The Boo of Viramontes’s Cafe: Retelling Ghost Stories, Central American Representing Social Death

Chicana author Helena Maria Viramontes’s culturally complex “The Cariboo Cafe,” renders a contemporaneous example of social death in the lives of undocumented migrants. Sociologist Orlando Patterson bases “social death” on the “profound natal alienation of the slave” (38) that once cut off from a past and future, promulgates the slave’s desocialization and depersonalization: systems also at play with undocumented Central American immigrants. While Patterson refers to an overt and systemized economic exploitation of a people, the concept remains relevant to this analysis, though symbolic. It examines a threefold negation through the representational experiences of undocumented immigration, gender, and what Arturo Arias calls Central American “nonentity” (186), in Viramontes’s short story to address Central American differences erased by the utopian desire for reconciliation in Chicana/Latina texts. While social death is originally conceived and applied through “a mode of oppression through which slaves, and by extension those who grew up under the control of Jim Crow society” were coerced through hegemony ( JanMohammed 246), its current relevance is allegorical to the conditions that delocalized and depersonalized literary representations of Central Americans. The question is what contemporary hegemonies socially kill the articulation of Central American subjectivities in a Latina/o US imaginary. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol37/iss2/6 The Boo of Viramontes’s Cafe: Retelling Ghost Stories, Central American Representing Social Death Karina Oliva Alvarado University of California Los Angeles “The Cariboo Cafe” in Helena Maria Viramontes’s The Moths and Other Stories (1985) introduced one of the earliest representations of a Central American protagonist in Latina/o literature. Viramontes foreshadowed subsequent representations of Central American characters and protagonists in Latina/Chicana novels such as Demetria Martinez’s romance novel Mother Tongue (1994), and Ana Castillo’s sapogonia (1990) that spoke to the people’s suffering in the isthmus through the traumas of wars in Central America and of experiences of (un)documented immigration. The stories were received as statements of solidarity with Central America in general in a type of second-voiced testimony or fictionalized testimonios. The specific wars of each nation were generalized as the countries were spoken for and at times written as a region through an imagined ethno-Central American subjectivity that prioritized political mobilization over first-hand experience of the narratives portrayed. For example, Luis J. Rodriguez urges on Mother Tongue’s back cover, “Read it. Get angry. And act.” While compelling, and at the time urgently needed, the generalization dissipated each person’s story and experience. Representing regionalized people in a generalized state-terror would create what Ana Patricia Rodriguez calls “undifferentiated” Central Americans (“The Fiction” 212),1 an act (of writing) that continues to promote a lack of knowledge of specific Central American histories and narratives if and when the loci of (representational) enunciation are left unexplored beyond the given that these are narratives of Third World Chicana/o, and/or hemispheric 1 Alvarado: The Boo of Viramontes’s Cafe: Retelling Ghost Stories, Central Am Published by New Prairie Press 78 STT Jose David Saldivar 1997; Barbara Harlow 1991; Anna M. Sandoval 2000; Ivonne Gordon Vailakis 2000), yet the cultural markers represented indicate that the immigrant washerwoman is most likely Nicaraguan. Undifferentiation promotes historical and cultural erasures through mis-characterizations, generalizations, and denial of first-hand lived specificities. These negations and cultural negotiations are a form of symbolic (literary/social) death of Central Americans as undocumented or illegitimized immigrants in real and imagined American and Latina/o communities. The undifferentiated representations of Central Americans intersected with gender and the non-being or ghosting2 of the represented existence of undocumented immigrants allegorize a contemporary example of social death. Sociologist Orlando Patterson bases social death on the “profound natal alienation of the slave” (38) that once cut off from a past and future, promulgates the slave’s desocialization and depersonalization, systems also at play with undocumented Central American immigrants. While Patterson refers to an overt and systemized economic exploitation of a people that used race to institute class divisions through Manichaean cultural/biological hierarchies, the concept remains relevant. This article explores a three-fold negation [undocumented immigrant, gender, Central American “nonentity” (Arias 186)] in Viramontes’s short story to address Central American differences erased by the utopian desire for reconciliation in Chicana/Latina authored texts. While social death is originally conceived and applied through “a mode of oppression through which slaves, and by extension those who grew up under the control of Jim Crow society” were coerced through hegemony (JanMohammed 246), its current relevance is seen as allegorical to the conditions that desocialized and depersonalized literary representations of Central Americans in Chicana authored texts, which informs the question: what contemporary hegemonies socially kill the articulation of Central American subjectivities in Latina/o US? Undocumented Social Death, Fragmentation and Denial 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 37, Iss. 2 [2013], Art. 6 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol37/iss2/6 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1806