The way the doll was put to use resembles, at a different level, the appropriation Itzá is making of Lavinia, and is suggestive of the novel’s title: as a feminist novel, La mujer habitada offers a critique of—in particular, at least—Latin American society’s patriarchal order, especially the ways in which women have been inhabited or colonized by men and made to serve the latter’s needs and wants. Clearly, however, the title also refers to the link Itzá establishes with Lavinia. While the majority of the story—that is, those sections directly involving Lavinia’s activities—is narrated in a third-person omniscient voice, Itzá’s first-person narrative is interwoven throughout. The latter’s perspective, then, plays a role not unlike that of a Greek

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chorus: Itzá describes Lavinia’s activities, at first with a pronounced degree of confusion given that there is much about twentieth-century life that seems strange to her. In this regard, the former provides— like the choruses of classical drama—an alternative perspective on the very same activities in which the latter engages, augmenting our understanding of them and, perhaps, our sympathies (or pathos) for both characters. As the bond between the two women strengthens, however, Itzá’s narration begins to serve as a poetic counterpoint to the events that are taking place in Lavinia’s world, particularly in terms of how they resemble similar events Itzá experienced while she and her people attempted to fight off the Spaniards.17 Itzá’s voice thus helps to locate the events of the plot within a broader, transhistorical, and transcultural continuum. In a sense, the inclusion of Itzá’s perspective is akin to the Maya narrator who moderates the action in John Sayles’s Men with Guns, a film that appeared approximately a decade following the publication of La mujer habitada and that also treats the topic of violence in Latin America. Is Itzá, however, merely a passive observer of Lavinia’s world? It is precisely this debate on the nature of Itzá’s involvement in Lavinia’s world, as well as the nature of the relationship between the two women, that comprises the novel’s most interesting and most controversial feature. Indeed, a survey of criticism on the novel reveals a significant degree of ambivalence regarding the character of Itzá. There are, first of all, clear similarities between Itzá and Lavinia. Both are (or were) involved in resistance movements: the former against the Spanish invaders and the latter against her country’s oppressive dictatorial regime. Both, also, are involved with men who initially play a more active role in their respective movements: Felipe, in Lavinia’s case, and Yarince in Itzá’s. In both scenarios, it is only after it becomes clear that the male contribution to the struggle would be insufficient that the two women take up arms and cease being merely passive observers and purveyors of moral support. In taking up arms and in fighting alongside the men, Itzá and Lavinia abandon traditional and stereotypical feminine roles in their respective liberation movements. On the other hand, the parallelisms between the two women elide the significant differences that separate them. Barbas-Rhoden

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explains that “there is little mention of differences that would certainly exist between a sixteenth-century indigenous woman and a twentieth-century woman of a different cultural heritage” (Writing Women in Central America 65). Conveniently, Itzá speaks to us in Spanish, for instance. Barbas-Rhoden locates the novel’s use of Itzá within the context of Nicaragua’s modern political reality: for Lavinia and Flor (a friend and fellow revolutionary18), “the Indian heritage of their country only surfaces in relation to the political struggles of the revolutionary front” (Writing Women 66).19 In addition, other criticism on the novel has seen Itzá as a passive observer and commentator, not unlike the Maya woman in Men with Guns, rather than as an active presence or protagonist. Craft argues, for example, that Itzá’s commentaries serve merely as a reflection of the events taking place in Lavinia’s world: “While she cannot control Lavinia’s life, Itzá can transmit certain images of her past” (163). In line with this interpretation of a passive and solely observant Itzá, some readers attribute to her the novel’s loss of its ideological focus. According to Craft, “this ‘magical clouding’ [that Itzá and her narrative voice embody] is precisely the reason some critics have posited for Belli’s novel falling outside a revolutionary aesthetic.”20 There are moments in La mujer habitada, however, when Itzá is increasingly able to exert a controlling influence on her modern counterpart. The first moment occurs about halfway in the narrative, when Itzá’s spirit attempts—unsuccessfully—to drive Lavinia out to the street when violence erupts during a funeral procession for a victim of the dictatorial regime. Lavinia, apparently, “just felt the need to get out of there” (211) [“Simplemente sentía la necesidad de irse de allí” 202). Immediately following this episode, Itzá berates herself for attempting to control someone (i.e., Lavinia) whose situation she has not fully grasped: “¿Por qué la empujé? ¿Qué me llevó a impulsarla hacia afuera, allí donde se escuchaban sonidos de batalla? Ni yo misma lo sé” (202) [“Why did I push her? What led me to push her outside, there where the sounds of battle could be heard? I hardly know myself” 212]. Later, Lavinia proudly—but apparently inexplicably—tells Flor that Felipe fights like Yarince (“Lucha como Yarince” 238). Lavinia has no answer for Flor’s confusion with regard to the identity of this mysterious person: “No sé quién es Yarince.

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No sé de dónde me salió” (238) [“I don’t know who Yarince is. I don’t know how that came out” 251]. Itzá, then, does more than mirror Lavinia. In this regard, I agree with Barbas-Rhoden’s contention that the former “is at once observer of and participant in Lavinia’s story” (Writing Women 61). The most important instance of Itzá’s agency occurs during the climactic scene at the general’s house, when it is she who forces Lavinia to pull the trigger on the gun the latter has trained on the general: Itzá “tightened [Lavinia’s] fingers, my fingers, over that metal that vomited fire” (409) [“. . . apretando sus dedos, mis dedos contra aquel metal que vomitaba fuego” 385]. Indeed, this example, in which Itzá manipulates Lavinia and gunfire is described in pre-Columbian terms, suggests that the past is not merely prelude to the present within a Latin American context. Rather, it can serve in many ways to inspire, shape, and transform this present: sometimes in ways beyond or outside conventional temporal schemes. Furthermore, the novel’s feminist agenda would seem to support, a priori perhaps, a reading of an engaged, active Itzá. The women’s switch to an active involvement in their people’s political and military struggles is also related to the novel’s salient themes pertaining to maternity and female fertility.21 Both women, for instance, decide not to have children, a decision that calls into question their potential contribution—if framed in terms of the traditional, patriarchal expectations placed on women—to their respective societies and resistance movements. In Lavinia’s case, her decision not to have children is rooted initially in her focus on her education as an architect, and later in her decision to sacrifice herself to the struggle for liberation. For Itzá, her decision stems from her desire not to provide the invaders with any future servants; Itzá recalls lying with Yarince after a battle against the Spaniards: “Esa noche lloramos abrazados, conteniendo el deseo de nuestros cuerpos, envueltos en un pesado rebozo de tristeza. Nos negamos la vida, la prolongación, la germinación de las semillas” (136) [“That night, embraced, we cried, containing the desire in our bodies, enveloped in a heavy cloak of sadness. We denied ourselves life, prolongation, the propagation of our seed” 143]. The women, thus, commit themselves to other types of creative acts; in addition, because Itzá has no biological children, the

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nature of her connection to Lavinia is anything but conventional— that is, Lavinia is not Itzá’s biological descendant. For the purposes of this study, however, of particular interest in the citation given in preceding passage, is Itzá’s use of a concept associated with plants (i.e., “the propagation of our seed”) to describe her own halted desire to procreate. Through this example and others (Flor’s name, for instance, and the relationship between Itzá and Lavinia), it becomes increasingly obvious that the novel is establishing an elaborate metaphor involving sometimes very subtle similarities between people and plants. Belli observes in her memoir that it was while bidding farewell to a comrade, who was embarking on the assault on the diplomat’s home, that she experienced something unusual: I watched him as he walked away receding into the distance. Several times he turned back to look at me, smiling and waving his hand up high. The lines of a poem came to me. The poem was from one of my favorite poets, Joaquín Pasos: “Es preciso que levantes la mano para llevarme de tí un recuerdo de árbol.” (“You must raise your hand when we part / For I want to keep of you a memory of trees.”)22 I felt no bad premonition. That made me feel better. (The Country Under My Skin 97) Although Belli does not elaborate on how she interpreted Pasos’s poem and why, in particular, trees (or the memory of them) had a calming effect on her, one could speculate on a possible reason: potentially dangerous human activities seem less ominous and dire when considered in terms of the different, vaster temporality of nature in general and trees in particular. In the novel, for example, Lavinia’s admiration for Sebastián’s leadership within the liberation movement is expressed as follows by the third-person narrator: “Sin que ella pudiera negarse, con su voz suave y firme, su apariencia de árbol, él había logrado que ella hiciera cosas que jamás pensó hacer” (88) [“Without letting her refuse, with his soft, firm voice, his tree-like appearance, he had gotten her to do things she never thought she would” 92–93]. Flor, too, “just like Sebastián . . . had the air of a serene tree” (96) [“Al igual que Sebastián, emanaba un aire de árbol sereno” 93].

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Belli, however, does not limit her use of what I term a human/tree equivalency to La mujer habitada. In “Plenitud,” a poem published in her 1998 collection, Apogeo, she once again equates women and trees: the speaker in the poem feels like a tree (“Hoy me siento como un árbol . . .”) whose body has roots (“Las raíces de mi cuerpo / han bendecido el amor”). In “Consuelo para la temporalidad,” a poem in the same collection, the speaker declares: “Somos como las plantas / Nuestra piel es hoja y nervadura / de pasiones hermosas / que bailan sin cesar” [“We are like plants / Our skin is leaf and nerves / of lovely passions / that dance without end”]. Later in the poem, the speaker pays homage to indigenous oral traditions and views on temporality by asserting that life nourishes life (“la vida se alimenta de la vida”) and that chants and myths will outlive us, just as the tree survives (“Cantos y mitos nos sobrevivirán, / como sobrevive el árbol . . .”). Lastly, in her 1996 novel, Waslala, a character describes the mysterious disappearance of the eponymous utopian community that had been built deep in the jungle: “los ceibos se la llevaron” (65) [“the ceiba trees took the town away”]. Given trees’ anthropomorphic, mystical powers in the preceding texts, one might ask if the human/ tree equivalency or metaphor can be placed in a broader context, that is, beyond Belli’s oeuvre. If so, might this lead to a different or more nuanced reading of La mujer habitada? Scholars have long been interested in the plant/person equivalency and began outlining as early as the nineteenth century how ancient, traditional societies understood this relationship. In 1897, J. O. Quantz, a developmental psychologist, described the correlation—echoed, perhaps, in the biblical tradition’s tree of the knowledge of good and evil—between humanity’s prehistoric development of religion and its belief in tree spirits. He argued, for instance, that “the groves were God’s first temples.”23 In a treatise on the history of religion published five years later, Frank Byron Jevons similarly explained that humans have worshipped trees since time immemorial and that the latter have often held a special, totemic significance for both individuals and communities. As such, according to Jevons, it should come as no surprise for “the tree totem to be anthropomorphized; and this is often the case” (208). He then concurs with another critic’s observation that any given “tree spirit was represented

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by a human being or a human figure tied to a tree or set on a tree-top, or enveloped in tree leaves . . . or otherwise associated with the tree” (208).24 Other thinkers have since linked the anthropomorphization of trees with a variety of movements, including Darwinism, depth psychology, phenomenology, ecopsychology, and environmentalism more broadly stated (Sommer 191). In terms of environmentalism, Jane Holtz Kay explains that the following note appeared in mailboxes when new trees were planted in a Boston neighborhood during the 1970s: “I’ve just moved in, actually, and there are a few things you should know about me. There are some things you can do to keep me alive and well. You should make sure I get 10 gallons of water a day . . .”25 In ways that may be of more specific relevance to Belli’s novel, Robert Sommer explains—based on the theories of Nathaniel Altman26 —that, primarily on account of a shared vertical perspective, some native peoples of North America “referred to humans as ‘walking trees,’ whose spine is the trunk, pelvis enfolds the roots, and brain is in the branches” (Sommer 196). Meanwhile, the links between people and plants are at the core of many traditional Mesoamerican cosmologies, including the Maya view—as expressed in the Popol Vuh—that posits the origins of humanity in maize. As concerns trees, Charles Phillips explains, with reference to the ancient Maya, that the ceiba, or silk-cotton tree, was held sacred “and identified by [the Maya] as the cosmic tree or tree of life” (280). Davíd Carrasco concurs: the ceiba was “the World Tree, that is, it was believed to embody the most essential powers of fertility, stability, and the renewal of life on earth” (400–1). Lastly, Altman (78–80) describes beliefs held by Mesoamerican peoples, among others, regarding creation myths involving human descent from trees. He also states that “there is some evidence that coffins, memorial columns, and grave headstones trace their origins to pagan tree rites . . . [the Sioux of North America] believed that the soul of a dead person entered the tree as the body was placed there” (196). Thus, there are precedents for the similar events that transpire in Belli’s novel. Although the use La mujer habitada makes of the interplay between the human and vegetable realms can be considered in light of these vast religious, psychological, and environmental currents, they can

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also be considered in terms of a more specific context involving elements of Latin American imagery and iconography. In the wake of descriptions like Jevons’s and Quantz’s that outline the religious, spiritual links between people and trees, later scholars would focus on the physical, material links. During the 1920s and 1930s, for example, Jay Hambidge, a North American art historian, suggested (in ways that anticipate the so-called fractal geometry Benoît Mandelbrot developed later) the structural similarities between humans and features of the natural realm, particularly plants.27 Quite significantly, according to Antonio Rodríguez, the painter Frida Kahlo and other Mexican artists became familiar with Hambidge’s ideas and incorporated them in their paintings and murals (249). If we consider two of Kahlo’s paintings, we quickly notice the parallels between them and the tree motif as expressed in La mujer habitada, as well as in the preceding survey of the tree/human equivalency. Alongside her awareness of Hambidge’s theories, Kahlo was clearly also familiar with Luther Burbank (1849–1926), an American botanist and horticulturalist who developed numerous varieties of plants during his long and illustrious career. Although apparently the two never met (Hoover Giese 53), such was her admiration for him, his work, and his ideas that in 1931 Kahlo painted “Portrait of Luther Burbank.” In the portrait, the American botanist clutches a philodendron and is flanked by citrus trees (Hoover Giese 55). Interestingly, Burbank’s torso rises out of a tree trunk whose roots emanate, oddly enough, from what are apparently his own decaying remains. This, according to Hayden Herrera, is “the first statement of a favorite Kahlo theme, the fertilization of life by death.”28 However, in an aptly titled essay, “A Rare Crossing: Frida Kahlo and Luther Burbank,” Lucretia Hoover Giese argues that one can find in the portrait a wealth of additional signifying layers, not the least of which is the connection between Burbank’s cadaver and the surrealist “exquisite corpse” drawings (56). In addition, that the citrus trees are of different shapes and sizes suggests that one of them is grafted or hybridized. Indeed, plant grafting and hybridization experiments were Burbank’s primary pursuit during his career as a botanist, and he extended the guiding principles he held as a botanist into the realm of human society,

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including—notoriously—his forays into eugenicist ideas (Hoover Giese 62). It is also fair to mention the unmistakable similarities between Kahlo’s painting and earlier ones by her husband, Diego Rivera: in his “Germination” (1926), for instance, a woman’s torso morphs upward from a tree trunk; she is surrounded by other women in the fetal position: although they are of different ages and in different stages of “gestation,” together they and the tree trunk seem to pay homage to female fertility. Perhaps, one could read “The Portrait of Luther Burbank” as Kahlo’s response to Rivera: men, as well as women, can be construed as participants (or objects) in the cycle of life. Meanwhile, Rivera’s fresco, “Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilizing the Earth” (1926–27),29 features the buried, restful (but identifiable) corpses of Emiliano Zapata and Otilio Montaño nourishing the maize that is growing above them: a clear reference to traditional Mesoamerican views on humanity’s origins.30 What, however, do we make of Burbank’s cadaver nourishing himself? Although the conclusion that the cadaver trope in Kahlo is a simple imitation of Rivera’s painting may be unwarranted, it does seem that the two paintings share an optimism in the triumph or persistence of life over death. One might also ask: Why Burbank? Kahlo was less concerned with the horticulturist’s eugenicist views than with his general interests in plant hybridization and human genetics—interests that for him, at least, were intertwined. Although there is no definitive evidence indicating the particulars of why, precisely, Kahlo was interested in Burbank and why she painted his portrait, Hoover Giese theorizes that “his work on hybridization would have been compelling because she herself was a hybrid, a mestiza” (58). Furthermore, although “Burbank apparently took no interest in the plant,” the philodendron—in particular due to its pre-Columbian uses and cultural associations—may have held special nationalist (particularly in the wake of the Mexican Revolution) and even personal meanings for Kahlo (Hoover Giese 60–61). Near her essay’s conclusion, Hoover Giese suggests—via a citation from Roger Bartra’s The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character (1992) and in ways that clearly evoke, and perhaps challenge, La mujer habitada—that metaphors involving trees are bound up with how Mexicans, in particular, understand their cultural

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identity. According to Bartra, “the specifically modern aspect” of the myth of Mexican inferiority is rooted in the fact that the stereotype of the antihero appears as an inner dimension of the individual: it is thought that Mexicans have within them, grafted onto their deep subconscious, an alter ego whose roots go back to time immemorial and are nourished by ancient indigenous sap.31 Hoover Giese is right in pointing out the abundance in Bartra’s writing of “biological vocabulary” (70). In addition, the presence in Belli’s novel of such vocabulary is indisputable. The notion of an “ancient indigenous sap,” for instance, is suggested in the novel as early as the opening page, when Itzá’s soul and material substance take possession of the orange tree, thereby activating the narrative: “Penetré en el árbol, en su sistema sanguíneo, lo recorrí como una larga caricia de savia y vida . . .” (9) [“I penetrated the tree, entered its circulatory system; I flowed through it like a long caress of sap and life . . .” 7]. Throughout the novel, in fact, there are constant references to Itzá’s sap and the juice from her fruit, not to mention the nourishing and empowering properties of these substances, akin to the transaction taking place in Rivera’s “Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilizing the Earth.” It is worth noting that while in La mujer habitada Itzá and the extended tree/human equivalency amounts to a metaphor of personal and political empowerment, in Bartra’s interpretation of Mexican identity, a similar equivalency holds negative, pessimistic undertones, as if Mexicans are tied to an unhappy past in much the same way as a tree is held in place by its roots. On the one hand, there are noticeable similarities between Belli’s and Bartra’s texts, at least insofar as they each make use of this human/tree equivalency, and they both draw—albeit for very different reasons—on Mesoamerica’s ancient, pre-Columbian past. On the other hand, however, there are also very interesting and important differences: one text is fiction, the other not; one is linked to a feminist and political agenda, the other not; one involves Nicaragua (where Aztec influence was marginal), the other Mexico, and so on. Could it be that La mujer habitada, despite

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its tragic ending, has an optimism stemming from the increasingly prominent and important role of women in certain Latin American countries? Along these lines, Kathleen N. March, for example, contends that “when God was a woman . . . the tree was not a phallic symbol but a female one, representing the communication of heaven and earth.”32 The question, then, could be restated: in what ways do attitudes and meanings ascribed to trees depend on contextual issues involving historical, cultural, sexual, and even ecological discourses? Before attempting to answer these questions, it is worth considering one more painting by Kahlo. In “Roots” (1943), Kahlo internalizes several of the ideas she had expressed in her earlier portrait of Burbank: here it is her own body that merges the human and vegetable realms, with a plant emanating from her torso. In this painting, once again, there are subtle references to Mexico’s pre-Columbian past. This time, however, the plant is a Calotropis procera, which contains a poison “used by the Indians of Latin America to kill or to commit suicide” (Ankori 194). At a very basic level, then, “Roots” seems to communicate a sense of negativity and despair. In addition, Kahlo is reclined in a manner that recalls La Malinche in Ruiz’s 1939 painting. Kahlo, apparently, was familiar with “El sueño de La Malinche” because she contributed two paintings to the same exhibition at the Galería de Arte Mexicano that premiered Ruiz’s work (Ankori 190). Gannit Ankori argues that such parallels between Kahlo’s and Ruiz’s work attest “to her identification with [La Malinche] who was ravaged and exploited by Cortés, like the Mexican earth itself” (192). Kahlo may have further identified with Cortés’s interpreter because, “like La Malinche herself, she, too, became a traitor” in apparent retaliation for Diego Rivera’s affairs (Ankori 193). Indeed, for Ankori, the opening in Kahlo’s torso out of which exits the plant is not indicative of a mystical and heuristic woman/nature bond that, according to some critics (Herrera 1983, 314; e.g., Burrus 2008, 89–90), Kahlo may have posited. It is rather—in “the context of Kahlo’s imagery”—an open wound that refers to her “Chingada Self” (Ankori 194). While the tree motif in La mujer habitada can be productively contextualized in terms of a number of (not necessarily mutually exclusive) discourses, including those involving science, environmentalism,

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gender, and art history, it appears that, ultimately, it is what one might call a “floating signifier.” According to Stuart Hall, such signifiers gain their meaning not because of what they contain in their essence but in the shifting relations of difference which they establish with other concepts and ideas in a signifying field. Their meaning, because it is relational and not essential, can never be fully fixed, but is subject to the constant process of redefinition and appropriation.33 Hall’s theory could help explain why critics tend to see the tree imagery in hopeful, optimistic terms in Kahlo’s “A Portrait of Luther Burbank,” while similar (albeit far from identical) imagery is viewed with greater ambiguity in her “Roots.” There seems to be, in addition, an interpretative discrepancy with regard to how critics view similar images in Kahlo’s and Rivera’s paintings. Belli’s novel, too, has been contested ground among competing critical readings, a sort of Rorschack test, as it were, of readers’ ideologies and the way they negotiate their understandings of Belli’s own ideologies. Does our understanding of La mujer habitada, then, end there? Is this novel no more than an intricate array of “floating signifiers” enveloped in an equally intricate scientific and aesthetic context? In the remainder of this chapter I offer that Kahlo’s “Roots” helps reveal what could be considered a “submerged” signifier in Belli’s novel: La Malinche. In terms both of Belli’s writing and of a Central American context broadly stated some confusion is possible when it comes to La Malinche, because “malinche” can refer to more than one being. In her poem “Nostalgia” (from her collection Apogeo), for instance, the speaker reports having left the land of her ancestors (“He dejado la Tierra de mis antepasados”) to pursue a romantic relationship. As a result, it is left to her lover to protect her from the ardent nostalgia she feels for home (“. . . tratas de protegerme de la nostalgia que poco a poco me / consume”). Of particular interest in this touching poem is how the speaker describes her journey in pursuit of her lover: in leaving her homeland, she is like “an indigenous woman on the trail of a conquistador, like La Malinche chasing Corteses” [“india tras

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el conquistador, malinche persiguiendo corteses”]. The “Malinche” in the preceding line, of course, corresponds to the meaning most readers would ascribe to the term—that is, “Malinche” is the nickname of Cortés’s interpreter: a figure Belli was undoubtedly familiar with, particularly given the novel’s broad Mesoamerican elements. Furthermore, however, the woman in the poem, in her journey into exile, dreams about the yellow blossoms of trees that walk in their sleep [“soñando con la floración amarilla de árboles sonámbulos”]. By now, the image in Belli’s writing of trees that walk about should no longer surprise us. It is worth inquiring, however, into the type of tree the poem’s speaker describes, that is, one with yellow blossoms and presumably from her Central American homeland. It so happens that in the tropics and subtropics (designators that encompass much of Central America), there is a species of tree native to Madagascar that has become nearly ubiquitous: Delonix regia, also known as Poinciana, Flamboyant, or Flame Tree (Record and Hess 313). According to the Firefly Encyclopedia of Trees, its combination of fast growth and long-lasting showy flowers borne on a tall umbrella-like tree makes the Flame Tree (Delonix regia) a favorite ornamental popular for urban planting schemes. Delonix regia is perhaps the widest planted species, grown throughout the subtropics and tropics as a street tree or in parks. (256) Interestingly, Record and Hess explain that D. regia is commonly known in Central America by an additional name: “malinche,” or Malinche tree (313). Although they mention Costa Rica as the specific country—one, incidentally, in which Belli lived in exile—where the tree is known as un malinche, La Real Academia Española adds Honduras and Nicaragua to this list of countries. La Real Academia, in fact, defines “malinche” as follows: Real academia: malinche (De Malinche, apodo de Marina, amante de Hernán Cortés, 1485–1547). 1. f. Hond. y Nic. Arbusto o árbol pequeño, de una altura máxima de cinco metros, de flores de color rojo fuego, o amarillo brillante, y fruto en vaina lampiña. La infusión de las hojas se supone que tiene propiedades abortivas.

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La corteza del tronco se utiliza para la curtimbre. 2. f. coloq. Hond. Persona, movimiento, institución, etc., que comete traición. [(From Malinche, nickname of Marina, lover of Hernán Cortés) . . . 1. Honduras and Nicaragua. Bush or small tree, with a maximum height of five meters, with flowers of fiery-red color, or bright yellow, and fruit in a smooth sheath. The infusion of the leaves supposedly has abortive properties. Its bark is used for tanning. 2. coloq. Honduras. Person, movement, institution, etc., that betrays]. These definitions and descriptions of the word malinche and the eponymous tree beg the question: are there such trees in La mujer habitada? If so, do they hold any particular significance? The most prominent tree in the novel is, after all, an orange tree. This tree, we know, has been associated with discourses of mestizaje in the Americas, and physically it works quite well as the symbol of the relationship between Lavinia and Itzá: an orange tree has attractive orange fruit that produce a common beverage (a beverage Lavinia consumes in copious amounts). The fruit of the malinche tree, meanwhile, is a slender, dry pod: a longer, wooden version of a string bean, and more suitable perhaps as a boomerang than for making juice. Returning to our question, however, there is, in fact, a malinche tree in La mujer habitada. Linda Craft’s observations about this tree are apropos: Sara, Lavinia’s best friend from childhood, carefully tends a garden of beautiful flowers surrounding a malinche tree that blooms bright red once a year . . . In contrast, General Vela’s wife and sister buy imported lotus flowers from Miami to decorate their new home for its inauguration . . . General Vela himself commits the final affront to nature, the extreme example of macho alienation from the Earth Mother, with [plastic flowers] on the tables of his office. (167–68) Craft’s interpretation is perceptive and persuasive. Let us, however, take another look. Sara does, indeed, have a malinche tree in her

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garden, and it is surrounded by lovely flowers (“hermosas flores” 44). That stated, the tree and the flowers surrounding it can be understood in a different light. Sara, after all, embodies the life path Lavinia could have taken but that she decided against. The former is the picture of wedded, domestic bliss, and she struggles to understand Lavinia’s choices and motivations. In defending her role as housewife, she asks Lavinia, rhetorically: “¿Pero no creés que las mujeres tenemos primacía sobre un territorio de la mayor importancia, con un poder real inimaginable . . . .. lo que se ha llamado ‘el poder detrás del trono’?” (177) [“But don’t you think we women control a more important territory, with an incredible, real power . . . what’s been called ‘the power behind the throne’?” 183]. Lavinia responds that such a justification has been invented by men (“Eso es un invento de los hombres” 177). The point here is that Sara and Lavinia are different: although their socioeconomic background is similar, they have developed divergent understandings of the role of women in society, and of the relationship between women and men. That Sara’s garden consists of pretty flowers, then, should be read in a way that differs from the paradigm that posits the tree as a female symbol of the harmony between heaven and earth. Rather, given Sara’s views, her garden represents a rigid social ornamentalism and superficiality. The malinche tree, similarly, is at best an ambiguous presence: as the two friends converse on topics that strike Lavinia as petty and inconsequential (particularly in comparison with her covert activities in the liberation movement), the narrator describes the somber ambiance in Sara’s house: “Atardecía. La luz crepuscular bañaba el jardín y las ramas bajas del árbol de malinche en medio del patio. Las dos amigas se quedaron en silencio, sumida cada una en sus propias reflexiones” (178) [“It was nearly dusk. The shadowy light bathed the garden and the low branches of the malinche tree in the middle of the patio. The two friends fell silent, each one submerged in her own reflections” 184]. Not surprisingly, Itzá “inhabited” an orange tree when she could have just as easily—particularly given its ubiquity—done the same to a malinche tree. Furthermore, the two trees are in separate physical spaces and Itzá makes no mention of the malinche tree. The malinche tree, in turn, is mute in the narrative, that is, it is not the novel’s vessel for a human spirit or voice.

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In my view, the novel (unwittingly, perhaps) proposes—not unlike Fuentes—the orange tree as a model for cultural identity in the Americas, and in so doing is critical of the malinche tree (and, by proxy, of La Malinche) and the things and ideas associated with it. It does so in ways, it is fair to say, that reinscribe the long-standing attacks against La Malinche and what she is seen as representing. It is also fair (and important) to say, however, that the year of the novel’s initial publication (1988) is just a few years before critical, feminist reappraisals of La Malinche began in earnest. If La Malinche has been seen negatively as being a traitor to the Aztecs and as the symbolic mother of mestizaje in Mexico, Itzá, in contrast, understands mestizaje differently. When she introduces us to Lavinia, for example, she remarks: “Es joven, alta, de cabellos oscuros, hermosa. Tiene rasgos parecidos a las mujeres de los invasores, pero también el andar de las mujeres de la tribu, un moverse con determinación, como nos movíamos y andábamos antes de los malos tiempos” (11) [“She is young, tall, dark-haired, beautiful. Her features resemble those of the women who came with the invaders, but she walks like the women of my tribe, firmly, as we used to move and walk before the bad times” 8–9]. Lavinia, then, in her mestizaje, combines in impressive ways qualities of both the invading and indigenous peoples. Itzá views Felipe, the male hero of the novel, through a similar optic: “Hoy vino un hombre . . . Él emana vibraciones fuertes. Lo rodea un halo de cosas ocultas. Es alto y blanco como los españoles. Ahora sé, sin embargo, que ni ella ni él lo son” (40) [“Today a man came . . . He gives off strong vibrations. He is surrounded by an aura of hidden things. He is tall and white, like the Spaniards. Now I know, however, that neither he nor she is a Spaniard” 41]. They are, in fact, representatives of what might be described as a successful or—at the very least—promising process of New World mestizaje, which presumably combines the best qualities of Spain and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. They may look European and to some extent think and behave accordingly, but their heart and soul are on the side of local political and cultural interests. Sara, meanwhile, represents the absence of mestizaje, or at the very least its failure. She could be seen in her tastes and interests as a malinchista, that is, someone more interested in foreign things.34 When

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she hosts Lavinia for breakfast, for instance, she serves her coffee in cups of white porcelain (“tazas de porcelana blancas” 44), which seem incongruous and awkward in Faguas’s tropical climate. During breakfast, Lavinia observed her friend’s “eighteenth-century lady’s face, with its fine, delicate features, her ‘porcelain skin,’ as Sara jokingly called it. Her blond hair was pulled back in a bun. Everything about her was soft and delicate” (44) [“Lavinia miró las facciones de dama del siglo XVIII, delicadas y finas, ‘cutis de porcelana’—decía Sara bromeando—; llevaba el pelo rubio recogido en un moño. Toda ella era leve y suave” 44]. In her delicacy and refinement, Sara seems more suitable for a place among old Castilian aristocracy than among Lavinia, Felipe, and their fellow revolutionaries. Everything about Sara seems to indicate an inauthentic preference for imported things and ideas. General Vela is another example of an unsuccessful, inauthentic mestizaje. Not only is he brutally opposed to many of his own countrymen and to their more idealistic and revolutionary vision of what Faguas could be; he is also uncomfortable in his own skin. According to the omniscient voice that narrates most of the story, Era un hombre a quien el apelativo de “gorila” le caía como anillo al dedo. Las facciones aindiadas casi escultóricas, podrían haber sido hermosas, si no estuvieran distorsionadas por la gordura y la expresión de blanco pedante. Renegado de su pasado y su origen, el general Vela olía a colonia cara usada con profusión . . . el pelo rizado, producto de mezclas de razas, había sido trabajosamente domado por el aceite . . . (246) [He was a man whom the nickname “gorilla” fit to a T. His Indianlike features, almost statuesque, could have been handsome if they hadn’t been distorted by fat and a conceited expression. General Vela denied his past and his origins, [and] reeked of expensive cologne . . . his curly hair, the product of a mix of races, had been tamed laboriously by brilliantine.] (259) General Vela “could have been handsome,” and probably could have been any number of other “good” things, but is too busy (as are his wife and sister-in-law) trying to ascend a social ladder imposed from

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the outside (i.e., external, eurocentric forces) on Faguas society. In short, he, too, is a traitorous malinchista who personifies a military presence every bit as intimidating as the conquistadors’ several hundred years earlier. Are the novel’s curious notions about mestizaje in any way problematic? In answering this question we can revisit, for example, Barbas-Rhoden’s contention that La mujer habitada in a sense reifies a mythical indigenous presence in the Americas while neglecting its modern manifestations. In addition, while Felipe and Lavinia seem to embody a “good” mestizaje, Sara and General Vela seem to embody its opposite, thus establishing what seems to amount to a simplistic albeit powerful binary between good and bad mestizajes. The orange tree/ malinche tree contrast, however, suggests another vantage point on the novel: Itzá is the indigenous female warrior who acted correctly, unlike La Malinche. Although she dies at the hands of the Spaniards, Itzá is able to inject her courageous spirit into Lavinia, who becomes embroiled in her own battle against oppressors. The challenge for Lavinia lies in using Itzá’s powers while attaining different practical (i.e., military) results. Ultimately, the two women coalesce into one force, whose duty it is, in a way, to exorcise La Malinche’s demons. The most noteworthy of these “demons” is, perhaps, the oppressive sense of guilt historically associated with La Malinche’s presumed act of betrayal.35 This sense of guilt or, as Cypess describes earlier, culpability, has been—in the wake of the Conquest—extended by patriarchal elements to all Latin American women. Similarly, Eve in particular and women in general have been held responsible for socalled original sin (see Belli’s recent novel, Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand). In La mujer habitada, Lavinia is initially reluctant to participate in the Movimiento and is tired from unexpectedly needing to help Felipe and Sebastian: Lavinia se inclinó sobre la mesa, puso la cabeza sobre los brazos y cerró los ojos. Se sentía cansada, exhausta; una culpa venida de resquicios oscuros la invadía. Imágenes extrañas de poblados en llamas, hombres morenos luchando contra perros salvajes—fantasmas de pesadillas diurnas clamaban en su mente. (70)

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[Lavinia leaned over the table, put her head on her arms and closed her eyes. She felt tired, exhausted, and a sense of shame welled from deep within her. Strange images of burning villages, dark men fighting off wild dogs—ghosts of daytime nightmares— clamored in her mind. 72] These images indeed seem strange given their anachronistic qualities: after all, Lavinia is a modern Latin American woman, but the ghosts in her “daytime nightmares” are straight out of episodes from the Conquest, an event Itzá rather than she experienced. In establishing contact with Lavinia, Itzá, too, is aware of the former’s initial feelings after declining to get involved in the revolution: “Ahora se siente culpable,” Itzá observes (74) [“Now she feels guilty” 76]. Unlike La Malinche and those whom she has influenced, presumably, the women in La mujer habitada overcome and transcend this feeling of guilt and are able to become active and (in Lavinia’s case) successful participants in revolutionary struggles. According to Paz’s simplistic and dated view, women in general are by nature enigmatic (“La mujer . . . es el Enigma” El laberinto de la soledad 89), a quality shared—as Zúñiga, among others, affirms—by La Malinche on account both of her “traitorous” acts and in the complex and varied construction of her historical persona over the centuries. Lavinia, too, can be enigmatic or duplicitous, not unlike La Malinche and Garro’s Laura Aldama: “Se tenía que acostumbrar, por lo pronto, a ser tres personas. Una para sus amigos y el trabajo, otra para el Movimiento, una tercera para Felipe. En ocasiones le daba miedo no saber cuál de esas personas era realmente” (154) [“For now, she had to get used to being three persons. One for her friends and her job, another for the Movement, a third for Felipe. At times she was afraid of not knowing which of these persons she really was” 158–59]. There are, then, clear parallels between La Malinche and an early stage of the Itzá/Lavinia dyad. Itzá and Lavinia act heroically in what was eventually a successful struggle for political control in Faguas; La Malinche, too—one could argue—was on the side of the victors. The basic difference between the women seems to be whose side they fought for. Itzá and Lavinia are on the side of local, American interests. This does not mean, however, that La mujer habitada advances a narrow, insular Americanism. On the contrary, Itzá’s

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reemergence as an orange tree and her relationship with Lavinia (who is both like and unlike Europeans) posits a new type of mestizaje—a mestizaje opposite the type associated with La Malinche for several centuries following the Conquest. Although in Lavinia’s time the invading Spaniards of the Conquest belong to the distant past, other battles remain, and Itzá as a character serves to underscore the commonalities between ancient and contemporary battles. It is fair to say, however, that such battles in La mujer habitada are not entirely about women’s roles in revolutionary struggles. Granted, they are about this, but also about much more. They are also about the ways Central American (and Latin American, as well) communities have developed over the centuries, oftentimes internalizing and perpetuating the agendas of the conquistadors through unproductive and self-defeating interpretations on mestizaje. Itzá, in her dual nature, frames these battles around a much vaster continuum, one that diminishes differences between women and men, past and present, and humans and their natural environment. The final words in the novel belong to Itzá. Given the ways they reiterate many of the concerns of this essay, it seems fitting that these words—a poem, in fact, that simultaneously eulogizes the martyred Lavinia while welcoming her to a different plane of existence—will also serve to help bring the present discussion to a close. Itzá introduces her poem by stating that she sees “great multitudes advancing along the roads opened by Yarince and the warriors, those of today, those of bygone eras” (411) [“Veo grandes multitudes avanzando en los caminos abiertos por Yarince y los guerreros, los de hoy, los de entonces” 387]. As such, previous and contemporary resistance movements are brought together in a common temporal plane. Then the poem begins: Nadie poseerá este cuerpo de lagos y volcanes. esta mezcla de razas; esta historia de lanzas; este pueblo amante del maíz, ... Pronto veremos el día colmado de la felicidad Los barcos de los conquistadores alejándose para siempre. (387)

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[No one will possess this body of lakes and volcanoes, this mixture of races, this history of spears; these people, lovers of maize, ... Soon we will see the joyous day the conquerors’ ships departing forever.] (411–12) As Itzá’s poem suggests, her (and Lavinia’s) story, quite significantly, encompasses the land of Central America, its history, its flora and fauna, and its people of mixed origins, all of whom partake in a collective nosotros that corresponds to everyone (and everything) negatively affected in the aftermath of the conquest of the Americas: an oppressive aftermath that continues into the present day of the novel (the 1970s) and one that is spanned by a fictional, ageless tree (Itzá) who reappears in the twentieth century in order to serve those whose interests and passions resemble her own. In effect, Lavinia gains fortitude from a time-traveling creature whose origins lie in the sixteenth century; not just any such creature, however: Itzá and not La Malinche, who would have been an inappropriate model. Interestingly, when Belli wrote La mujer habitada she may have already seen signs that her country’s revolutionary project would unravel. Indeed, the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990, two years after Belli published her novel. That stated, the character of Itzá helps the novel maintain its utopian impetus by underscoring the ways in which the cycle of victories and defeats involving the Sandinista movement are just part of larger, long-term efforts to bring about lasting peace, social justice, and equality in the region. Lastly, Itzá as a character amounts to a heroic model for modern women: one who has both stood the test of time and profited from her dual historical vantage point. While her presence in the novel and her particular way of traveling through time seem a far cry from those kinds informed by the science fictional varieties we have seen in earlier chapters, she nonetheless expresses—not unlike said varieties—extraordinary and supernatural means of bringing about long-awaited social changes in a Latin American locale.

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Inés Arredondo’s Historia verdadera de una princesa (1984) [“The True Story of a Princess,” 1997] is one of many texts that reexamines La Malinche and attempts to recast her in a favorable light: in this version of the story, La Malinche—true to the title of the work—is a princess who suffers the misfortune of being sold into slavery by her wicked mother after the sudden death of the former’s father. Afterward (i.e., during the Conquest, an event that is referred to only in the most general of ways), the princess maintains a regal air and acts with unfailing dignity, going as far as to forgive her mother, who by that time had herself become a slave to Cortés. If this version of the Malinche myth sounds inspired by the Old Testament story of Joseph being sold into slavery, as well as, perhaps, the story of Cinderella, that is because Historia verdadera de una princesa was written with a youthful audience in mind: it is, in fact, an illustrated children’s story (the subtitle is “Cuento para niños”). Furthermore, Arredondo’s story establishes an explicit connection with the story of Joseph. Young readers can learn, for example, that La Malinche’s “almost identical story [to Joseph’s] took place in Mexico less than five hundred years ago” (45). Indeed, one could argue that despite the numerous permutations La Malinche has endured in the Mexican mentality over the past 500 years, she is—in biblical terms, anyway—relatively recent news: Mexicans and, in particular, Mexican youth might do well to reconsider via the words and images in Historia verdadera de una princesa how they view the iconic sixteenth-century woman. Arredondo’s illustrated story about La Malinche brings us to the topic for the next chapter. Just as a broad examination of various contextual discourses (i.e., historiography, painting, botany, etc.) was necessary in providing a reading of La mujer habitada and other texts, the same holds true more generally for this entire study’s larger focus on time travel in cultural production from the Americas. It should come as no surprise, in some ways, that texts and other artifacts involving time travel and other seemingly impossible feats would break other kinds of “boundaries,” including those that inform “genre” and disciplinary divisions. Or is it rather the case that the boundaries we imagine are actually absent? In chapter 4, my focus turns to what is

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typically labeled “popular culture,” which—for the purposes of this study, at least—represents a “final frontier” of sorts: the increasingly contested frontier or division between “high” and “low” culture. Admittedly, several of the texts I analyzed in the preceding chapters could be labeled under “popular culture,” particularly some of the science fiction narratives. What distinguishes the texts I examine in chapter 4 is the kind of reader to whom they are directed: these readers are, by and large, as is the case with Historia verdadera de una princesa, beginning readers (or the young at heart), whether the texts be comic books and/or language “readers” geared toward learners of a second language. In both cases, time travel in the Americas is of primary concern. While one might assume that the stakes are lower with “readers” and comic books, this is far from being the case.

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CHAPTER 4

Not Just Kids’ Stuff: Time Travel as Pedagogy in the Americas

The Earth Historical Section has prepared some information for you about what to expect during the [Aztec] time period. Study this information carefully. And, keep a careful lookout. There will be plenty of danger, those Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, you know. Now, good luck and get going. Mark Acres, Temples of Blood, 1985

M

el Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006) focuses on the decadence and brutality of Maya kingdoms in his efforts to make the argument (as stated in the film’s epigram quoting the philosopher Will Durant) that a society can only be conquered after it has become fragmented internally. He drives his point home when, as the film nears its end, a fantastic, drawn-out fight between members of warring tribes is interrupted when they stumble upon the arrival of a Spanish flotilla. This scene, in which two Maya warriors literally drop their weapons from sheer amazement and proceed as if in a trance in the direction of the galleons, is more fiction and anachronism— driven by Gibson’s ideologies—than historical fact. The landscape, for example, is wrong: the Spaniards did not arrive on the mountainous Pacific side of Mesoamerica. More importantly, the Maya kingdoms the film depicts were already a thing of the past by the time the Spaniards first arrived in the Yucatan in the early fifteenth century.

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Gibson, however, could not have made his argument without this temporal convergence.1 A friend of mine joked that the actors in the film must have been paid by the amount of blood they shed, given the remarkable amount of violence and savagery depicted in the film. Indeed, Gibson is not alone in underscoring this aspect of pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas: we may recall that in Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch (see chapter 1), a traveler from several thousand years into the future journeys to Mexico in advance of the first Spanish conquistadors, imploring the local population to stop ritually sacrificing each other so as to better present a common front to the Spaniards. By no means am I suggesting that violence and bloodshed were absent from preColumbian civilizations and that these are simply imaginative and ideology-driven projections, both on the part of the Europeans who encountered these groups during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and by contemporary commentators (like Gibson), eager to use certain elements of pre-Columbian life as a way to put forth an argument within a modern polemical context. Indeed, there is copious evidence pointing to the presence of violence (and other forms of hostility) in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explains, for instance, while objecting to anthropologists and other researchers who see humankind as being essentially selfish and belligerent, there are, in fact, “beautifully colored murals from ancient Mexico and other locales [that] depict the grisly torture of captured enemies, fearsome and totally convincing war propaganda from the distant past. Such evidence renders a bloody-awful record bloody clear” (26). As Spartan-like as the Aztecs, to take one pre-Columbian group as an example, may have been, it would also be a mistake to reduce their society to the violence often associated with it, just as it would be wrongheaded to define US society in light of its military activities in the Middle East and elsewhere. Nonetheless, irrespective of their historical accuracy; ideological agenda; or imaginative, science fictional plot turns, novels like Pastwatch and films like Apocalypto ask either explicitly or implicitly intriguing questions surrounding the fate of the Americas. Such questions have, in some form or fashion, fascinated many scholars (Tzvetan Todorov and Jared Diamond, among others): First, was the Conquest inevitable? Furthermore, which aspects of pre-Columbian

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civilizations would have required modifications in order to prevent the devastation that ensued upon the arrival of the Europeans? These questions continue to inspire both scholars and writers of fiction. The latter, often in an attempt to arrive at possible answers to such questions, have in several instances sent fictional emissaries on exploratory missions to the past. One might ask, in addition, if representations of the Conquest and/or pre-Columbian civilizations, including Gibson’s film, need be almost x-rated, based on the amount of violence they depict as well as in the gravity of the themes and questions they posit. Surprisingly, the answer is “no,” as is revealed by a look at some recent texts about time travel intended for beginning readers: texts that—given their intended audience and the gravity of the topics they address—in many respects problematize conventional divisions between “high” and “low” cultural production. That stated, such texts nonetheless often accomplish two things: they manage to emphasize the violent aspects of pre-Columbian American societies while adopting or reactivating the perspective of the conquerors. Teaching the History of the Americas to Young Anglophone Readers

Me oh Maya! (2003), written by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Adam McCauley, is, according to the book jacket, intended for readers ages seven to eleven, and is one of several texts that, taken collectively, comprise an additional discursive site or focal point for the fictional missions to alter history in Latin America and the Caribbean. My comments on Me oh Maya! should be prefaced by a brief account of an earlier but quite similar work of science fiction, although it was presumably written for adults: John Christopher’s New Found Land (1983). In this novel, a North American named Brad and an Englishman named Simon travel through a portal that places them in an alternate, allohistorical reality. Having left the twentieth-century world they knew, their new reality “stemmed from a particular juncture in European history. Here the Roman empire had survived into the late twentieth century, though at a cost of total lack of social or technological progress” (4). Thinking that things might be better back in the Americas, the young men and two Romans sail across the Atlantic only to encounter

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hostile Native Americans and Vikings. They also learn that, in their new reality, the Aztecs have met (and conquered)2 the Incas, and that their domain spans from South America to much of what is—in our reality—US territory. Their first stop in the land of the Aztecs is the city of Palzibil, located in what otherwise would be South Carolina. Realizing that success in the ceremonial ballgame amounts to the most efficient way of acquiring food and other goods in an otherwise rigid Aztec society, the four youths (including a Viking woman who replaced one of the Romans who died in battle) decide to compete in the games. After some early victories, they learn that if they reach the finals they had better win: the losers “qualify for . . . being ritually sacrificed!” (92). It goes without saying that—in what is perhaps the novel’s pivotal sequence—our “heroes” prevail. Their victories (and the novel as a whole, perhaps), as juvenile and heuristic as they may seem in Christopher’s tale, reveal nonetheless that the Aztecs are outwitted by the newcomers and are the object of their derision even in this alternate world. Brad, for example, states the following by way of explaining the symbolic importance of the ballgame in the Aztec mentality: “Religious nuts. It fits in with their beliefs. Winning the games is the greatest thing in the world as far as an Aztec is concerned” (92). The third-person narrator’s choice of words is also condescending: the chief priest, for example, “had jabbered in Aztec . . . some kind of blessing” at the foreigners (99, emphasis added). Ultimately, the Aztecs as well as all the other pre-Columbian societies the protagonists encountered in their journey through the alternate reality remain no less foreign and exotic as these societies might appear to anyone giving the history of the Americas the most cursory glance. The Aztecs, having once already been defeated by the Spaniards in the actual historical record, amount in New Found Land to a punching bag: an interesting and somewhat challenging opponent, but one that seems predestined to fulfill its preordained role as loser. Meanwhile, Scieszka’s tale—despite being targeted for a younger audience—is similar in structure and in spirit to New Found Land. Part of the “Time Warp Trio,” the youthful protagonists of Me oh Maya! have, in other adventures, seen “everything from Stone Age cave people to our own great-granddaughters one hundred years in the future. We’ve wrestled gladiators. We’ve sailed with pirates. We’ve

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hung out with the guy who built the Brooklyn Bridge” (7). This time, Joe, Sam, and Fred are hurled from an informal basketball game in present-day Brooklyn to Chichén Itzá in the year 1000 ce. Prior to their travel back in time, the game is so casual that at one point Sam interrupts play to explain, using chalk on the court, the Maya number system to his buddies. Just as he is writing the present date in Maya numerals, Fred’s shot is suspended in midair and the three began their fantastic (and thus hardly science fictional) voyage through space and time. Suddenly, “guys with bright colored feather headpieces and long white loincloths grabbed [their] arms. Other guys poked sharp green stone blade spears in [their] chests” (12). In a series of events that prefigure Apocalypto and in some ways recall Christopher’s New Found Land, Julio Cortázar’s “La noche boca arriba” (1956), and Augusto Monterroso’s classic short story, “El eclipse” (1952), the boys from Brooklyn are apprehended and prepared as sacrifices to the harvest. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the author takes several liberties that require a not-insignificant suspension of disbelief on the part of his readers (or at least this reader). The boys, for example, are able to communicate with their Maya captors in English, which the latter understand perfectly, save for the occasional basketball-related expressions uttered by the boys (they introduce themselves to the high priest as Fred Kashmuny, Sam Inurface, and Joe Kikbut). Furthermore, during the crucial game of pelota that would determine their fate, the boys are allowed to compete with their hands (as in basketball), a practice prohibited in the Maya sport. Nonetheless, Me oh Maya!, as promised by the book jacket, manages to interweave information about Maya civilization that might be of interest and educational value to young North American readers. For instance, after being escorted to the top of the main pyramid (the Kukulkán pyramid, to be precise), Sam corrects Fred, who felt he had just climbed a thousand steps: “Ninety-one [steps],” Sam explains, “It’s a calendar thing. Four sides of ninety-one steps . . . This last step on top equals three hundred sixty-five for the number of days in the year” (26). Ultimately, the boys’ fate (or better stated, their capacity to return to their time period) rests—as was also the case in New Found Land—on their ability to outplay their Maya captors in a game of pelota. After being left to die in the jungle, they are rescued by a Maya

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boy whose father had been sacrificed by the ruling priests, and are encouraged by the boy’s mother to pretend they are warriors returned from the underworld. In sharp distinction with Monterroso’s short story, it is the outsiders who prevail in Me oh Maya!: the boys narrowly win the game, proceed to escape from their captors, and return to modern-day Brooklyn. They do so, however, only after describing to the Maya a wealth of technologies and stores of knowledge previously unknown to them: “You guys make a great calendar,” said Sam. “And the zero is fantastic. But you really might want to look into this thing called ‘the wheel.’ Very handy invention” (61). Joe, the narrator, adds: “Let’s show them our alphabet . . . It’s got to be easier than drawing all of those pictures” (61–62). Forgive me for not laughing at these playful criticisms on Maya technology. A student in one of my classes giggled when I mentioned that many Mesoamericans mistook Spaniards mounted on horseback for a single, centaurlike creature. One person’s tragedy can be another’s joke, apparently. Me oh Maya!, then, is a glimpse into some of the characteristics of Maya civilization (including aspects of its social divisions and fragmentations) sufficiently filtered and sanitized for young readers of English. Alas, through the magic of time travel, boys from Brooklyn can play ball for their lives against eleventh-century Maya warriors and in doing so encourage the practice of reading among North American youth while introducing them to an easily digestible but dramatically skewed and/or incomplete version of a very different culture. Sam, after all, might have wondered (and Scieszka might have provided an answer) why Mesoamericans did not use the wheel. Sam and Joe’s observations are preceded in spirit and content, for example, by those of Richard Current, Harry Williams, and Frank Freidel, who affirmed in the mid-1960s that “American civilization owed very little to the aborigines of the New World,” and that “even the most brilliant of the native cultures were stunted in comparison with the growing civilization of Europe. None of the Indians had an alphabet . . . and none had any conception of the wheel” (4). Virgil Vogel counters, however (and in ways that anticipate the ideas put forth by Jared Diamond in his Guns, Germs, and Steel), that the Aztecs used wheels on children’s toys, but had no beasts of burden to enable them to put the principle to better use . . . the

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comparisons made above [i.e., by Current et al] are perniciously unfair. Barbaric Europe borrowed its wheel and its alphabet, not to mention its numerals and many domesticated plants and animals, from Semitic peoples of Asia. (292) Its factual errors and playful but fundamental arrogance aside, one of the premises underlying Me oh Maya! is that pre-Columbian American societies are not only of ongoing interest, but that they are of sufficient interest to warrant the temporal journey necessary to facilitate a fictional encounter between past and present, particularly when certain elements of pre-Columbian societies are foregrounded for young readers, even as objects of derision (contemporary Maya societies would not, apparently, be worthy of this kind of attention). One could, perhaps, go further in establishing commonalities between present-day Brooklyn and ancient Chichén Itzá. The two, after all, share the same—albeit vast—landmass (i.e., North America) and in many ways can be connected to the same narrative or set of narratives that account for what has become the story of the Americas. This is so even if Scieszka—who in 2008 was named by the Library of Congress the National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature—is unable to address these broader, more philosophical connections due at least in part to pragmatic reasons involving the age of his intended audience. Me oh Maya! also suggests that the desire to instruct students on the history of the Americas, whether pre- or post-Columbian, is often closely linked to the desire (seen also in New Found Land, Pastwatch, and Conquistador) to wonder what might have happened had the indigenous populations had different technologies and ideologies, or if certain pivotal historical moments had taken a different turn: a different turn, it must be stated, created by a direct intervention from visitors from another place and time. Such fictional speculation on variations of historical outcomes can in some ways be linked both to ancient pre-Columbian conceptions of time and to more modern conceptions. In terms of the former, in his Labyrinth of Solitude, for example, Octavio Paz explains that for the Aztecs, “el tiempo—o más exactamente: los tiempos—además de constituir algo vivo que nace, crece, decae, era una sucesión que regresa. Un tiempo se acaba; otro vuelve” (119) [“. . . time—or, more precisely, each period of time—was not only

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something living that was born, grew up, decayed and was reborn. It was also a succession that returned: one period of time ended and another came back” 94–95]. In other words, what modern readers and writers are inclined to categorize under science fiction or fantasy (i.e., contact between different time periods) may, in fact, have held similarities to certain pre-Columbian understandings of how time works. That stated, modern writers in the Americas have not been satisfied merely to mimic in their writings Mesoamerican temporal schemes. Instead, some of them—for practical reasons involving current political and social realities—combine these ancient temporal schemes with decidedly modern ones: referring specifically to Mexican writers like Juan Rulfo and Elena Garro, Victoria Campos argues that these writers “disrupt the mythical with its circular time and structure in favor of a linear narration that returns to the past in order to set it ‘straight,’ in order to emancipate the revolutionladen present onto a new historical trajectory” (60–61). Fictional, interventionist visits to the past, then—and here I am thinking in particular of time travel—can also have practical objectives in terms of the present. Scieszka’s book, not unlike the authors Campos describes, has practical objectives. These objectives, however, differ greatly from those of Rulfo and Garro in their political orientation. Instead, Me oh Maya!, in its use of pre-Columbian peoples primarily for diversionary and pedagogical ends, falls within a pattern of similar tales geared at young English-speaking readers and viewers. In these texts, the devastation and pain of conquest are either absent or muted. The Canadian animated series, Backyardigans, for instance, features an episode, entitled, “Chichen-Itza Pizza,” in which the young adventurers descend on the eponymous Maya archaeological site during the pre-Conquest era, that is, at its imperial zenith. Far from making any serious attempt to introduce its viewers to the complexities of Chichén Itzá, however, the episode engages in lighthearted, G-rated anachronisms. The “king” of Chichén Itzá, for example, unexpectedly proclaims, “Bring forth my pizza,” and is happy when a pizza arrives despite the fact that he lives so far outside Chichén Itzá Pizza’s delivery area. Such a scene can be read in light of critiques offered by postcolonial studies. Val Plumwood, for instance, describes

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the strategy of “Incorporation” that has commonly been used in colonizing discourses: Differences are judged as grounds of inferiority. The order which the colonized possess is represented as disorder or unreason. The colonized with their “disorderly” space are available for use without limit, and the assimilating project of the colonizer is to remake the colonized and their space in the image of the colonizer’s own selfspace, own culture or land, which is represented as the paradigm of reason, beauty, and order. The speech or voice of the colonized is recognized only to the extent that it is assimilated to that of the colonizer. (339) Thus, Joe’s and Sam’s comparative assessments of Maya civilization in Me oh Maya! and the Maya king’s apparent obsession with pizza in the Backyardigans episode can be reconsidered as being something besides just innocent fun and games intended for children. Indeed, they can also be considered a cruel joke played on the memory of the conquered Mesoamerican civilizations and a symptom of the ongoing neglect and oppression of the living descendants of said civilizations. While Me oh Maya! and “Chichen Itza Pizza” are meant primarily as fanciful entertainments for young readers, there are examples of tales with stated pedagogical objectives with regard to Mesoamerican civilizations, even if they, too, delve into unproblematized sensationalism. Fiona Macdonald’s You Wouldn’t Want to Be an Aztec Sacrifice! Gruesome Things You’ d Rather Not Know (2001) exemplifies this trend. Although this text does not involve time travel in the way I understand it in this study, it does ask contemporary young readers to envision themselves in fifteenth-century Tenochtitlán. Should this unlikely event transpire, Macdonald explains (among other things) that the reader, if captured by the Aztecs, “might be: flayed (skinned) . . . beheaded . . . [or] drowned” (22). In many respects, Macdonald adopts for young readers the ideological position of the conquerors, who used their revulsion against Mexica/Aztec cultural practices to legitimate their annihilation (or subjugation) of Tenochtitlán and much of the rest of Mesoamerica.

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Tenochtitlán is also the setting for Julia Jarman’s similarly titled The Time-Travelling Cat and the Aztec Sacrifice (2006). Jarman’s children’s novel is longer and more sophisticated than Scieszka’s and Macdonald’s, and is probably designed for a slightly older readership akin to that of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In other temporal adventures, Ka (the time-traveling cat) has also visited ancient Rome and ancient Egypt. It is clear from the text that Jarman has consulted some of the primary texts that detail the conquest of the Americas, including the writings of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Hernán Cortés, and Bartolomé de las Casas. Some of the dialogue, in fact, consists of direct citations of the transcribed speeches of these last two. That stated, Jarman employs not a small amount of authorial license in crafting her tale: Las Casas, for instance, was absent from Cortés’s 1519 expedition into the Valley of Mexico, but is present in the novel as a defender of the Aztecs.3 Not unlike Scieszka’s and Macdonald’s texts, Jarman’s also engages in simplistic, stereotyped visions of Mesoamerican culture: visions that appeal, in this case, to young British readers and their fears. The back cover, for instance, states: When Ka, the time-travelling cat, vanishes [from her home in England], she leaves a word on Topher’s computer: Tenochtitlán. Topher [the young boy with whom Ka lived and who invariably must retrieve him] is horrified. That was the home of the bloodthirsty Aztecs! Indeed, Topher already feared that Ka would travel to Tenochtitlán after the two had watched a TV program on the Aztecs and their sanguinary ways (1). Topher warned, “Don’t ever travel to the time of the Aztecs, Ka . . . I’d hate to have to go there” (1). Once again, the fear of a mysterious, ominous, pre-Columbian society serves as the simple device to activate the events of the story. Not surprisingly, Ka vanishes, and it is left to Topher to go find him. The novel provides little in the way of scientific explanations for Ka’s time travel, except for certain magical powers he acquired via contacts with ancient Egyptians. Topher, meanwhile, is (quite appropriately) conveyed to sixteenth-century Tenochtitlán on the wings of a giant quetzal, a rare bird prized throughout Mesoamerica because

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of its brilliant plumage. Once on site, Topher is somehow equipped with a preexisting personal narrative that everyone recognizes: he has been, during Cortés’s voyage to Mexico, the latter’s cabin boy (32). Even though his “fellow” Spaniards call him Topher, he is able to communicate freely with them in the language of the novel (English), and he has well-developed likes and dislikes among Cortés’s crew: he is particularly fond, for example, of Las Casas and holds a strong aversion toward Alvarado, Cortés’s (actual) brutal and conniving secondin-command. Ultimately, Topher is able to rescue Ka from the Aztecs, and avoids destruction at the hands of Alvarado, who had assumed command when Cortés was summoned elsewhere to suppress a brewing mutiny among his fellow Spaniards. Throughout, Topher is witness to the cataclysmic events of the Conquest, which include the destruction of Tenochtitlán and the rise of the Spanish colonial apparatus. Safely ensconced back in England, he has a newly acquired perspective of a museum exhibition on the ancient Aztecs: He was hesitating outside the darkened gallery where two huge statues of Aztec gods stood guard. Suddenly he was back on the pyramid steps with statues peering down at him, and though he could hear kids inside the gallery shrieking and laughing, he could smell dried blood. (146) Needless to say, he could smell this dried blood only in a fictional sense, for this blood had long since dried and vanished. Furthermore, there is (and was) no Topher who visited sixteenth-century Tenochtitlán, except in this novel. For its young readers, however, Jarman’s novel may amount to the nearest, most vivid visit they may make to that time and place, factual errors notwithstanding. Along these lines, it is worth asking if it is better for young readers to have access to presumably enjoyable and theatrical (but in some respects incorrect) texts about civilizations from the past than to have no awareness at all about these civilizations. Similarly, it seems fair to posit the possibility that in these texts, and particularly on account of their emphasis on Mesoamerican (ritual) violence, the Conquest and its aftermath seem on the one hand inevitable and on the other hand justified.

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For youth hoping to “travel” to sixteenth-century Tenochititlán, there is an additional option beyond merely reading about Cortés and Moctezuma. Mark Acres’s Temples of Blood (1985) allows its readers to participate in complex role-playing exercises akin, perhaps, to the better known game, Dungeons and Dragons. Part of the Timemaster series, which includes visits to other times and locations such as Cleopatra’s Egypt, King Arthur’s Camelot, and Odysseus’s Greece, Temples of Blood is premised on the need for participants (members of the “TimeCorps”) to prevent time “renegades” (both human and alien) from intervening in pivotal historical moments and consequently altering the flow of history. In effect, nothing less than the fate of humankind is at stake. Players are furnished with the equipment typical of a parlor game, including a game board, dice, and lengthy (sixty-four pages!) instructions. They are also, however, given a mission statement for each of the episodes. In Temples of Blood, as in all their adventures, it is “to find and capture renegades while preventing any disruption of the timeline” (front inside cover). They are also given their current mission’s “Historical Background” which, in the case of Temples of Blood, details—once again, based on Díaz del Castillo’s chronicles—Cortés’s background and agendas, and the same for Moctezuma. The game, in theory at least, combines fun of a cerebral, strategizing nature with a basic, informal introduction to the events of the conquest of Mexico. In addition, players receive character profiles on the principal actors (both historical and fictitious) in this saga. Cortés, for example, is listed as having the following tools and character traits: dagger/knife, horseman’s lance, polearm, swords, master equestrian, mounted melee, crossbow, long-barreled gun, cannon, gambling, master of investigation, master of military leadership, and outdoor survival (3). This list is followed by an assessment of his character: Cortes [sic] ranks as one of the greatest military commanders of all time. His conquest of Mexico, against overwhelming odds, was due in part to luck, but also to an iron will, singleness of purpose, an ability to anticipate and prevent or blunt attacks by an opponent, and an engaging personality that enabled him to win over to his side most people with whom he dealt. (3)

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Moctezuma, in turn, is given in the game a “Significance Rating” of 200, higher than any other character, save for his equal Cortés. His tools and character traits are comparable to Cortés’s: dagger/ knife, swords, sling, shortbow, thrown weapon, javelin, distance running, master of investigation, and master of military leadership (4). Significantly, he (and his allies) must do without the Spaniards’ horses and firearms. Moctezuma is assessed as follows: Moctezuma is frequently seen as a tragic figure. He was a thoroughbred aristocrat, an able and (in terms of his own beliefs) just ruler, and a man with enormous pride in his people, their culture, and their accomplishments. He was also devoted to the religious beliefs and practices of his people. (4) This description is followed by specific instructions to the participant acting as Moctezuma: “Play Moctezuma as a ruler of great dignity. He is a man bound by his word, and he grieves as he watches the destruction of his kingdom with the fatalistic conviction that its destruction must be the will of the gods” (4). Interestingly, La Malinche is absent from the game and is given no character profile. This omission could be explained by the game’s emphasis on warfare and military strategy as well as, perhaps, by Acres’s own interests and presumably limited knowledge of the events surrounding the Conquest. One could, for example, liken the focus in Temples of Blood (notice the title) to that in other texts we have seen that highlight the Aztecs’ bellicosity. That stated, Temples of Blood—in keeping with the limited and sketchy role a few Spanish women had in Cortés’s expedition4 —does allow for female players. The instructions indicate, for instance, that players will arrive on scene on November 7, 1519, just outside the beautiful gardens of Iztapalapa [near Tenochtitlán]. From there, you should be able to link up easily with Cortes and his forces. Male agents will be disguised as ordinary Spanish soldiers . . . Female agents will be disguised as distinguished ladies visiting the New World from old Castille. (33) The game also provides fictitious architectural diagrams for the major temples in Tenochtitlán, as well as a guide to the pronunciation

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of words in the Nahuatl language that recur in the game (e.g., Huitzilipochtli, Quetzalcoatl, Tlaloc, etc.). This pronunciation guide is above all for the benefit of youthful players; the time-traveling characters themselves have no such need: besides being furnished with a “chronoscooter, communicator, and stunner with one extra clip of stunner ammo,” the characters also receive “language implants for Spanish and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs” (33). Now to the game. Participants are graded on their ability to identify the mischievous time renegades and, ultimately, on whether or not they ensure that the historical record remains intact. It so happens that these renegades have their own reasons for wanting to see Cortés fail: they “assume that the destruction of Cortes will lead to a powerful, unified Indian civilization on the North American continent. A more ‘perfect,’ easily-controlled civilization” (2): one not unlike the kind Aurelio tried to establish in Mauricio-José Schwarz’s “Seguir a los príncipes” (See chapter 1). Seemingly, then, participants have at best dubious motivations for partaking in the game. After all, there are two possible outcomes: either the renegades win by enabling the Aztecs to destroy Cortés, which would lead to the aforementioned powerful and unified Indian civilization that will later be subservient to the renegade masters,5 or Cortés and his army are victorious. This, we know, also led to the colonization and servitude of the Mesoamericans. Hence, for the Aztecs, they must contend with a foreign master in either eventuality. Although I have not rounded up participants with whom to stage an experimental episode of Temples of Blood, if reasonably astute participants are divided equitably on either side of the proceedings and if, quite importantly, the results hinge to a significant degree on the roll of the dice, then the final outcome will favor the renegades about as often as it favors the Spaniards. The game, then, has an equal chance of subverting the historical record as it does of preserving it. The instructions for the game, quite appropriately, account for deviations from the events of the Conquest: Moctezuma may, for instance, be stoned by his people, which would be in line with recorded history (whether or not he died from these wounds or was helped to his demise by the Spaniards is a separate issue). If, meanwhile, the events in the game have been sufficiently diverted from the historical record, Moctezuma can offer the following words to his

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subjects: “Rise up, my people! Rise up, and give their [the Spaniards’] blood to Huitzilipochtli! Give their hearts to the sun!” (29). The instructions then indicate that Moctezuma’s “courageous speech so inflames the Aztec people that they overwhelm the Spanish garrison. Cortes is killed, and the [participants] have to escape Tenochtitlán as best they can” (29). Ultimately, success for participants in the game amounts to preserving the historical events as they were recorded by writers like Díaz del Castillo. They lose some points if they leave evidence behind of their time travel apparatuses. Failure, interestingly enough, lies in Aztec victory, for it will eventually imperil everyone: following the unification of American indigenous civilizations, “sporadic warfare” between Europe and Mesoamerica would culminate in the “holocaust of 2054, in which British Europe and the Indian New World destroyed one another” (32). If Temples of Blood communicates any broader messages, they seem to be that, first, the events surrounding the conquest of Mexico played a pivotal role in the creation of society as we now know it. Second, these events are worthy of study and analysis even in the guise of a game designed for youth. Lastly, the game calls on its participants to privilege the perspective and interests of the invading Spaniards. After all, deviations from a historical record in which they were victorious could spell doom for everyone. In this regard, one could argue that the subtle fear of science fictional interventions in the world’s historical events in equally subtle ways once again favors the symbolic, ongoing, and repetitive decimation of pre-Columbian civilizations, not to mention the consequences of said decimation. Teaching the History of the Americas to English-Speaking Learners of Spanish

Elías Miguel Muñoz, a Cuban poet and novelist currently residing in the United States, has also contributed to the field of readers for language learners. Unlike Scieszka’s and Jarman’s stories, however, Muñoz’s texts are targeted to adult or young adult learners of Spanish. As Stephen Krashen explains in the preface to Muñoz’s Viajes fantásticos, the stories in this collection provide “students of Spanish with comprehensible reading material and hopes to inspire

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in them the desire to read more” (ix). One of these stories, “El último sol,” which is in many respects a love story, also concerns itself with temporal travel between the present and the final days of the Aztec empire (the “last sun,” or fifth sun, corresponds to the epoch of the Aztec calendar during which the Spaniards arrived; for more on the fifth sun in Aztec lore, see also the discussion in chapter 1 of Homero Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles). Gone from “El último sol” are the juvenile jokes and puns that characterize Me oh Maya! Underlying both stories, however, is the understanding (at times implicit) of both authors that themes involving pre-Columbian societies and/or the Conquest, as well as direct “visits” to these eras will—in the words of Krashen—inspire in beginning readers the “desire to read more.” One could object that the Maya and Aztec civilizations are sufficiently interesting in their own right and that they should not or need not be taught as dimensions of an experiment with standard conceptions of time. For educators, though, Me oh Maya! and “El último sol” present an opportunity to explain pre-Columbian cosmologies or cosmovisiones and to underscore the sense among many residents of the Americas (and palpable to both Scieszka and Muñoz) that the present, and indeed the future, are closely linked or weighted by the events surrounding the Conquest. As Alan Riding observes in reference to modern Mexico, the birth pains of the new mestizo race are not over. More than 460 years after the Conquest, neither the triumph of Cortés nor the defeat of Cuauhtémoc has been properly assimilated, and the repercussions of that bloody afternoon in Tlatelolco [that sealed the fate of the Aztecs] continue to be felt. (3) In the section on suggested writing activities that follows the story, Muñoz himself frames the issue in much broader terms by suggesting to students the following composition topic: “En su opinión, ¿por qué tienen tanto interés los seres humanos en la idea de viajar por el tiempo? ¿Cuál es la posible base de esa fascinación?” (96) [“In your opinion, why do humans have so much interest in the idea of time travel? What lies at the root of this fascination?”]. Later, in his suggestions to the instructor on possible activities for the class, he offers

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some examples of movies, TV shows, and books that depict time travel as a way to get the discussion going. Movies: Back to the Future, Somewhere in Time, Star Trek: First Contact; Television: Several episodes of the science fiction shows Babylon 5, Farscape, and all the Star Trek series; Books: the classics The Time Machine by H. G. Wells and The Winds of Time by Chad Oliver. You will also find abundant recent fiction on this theme. (106–7) Clearly, as evidenced by this list, time travel has been mined as a theme several times by English speakers in the arena of cultural production. Interestingly, however, and perhaps in an effort to offer instructors cultural material with which their students may be familiar, he overlooks the not insignificant corpus of texts interested in both time travel and New World themes, of which “El último sol” happens to be an example (we shall see, however, that this story is not the only one by Muñoz within this general category). “El último sol” is the tale of a young Mexican man named Daniel Flores who lives in a small town in the central valley of Mexico City and in the shadows of the storied volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. Following a prologue that outlines the basic legend of the settlement of Tenochtitlán and the development of the ensuing Aztec civilization, we learn that Daniel (whose last name, “Flores,” echoes the description of the Aztec guerra florida described in the story’s prologue) is caught between two eras: despite living in contemporary Mexico and—as a member of a small-scale farming family—being confronted with limited opportunities for educational achievement and social mobility, he has always been fascinated with Mexico’s past. He states, Desde niño me ha fascinado la historia. En la preparatoria estaba seguro de que iba a seguir la carrera de historiador. Quería hacer descubrimientos, registrar archivos, encontrar documentos importantes. Me interesaban sobre todo las culturas prehispánicas. (32–33) [I have been fascinated with history since I was a child. In high school I was sure that I would become a historian. I wanted to

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discover, to search archives, to find important documents. Above all, pre-Hispanic cultures interested me.] In a compromise with his parents, however, he agrees to follow his dream of going to Mexico City in order to pursue his university studies, but with the stipulation that he concentrate on agronomy, a more practical and potentially beneficial field of study. Nonetheless, in Mexico City he is able to find enjoyment in Diego Rivera’s mural at the Hotel del Prado, where he had found employment as a bellboy. This mural, incidentally, is titled “Sueño de una tarde dominical en Alameda Central” and dates from 1947 (following the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City it was moved to the Diego Rivera Museum, which was built specifically to house the famous—and portable— mural). Significantly, the mural is a composite of Mexican history and depicts—in anachronistic fashion—Rivera as a young boy next to the adult Frida Kahlo, and they in turn are flanked by, among many others, Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez, and several conquistadors. Not only does the mural’s subject matter serve in reinforcing Daniel’s stated interest in history, it also prefigures the temporal dislocations and anachronisms that await him later in the story. In another endeavor to immerse himself in Mexico’s past, on weekends Daniel would visit Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology (“los fines de semana, para distraerme . . . iba al Museo de Antropología” 34). This museum happens to be known throughout the world for its collection of Mexican pre-Columbian art, its reproductions of Tenochtitlán, and its depictions of everyday life in Aztec society. Furthermore, he is unable to look out over Mexico City without wondering about its distant past: “Como otras veces, me pregunté cómo habrá sido este lugar cuando, un día de 1519, Hernán Cortés lo tuvo ante sus ojos” (41) [“As in other times, I wondered what this place would have been like when, on a day in 1519, Hernán Cortés beheld it”]. Mexico’s pre-Columbian past, in effect, coincides in Daniel’s mind with its present. Despite his commitment to his studies, however, Daniel longs for the tranquility of his small pueblo, and in particular the company of his girlfriend, Chalchi (short for Chalchiunenetl, which means “jade doll” in Nahuatl; 36). According to Daniel, one of their favorite activities was to immerse themselves in Aztec folklore: they would

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pretend she was an Aztec princess and he a warrior in love with her. They would also engage in philosophical discussions on the nature of history. To Daniel’s contention that history documents grand events and that’s how it should be (“la historia documenta los grandes eventos . . . así debe ser: la escritura de acciones y acontecimientos” 37), Chalchi (who, incidentally, planned on becoming a university literature professor) would counter, No estoy de acuerdo contigo, Daniel. La historia es la gente, tú y yo, nuestras familias. Y sí tenemos el derecho de cuestionar lo que hacemos y decimos. La historia no es sólo lo que se publica en los libros. Es también, por ejemplo, todas las leyendas de nuestra cultura, los mitos. (37) [I don’t agree with you, Daniel. History is people, you and I, our families. And we do have the right to question what we do and say. History is not only what is published in books. It is also, for example, all the legends of our culture, our myths.] Ultimately, it is Chalchi’s vision of historical understanding that proves more potent in Muñoz’s story. Driven by nostalgia, Daniel travels home from Mexico City and asks for Chalchi’s hand in marriage, offering her an inexpensive necklace made from fake obsidian. Chalchi, for her part, accepts, declaring, “Claro que acepto . . . mi corazón te pertenece. Te ha pertenecido siempre” (45) [“Sure, I accept . . . my heart belongs to you. It has always belonged to you”]. Their marriage plans confirmed, the young lovers suddenly feel a new sense of freedom that moves beyond the desire to act out episodes from Mexico’s ancient past: “Libres nos sentimos en nuestro acto de amor, libres para imaginarnos—para encarnar— cualquier fantasía” (45) [“We felt free in our lovemaking, free to imagine—to embody—any fantasy”]. This notion of embodiment, or rather, embodying any fantasy, harkens back to the fascination Daniel has always had for the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, which are themselves associated with Aztec folklore. The most popular legend, according to Daniel, holds that two young lovers were “separated by death and united by Xochiquétzal, goddess of love. They were lovers whom she turned into volcanoes” [“separados por la muerte y unidos por Xochiquétzal, diosa del amor. Eran enamorados que

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ella convertía en volcanes” 35]. It is worth noting that in the legend, these youth passed through several stages in their ontological reality: from living humans together in love and later separated in death, and finally to spirits immortalized and solidified as immense landmasses that remain visible from Mexico City on clear days. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Daniel and Chalchi agree to marry at the feet of Popo and Izta, as the volcanoes are commonly known. In a sense, these marriage plans are suggestive of the ways in which a religious ceremony or a social ritual in general is correlated to the flow of time: simultaneously discrete moments in time but also ones that somehow attempt to suspend it, such moments can be readily linked to the timeless, that is, a space outside of standard conventions of time. Going one step further (and following the journey we will soon see Daniel undertake), these moments could be the final step taken before standard temporal conventions are completely violated by a character’s ability to travel backward in time. As such, although time travel is most commonly associated with the realm of science (or speculative) fiction, in scenarios like the one in “El último sol,” one cannot overlook the ritualistic or religious dimensions of the phenomenon. For the purposes of this study, these dimensions should, perhaps, be expected on account of the different religious sensibilities held by the pre-Columbian societies that are often the temporal destination of time travelers from the present or future. Similarly, because the Conquest was not only–to his way of looking at matters, at least—foreseen by Moctezuma and his priests but was also a relatively dramatic and abrupt event or series of events, writers like Paz and Todorov have argued that the clash between the Spaniards and the Aztecs was a clash of temporalities or ways of understanding time. Paz, for example, writes that “the arrival of the Spaniards was interpreted by Moctezuma, at least at the beginning, not so much as a threat from outside than as the internal conclusion of one cosmic period and the commencement of another” (94) [“la llegada de los españoles fue interpretada por Moctezuma—al menos al principio—no tanto como un peligro ‘exterior’ sino como el acabamiento interno de una era cósmica y el principio de otra era” 119–20]. Whether or not one chooses to follow Moctezuma’s reading of reality, it is hard to counter the notion that the Conquest was a singularly pivotal and transformative epoch. In a sense, pre-Columbian societies

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during the time of the Conquest were caught in a liminal state of suspended animation or temporal interruption: a condition that invites or beckons fictional visitors from modern times (as is also the case in Pastwatch) for the simple reason that it is then that one can most efficiently make high-impact changes in the flow of history. For Daniel, meanwhile, a marriage near Popo and Izta would merely enhance the ceremony because these volcanoes have been a visible part of the young couple’s lives for years. In contrast, for Chalchi, such a marriage would spiritually connect the young couple to the other couple of the Aztec legend. Which is preferable, the young couple debate (particularly as concerns any children they may have in the future): The scientific view of history and reality Daniel espouses (“I simply wish to teach our future children to take pride in their nation and in its history . . . we must help them learn the truth” [“Yo simplemente quiero enseñarles a sentirse orgullosos de su patria y de su historia . . . debemos ayudarlos a conocer la realidad” 46] is met with Chalchi’s Carlos Fuentes–like view (see chapter 1) that “reality is many things, Daniel. It is also what one wishes it to be” [“la realidad es muchas cosas, Daniel. Es también lo que uno quiera que sea” 46]. It is immediately following this exchange that Chalchi proposes what in many ways amounts to the turning point in the story: “¿por qué no les contamos una historia diferente a esos futuros niños? . . . Podríamos inventarles el pasado, imaginarnos un universo perfecto para ellos” (47) [“why don’t we tell our future children a different history? . . . We could invent the past, imagine a perfect universe for them”]. Chalchi then makes a transition (or leap) from her initial suggestions of inventing a past and imagining a perfect universe to the notion of directly changing the past: “Piénsalo, Daniel: Si pudieras cambiar el pasado en honor a tus hijos, ¿qué cambiarías?” (47) [“Think it over, Daniel: If you could change the past in honor of your children, what would you change?”]. Chalchi’s question merits a brief (but relevant) aside: Inspired by his observations of the pachucos, or Mexican-American youth in Los Angeles, in his prologue to the 1992 edition of The Labyrinth of Solitude Paz writes in broad terms on the options available to those who, in his words, have been defeated. For Paz, the recourse of the defeated, or el “recurso del vencido,” is the aesthetic use of defeat and the vengeance of the imagination (“el uso estético de la derrota,

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la venganza de la imaginación” 13–14).6 My understanding of this passage is such that, for the group in question (the “defeated”), vengeance against the oppressor group consists solely of symbolic acts that do no real damage; in effect, this type of vengeance is worthy of the name only in the imagination (whether personal or collective) of the defeated. One could ask if the imaginative qualities of the conversations between Daniel and Chalchi can be linked to the notion by Paz that such symbolic brainstorming confirms these characters’ membership in the “defeated” category. This categorization could be further confirmed given Daniel’s response to the inquiry made by Chalchi regarding which event in the past he would change if given the opportunity: “Hay tantos eventos . . . la colonización de México, por ejemplo” (47) [“There are so many events . . . the colonization of Mexico, for example”]. Alas, echoing the contentions held by Paz and Riding among others, Daniel—in “typical” Mexican fashion—is preoccupied with his country’s history. Consequently, he dreams of changing the past and undoing (or altering, at least) the Spanish Conquest. It is then that Daniel falls asleep and awakens in an unfamiliar setting. Unlike certain stories—some science fiction, for example—that sometimes take a close look at the science and logistics involved in time travel (i.e., the “how”) and/or those that speculate in philosophical ways on the potential consequences to the present of a journey to the past, there is little such commentary in “El último sol.” Here, the love between the two youth and their desire to understand (and alter) Mexico’s past are the mechanisms that propel and justify the story’s temporal dislocation. In effect, Chalchi’s and Daniel’s travel through time is not unlike the kind that occurs in Octavia Butler’s Kindred. In the latter, the grimness of the Middle Passage—rather than a science fictional time machine—served as the impetus for time travel (see chapter 2); in the former, the temporal journey is spurred on by the protagonists’ fascination with Mexican history and by their desire to change it (and thereby the present, as well). When he wakes, Daniel is no longer in the twentieth century, but rather in the Aztec date roughly equivalent to a month before the Spaniards are due to arrive in 1519. Next to him is a woman (also named Chalchi) who insists on calling him “Tozani.” As if by magic (and, as such, not unlike the situation we found in Me oh Maya!), he

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finds that he understands her perfectly (and she him) even though she speaks to him in Nahuatl, a language unknown to him. Chalchi explains to him that in his sleep he (Tozani) was uttering words in a strange language. In a moment of the story reminiscent of the inverted realities in Cortázar’s “La noche boca arriba,” Tozani wonders, “¿Cómo explicar todo esto? Según esta joven, he estado soñando. Si es así, mi verdadera vida—la de Daniel Flores—fue sólo un sueño que tuve anoche. Pero eso es imposible. ¡El sueño es este mundo!” (51) [“How to explain all this? According to this youth, I have been dreaming. If that’s so, my entire life—Daniel Flores’s life—was only a dream I had last night. But that’s impossible. The dream is this world!]. If in fact Tozani/Daniel is dreaming, he is in for a long night: as Tozani, Daniel must play the part of a celebrated warrior who, according to legend, was a personal favorite of Moctezuma. Given his status, he is assigned the task of setting out as the emperor’s envoy and reconnoitering the strange newcomers who have arrived on the coast in a distant part of the Aztec empire. Not unlike the historical record, Moctezuma believes the newcomers are gods, among whom is the mighty Quetzalcóatl who has come to reclaim his throne. Tozani/ Daniel, however, knows differently. Thinking that by assassinating Cortés he could postpone the colonization of Tenochtitlán, Tozani/Daniel endeavors to infiltrate Cortés’s camp and get close enough to the Spanish captain to launch a strike. Interestingly, the possibility of “re-educating” Cortés like the Pastwatch characters did for Columbus (chapter 1) does not seem to cross Tozani/Daniel’s mind. When the opportunity to strike presents itself, however, the Mexican is paralyzed by indecision stemming from his conflicted temporal identity: ¡¿Pero qué estoy pensando?! ¡Yo no soy asesino! Soy estudiante de agronomía y vengo de un tiempo futuro, del siglo veintiuno. Allí, en ese futuro, soy un joven pobre en busca de éxito y felicidad. Aquí, de pronto, encarno a un famoso guerrero condecorado, a un valiente militar con la oportunidad de cambiar el curso de la historia. ¿Qué hago? ¿Actúo como Daniel Flores o como Tozani? ¿Cierro los ojos a esta oportunidad, o trato de evitar la destrucción de Tenochtitlán? (69)

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[What am I thinking? I’m no assassin! I am an agronomy student and I come from a future time, from the twenty-first century. There, in that future, I am a poor lad in search of success and happiness. Here, suddenly, I am a heralded warrior, a courageous soldier with the opportunity to change the course of history. What do I do? Do I act like Daniel Flores or Tozani? Do I close my eyes to this opportunity or do I attempt to avert the destruction of Tenochtitlán?] Letting the best opportunity to kill Cortés slip by, he instead wrestles with the captain and escapes with his own life only after taking La Malinche hostage. Moctezuma (both the character in this story as well as the historical figure), unfortunately, suffers his own form of paralysis: he is unmoved by Tozani’s pleas regarding the true intentions of the Spaniards (“Tienes gran imaginación, Tozani . . . demasiada para un soldado” 73 [“You have a great imagination, Tozani . . . too great for a soldier”]) and decides instead to offer Tozani himself as a sacrifice to the gods, rather than allow an underling to challenge his preconceived notions: an action that has a certain logic based on the Aztec worldview. At the moment of his death, Tozani reawakens from his slumbers as Daniel, once again in the present era. This era remains unchanged in the story: on a large scale the Conquest is still part of Mexico’s historical narrative, while on a smaller scale Daniel is still engaged to be married to Chalchi. As Daniel explains, however, “nothing has changed here outside. But inside of me . . .” [“Nada ha cambiado aquí afuera. Pero dentro de mí . . .” 81]. The ellipsis that concludes the previous sentence belongs to Daniel rather than to this author, and is suggestive of the importance of internal, perspectival changes (reminiscent, perhaps, of those Paz discusses earlier) when actual changes seem impossible, especially as they may involve undoing historical occurrences. Interestingly, there is hard evidence of Daniel’s journey in time: when he awakes, he finds that he is—in quite fantastical fashion— wearing the necklace he had given to Chalchi as an engagement gift, except that now it is made from real obsidian, a mineral prized by the Aztecs. This single but significant change suggests that Daniel’s journey could also have a broader impact; what, specifically, this impact

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might entail is not unveiled in the story, but could involve Chalchi’s earlier notion of inventing a past that held a perfect universe in which the Conquest never occurred. Consequently, at a more general level, the obsidian necklace would embody a sense of hope: if the necklace can be transformed from phony to real obsidian, maybe a more perfect (or sanitized) version of the past can bring about additional changes in the present era. More to the point, if the phony obsidian necklace can become real, perhaps a theoretical desire to return Mexico to its ancient Aztec roots can become fulfilled. Before looking at Isla de luz, another student reader written by Muñoz, it is worth considering a short story by the Peruvian journalist and fiction writer José Adolph, a story whose subject matter in many ways anticipates in condensed form that of Isla de luz. According to José Alberto Bravo de Rueda, Adolph’s science fiction “always addresses issues that are of social, historical, political, or religious concern” (3). A story representative of these broad concerns is “El falsificador.” Published in 1971 in the collection Hasta que la muerte and first published in English in the 2003 Cosmos Latinos collection of Latin American science fiction, “El falsificador” offers a speculative contextualization of a passage written in the sixteenth century by Pedro Cieza de León, a Spanish conquistador and chronicler. In the passage, Cieza de León describes—seemingly with objectivity—ancient Inca creation myths in which, apparently, two tall white men visited Inca territory on separate occasions. The visitors’ supernatural exploits and bizarre behaviors supposedly both confounded and inspired the locals. The first visitor, according to Cieza de León’s account of his Inca interlocutors, had great power, insomuch that he could change plains into mountains, and great hills into valleys, and make water flow of stones. As soon as such power was beheld, the people called him the Maker of created things, the Prince of all things. Father of the Sun. For they say that he performed other wonders, giving life to men and animals, so that by his hand marvelous great benefits were conferred on the people . . . In many places he gave orders to men how they should live, and he spoke lovingly to them and with much gentleness, admonishing them that they should do good, and no evil or injury one to another, and that they should be loving and charitable to all. (154)

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[Mostraba gran autoridad y veneración, y queste varón, que así vieron, tenía gran poder, que de los cerros hacía llanuras y de las llanuras hacía cerros grandes, haciendo fuentes en piedras vivas; y como tal poder reconociesen, llamábanle Hacedor de todas las cosas criadas, Principio dellas, Padre del sol, porque, sin este, dicen que hacía otras cosas mayores, porque dio ser a los hombres y animales, y que, en fin, por su mano les vino notable beneficio . . . En muchos lugares diz que dio orden a los hombres cómo viviesen, y que los hablaba amorosamente y con mucha mansedumbre, amonestándoles que fuesen buenos y los unos a los otros no se hiciesen daño ni injuria, antes, amándose, en todos hubiese caridad. 30–31] A long time later, the second visitor arrived, “resembling the first” (155) [“. . . otro hombre semejable al questá dicho” 30]. He, too, according to the chronicle set down by Cieza de León, healed the infirm, and “where there were blind he gave them sight by only uttering words” (155) [“. . . los ciegos con solamente palabras daba vista” 30]. However, after the villagers rose against him and threatened to stone him, the second visitor departed for the coast and was never seen again. The crux of the story, and the reason for its title, is that apparently Cieza de León invented the whole thing as he set it down in writing for posterity. More precisely, he gave an Inca legend a dishonest ideological spin to have it resemble conventional Christian teachings. His objective was to convert—for strategic, evangelical reasons—an altogether different myth into a sort of “Indian version of the Nazarene prophet . . . the crucifixion becomes a stoning, just as the Palestinian Jews, fifteen hundred years ago, used to execute their criminals and victims” (156) [“. . . una versión india del profeta nazareno . . . La crucifixión se convierte en pedrea, tal como los judíos de Palestina, mil quinientos años antes, solían ajusticiar a sus criminales y víctimas” 32]. Despite giving the myth a Christian slant, the Spanish falsifier remains apprehensive; after all, “might it not be heresy to suggest that the message of the Son of God made man might be known to those outside the fold of the baptized?” (156) [“¿no puede ser herejía el sugerir que el mensaje del hijo de Dios hecho hombre puede ser conocido fuera del cuerpo de los bautizados?” 33].

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Needless to say, perhaps, Cieza de León’s version would not be the only revision of the Christian story that imagines the Judeo-Christian God’s activities in the Americas prior to the fifteenth century: the Book of Mormon describes such activities as well. For the purposes of the present study, however, it would be more productive to ask what were, according to Adolph’s story, the original Inca myths that Cieza de León so painstakingly altered. According to the story’s nameless narrator, the Spaniard omits several crucial details that would have betrayed its non-Christian origins: he “mentions neither [celestial] carriages nor electric fields. The story is too bizarre, too heretical” (156) [“. . . no menciona ni los carruajes ni los campos eléctricos” 32]. Electrical fields? Celestial carriages? Indeed, the narrator reports that the Incas had in fact spoken to Cieza de León of a good and powerful man, armed with indescribable instruments, wise beyond all knowing . . . of a man who spoke with other men who were not there, and who answered him from afar . . . of colorful visions on silver screens; of long tubes of airy green metal, able to settle like a discreet bird upon the blackened fields of grass. (157) [hombre poderoso y bueno, armado con instrumentos indescriptibles, sabio más allá de toda sabiduría . . . de un hombre que hablaba con otros hombres que no estaban allí, y que le respondían desde lejos . . . de visiones coloreadas en pantallas de plata; de largos tubos de airoso metal verde, capaces de posarse como un ave discreta en la pampa ennegrecida. 34] In fact, the visitors in the Inca tales were none other than aliens from a more advanced and enlightened extraterrestrial civilization. At story’s end, the narrator shifts to the first person plural while offering some concluding remarks: “Perhaps out of cowardice, perhaps from insanity, perhaps due to terror, a chronicler embellished the incomprehensible and saved us, once again, from humans gaining knowledge about us” (157) [“Quizás por cobardía, quizás por sanidad mental, quizás por horror, un cronista embelleció lo incomprensible y nos salvó, una vez más, del conocimiento humano sobre nosotros” 34]. The narrator then closes his (or her) communiqué by stating to her “commander” that her research on the falsifier has come to an end, and that she

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requests “permission to continue [her] journey and that of [her] crewmate, now recovered from her injuries on the base on Pluto” (157) [“. . . solicitando su permiso para proseguir mi viaje y el de mi ya restablecida compañera, a la base de Plutón” 34]. *

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It would not be beyond the realm of imagination for the space travelers filing their report in Adolph’s “The Falsifier” to be linked somehow to the traveler who serves as protagonist in Muñoz’s Isla de luz, a novel published in 2001, a year after his Viajes fantásticos. It is not simply because it was published after Viajes fantásticos that I will comment on this novel now, but rather because in it Muñoz treats time travel in ways that surpass in ambition his treatment of the same in his earlier story. This time, the setting is the Hispanic Caribbean rather than Mexico; the time frame is several hundred years in the history of the region. In this novel, a postterrestrial (and postsolar) human living on a space station 200,000 years in the future is sent on a mission (as is the case in Adolph’s story) back to earth to witness firsthand what the earth was like when it was still inhabitable and when the sun was still able to warm it. This interstellar time traveler may recall for some the extraterrestrial in the film Starman (1984), who makes a similar voyage to earth and ultimately involves himself in the various intimacies and peculiarities of human life. The time traveler in Isla de luz, like his fellow residents on the spaceship, has a code for a name, not unlike some of the robots in the Star Wars movies. His name is H-01, which suggests that he could be either the first human or hombre (or at least the first to undertake such a voyage), or a primal man (in the sense that he is, at every stop, a blank slate upon whom the islanders project or construct an identity), or even the first historian. His passion, after all, is history: “H-01 es un ciudadano ejemplar, dedicado estudioso de textos archivados. Su objetivo principal es conocer la verdad histórica” (5) [“H-01 is a model citizen, devoted student of archived texts. His principal objective is to know the historical truth”]. Thus, as is the case in “El último sol,” history—or perhaps better stated, historical understanding—is an important theme in La isla de luz. Indeed, from a pedagogical perspective, there may be

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no better way to teach the basic aspects in the history of a place than through the adventures of a time traveler able to make several “stops” in the historical record. The people on board the spaceship are keenly interested in light because they drift in regions almost entirely devoid of it and have been reduced to simulating light and images of a long-ago extinguished life on earth through complex holographic displays. Fortunately, the technological advances that enable them to simulate terrestrial life have also made it possible, based on “theories and discoveries in the field of physics—quantum foam, for example” [“teorías y descubrimientos del campo de la física—la espuma cuántica, por ejemplo” 4], to travel backward in time. This technology suits H-01 just fine, because in returning to earth during three separate periods (the fifteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first centuries), he has a personal agenda that he keeps hidden from mission control: “poder ser testigo de la historia, encontrar nuevas maneras de entenderla y escribirla, de sentirla” (5) [“to bear witness to history, to find new ways of understanding it and writing it, to feel it”]. Despite having been instructed to obey the “Law of Observation,” little does he know that his curiosity (and sense of compassion) will also result—in ways reminiscent of other time travelers we have seen—in his intervention in the flow of events during these periods; through these interventions he will alter both the course of history and the ways this history is remembered. What better place to travel to with the objective of harvesting light than to the tropics, the Caribbean to be more precise? H-01 happens to be a historian of the Hispanic Caribbean, a region known for stark contradictions throughout its modern history: sunlight, beautiful scenery, merriment, and vibrant music have shared the scene with class disparities, imperialist and domestic oppression and exploitation, and sporadic violence and unrest. Tellingly, in his epigram to the novel, Muñoz quotes the Cuban patriot José Martí: “¡La esclavitud de los hombres / Es la gran pena del mundo!” [“The slavery of men / Is the great shame of the world!”] Thus, while H-01 travels in both time and space to the Hispanic Caribbean familiar to contemporary readers in his quest for light in both its physical and symbolic senses (i.e., historical clarity), he is also on a collision course with much of the tension and suffering that has plagued the region. Interestingly, he

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is also on a collision course with Martí himself, who—thinly veiled— appears in Isla de luz as the patriot and poet Juan Martínez. H-01’s destination in the Hispanic Caribbean is not Cuba, however, but rather the island of Taína. Taína, of course, does not exist outside of Isla de luz and is instead a historical and cultural composite7 of the three major islands (or areas) in the region: Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. These areas do, indeed, have much history in common, including the conquest and decimation of the indigenous populations, a protracted (more so than on the continent) colonial period that included (in some areas more than others) a plantation system based on slavery and (later) problematic, uneven relationships with the United States, all of which are thematized in the novel. As if to further the motif of humanness or humanity (in contradistinction with the barrenness of life in space) suggested by H-01’s name, the island of Taína’s northern coast has the shape of a human profile (“un perfil humano” 16). Given the region’s vast historical, cultural, linguistic, and political complexity (to name just a few of the components that comprise the composite Taína), H-01 is equipped not only with his interest, passion, and expertise in the region, but also with a few special tools, some of which we have seen with other time travelers: not only can his spaceship take him backward in time across space, his brain is also fitted with an Archivo de datos (“an Archive of Data”), that encompasses the significant events in the history of Taína and the biography of its most important public figures (“los acontecimientos significativos de la historia de Taína y la biografía de sus figuras más importantes” 9). This high-tech implant, eerily reminiscent of the archivo Roberto González Echevarría describes,8 also enables H-01 to communicate in the local languages spoken during Taína’s history. The tropical sun will take care of an additional hurdle: because they have been living in the darkness of outer space for thousands of years, H-01 and others in his branch of humanity have developed transparent skin, which can regain color in a place like Taína. Interestingly, this transparency of the skin is a feature that stands in sharp contrast with the often-exaggerated importance placed on skin color in the Hispanic Caribbean. The space travelers, in fact, have through the course of many millennia abandoned the chore (“tarea”) of sexual reproduction and instead leave this task to machines (17).

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H-01 admits a further difference between himself and the societies he visits on Taína: “Desconozco el placer, y jamás he tenido contacto íntimo con otras personas. Quizá por eso vine a este sitio y a este tiempo” (17) [“I have no knowledge of pleasure, and I have never had intimate contact with other people. Perhaps that is why I have come to this place and time”]. The brave new world aboard his spaceship was devoid not only of sex, but also of art and the freedom to express oneself in a personal, subjective way. H-01’s first stop is the Taína of the fifteenth century, prior to the arrival of the Europeans and for the time being safe in its traditional, mythical worldview. It is hard not to draw comparisons between his benevolent, documentary mission on the island and the brutality of the conquerors who would soon arrive. Isla de luz, because it is first and foremost designed to foster Spanish-language reading skills in English-speaking students, does not make assumptions about the extent to which these students may be familiar with basic facts about the history of the Americas. Accordingly, H-01 outlines this history by providing, for example, a description of Taíno beliefs and social practices as well as an account of Columbus’s personal and political agendas, which are revealed by his erroneous descriptions of the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean islands. In contrast, H-01 proclaims an enlightenment and historical sensitivity far beyond the first European chroniclers of the Americas (and closer in spirit to Chalchi’s views on history in the author’s “El ultimo sol”): “. . . no quiero imitar a esos autores. Porque vinieron para colonizar esta tierra. Porque desconocían el modo de vida de los indígenas e impusieron su cultura y su religión” (19) [“. . . I do not wish to imitate those authors. Because they came to colonize this land. Because they were unaware of the lifestyle of the indigenous population and imposed their own culture and religion”]. Sarai, the young Taíno woman H-01 befriends on the island, tells him (in the Taíno language, in which H-01—like a good scholar—is fluent) of a dream in which she saw, not unlike Kevin Baldeosingh’s Guaikan (see chapter 2) what could only be fantasy: “Vi que unos seres blancos llegaban a la isla, después de cruzar las vastas aguas” (44) [“I saw that some white beings were arriving on the island, after crossing the vast waters”]. Nonetheless, because Sarai has prophetic powers, she becomes convinced of the inevitability of her dream. She then

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asks H-01, whom she calls Marcorai (Taíno for “visitor”), “What will become of this island . . . Who will remember us?” [“¿Qué será de esta isla . . . Quién se acordará de nosotros?” 45]. H-01 promises her that he would be responsible for this archival endeavor, despite the thoroughness with which the conquerors would later annihilate the locals and their traditions. Before leaving fifteenth-century Taína, H-01 and Sarai fall in love, thereby constituting the former’s first violation of the Law of Observation as well as marking the beginning of an awareness of the ways in which his earlier life on board the spaceship had been repressed and flavorless. Thinking that “Marcorai” was a strange visitor from another island, Sarai does not know the true reasons behind his need to leave. After this departure, she informs him telepathically of the arrival of the Spaniards and their cruel dominion, and also foretells the distant future when a man seeking light would come from afar in his quest to learn about Taína (“vendrá desde lejos para conocer este mundo” 47). H-01’s next stop in Taína is the year 1865, and his new guise is that of Marcos Soulek, a Slavic historian conducting research on the island. Here, on an island that is still under the yoke of Spain and is still dependent on the labor of slaves (both matters that can only be discussed furtively in Taína society), his love interest is Sara Inés Monterrosa, a homonym for Sarai. H-01 cannot help but remember his Taíno lover, whose memory remains fresh in his mind despite the four centuries that separate the two women: “El parecido entre las dos mujeres es sorprendente. ¡Hasta en el nombre de una resuena el de la otra! Puedo imaginar la piel de Sara Inés desnuda y bronceada por el sol . . .” (61) [“The resemblance between the two women is surprising. The name of the first even reverberates in the second’s! I can imagine Sara Inés in the nude and tanned by the sun . . .”]. Sara Inés, however, is not limited to being the object of fantasy for a time-traveling flâneur, and has her own set of interests and concerns appropriate to her own time period. Her favorite poet, for example, is none other than the passionate and subversive Juan Martínez, who is during this time fomenting a rebellion against the island’s colonial government (a tad early chronologically, one might add, for him to be an exact copy of Martí, who was most active between twenty and thirty years later).

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To H-01’s surprise, his obligation to preserve the memory of Taíno culture in general and of Sarai in particular does not rest entirely on his shoulders. In what could be considered a cruel irony, for example— the kind of irony, in fact, that the whole of the Americas became very good at after the arrival of Europeans—the capital of the island was named Ciudad Taína in honor of the decimated indigenous population. Furthermore, while strolling through this city H-01 overheard a street band playing a catchy tune: “Trato de ubicar la melodía, ¡y descubro que es la canción de Sarai! Su canto ha atravesado el túnel del tiempo, incorporándose al folklore de la isla” (64) [“I try to place the melody, and I discover that it’s Sarai’s song! Her song has traversed the tunnel of time and integrated the island’s folklore”]. Later, H-01 and Sara Inés visit the island’s Museo Nacional. To the former’s amazement, among the works held at the museum was a small stone figurine, now called El abrazo, a figure representing two lovers embracing made by Sarai centuries earlier. Needless to say, only H-01 knew the precise identity of the work’s sculptor. With regard to the ubiquity in the novel of such unlikely transhistorical connections or coincidences and to their narrative importance, El ultimo sol may recall similar occurrences in Baldeosingh’s The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar and the poetry of Nancy Morejón (see chapter 2), among other possibilities. Soon thereafter, H-01—in further defiance of his mandate to remain a detached observer—becomes fully involved in the independence movement and finds himself thrown in jail. To make matters worse, the evil colonial governor on the island asks for Sara Inés’s hand in marriage. With her help, H-01 manages an escape from his captivity and resumes his temporal adventure. Sara Inés, however, does not fare so well. In what could be a subtle commentary by Muñoz on the political oppression and personal misfortunes of Hispanic Caribbeans, the visitor escapes unscathed while the local inhabitant (embodied by both Sarai and Sara Inés) must confront either the harsh realities that await her on the island or be exiled to an undesirable location. Sara Inés, following the assassination of the governor who had become her husband in a sham marriage, opts for the latter option. While still a young woman, she writes in a letter to H-01 that all she can do now is envision returning to Taína someday, to die in old age. Echoing the vision H-01 had once held about her (a vision

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inspired by his recollections of Sarai), she foresees the moment of her death: “Y allí me dormiré tranquila, mi cuerpo acariciado por el sol, bañado por la luz de Taína” (97) [“And there I will slumber in peace, my body caressed by the sun, bathed in Taína’s light”]. The Taína H-01 encounters in 2010 is a modern, bustling metropolis not unlike San Juan, Puerto Rico, or Miami, Florida, and in it he is pleased to see a multicultural, largely Creole society: “. . . me agrada ver la variedad racial. Recurre una figura étnica, mezcla de negro, blanco y asiático; figura que ha surgido de la infusión de varias razas y culturas” (102) [“. . . I am pleased to see the racial variety. An ethnic type prevails, a mixture of black, white and Asian; a type that has sprung from the infusion of a variety of races and cultures”]. Modern Taína, however, with its repressive political atmosphere and the paranoia rampant among its inhabitants, is reminiscent of contemporary Havana, even though this city is in some ways stuck in a 1950s time capsule. We soon learn that the political repression is of a conservative nature and that the island’s president is basically a puppet of the United States. In this regard, the Taína of 2010 may more closely recall the authoritarian regime of the Dominican Rafael Trujillo during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Isla de luz, then, can be a very effective teaching tool on the Hispanic Caribbean, but probably not without the filter of an instructor knowledgeable in the region who can decode the text’s many historical allusions. Interestingly, at novel’s end, H-01’s supervisors try to convince him that Taína was merely a figment of his imagination, in which the real islands of the Hispanic Caribbean had been scrambled in such a way as to produce a composite. Thinking that in the age of the Internet it would be easy to crossreference any actual name he would use on the island, in his final stop on Taína H-01 opts instead to pretend he is a resident of the island, but one who—very conveniently—is suffering from amnesia and who thinks his name is Marcos Ramis, a name common on the island. His love interest this time is Zoraida Valdés, a journalist and divorced mother who in her spare time is active in the island’s secretive rebel movement. Her name, too, besides being similar to the names Sarai and Sara Inés, recalls the eponymous character in Cirilo Villaverde’s nineteenth-century novel, Cecilia Valdés, a figure who for many is emblematic of colonial Cuba.

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Despite her skeptical, mistrustful temperament, Zoraida falls for Marcos’s repeated and pathetic pleas for help next to her bus stop. During the course of the months that ensue, they become intellectually and romantically entangled. Ultimately she reveals her participation in the rebel movement, and he reveals his identity as an intergalactic time traveler, going so far as to take her for a ride on his space vessel. Like many rebels in the history of the region, Zoraida seeks refuge in the United States, even though by this time it is this country that poses the most serious external threat to Taína. What remains unknown to her, however (but not to H-01), is that eventually she would return to her island triumphantly and become its first female leader. Meanwhile, H-01 is forced to return to his base where he must endure the censure of his superiors for having violated the terms of his mission, especially those prohibiting his direct involvement in the lives of the islanders. He swears that one day he will return, however, because Taína exists in his soul, “as real as [his] own body” (“existe en mi alma, tan verdadera como mi propio cuerpo” 164), and also because he never wants to forget “the pleasure of a laugh, the warmth of an embrace, joy” [“el placer de la risa, el calor de un abrazo, la alegría” 164], that is, things that were unavailable to him in the far reaches of space thousands of years in the future. The heuristic ending notwithstanding, it seems telling that H-01 is able to “pass” as a European outsider in the Hispanic Caribbean. Isla de luz rehearses the popular image of a white, male foreign traveler from the developed world visiting the Hispanic Caribbean, whether to conquer, trade, sunbathe, or carry out academic research, among a host of possible activities. Nonetheless, H-01’s skin color (or lack thereof) also serves as a counterpoint to the historical development of racial relations in the Hispanic Caribbean, a region—granted, not unlike many in the world—where skin color and/or attitudes toward it have played a decisive role in patterns of social development. In conclusion, it seems fair to assert that the novel’s ambivalent ending may echo the author’s nostalgia toward Cuba, his country of birth. Even though La isla de luz is geared toward a readership that is in the intermediate stages of learning the Spanish language and that is quite possibly also oblivious to the complexities of Hispanic Caribbean history, culture, and politics, the author is able in many ways to register the intensity of feeling and engagement toward the

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region common in its diasporic communities. While there exists a distant hope for the region in the character of Zoraida, who is positioned to return triumphantly from her exile (and thereby rehearses a return similar to José Martí’s in the late nineteenth century), the more obvious sentiments at novel’s end are H-01’s disappointment at being forced to leave Taína, coupled with his passion for life there. As we saw in chapter 2, the Caribbean in general and the Hispanic Caribbean in particular are places that seem to overflow with the weight of multiple historical layers: La isla de luz very effectively introduces readers to this historical complexity via the mechanism of targeted, fictional temporal journeys. *

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The Sarai/Sara Inés/Zoraida characters in La isla de luz prefigure the protagonist in Tina Casanova’s 2007 historical novel, En busca del cemí dorado,9 who—coincidentally—is named Sara. In this thriller for young readers, Sara encounters a hidden Taíno tribe that has spent the past few hundred years living in a remote Puerto Rican cave. Although members of this tribe have not, technically speaking, traveled through time, one could nonetheless argue that in some (symbolic) respects they have: they have been absent for five centuries from Puerto Rico’s historical narrative, only to resurface in the modern era with their cultural traditions intact. Far from having been annihilated during the first few decades of European activity in the region, they consider themselves, in fact, contemporary Taínos. With particular focus on a different novel intended for more mature audiences, this study’s afterword considers similar neo-indigenisms10 in the Americas and their broader implications.

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AFTERWORD

Time Travel Fact and Fiction

There is no “outside” to the text. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1967 Who has not known . . . the surge of an overwhelming nostalgia for lost origins, for times past? And yet, this “return to the beginning” is like the imaginary in Lacan—it can neither be fulfilled nor requited. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 1990

T

he central idea Time Travel has put forth is that fictional temporal dislocations are bound up in the Americas with crucial, albeit unresolved, issues surrounding expressions of cultural identity: issues that in many ways can be seen as the aftermath of conquest and centuries of oppression. Accordingly, these temporal dislocations may—in some form or fashion—link the present with the Conquest era, interrogate the history and cultural identities of the Caribbean region, explore matters pertaining to the roles of women in society, or serve as a pedagogical tool and/or children’s entertainment. A sentiment to varying degrees common in the texts that represent these dislocations or episodes of time travel is that Latin America and the Caribbean have taken a wrong turn and are in need of fixing. Occasionally, the only possible remedy for historically profound social ills seems to lie in—or be informed by—the fictional mechanism of time travel.

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A related notion is that however difficult this may be to ascertain or measure, fiction can provide templates for the actual creation of a different world. Early in this study, for instance, I referenced Carrie Chorba’s reworking of an idea expressed by Carlos Fuentes: to wit, that literature, “specifically the manner in which one narrates the past or the future, contributes to our reality—whether or not the narrated events ever actually take place” (Chorba 106). Although the term Chorba uses, that is, “contribute,” may, to a certain extent, lack clarity (the term seems, for instance, a less powerful and active one than “change” or “modify”), it nonetheless seems fair to assert that this dialogue or rapport between the textual world of fiction and the “real” world around us in many ways lends credence to Jacques Derrida’s observation that the line presumably dividing a text from the world beyond its covers is provisional and arbitrary. Is, however, the text in no way different from its context? Are the two coterminous? This afterword explores these tensions. Now, many of the events I describe in Time Travel have not, in fact, actually “taken place.” Indeed, my focus in the study has primarily been on the world of fictional representation (i.e., the arena where time travel can occur), on historical contexts or backdrops, and to a lesser extent on related—and often abstract—philosophical conversations. That stated, it is worth pondering if one can speak of any specific link or correlation between the world of fictional time travel and actual, real-world events. Chinese censorship authorities, at least, seem to believe that one can, given their decision in March 2011 to ban fictional time travel from television. According to CNN’s Eunice Yoon, these authorities have decreed that “TV dramas [Chinese or foreign] shouldn’t have characters that travel back in time and rewrite history. They say that this goes against Chinese heritage” (see “Yoon” in bibliography). Within a Latin American and Caribbean context, one text in particular suggests such a link between fictional time travel and realworld events. This is a link, one might add, with broad and intriguing implications: in a Caribbean context, at least (although the same could very well hold true for other places), the possibility of a return to a cultural and historical “point of origin” has come into question. In other words, events have taken place that have forever altered the course of history and rendered the past irretrievable in any absolute,

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concrete sense. Stuart Hall makes a relevant observation with respect to the occasional desire among many Caribbean peoples to return to a “timeless” Africa, a desire of which he is critical (see introduction). There are, then, two issues: one involving the real-world agency of fictional texts (seemingly possible) and the other involving the (seemingly nonexistent) possibility of a science-fictional return to a cultural point of origin. We shall turn first to a novel that describes such a return, and then to a related social and political movement attempting to accomplish something similar. K. B. Forrest’s novel, Taíno Ti (2007; the title is a salutation in the Taíno language), is the tale of a young Puerto Rican American who leaves his Florida home for New York City in order to pursue a career as a graphic artist. Beyond having authored several other erotic thrillers available as digital files through the same publisher (Extasy Books), little information is available about the author, except that which appears in a postscript to the novel: Forrest received a doctorate in anthropology and is currently working on a postdoctoral dissertation on the Ancient Near East. In the same postscript, s/he also explains that “the Native American Storyteller runs through [his/her] blood,” a statement that (unless expressed in symbolic terms) indicates a Native American parentage. Although the novel is marketed as an erotic thriller (indeed, it contains numerous sexually explicit passages), in some ways it shares the youthful concerns of the texts I review in the prior chapter: it is a coming-of-age story in which Yuis, the protagonist, must wrestle with his relationships with his parents (his father, in particular) as he seeks to define and fulfill his destiny in life. Part of this destiny is known to him (i.e., his desire for a life as an artist); another part, however, is not. According to the novel’s omniscient, third-person narrator, when Yuis drew, the images would come to him from his dreams, in which he found himself deep in Puerto Rican jungles surrounded by strangers with whom he spoke in a language unknown to him in his waking life. These dreams, moreover, were fleeting: “Once in a while, he was left with the faint memory of walking through the lush jungle, but that was all. The rest was a jumble” (9). In his search for a gallery that would display his art, he encounters La Galería Boricua, owned by one Felipe Cacique. It bears mentioning that “Boricua” refers to the

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Taíno name for indigenous Puerto Ricans (from the indigenous term Borikén, Boriquén, or Borinquén) while “Cacique” is a Taíno term for political leader. Interestingly, Yuis is initially transfixed by objects he sees within the gallery as he passes it on the street: small, sculpted figurines. One of them “made his head spin. It was something . . . something he’d seen before” (37). The relationship between Yuis and Felipe lies at the heart of the story. Despite the best efforts of the antagonistic Mr. Freunhoffer, a false hero who casts doubt on Felipe’s intentions while hiding his own quest to illegally acquire indigenous Puerto Rican artifacts, Yuis and Felipe ultimately attain a spiritual and sexual rapprochement. Having been taught all his life that the Taínos had become extinct, Yuis is surprised to learn that Felipe considers himself “a member of the Taíno tribe, from Borikén—that is, Puerto Rico” (39). To Yuis’s further amazement, Felipe then explains that the former’s name is, in fact, “a Taíno name. Caciquea Yuisa was one of the last leaders of our nation” (39).1 Felipe, too, is amazed (as is Freunhoffer, although for more sinister reasons) by Yuis’s uncanny ability to draw and paint Taíno cemíes, that is, the religious figurines of the type Yuis had noticed during his walk. The explanation Felipe offers to account for this gift startles the young artist: “only a Bohiti, a Shaman, can make one of these” (42). Indeed, Yuis’s cemíes are not of the garden variety that one might find at gift shops in San Juan. Upon examining one of them, a fellow artist exclaims, “Well, I’ve been in the business for a while, and . . . this piece is old—very, very old . . . there’re signs of wear and weathering that you just can’t find on a new piece. Besides, the clay . . . well, it’s not your run of the mill stuff . . . there are even bits of debris—straw and stuff ” (137). In the way Yuis’s cemíes, through their unexplained authenticity, seem to evade the logic of time, they may recall intertextually similar artifacts. Examples include Sarai’s sculpture of the two lovers in Elías Miguel Muñoz’s La isla de luz (see previous chapter), or perhaps even the statue of Chac Mool in Carlos Fuentes’s eponymous 1954 short story: a statue so authentic that it literally comes to life and eventually overpowers its modernday owner. Yuis’s relationship with Puerto Rico’s indigenous past is not limited to his gift for creating actual, authentic cemíes. On the contrary,

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indigenous Taíno elements begin manifesting themselves in his daily life. At Felipe’s gallery, for example, he has the following experience upon seeing a model display of a typical pre-Columbian Taíno village: A wave of giddiness made Yuis hold onto the glass case as he thought he heard the sounds of the village. The murmur of voices in a language somehow familiar to him came from the village, and instead of tiny forms, Yuis now saw himself in the village. He stood naked in front of a rectangular hut. People went about their business as if he were a familiar sight. (76–77) In short, Yuis’s newly realized powers as a modern-day Bohiti or shaman allow him to span the temporal gulf that separates him from Puerto Rico’s pre-Columbian Taíno society; furthermore, not unlike the case for several other characters we have seen in Time Travel, linguistic differences evaporate: in some respects, it seems, the desire for time travel in the Americas carries with it a related, Edenic desire for a linguistic and cultural unity or wholeness. Ultimately, Yuis commits himself to protecting the cemíes he creates and in the process defeats Freunhoffer, the conniving art thief. In the end, Yuis is fully rewarded for his efforts: he and Felipe seal their spiritual and sexual bond as the two embark on a successful artistic collaboration. I would like now to pay particular attention to the novel’s notion of a contemporary, actual Taíno community. By most accounts, such a community would not be possible. As Ignacio López-Calvo explains (in ways that affirm standard views), “As a result of the exploitation and the new diseases introduced by Spanish colonists, the Taíno people underwent a sharp decline in population, until they eventually disappeared” (15). In other words, by the twenty-first century, the Taínos would have been absent for several centuries, however one chooses to define “disappeared.” Taíno Ti, meanwhile, points to a different fate for the Taínos. If in the beginning of the novel this community manifests itself, seemingly, through Yuis’s dreams and his artistic inspiration (i.e., as a “past” that somehow visits—or reverberates within—the present), by novel’s end it becomes clear that any notion of the past being “past” was merely

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a plot device. The Taínos, in fact, according to the novel, at least, are alive and well. As Felipe explains to Yuis: Well maybe there aren’t many full-blooded Taínos, but we are Taínos, nevertheless. One thing I saw at a Chickasaw Powwow [in the United States] last year was that 90% of the Indians were mixed. Some even had blonde hair and blue eyes, yet they were card-carrying Native Americans. Just think of it—many of the people of Puerto Rico, including you and I, have Indian features. Where do you think they come from? We don’t look like Spaniards! Some people contend that our looks are from a mixing with Black blood, and although there are people of Black descent, why don’t we look like the mixed Blacks of the mainland? Because we are Native Americans . . . The thing is that not only do we carry Taíno DNA, as proven by a nineteen ninety-nine study that shows that sixty percent of Puerto Ricans have Taíno blood [the quantity of Taíno blood remains unspecified in this observation], but there are also many of us who have never forgotten the old ways and have always practiced them to whatever extent we could. (267) Even though the author does not claim a Taíno lineage in particular, s/he registers a recent cultural movement involving the apparent resurrection of the Taínos: a movement that has some adherents in Puerto Rico, although “the overwhelming majority of self-identified Taínos live in the United States” (Jiménez Román 103). Miriam Jiménez Román’s contention, expressed in relation to the prevalence in the United States of discourses on minority empowerment and cultural affirmation (with the corresponding blurring of once-common notions of ethnic affiliation), is echoed in Felipe’s reference to a North American Chickasaw ceremony. Along these lines, it is perhaps no coincidence that Forrest studied at a university in New England and as such would be familiar with cultural trends among both Native Americans and Puerto Rican Americans residing in New York and its environs. Similarly, Felipe’s insistence that Yuis not confuse Puerto Rico’s Taíno biological heritage with its apparently less pronounced African counterpart recalls Jiménez Román’s views and those of others in the 2001 collection, Taíno Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics. Jorge Duany, for instance, argues

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that the movement has a racist agenda. According to him, “nationalist intellectuals have constructed and elaborated a coherent but incomplete image of the Island’s cultural identity based on a selective reading of its history, which tends to exclude the African component and celebrate the Indian heritage” (75). If the so-called Taíno revival stems, according to its academic commentators, from the apparent need among some Puerto Ricans, particularly those living in the United States, to rehabilitate an extinguished (and thereby unchanging) cultural identity in light of the cacophony of modernity, the related neo-Taíno identities of characters like Yuis and Felipe suddenly become problematic. Are they, for example, symptomatic of a collective fiction some Puerto Ricans are engaging in?2 Interestingly, Roberto Mucaro Borrero, the sole selfidentified Taíno contributor to Taíno Revival, responds strongly to the skepticism among academics with regard to his and others’ affirmation of a Taíno identity. Addressing himself toward Duany’s assessment of the Taíno revival, he states, for example, that he “could not help but feel that the lack of research and outright denial of Puerto Rico’s Taíno ‘phenomenon’ by this island-based scholar exhibited the contempt that most academics have towards Taíno/Indigenous affirmation in general” (142). Borrero adds that “it is well documented that persons asserting their Taíno identity have been active in Puerto Rico in recent years,”3 and then offers several examples to substantiate his claim. It is fair to say, first, that the Taínos are not the only group decimated (or greatly reduced in numbers) during the Conquest and the ensuing centuries of colonialism that is attempting a revival (there exists also, for example, a politically active neo-Mexica movement based in California).4 Second, the neo-Taíno movement, apparently (either mostly as a symbol or as an actual sociopolitical group), also has adherents in places other than Puerto Rico or the United States. In terms of symbolic appropriations with no claims of the Taíno’s ongoing existence, López-Calvo explains that some Dominican authors “manipulate the representation and vindication of the disappeared Tainos, no longer a threatening social group, to emphasize the foreignness of a racialized social group, which, in this case, is composed of the Dominicans of African origin” (145). Seemingly, then, in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the Taíno myth is used as

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a counterpoint to the African legacies in these places. Meanwhile, in Portrait of the Caribbean, his 1991 documentary series on the region, Stuart Hall visits a religious ceremony performed by Dominicans in what is now Haitian territory. The ceremony is held in honor of Anacaona, the fifteenth-century Taíno queen. Hall asks an interesting question and provides an even more interesting answer: Why do these people of such mixed ancestry come to dance at the shrine of an Indian queen? It’s not that they’re Indians, of course. Although some, I suppose, could have traces of Taíno blood. It’s because they want something to identify with which was not born of colonialism or slavery. And the Taínos were here before both. At this point, the documentary transitions from the ceremony for Anacaona to a cockfight in the Dominican Republic. This transition to an activity that is often perceived as a brutal reminder of harsh Spanish colonial rule is meant to challenge and—in very subtle terms—debunk the neo-Taíno movement. As a voice-over during this transition, Hall asserts, “But it’s easier to change your history than your [violent] character.” Ultimately, perhaps one can “return” to the “past” (or at least change history as it has been transmitted), although doing so is undeniably a political and—one might add—highly imaginative act. Both Borrero’s essay defending the neo-Taíno movement and Forrest’s novel reference a historical figure central to the first chapter of the present study. During their stay in Puerto Rico, Yuis and Felipe visit a modern-day Taíno village: “Yuis saw small houses with lush gardens as they approached the main tribal buildings. Then the world seemed to return to the day before Columbus” (267). Once again, Christopher Columbus (the “story” of Time Travel has come full circle, as it were). Indeed, one of the principal objectives of the Taíno revival is the elision of Columbus and the effects of his journeys to the Americas. Felipe and his fellow Taínos, in effect, have aspired “to recreate the typical Taíno village” (268) thereby rewinding the clock from some date in the current era to life as it was lived among the Taínos on October 11, 1492; in other words, to the time of Guaikan and “el Indio” (chapter 2), not to mention Cristóbal Cuahtli (chapter 1), Itzá (chapter 3) and Sarai (chapter 4). Such desires for

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either a symbolic or literal return to the past recall Barbara Webb’s notion in Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction (1992; see chapter 2) that for Caribbean writers, the “quest for origins [is] the central problem inscribed in myth” (62). With respect to such quests for origins, which may include instances of time travel, one could argue that the Americas have—during the last half-millennium—seen a shift from myth to history and a more recent attempt at a shift among some communities from history back to myth; at the very least, the line between the two seems to have been blurred, which is all well and good except that this blurring seems to come at the expense of AfroCaribbeans. Borrero, the Taíno activist, meanwhile, would probably shed no tears if the memory of Columbus were entirely obliterated. He states that “for the Indigenous Peoples of this hemisphere, and African peoples as well, Columbus remains the ultimate symbol of racism, genocide and colonialism” (148). In these and in other ways, the worlds and strategies of “fact” and “fiction” this study describes at the very least resemble each other and could also be said to influence the others’ agendas to the point of becoming, in certain respects and among some communities, mutually indistinguishable. Furthermore, if they seek either a literal or symbolic return to the past, both “fiction” and “nonfiction,” loosely stated, do so because they want to change something that seems immutable without such an imaginative return to the past. The fictional missions that began a few decades ago with the objective of altering history in the Americas have become among some groups the actual missions to alter the present. *

*

*

One of the fascinating—and to some extent unfortunate—correlates to the Taíno revival is the commercialization of culture that has accompanied it: another example of how fact (or dollar bills) and fiction commingle in this context in order to facilitate a “return” to the past. Duany explains that in both Tibes and Caguana, Taíno archaeological sites in Puerto Rico, researchers have re-created yucayeques, or small Taíno villages akin to the one in Taíno Ti. Unlike the case in Felipe’s village, however, the “inhabitants” of Tibes—according to Duany— are neither Taínos nor neo-Taínos. Instead, they are employees who

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“frequently dress themselves in Indian garb to re-enact the Taínos’ everyday life, complete with their own version of the native ball game” (70). Duany adds that in recent decades, “indigenous motifs have become increasingly fashionable in Puerto Rico—from naming practices to T-shirts and tourist merchandise” (70). Similarly, Jiménez Román describes souvenir shops in Puerto Rico that display “eclectic collections of ‘authentic’ cultural artifacts” (113). Although it is unclear from these accounts whether or not today’s Taínos participate in and profit from this commercialization of culture, there can be no doubt that packaged expressions of a pre-Columbian Taíno identity is a lucrative component of the tourist trade in Puerto Rico. The Taínos and Puerto Rico, however, are not the only entities involved in the commercialization of culture and tourism. In the present era of globalization and international travel (curtailed to some extent, perhaps, by epidemics, drug-related violence, and the U.S. War on Terror, among other factors), tourists have been lured by the prospects of symbolic time travel in conjunction with visits to cultural sites in the Americas and beyond. There are, of course, the ubiquitous advertisements and billboards asking tourists to “go back in time” by visiting Rome, to “walk through time in Colonial Williamsburg,” or to “travel to the time of the ancient Maya.” Indeed, the tourism industry has for decades used the prospects of a symbolic return to the past as a way of stimulating business. As Louis A. Pérez explains, few travelers to Cuba prior to the 1959 revolution “failed to evoke the image of an earlier time, in fact, the beginning of time, which, of course, was to transcend temporal dimensions and imply another place altogether” (22). Indeed, these travelers—many of whom were presumably from a more technologically advanced North American society—saw their visits to Cuba as a return to Eden. In a possible case of unintended consequences, however, such journeys (and their accompanying enticing offers and invitations) may provide a reminder that we cannot in fact return to the past and to a point of origin, except perhaps a) in the realm of fiction, b) in the realm of myth, or c) by emptying our pocketbooks. We are separated from the Chichén Itzá of 1011 ce by a millennium, and the temporal distance will only continue to grow. Indeed, the present (perhaps in the form of an ATM or Coke machine) inevitably lurks just around the corner within any supposed “reconstruction” of an actual past.

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There is also the question of what (or whom) gets elided when we try to recover or return to the past (Afro-Puerto Ricans and AfroDominicans, apparently, in the case of the neo-Taínos).5 All that stated, as separate as it may seem from the present in most respects, my hope in Time Travel has been to show some of the startling ways the past—although not necessarily the reconstructed and sanitized past of theme parks—in many ways remains through fictions alive and active in the present. The past is certainly a popular fictional destination for those who are dissatisfied with the present the past has produced or the future to which the past and present seem to lead. Conversely, fictional visitors from the past to the present (or those who return from the past to the present) are often the bearers of important messages and instructions promising radical changes. These visitors—often victims of the Conquest or slavery— seek to inspire and empower those in the present who in some (often symbolic) manner have taken up battles and challenges that resemble those from centuries ago. Interestingly, and by way of a brief return to a discussion of the tourist trade, it is well known that many popular tourist destinations have been laid at sites of prior brutalities: for instance, old slave forts on the West African coast or former colonial plantations in the Caribbean. While descendants of those forced into labor in such places may consider a visit to them a kind of pilgrimage, certainly not all visitors hold the same attitude. In A Small Place (1988), for example, Jamaica Kincaid admonishes would-be leisure tourists to Antigua not to be fooled by the beauty of the ocean surrounding the island: “it would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up” (14). Similar comments could be said about the earlier, pre-Columbian inhabitants of the island, and for the untold number of Mexicas, Mayas, and so on, buried in the otherwise lovely terrains of Mesoamerica after perishing during the Conquest. Though they may have died centuries ago, and though their temples may now be tourist attractions, they are alive and well—still resisting, still strategizing along with emissaries from their future—in fiction from the Americas.

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Notes

Introduction Time and Narrative in the Americas 1. 1992 and the years immediately surrounding it seemed rife with instability: in 1992 the Eastern Bloc had only recently dissolved; 1992 is also the year the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed. For a thorough discussion of the impact NAFTA has had on recent narrative by Mexican and Chicano writers, see Miguel LópezLozano’s Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares (2008). 2. I do mention the novel again briefly in chapter 2. 3. Which includes Brazil but which, quite problematically, brushes over the sociohistorical complexity of the region. Furthermore as Brotherston and De Sá point out, “Latin America” confusingly “invokes Rome” (8). 4. “Mexica” and “Aztec” refer to the same ethnic group; the latter is a relatively recent (nineteenth-century) reactivation of a term that had fallen out of use by the sixteenth century. Because of the frequency in this manuscript of the term “Mexican” (which generally refers to the modern nation), and because most writers I cite employ the term “Aztec,” to avoid confusion I, too, will on most occasions employ this term. 5. It is worth clarifying that Hall makes no reference to actual time travel in the sense I discuss it in this study. 6. See Foote’s The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction for useful and detailed categorizations of the possible forms of fictional time travel. 7. Some of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s writings refer to this type of “counter-conquest” or conquest in reverse. In his poem, “El Aztec Poet,” for example, he writes of a Mexica/Aztec sailor “named Noctli Europzin Tezpoca” who departs from Mexico in 1492 and thereafter begins “the conquest of Europzin” (67). Similarly, in Irving E. Cox, Jr.’s short story “In the Circle of Nowhere,” Native Americans from the Great Lakes

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region “discover” and conquer the “white savages” of Europe, while in Sesshu Foster’s “Atomik Aztex” the Aztecs become a world power after defeating the Spanish. Such hypothetical counter-conquests do not involve time travel as I define it in this study. Despite, for example, the incredible odds Hernán Cortés overcame in defeating the Aztecs, mainstream Western intellectuals tend to see only either Chinese civilization (see Ian Morris 2010) or Islam (see Lee Harris 2007) as the only societies that could have prevented—and could yet undermine—the rise and eventual supremacy of the “West.” 8. There is, here, an obvious similarity to Joseph Conrad’s famous observation about his aims as a writer: “My task which I am trying to achieve is . . . above all to make you see” (The Nigger of the Narcissus, xiv). 9. It bears underlining that while conducting research for this study I found many texts pertaining to issues connecting time travel and the Americas. That stated, readers hoping for a comprehensive treatment involving every single relevant text will be disappointed. 10. Gonzalo Guerrero, the Spanish sailor who survived a shipwreck of the coast of Yucatán in 1511 and was enslaved by the Maya, eventually rose to prominence among his former captors. According to several sources (most notably Bernal Díaz del Castillo), Guerrero had three children with a Maya woman. These children, at least (there could well have been others lost to the historical record), would have been born several years prior to Martín. On a related note, Mario Acevedo’s whimsical detective novel, X-Rated Bloodsuckers, features a vampire named Coyote. Besides constantly peppering his language with contemporary Chicano street slang, Coyote claims to be the son of La Malinche and a Jewish conquistador. As a vampire he has survived into the present day. In tone, Acevedo’s novel is similar to Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles (see chapter 1), although the former does not develop themes involving the Conquest. 1

Continuing Encounters: Journeys to (and From) the “Discovery” and Conquest of the Americas

1. Interestingly, in the 1950s Walter Cronkite made use of this anachronistic handling of important world historical events via modern journalistic methods in his series “You Are There”; of the several dozen episodes in the series, those on the conquest of Mexico and Columbus’s arrival in San Salvador may have inspired Eco’s story. 2. “. . . un país donde cada paso hacia el porvenir va acompañado de las pisadas de un pasado simultáneas a nuestros presentes” Nuevo tiempo

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

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mexicano, Mexico City: Nuevo Siglo, 1994 (10). The English translation is my own. Although there is a published English translation (A New Time for Mexico, translated by Marina Gutman Castañeda and Fuentes, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), it omits the prologue from which the citation is taken. See Chorba’s Mexico, From Mestizo to Multicultural: National Identity and Recent Representations of the Conquest (2007) for a fuller treatment of this story. In place of the more standard “alternative history,” Gordon B. Chamberlain uses the term allohistory to describe any kind of cultural production that hypothesizes on “what might have been” had certain historical events transpired differently (282). Federico Schaffler González’s “Tloque Nahuaque” exemplifies such cultural production. In this short story, the Aztec and Inca empires join forces in time to successfully repel the Spanish invaders; later, the Aztec/Inca alliance assumes a prominent position on the world stage. Another allohistory is Steven Barnes’s Lion’s Blood. This novel imagines a scenario in which Muslims discover the Americas in the year 1000 and proceed to develop it with the toil of white European slaves. Allohistories need not involve time travel, although oftentimes they do via the presence of portals that transport characters from one reality to another that is usually similar to the first, only in a different stage of development. See Gioconda Belli’s Waslala (1996) for another novel in which a character named Raphael speaks of the eponymous, hidden utopian community. Louis L’Amour calls a similar parallel universe “the Other Side” in The Haunted Mesa (1987), a novel with a fictional explanation for the unsolved disappearance of the Anasazi peoples of the American Southwest. Interestingly, the characters who inhabit the Other Side have names taken from the Maya Popol Vuh. L’Amour explains that the presence of “trade and communication between the Anasazi and the Maya is well established” (357). A Publishers Weekly review from 1996 states the following about the characters in Pastwatch: “Uniformly well-meaning, the trio is just too sanctified to believe . . .” Card, a devout Mormon, has also written several books with overtly religious themes. This scene may be reminiscent to some of Alejandro Paternain’s Crónica del descubrimiento (1980), the fantastic parody in which a fictitious American indigenous group travels to Spain in 1492 in order to “discover” the Old World. Paternain’s novel is undoubtedly related to the

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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present study, except inasmuch as there are in it no discernible temporal leaps. Granted, the argument can be made that there are—in broad terms— elements of science fiction as it is conventionally understood in texts that are not generally included in this genre, for example, “The Discovery of America” by Eco, and “The Two Americas” by Fuentes. If we discount stories of time travel, there do exist earlier works of science fiction by Spanish-American writers. Darrell Lockhart, for example, explains that the Mexican friar Manuel Antonio de Rivas published in 1775 what “may be considered the first science fiction work of Latin America,” a story titled “Sizigias y cuadraturas lunares ajustadas al meridiano de Mérida de Yucatán por un anctítona o habitador de la luna,” about a voyage to the moon (xii). In his Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares, Miguel LópezLozano provides a thorough analysis of Alejandro Morales’s dystopian novel, The Rag Doll Plagues (1992). This novel, it could be argued, involves instances of paranormal temporal conflations between the early colonial past of Mexico and the present and future of both Mexico and California. Finally, and with respect to the postcolonial period in the Dominican Republic, Bernardo Vega’s Domini Canes: Los perros del señor (1989) imagines a posthumous conversation—one that, chronologically, could never have taken place to begin with—between the Dominican dictators Rafael Trujillo (1891 and 1961; ruled in various guises between 1930 and 1961) and a much earlier predecessor, Ulises Heureaux (aka “Lilís”; 1845–99; ruled off and on during last two decades of the nineteenth century). Both Trujillo and Lilís were assassinated. For a fuller treatment of this novel, see Ignacio LópezCalvo’s “God and Trujillo”: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator. It would be more precise to call the time period depicted in the film as the late colonial period or independence era. In any case, what matters most here is that Bolívar’s epoch lies well beyond the time of the Conquest. The same has been said about the so-called “discovery” of the Americas: In Days of Obligation, Richard Rodriguez wonders if it is “the nature of Indians—not verifiable in nature, of course, but in the European description of Indians—that we wait around to be ‘discovered’?” (6–7). Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s writings and performance art offer a similar critique about the modern plight of not just Native Americans but of everyone caught in the cultural and political middle ground between Mexico and the United States. With Coco Fusco, Gómez-Peña

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performed as an “undiscovered” Guatinaui tribesman in a 1992 exhibition titled The Couple in the Cage (see Gómez-Peña in bibliography), which visited museums in several cities, including Chicago, New York, and Madrid. At least part of the power in the couple’s “reverse anthropology” performance lay in the fact that many in the audience actually thought the display was “authentic.” In their heuristic abstractness, popular visions of European encounters with the indigenous population in North America would amount to the antithesis of the Black Legend. Note the irony in his name: “creo” means “I believe” in Spanish, while “Thomas” is often associated with disbelief on account of Jesus’ disciple. In chapter 3 I discuss Elena Garro’s short story, “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas,” which features a similar relationship between a man and a woman. Some New Age thinkers are convinced Quetzalcoatl’s return will occur in December 2012, when a Maya calendar cycle over 5,000 years long will come to an end. Fuentes interview by Emmanuel Carballo, “Carlos Fuentes (1928),” in Diecinueve protagonistas de la literatura mexicana del siglo XX (Mexico: Empresas Editoriales, 1965) 428. Translated by and quoted from Luis Leal, “History and Myth in the Narrative of Carlos Fuentes.” In Carlos Fuentes: A Critical View. Edited by Robert Brody and Charles Rossman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Shirley Williams observes similarly that Fuentes’s “is a uniquely Mexican reality, a reality peopled by ghosts and phantasms from Mexico’s past—a past that refuses to die, that remains eternally a part of the present” (40). Frank Dauster reads this kitschiness as a commentary on modern Mexico (302–3). Fuentes has also participated in the Grupo de los Cien. Speaking of spirits, Vallarino’s claim that Lake Texcoco was where the Mexican federal police dumped bodies should come as no surprise (543). Environmental concerns regarding Mexico in general and Mexico City in particular have been a sustained topic of interest throughout Aridjis’s poetry. Two among numerous possible examples include “Distrito Federal” (from Construir la muerte, Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1982) and “Detritus Federal” (from Imágenes para el fin del milenio & Nueva expulsión del paraíso, Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1990). Quoted in David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. New York: Doubleday, 2009 (277). Heckenberger’s

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observation stands in contrast with outdated views within Western anthropology, which for quite some time posited traditional New World societies as existing beyond the realm of chronology and historicity. As recently as the mid-twentieth century, for instance, Allan Holmberg, an American anthropologist conducting fieldwork in Bolivia on the Sirionó ethnic group, gave rise to what has come to be known as “Holmberg’s Mistake”: According to Charles Mann, Holmberg believed that the Sirionó “had existed almost without change in a landscape unmarked by their presence. Then they encountered European society and for the first time their history acquired a narrative flow” (8). “A Special Report on Water: For Want of a Drink.” The Economist (May 22–28, 2010): 5. No author listed. This is the case, for instance, in Alfonso Reyes’s 1915 essay, “Visión de Anáhuac (1519),” whose epigraph famously states the following about the central Mexican valley: “Viajero: has llegado a la región más transparente del aire.” Fuentes would use this epigraph as the basis for the title of his 1959 novel, La región más transparente. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo goes so far as to consider Heredia’s poem the best “ever written by a Spanish American in the Spanish language” (Quoted in Keen 364). Sadly, turmoil also prevailed in Heredia’s adoptive country of Mexico soon after it gained its independence from Spain. The poem juxtaposes this turmoil with the tranquility the speaker experiences on the teocalli. See Leonardo Padura’s excellent novel, La novela de mi vida (2002) for a creative interpretation of Heredia’s life and legacy. The novel itself is masterful in its handling of its temporal schemes, juxtaposing—often to great effect—Heredia’s early nineteenth-century colonial Cuba with contemporary Cuba’s equally repressive political and artistic conditions. On Island Time? Temporal Displacement and the Caribbean

1. Undoubtedly, Cubans on the island would probably see matters in a different light. In fact, throughout the island time is often seen as commencing with the revolution: the current year, for example, is often indicated not by the standard count (2010), but by its distance from the revolution (“. . . in year 51 of the Revolution . . .”). Such was also the case after the French Revolution. 2. The abundant bibliography in Alternative Histories: Eleven Stories of the World as It Might Have Been, edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, reveals that the Caribbean is much less involved in

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4. 5.

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English-language time travel fiction and novels of alternate history than Hitler’s Germany, the United States during the Civil War, the Atlantic World (broadly stated) during the time of the “discovery” of America, the Near East during the time of Jesus, and the World War II era. Kodwo Eshun, cited by his brother Ekow, in reference to Sun Ra’s announcement in 1955 that he was born on Saturn (Sun Ra was a pioneer of Black Atlantic Futurism). Ekow Eshun: Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005, p. 221. Fidel Castro, speech of June 12, 1971, in Granma, September 7, 1972. Quoted in Carlos Moore’s Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (319). Translated by Kathleen Weaver; in Looking Within / Mirar adentro. Other poems by Morejón, including “Persona,” “Mujeres nuevas,” and “Mirar adentro,” also explore Afro-Cuban identity in ways that challenge conventional understandings of history and temporality. Toni Morrison, in her essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” states the following about the importance of ancestors in writings by African Americans: “. . . it seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of an ancestor. Which is to say a grandfather as in Ralph Ellison, or a grandmother as in Toni Cade Bambara, or a healer as in Bambara or Henry Dumas. There is always an elder there. And these ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom” (343). Clearly, for Morrison, ancestors have a profound and timeless importance. That said, in this essay she does not seem to be referring to ancestors that actually travel in time. Notice the similarities between the “hauntings” described in the preceding citations and the following one, taken from a description offered by Delores McQuinn upon first visiting the site of a former slave jail in Richmond, Virginia. According to Abigail Tucker, “the place has haunted McQuinn ever since her initial visit in 2003, soon after she learned of its existence. ‘I started weeping and couldn’t stop. There was a presence here’ ” (Tucker 22). Information found in the website that distributes the film, www.sankofa. com. Through the Door of No Return, a 1997 documentary by the same production company shows how Ghana’s past as a point of embarkation for slaves has in recent years become closely tied to a tourism industry designed for African Americans who seek to retrace the ordeal of their enslaved ancestors. As visitors to a fort that served to warehouse slaves during the era of the slave trade, these tourists participate in ceremonies

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

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that pay homage to their ancestors while re-creating elements of their captivity. See afterword for additional commentary on time travel and tourism. I am grateful to Keith Mitchell for alerting me to an additional text with which Baldeosingh’s novel shares similarities: Jewell Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), a vampire story with a feminist perspective about a female slave in the United States who lives several hundred years. In my discussion on the novel I will use the term “incarnation” to refer to specific manifestations of this phenomenon within the text, and “reincarnation” to refer to the process or concept of this phenomenon in more general terms. The St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott has also explored in his poetry the Adam trope, particularly in an American context in which new realities need to be given a name. See, for example, “Crusoe’s Island” in his collection The Castaway and Other Poems (1965) and “The Estranging Sea” in Another Life (1973). Fernando Henriques, “Colour Values in Jamaican Society,” British Journal of Sociology 2, no. 2 (June 1951): 115–21. Quoted in Gladwell 282. Chardonbois’s excesses were, unfortunately, not unique in the Caribbean during the slavery era. With reference to the Francophone Caribbean, Ned Sublette observes that “the hyperbolic cruelties of the Marquis de Sade’s writings were not mere fantasy in Saint-Domingue, where a rich woman could have her cook roasted alive in the oven if she was displeased. As was true in every slave territory, some slave owners were more humane than others; but there was nothing to restrain the more monstrous ones, who treated their property as they liked” (136). Meanwhile, both Douglas Hall’s In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86 (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 1999) and Trevor Burnard’s Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) describe all manner of horrific abuse and punishment of slaves by masters in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Hamlet. Act I, Scene V, ln. 189. According to Oppenheimer, “Prostitution on Havana’s Malecón boulevard was beginning to spread fast in 1989, yet Castro’s speeches kept talking about those shameful prerevolutionary days when one could find prostitutes on the streets of Havana. Officially, there was no prostitution in Cuba” (146). Another of Oppenheimer’s observations is of relevance to these young characters’ interrupted careers: “The group aged twenty-five to thirty

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was to become the largest bloc within Cuba’s youth in the 1990s, according to Cuba’s Statistics Committee. These young adults were the most affected by the collapse of the Socialist dream. They could not buy clothes because of the growing shortages of consumer goods. They could not meet at restaurants or cafés because most establishments had closed down for lack of food” (262). No specific explanation is given for Claudia’s mystical powers. She does, however, offer Jung’s theories (see chapter 1 for additional commentary on Jung) as a possible explanation. One of the few books in her possession cites the Swiss psychoanalyst’s contention that “the first requirement of a vision is the presence of an unusual emotion” [“La presencia de una emoción inusual” 242]. Although there are others, Muba is the novel’s most salient Afro-Cuban character. There are none, for instance, in the principal narrative thread (i.e., the one set in the 1990s), except for Muba, and she—of course—is a visitor from an earlier epoch. In terms of how to interpret Muba in light of Cuba’s demographic makeup, it can be difficult to draw conclusions about the current size of Cuba’s black population on account of the often-contradictory censuses. The 2002 official census lists this population at 11 percent of the island’s total. According to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, the real figure is above 60 percent (Miami Herald, June 20, 2007). This apparent elision of Cuba’s present-day African elements in Chaviano’s novel raises an interesting question regarding how to position Muba: as a character that affirms and celebrates Cuba’s African heritage or as an exotic relic from the past—a relic, moreover, out of touch with certain descriptions of Cuba’s demographic reality. One could wonder, then, if Chaviano’s novel approximates the veiled racially driven agenda underlying the outwardly abolitionist pronouncements of Cuba’s mid-nineteenth-century Del Monte Circle. If this is the case, the novel would stand in sharp contrast to Baldeosingh’s celebration of Caribbean creolization. There is no indication that Guillén’s poem was in fact banned in Cuba during the 1980s or 1990s. The novel’s ending is, in fact, a cliffhanger: it is unclear if she decides to leave or not. 3

The Ghost of La Malinche: Time Travel and Feminism

1. Here, Maureen Shea’s distinction between feminine and feminist works can be useful: “the former interprets and describes, while the

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3.

4. 5.

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latter transforms and advocates change in the existing culture” (58). The works I examine in the present chapter share this transformative and engaged attitude characteristic of feminism as Shea defines it. Los tlaxcaltecas or Tlaxcaltecs were a tribe in ancient Mexico’s central valley. In order to free themselves from Aztec domination, they collaborated with the Spaniards in the defeat of the former. Although she is known by several other names, including Doña Marina, Malintzin, Malinalli, and most infamously as La Chingada, in the interest of coherence—and following several other writers—I refer to her as La Malinche. Ruiz’s painting, as well as all others referenced in this chapter, are easily accessible via standard Internet image searches. Rita Eder also notices the hill’s similarity with the one in Cholula and signals the important historical role attributed to La Malinche at this site: “De no ser por Marina, quien advirtió a Cortés que los cholultecas lo esperaban en ese sitio para emboscarlo, la historia, se ha especulado, hubiero sido la opuesta” (98) [“Had it not been for Marina, who warned Cortés that the inhabitants of Cholula awaited him there to ambush him, history, it has been speculated, would have had an opposite result”]. As Cypess observes, both Cholula and the figure of La Malinche herself can be likened to a palimpsest: “The palimpsest is an important archaeological image in Mexico and describes the way the Aztecs, Mayans, and other tribes built one pyramid atop another, or how the Catholic church constructed its religious sites on pre-Hispanic foundations” (La Malinche 8). This equation, incidentally, in many ways recalls the similar one made in Portalatín’s Yania Tierra. Furthermore, paintings that predate Ruiz’s, including Diego Rivera’s 1928 murals at a chapel in Chapingo, Mexico, “also liken women to the landscape” (Eder 101). The initial “Yes” belongs to Zúñiga. All page numbers correspond to Zúñiga’s study. Page 55. There are minor discrepancies between Zúñiga’s citation of Núñez and my own in the epigraph to this chapter. The epigraph to La mujer habitada is also on the opening page of Galeano’s text and stems, in turn, from Marc de Civrieux’s Watunna. Mitología makiritare (1970). The English version of Galeano’s text translates the passage as follows: “I break this egg and the woman is born and the man is born. And together they will live and die. But they will be born again. They will be born and die again and be born again. They will never stop being born, because death is a lie” (3). With the exception of this epigraph, which does not appear in the English

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translation of the novel, all further translations to Belli’s novel are by Kathleen March. For a detailed account of Belli’s version of the actual assault, which—it must be stated—closely parallels the events described in the novel, see her The Country Under My Skin, 99–100. House/Garden/Nation 169. Indeed, for Rodríguez, the preceding amounts to the “the main question of the novel” (170). “Resistance and Liberation: The Mythic Voice and Textual Authority in Belli’s La mujer habitada” In Critical Essays on the Literatures of Spain and Spanish America, eds. Luis T. González-del-Valle and Julio Baena. Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1991 (210). Quoted in Craft (161). A fictionalized Christopher Columbus states the following in “Las dos Américas,” a story in El Naranjo: “De mi costal saqué las semillas que eran del naranjo y juntos sembramos . . . Mejor que en Andalucía creció en Antilia el árbol con hojas lustrosas y flores aromáticas. Jamás vi mejores naranjas . . .” (246) [“Out of my sack I took orange seeds, and together we planted them . . . The trees grew better in Antilia than in Andalusia, with shiny leaves and fragrant flowers. I never saw better oranges . . .” 215]. See chapter 1 for further discussion of El Naranjo. It is fair to say, perhaps, that the orange tree/American mestizaje analogy can only be stretched so far: with a European seed and American soil as its basic units, much about mestizaje in the Americas seems missing from Fuentes’s analogy. After all, biological mestizaje, at least, presupposes the existence of two “sides,” each of which plays an equal role in the process of biological reproduction. In Fuentes’s analogy, the two sides seem unequal (or at least seem to belong to different categories). Itzá makes her ethnicity known on pages 40 and 102. In fact, Belli takes geographical liberties with regard to Mesoamerican cultural groups. The Nahuas (or Mexicas) did not populate or colonize Nicaragua. Similarly, the name “Itzá” is an obvious allusion to the Maya civilization of the northern Yucatan peninsula, particularly the famous Chichén Itzá archaeological site. The character Itzá translates her name into Spanish as “gota de rocío” (58–59) or “dew drop” which is a far cry from how linguists of the Maya language family commonly translate the name: “people who speak our language brokenly” (Sharer 560). The name derived, in a sense, from a term similar to the Greek’s “barbarians.” In any case, intermittently throughout the novel, Itzá’s presence is suggested via references to dew. Meanwhile, Lavinia, in Roman mythology, was the daughter of Latinus and Amata and sparked a war when two men competed for her hand in marriage (Snodgrass 60–61). In keeping

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16.

17.

18. 19.

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with the novel’s references to plant life and fertility, one could argue that the name closely resembles the Spanish words la viña, or vineyard. It so happens, however, that “Lavinia” is also Belli’s younger sister’s name (see Belli, The Country Under My Skin 16). For a productive discussion on focalization and the gaze, see her article, “Anatomy of a Woman: Pleasure, Power, and Politics in Gioconda Belli’s Writing” (2006; see bibliography for further details). Quoted in Huellas de las literaturas hispanoamericanas, 2nd Edition. Edited by Garganigo et al. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002. Notice, too, Carlos Fuentes’s fictionalized indigenous lament on the Conquest that marks the beginning of “Las dos orillas” (“The Two Shores”) a short story in El naranjo: “Yo vi todo esto. La caída de la gran ciudad azteca . . .” (11) [“All this I saw. The fall of the great Aztec city . . .” 3]. Belli explains that she was inspired by Jaime Wheelock’s Indigenous Roots of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Nicaragua, a book that “presented historical facts that refuted the fallacies of the ‘official history,’ which maintained that the Indians had coexisted peacefully with the Spanish. His information, along with [her] grandfather Pancho’s memories, inspired the character of Itzá in [her] novel La mujer habitada” (The Country Under My Skin 139). According to Craft, Flor’s name “equates this mature, self-actuated woman with nature in full bloom” (167). Such a criticism would probably also extend to poems of Belli’s, such as “América en el idioma de la memoria” (Apogeo 1998), in which the speaker’s ancestors are presumably (and entirely) indigenous. Craft 180. See Craft 180–81 for a fuller discussion on critiques of La mujer habitada that precede Barbas-Rhoden’s contention that the novel romanticizes an indigenous past that is not truly past. For her part, Craft ultimately praises the novel for standing “as a striking example of resistance literature, especially challenging longheld societal assumptions about gender and class . . . What emerges in the end is a hybrid novel that pays homage to Nicaragua’s fighting women who, in touch with their natural and indigenous roots and in solidarity with their sisters, demand freedom from oppressive social values and access to power alongside their male counterparts” (181–82). Barbas-Rhoden reads this aspect of the novel in terms of Lavinia’s and Itzá’s absent mothers (Writing Women 53). This translation is, presumably, Belli and Kristina Cordero’s. Belli’s mention of Pasos, who was prominent in Nicaragua’s literary scene

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during the 1920s and 1930s (he died in 1947, the year before her birth), positions much of her work within the context of Nicaragua’s earlier, iconoclastic Vanguardista movement, of which Pasos was a founding member, along with his contemporaries Pablo Antonio Cuadra, and José Coronel Urtecho. Cuadra and Urtecho championed Belli’s early poetry (see her The Country Under My Skin). “Dendro-psychoses.” American Journal of Psychology, 9, 1897 (471). Quoted in Robert Sommer, “Trees and Human Identity,” in Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature. Edited by Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003 (192). In a later study, Quantz outlined the ways children, in particular, ascribe to trees human qualities (Sommer 192–93). See also the essay “Moralizing Trees” (Gebhard, Nevers, and BillmannMahecha) in Identity and the Natural Environment for a more recent analysis of children’s understanding of trees. With respect to the role of trees in the formation of social movements, we might recall Nancy Morejón’s observations, expressed in her poem “Mujer Negra,” concerning the connection between trees and the growth of communism in Cuba (see previous chapter). Lastly, in her recent novel about the JudeoChristian story of Genesis, El infinito en la palma de la mano (2008) [Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand, 2009], Belli reprises to a limited extent La mujer habitada’s interest in trees by juxtaposing the Edenic tree of life with the more sinister tree of the knowledge of good and evil. See El infinito, pp. 24–25. One could, perhaps, read in this light the anthropomorphised trees in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1937–49), not to mention those in Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900). “The City Tree.” Horticulture, 54, 1976 (26). Quoted in Sommer 182–83. Anthropomorphism and tree metaphors aside, perhaps no one could have foreseen the strange case of Artyom Sidorkin, a Russian man, who was found, in 2009, to have a small fir tree growing in one of his lungs. See www.associatedcontent.com/article/1657389/fir_tree_ grows_in_mans_lung.html. See Altman’s Sacred Trees. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994. Hambidge’s principal texts are Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by the Artists, 1923, and Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry, 1932. Frida Kahlo: The Paintings. New York: Harper Collins, 1991 (86). Quoted in Hoover Giese 55. Both Rivera frescoes are located on the east wall of a chapel at the Autonomous University of Chapingo in Mexico.

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30. See the Popol Vuh, which details the Maya creation story. Contemporary Maya communities in western Guatemala have been critical of the white custom of burying in niches. They “consider it better to feed the earth with their dead bodies in payment for the products it gives them when they are alive” (Thompson 2002, 87). Meanwhile, according to Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs called human blood, “most particularly human blood deliberately shed, ‘most precious water.’ They understood it to be a non-renewable resource, so its value was enhanced. It was thought to have extraordinary fertilizing power” (72). 31. The Cage of Melancholy (81). Quoted in Hoover Giese 70. The emphasis is Hoover Giese’s. 32. March, in turn, draws from the work of art historian Merlin Stone. Quoted in Craft 163. 33. Hall 1996. See bibliography for additional information. 34. In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz describes “the contemptuous adjective malinchista recently put into circulation by the newspapers to denounce all those who have been corrupted by foreign influences. The malinchistas are those who want Mexico to open itself to the outside world: the true sons of La Malinche, who is the Chingada in person” (86). 35. Other writers have commented on a similar sense of guilt involving the Conquest of the Americas. Ray Broadus Browne, for instance, asserts that whites in North America have a “general sense of guilt and wrongdoing against the Natives who peopled the American Garden of Eden that the New World was thought to be” (30). Carol Spindel makes a comparable claim with reference to the use of a Native American nomenclature for athletic teams in the United States: “Indian mascots present a mythic past that is simpler and sweeter, a mythic history that absolves much” (268). 4 Not Just Kids’ Stuff: Time Travel as Pedagogy in the Americas 1. Similar temporal convergences or anachronisms characterize several political cartoons featured in Spanish-language compilations that were published to commemorate (or decry) the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. In one such cartoon, by an artist named Ulises, a Maya youth wearing a tank top and blue jeans spraypaints Maya glyphs on a wall. Another cartoon, by Ríus, features a Mesoamerican ruler atop his pyramid wondering what stance his society should take with regard to foreign investment. See Nuestra América frente al V centenario and 1492–1992: La interminable Conquista in bibliography.

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2. Perhaps because the geographical location of the erstwhile Aztec empire is closer than the Inca to the home regions of many of the authors in the present study (and, as such, may inspire greater fear or awe), it seems as if the Aztecs always defeat the Incas in hypothetical fictional encounters. 3. The character of Las Casas in Jarman’s novel most closely resembles the Mercedarian friar who did, in fact, accompany Cortés in Mexico, Bartolomé de Olmedo (see The Bernal Díaz Chronicles: The True Story of the Conquest of Mexico, translated and edited by Albert Idell. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956; p. 39). 4. This according to Hugh Thomas’s Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 152. 5. For a fascinating conjectural analysis of the chain of events that might have ensued had the Aztecs defeated Cortés, see the anthropologist Ross Hassig’s essay, “The Immolation of Hernán Cortés” (see bibliography for additional information). In sum, Hassig contends that “even with an Aztec victory, Mexico would have been profoundly changed by the Spanish presence” (133). 6. Translations are my own (this prologue was written after Lysander Kemp’s popular 1985 translation of Paz’s book). 7. This type of composite of Latin American society has long been popular. Examples of composite histories of Latin America include the novel Tirano Banderas (1926) by the Spaniard Valle-Inclán; the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias’s novel, El señor presidente (1946); and the relatively recent film by the North American John Sayles, Men with Guns/ Hombres armados (1997). 8. See González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive. The fact that H-01 writes a book that chronicles his experiences in Taína further suggests the presence of el Archivo. 9. This book has not been translated into English. The title’s literal translation would be “In Search of the Golden Cemí.” A cemí (or zemi) is a Taíno religious sculpture that embodies ancestral spirits. 10. According to Philip Swanson, twentieth-century fictional neoindigenist texts like Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) and Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Hombres de Maíz (1949) “attempted to recreate the indigenous experience from the inside, that is, to show reality through the filter of the indigenous population’s perception of it” (51). In many ways, Swanson’s understanding of neo-indigenism is akin to conventional definitions of indigenism. I employ “neo-indigenism” more specifically to denote modern attempts to establish not only symbolic or perspectival links between communities from the past and

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present, but also genealogical continuities and kinship ties between these communities. Afterword: Time Travel Fact and Fiction 1. Significantly, Caciquea Yuisa was female, a fact that underscores the novel’s representation of a sexual slipperiness to go alongside its unusual temporal schemes. 2. Along these lines, it comes as little surprise that some of the academic writers in the study cite Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” as a way to explain this revival. 3. The abundance of information online about the various Taíno groups active on the island supports Borrero’s assertion. 4. See www.mexica-movement.org. 5. For a look at how the tourist trade (among other modern forces) to the world of the Maya ignores their living descendants, see Jeffrey Himpele’s documentary, Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 1997.

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Index

Acres, Mark, Temples of Blood, 151, 162–5 Adolph, José B., “El falsificador,” 175–8 Aínsa, Fernando, 6 Alcocer, Rudyard J, Narrative Mutations, 2, 4 Alí Triana, Jorge, xv Bolívar soy yo (film), 43–4 allohistory, 201n4 Altman, Nathaniel, 133 Americas, the (definitions), xv, 3 Anderson, Benedict, 122 Andrade, Mário de, 4 Ankori, Gannit, 137 anthropology, 10 anthropomorphism (person/plant equivalency), 132–3 Apocalypto (film), 151–2 Arenas, Reinaldo, El color del verano, 101–4 Aridjis, Homero “Carta de México,” 53 Grupo de los cien, 52 La leyenda de los soles, 51–65 Arredondo, Inés, 148 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 24 Aztecs, 50, 65, 79, 115, 121, 142, 152, 154, 156 and Conquistador, 34 definition, 199n4 and “El último sol” (Muñoz), 166–75

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and La leyenda de los soles, 59 and Mexico City, 57 and Pastwatch, 38 and Temples of Blood (Acres), 163–5 and temporality, 157–8 and The Time Travelling Cat and the Aztec Sacrifice (Jarman), 160–1 and You Wouldn’t Want to Be an Aztec Sacrifice! (Macdonald), 159 Backyardigans, The (animated film), 158–9 Baldeosingh, Kevin and personal ethnic identity, 84 and religious views, 97–8 The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar, 19–20, 84–101 and vision of Caribbean identity, 96–9 Barbas-Rhoden, Laura, 112, 126, 128–30, 144 Barbassa, Juliana, 106 Barnitz, Jacqueline, 117 Bartra, Roger, 135–6 Base, Ron, 72 Baugh, Edward, 68 Behar, Sonia, 104–5 Being Human (film), 87 Bell, Andrea L. and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, 41 Bell, Vera, 67, 82

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Index

Belli, Gioconda “Consuelo para la temporalidad,” 132 The Country under My Skin, 131 La mujer habitada, 20, 123–47 “Plenitud,” 132 Waslala, 132 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 19, 70 Bingen, Hildegard von, 107 Black Legend, 37–8 Bolívar, Simón, 43–4 Bolívar soy yo (film), 43–4 Borges, Jorge Luis, 5, 12 Borrero, Roberto Mucaro, 193–5 Boullosa, Carmen, 17 Bravo de Rueda, José Alberto, 175 Brazil, 4 Brooks, Peter, 5 Brotherston, Gordon and Lúcia de Sá, 3 Buena Vista Social Club (documentary), 72 Burbank, Luther, 134–5 Burrus, Christina, 137 Butler, Octavia, Kindred, 3, 77–8 Cameron, James, 84 Campana, Patrizia, 41–2 Campos, Victoria, 158 Card, Orson Scott interest in Conquest, 35 Pastwatch, xiv, 18, 34–40 religious views, 201n8 Caribbean region, 19–20 and curse of Columbus, 24, 67–112 and heredity, 4 and Hinduism, 97–9 and history, 68, 100, 186 and identity, 107 and La isla de luz, 178–86 and legacy of slavery, 75–83 and links to Spanish America, 4 and notion of progress, 8 and postethnicity, 100 and return to lost origins, 11, 68–9, 188–9, 195 and skin color, 180, 185

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and temporality, 69–71 and tourism, 195–7 and women, 114 Carpentier, Alejo, xi, 1 and “De lo real maravilloso americano,” 69 and El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow), 15, 44 and Los pasos perdidos, 14 and “Viaje a la semilla,” 14 Carrasco, Davíd, 133 Caruth, Cathy, 13 Caso, Antonio, 45 Castro, Fidel, 78, 104–6, 110–11 Catholic Church, 15 cemíes, 190–1, 213n9 Chamberlain, Gordon B., 46–7 and allohistory, 201n4 Chávez, Hugo, 44 Chaviano, Daína, El hombre, la hembra y el hambre, 101, 104–11 Chichén Itzá, 158, 196 “Chichen Itza Pizza,” see Backyardigans, The China (official censorship of fictional time travel), 188 Chomsky, Noam, 45 Chorba, Carrie, 17, 28, 123, 188 Christensen, Thomas and Carol, 44 Christopher, John, New Found Land, 153–4 colonial era and Bolívar soy yo (Alí Triana), 43 contrasted with conquest era, 42–3 and neo-Taíno movement, 194 and notion of progress, 8 Columbus, Christopher, xiv, 2, 31, 33, 48, 194–5 and El arpa y la sombra (Carpentier), 15 and curse of Columbus, 24 and “The Discovery of America” (Eco), 25–7 and “Las dos américas” (Fuentes), 29–30

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Index and Pastwatch, 35–40 and The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar, 86–7 comparative literature, 2 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 113 conquest, the, xv, 9 and board games, 162–5 and consequent rapport between Latin America and history, 8 and contested disappearance of Taínos, 193 as depicted by North American writers, 32–40 and disruption of pre-Columbian temporal schemes, 9 and feminist issues, 113–47 and Hispanic science fiction, 40–65 and modern Latin American novels, 24, 27, 30 and slow development in Latin America, 7 and storytelling, 18 and time travelers, 4 Conrad, Geoffrey and Arthur Demarest, 56 Cordones-Cook, Juanamaría, 81 Cortázar, Julio, 5, 50 Cortés, Hernán, 20, 35, 53, 116, 120–1, 137 and Temples of Blood (Acres), 162–5 and The Time Travelling Cat and the Aztec Sacrifice (Jarman), 161 and “El ultimo sol” (Muñoz), 168, 173–4 Crossley, Robert, 77–8 Cuarón, Alfonso, Y tu mamá también, 46 Cuauhtémoc, 45 Currie, Mark, 6 Cypess, Sandra Messinger, 9, 13, 115–16, 120–2 Dash, J. Michael, 3 Demarest, Arthur, see Conrad, Geoffrey Derrida, Jacques, 187–8 Diamond, Jared, 152, 156

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235

diasporas, 76–7 Díaz del Castillo, Bernál, 65, 118–19, 122, 160, 162, 165 “The Discovery of America,” see Eco, Umberto Doidge, Norman, 11–14 Dominican Republic, 92, 193–4 and curse of Columbus, 24 Dri, Rubén, 7 Duany, Jorge, 192–3, 195–6 Eco, Umberto, 3 and “The Discovery of America,” 25–7 Economist, The (magazine), 57 Eder, Rita, 118 Eersel, Eugenie, 82 Emerald Forest, The (film), 10 Eshun, Ekow, 83 Esquivel, Laura, 119–20 Estévez, Abilio “Tosca,” 73–4 ethnogenesis, 89 Faulkner, William, 23 Fenwick, M. J., 114 Ferraz, Vicente, see Siberian Mammoth, The Foote, Bud, 12, 35 Forrest Gump (film), 87 Fountain, The (film), 46 Freud, Sigmund, 10–11 Fuentes, Carlos, 13, 23, 28, 50–1, 120, 126, 190 and “Las dos Américas,” 29–30 Gabaldon, Diana, Voyager, 74 Galeano, Eduardo, 44, 113, 123 García Márquez, Gabriel, 23–4 Garro, Elena, 158 and “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas,” 115–16 Gaspar, Enrique, 41 Gerima, Haile, Sankofa, 82–3, 100 ghosts, 13–14, 54 Glissant, Edouard, 68

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Index

Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 102–4 González Echevarría, Roberto, 9–10, 180 Gorodischer, Angélica, “De navegantes,” 31–2 Grupo de los Cien, 52, 64 Guillén, Nicolás and “Futuro,” 79–80 and “Tengo,” 110–11 and “Vine en un barco negrero,” 80 Guillermoprieto, Alma, 52 Haiti, 38–9, 67–9, 86, 194 Hall, Stuart, 11, 76–7, 83, 138, 187, 189, 194 Hambidge, Jay, 134 Havana, 71–3, 104, 184 and El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Chaviano), 106–11 Haywood-Ferreira, Rachel, 40 Heckenberger, Michael, 56–7 Heise, Ursula, 5 Hemingway, Ernest, 73, 109 Henriques, Fernando, 93 Heredia, José María, 65, 204n28 Herrera, Hayden, 134 Hinduism, 95–7, 99–101 Holtz Kay, Jane, 133 Hoover Giese, Lucretia, 134–6 Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, 152 I am Cuba (film), 72–3 Incas, 56, 79, 154, 175–7, 201n4 Jarman, Julia, The Time Travelling Cat and the Aztec Sacrifice, 160–1 Jenkins, Gareth, 71 Jiménez Román, Miriam, 192, 196 Johnson, Erika, 14 Jung, Carl G., 11–12 Kahlo, Frida, 29, 168 and “Portrait of Luther Burbank,” 134–5 and “Roots,” 137–8

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Kalatozov, Mikhail, see I am Cuba Kincaid, Jamaica, 197 Last of the Dogmen, The (film), 16 Latin America, 4 Leal, Luis, 51 Lewis, Gordon K., 75 leyenda negra, see Black Legend Lodge, David, 52 López, Kimberle, 17–18 López-Calvo, Ignacio, 191, 193, 202n12 López Lozano, Miguel, 18, 25, 32, 52, 199n1, 202n12 Lowenthal, David, 69–70 Loza, Gustavo, 46 Lucie-Smith, Edward, 117 Macdonald, Fiona, 159 Machu Picchu, 23 Malinche, La, 20, 113, 116–17, 118–20, 148, 163 and La mujer habitada (Belli), 123, 138–47 and El sueño de La Malinche (Del Río), 120–3 and “El sueño de La Malinche” (Ruiz), 117–18 March, Kathleen N., 137 Marley, Bob, 82 Martí, José and El color del verano (Arenas), 103 and El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Chaviano), 110–11 and La isla de luz (Muñoz), 179–80, 182 Matthiessen, Peter, 10 Mayas, 24, 38, 75, 129, 166 and Apocalypto (Gibson), 151–2 and “Chichen Itza Pizza” (cartoon), 158–9 and Me oh Maya! (Scieszka), 153, 154–8 and relationship to ancestors, 56 and temporality, 9 and views on plants/trees, 133

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Index McAnany, Patricia, 56 McAnuff-Gauntlett, Delores, 82 McCullough, David, 28 Medicine Man (film), 10 memory, 1, 10–11, 70–1 mestizaje, 20, 89, 126, 135, 142–4, 146, 209n13 Mexicas (definition), 199n4 Mexico, 28, 45, 53–4, 64, 117 and H1N1, xii–xiii Mexico City, xii–xiii and La leyenda de los soles (Aridjis), 52–65 Moctezma, 163–5, 170, 173–4 Molina-Gavilán, Yolanda, see Bell, Andrea L. Moore, Carlos, 78, 82 More, Thomas, 31 Morejon, Nancy, 81–2 Muñoz, Elías Miguel and “El último sol,” 165–75 and La isla de luz, 178–86 Murray, Yxta Maya, 114 NAFTA, 64 Naipaul, V. S., 68, 78 Narayanan, Vasudha, 95–6 neo-indigenism, 213n10 neo-Taíno movement, 191–5 Núñez Becerra, Fernanda, 113, 119 Obama, Barack, xii Oppenheimer, Andres, 105–6, 110 palimpsests, 71–2, 208n5 Palmié, Stephan, 79 Paz, Octavio, 8, 63, 115, 145, 157, 170–2 Phillips, Charles, 133 Plotnik, Viviana, 24 Plumwood, Val, 158–9 popular culture, 18, 21, 149 Portalatín, Aída Cartagena, 113–14 Portilla, Miguel León, 127 Posse, Abel, 16

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Pratt, Mary Louise, 16–17 psychoanalysis, 11–14 Puerto Rico, 186 and neo-Taíno movement, 193–5 and Taíno Ti, 189–96 Quantz, J. O., 132 Quetzalcoatl, 48, 208n18 Quiroga, José, 19, 70–2 Reati, Fernando, 17 reincarnation, 96, 101 vs. “incarnation,” 206n10 Restall, Matthew, 9 Richards, Timothy A. B., 124 Ricoeur, Paul, 5–6 Riding, Alan, 45, 53, 166 Río, Marcela del, El sueño de La Malinche, 120–3 Rodríguez, Antonio, 134 Rodríguez, Ileana, 124 Rojas, Manuel, 16 Ruiz, Antonio, 117–18 Ruiz, Elio, 76 Rushdie, Salman, 52 Sá, Lúcia de, see Brotherston, Gordon Saint Domingue, see Haiti Sandinista Movement, 124, 147 Santería, 76 Sayles, John, 128 Schwarz, Mauricio-José (“Seguir a los príncipes”), 46–50 Science Fiction, 5, 12, 17, 35, 46, 74, 175 contrasted with fantasy, 12 and Hispanic writing, 40–3 and time travelers, 46 Scieszka, Jon, Me oh Maya!, 153–8 Shakespeare, William, xi, xiii, 104 Shelley, Mary, 89 Siberian Mammoth, The (documentary), 73 Simon, Joel, 53, 57

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Index

Slavery, 3–4, 43, 148, 179–80, 194, 197 and Christopher Columbus, 15, 36 and El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Chaviano), 108–9 and modern Caribbean cultural production, 79–83 and The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (Baldeosingh), 89–94 and time travel in the Caribbean, 75–9 Sommer, Robert, 133 Somoza Debayle, Anastasio, 124 Spain, 7, 43, 45, 142 Special Period in Cuba, 72, 74 and El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Chaviano), 104–7, 110–11 speculative fiction (definition), 12 Stargate (film), 33 Starman (film), 178 Star Trek (television series), 33, 47 Star Wars (film), 178 Steiden, Bill, 67–8 Stirling, S. M., Conquistador, 32–4, 37–8, 40

time, xiii–xiv, 2, 5, 12, 15 and dislocation, 11, 101 and narratology, 5–6 and pre-Columbian societies, 9–10, 157–8 Time travel (definitions), 2, 4, 6, 8–9, 11–12, 15, 17–18 Todorov, Tzvetan, 9, 35, 119, 152, 170 tourism, 195–7, 205n8 Trinidad, 4, 92–4, 96, 99 and East Indians, 94, 96–8 and Trinidadians, 97–8 Trujillo, Rafael, 184

Taínos, 186 and La isla de luz (Muñoz), 181–3 and neo-Taíno movement, 191–5 and Taíno Ti (Forrest), 189–97 and The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (Baldeosingh), 86–90 temporality, see time Tenochtitlán, 48, 58, 62–3, 115, 159–63, 168, 173 Thompson, Alvin, 24

Webb, Barbara J., 68 Wenders, Wim, 72 Wolfe, Gene, Pirate Freedom, 74–5

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uncanny, 11–12 United States, The, xii, 4, 38, 67, 70, 77, 104, 192–3 utopias, 31, 132, 147 Vallarino, Roberto, 53–4 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 10 Vatican, see Catholic Church Villaverde, Cirilo, 184 Vogel, Virgil, 156–7

Yoon, Eunice, see China Yucatan, 151, 200n10, 209n14 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 6, 13 Zea, Leopoldo, 7–8 Zúñiga, Rosa María, 117–19

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