Maurice Echeverría's Labios: A Disenchanted Story about Lesbians in Guatemala's Postwar Reality

In the last two decades, lesbian, gay, and queer literary studies have gained significant ground in the broader field of Latin American cultural studies. Within this growing body of critical work, however, the Central American region and its literature have been largely ignored. This article, which focuses on the representation of lesbians and queer desire in the Guatemalan novel Labios (2004) ‘Lips’ by Maurice Echeverria, seeks to contribute to such a lack in Central American perspective. This essay contends, Echeverria’s text, one of a growing number of recent Central American narratives to call attention to and portray gay, lesbian, and/or transgender individuals and their experiences, evinces an alternate and composite form of visibility that can be understood as a visibilidad cosmo-queer. This visibility is an expression of the complex social reality of sexual minorities in postwar Guatemala, one marked by global or cosmopolitan discourses of gay and lesbian identity politics as well as queer modes of self-definition that challenge those same dominant discourses. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol37/iss2/10 Maurice Echeverria’s Labios: A Disenchanted Story about Lesbians in Guatemala’s Postwar Reality Yajaira M. Padilla University of Arkansas Explorations of literary manifestations of queer subjectivities, identities, and desires have become more prolific within the field of Latin American cultural studies in the last twenty years. A number of such studies are to be found in the pioneering anthologies, Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes (1994), ?Entiendes? (1995), Bodies and Biases (1996), Sexual Textualities (1997), Sex and Sexuality in Latin America (1997), Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998), Reading and Writing the Ambiente (2000), Tortilleras (2003), and in special issues of journals such as the volume of Revista Iberoamericana devoted to “los estudios lesbicogays y queer latinoamericanos” (Martinez 2008), ‘Latin American lesbian, gay, and queer studies,’ of Letras Femeninas (2010) focused on lesbianism, and of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos (35.1 2010) that explores queer space. Several of these compilations strive—although somewhat problematically as Luciano Martinez observes—to bridge the gap between Peninsular, Latin American and US Latino studies (862). Despite the intended breadth of these studies, all of them fail to include any critical works that engage Central America and its cultural production. The only exceptions are discussions centered on Nicaraguan poet, Ruben Dario, and the homophobia that plagued the broader modernist movement.1 Such an omission recalls Arturo Arias’s contention that in what concerns literary production, Central America is a doubly marginalized region—excluded from both the “cosmopolitan center and by countries exercising hegemony in Latin America” (xii). It also underscores the fact that in most of this region, the emergence 1 Padilla: Maurice Echeverria’s Labios: A Disenchanted Story about Lesbians Published by New Prairie Press 148 ST&TCL, Volume 37, No. 2 (Summer 2013) of a political consciousness with regard to sexual minority rights and the forging of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements are relatively new occurrences in contrast to other regions that witnessed such developments in the 1980s, if not earlier.2 Key reasons for this chronological difference were the revolutionary wars, violent repression, and economic instability that beleaguered Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and to a lesser extent, Honduras, in the 1970s and 80s. Such conditions presented grave obstacles to the mobilization of LGBT communities and their struggles for political representation. Moreover, as Florence Babb observes in the case of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the revolutionary movements that meant to transform society were also limiting as they promoted a notion of society that remained premised on a heterosexist model of family and coupling (275). Much of the writing produced by Central American authors during this period was similarly impacted by and engaged with the immediate political reality to the detriment of other pressing social concerns related to gender and sexualitybased oppression. However, this is no longer the case. Since the mid-1990s, and with the end of the armed conflicts, LGBT activism has begun to slowly gain more ground in the region, a result, in part, of the growing presence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the proliferation of global discourses of gay and lesbian identity politics.3 It has also led to the production of literature and, to a lesser extent, literary criticism that engages with the complex lives and struggles of gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals.4 This is not to say that queer sexualities and the expression of same-sex desire are not discernible in the narratives produced prior to the postwar period, but in more recent works they are depicted in more markedly explicit ways. LGBT individuals have become central characters with greater depth and do not solely occupy marginal or stereotypical roles.5 This article adds to the body of literary scholarship on sexual minorities in Central America, centering on Maurice Echeverria’s Labios (2004) ‘Lips,’ a novel that stands out for its overt representation of lesbians and its exploration of queer desire, as well as for having garnered significant national awards and honors.6 Labios was the recipient of the Primer premio nacional de novela corta Luis de Leon 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 37, Iss. 2 [2013], Art. 10 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol37/iss2/10 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1810