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Telling Ruins in Latin America

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Telling Ruins in Latin America
Edited by
Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh

TELLING RUINS IN LATIN AMERICA
Copyright © Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh, 2009.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
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ISBN: 978–0–230–60522–0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Telling ruins in Latin America / Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh,
editors.
p. cm.—(New concepts in Latino American cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–230–60522–2
1. Latin America—Antiquities—Social aspects. 2. Cultural property—
Latin America—Social aspects. 3. Latin America—Intellectual life—21st
century. 4. Latin America—Social conditions—21st century. 5. Latin
America—Historiography. I. Lazzara, Michael J., 1975– II. Unruh, Vicky.
F1403.3.T45 2009
980⬘.012072—dc22 2008054703
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Figures vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Telling Ruins 1

Part One What Are We Doing Here?:

Ruins, Performance, Meditation
1 Performing Ruins 13
Diana Taylor
2 Scribbling on the Wreck 27
Francine Masiello
3 “Oh tiempo tus pirámides”: Ruins in Borges 39
Daniel Balderston
Part Two Whose Ruins?: Ownership and

Cross-Cultural Mappings
4 Translating Ruins: An American Parable 51
Sylvia Molloy
5 Machu Picchu Recycled 63
Regina Harrison
6 The Ruins of the Present: Cuzco Evoked 77
Sara Castro-Klarén
7 Ruins in the Desert: Field Notes by a Filmmaker 87
Andrés Di Tella
8 The Twentieth Century as Ruin: Tango and Historical Memory 95
María Rosa Olivera-Williams
9 Modernist Ruins: The Case Study of Tlatelolco 107
Rubén Gallo
vi Contents
Part Three The Ruins of Fragile Ceasefires:

Scenes of Loss and Memory
10 Pinochet’s Cadaver as Ruin and Palimpsest 121
Michael J. Lazzara
11 Spatial Truth and Reconciliation: Peru, 2003–2004 135
Jill Lane
12 “Words of the Dead”: Ruins, Resistance, and Reconstruction
in Ayacucho 147
Leslie Bayers
13 Tlatelolco: From Ruins to Poetry 163
Sandra Messinger Cypess
14 Sites of Memory, Emptying Remembrance 175
Nelly Richard
15 History, Neurosis, and Subjectivity: Gustavo Ferreyra’s
Rewriting of Neoliberal Ruins 183
Idelber Avelar
Part Four Ordinary People: Inhabited Ruins,

Precarious Survival
16 All in a Day’s Work: Ruins Dwellers in Havana 197
Vicky Unruh
17 Witness to the Ruins: An Artist’s Testimony 211
Rolf Abderhalden Cortés
18 Coming Home to Praia de Flamengo: The Once and Future
National Student Union Headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 219
Victoria Langland
19 Fernando Vallejo’s Ruinous Heterotopias: The Queer
Subject in Latin America’s Urban Spaces 229
Arturo Arias
20 Charges and Discharges 241
Diamela Eltit
21 Angels among Ruins 249
Sandra Lorenzano
Contributors 261
Index 267
Figures
1.1 Templo Mayor (Mexico City) 15

1.2 Standing on the ruins at Villa Grimaldi (Santiago, Chile) 18
5.1 Machu Picchu (Peru) 66
7.1 Luis Baigorrita, a survivor of Argentina’s 1879
“Conquest of the Desert” 93
9.1 “Parque Vertical,” Tlatelolco (Mexico City) 116
10.1 Neo-Nazi salute to General Pinochet in The Clinic,
December 14, 2006 125
10.2 Pinochet’s cadaver in The Clinic, December 14, 2006 126
11.1 Yuyanapaq: para recordar (Lima, Peru, 2004) 140
11.2 A scene from “Sin título,” by Grupo Cultural
Yuyachkani (Peru) 144
14.1 Villa Grimaldi, “Park for Peace”: “El Patio Deseado”
(Santiago, Chile) 177
14.2 Empty graves awaiting the remains of the disappeared,
General Cemetery (Santiago, Chile) 179
14.3 Muro de la memoria, by Claudio Pérez and Rodrigo
Gómez, Puente Bulnes (Santiago, Chile) 182
17.1 Juana Ramírez in Mapa Teatro’s Testigo
de las ruinas (Colombia) 217
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
The idea for this book emerged following a panel on the Latin American
city at a session of the Division of Twentieth-Century Latin American
Literature, organized by María Rosa Olivera-Williams for the December
2005 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in Washington,
D.C. With the project well on its way, we organized a session on ruins
in Latin America at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
Congress in Montreal, September 2007, with presentations by con-
tributors Leslie Bayers, Rubén Gallo, Regina Harrison, and Jill Lane.
We extend our immense appreciation to all our contributors for their
enduring enthusiasm and hard work. We especially thank José Quiroga
for encouraging us to submit our project proposal to Palgrave’s New
Concepts in Latino American Cultures series that he coedits with Licia
Fiol-Matta; their combined support for the book was fundamental,
along with feedback from Palgrave Macmillan’s two anonymous readers
and ongoing assistance from their editors and editorial staff, including
Luba Ostachevsky, Joanna Mericle, Colleen Lawrie, and Julia Cohen.
From the University of Kansas, we thank Dean Joseph Steinmetz and
former Associate Dean Paul D’Anieri of the College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences and Jill Kuhnheim, Acting Chair of the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese, for making possible Vicky Unruh’s release time that
facilitated the book’s completion; and Paula Courtney, Director of the
College’s Digital Media Services for her excellent, and always patient,
technical support. We also thank Juan Camilo Lorca, the Critical
References Bibliographer at Chile’s National Library for his research
assistance to Michael Lazzara, and Ediciones Era S.A., Marcial Molina
Richter, Warner/Chappell Music Argentina, and Marcela del Río for
allowing our contributors to quote poetic and musical verses. We extend
our appreciation to the translators of three essays: Laura Kanost for
her translation of Sandra Lorenzano’s piece; Susan García, Bernardita
Llanos, and Leslie Marsh for their translation of Diamela Eltit’s essay;
and Sarah Townsend, translator of Rolf Abderhalden’s essay. A spe-
cial thank you goes to Joe Guerriero, whose photograph of Antigua,
Guatemala provides the cover-art for the book. Our largest debts by
far are to Julie and Ana Lazzara in Woodland, California and to David
x Acknowledgments
Unruh in Lawrence, Kansas, not only for their steadying support but
also for their willingness to spend these months of their lives among the
ruins.
Four pieces in this book are revised or translated versions of previously
published essays and are reprinted with permission from the following
publishers to whom we extend our gratitude: Rolf Abderhalden Cortés,
“The Artist as Witness: An Artist’s Testimony” appeared in E-misférica
4, no. 2 (November 2007); Diamela Eltit’s “Cargas y descargas” appeared
in E-misférica 4, no. 2 (November 2007) and in Signos vitales: escritos
sobre literatura, arte, y política, Santiago: Editorial Universidad Diego
Portales, 2008 (31–40); Nelly Richard, “Sitios de la memoria, vaci-
amiento del recuerdo” appeared in Revista de critica cultural 23 (2001):
11–13; and Francine Masiello, “Los sentidos y las ruinas” appeared in
Iberoamericana (nueva época) 8, no. 30 (2008): 103–112.
Introduction: Telling Ruins
Between 2001 and 2005, displaced citizens from Bogotá’s condemned El

Cartucho barrio revisit their neighborhood, now under demolition for a
new millennium park; they stage scenes that combine material remains
and memories of their lives there with images of their homes’ destruction
in progress. In 2007 Rio de Janeiro, members of the National Students’
Union take up residence in a deteriorated parking lot that once housed
their long-demolished headquarters and organize a cultural festival to
commemorate the union’s tumultuous past and reclaim the space as
their own. In 2005, a photographic exhibit forces Lima inhabitants who
chose to ignore the brutal violence that took place in the indigenous
Andes between 1990 and 2000 to confront powerful images of fellow
Peruvians surviving amid the material rubble of civil war. In post-Soviet
Havana, citizens perform taxing physical labor just to keep themselves
and the crumbling buildings they inhabit standing, acts of recycling that
reconfigure revolutionary ideology and Cuba’s cultural past. In post-
2001 Buenos Aires, writers collaborate with street trash recyclers in a
struggle to survive economic crisis and turn refuse into art. In December
2006, Chileans passionately enact their angst over how to interpret
Augusto Pinochet’s disintegrating remains.
By telling stories like these, this book investigates the rich network
of narratives and cultural debates generated by ruins in modern Latin
America. Focusing on the ties between ruins and storytelling in a broad
sense, 21 authors probe the ruin—as metaphor and trope—in such var-
ied expressive forms as literature, visual arts, performance, film, archi-
tecture, archeology, and real world locales (e.g., Buenos Aires, Bogotá,
Havana, Lima, Machu Picchu, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago). A
central premise is that the ruin—as a merger of past, present, and future,
and as a material embodiment of change—offers a fertile locale for com-
peting cultural stories about historical events, political projects, and the
constitution of communities. Equally important is the idea that what a
human group does with its ruins—maintain them in disarray, restore
them, transport them to alternative sites, linger on them with pause, or
2 Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh
banish them from view—unleashes compelling social, ethical, or politi-

cal consequences for the present and the future.
As a literary, artistic, or architectural motif, of course, the ruin is
new to neither Latin America nor Western culture. Manifestations of
the ruin in European discourses of modernity include the classical ruin
transposed from the grand tour to aristocratic gardens for reflections on
life’s brevity; the ruin of Romantic yearnings for cultural or historical
difference; the ghostly, self-parodying ruin of the modern gothic; or the
fragment ruin of the avant-gardes. Recognizing ruins as powerful gener-
ators of critical-theoretical reflection, major twentieth-century thinkers
conceived of activity around ruins as a metaphor for intellectual inquiry
itself. Thus, attuned to the “speech” of stones, Freud compared psycho-
analysis to an archeological dig (Merewether, 25). Even more frequently
cited is the affirmation by Walter Benjamin—whose Angel of History
hovers over this volume from beginning to end—that “allegories are, in
the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (1977, 178).
Also germane is Benjamin’s comparison of voluntary memory to an act
of retrospective “excavation,” whereby memory becomes the “medium”
rather than the “instrument” for exploring the past, “just as the earth is
the medium in which ancient cities lie buried” (1999, 576). Not surpris-
ingly, reconfigurations of Benjamin’s ruins metaphors inform contempo-
rary theorists who imagine reflexive, critical, and future-looking uses of
nostalgia (Boym); plot new understandings of melancholy as a produc-
tive activity that reworks for critical ends the losses embodied in material
and experiential remains (Eng and Kazanjian); and propose new ideas
about creatively recycling the ruinous “detritus” of contemporary life
into an “ecology of everyday experience” that might unmask the mecha-
nisms of modern “progress” that spawn the debris (Highmore, 65).
In Latin America, an appropriative recycling of pre-Columbian
physical or cultural ruins weaves through nineteenth-century nation-
building projects and is seen in such diverse works as Cuban José de
Heredia’s meditative poem “En el teocalli de Cholula” (1820), which
contemplates Aztec ruins in a Romantic reflection on the past; the long
poem, La victoria de Junín: canto a Bolívar (1825), by Ecuador’s José
Joaquín Olmedo, that celebrates a heroic Latin America founded not
only on Bolívar’s achievements but also on the spirit of the Inca leader,
Huayna Capac; or Manuel de Jesús Galván’s 1882 novel Enriquillo that
resuscitates an obliterated indigenous past to create, in the aftermath
of Haitian independence, a national romance that erases a substantial
Afro-Caribbean presence from the Dominican Republic’s cultural map.
Foreign explorers who visited Latin American ruins in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries—such as John Lloyd Stephens, Sir Clement
Markham, and Hiram Bingham—arrived with capacious cultural bag-
gage and grand plans of their own, bringing into focus property dis-
putes and identity claims that stemmed from their imperialist sojourns.
Later experiments by twentieth-century Latin American writers linked
avant-garde originality with an imagined ground zero of pre-Columbian

origins in stories that no longer unified peoples and geographies but
instead signaled radical discontinuities in a region whose modernity has
been qualified in more recent theoretical disquisitions as peripheral, bur-
densome, divergent, ambiguous, or hybrid. Thus the narrator in Miguel
Ángel Asturias’s early Leyendas de Guatemala (1930) derives his cre-
dentials for avant-garde storytelling from a lyrical dig into Guatemala’s
ruinous Mayan past, and Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928)
recycles remains of Amazonian folklore into a parodic Brazilian “hero
without any character” who journeys from the primeval, virgin forest of
his birth to conquer the wondrous modern city of São Paulo. Asturias
and de Andrade’s contemporaries later launched their own wanderings
among the ruins, as in Pablo Neruda’s Canto General (1950), or in the
ruinous metaphors that traverse Jorge Luis Borges’s meditations on
the aesthetic and philosophical implications of human epistemologies.
Macondo, Comala, and so many other fictional places, too, affirm that
ruins and ruination have been major detonators for Latin American lit-
erary imaginings.
Several contributors to this volume reflect on ruins’ early uses—their
deployments, silencing, or potentialities. But a key argument of Telling
Ruins in Latin America is that the ruin returns with fervent intensity at
the turn of the millennium as a measure of the era’s own structure of feel-
ing and as a new interpretive path for revisiting earlier manifestations of
ruins in Latin American cultural discourse. In turn-of-the-millennium
Latin America, ruins created by temporal erosion, unanticipated cata-
clysms, or natural disasters meld with ruins born of human-inflicted
violence and authoritarian abuses of power. As a result, urban spaces
are littered with “trash heaps of memories, corpses, rubble, vestiges
of experience . . . lost illusions, obsolete narratives, bygone styles, [and]
lapsed traditions” (Richard, 51) that evoke the devastation of failed uto-
pian political projects, the inequities produced by economic “progress,”
and human lives torn asunder. If, as Jean Franco suggests, the Latin
American megalopolis can no longer “be imagined as totality,” the chal-
lenge of the present is that “community, identity, and subjectivity [must]
be rethought or refashioned from fragments and ruins” (190). Although
some ruins are ignored or fade into the landscape, the intellectuals and
artists whose reflections comprise Telling Ruins forcefully argue that
ruins are dynamic sites shot through with competing cultural narra-
tives, palimpsests on which memories and histories are fashioned and
refashioned. Ruins, for these authors, do not invite backward-looking
nostalgia, but a politically and ethically motivated “reflective excava-
tion” (Unruh, 146) that can lead to historical revision and the creation
of alternative futures.
Recent scholarship on Latin America addresses issues germane to the
critical discussion of ruins: the collapse of utopian artistic, political, and
ideological projects; the workings of memory, healing, and reconstruction
in postauthoritarian art and testimony; dystopian representations of urban

locales; the search for models of change; and artistic inquiries into the eth-
ics of art and intellectual work. Yet the focused study of ruins as sites
of competing cultural stories about Latin America’s past and contested
future offers a rich new vein of inquiry into these overlapping problems,
one that reveals more sharply a stirring creative drive toward ethical reflec-
tion and change in the midst of ruinous devastation. Building on schol-
arship by major twentieth-century theorists like Benjamin; prominent
Latin Americanist scholars like Avelar, Masiello, Richard, Franco, and
Taylor; and international critics like Boym, Huyssen, Roach, Woodward,
Ginsberg, Merewether, Roth, Lyons, and Young—all of whom crop up in
the contributors’ bibliographies—this book’s contribution lies in its place-
ment of the ruin on center-stage as a topic for reflection about the new
shapes of artistic and intellectual inquiry in turn-of-the-millennium Latin
America and in its teasing-out of an intimate dialogue among artists and
intellectuals on ruins, politics, and ethics. Through the act of telling, this
book shows how artists, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens impose trans-
formative and “creative ruination on the material objects of history” (see
Masiello in this volume).
Part one, “What Are We Doing Here?: Ruins, Performance,
Meditation,” echoes the ethical concerns raised by Cuban writer and
“ruinologist” Antonio José Ponte about artistic or intellectual projects—
say like this book—that draw sustenance from disasters. This section
argues that although ruins harbor temptations of reactionary nostalgia,
melancholy, voyeurism, and sentimentality, the affective and reflective
modes that ruins breed can also be productive, creative, political, or eth-
ical. However, the ethics of ruins often pose dilemmas for subjects who
must decide how to relate to them and what to do with them.
Diana Taylor speaks to these dilemmas by taking us on a first person
journey that signals the very real crisis of a subject who confronts—with
her own body—not the “glorious ruins” of “ancient scenes of power,”
but the “dark ruins” of the present, those of Latin America’s recent epi-
sodes of political violence and uneven modernization. For Taylor, visiting
places such as Santiago, Chile’s “Park for Peace” at Villa Grimaldi, one
of the Pinochet regime’s most notorious torture centers, is vexing. What
might be “our” individual and collective responsibility in the face of a
ruinous past and its human fallout, particularly when complete under-
standing is paradoxically impossible and imperative? Francine Masiello
and Daniel Balderston join Taylor, and all contributors featured in this
book, to speak collectively against the preservationist drive to immor-
talize the past by reifying ruins, emphasizing instead the ruin’s capacity
to be reframed, recycled, and debated. In Latin America, ruinous experi-
ence has generated ruinous narratives filled with stammering, stuttering,
melancholia, and paralyzing trauma. But ruins, Masiello counters, can
also be sites of “ethical possibility” that permit movement beyond the
stammer, that usher us away from historical stasis toward unanticipated
“frontiers of action” and “collective thinking.” Balderston, in analyzing

the ruins theme in Borges, echoes Masiello when he shows that ruins, in
all of their seductiveness and recombinatory potential, provoke a reflec-
tion on history’s “malleability.” Balderston catalogues the Argentine
writer’s deployment of ruins as sites of intra- and intertextual play. Like
the critics and artists gathered in this book, Borges saw ruins as “incom-
plete fragments of a lost whole” on whose palimpsestic surfaces tempo-
ralities could mix and mingle in ways unforeseen.
Part two, “Whose Ruins?: Ownership and Cross-Cultural Mappings,”
demonstrates that encounters with ruins can provoke competing claims
of cultural or national ownership among diverse constituencies. These
chapters demonstrate that the interpretive reconstruction, restoration,
transportation, or commodification of archeological or urban ruins in
Latin America reveal unresolved tensions in international, national, or
local political projects, as well as a ruinous site’s potential for unantici-
pated resignifications over time. Although some of these cross-cultural
mappings involve movement across national borders, others unfold
within the contentious struggles of a single nation’s serial and sometimes
catastrophic reconfigurations of itself.
Thus, Sylvia Molloy investigates what happens when ruins are trans-
planted, literally and linguistically, from one national context to another.
Her analysis of John Lloyd Stephens’s mid-nineteenth-century writings
on his travels to the Yucatán and Central America illuminates how he
used ruins from that other “not-quite-American” America to imagine a
“culturally worthy,” ancient US-American past. These inter-American
cultural translations of ruins, Molloy argues, reveal the uneven cul-
tural relationship between the Americas—North and South—from their
very beginnings. Such uneven relationships also weave through Regina
Harrison’s analysis of how Machu Picchu was resignified throughout the
twentieth century. At once an archeological enigma, an object of aesthetic
contemplation, an inspiration for political projects, and a commodity for
tourist consumption, Machu Picchu’s ruins have gone through multiple
recyclings since their 1911 “discovery” by Hiram Bingham. Turning to
another cross-cultural encounter with Andean ruins, Sara Castro-Klarén
demonstrates how Sir Clement Markham’s 1856 account of his trip to
Cuzco is filtered through a lettered cultural memory, acquired through
reading, that trumps what he actually sees as an eyewitness to ruins. The
archive of existing cultural narratives about Cuzco shapes Markham’s
evocation of ruins, thus revealing the complex “interpretive discursive
conditions” that mark archeology as a discipline.
Focusing on the devastating consequences of one nation’s internal
cross-cultural encounters, Argentine documentary filmmaker Andrés
Di Tella discusses how ruins provide essential “visible evidence” for his
cinematic exploration of how southern Argentina’s indigenous peoples
were exterminated in the late nineteenth century. Ruins, for Di Tella,
are double edged—evocative of both past time and future potentialities.
As with photograph for Barthes, Di Tella sees in genocidal ruins not

only what was lost, but also a more inclusive national project that “could
have been.” Extending the discussion on Argentina further, María Rosa
Olivera-Williams reads the tango as a compendium of the twentieth cen-
tury’s ruins. Tango, Olivera-Williams argues, consists in the fragments
of heterogeneous cultures and experiences (modernization, migration,
war, violence) that mix creatively without harmonizing their differences.
Focused similarly on the ruinous fallout of modernization’s cultural and
class encounters, Rubén Gallo investigates modernist Mario Pani’s mid-
twentieth-century architectural innovations of Mexico City’s massive
Tlatelolco housing project, built over the razed layers of a pre-Columbian
Aztec city and the colonial city that replaced it. In Gallo’s account, Pani’s
expansive “mixed-blood modernism,” which included a mythologizing
appropriation of the earlier sites into the Plaza of the Three Cultures,
harbored the seeds of its own physical and ideological ruination: the
housing project’s “reverse panoptic” relationship to the Plaza facilitated
the government’s 1968 massacre of citizens, and its faulty construction
exacerbated exponentially the 1985 earthquake’s casualties. Both events
signaled the incipient demise of the modernist project and of the author-
itarian state that supported it.
Rising from the rubble of such collapses, part three, “The Ruins of
Fragile Ceasefires: Scenes of Loss and Memory,” revisits the ruins—
human and geographical—generated by authoritarianism and civil war.
The leftist revolutions and student movements of the 1960s gave way
to the extreme political violence of military regimes and counterrevolu-
tionary movements in the 1970s and beyond, whose goal was to install
neoliberal economies. In postconflict “transitions,” memory has been
imperative for citizens unwilling to participate in tacit amnesias or offi-
cial versions of history. But what and how to remember—that is, how
to frame the ruins of the disaster—are salient questions with no easy
answers. While many have wanted to leave the past untouched in the
interest of tenuous national reconciliations, others have fought to frame
the ruins in ways that honor the dead and respect the suffering of the
tortured.
Michael Lazzara’s “Pinochet’s Cadaver as Ruin and Palimpsest”
proposes that ruination affects not only architecture, but also bodies
and ideas that can be framed as ruins. In late 2006, Pinochet’s cadaver
became a ruinous site upon which struggles over power and memory
were performed, thus revealing Chile’s deepest anxieties about its still-
divisive past. Shifting focus to Peru and arguing for the production of
social memory as “embodied” and “spatial” practices, Jill Lane explores
how a nation emerging from civil war confronted similar anxieties over
memory and the writing of history. Her discussion of a performance pro-
ject by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani speaks once again to ruins’ mallea-
bility: by creating a “museum-before-the museum” of objects, memories,
and artifacts not yet codified in national space or woven into official
stories, Yuyachkani turns the residues of violence into pliable, powerful

forces capable of signaling epistemological gaps or of raising conscious-
ness among apathetic bystanders.
Poetry, too, has provided fertile terrain for reconfiguring shards of
experience in ways that blur boundaries among memory, history, and
fiction. In their respective analyses of Peruvian poet Marcial Molina
Richter and Mexican poets Marcela del Río and José Emilio Pacheco,
Leslie Bayers and Sandra Messinger Cypess show that far from mus-
ing contemplatively on ruins, these poets perform and transform them
through acts of witnessing. While Ayacucho and Tlatelolco have under-
gone multiple cycles of violence whose ruinations have marked national
histories, poetry writes against history to rescue silenced voices buried
in the ruins. Returning to Chile, Nelly Richard considers connections
among urban space, public art, and social memory. She admonishes that
form matters when framing ruins aesthetically and wonders how the
disaster’s remnants can best be recast to agitate social malaise and make
memory’s variegated textures explode and provoke. Part three closes
with Idelber Avelar’s intervention on Argentine writer Gustavo Ferreyra,
in which he thinks beyond his prior work on postdictatorial ruins and
allegory to assert an emergent “second wave” of postdictatorship liter-
ature in which metaphors of “recovery, recuperation, and restoration”
are losing relevance. This new work, he argues, presents ruinous bodies
heretofore ignored: gray or neutral subjects (neither victims nor accom-
plices) who merely persist in neoliberal times among “the ruins left by
the destructive utopia of privatization.” In Avelar’s account, these sub-
jects appear as “repeated re-codification[s] of [their] own ruins,” a sum
of previous failures and political metamorphoses. They are ordinary
people living not just among ruins, but as ruins.
Part four, “Ordinary People: Inhabited Ruins, Precarious Survival,”
turns to the creative and critical responses of people whose everyday
experience unfolds among the remains of failed utopias, catastrophic
political projects, or economic crises. In their everyday survival, the
ruins dwellers discussed in these chapters illuminate what Joseph Roach
has said about repositories of urban remains—he calls them “cities of the
dead”—which become “vortices of behavior” that can generate cultural
self-invention (28). In contrast to the grandiose projects whose collapse
is symbolized by the rubble, these chapters tease out the small stories of
those who comb through, recycle, and reconfigure their lives from and
within those ruins.
Vicky Unruh demonstrates how filmic and prose representations of
Havana’s contemporary ruins dwellers critically revisit the revolutionary
discourse of work. The refurbishing, recycling activity of ordinary work-
ers engaged in surviving, she argues, not only recasts the Revolution’s
hierarchical dichotomy between physical and intellectual labor but also
reconfigures its famed literacy campaigns into a pedagogic repertoire
of cultural literacy that reactivates Cuba’s vast cultural archive. Rolf
Abderhalden Cortés, codirector of the Bogotá Mapa Teatro Laboratory

of Artists, details his group’s work with the displaced inhabitants of the
officially condemned El Cartucho neighborhood, slated for obliteration
so that a new millennial park could be built in its place. Abderhalden
describes a series of creative “install-actions” that constituted Mapa
Teatro’s Proyecto C’ùndua, in which displaced residents returned to
their vanishing neighborhood to reenact their own memories and sto-
ries simultaneously with the site’s demolition. In a comparable tale of
return and symbolic repossession, Victoria Langland traces how Brazil’s
National Students’ Union (UNE) reoccupied a dilapidated parking lot
constructed over the site of its former headquarters (1942–1964) in Rio
de Janeiro. Langland’s account addresses the students’ serial-stagings of
commemorative acts—from the years of dictatorship to the present—to
highlight how the group’s memories and the meanings they ascribe to
the site have shifted over time in response to present-bound interests.
In different contexts, Arturo Arias, Diamela Eltit, and Sandra
Lorenzano focus on bodies and subjectivities in ruins—on the ruina-
tion of ordinary citizens by hegemonic power and on the resistance that
these citizens show despite the odds. Arias, for example, demonstrates
how Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo creates a fictional portrayal of
Medellín as a “ruinous heterotopia” that signals how heteronormative
society suppresses queer desire and how violence (political and social)
only breeds further violence. Arias argues that Vallejo unmasks the
nostalgic notion of “home” as an idyllic narrative of origins but also
resurrects its “hidden grids of affection” from within the logic of queer-
ness that marks his protagonist. Diamela Eltit focuses on recent Chilean
filmic and narrative representations of ruined female bodies marked by
poverty. Her text shows how literature has been a key site for imagin-
ing subjectivity otherwise, even as official discourses have continued to
perpetuate the stereotyping and ruination of women. In the book’s con-
cluding chapter, Sandra Lorenzano returns to Argentina to show us the
“wreckage upon wreckage” (Benjamin) that has accumulated through-
out Latin America’s recent trajectory of violence and economic plunder.
Using director Carlos Sorín’s 2002 film Historias mínimas (Minimal
stories) as an extended metaphor, she urges us to listen closely to the
critically creative, forward-looking, “small voices” discernable in the
debris. Her chapter compels readers to engage with these “small voices,”
to assume the responsibility of transmitting memories and demanding
justice.
Ruins, politics, ethics: these axes cross Telling Ruins at every turn. As
remnants of cataclysms past and embodiments of time’s fleeting nature,
ruins make us realize that what today qualifies as “progress” will tomor-
row be obsolete. Because they lack functionality, ruins challenge moder-
nity’s imposed narratives and harbor enormous creative potential for
artists and activists. Just as they evoke the past—and these evocations,
though sometimes nostalgic or melancholic, may also be profoundly
critical and constructive—ruins also stimulate future imaginings. The

chapters in this volume, taken together, can remind us that stirring up
ruins is a vital ingredient for the critical work of the present.
Select Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “Excavation and Memory.” In Selected Writings, volume 2,
edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, translated by
Rodney Livingstone et al., 576. Cambridge, MA: Belknap—Harvard University
Press, 1999.
———. The Origins of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne.
London: NLB, 1977.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian. “Mourning Remains.” In Loss: The Politics of
Mourning, edited by Eng and Kazanjian, 1–25. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003.
Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold
War. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
Merewether, Charles. “Traces of Loss.” In Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed,
edited by Michael Roth with Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether, 25–40. Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1998.
Ponte, Antonio José. “What Am I Doing Here?” In Cuba on the Verge: An Island
in Transition, edited by Terry McCoy, 14–16. Boston, New York, and London:
Bulfinch Press, 2003.
Richard, Nelly. Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition. Translated by Alan West-
Durán and Theodore Quester. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996.
Unruh, Vicky. “ ‘It’s a Sin to Bring Down an Art Deco’: Sabina Berman’s Theater
among the Ruins.” PMLA 122, no. 1 (January 2007): 135–50.
Part One
What Are We Doing Here?:

Ruins, Performance, Meditation
Chapter 1
Performing Ruins
Diana Taylor
I
Accompany me to the ruins. Over here, the glorious ruins, such as
Templo Mayor buried under modern day Mexico City, ancient scenes of
power. And over here, the dark ruins, the rubble of recently destroyed
and abandoned torture centers like Villa Grimaldi in Santiago de Chile,
where military regimes tortured and murdered members of their popu-
lations. And these over here, a third kind, I will call renovation ruins,
many of which exist only as traces. The large Millennium Park in down-
town Bogotá covers what used to be 15 square blocks of a community
known as El Cartucho, a “blighted” neighborhood erased in an urban
renovation project. I know this site through the work of the Colombian
art lab Mapa Teatro, which worked with members of the condemned
community for four years and developed a performance, Testigo de las
ruinas, that takes us through the process of demolition. Ruins, past and
present, are bracketed from everyday life, as if from another era that
only incidentally touches our own; nonetheless, they are bound up with
nationalist discourses of power, identity, and memory. Not just “proof”
of human existence and past practices, the crushed rocks become the
measure of who “we” are now. But how? What do ruins ask of us as
we walk through as tourists, visitors, or witnesses? Does the materiality
of the places transmit the knowledge of past lives, or does it affect only
those who already know what happened there? How does being there
affect what and how we know? While we perform ruins by physically
walking through them and bringing them to life, does the activation
work at a remove? Does the artistic representation of place and presence
evoke the same reactions?
Ruin (or ruins), as a noun, conjures up mysterious and romanticized
pasts, unique tourist destinations, places where “we” (not of that place
14 Diana Taylor
or time) can perform the unimaginable, keep the past intact as past even
as we bring it up close and move through it. Shells, structures, scenery:
ruins are empty of something palpable in its absence. At times, the onto-
logical “empty” gives way to the violent practice that emptied recalls. At
others, ruins allow us to fantasize about the existence or even possibility
of the ontological empty, the stillness of arrested motion, the quiet aura
of the far away, even as we walk through them before or after lunch.
These stones—the “real” thing—materialize the past. The physical
remains provide the scenarios that invite visitors to envision the lives that
others lived within them. All objects reference behaviors. Each object we
see was made, or positioned, with a certain use in mind. We populate
the space with peoples and actions as we reenact past practices, con-
scious that others climbed these stairs and sat where we are now sitting.
Walking the ruins is a durational performance; presenciamos y damos
cuerpo (we experience, “being present” and “lending our bodies”) as we
repeat the acts suggested by the scenario. Physically being in the place,
listening to the tour guide and/or imagining past practices can summon
up visceral connections to lives lived and lost, even to lives about which
the visitors know little. But as we conjure them up, we know that they’re
gone, and remain there forever as gone. They allows us to forget that we
too are present and absent at the same time. We come and go; the ruins
(and the ghosts) remain in their still-there-ness.
Although ruins conjure up loss, sometimes violent and traumatic loss,
the experience of visiting ruins is usually thought of as nontraumatic.
Being there, putting ourselves physically in another’s place, suggests as
much about not knowing as about knowing. Does proximity somehow
transmit knowledge of someone else’s experience? What are we presen-
ciando, or making present?
Perhaps it depends on the quality of our being there. A tourist, the
noun suggests, is a thing, not an action. A tourist might be there but do
nothing. The “tourist,” as a category associated with short stays and
recreation, is both a product of and a target for massive marketing cam-
paigns. Advertised as a romantic one-on-one contact with exotic other-
ness, tourism has made experience widely accessible and filled the space
for us; being there, in person, can be anything but unique.
For others—let us call them visitors (noun) who do something (visit
“in a friendly way” to comfort or benefit or behold)—these skeletal
structures offer information. Ruins of ancient cities make visible the bare
bones of past social structures, the hierarchies and values of stratified
systems. Being in place allows us to imagine, perhaps even presenciar, a
set of social and cosmic relations performed through architecture: scale,
distance, height, and positionality. There are things we can know by
being there. Presencing—more “accompanying” than identifying with
another—places us in the scenario. Although reenacting the moves of
another may allow us to imagine that we share basic understandings of
how social actors once lived in and through these structures of power,
Performing Ruins 15
Figure 1.1 Templo Mayor (Mexico City). Photograph courtesy of Diana Taylor.
we can, of course, only move in and through them by means of our own
systems of understanding.
Take the very idea of ruins. What differentiates a ruin-as-monument
from the unidentified mounds of brush and bramble that cover ancient
cities? A topographical survey of Latin America would reveal that the
region is full of ancient lands, though not all of them charge admission.
Since national and international institutions started taking an interest in
Latin American ruins in the late nineteenth century, they have cemented
a history and identity of “our” present.1 Mexican children visit sites to
gain knowledge of their heroic forefathers. UNESCO’s world heritage
initiatives signal certain ruins as humanity’s patrimony. “We,” the col-
lective constituted by categories such as “the world” and “humanity,”
are beneficiaries and heirs of past greatness. Even though these sites are
the state’s responsibility, the rate of excavation cannot compete with
archeologists’ identification of yet more sites. The past overtakes the
present’s technical and economic capacity to uncover it, even as the pre-
sent rapidly becomes past. More buildings fall into ruin, often victims of
economic decay and dislocation rather than of time and weather.
Some ruins I have visited lately have little to do with ancient power
and glory, at least not the kinds of power about which societies boast.
In Latin America, and I suspect elsewhere, ruins (as noun) coexist with
other kinds of ruin: the active, willful ruin of sites associated with
16 Diana Taylor
governmental, military, or economic violence. Ruin (as verb) yanks us

back into the world of agency: people ruin things; people ruin other peo-
ple. Recent sites of torture by state forces have only recently fallen into
disrepair. In some countries, rubble proves that the military destroyed
the evidence of its crimes against humanity. In others, the armed forces
feel so empowered that they don’t bother to cover their tracks. The cur-
rent neglect only signals a pause in operations.
II
Pedro Matta, a tall, strong man walked up to us when we arrived at
the unassuming side entrance to Villa Grimaldi, a former detention and
extermination camp on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. He is a survi-
vor who gives guided visits to people who want to know about the site.
He says hello to Soledad Falabella and Alejandro Gruman, colleagues of
mine in Chile who thought I would be interested in meeting Matta. He
greets me and hands me the English version of a book he has written:
A Walk through a Twentieth Century Torture Center: Villa Grimaldi,
A Visitor’s Guide. I tell him that I am from Mexico and speak Spanish.
“Ah,” he says focusing on me, “Taylor, I just assumed. . . .” We all walk
into the compound. The site is expansive. It looks like a ruin or construc-
tion site, and it’s hard to get a sense of it from where we’re standing. A
sign at the entrance, Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi, informs visitors
that 4,500 people were tortured here and 226 people were disappeared
and killed between 1973 and 1979. Another peace park, I think, in the
tradition of Hiroshima to Virginia Tech, another peace park that buries
violence under the name of peace. I photograph the sign that reminds us
that we are in a memorial and this tragic history belongs to us all. Like
many memory sites, it asks us to behave respectfully so that it might
remain and continue to instruct. Lesson one, clearly, is that this place is
“our” responsibility in more ways than one.
“This way, please.” Matta leads us into the emptied space. He walks
us past the rubble near the entrance to the small model of the torture
camp to help us visualize the architectural arrangement of a place now
gone. It is laid out, like a coffin, under a large plastic sunshade. We do
the recorrido in Spanish, which makes a difference. He seems to relax a
little, though his voice is strained and he clears his throat often. He tells
us that the compound, a nineteenth-century villa for upper-class par-
ties and weekend affairs, was taken over by DINA, Augusto Pinochet’s
special forces, to interrogate people detained by the military during
massive round-ups.2 In the late 1980s, one of the generals sold it to a
construction company to tear it down and replace it with a housing pro-
ject. Survivors and human rights activists could not stop the demolition,
but after heated contestation they secured the space as a memory site
and peace park.
Performing Ruins 17
A miniature scale model of the extermination camp positions us as

spectators. The main entrance allowed passage for vehicles delivering
the hooded captives to the main building. Matta’s language and our
imaginations populate the emptied space. He points to the large main
building where the officers lived, right here, exactly where we’re stand-
ing; then the small buildings that run along the perimeter to the left
where the prisoners were divided up, separated, and blindfolded—men
there, women there. There are drawings made by survivors: hooded pris-
oners pushed by guards with rifles for their three seconds at the latrines;
a hall of small, locked cells guarded by an armed man; a close-up draw-
ing of the inside of one of the cells in which a half-dozen shackled and
hooded men are squeezed in tightly; an empty torture chamber with a
bare metal bunk bed equipped with leather straps, a chair with straps
for arms and feet, a table with instruments. Here, too, objects reference
behaviors. We know exactly what happened there/here. Matta points to
other structures on the model. He is explicit about the violence and clear
in his condemnation of the United States’ role in the Chilean crisis. He
looks at me and remembers I am not that audience—an audience, yes,
but not that audience.
Looking down at the model, everything is visible through Matta’s
recounting. Past/present, there/here converge. We stand on the site of
the main building, usurping the military’s place. Looking offers us the
strange fantasy of seeing or grasping the “whole,” the fiction that we can
understand systemic criminal violence even as we position ourselves in
and “above” the fray. We are permitted to identify without identifying.
We look up and around at the “place itself.” What does being there
mean in this case? There’s not much to see of the former camp. The
remains of a few original structures, replicas of isolation cells, and a
tower dot the compound. Matta walks us toward the original entryway,
the massive iron gate now permanently sealed as if to shut out further
violence. Here it is clear that another layer has been added to the space.
A wash of decorative tiles, chips of original ceramic from the site, forms
a huge arrow-like shape on the ground pointing away from the gate
toward the new “peace” fountain and performance pavilion. 3 Matta
ignores that for the moment. This is not the time for reconciliation. He
continues his recorrido. He speaks impersonally, in the third person,
about the role of torture in Chile: one-half million people tortured and
5,000 killed out of population of 8 million. I do the math. There were
far more tortures and fewer murders in Chile than Argentina. He speaks
about torture’s development as a state tool from its experimental phase
to the precise and tested practice it became. Pinochet chose to break
rather than eliminate his enemies. The population of ghosts, or individu-
als destroyed by torture, would serve as a warning to others when the
former prisoners were thrown back, like zombies, into society. Matta’s
tone is controlled and reserved. He is giving historical information, not
personal testimony, as he outlines the camp’s daily workings. Language,
18 Diana Taylor
too, was transformed as words were outlawed: crímenes, desapareci-

dos, and dictadura (crimes, disappeared people, and dictatorship) were
replaced by excesos, presuntos desaparecidos, and gobierno militar
(excesses, presumed disappeared people, and military government).
As we walk, Matta describes what happened in each area of the park,
keeping his eyes on the ground, a habit born of peering down from under
the blindfold he was forced to wear. He re-enacts even as he retells.
Colored shards of ceramic tiles and stones now mark the places where
buildings once stood and the paths where victims were pushed to the
latrine or torture chambers. As we follow, we, too, know our way by
keeping our eyes on the ground: “Sala de tortura” (Torture Chamber),
“Celdas para mujeres detenidas” (Cells for Detained Women).
Gradually, his pronouns change. They tortured them becomes they
tortured us. He brings us in closer. His performance animates the space
and keeps it alive. His body connects me to what Pinochet wanted to
disappear. Matta’s presence performs the claim; le da cuerpo. He has
survived to tell. Being in place with him communicates a very different
sense of the crimes than looking down on the model. Glorious ruins,
like Templo Mayor, take us back in time; dark ruins like Villa Grimaldi
bring time right up close: now, here, and in many parts of the world, as
we speak. I can’t think past that, rooted as I am to place reactivated as
Figure 1.2 Standing on the ruins at Villa Grimaldi (Santiago, Chile). Photograph courtesy
of Diana Taylor.
Performing Ruins 19
practice. I, too, am part of this scenario now; I have accompanied him.

My chest hurts. My throat tightens. My “unarmed” eyes look straight
down, mimetically rather than reflectively, through his down-turned
eyes.4 I do not see, really; I imagine. I presenciar; I presence. I partici-
pate not in events but in his recounting of events. My “presencing” offers
me no sense of control, no fictions of understanding. He walks, he sits,
he tells. When he gets to the Memorial Wall with the names of the dead,
he breaks down and weeps. He cries for those who died but also for
those who survived. “Torture,” he says, “destroys the human being. And
I am no exception. I was destroyed through torture.” Torture is also
transformative, turning societies into terrifying places and people into
zombies.5 We walk; we talk about how other survivors have dealt with
their trauma, about comparisons with other torture centers and con-
centration camps. He says he needs to return to Villa Grimaldi, even
though it makes him sick. Afterward he goes home, takes aspirin, and
goes to bed. We continue to walk, past the replica of the water tower,
past the “Sala de la memoria” (Memory Room), the small building that
originally served as the photo and documentation lab, past the pool and
the memory tree with names hanging from the branches, like leaves.
Different commemorative art pieces remind us that “forgetfulness is full
of memory.”
Later Soledad tells me that Matta does the visit the same every
time: stands in the same spot, recounts the same events, cries at the
Memorial Wall. What does this mean about witnessing and the quality
of being in place? Matta is, as he has told us, our “guide.” Every move
follows the outline of the book he has written. But is he also a profes-
sional survivor? Is he acting? Am I his witness? His audience? A voyeur
of trauma tourism? What kind of scenario is this? Or maybe, like the
space itself, there are many overlays and several things converging at
that same time.
Like other survivors, I believe, Matta is both a traumatized victim
and a witness to trauma. Trauma, too, is a durational performance,
characterized by the nature of its repetitions. For Matta, the experience
has lasted for years, ever since he was disappeared by the armed forces.
His reiterated acts of showing, telling, and leading people down the
paths, characterize both trauma and trauma-driven actions (like these
tours) intended to channel and alleviate it. Perhaps for him, as for the
Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the ritualized tour offers both personal con-
solation and revenge. Memory is a tool and political project, honoring
those who are gone and reminding those who will listen that the victim-
izers have gotten away with murder. His tour, like the Mothers’ march,
bears witness to a society in ruins in which judicial systems cannot bring
perpetrators to justice. Yet the walk-through, like the march, also makes
visible the memory paths that maintain another topography of place and
practice, not of terror but of resistance, the will not only to live but also
to keep memory alive.
20 Diana Taylor
I can understand what Matta is doing here better than I can under-
stand what I am doing here. He needs others (in this case me) to com-
plete the task of witnessing, to keep those memory paths fresh, and
create more human rights activists. To witness, a transitive verb, defines
both the act and the person carrying it out; the verb precedes the noun.
Through the act of witnessing, we become witnesses. Identity relies on
action. We are both subjects and products of our acts. Matta is both
a witness to himself and a witness for those who are no longer alive
to tell. He is a juridical witness, too, having brought charges against
the Pinochet dictatorship, but he is also the object of my witnessing: he
needs me to acknowledge what he and others endured. The transitivity
of “witness” ties us together; that’s one reason he’s keen to gauge his
audience. Trauma-driven activism (like trauma itself) cannot simply be
told or known; it must be repeated and externalized through embodied
practice.
But why do I need him? I wonder about aura and worry about voyeur-
ism and (dark) tourism. Is Matta my close-up? Does he allow me to bring
unspeakable violence as close as possible? If so, to what end? This, too,
is multilayered in the ways that the personal, interpersonal, social, and
political come together. Walking through Villa Grimaldi with Matta, the
oversized issues of human rights violations and crimes against humanity,
too large and general on one level, take on an immediate and embod-
ied form. In this spot where we now stand, other people brutalized and
killed their fellow citizens. Matta was one of those brutalized. I knew
that, of course. But standing there with him, I know it differently. On
another level, the corporeal proximity to atrocity allows me to feel my
own experiences of criminal violence in an openly public, political con-
text. Matta’s pain activates mine, which is different in many ways, but
not in one essential way: in our everyday lives, we have no way of dealing
with violent acts that shatter the limits of our understanding. Therapy
offers some people comfort. But for others, this brutally emptied space
of mourning and remembrance is more appropriate. We all live in prox-
imity to criminal violence, and though some have felt it more personally
than others, this violence is never just personal. If we focus only on the
trauma, we risk evacuating the politics. Standing there, together, bring-
ing the buildings and routines back to life, we bear witness not just to
loss, but to a system of power relations, hierarchies, and values that not
only allowed but required the disappearance of certain people.
The questions posed by these dark ruins may not be unrelated to those
prompted by more glorious ruins. They, like the pyramids, make visible
the bare bones of current social structures normally exceeding the eye. A
topography of this zone would show that there were 800 torture centers
in Chile under Pinochet. If so many civic and public places such as villas,
gyms, department stores, and schools were used for criminal violence,
how do we know the whole city did not function as a clandestine tor-
ture center? The scale of the violations is stunning. The ubiquity of the
Performing Ruins 21
practice spills over and contaminates social life. The guided tour through
Villa Grimaldi gives us an intensely condensed experience within the com-
pound walls. But like the glorious ruins, the isolation is bracketed, only in
seeming isolation from everything surrounding them. We know, walking
through the compound, that criminal violence has spread so uncontrolla-
bly that walls cannot contain it nor guides explain it. We might control
a site and fence it in, but the city, the country, the Southern Cone, the
hemisphere, have been networked for violence (and beyond too, not just
because the United States has taken to outsourcing torture). Is the dark
ruin sickening because it situates us in concrete proximity to atrocity or
because the ubiquitous practice situates us all in constant proximity to the
dark ruin that is our society? I think “we” actually do always know what
happened here/there and that this, like many other sites, is our responsi-
bility. The emotional charge comes from the friction of place and practice,
inseparable from one another, even if disavowed. As the ruins themselves
suggest, instead of the and/or approach, we might recognize the layers and
layers of material and corporeal practices that created these places and
that get triggered as we walk through them in our own ways.
III
Accompany me into the theater. What does being in place mean here in
terms of witnessing? Can a spectator be a witness? What happens to the
notion of place and objects as authenticators, to varying degrees, for the
experiences of others?
The stage looks like a warehouse or workspace. The wide central area
is open, the periphery cluttered with large metal screens, small mobile
stands, chairs, drop cloths, and other sundry objects. During their
performance, Testigo de las ruinas, members of Mapa Teatro, one of
Colombia’s major performance and theater “laboratories” (rather than a
collective so common in Latin American theater in the 1960s), look more
like technicians than actors as they mill about in work clothes moving
projectors and screens that show the demolition of a blighted neighbor-
hood, El Cartucho, in Bogotá. To the side or downstage center (depend-
ing on the performance space), a heavy, dark skinned woman sets up a
makeshift kitchen table, lights a grill, and starts grinding corn. A video
camera projects her steady movements onto a large screen that somebody
centers in the open space. The woman is present throughout the perfor-
mance: she’s a “character” in the video, an actor onstage; she plays the
role of herself, the street vendor that she was in El Cartucho, cooking for
a public. Only afterward do we learn her name: Juana María Ramírez.
The audience can see her both on screen and off as she goes about her
business of turning out perfectly shaped arepas, typical Colombian corn
cakes, much as she used to in Bogotá. Audience members can smell the
arepas and, at the end of the performance, she invites people to eat them.
22 Diana Taylor
Although this is not environmental theater in the 1960s understanding of

the phenomenon, the audience is transported into an uncanny and con-
stantly changing space of social relations, smells, sights, and sounds that
is both alienating and weirdly “homey.” Both no-tech and high-tech, the
performance makes a street of the stage and a stage of the street.
On screen, former El Cartucho inhabitants give testimony about what
their neighborhood used to be. As they speak, the audience sees demo-
lition balls knocking away walls; buildings implode; dust and debris
mushroom and settle; the contemporary ruins recall postnuclear holo-
caust images from sci-fi movies. The city has become an arena of urban
warfare, not because the guerillas have arrived from the mountains, but
because politicians have chosen urban renewal initiatives that disappear
the poor and obliterate the past. Cartucho (meaning cartridge, but also
translated as “Lily Street”) is the common name for Barrio Santa Inés.
The inhabitants, however, know that it means desechable: disposable
people, homes, and neighborhoods. The affluent long ago abandoned
its beautiful 1830s vintage homes and moved to other parts of the city.
The decayed houses became homes for the poor or flophouses for immi-
grants (refugees, the performance calls them) fleeing from the country’s
conflict-torn interior. Gradually, the government and private compa-
nies withdrew services. Bogotá’s more prosperous inhabitants shunned
El Cartucho as a place of poverty, petty crime, and drug addiction. It
disappeared from their map. Soon, a city beautification and revitali-
zation project ensured it was on no map. Fifteen square blocks were
razed and two thousand people were left homeless, their predicament
unacknowledged.
In 1998, Bogotá was in the throes of an ambitious urban renewal
project undertaken by Mayor Enrique Peñalosa (1998–2000). Located
a stone’s throw from the president’s residence and the country’s cen-
ter of political power, El Cartucho provided visual proof of Colombia’s
failed social policies. Given the logic of progress and beautification, it
needed to disappear. Political ideologies, as Michel de Certeau observed,
“transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfor-
tune” (96). Bad places breed bad behaviors and bad people. Or is it the
other way around? The unsightly and unsafe area was converted into a
people-free, clean, well-lighted showcase. The model of spatial interac-
tion was imposed from above—not a reflection of what was (as in Villa
Grimaldi), but of what the mayor’s office wanted it to be. Instead of
space evoking practice, this one evacuated it, emptied it, transforming
space into a concept, a utopia, a no-place. The Parque Tercer Milenio
(Third Millennium Park) materialized the rhetorical commitment to
improving national life. Inaugurated in August 2005, the park won first
prize in Colombia’s 2006 Architecture Biennial.
The performance guides us through the ruins. Former inhabitants’
screened testimonies challenge the notion of “renewal.” Mapa Teatro,
founded in 1984 by brother and sister, Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden
Performing Ruins 23
Cortés, clearly refers to ruins as more than physical remains, rubble, or

destruction. It refers also to a state of ruins, a government capable of
rounding up undesirable citizens and transporting them to the matadero
(the city’s slaughterhouse) without telling them where they were going.
The high walls of the matadero surrounded by barbed wire can’t hide the
eerie smoke chimney that towers over them. The images underscore the
violence of national purification fantasies that rely on the disappearance
of certain populations. After a few days, El Cartucho’s former residents
were dumped off in different parts of the city. No plan or policy had
been arranged for them. No one knows what happened to all the dogs
thrown into the back of trucks and carted away.
As former El Cartucho residents talk about their old homes, they
invoke a mental map of the violently emptied space, the “no-space” as
Mapa Teatro calls it, that their area has become. “I used to live here,”
says a man, penciling a map. He, like Matta, is a witness to himself and
others in the disappeared community. He tells, he points, he implicitly
attests to the impunity of those who mandated the project from above.
The screens juxtapose historical maps with these drawings, underscor-
ing how the renewal process wipes out, rather than revitalizes, what
was there before. Identity, of course, is bound up with space. The diffi-
culties former inhabitants have situating themselves in relation to their
past also defines their present and future status. Where do they belong?
Nowhere, obviously, according to their government. Disposable people
do not belong; they are used and discarded.
City designers are only enacting what Latin American military forces
have long known: by eradicating or shutting down institutions and
places associated with past practices, they can change a society’s sense
and memory of itself. While urban renewal cannot compare with the
criminal violence of disappearing “subversives” in dirty wars, some sec-
tors of the population are slated to disappear from their homes to make
room for new, improved places. Performative utterances, calling a bar-
rio blighted for example, allow for policies that eradicate the disease.
No one invests in blighted communities or provides hygienic infrastruc-
ture and services; the government need not offer educational resources,
health services, drug counseling, rehab, or work opportunities. These
communities, the logic goes, are ruined already. What is the point in
recognizing their members as cultural agents with vested interests in
improving their environment and life chances? The city is the battle-
ground. The war is not just on terror and terrorists, but also on poverty
and the poor. The rhetoric of destroying the village to save it applies the
militarized language of Vietnam to urban landscapes. Ruin is a political
project.
The actors move the four large screens around, rearranging the projec-
tors in front of them, bringing the images and sounds up close, juxtapos-
ing them with others, creating a spillover effect that defies containment.
Unlike most performances, the focus here is not on actors. They do
24 Diana Taylor
not speak or tell. They show. They show by moving the projectors and
by melting their bodies into the projections. At times, they drape huge
drop cloths over their shoulders and position themselves in front of the
screens, allowing the images to fold their bodies into the scenario. The
fires of burning debris become fires on the body. Their bodies make visi-
ble other bodies on and through them—much as traditional acting does.
Yet, instead of using their bodies as instruments or vessels channeling
other lives, their bodies become screens for the projected experiences
of others. The replication and layering of images illustrate the degree
to which bodies and space stand-in for each other in the discourse on
urbanization. Situated in the ambiguous yet generative inside/outside,
Mapa Teatro’s members position themselves, too, as witnesses to ruins.
They presence and accompany the El Cartucho inhabitants throughout
the process. They serve as their witnesses and acknowledge their loss
and trauma, a vital role in a situation where few will call violence by its
proper name. The bodies of Mapa Teatro members also make visible and
transmit to us—the audience—the memories and trauma of those suf-
fering the violence of urbanization. Mapa Teatro’s performance process
thus involves at least three aspects—revelation (illuminating and making
visible the destruction of the El Cartucho inhabitants’ plight), witnessing
(accompanying the inhabitants and recognizing their trauma), and trans-
mission (passing the knowledge of the experience to the audience). The
montage is both a testimony to past pain and a sign of hope; the actors,
like the El Cartucho inhabitants, are able to place themselves, through
acts of creation and memory, back in the places that no longer exist.
They leave a trace, or “huella,” as Rolf Abderhalden calls it. They cre-
ate testimonies and art from what others have deemed trash. And even
in this devastated landscape, there is beauty: the warmth and humor
of the inhabitants who speak of their lives, the surprising textures and
colors of ordinary objects (bricks, rocks, windows), and the rhythm and
motions of everyday life. Then Mapa Teatro wheels the screens away in
a fluid coming-and-going of images, sounds, voices, and perspectives
that makes visible not a violent community, but a violent set of social
relations. The performance’s precision and beauty simultaneously crash
against and mitigate the brutality of what is shown.
Art, as Mapa Teatro and so many other Latin American theater and
performance practitioners have demonstrated, can function as a practice
of witnessing. Art is not a thing—a beautiful object—but a process, an
engagement with those who interact with it. It creates a safe space of
encounter, an occasion to tell (atestiguar) and be heard. For four years,
Mapa Teatro developed C’ùndua, an art project/process encompassing
various in situ “install-actions” with the El Cartucho inhabitants in which
they revisited the space, drew maps, created intergenerational and inter-
ethnic memory books, and developed several powerful performances.
Testigo de las ruinas, the aesthetic culmination of work developed in
the various projects, was completed after the park was built. C’ùndua in
Performing Ruins 25
Arhuaca mythology refers to “the place where we will go after death.”6

Yet the proposal was, as they call it, a “pact with life.” They wanted to
accompany, presenciar, listen to, and acknowledge the subjectivity of
those whom the government was ready to discard in the name of urban
renewal: “A well built city is not only one whose spaces and buildings
are durable and beautiful; it is one whose spaces and buildings hold a
sense of the life of its citizens” (Proyecto C’ùndua, 88). Ironically, the
park—an emptied space—is also empty. The desired presence is absent;
the upscale pedestrians with leisure time to walk through the park or
sit and watch a performance did not materialize. Yet the memory of
the undesired people who were so brutally absented is present. The
space makes visible that which has been disappeared. Poverty—albeit
banished—has made its way back. As no economic policies were put in
place to address the brutal financial disparities, the streets bordering the
park increasingly show signs of disrepair. The decline is a sign not of
bad people, but of bad social practice, of waging the “war” on poverty
against the poor rather than against unequal systems of production and
distribution of wealth.
Revelation, witnessing, transmission. How does performance make
witnesses of the audience? Audiences do not have a chance to be present,
to presenciar, the original events being depicted. But theater and perfor-
mance can allow audiences to experience the testimonies of those who
lived through the events. We are witnesses not to the demolition, but to its
retelling. Mapa Teatro felt that the video performance was not sufficient
to create the occasion for witnessing they had envisioned. Asking Juana
Ramírez to join them onstage changed everything. While no buildings
or rubble provide the authenticating materiality for the scenario, Juana’s
physical presence “da cuerpo” (gives body) to the scene she invites us to
enter. Part of our role as audience, we gradually come to understand, is
to accompany her through the re-presentation. She is the link between
the “here”—captured on screen but now gone—and us, the spectators
gradually turned witnesses. Theater and performance offer a space for
transforming the trauma of loss into a force of life affirming action.7
Ruins, whether “glorious,” “dark,” or “reconstructed” ask us to par-
ticipate and to witness in many different encounters, to accompany and
“presence” the reality of the experience of others. But witnessing works
across a continuum: the impossible witness to which Elie Wiesel and
Giorgio Agamben point (“we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses”
[Wiesel quoted in Agamben, 33]); the witness to oneself articulated by
Dori Laub; the witness to the victim (as in my interaction with Pedro
Matta at Villa Grimaldi); the witness to the event in Bertolt Brecht’s
“street scene” (123–29); the juridical witness called to court; and vari-
ous kinds of witnessing at a remove—either in time (ruins), space (ren-
ovation projects), or through representation. Here I have asked you to
accompany me through the ruins, to participate in yet another transmis-
sion of the act of witnessing. Where this will lead us, I do not know.
26 Diana Taylor
Notes
1. See Chapter 3 of Castañeda.
2. DINA stands for Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (National Intelligence
Directorate).
3. See Lazzara’s Chapter 4 for an excellent study of Pedro Matta and the physical
layout of Villa Grimaldi.
4. See Benjamin, 225.
5. I am indebted to Marcial Godoy for this observation.
6. The multimedia Proyecto C’ùndua: Un pacto por la vida/A Pact for Life was
produced in 2003 by the Bogotá Mayor’s office and the Bogotá Para Vivir
association.
7. See Reisner.
Select Bibliography
Abderhalden Cortés, Rolf. “The Artist as Witness: An Artist’s Testimony.”
E-misferíca 4, no. 2. (November 2007): http://www.hemi.nyu.edu/journal/4.2/
eng/artist_presentation/mapateatro/mapa_artist.htm.
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New
York: Zone Books, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In
Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 219–53. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
and World, 1968.
Brecht, Bertolt. “The Street Scene.” In Brecht on Theatre, translated by John Willett,
121–29. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Castañeda, Quetzile E. In the Museum of Maya Culture: Touring Chichén Itzá.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” In Trauma:
Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 61–75. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Lazzara, Michael J. Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
Proyecto C’ùndua: Un pacto por la vida/A Pact for Life, A Multimedia Project.
Bogotá: Mayor’s Office of Bogotá and the Bogotá Para Vivir Association, 2003.
Reisner, Steven. “Private Trauma/Public Drama: Theater as a Response to
International Political Trauma.” In The Scholar and Feminist Online 2, no. 1
(Summer 2003): http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/ps/printsre.htm.
Chapter 2
Scribbling on the Wreck
Francine Masiello
Like ossuaries, ruins prove the end of nationalisms and frontiers to which we so labori-
ously adhere.
—Luisa Futoransky
I
On the way to Cafayate, somewhere north of Tucumán, the ruined cit-
adel of the Quilmes Indians allows me the leisure of pausing. Perched
on the pinnacle of what was once the fortress of a mighty nation, I
admire the heights that I have scaled; I stretch my gaze over the hori-
zon; I try to imagine life as it might have been before time swept it
all away. Nonetheless, these are not free thoughts, unshackled from
any earlier logic. After all, the guidebook has intervened far before my
arrival, alerting me to the story of the rise and fall of this once flourish-
ing culture. The largest settlement in Argentina before the Conquest, the
Quilmes first resisted the Inca empire and then, for 130 years, opposed
the power of Spanish invaders. We know from the tour books that the
Spaniards dragged the last Quilmes survivors on foot to Buenos Aires.
Most perished in the march. We are also told that the ruins were reha-
bilitated during Videla’s military dictatorship (1976–1983). Who then
can escape the irony of the junta’s gesture, staged in 1978, possibly its
cruelest moment, of remembering its native peoples who, much like
30,000 citizens under military rule, had also been disappeared? This
is an all-too familiar narrative that runs from Wounded Knee to Tierra
del Fuego: first we kill indigenous peoples and later we return as tourists
to celebrate their achievements. All the while, we continue in the call to
justify ongoing destruction.
28 Francine Masiello
I reread my words here and see that they border on the obvious: they
are what every tourist needs to say upon perceiving the traces of a lost civ-
ilization. Pablo Neruda performed a similar act of remembrance (though
with considerably greater eloquence) when in “Heights of Machu Picchu”
he wrote, “I come to speak for your dead mouths.” Writers like Neruda
use the lyric voice to lay claim to the past, to speak control over history.
This process begins with the perception of a present-bound concreteness
which, like a stone, is polished again and again and remembered by the
rhythms of repetition. Originality is achieved not only through the style
in which history is recalled, but also through the confidence we place
in our senses: vision to capture the image before us and auditory power
to track the rhythms of narration. I will return to the role of the senses
in relation to ruins, but first, let me turn to some possible strategies for
reaching a past that is not ours. I begin with a sense of place.
Perhaps, as Pierre Nora once said, the site of memory is more exacting
than the memory itself. And that indeed is the point. Ruins bring an aware-
ness of framing, of the device of representation; they are a site of memory
that enters into a state of play with memory itself. The experience is dia-
logic; it insists on the push and pull between past and present, between
the givens of nature’s destructive art and my (the witness’s) insistence on
innovation. But it is also about the conflict of what I see directly and the
history that I will later narrate about the scene observed, or about my ver-
sion of events in contrast to all the previous texts that have been written
about the same. Nothing is innocent: in the presence of ruins, citation and
repetition rule the day. Ruins thus drag our imaginations back and forth
in time; we leave our sphere of conventional understanding and surrender
to lines of flight that lead us to remote and undecipherable sensations.
The romantics turned to ancient civilizations to posit a new totality
of history. Constantin-Francois Volney, observing the decayed structures
of the Turks (1799), and Edward Bulwer Lytton in The Last Days of
Pompeii (1834), found in the past the moral lessons necessary for acting
in the present; they thus installed a back-and-forth in history that caused
a volley in space and time. But the romantics also used ruins for the fic-
tion of meditation. Pondering a memento mori or the theme of Ubi sunt?,
they lingered in states of melancholia and paused for self-reflection. In
this regard, romantic writers are quite unlike today’s postmoderns who
put the fragments of ruins in play, refusing to acknowledge a whole.
Here, Andreas Huyssen is right when he claims that the ruin is an apt
postmodern site; its irreconcilable fragments resist totality and signal the
failure of interpretation. Boundaries collapse; norms are upset; space is
restructured. It would seem, in this respect, that the grand oppositions of
totality and infinity drive the discussion of ruins. Though we try to grasp
the whole, tracking back toward some original form, fragments of mean-
ing lead us forward in infinite movement. I take the antonyms “totality
and infinity” from Levinas to signal an ethical possibility that the site of
ruins proposes. Here, and this is central to all that will follow, in both
Scribbling on the Wreck 29
extremes of “then” and “now,” between totality and infinite fragments,

ruins always oblige us to see and think in double time. Here, in this dou-
ble time, we find the moment to touch past and future, to enter the ethical
moment of historical revision and move toward collective practice.
II
Let me review this slowly by starting with the event of the ruin. The double
reading to which I refer emerges from two possibilities: first, the idea of the
ruin as a liminal space, a feast for the traveler as it was in another time a
feast for the colonist’s eye. In all of this, when we ask how to experience the
past, we examine the ways in which we recapture an event that belonged to
others. How we establish continuity between past and present is key. At the
same time, the breaks in flow may well be the cause for trauma.
Second, when a volley of conflicting experiences is staged in the the-
ater of ruins, it touches not simply the double time of past and present,
but the wide canvas of history in relation to my interior moments. Ruins
speak a lack in my primary experience; they scream out my inability to
capture the past accurately. I then try to impose my own experience on
a past that I cannot reach directly. I fill in the gaps; I make sense of the
rubble; and when all else fails, I try to find an aesthetics of ruin, a beauty
that combines nature’s artistic hand with human planning.
Staged another way, the archaeological site or the place where disaster
fell upon an otherwise organized culture reminds us, as sentient subjects,
that we manage multiple time schemes. It reminds us that we are composed
of heterogeneous times in contradistinction to the singularity of the effi-
cient public clock. Here, Walter Benjamin gives a useful twist to the prob-
lem when he tells us that History is not homogeneous empty time, but time
filled by the presence of the now (Jetztheit) (1969, 261). In this collision of
temporalities, the chorus of an alternative harmonization can be heard.
Benjamin is harsh (and, ultimately, more helpful) when he takes
stock of the observer’s present-bound perspective. In his work on the
Trauerspiel, for example, he directs us to the artist’s allegorical capacity
to make sense of the fragment. On one hand, this talent is the basis of
creation, the miracle through which an observer assembles the remnants
of the past, piling them up, repeating forms, and producing, in the end,
a work of art: creation through citation. But then there is the literary
critic, who reveals craftsmanship differently: by taking all of literature,
deconstructing it, breaking it down into remnants and then rebuild-
ing the corpus, investing it with new meanings for history. In search of
allegorical values lying behind the image, the critic perversely turns the
literary artifact into a ruin: “Criticism means the mortification of the
work: not the—as the romantics have it—awakening of consciousness in
living works, but the settlement of knowledge in dead ones” (1998, 182).
So this is not just about the study of ruins; it is also about the creative
ruination we impose on material objects in history.
The ruins stage an in-betweenness: on the one hand, a connection

between past and present, between life and death; on the other, the tran-
sitory nature of all human progress, a subtle movement in time in which
nature comes back to reign over the works of human creation. In this way,
the garden—or life itself—is always connected to ruins. This runs from
the romantic period to our times. The decayed tombstone surrounded
by weeds, which the romantics so much enjoyed, is also found in the
visual work of postmodern artist Gordon Matta Clark, who purposefully
destroyed existing buildings to let sunshine peer through broken walls and
roofs, or in Anselm Kiefer’s monumental links between ruins and civiliza-
tion, ashes and poetic life. A modern ruin confected to join nature and cul-
ture, a modern ruin that cites nineteenth-century ruins: in these extremes,
the visual field’s closed totality is pried open. Everything is available, ready
for reconstruction. Consequently, the future is left open as well.
We are always caught in this disglossia, which captures the before
and after in a single frame. It can also be said that framing activates
ruins’ aesthetic potential. Through the observer’s lens, we try to detain
the flow of a history on the verge of disappearing; we also translate acts
of nature into a work of art. No wonder, then, that the frame narrative
often introduces some remote past into fiction. Juana Manuela Gorriti’s
narrators tell embedded stories crafted like Russian dolls, one inside the
next. In any given story, arches and doorways separate her observers
from the abandoned ruins of the homeland; each gaze frames another to
sustain the art of telling while also sustaining, on a primary plane, the
double times of past and present.
But ruins impose a peculiar syntax for speaking that encounter, a
grammar of double voicing, loaded with double meaning. In its most
extreme manifestation, when crying out the failure of the romantic pro-
ject, ruins produce aphasia; they dislocate oral language. The unheimlich
(uncanny) of the ghostly past weighs on us, producing an inarticulate
stammer. This is where speech breaks down, but it is also the point at
which speech is translated creatively into poetic rhythm. The stammer of
irrecoverable loss takes shape in literature as a repetition of the unnam-
able, a halting vibration that speaks the heterogeneous times that cannot
be reconciled as one. Gilles Deleuze would even say that when language
trembles from head to toe, we witness “the principle of poetic compre-
hension of language itself” (1987, 108). To get there—to the potential of
art and indeed the potential of the future—I first want to consider some
nineteenth-century texts and then draw upon our experience today.
III
The romantics tell us that ruins awaken us to the sensorial realm.
Confounding the normal structure of things, ruins startle the senses; they
alert us to unexpected feelings. For Herman Melville, the Encantadas,
on the surface, are beyond comparison; yet more importantly, he invites

us to see in them the world before time. Ruins draw us to search back for
an imagined, prelapsarian moment. Melville writes, “[H]ere hues were
seen as yet unpainted, and figures . . . unengraved” (768). He describes
a world before writing, before inscription, pure experience without the
intermediate step of representation. He goes on, “[N]o voice, no low,
no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss” (768). This is the
world of the not yet, a materiality before speech, pure delivery to the
senses.
Volney begins to hear in the presence of ruins. Feelings are awakened,
bodies begin to move, and an apparition then speaks to him and ech-
oes his thoughts (87). Already a doubling of voices is heard, along with
an unfolding of the other senses. Tactility comes into play as he walks
around the remaining structures that once belonged to the Ottoman
Empire. Sound enters laterally as when, for example, one’s perception
of ancient time is disturbed by the incongruities of nearby vehicular
traffic. The clutter of ruins awakens consciousness to material texture.
Experience becomes somatic, dissolving reason in favor of a physical,
instinctual interaction with the world. The starting point for reflect-
ing on ruins is the body’s carnal density. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
wants to touch the barbaric, to control it. Gorriti contemplates past and
future while touching the headstones and trees of Paris’s Père Lachaise
Cemetery; her characters long to touch the Incas’ treasures or caress the
stones of the homeland. Melville dwells on the senses when he focuses on
Ahab’s abandonment of reason in favor of sensory perception. Memory
and perception belong to the larger sensual body. By mid-century, how-
ever, a shift occurs from a sensorial, body-centric perception of the
world toward a new psychic discipline that alters how subjects perceive
the past. Caught in these ever-changing modes of perception, the three
writers whom I will consider here—Gorriti, Sarmiento, and Melville—
rewrite the terms for engaging a ruined past and for registering their
experience.
Memory is the topic of Gorriti’s fictions; she turns back the clock
to envision a time preceding civil war and dissent, when elites of the
Revolution of May 1810—among them, members of her own family—
could claim a place in Argentina’s pantheon of heroes. General Juan
Manuel de Rosas, of course, brings this glory to an end, resulting in
a nation in ruins. In the realm of fiction, Gorriti’s characters register
a sense of abandonment as they wander through the debris of battle-
grounds. War, indeed, draws the lines between past and future; it
signifies dislocation. But it also leads Gorriti to seek other spaces for
recording experience. She thus turns to the pre-Conquest Incas and the
altiplanos of Bolivia and Peru. Whether in reference to her homeland
or distant points of travel, Gorriti begs us to notice the construction of
memory as it rises from ruins. More importantly, memory is embodied;
it imposes itself in an almost Proustian way through sensorial stimuli.
The voice of nature, the roar of water, or the grinding of stone awaken
Gorriti to the past; her body absorbs the world’s sounds; sensation drives
memory home. Gorriti will draw on the disorder thrust upon the mate-
rial body both by sensations and the abstract world of ideas. However,
when characters fail to feel, to channel the work of memory through the
sensate body, then Gorriti’s stories collapse and chaos reigns. Reason, it
would seem, fails to bring desired order.
There is a simple way of reading Gorriti as the writer who wants to
found a nation based on a common remembrance of sacrifice. In her
fiction, this is exemplified by the bodies that litter the battlefields of the
Argentine civil wars and by her memorials to dead military leaders and
her clan’s elders. In this regard, she sustains a narrative about the eternal
return of the disappeared. She is haunted by memories of a bitter past
and nightmares of the future. But the gesture introduces a double step in
Gorriti’s writings so that nostalgia and futuricity operate as one. Nature
regulates both. When she returns to her native Horcones, for example,
she tells us:
Horcones! Paternal home, now a mound of ruins inhabited only by jack-

als and snakes. What remains of your former splendor? Your walls have
decayed; the pillars of your arches have crumbled as if once erected upon
an abyss. The sinuous roots of the fig tree and the golden trunk of the
citrus barely signal the site of you gardens. Silence and loneliness have
settled upon your once festive days. (Gorriti, xvi)
Here, nature is an indispensable part of ruin; it overtakes the edifice of

human construction much in the same way that Rosas’s barbaric nature
overtook civilization. Even when Gorriti forgoes her obsession with
Rosas and moves back to the conflict between Inca and Spaniard, ruins
become a metaphor for decay in human understanding. Let me provide
a few brief examples. In “El tesoro de los Incas,” the story’s title alludes
to the natives’ hidden gold, but also to the ruins of the past and to an
imperial memory that is unable to see the virtue of indigenous civiliza-
tions. Indeed, blindness is the trope that links the story’s characters. The
Spaniards fail to see the power of Inca family ties; they fail to recognize
codes of honor. Sightless in the face of disaster, colonized and colonizer
are led blindly to their ultimate collapse. Here, the sensate world, awak-
ened by brilliant images of gold, is contrasted to moral darkness. This
story marks a point of transition in the nineteenth-century culture to
which I earlier referred: if nineteenth-century writers vacillate between
a defense of the regime of the senses and that of reason, Gorriti finds in
both a lack of ethical guarantees. This ethical quandary is balanced on
the trope of ruins.
It is no surprise, then, that greed and thievery run through all of
Gorriti’s stories. Swindlers, embezzlers, and highway robbers are stock
figures in her fiction. They lack a memory of rectitude, but are enticed
by the treasures of the past. This awakens their senses and their thirst for
gold. In “La quena,” Rosa is courted by an avaricious and evil Spaniard,
yet she is smitten with the mestizo Hernán whom she loves. Following
endless plot twists, Rosa dies and Hernán chooses the monastic life. But
in a final scene that can only be likened to high gothic, Hernán contem-
plates Rosa’s skeleton and devotedly turns the femur of his beloved into
a musical instrument. The quena resonates with Rosa’s song, wailing
of melancholia and loss. It also enables Hernán to pull himself out of
silence; he manages to touch the depths of his regret through the spec-
tral voice he hears. Gorriti brings us to the scene of haunting so that her
characters can overcome moral blindness or paralysis by grief. The truth
is spoken in “La quena” through the bones of the dead just as, in other
stories, it is uttered through the voice of madness or through the des-
perate lyrics of an operatic aria or a funeral dirge. Characters sing; they
wail; they go mad; they drown themselves in repetition. At times, they
are left speechless. The truth is also spoken in bilingual voices, resid-
ual and dominant tongues that demonstrate a contest of values and cul-
tures. Indigenous languages cross with cosmopolitan tongues; Latinisms
infuse Spanish prose; musical composition and lyrics from Italian opera
disrupt Spanish syntax. These are the sounds of different memories at
work, not projected through a single voice, but through dissonant tones
and enunciations. Memory, then, is never pure in formation, but always
depends on a conflict or blending of colonizing and colonized voices,
on liberals and conservatives meeting in distant lands, on bandits facing
the law. Memory, above all, is reinforced by repetition, yet a nonnorma-
tive or exceptional voice always tells a second story. Not unlike the act
of stuttering, this doubling or repetition in speech exceeds time’s linear
organization.
Perhaps ruins as a nineteenth-century trope respond to a new concep-
tion of private interior time that is pulled in several directions. “I was
two persons,” the narrator tells us in Gorriti’s autobiography. Yet in an
early story, “Gubi Amaya,” a character utters the same phrase. This dual
self is caught between sensate experience and reason, between home and
exile, public and private time, as the narrator tries to straighten out the
ruined history of the past. Bergson here is helpful when he reminds us
that the body is a boundary between future and present (Cited in Crary,
43). In the materiality of experience so dear to nineteenth-century writ-
ers, the reception of ruins is written on the narrative body, installed
in a border space where ethical direction comes into doubt. Framing,
haunting, and doubleness serve a disruptive function. Repetition, as a
strategy that might have harbored the hope of bringing elusive fragments
together, inevitably collapses upon itself, almost like a stammer.
Sarmiento also confronted the idea of ruins when he stared at the
decayed walls of the baths of Zonda and scribbled on their surface: “One
can kill men, but not their ideas.” In itself a badly copied phrase that
Sarmiento would cite time and again during his career, this is a phrase
that he inscribes under an image of the escutcheon of the Rosas regime,

as if his second text could turn the first into a ruin and alter Argentine
history. For Gorriti, corporeality is the enduring basis of legend. For
Sarmiento, when the body is effaced, voice remains his resource. Both
writers evoke the conflict of experience and representation, the doubling
of body and ideas, the clash of original and citation as they emerge from
history’s ruins. Much in the way that Gorriti’s characters turn to mad-
ness in ruins, Sarmiento gets ensnared in this doubleness when he sets
abstract reason against the damaged body, civilization against barba-
rism. Sarmiento cannot live without either. Like the ruins that introduce
Facundo, ideas need extension in time, but invariably they fall into the
double time of repetition, the equivalent in writing of the oral stutter.
An observation about citations in the works of Gorriti and Sarmiento:
the passage by Gorriti that I cited earlier appears many times in her
works; it introduces several early stories and novellas and makes a final
appearance in the pages of Lo íntimo, her memoir written in the year of
her death. Sarmiento’s anecdote about graffiti writing on the walls is his
stock refrain. It inaugurates Facundo and appears, as well, in many of
his texts. We seem to know it by heart. For both writers, repetition is like
an enchantment that drives away the horrors of history. Haunting us,
like an incantation, repetition alerts us to the double lineage that tears us
between past and present. Sigmund Freud linked repetition of trauma to
the pleasure principle. By restaging the trauma (the famous “Fort-Da” of
Little Hans), the repetition or reenactment allows the individual to mas-
ter experience that ultimately leads to pleasure. Yet repetition without
mastery leaves us with trauma: it often stands for blockage; occasion-
ally it inspires madness; it finds its way into speech through inarticulate
stammer. Halting repetitions like this leave us stuck in sameness; with-
out advancing, without reproducing, they lock us in the present.
IV
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken,” says
Stephen Dedalus at least twice in Ulysses. How strange, it seems, that in
this monument to high modernism James Joyce’s hero needs to reiterate
his panic over ruins. Perhaps Benjamin is correct: we see history only
as a set of fragments; lacking confidence in a holistic past, we instead
reduce history to bits and pieces that we later repeat to assure ourselves
(albeit without success) of a basic truth under our control. Yet here we
fall upon a paradox: if repetition screams the unfinished obsession with
a history in ruins, in literature, it also forms the basis of style (as Barthes
once told us). Literature’s most famous scenes rehearse this trauma when
the main characters fail to resolve their connection to history: Benjy’s
mumblings in the Sound and the Fury, the famous stutter of Billy Budd,
Kafka’s Gregor Samsa squeaking out his demand for justice by telling a
squeaky tale, the Pelele of El señor presidente, the tartamudo of Pedro

Páramo, the lyric voice stammering through the lines of Trilce, or the
howling child in Diamela Eltit’s Los vigilantes. History is in ruins and
there is no way to voice the experience in a single coherent utterance.
Perhaps the originality of these Latin American writers is that they man-
age to locate the crisis of history not in Pompeii’s volcanic ash or the
Parthenon’s crumbled pillars, but in a uniquely American terrain that
refuses narration. The American ruin is translated in the stammer that
is the basis of style itself.
V
Edward Said remarked that dualism is required for all second begin-
nings: phantoms underlie the invention of the new. No wonder, then, that
ghosts persist in Gorriti’s narration, or that thieves and swindlers invei-
gle the republic’s founding principles. What is a thief, in effect, but one
who swipes another’s possessions, one who speaks from the underside
of the law, inverting linear order. A thief steals another’s narrative prop-
erty and, through the copy, calls it his own. With his gestures, the thief
installs a double reading required of all progress in history. In a way, he
becomes history’s ghostly double, the broken mirror that reminds us of
some forsaken whole. A phantom of disorder and antiprogress, he calls
for a fresh start. The thief challenges the law’s given order while he leads
us to excavate knowledge about things that clearly belong to others.
Let’s look at Facundo. Not only does Facundo bring forward the
famed stories of repetition (Sarmiento as he sits at Rosas’s desk and pro-
claims himself to be Rosas), but also posits Facundo as a surrogate for
the despot. In this hall of mirrors, Sarmiento leads us to believe that
we might find a revelation or unearth the secrets that lie buried with
Facundo’s corpse. He makes a ruin of the past in the hope for something
new. And here is the brilliance of Facundo: supposedly a denunciation
of barbarism, of the uncultivated savagery of tyrants, the text goes on
to advance barbarism as a source of art. The ruin of history is not an
appendix to civilization; civilization cannot do without it. Sarmiento
obsesses with American originality and finds its face in the ruin.
We all remember the opening chapter of Facundo when the rastre-
ador and the baqueano rely on their senses to organize knowledge.
Sound teaches us to listen to nature; with sight, Sarmiento trains us to
see the true nature of the barbaric other. But just as Sarmiento longs
to touch barbarism and give outline to its form, he enters into a con-
tradiction: he admits that poetry lies at the center of savage disorder.
Perhaps, as Deleuze might put it, the choices are between creative forces
and the force of domestication (1995, 290). Savagery falls in with the
realm of the senses: rhythm, as the energy behind the primitive economy
of speech, teaches us how to listen and understand; sight, sound, and
touch belong to the barbaric. Reason is thus left aside in order for orig-
inality to blossom.
That the sensate world drives the literature of the romantics is hardly
a new idea. Of greater importance in Sarmiento’s case is the way in
which reason and the senses meet. Recall, for example, chapter nine, the
famous chapter about Facundo’s murder in Barranca Yaco. After some
time in Buenos Aires, with his children in a private school usually desig-
nated for elites and Facundo himself dressed up in a great coat looking
like a gran señor, he decides to move on to Córdoba despite all counsel
against it. Facundo refuses to listen to warnings about his threatened
safety and begins a voyage that will culminate in death. I find this sig-
nificant. In the city, Facundo loses contact with the senses; his intui-
tive feel for danger is suppressed. Blinded in the city and loosened from
that appropriate combination of native intuition and judgment that ear-
lier had ensured his survival, Facundo’s senses fail him. He is no longer
attuned to surrounding danger. He thus ventures forth and meets his
demise.
Melville’s Ahab is no less careless. Having broken the quadrant that
guides his ship, he relies only upon his senses to access the secret of the
ancient past: the enemy within that has brought him to ruin. Of course,
he is correct in his intuition and finds the whale. But being correct also
leads to his destruction. Ahab thus reaches a crossroads between the
senses and reason. By choosing sensibility over reason, he brings down
both ship and crew. The lesson: collective power is endangered when
only the senses command. Yet, at the same time, a community without
intuitions to bind it surely cannot prosper.
I do not want to make a case for embodied knowledge because, of
course, we know that carnal experience is crafted by a biopower that is
far stronger than individual desire. But I want to point, with all of this,
to a shift in sentiment in the mid-nineteenth century that announces
the crisis of an ongoing authority, a crisis of the masculine pact, caught
between the pull of organized reason and the draw of the senses. Hence,
the republics’ founding fathers—the senior members of the Gorriti clan
with talents funneled through a prodigious daughter, the generation of
1837 to which Sarmiento subscribed, the decorated Gansevoorts who led
a revolution in the United States as impoverished ancestors of Melville—
seem to exhaust their political line and surrender to a nation in ruins.
Yet creativity saves their heirs. The ruined structures they perceive—the
home, the estate, the doomed ship of a desperate captain—become alle-
gories for failed associations among powerful men. They signal the col-
lapse of the sought-after liberal ideal. Understandably, then, the children
of revolution drift in travel and exile. They thus turn to writing, and they
remain alone.
In this regard, it is no surprise that Sarmiento and Gorriti turn to
repetition during the Rosas years, as if to stitch together the scraps of
an illusory past. Nor is it any surprise that Melville keeps reflecting on
human extinction, never able to find a way to link past and present.
Melville, up to his final fiction written shortly before his death, still
tries to capture a before and after in the stuttering figure of Billy Budd.
The stutter, then, constitutes an embodied way to name a failure that
won’t let us go forward; it announces an inability to represent the past
or future while we are stuck in a seemingly eternal present. Like white-
ness, the vocabulary of knowledge fails; no connective can redeem it.
Melville’s heroes falter and fly away from reason (Ahab, Pip, and Billy
Budd), and social connection comes to naught. Whiteness is also the
blank slate of Sarmiento’s desert or the battlefields on which Gorriti’s
characters wail their sorrows in babbled incoherence. In each case, the
illegibility of a fragmented whole torments these authors; its visual trope
is found in ruins and its vocal answer in the stutter.
VI
Michel de Certeau speaks of the ways in which pedestrians forge spaces
of enunciation in dangerous sites to avoid the strategies of the power-
ful and find alternatives to rationalized space (97–99). Ruins open us to
those unconventional spaces, more often collapsing the anxiety of mis-
measurement in a habit of endless repetition. Ruins not only speak the
dual pull of past and present, the return of the conflict between senses
and reason at the scene of crisis, but they also prompt a collective critique
of those structures left standing. From the site of the Roman Forum to
the burning steel of the World Trade Center, ruins are about the history
of ruining others. They speak our failure to find an enduring social bond;
they name the site where reason crumbles and harmonic voice is lost. One
solution for the ruin of history is found in the force of literature; another
might take ruins as a site for new beginnings. In short, ruins awaken us
to collective thinking that takes us to the frontier of action.
Select Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “Excavation and Memory.” In Selected Writings, 1927–34,
edited by Michael William Jennings, 576. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999.
———. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books,
1969.
———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London:
Verso, 1998.
Bulwer Lytton, Edward. The Last Days of Pompeii. New York: A. L. Burt Company,
n.d.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century. Cambridge MA: MIT Press [1990], 1995.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Stephen Rendell.
Berkeley: University of California Press [1984], 1988.
Deleuze, Gilles. “He Stuttered.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel
W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, 107–14. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987.
———. “Mediators.” In Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford
Kwinter, 281–94. New York: Zone Books, 1995.
Edensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. New York: Berg,
2005.
Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy.” In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume 10,
translated by James Strachey, 1–50. London: Hogarth, 1953–66.
Futoransky, Luisa. “Prologue.” In Desaires, with photographs by José Antonio
Berni. Madrid: Ediciones del Centro de Arte Moderno, 2006.
Ginsberg, Robert. The Aesthetics of Ruins. New York: Rodopi, 2004.
Gorriti, Juana Manuela. Dreams and Realities. Edited by Francine Masiello. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Nostalgia for Ruins.” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006): 6–21.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, Billy Budd, and Other Writings. New York: Library
of America, 2000.
Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Piglia, Ricardo. “Sarmiento the Writer.” In Sarmiento: Author of a Nation. A
Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Tulio Halperín Donghi, Gwen Kirkpatrick,
and Francine Masiello, 127–44. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. London: Granta, 1997.
Volney, Constantin-Francois. The Ruins; or, A Survey of the Revolution of Empires.
London: Holyoake, [1799] 1857.
Chapter 3
“Oh tiempo tus pirámides”: Ruins in Borges
Daniel Balderston
[R]uins do not speak; we speak for them.
—Christopher Woodward, In Ruins
Ruins haunt the works of Jorge Luis Borges: circular ruins in ancient
Persia, a labyrinth on a cliff above the sea in Cornwall, the City of the
Immortals in north Africa. In the famous essay “La muralla y los libros”
(which opens Otras inquisiciones), he meditates on the distant Great
Wall of China:
The unyielding wall which, at this moment and all moments, casts its
system of shadows over lands I shall never see, is the shadow of a Caesar
who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past; that idea is
what moves us, quite apart from the speculations it allows. (Its virtue may
be the contrast between construction and destruction, on an enormous
scale.) (1999, 346)
The imagination is powerfully stirred by the distant (and unseen) ruin.

It is a puzzle to be meditated on, one which will culminate in one of the
great concluding lines in Borges’s work, the famous definition of “el
hecho estético,” which we may translate as the experience of ravishing
beauty: “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, cer-
tain twilights and certain places, all want to tell us something, or have
told us something we shouldn’t have lost, or are about to tell us some-
thing; that imminence of a revelation as yet unproduced is, perhaps, the
‘aesthetic fact’ ” (1999, 346). What is crucial in this famous sentence
is the half-understood, half-seen nature of the object that captures our
attention. And perhaps for that reason, ruins—incomplete fragments of
40 Daniel Balderston
a lost whole—are seductive for Borges. At an uneasy point of presence

and loss (“destruction” and “construction,” as he says in the essay on
Shih Huang Ti and the Great Wall), they project themselves forward in
time, into an uneasy present and an uncertain future.
A wonderful example of the function of ruins in Borges is the archeo-
logical excavation conducted on Tlön, the imaginary planet in “Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The objective is to try to define the nature of
hrönir, the imaginary objects that so preoccupy Tlön’s philosophers.
The description reads:
The first attempts were unsuccessful, but the modus operandi is worth
recalling: the warden of one of the state prisons informed his prisoners
that there were certain tombs in the ancient bed of a nearby river, and
he promised that anyone who brought in an important find would be set
free. For months before the excavation, the inmates were shown photo-
graphs of what they were going to discover. That first attempt proved
that hope and greed can be inhibiting; after a week’s work with pick and
shovel, the only hrön unearthed was a rusty wheel, dated some time later
than the date of the experiment. The experiment was kept secret, but was
repeated afterward at four high schools. In three of them, the failure was
virtually complete; in the fourth (where the principal happened to die dur-
ing the early expeditions), the students unearthed—or produced—a gold
mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay amphorae, and the verdigris’d
and mutilated torso of a king with an inscription on the chest that has
yet to be deciphered. Thus it was discovered that no witnesses who were
aware of the experimental nature of the search could be allowed near the
site. (1998, 77)
Here, the crucial found object, the rusty wheel from the future, is related
to a passage from “La flor de Coleridge” (written several years later)
in which Borges sums up an incident from H. G. Wells’s The Time
Machine. The Time Traveler “brings from the future a wilted flower.
This is the second version of Coleridge’s image. More incredible than
a celestial flower or a dream flower is a future flower, the contradic-
tory flower whose atoms, not yet assembled, now occupy other spaces”
(1999, 241). In Wells’s novel there are actually two white flowers that
the Time Traveler puts on the desk at the end of the novel, objects that
Weena, his love interest in the distant future, had put—if you’ll permit
me the use of the past perfect to refer to future time in the novel—in his
pocket, which she considered “an eccentric kind of vase for floral deco-
ration” (43). In Borges’s essay, the number of flowers is reduced to one;
one paradoxical dried flower, wilted on the trip back from the future to
the present, is sufficient for his purposes.
Wells’s novel ends: “And I have by me now, for my comfort, two
strange white flowers—shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle—
to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a
mutual tenderness still lived in the heart of man” (66). This sentimental
Ruins in Borges 41
interpretation of the wilted flower does not appeal to Borges so much

as the philosophical paradox (similar to the one that worried Tlön’s
philosophers): why would the flower “shrivel” on being brought from
the future to the present of the narration? “Tlön” famously concludes
with a “postscript” from 1947 (seven years after the publication of
the story), and “La muerte y la brújula” takes place seven years after
it was published; several of the most famous stories, then, are intru-
sions from the future, disturbing and dazzling in their promise.1 And
“Tlön” ends with a discussion of how the world of 1947 is radically
different from the world of 1937 (when the second part of the story
takes place): there is a complex game of anticipation and memory, a
labyrinth in time like the one proposed in “El jardín de senderos que
se bifurcan” and “Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain.” The visual
emblem of that game is the rusty wheel (of a date later than that of the
experiment).
“Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto” considers a different
kind of ruin—a vast labyrinth on a cliff above the sea in Cornwall, con-
structed to entrap the cousin and rival of the builder. It is described as
“a majestic, tumbledown edifice that looked much like a stable fallen
upon hard times” (1998, 255) and “a great circular trap of brickwork”
(1998, 262), its center “a round apartment, a good bit run-down and
gone to seed” (1998, 259). Though only a couple of decades have passed
since it was built, it is now a ruin, or perhaps it was built as an inten-
tional ruin in the first place in the tradition of Romantic garden follies.
The description of the labyrinth evokes that of Daedalus’s labyrinth in
Crete (location of another Borges story, “La casa de Asterión”), which
was similarly designed to be a hiding place and a trap. Thus the laby-
rinth is designed to evoke an ancient ruin, while it hopes to entice the
builder’s rival to enter it (a future event with respect to the moment of
its construction).
Narrative time in this story is itself a labyrinth. Unwin and Dunraven,
the two young British visitors to the already ruined labyrinth, visit it at
a precise moment in history: “It was the first evening of the summer of
1914; weary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger, the friends
prized the solitude of that corner of Cornwall” (1998, 255). The narra-
tor’s irony could not be more precise: they visit on June 21, 1914, and
of course the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would take
place in Sarajevo a mere week later, on June 28, 1914, and war would be
declared on July 28, 1914. By late summer, the train stations of Europe
would be busy carrying young soldiers to the fronts; no doubt Dunraven
and Unwin found the adventure they desired in the battlefields of the
Somme (the secret subject of “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”).2
The opening of the story, then, looks backward to the construction of
the labyrinth (and within that motion backward, forward to the killing
of “Abenjacán”), and also forward to Dunraven and Unwin’s unstated
future “adventures” in the Great War.
The building, erected in the tradition of garden follies to be a ruin

even at the time of its construction, is designed as a trap. The man pos-
ing as Abenjacán, who claims to be fleeing his cousin Zaid, is revealed
(according to Unwin’s solution of the mystery) to be Zaid seeking to
entrap Abenjacán. The signature of the serial murderer is the obliter-
ation of the victims’ faces—of Abenjacán (the real Abenjacán, cast in
Dunraven’s version of the story as Zaid), the black slave and the lion that
accompanies them to Cornwall. The story is set up as a case of deduction
from the terms of the series, and the surname “Unwin” suggests that
Borges—a reader in this period of Kasner and Newman’s Mathematics
and the Imagination (1940) and of Bertrand Russell’s writings on for-
mal logic—is suggesting that the appropriate reasoning process would
be derived from game theory, and perhaps more specifically from the
notion of zero-sum games, posited by John von Neumann and Oscar
Morgenstern in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944).
The story was first published in Sur in 1951 and is a “zero-sum game”
in the sense that the lion-slave-“Abenjacán” comprises a 3/–3 game, one
of von Neumann’s classic formulations of the mathematical structure of
a game.
“Las ruinas circulares” works quite differently with an extratextual
reference. The initial geographical reference seems vague: “his homeland
was one of those infinite villages that lie upriver, on the violent flank
of the mountain, where the language of the Zend is uncontaminated
by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon” (1998, 96), but points to
ancient Persia, and probably to its mountainous north, as the location
for the story. The religious references (the fire cult, the presence of the
totem animals, the purification rituals) point to the Zervanite heresy
of Zoroastrianism. 3 In this story, ruins (again constructed as a math-
ematical series, with the sage coming from a ruin upriver to the south,
and the “son” going to a ruin downriver to the north) are places of
generation and creation. Life and death are closely intertwined, as in
Zoroastrianism, and the presence of both the river’s water and the tem-
ple’s fire point to the concern for these two warring elements. “The idol
that was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt” (1998, 99), but also a bull,
and a rose, and a storm, refers perhaps to the earlier idols that, as R. C.
Zaehner notes, were destroyed in the religious wars that preceded the
rise of Zurvan (24), which included the lighting of sacred fires in the
places where the idols had been.
Zaehner, in Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma, refers to an element
of Zoroastrian mythology that seems particularly pertinent to the story.
With regard to “the appearance of the form of the youth,” Zaehner
states: “Theodore [bar Kônai] identifies the youth with Narsê and the
same god figures in the Manichean myth, where his function is plain.
In the Bundahisn, when the onslaught is finally unleashed, Ohrmazd
brought sleep upon Gayomart in the form of ‘a youth of fifteen years of
age, shining and tall.’ This youthful form would then appear to be the
Ruins in Borges 43
personification of Gayomart’s sleep” (191). The relation between this

passage (perhaps known to Borges through other classical sources, or
through more recent German or British scholarship, as happened with
his appropriation of ideas from the not-yet-discovered Gospel of Judas in
“Tres versiones de Judas”) and the plot of the story is obvious enough:
the youth of the myth also appears in the sage’s dream, though the twist
that Borges gives the plot—that the sage himself is a figment of another’s
dream—is not developed in this source.4
“Las ruinas circulares” constitutes a kind of limit-case to the
sort of reading I do in Out of Context: Historical Reference and the
Representation of Reality in Borges, since the historical references (and
even the geographical location) are so minimal as to be almost invisi-
ble. Though these references may appear to be vague, they do suffice to
place the story in what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “contact zone,”
just east of the cultural boundary between the Greek and the Persian
spheres, and perhaps early enough that Eastern influences (soon to be
manifest in the Greco-Roman world in the cult of Mithra) have not
yet spread westward. Borges’s work almost always conceals knowledge
known to the author that is not made explicit in the text, and certainly
the Zoroastrian and Zervanite elements in this story would be examples
of that kind.
“El inmortal” is another story that is set mostly in a ruin, in this
case also a place of creation and generation, though in an ironic sense.
Beginning in the reign of Emperor Diocletian (284–305), it is narrated
by the tribune Marco Flaminio Rufo (the name evokes that of several
Roman consuls), whose wanderings take him from Egypt to the ruined
City of the Immortals, somewhere in the western part of north Africa,
presumably in present-day Morocco. There he drinks of a stream that
makes him immortal, which turns out, of course, to be more a curse
than a blessing. Much of the story consists of a description of the City of
the Immortals (535–42), first from afar: “At dawn, the distance bristled
with pyramids and towers” (1998, 185), and then, gradually, he explores
the perverse ruins. The most important description reads as follows:
Out of the shattered remains of the City’s ruin they had built on the same
spot the incoherent city I had wandered through—that parody or antithesis
of City which was also a temple to the irrational gods that rule the world
and to those gods about whom we know nothing save that they do not
resemble man. The founding of this city was the last symbol to which the
Immortals had descended; it marks the point at which, esteeming all exer-
tion vain, they resolved to live in thought, in pure speculation. (1998, 190)
This is a folly on a much larger scale than the labyrinth in Cornwall, and
like the ruin in “Las ruinas circulares” it is presided over by an ambig-
uous effigy figure: “the body of a tiger or a bull” (1998, 188). Probably
a reference to figures made popular by the expansion of Eastern cults
such as that of Mithra in the Roman Empire, this statue presides over
a liminal place where mortal life becomes everlasting, which turns out
to be a fate more terrible than death. It is a place of loss—where Homer
has forgotten his epics, where the Roman tribune loses his faith in the
future—but also mysteriously of a new kind of generation, where the
group of immortals (and it is impossible not to hear echoes of the pomp-
ous language that is used by literary academies to talk about their mem-
bers) forget their glory, even their names, and turn into the elemental
beings who rush out naked to enjoy a sudden downpour in the desert.
This catalog by no means exhausts the list of ruins in Borges’s texts.
Three more deserve mention here. In “La escritura del dios,” “[o]n the
first day of creation, foreseeing that at the end of time many disasters
and calamities [ruinas] would befall, the god had written a magical
phrase, capable of warding off those evils” (1998, 251). 5 In “La Secta
de los Treinta,” the members “[t]heir number decimated by sword and
fire . . . sleep by the side of the road or in the ruins spared them by war, as
they are forbidden to build dwellings” (1998, 443). And another futurist
fantasy in the vein of “Tlön,” “Utopía de un hombre que está cansado,”
includes a brief description of the lost world of the present: “To judge by
the ruins of Bahía Blanca, which curiosity once led me to explore, it’s
no great loss” (1998, 463). In fact, one of Borges’s late projects was the
writing of an introduction to a book entitled El libro de las ruinas, pub-
lished 11 years after his death by Franco Maria Ricci in deluxe editions
in several languages; that introduction has been collected in an anthol-
ogy of his prologues, El círculo secreto (2003, 156–63).
Borges is fascinated by intellectual projects that include the intru-
sion of the future into the past. An almost secret example of this is in
the essay “La creación y P. H. Gosse,” one of the least studied texts in
Otras inquisiciones, which concerns the religious and scientific crisis
visited upon Edmund Gosse’s father, a scientist and devout Christian, by
the discovery of geological strata and fossils. Gosse proposes that God
created the world as if it were old: Adam has a navel although he was
never connected to a mother by an umbilical cord. Borges adds, with a
touch of local Argentine color: “There are skeletons of glyptodonts [sic]
in the gorge of Luján, but there have never been glyptodonts” (1999,
224). By referring to one of the key discoveries of Argentine paleontol-
ogy, which brought Florentino Ameghino to world fame and encouraged
him in his nationalist fantasies that the human species had originated in
Patagonia, Borges links Gosse’s tortured reconciliation of evolutionary
science and Christian creationism to that of his compatriots who would
argue against all odds for a Patagonian origin.6
Near the end of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot famously calls his poem
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Borges’s works, also
brilliant fragments of a whole that was lost or that never quite happened,
are similarly the products of a personal quest, the wilted flowers of the
future, or the umbilical cord linking someone to a nonexistent mother.
Ruins in Borges 45
Ruins in Borges are as often the ruins of the future—the great project of
the encyclopedia of Tlön, Pierre Menard’s unfinished masterpiece—as
they are relics that can be reimagined. The past is always invented, the
future impossible but inexorably imagined.7 As he writes at the end of
“Tlön”:
Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world.
Spellbound by Tlön’s rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to for-
get, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already Tlön’s (con-
jectural) “primitive language” has filtered into our schools; already the
teaching of Tlön’s harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has
obliterated the history that governed my own childhood; already a ficti-
tious past has supplanted in men’s memories that other past, of which we
now know nothing certain—not even that it is false. (1998, 81)8
This striking meditation on the malleability of history was of course

written in 1940 (though it is attributed in the postscript to the story to
the then-future date 1947). In 1940, diabolic utopian political projects
were reshaping the past: rewriting German cultural history, retouching
photographs of the Bolshevik Revolution, remaking great urban spaces
(Rome, Berlin, Moscow) as fantasies of an imagined past.9
Significantly, archeology—concerned especially in its period of
growth, from Goethe in Greece and Italy, Stephens in the Yucatán and
Central America, Schliemann in Troy and Mycenae, to Bingham in
Machu Picchu, with the exploration of ruins and with an aesthetic appre-
ciation of them—is mentioned specifically as one of the intellectual fields
that is rethought in Tlön: “Numismatics, pharmacology, and archeology
have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics are also
awaiting their next avatar” (1998, 81). Archeology is one of the fields
being remade—not only in Tlön but also in the narrator’s world—by the
intrusion of the imagined world into the real one. Just as archeology on
Tlön is subject to the desire and imagination of those who are doing the
digging, so our planet’s ruins are the space defined by Juan José Saer (in
the opening pages of his great novel El entenado): “The unknown is an
abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is
the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucinations” (10).
An aesthetic of ruins is for Borges a poetics of the fragment: pieces
of a lost whole invite a reconstruction through imagination, a recon-
struction that is always bounded by uncertainty and hypothesis but
fueled by desire. Borges’s works—his thousands of short texts, few of
them written to be parts of books, though when collected into books
they amount to thousands of fascinating (and often difficult) pages—
themselves depend on a poetics of the fragment. The reader is always
invited to puzzle over the relation of one text to another, of one idea to
another that repeats (and often contradicts) it, over textual fragments
that are repeated (think of Menard and Cervantes’s sentences; think of
the old man curled up in the corner who appears in both “El Sur” and
“El hombre en el umbral”; think of the mysterious verse “Axaxaxas
mlö” that appears in both “Tlön” and “La biblioteca de Babel”). Ruins
are even more literally the space of desire in “La secta del Fénix.” The
sex act (and there is consensus in the criticism that this story is about
that) takes place in such liminal spaces: “There are no temples dedicated
expressly to the cult’s worship, but ruins, cellars, or entryways are con-
sidered appropriate sites” (1998, 173).10 Ruins are, then, frightful and
awe-inspiring, but also potentially places of generation and creation, in
even the most literal senses of those words.11
Christopher Woodward notes that Freud “saw archeology as an
analogy for the practice of psychoanalysis” (54–55) and quotes him
as saying “Stones speak” (55). He then quotes at greater length from
Freud’s comments on Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1903), set in
Pompeii: “What had formerly been the city of Pompeii assumed an
entirely changed appearance, but not a living one; it now appeared
rather to become petrified in dead immobility. Yet out of it stirred a
feeling that death was beginning to talk” (Cited in Woodward, 55).
Clearly what is at stake for Borges are the ways in which archeological
fragments provide an aesthetic of the textual fragment and a way of
thinking about the imagination. In “La biblioteca de Babel,” one of
the few fragments of text that the librarian-narrator has found to make
some sense reads: “Oh tiempo tus pirámides” (1974, 466) (“O Time
thy pyramids” [1998, 114]), thus making explicit the link between tem-
poral and spatial fragments, and the presence of both kinds of frag-
ments in textuality. As Borges says in “El sueño de Coleridge,” about
the writing of Coleridge’s great poem “Kublai Khan”:
In 1691, Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins

were all that was left of Kublai Khan’s palace; of the poem, we know that
barely fifty lines were salvaged. Such facts raise the possibility that this
series of dreams and works has not yet ended. (1999, 372)
Here Borges notes the sequence of dreams that intrude on reality, but that
now exist only as shards. Kublai Khan’s dream of a palace resulted in the
construction of Xanadu, but the palace is now just a ruin; Coleridge’s
dream resulted in the composition of the poem, but the fragment that
he was able to write down after being awakened was but a part of the
lost whole. For Borges, then, the processes of destruction and construc-
tion (as he calls them in the essay on Shih Huang Ti and the Great Wall)
are intertwined. The whole can only be imagined from the fragment.
Or to turn this formulation around: the fragment gives us access to the
whole.
In “Tlön,” the second part of the story ends: “The classic example
is the doorway that continued to exist so long as a certain beggar fre-
quented it, but which was lost to sight when he died. Sometimes a few
Ruins in Borges 47
birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater” (1998, 78).

Here, clearly it is the power of thought—attention, memory, and antic-
ipation, as Augustine defined it in Book XI of the Confessions—that is
crucial to the world’s very existence.12 Ruins—what Woodward calls “a
dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spec-
tator” (139)—are privileged settings in Borges’s work for the experience
of that precarious and contradictory nature. Artistic creation (“el hecho
estético”) comes from that liminal space: the revelation that is not pro-
duced, whose wholeness can only be imagined.13
Notes
1. On the time frame in “La muerte y la brújula,” see Zalcman and my commen-
tary in Balderston 2000 (106–7).
2. On the secret subject of “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” see Balderston
1993 (39–55).
3. For further detail on the Zoroastrian and Zervantine background to “Las rui-
nas circulares,” see Williams.
4. For more details on Borges’s sources for “Tres versiones de Judas,” see
Aizenberg.
5. Note that the concept of “ruinas” in “La escritura del dios,” here translated as
“calamities,” is not so obvious in the English version.
6. See Andersmann on the Museum of Natural History of Buenos Aires.
7. Woodward notes that at various moments in the history of architecture “the
vanished past has become an inspiration for the future” (115).
8. This haunting passage contains a thought not unlike that in Sebald’s The Rings
of Saturn (1995), quoted by Woodward in his discussion of cold war ruins in
southern England: “The closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a
mysterious isle of the dead receded and the more I imagined myself amidst the
remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe”
(Cited in Woodward, 225).
9. Borges wrote a number of essays on the rewriting of German cultural history in
Nazi Germany. These are collected in the section “Notes on Germany and the
War” of the Selected Non-Fictions. On the retouching of photographs of the
Bolshevik Revolution, see for instance King.
10. Canto writes of Borges’s fear of vacant lots, which she implies were associ-
ated in his mind with a fear of homosexual contact, or perhaps even of male
rape (52).
11. See for instance Ginsberg’s comments on Jerusalem’s Western Wall: “The Wall
is a cipher, an aleph, a root of meaning whose full articulation awaits the human
heart. The Wall is a sounding board of the heart, a resonant terminus. Nothing
is thought of as being beyond the Wall. The Wall does not speak to what is on
the other side of it. It has within itself endless depth, walling nothing in or out.
The Wall is self-existent. In a word, a ruin. Its wholeness is gone, and its holi-
ness is present” (138).
12. Augustine’s “anticipation” sometimes appears instead as “expectation” in
English translations of the Confessions.
13. I am grateful to Vicky Unruh and Michael Lazzara for the invitation to write
this piece, and to Luciano Martínez for organizing the warm occasion at
Swarthmore College where I presented it for the first time. It is dedicated in
fond friendship to Antonio José Ponte, “ruinólogo.”
Select Bibliography
Aizenberg, Edna. “Three Versions of Judas Found in Buenos Aires: Discovery
Challenges Biblical Betrayal.” Variaciones Borges 22 (2006): 1–13.
Andersmann, Jens. “Relics and Selves: The Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales,
Buenos Aires.” www.bbk.ac.uk/ibamuseum/texts/Andermann05.htm.
Augustine. Confessions. Book XI. Online version. http://www.ourladyswarriors.
org/saints/augcon11.htm#chap1.
Balderston, Daniel. Borges, realidades y simulacros. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2000.
———. Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in
Borges. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Borges, Jorge Luis. El círculo secreto: prólogos y notas. Buenos Aires: Emecé,
2003.
———. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking,
1998.
———. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974.
———. Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1989. 4 vols.
———. Selected Non-Fictions. Edited by Eliot Weinberger and translated by Esther
Allen, Eliot Weinberger, and Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Viking, 1999.
Canto, Estela. Borges a contraluz. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1990.
Ginsberg, Robert. The Aesthetics of Ruins. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.
King, David. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in
Stalin’s Russia. New York: Metropolitan, 1997.
Saer, Juan José. El entenado. Buenos Aires: Folios Ediciones, 1983.
———. The Witness. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent’s Tail,
1990.
Wells, H. G. The Complete Science Fiction Treasury of H. G. Wells. New York:
Avenel Books, 1978.
Williams, Mac. “Zoroastrian and Zurvanite Symbolism in ‘Las ruinas circulares.’ ”
Variaciones Borges 25 (2008): 115–35.
Woodward, Christopher. In Ruins: A Journey through History, Art, and Literature.
New York: Vintage, 2003.
Zaehner, R. C. Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.
Zalcman, Lawrence. “La muerte y el calendario.” Hispamérica 45 (1976): 17–29.
Part Two
Whose Ruins?: Ownership and

Cross-Cultural Mappings
Chapter 4
Translating Ruins: An American Parable
Sylvia Molloy
In all our journey through this country there were no associations. Day after day we
rode into places unknown beyond the boundaries of Yucatán, with no history attached
to them, and touching no chord of feeling.
—John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán
In 1839, John Lloyd Stephens, a New Jersey lawyer and businessman,

toured Central America and the Yucatán peninsula on what was to be
the first of two voyages. Stephens was, at that point, a seasoned traveler
and dabbler in exotica. He was the author, too, of travelogues: Incidents
of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1937) and
Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1938), which
had gone through multiple printings and earned him the quite tidy sum
of twenty-five thousand dollars in two years. Stephens’s companion on
the trip to Yucatán was Frederick Catherwood, the well-known English
architect and draughtsman, himself a seasoned traveler and dabbler in
exotica, already famous for his drawings of Middle Eastern ruins and
for his painted panoramas. It was rumored that Catherwood was the
first Westerner to make a detailed survey of Jerusalem’s Dome of the
Rock. He and Stephens met in London in 1834 and Catherwood moved
to the United States two years later.1
The travelers set out from New York harbor bound for Belize in October
1839. While the purpose of this first journey remains unclear—Stephens’s
habitual penchant for travel is complemented by a mysterious “diplo-
matic appointment” from President Van Buren that is never clarified—the
ultimate goal of the first trip, which Stephens would later write up as
Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, is to
reach Copán.2 As with most travel narratives that are destined to whet
52 Sylvia Molloy
the curiosity of readers and future travelers, Stephens delays narrating

the arrival in Copán, taking pains to detail multiple sights and inci-
dents on the road from Belize. One of these—striking enough to inspire
Catherwood’s first sketch—is, in retrospect, significant. In Chiquimula,
Stephens and Catherwood come upon “what had attracted our attention
at a great distance, a gigantic church in ruins”:
It was seventy-five feet front and two hundred and fifty feet deep, and
the walls were ten feet thick. The façade was adorned with ornaments
and figures of the saints, larger than life. The roof had fallen, and inside
were huge masses of stone and mortar, and a thick growth of trees. It was
built by the Spaniards on the site of the old Indian village; but, having
been twice shattered by earthquakes, the inhabitants had deserted it, and
built the town where it now stands. The ruined village was now occupied
as a campo santo, or burial-place; inside the church were the graves of
the principal inhabitants, and in the niches of the wall were the bones of
priests and monks, with their names written under them. Outside were
the graves of the common people. . . . The bodies had decayed, the dirt
fallen in, and the graves were yawning. Around this scene of desolation
and death nature was rioting in beauty; the ground was covered with
flowers, and parrots on every bush and tree. (1969 1:74)
This, one could argue, is Stephens’s first view of a ruin. Yet, he does not
identify it as such; rather, he calls it a building in ruins. The difference, I
would argue, is not negligible. Something “in ruins” for Stephens—and
indeed for many of his fellow travelers—is something in some way famil-
iar (a church) that, while deteriorated, can be reconstituted (one “knows”
what the missing parts were like). While this church “in ruins” may be
described as being “enormous” and “at a great distance”—conventional
requisites of ruins—the distance that separates it from the observers is
neither symbolic nor mythical, but conventionally measurable in both
space and time. The church’s filiation can be traced, its ruinous state
explained by natural causes, the distance separating it from the trav-
eler crossed. The church “in ruins” is a sort of tropical Tintern Abbey,
and Stephens’s calculated description of the yawning graves and the lus-
cious nature overtaking them constitutes a perfect memento mori—one
that will not be repeated at the sight of the “real” ruins whose incom-
pleteness is harder to mourn or to compensate. Something “in ruins”
can be remembered, if not personally at least collectively. A ruin—or the
lack it represents—can only be conjectured or, more precisely, evoked.
There are other important differences between this church “in ruins”
and the ruins for which Stephens looks. Unsaid, but very much in his
mind, is the sense that, as he himself puts it, he is “entering abruptly into
new ground” (1969, 1:96), initiating the exploration of “monuments and
architectural remains of the aborigines” (1969, 1:97) as part of an ongo-
ing investigation into the first inhabitants of America. 3 From that per-
spective, Stephens has little use for vestiges of the European Colonial: the
Translating Ruins: An American Parable 53
church “in ruins” that, to further thwart its possibility of ever becoming
a bona fide ruin, has been recycled as a cemetery, that is, brought up to
the present.
Stephens and Catherwood are filled with boundless admiration when
they happen upon Copán. The travelers, however, inspire little admira-
tion among the inhabitants who view them with distrust, especially one
José María Acevedo, who claimed to own the land, showed no inclina-
tion to give them permission to look around, and waved the title deed
at them to prove his ownership. This piece of paper, which Stephens
peruses at length in Acevedo’s presence, threateningly, “as if [he] med-
itated an action in ejectment” (1969, 1:82), gives rise to what Stephens
calls “an operation”:
All day I have been brooding over the title-deeds and, drawing my blan-
ket around me, suggested to Mr. Catherwood “an operation”. . . . [T]o buy
Copán and remove the monuments of a by-gone people from the desolate
region in which they were buried, set them up in the “great commercial
emporium,” and found an institution to be the nucleus of a great national
museum of American antiquities! (1969, 2:115)
To settle the purchase expeditiously and dispel any of the professed

landowner’s lingering doubts, Stephens resorts to an uncommon mas-
querade:
I opened my trunk and put on a diplomatic coat with a profusion of large

eagle buttons. I had on a Panama hat, soaked with rain and spotted with
mud, a checked shirt, white pantaloons, yellow up to the knees with mud,
and was about as outré as the negro king who received a company of
British officers on the coast of Africa in a cocked hat and military coat,
without any inexpressibles. But Don José María could not withstand the
buttons on my coat; the cloth was the finest he had ever seen and [they]
realized fully that they had in their hut an illustrious incognito. (1969,
1:127–28)
The threatening pose, the colonial masquerade, and Acevedo’s greed

close the deal: Stephens bought Copán and all the ruins within for fifty
dollars.4
At first view, there is little new here: the First World traveler, with
the by now familiar pretext that ruins are neglected, if not destroyed,
by indifferent Third World natives, disconnected from their past and
ignorant of the ruins’ value, embarks on a lucrative salvage operation in
the name of art. But this is not Stephens’s only concern: he worries that
someone else may beat him to it. “Very soon,” he argues, “[the] exis-
tence [of the ruins] would become known and their value appreciated,
and the friends of science and the arts in Europe would get possession
of them. They belonged of right to us and, though we did not know how
soon we might be kicked out ourselves, I resolved that ours they should
54 Sylvia Molloy
remain” (1969, 1:115–16). Remarkably, these defiant reflections precede

Stephens’s purchase, so the claim to proprietorship both present and
future (“they belonged of right to us” and “ours they should remain”) is
not based on actual acquisition but on a preexisting right, albeit one that
may meet with local opposition (“we might be kicked out ourselves”). I
shall return to this right and to the possessive first-person plural.
The purchase of Copán signifies a double victory for Stephens: he
seizes the ruins from the natives, who appear indifferent, and from
European antiquarians who must be beaten at their own game. Regarding
the ruins of Palenque, in Mexico, Stephens could not purchase the site
because Mexican law prohibited a foreigner from buying land unless he
was married to a Mexican woman; according to Stephens’s biographer,
he actively contemplated the possibility of marriage but ultimately gave
it up.
Up to here, then, nothing new, nothing remarkably different from,
say, Lord Elgin’s infamous plunder. Indeed, Stephens himself compares
his project to that of the Parthenon marbles, “precious memorials in the
British Museum” (1969, 1:89), as he wonders how, given the difficulty of
transportation, he might move the pieces to New York: “I could exhibit
by sample,” he writes, “I could cut up one idol and remove it in pieces,
and then make casts of the others” (1969, 1:89). Yet in this enterprise of
recovery, there is one aspect that is quite unique; one that illustrates, if
somewhat perversely, the topic of cultural translation or, quite literally,
of cultural transfer. Whereas Stephens’s previous ventures in the Middle
East and Eastern Europe were primarily those of a cosmopolitan anti-
quarian, his voyages to Central America, Yucatán, and Mexico (two of
them, a second trip closely following the first), beyond the collection
of exotica, involve a national engagement: Stephens is traveling as an
“American,” an official American, one could say, thanks to his mysteri-
ous “special mission.” And as an “American” he proceeds to view, claim
possession, and transfer the ruins of Mayan civilization which are, after
all, “American” pieces: not foreign, but ours.
Ideologically speaking, as Esther Allen points out, this expansive
Americanness was not all that common at the time Stephens wrote. There
was no notion of a shared America, north and south, in the US imagi-
nary. (Nor, I hasten to say, is there now.) Instead, there was America; and
then, there was South America (Allen, 72). Allen quotes Henry Marie
Brackenridge who, on an early journey south in 1820, wrote disapprov-
ingly of Argentines: “They call us Americans of the north—Americanos
del norte; and themselves, Americanos del sud” (Cited in Allen, 72).
Brackenridge’s dissatisfaction is leveled not so much at the self-appella-
tion of the one—South Americans—as at the unnecessary qualifier to
describe the other. In a letter to James Monroe, also quoted by Allen, sig-
nificantly titled “A Letter on South American Affairs by an American,”
Brackenridge writes that “[A]s the first of the colonies in forming an
independent government, [we] have become peculiarly entitled to the
appellation of AMERICANS,” and further adds that the United States,

by that very primacy, should be seen as “THE NATURAL HEAD OF
AMERICA” (Cited in Allen, 75; Brackenridge’s capitalization).
When it came to the past, however, and to whatever prestigious lineage
might be educed from that past, the term America took on a more ample
meaning for Stephens, one determined not so much by geography as by
ideology. In a century committed to the search for origins and inspired
by the culture of ruins, Stephens, a connoisseur of the so-called cradle of
Western civilization, was eager to establish the existence (as were some
of his contemporaries) of a “civilized,” culturally worthy, American
past. But he had trouble meeting those criteria in North America. If the
desire for that past was there, the great and mighty ruins attesting to
great civilizations were not. All there appeared to be in the North (and it
is interesting that Stephens never traveled extensively in North America)
were unsatisfactory bits and pieces, not monuments. The monuments
were elsewhere, in the other America, or rather in the other of America,
the shadow figure that must constantly be qualified: South America,
Spanish America, Latin America, in other words, America-not-quite-
America. The process then was to establish a continuity between the two
through a strategic Americanness that would allow the United States to
have its American ruins through ideological annexation, material trans-
fer, and cultural translation, thus creating a prosthetic “high-cultural”
past that would conveniently prove to the world “that the people who
once occupied the American continents were not savages” (1969, 1:79).5
Note how in the following passage Stephens casually establishes such
a seamless Americanness, relying on the continuity of syntax to mask
hiatus:
In our own country, wild and wandering ideas in regard to its first peopling
have been inspired by the opening of forests, the discovery of tumuli, or
mounds, and the fortifications extending in ranges from the lakes through
the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi, the finding of mummies in a cave
in Kentucky, the discovery on the rock at Dighton of an inscription sup-
posed to be in Phoenician characters. . . . From such evidence there arose a
strong belief that powerful and populous nations had once occupied the
country and had passed away, leaving little knowledge of their histories.
In Mexico the evidence assumes a still more definite form. (1969, 1:75)
Mummies and a fraudulent Phoenician inscription on the one hand,

Copán, Palenque, Uxmal, Chichén, on the other.6 On one side, belief
and passion but few fragments of the past; on the other, the past’s “def-
inite forms.”
To achieve the cultural transfer effectively, the ruins, as symbolic
goods, must be uncoupled from the culture in which they still hold
meaning. Stephens must demonstrate that Guatemala’s and Mexico’s
indigenous peoples, for whom the ruins were part of the quotidian, are
unaware or disdainful of the ruins’ symbolic value; in a word, he must
56 Sylvia Molloy
demonstrate that the ruins, to these peoples, typically pictured as naïve,

plodding, and lazy,7 constitute what Jennifer L. Roberts calls a “land-
scape of indifference”: that they are literally insignificant. Despite the
fact that Stephens is guided through the ruins by indigenous inhabitants
(who thus prove they have a better sense of the monuments than he cred-
its them for), these inhabitants must be effaced from his text lest they
unduly complicate the effect he seeks—hence the following, eloquent
description of an empty, abandoned Copán, meaningless, prompting no
associations. Like a forgotten text, a relic that has lost its connective
potential, it is ready to be translated, transported, resignified:
The city was desolate. No remnant of this race hangs round the ruins,
with traditions handed down from father to son and from generation to
generation. It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean,
her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell
whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or
what had caused her destruction.8 (1969, 1:104)
Considered incapable of cultural memory, the native informants’ knowl-

edge is belittled or not recognized as knowledge. Thus, to illustrate their
disaffection, Stephens reports the following exchange:
When we asked the Indians who had made them [the monuments], the
dull answer was “¿Quién sabe? (Who knows?)” There were no associa-
tions connected with this place, none of those stirring recollections which
hallow Rome, Athens, and “[t]he world’s great mistress on the Egyptian
plain.” (1969, 1:104)
The question bears asking: For whom are there no associations? The
Indians’ answer, Quién sabe, is much too rich to be translated literally,
as Stephens does, in order to prove disaffection. Given the ambiguity of
the expression and the multiple uses to which it can be put in Spanish,
it could just as easily be proof of resistance, of shrewdness, and not of
dullness, a calculated will not to reveal knowledge: I know but I won’t
tell you.9 This would illustrate precisely what Stephens would deny: that
the ruins do have meaning for these other-Americans, but a meaning
(and, indeed, associations) that he, Stephens, does not recognize. Even if
he did recognize them, he would have trouble acknowledging them; for
the sake of his American project, he must stress other-American indif-
ference.10 In the same way, when asked how old the ruins are, the natives
answer, “Muy antiguo,” by which Stephens understands very old, and
again judges it a careless response. Once more, the implications of the
Spanish term antiguo are lost on Stephens: antiguo is, yes, very old,
but it is also very ancient, in the realm of the archaic; similar to the
suranné, it belongs to a mythical, a-historical time, as Walter Benjamin
reads in Baudelaire. Stephens wants dates instead, linear time, precise
history.11 His linguistic competence is limited, requiring recourse to a
go-between: “I was not very familiar with the Spanish language and,
through Agustín, explained my official character” (1969, 1:80). From
the errors in his text, he seems to have had little Spanish and less Maya
Quiché.12 This does not stop him, however, from relating his story as if
linguistic communication were transparent, in the “we-asked-and-they-
told-us” style that marks travel narrative to Latin America since the time
of Columbus.
Given Stephens’s project, to “discover” American ruins in America
and, at the same time, take them away to America in name of a first-
person plural imposed from the North, not only was he unable to seize
cultural differences, he was predisposed to ignore them. In the end, mis-
apprehension served him well. He could claim the ruins as ours even
before purchasing them because we, as Americans, were entitled to them,
“they belong of right to us” (1969, 1:115–16), and not, say, to Europeans.
In that we, needless to say, there was no room for the other-Americans
from Guatemala, from Chiapas, from Yucatán. Only a flexible, yet all-
incorporating concept of America could allow for the following syntacti-
cally unstable, serpentine passage in the account of the first voyage:
[T]he [Mexican] republic, without impoverishing herself will enrich her

neighbors of the North with the knowledge of the many other curious
remains scattered through her country. And [I entertain] the belief also that
England and France . . . will leave the field of American antiquities to us; that
they will not deprive a destitute country of its only chance of contributing to
the cause of science, but rather encourage it in the work of bringing together,
from remote and almost inaccessible places, and retaining on its own soil,
the architectural remains of its aboriginal inhabitants. (1969, 2:474)
Europe must leave the study of American antiquities to us, Americans.

They should not deprive a “destitute country” of contributing to science
and retaining “on its own soil” the “remains of its aboriginal inhab-
itants.” The sentence is remarkably muddled: Which is the “destitute
country,” Mexico or the United States? Which keeps the ruins “on its
own soil,” Mexico or the United States? And whose aboriginal inhabi-
tants are these, Mexico’s or those of the United States? No one coun-
try name can answer all three questions, but all three can be answered
with America, or rather, with different inflections of the word America,
where the term can be either strategically comprehensive or strategically
exclusive. In Stephens’s system of transfers, America (in the most ample
sense) functions as a linguistic shifter that can only really be actualized
by a US citizen. Or, said another way, America is an all-encompassing
term, but only if posited from one location.
If Stephens’s primary goal in his use of expansive Americanness was
to salvage the Mayan ruins and claim them for “our nation”—deriving
from this feat a sense of personal achievement, national acclaim, and a
not negligible financial gain—some of his readers, after the Mexican-
American war, took the notion even further. Stephens published his first
58 Sylvia Molloy
travel book in 1841, his second in 1843, roughly around the time that
the notion of Manifest Destiny began to see the light. Whether Stephens
shared this belief is not certain although, being a Jacksonian Democrat,
one may surmise that at least in some sense he did. There is no doubt,
however, that many of his readers not only espoused the belief in Manifest
Destiny but also used Stephens’s own arguments vis-à-vis the legitimacy
of US claims on Mesoamerican ruins to bolster their cause. Thus Albert
Welles Ely, a physician from New Orleans, in the 1851 issue of Debow’s
Review, Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial Progress, and Resources,
a notoriously pro-slavery, Southern-nationalist publication, wrote an
article entitled “Ruins of Central America and Yucatan,” largely cribbed
from Stephens.13 The same floating use of “America,” “our country,”
and “home” are found here in Ely’s fiercely nationalistic arguments:
Do the American people realize the fact that here in our own country we
have the most stupendous ruins of cities upon the face of the globe? That
we have pyramids too, greater than many of those in Egypt? Must we go
so far from home as that [to the Middle East] to find wonders when here,
in the very heart of America, we have the most astonishing ruins that the
world can afford? We talk of the ruins of Ninevah, that “exceeding great
city of three days’ journey,” when here, within a week’s travel of New
Orleans, we have Ninevahs and Taadmors, and Baalbecs, and hundred-
gated Thebes! (47–48; my italics)
Whereas Stephens figured that, in order to prove that they belonged

to America, these ruins had to be transferred to “America”—that is,
the United States—Ely did not express the need to have them moved at
all. Writing in 1851, after calls for the annexation of “All Mexico” had
become a matter of course, particularly among Democrats who argued
that bringing Mexico into the Union was the best way to ensure future
peace in the region, the Yucatán was—or very shortly was bound to
become—“our own country.”
Speaking of transfers, it is fitting to mention that Stephens’s grand
plan to found a “great national museum of American antiquities”
(1969, 2:115) in New York City never materialized. Difficulties with the
Mexican government thwarted his attempts at wholesale exportation
and limited the pieces he managed to bring back to New York. Those
objects he did bring back, however, “were most curious and valuable;
and if I were to go over the whole ground again, I could not find others
equal to them” (1963, 1:118). Among them was the only dated, carved
wooden beam in the governor’s palace in Uxmal and a similarly carved
wooden lintel from the ruins at Kabah, which Stephens again claimed
“were the most interesting specimens the country afforded” (1963,
1:261). Stephens, writes an admiring critic, “brought to an America
now ripe for self-discovery the first fair account of its distant past”
(Predmore, xviii).
Lacking the proper national space to house the objects attesting to

an “American” civilized past, Stephens changed plans and decided to
send his collection, and notably the beam from the palace at Uxmal,
to the National Museum in Washington. While waiting in New York
for a second shipment of carved stone doorjambs from Kabah, Stephens
had the pieces installed in Catherwood’s Rotunda, on the corner of
Broadway and Prince Street, where they were exhibited together with
Catherwood’s famous panoramas of Jerusalem and Thebes and seen by
thousands, the viewing of panoramas being one of the most popular pas-
times of the period. Temporarily dissociated from their Americanness by
their Orientalist setting, the Mayan ruins were “translated” yet again
and made to tell another story; the American self-discovery they were
supposed to inspire gave way to the distraction of exotica. Note also
the disparities in the exhibit: paintings of Thebes and Jerusalem were
juxtaposed with Yucatán ruins in what was meant to be suggestive bric-
a-brac. If the objects spurred any reflection on the past, it was on the
past as curio.
On July 31, 1844, a few weeks into the exhibition, the Rotunda
went up in flames. As one witness wrote, “[T]he panorama burnt last
night about ten o’clock and the two valuable paintings [Catherwood’s
Thebes and Jerusalem] were destroyed together with a large collection
of curiosities, relics, and other precious things collected by them on
their recent travels in Central America” (1963, 1:xvii). The dated beam
from the Governor’s Palace in Uxmal, which would have allowed for
the precise dating of the whole structure, was reduced to ashes, thus
rendering the issue of dating moot and Uxmal, in effect, muy anti-
guo, as Stephens’s disdained native informants knew full well and had
already told him.14 The Kabah stone doorjambs suffered another mis-
erable fate; arriving too late to be exhibited in the Rotunda, they were
given by Stephens to a friend, John Church Cruger, who transported
them to his estate on a private island on the Hudson, incorporating
them into a moldering wall simulating a ruin, constructed to Cruger’s
specifications to emulate a Thomas Cole painting. One more layer was
thus added: from Mayan ruin to national American relic, from exotic
exhibit to rich man’s simulacrum.15
I don’t want to push this story into rigidly fixed meanings, just allow it
to reverberate critically in a reflection on Inter-American cultural trans-
lation and on the problematically uneven cultural relations and cultural
imports between the Americas since the very beginning of “America.”
The discourse of Americanness that Stephens’s work so clearly exempli-
fies (a discourse that echoes in the Monroe doctrine, the Americanist
ideology of Waldo Frank and Van Wyck Brooks, the Good Neighbor
Policy, and the Alliance for Progress) is, whatever its diverse, even con-
tradictory ideological and political inflections, based on a lack of cul-
tural reciprocity and a denial of coevalness, to quote Johannes Fabian,
that thwarts true exchange. Stephens’s recycling of the Yucatán ruins
60 Sylvia Molloy
as an American past, whatever its many merits in terms of archeology,

translates a culture out of its context and opens the way for a particular
perception of Latin American cultural goods as charmingly out-of-sync
and yet easily translatable into the culture of “America.” Furthermore,
Stephens’s exhibition of his ruins in a panorama, a popular venue, next
to other representations of exotica, prefigures the commodification
of Latin American cultural products that prevails even today. “Stones
speak,” wrote Freud. Unfortunately, the listener often has them say only
what he wishes to hear.
Notes
1. For further information on Catherwood, see von Hagen.
2. On his mysterious appointment to travel, Stephens writes: “The author is indebted
to Mr. Van Buren, late President of the United States, for the opportunity of pre-
senting to the public the following pages. He considers it proper to say, that his
diplomatic appointment was for a specific purpose, not requiring a residence
at the capital, and the object of his mission being fulfilled or failing, he was at
liberty to travel” (1969, 1:1). Although the official nature of the mission is often
mentioned, no information is ever provided about that “specific purpose.”
3. More than once, Stephens would have his reader believe that he was the first
Westerner to penetrate the region. In reality, European travelers had already
explored the area and written about it from the Spanish conquest on—though it
is true that Stephens and Catherwood were the first to survey the ruins system-
atically and in detail. Five years before them Juan Galindo, a Central American
explorer and army officer, had conducted a scientific expedition into Copán and
recorded his findings in letters that did not circulate widely. Galindo was the
first to point out the physiognomic resemblance between Mayan carvings and
the indigenous people of the region. Stephens and Catherwood seemingly met
Galindo in England, and Stephens refers to him occasionally.
4. On his purchase of Copán, Stephens observes: “The reader is perhaps curious to
know how old cities sell in Central America. Like other articles of trade, they are
regulated by the quantity in the market and the demand; but, not being staple arti-
cles like cotton and indigo, they were held at fancy prices, and at that time were dull
of sale. I paid fifty dollars for Copán. There was never any difficulty about price. I
offered that sum, for which Don José María thought me only a fool; if I had offered
more, he would probably have considered me something worse” (1969, 1:99).
5. In the narrative of his second journey to the area, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán,
always intent on stressing the “American” nature of the Mesoamerican ruins,
Stephens proposes continuity between the indigenous peoples of the South and
North. Frequently noticing the imprint of a red hand on many ruins, he observes,
“I have been advised that in Mr. Catlin’s collection of Indian curiosities, made
during a long residence among our North American tribes, was a tent presented
to him . . . which exhibits, among other marks, two prints of the red hand: and I
have been further advised that the red hand is seen constantly upon the buffalo
robes and skins . . . and, in fact, that it is a symbol recognized and in common use
by the North American Indians of the present day. . . . I suggest the interesting
consideration that, if true, the red hand on the tent and the buffalo robes points
back from the wandering tribes in our country to the comparatively polished peo-
ple who erected at the south” (1963, 2:27).
6. In the ongoing debate about the peoples to whom New World ruins might be
attributed, a major current of thought contended that indigenous natives were
incapable of such feats, and that, in all probability they had been built by peo-
ples from other ancient civilizations. See Coe (73–98).
7. Stephens writes: “[T]he Indians, as in the days when the Spaniards discovered
them, applied to work without ardor, carried it on with little activity, and, like
children, were easily diverted from it” (1969, 1:118).
8. Desolate and desolation are words that come up frequently in Stephens’s text
as a way of erasing (or not wanting to see) signs of human life. Charles Darwin
resorts to a similar strategic erasure when he describes Patagonia as a “wilder-
ness” in The Voyage of the Beagle.
9. On indigenous resistance, see Sommer: “Natives who remained incalculable,
because they refused to tell secrets, obviously frustrated colonial state control”
(116).
10. Stephens argues: “The ignorance, carelessness, and indifference of the inhabi-
tants of Spanish America on this subject are matter of wonder” (1996, 1:98).
11. Roberts writes: “Stephens’s implies that historiographical perspicacity is not
available locally. It is efficient, deictic, and discriminating, and must be manu-
factured by the historicizing eye of the modern traveler” (545).
12. It is interesting to note that Stephens’s account of his second voyage to Yucatán
shows greater familiarity with Spanish than does the narrative of his first voy-
age. He starts to write words correctly (mestizos and not mestitzos) and often
incorporates Spanish in the text without highlighting terms: “the bayle,” “the
enramada,” “the garrapatas” (1963, 2:63).
13. Ely cribs from Stephens to such an extent that he quotes the same verse describ-
ing Thebes, from Pope’s translation of the Iliad, to describe Copán, this time
quoting correctly: “great empress” (and not “great mistress,” as Stephens had
written).
14. On the burning of pieces from Yucatán ruins in the Catherwood Rotunda fire,
Stephens writes: “I had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing their ashes exactly
as the fire had left them” (Cited in von Hagen, 256).
15. This folly, much in fashion at the time, was seen, von Hagen tells us, by the
Swedish traveler Frederika Bremer, who described the pastiche as “a design in
the best taste” (231–32). It is this mention of the Cruger folly that allowed
scholars to trace the “Stephens stones” that had been deemed lost. They are
currently in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History.
Select Bibliography
Allen, Esther. “This Is Not America: Nineteenth-Century Accounts of Travel
between the Americas.” Ph.D. diss., New York University. 1991.
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, 155–200.
New York: Schocken, 1968.
Coe, Michael. Breaking the Maya Code. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992.
Ely, Albert Welles. “Ruins of Central America and Yucatan,” Debow’s Review,
Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial Progress, and Resources (1851): 44–50.
Predmore, Richard. Introduction to Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas,
and Yucatán, by John L. Stevens, 1:xiii–xx. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1949.
Roberts, Jennifer L. “Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd
Stephens in Yucatan.” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 544–67.
62 Sylvia Molloy
Sommer, Doris. Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the
Americas. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Stephens, John L. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán,
2 vols. 1841. Reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Page references are
to the 1969 edition.
———. Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, 2 vols. 1843. Reprint, New York: Dover
Publications, 1963. Page references are to the 1963 edition.
von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang. Frederick Catherwood, Architect. Introduction by
Aldous Huxley. London: Oxford University Press, 1950.
———. Maya Explorer. John Lloyd Stephens and the Lost Cities of Central America
and Yucatan. 1947. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1990.
Woodward, Christopher. In Ruins. New York: Pantheon, 2001.
Chapter 5
Machu Picchu Recycled
Regina Harrison
Tourists, pilgrims, multinational commissions, and anthropologists all

wend their way to the Machu Picchu’s iconic peak. Tours to Peru have
surged since the Shining Path’s guerrilla activities were curtailed in 1992;
most visitors carry a specific agenda in their daypacks, and their particu-
lar reasons for stepping onto the grassy terraces and smooth granite stair-
cases converge in the Incan “lost” city. Since 1911—when Hiram Bingham
“re-discovered” the ruins of Machu Picchu—the stone outcroppings, stone
huts, and ceremonial spaces exist alternately as sites of measurement, as a
physical obstacle testing stamina, and as an unqualifiedly mysterious field
of energy. A most spectacular place of Incan engineering prowess, Machu
Picchu has served as a staging for aesthetic contemplation, as a blueprint for
political agendas, and as a cultural icon to be consumed by the masses.
Machu Picchu’s relatively recent emergence from the mists of time
positions the marvelous ruin both in this world and outside its worldly
confines. Straddling histories of the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries,
Machu Picchu appears fixed and constant in its granite presence. The
masonry’s intricacies attest to real functioning of empire—then and
now—as history emerges when the vines are cleared. We experience time
and space as compressed, according to Walter Benjamin: “In [ruins] all
the contradictions of the epochs of transition are frozen in a stand-still
dialectic; they are allegories of transient times” (Cited in Boym, 208).
Competing discourses of ruination and rumination mingle: personally
experienced ruins yield knowledge of death or an image of nature tri-
umphant; they offer a misdirected search for authenticity in a postmod-
ern world, a pilgrimage toward transcendence, the bliss of communitas
shared in contemplation; or they elicit emotional responses of melan-
choly and nostalgia.1 Words, photographs, and maps make these traces
visible, as poets, explorers, and backpackers create personal testimony
of their journey and refashion the ruins to their liking.
64 Regina Harrison
His-tory: Bingham
To Hiram Bingham goes the glory of being the first traveler from a dis-
tant land to see the ruins. His hastily written comments about that first
day, that first encounter, appear in his diary. Of that primal scene on
July 24, 1911, he jots briefly in his notes:
10:07 start from camp

10:40 #1, hill + M.P. . . . looking S.W. . . .
10:45 #2 bridge 1/25 [shutter speed]
12:07 Arr. hut. Curiosity of ranchers. Sweet potatoes. Fine Ruins—much
better than Choq. (A. Bingham, 2)
The entry continues for several more handwritten pages. He lists the
series of photographs with the exposures, notes the fine stonework of
the bath and houses, paces off the dimensions of the three buildings
at the sacred plaza, marvels at the “magnificent view,” and roughly
sketches the complex. Then, he packs up his camera and is back at the
base camp by 5:32 p.m., as night falls. The explorer’s visit to Machu
Picchu had lasted a mere five hours, similar to the modern escorted tour
to the site!
The sacred space—even in 1911—was not a pristine primeval set-
ting unscathed by modern encroaching. Melchor Arteaga, the owner of
this land, had rented out the space to three Peruvian Indian families
who planted corn and potatoes amid the ruins. Arteaga, persuaded by
Bingham to climb up to Machu Picchu by his bribe of a US silver dollar,
knew the sharecroppers well (A. Bingham, 6–10). Melquíades Richarte,
a poncho-clad boy who lived at the site (and who guided Bingham),
appears several times in the photographs and provides a dimension of
scale next to the giant stone structures.
Furthermore, this stone ruin and monument of time also bears the
defacement of modern writing—graffiti—as well as evidence of ongo-
ing agricultural cultivation. In his diary, Bingham jots down “Lizarraga
1902,” which he finds lettered on the wall with three windows. The
young Yale professor, reflecting on his trek up to the heights of Machu
Picchu a day later, does not claim credit for the find in the 1911 report.
Instead he notes, “Augustín Lizarraga is discoverer of Machu Picchu and
lives at San Miguel bridge . . .” (A. Bingham, 19). Yet, penning a letter
to his wife several days later, his (now) contested ownership of the site
begins: “I started to tell you yesterday about my new Inca City, Machu
[sic] Picchu. . . . The stone is as fine as any in Cuzco! It is unknown and
will make a fine story.” (A. Bingham, 25; my italics). Publicly, in some
later versions he writes up, Bingham still gives credit to those who have
come before him to the ruin. His “The Discovery of Machu Picchu” in
Harper’s Monthly (1913) embeds a mention of Lizarraga: “From some
rude scrawls on the stones of a temple we learned that it was visited in
Machu Picchu Recycled 65
1902 by one Lizarraga, a local muleteer” (Bingham III, 13).Yet, this gra-
ciousness of credit is marred by his manner of description (“some rude
scrawls”), which leaves the handsome Yale instructor as the towering
figure at the site.
With the publication of Lost City of the Incas (1948), Lizarraga’s
tagging of the wall is nowhere mentioned. And, in this version, the “fine
story” that Bingham promised to tell takes on the dimensions of Raiders
of the Lost Ark, where peril awaits at every bend of the watery torrent
or tangly trail. The field journal entry “10:45 bridge” has been consid-
erably enhanced with mention of possibly being dashed to pieces on the
rocks. Similarly, the ascent, not even described in the field notes, takes
on awesome proportions in 1948: “For an hour and twenty minutes,
we had a hard climb. A good part of the distance we went on all fours,
sometimes holding on by our fingernails” (Bingham, 162).
While here Bingham is precise about energies expended to get to the
site, in describing the ruins he is aware of the inadequacy of words to
fully render the surroundings. In 1911, he resorts to a sketch; in the book
(1948), he gratefully acknowledges the accurate representation afforded
by a camera: “Would anyone believe what I had found? Fortunately, in
this land where accuracy in reporting what one has seen is not a pre-
vailing characteristic of travelers, I had a good camera and the sun was
shining” (Bingham, 166). Yet even that photographic record in black
and white is selectively shaped as Bingham culls out panorama shots
that reveal how much clearing the indigenous families had done. And,
fitting his purpose in 1948, the ruins are reported as overladen by thick
vegetation: “It was hard to see [the ruined houses] for they were partly
covered with trees and moss, the growth of centuries, but in the dense
shadow, hiding in bamboo thickets and tangled vines, appeared here and
there walls of white granite ashlars carefully cut and exquisitely fitted
together” (Bingham, 165–66). However, the scholarly cache of thou-
sands of photographs taken during the expeditions clearly contrasts with
the prose description and reveals, from that first day on, the Quechua
Indians who lived there hacked at the vegetation, were sheltered by the
ruins, and eked out a daily existence in the fields.
In contrast to the prose versions of the site, Hiram Bingham, the
meticulous photographer, rarely shows up in the photographs at Machu
Picchu. Unlike most tourists today, he does not stand in full fron-
tal mode smiling at the camera with the iconic green peak of Huayna
Picchu behind him. One photo taken at the site captures him bending
over, adjusting his tripod. His face is obscured by his hat and jacket;
Huayna Picchu is densely covered with low lying clouds (A. Bingham,
288). Only in 1948, with snowy white hair and garbed in a beige suit,
does he get into the typically iconic postcard stance with the ruins in
the background (A. Bingham, 343). Now a new road, labeled the Hiram
Bingham Highway, zigzags upward; he was there for the inauguration
on the day that mass travel to Machu Picchu began.
66 Regina Harrison
Figure 5.1 Machu Picchu (Peru). Photograph courtesy of Regina Harrison.
Writer-Travelers to Machu Picchu

Pablo Neruda, who visited the site in 1943, still had to get there the old
way: rail travel for six to seven hours from Cuzco and then by horseback
up to the ruins. Visibly awestruck by the “lofty solemnity of the aban-
doned Incan towers,” Neruda reflects on the misguided privileging of
far-distant ruins, preferred over those sites closer to home: “After seeing
the ruins of Machu [sic] Picchu, the fabulous cultures of antiquity seemed
to me papier-mâché” (Cited in Felstiner, 144). Guided around by José
Uriel García, author of The New Indian, Neruda listened to a kindred
spirit who saw the ruins as a site of communal enterprise, a source of
regeneration for the indigenous peoples. 2 Indeed, in Neruda’s crafting of
the “crucible” of civilization, admiration for the genius of the construc-
tion abounds in an expansive poetic archeology. The “tall city of stepped
stone” morphs poetically into “Granite lamp, bread of stone./ Mineral
snake, rose of stone./ Buried ship, wellspring of stone” and “Final geom-
etry, book of stone” (Cited in Felstiner, 227). Yet Canto IX, with its daz-
zling crescendo, gives way to Neruda’s ultimate question amid the ruins:
I question you, salt of the highways,

show me the trowel; allow me, architecture
to fret stone stamens with a little stick
climb all the steps of air into the emptiness,
scrape the intestine until I touch mankind.

Machu Picchu, did you lift
stone above stone on a groundwork of rags?
(57)
The departed ragged laborers whom Neruda envisions trapped beneath

layers of stone, imprisoned in tasks thrust on them, will surface once
again through his remembrance and his voicing of their plight. 3
By 1947, the writer Christopher Isherwood embarks on a long South
American journey that is written up in his Condor and the Cows. Informed
by John Rowe’s “Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest”
and Bingham’s Lost City of the Incas, Isherwood deems Rowe’s work
“absolutely authoritative” and pans Bingham’s book as “rather too jour-
nalistic in style and perhaps too speculative” (5). Apparently, he carries
a number of guidebooks with him, which make him leery of his own
descriptions of the sights: “There is no sense in my trying to describe
Cuzco; I should only be quoting from the guide-book. In fact, after two
days’ sightseeing I am so bewildered by impressions that I scarcely know
what we have actually seen and what we have read” (145). Yet once up
at the site of Machu Picchu, words do not fail Isherwood, who exclaims:
“This site is too stupendous for any architecture. Even the Parthenon
would seem unimpressive here. The Incas’ masonry is a miracle of tech-
nical skill, but I can’t help thinking that their buildings must have resem-
bled municipal washrooms or public tombs” (150).
Che Guevara’s 1952 visit to Machu Picchu is visualized prominently
in Walter Salles’s Motorcycle Diaries (2004). Although the motorcycle is
featured in the title, it is, ironically, when Che and his companion Alberto
Granado are down and out on foot that they share in the daily injustices
of the multitudes of Latin America’s oppressed. Both men write up their
impressions of the trip; the contemplation of Machu Picchu reflects their
differing perspectives.
While the movie dwells on Machu Picchu’s spectacular ruins,
Che’s published diary offers only one battered photograph from the
archives; sun leaks into the photo frame from the left, the two peaks
are slightly off center, and the photograph is not attributed to either
Che or Alberto. Che’s prose is better, as he zooms in to give a close-up
travel portrait: “[T]he Temple of the Sun with its famous Intiwatana
crowns the city. It is carved from the rock which also serves as its ped-
estal, and close by a series of carefully polished stones suggest that this
is a very important place” (109). Turning from the luxurious remains
of the Inca’s tomb under the base of the temple, and foretelling the man
he “was going to be,” he emphasizes the segregation of the architec-
tural forms at the site: “Here you can easily appreciate the differences
between the various social classes of the village, each of them occupy-
ing a distinct place according to their grouping, and remaining more
or less independent from the rest of the community” (110). Similarly,
68 Regina Harrison
his observations of the 12-hour train ride to the site pinpoint the class
structure reflected in the price of a ticket: “third-class carriages [are]
‘reserved’ for the local Indians” who, because of unfamiliarity with
modern hygienic practices, are strikingly odiferous seated next to him
in the train (116).
Che knows of Hiram Bingham and he deplores the hordes of US citi-
zens who swoop in to see Peru because of what the explorer described:
The fact that it was the US archeologist Bingham who discovered the
ruins, and expounded his findings in easily accessible articles for the
general public, means that Machu Picchu is by now very famous in that
country to the north and the majority of North Americans visiting Peru
come here. (In general they fly direct to Lima, tour Cuzco, visit the ruins
and return straight home, not believing that anything else is worth see-
ing.) (117)
Che frets at how the tourist train pushes the local train off to the side.
Using the tourist/traveler binary, he laments what “they” will never
see as they journey compared to what he experienced: “Of course, the
tourists traveling in their comfortable rail coaches could only glean the
vaguest idea of the conditions in which the Indians live, from the fast
glimpses they catch as they speed past” (117).
Alberto Granado, Che’s travel companion, narrates how they did not
rough it at all after ascending on the old mule trail to Machu Picchu.
They stay for free at the hotel near the ruins thanks to the Peruvian
manager’s kindness. They climb Huayna Picchu, leave their names in
a bottle there on the peak, take some photos, and descend to light a
fire among the ruins for an afternoon mate tea break. Lying on the
“sacrificial stone” in the turret’s round walls, Granado conceives of an
American Indian revolution, which would be based on his marriage to
an indigenous woman he met in Cuzco. Not a shot would be fired to
bring about this revolution, he says. Che vehemently objects. Enwrapped
by thoughts of revolution, Granado contemplates the spectacular natu-
ral setting and lingers in description of the impressive blocks hewn into
“the living rock” (92–95).
Early in 1960, Sacheverel Sitwell, the British writer, is loaded onto
a hotel bus after taking the slow, little one-coach train, fueled by a gas
engine whose top speed was a mere 40 kilometers per hour. Zigzagging
up to the heights, Sitwell is overcome by the site: “This is the most stu-
pendous approach there has ever been, to something which in its own
right is perhaps the most startling dramatic archeological site in either
the Old or the New World. For the setting is enough, is almost too much
in itself” (76). He compares Machu Picchu to the Valley of the Kings at
Luxor or the dramatic arrival at Petra; however, both pale in scale to this
Andean site. He is enchanted by the mystery of the place. Was it a refuge
for women? Was it one in a chain of fortresses? In the 1960s, visitors
could stay overnight in a small tourist hotel, now enlarged to 12 rooms

(Maxwell, 151), but Sitwell pointedly advises against that:
Machu Picchu, which is certainly among the wonders of both Americas,

and a dual artifact of nature and of man, has hidden itself away, and it
is not in its intention that we should spend too long a time looking at it.
We should come to it, preferably from far away, admire it, and move on.
(82–83)
By the end of the 1970s, the train trip to Machu Picchu is still prom-
inently featured, especially in Paul Theroux’s Old Patagonian Express.
He notes he is one of 200 tourists catching the train, box lunch in hand,
along with the indigenous passengers who are also waiting to board. In
the chapter entitled “The Passenger Train to Machu Picchu,” the site
itself is contained in a scant three paragraphs. Theroux sets the scene,
humbled by a shimmering rainbow hovering over the site on the ridge
above him and the tourists. But he refrains from excess; instead, he is
concise and pointed:
We continued to climb the steepness. The tourists chattered, stopping

only to gasp; the gasping turned to complaint. It was not until the last
step, at the brow of the hill, that the whole city was revealed. It sprawled
across the peak, like a vast broken skeleton picked clean by condors. For
once, the tourists were silent. (318)
Tourist Tracts
While these well-known writers busily narrate Machu Picchu, other
scribes—dedicated to persuasion, not lyricism or awe—spin prose that
similarly fashions the image of the ruins. A brief look at travel industry
texts brings Machu Picchu out of the mists of time to reveal its green
cutting-edge profile; these advertisements allow us to chronicle the
metamorphoses of the Peruvian marvel. An early travel promotion to
South America by Grace Line promises a weekly service of ships (New
Yorker, January 11, 1936). This ad prominently features the “ancient
Incan race” in a large reed raft on Lake Titicaca; the photo of the raft
fills the page. Mention is made of “ruins as old as the Pyramids,” but
not Machu Picchu specifically. The commercial pitch is conveyed in the
last sentence: “Everywhere, sights to be seen nowhere else, repaying the
traveler again and again for his journey . . . where his dollar at the present
rate of exchange stretches surprisingly far.”
By the 1950s, the image of Machu Picchu looms large in the ads. A
Pan American/Panagra Airways ad in Time (March 12, 1956) promotes
“[t]he city that hid in the sky for 350 years” in a bold headline; the site
photo covers two-thirds of the two-page ad. A romantic narrative spins
out in advertising prose: in 1535, a Spanish grandee leads his horse in
70 Regina Harrison
the jungle; the Incan warriors are killed while protecting the maidens in
the sky-high sanctuary. This fanciful tale ends in silence: “The city was
stilled by tragedy—yet will live forever as a noble creation of a proud
race.” The same airline promotes a past/modern dichotomy by strategi-
cally positioning tourists perched on the steep cut steps of the entrance
to the ruins in a 1957 Newsweek captioned “Glimpse into the past . . .”
(February 25, 1957).4 In 1958, Machu Picchu shares the advertising
space along with inset photos of the open air markets, scenery, sports
venues, and hotels. Middle-aged tourists sit at the foot of the giant stone
complex, which now looks more like a tamed pyramid rather than a
“lost” city (Holiday, February 1958). A later promotion that same year
features the ruins, a “high spot on side trip to Incaland” (Holiday, June
1958).
Machu Picchu is front and center in advertising space in the 1960s.
A Holiday magazine ad in 1964 makes an invidious comparison—“See
Europe First. That’s natural”—but goes on to praise Peru, especially
Machu Picchu, as a destination. This mysterious, lost city is yours to
explore: “watch towers, temples, baths, and terraces” (July 1964). In the
same magazine and the same year, the familiar Machu Picchu panorama
shot expands to cover half of an ad page, beneath a headline that states:
“Odds are 1300 to 1 you’ve never heard of Machu Picchu. (No wonder.
It was lost for 400 years!).” The site is described as slumbering (“Why,
nobody knows”) until an “American” explorer “scaled its heights and
hacked through the matted vines.” The pitch for Machu Picchu ends with
an assurance for comfort: “you can visit . . . easily, comfortably” (Holiday,
October 1964). The following year, in a different theme, the adventure
tourist is seduced by a huge one-page ad ruggedly boasting: “[t]here is no
Machu Picchu-Hilton . . . yet” (New Yorker, July 31, 1965).
By 1968, Braniff Airlines devotes an entire page to a photograph
of the mountain ruin, with reduced text promoting it as “The Next
Place.” Pristine, with gleaming white granite buildings and terraces,
the photo is unusual in that a wispy cloud covers the sharp razor edge
of Huayna Picchu. The text combines temporal sequences: the jungle
growth that obscured ruined palaces and temples have been “cleared
away.” Imaginatively, in this ad, the “ancient gods” are there as well
as the graceful maidens, phantasms significantly “laughing, and wait-
ing.” No hardship trek, this sell is for mysterious time travel: “When
you come to Peru, you’ll find many mysteries . . . only a few hours (and a
few thousand years) from the sophisticated city of Lima” (New Yorker,
January 20, 1968). American Express, the same year, sneaks a photo of
the ruins into its pitch for six package tours. However, Machu Picchu is
erroneously labeled a “4,000-year-old mystery” covering “300 square
miles” (Travel, December 1968). Oops!
Although Shining Path had begun its political agenda of societal trans-
formation in Peru in the early 1980s, travel promotion did not reflect this
reality. A New Yorker issue of March 1983 beckoned tourists, sponsored
by the Peruvian Tourism Promotion Fund, to come “[f]ace to face with

another world.” A reed boat paddled by a poncho-clad Indian in a tra-
ditional earflap hat scoots a llama bedecked in ribbon to a fiesta. Machu
Picchu appears reduced in the corner of the page. A riff on iconic photos,
Huayna Picchu is shifted to the right so that a deep chasm falls between it
and another mountain. An otherworldly dark cloud hovers in that space,
while an eerie soft glow emerges from the center. The text illuminates
the visual strategy: “Explore another world. Come to Peru. Come to the
country of incredibilities” (New Yorker, March 14, 1983). Twenty-first-
century tourist promotions by PromPerú also appeal to sensory experi-
ence and lessen the history lessons by telling potential travelers to “Pack
your six senses.” Furthermore, Machu Picchu no longer claims special
advertising prominence. Promoted instead are the flavors of Peru’s culi-
nary heritage, other ancient wonders, and tropical forest ecology. The
March 2007 issue of Natural History has a striking two-page spread
about the “oldest mud city in the Americas,” Chan Chan on the Peruvian
coast, with scarce mention of Machu Picchu.
Tourist Treks
The complete Machu Picchu experience is sought after by legions of
twenty-first-century tourists who must feel the pain of the arduous jour-
ney to the site by foot. No sleeping under sheets at the tourist hotel; these
travelers’ tales stress their efforts to inhale the essence of the Andes all
the way. Phyllis Rose, writing for the New York Times in 1996, notes
that the site is “once again a popular tourist destination,” with the guer-
rillas now in jail. At age 53, she is determined to walk there. She softens
the trip; there are 26 porters in her tour group, a cook, and three assis-
tants who carry the cooking gear. Even so, the “aging hiker” can only
think about grouping breaths and where to place her feet. Her look back
after a five-day trek reveals what this site means for her: “You may be
so tired you can hardly appreciate the view. . . . But one way or another
I think you are repeating the Incas’ experience in feeling that you have
come to a safe haven, a center of civilization, protected and guarded by
the mountains” (November 10, 1996).
Ten years later, a New York Times article describes the Inca Trail as
“the Long Island Expressway of Central Peru” (Healy, November 12,
2006). The trek is now so popular that the Peruvian government sets
limits: only 200 tourists and 300 bearers of their stuff per day. Plan B,
not similarly controlled, accommodates those determined to hike, start-
ing at Salkantay or Choququirao, but neither trek allows hikers to enter
through the fabled Doorway to the Sun prized by Inca Trail tourists.
Still, foot travel is worth the sacrifice as one hiker states, “This seemed
a little bit less touristy and farther off the beaten path. . . . I twisted my
ankles, I wrecked my knees descending a rock-strewn hillside with no
72 Regina Harrison
path for an hour, and I fell on a cactus while bouldering. I am so glad I

went” (Cited in Healy, November 12, 2006).
The sprained ankles and battered feet are irrelevant to the New Age
pilgrim, the latest traveler to approach the ruins. The package tour of
sacred traveling, metaphysical touring, is a growing segment of the
tourist industry (Todras-Whitehill). Every June, “Body Mind Spirit
Journeys” arranges for an annual Incan Shamanic Journey for $2,999
per person, double occupancy, plus airfare. Numerous bloggers sin-
cerely testify to being “changed forever,” connected with the “powerful
energies of each of the places,” and carrying home an “aura of peaceful-
ness and joy” (www.bodymindspiritjourneys.com). This trip to Machu
Picchu features a special sunrise meditation, trips to the countryside
to participate in ritual shamanic healing, and guided travel by bus and
train. With no need for hiking boots, this road to Machu Picchu is
inspirational group travel aimed at the journey there and then the path
inward.
High-tech mass media also allows for the consumption of Machu
Picchu without the sweat or high prices. Virtual travel, summoned by
computer, provides images of Machu Picchu, recycling some of the tired
clichés, which still manage to captivate the viewer. Slow and sometimes
shaky 360-degree tours around the ruins are abundant on YouTube;
still photos accompanied by electronic panpipes focus on tourists
inspecting quarries, dry wells, and storage houses. PromPerú sponsors
www.peru.info; clicking there engages a soundtrack of Quechua and
panpipe flutes, while a top screen banner gives a wide panoramic vista
of Machu Picchu after the mist has lifted. But this scene on a busy page
gives way immediately to other regions and quintessentially Peruvian
products of equal standing with the Incan site (Chan Chan, Sipán,
pisco liquor, potatoes). The multimedia section features a 30-second
video by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. In nostalgic retro-
fashioning, this spot begins with an Indian boy conversing with his
father in Quechua, their faces in tight close-ups. Both wear ponchos,
the pointed wool ch’ullu cap; they drink out of a quero wooden cup,
whose elixir leaps from the cup to shroud the mountains, only then
to dissipate. Orchestral thunder explodes as the camera backtracks,
revealing the two Indians and their llama herd, located on a terrace
overlooking the iconic mountain range and stony village. Although the
Quechua phrases are never translated, the message spoken in English
at the end is clear: “Pack your six senses, come to Peru, land of the
Inkas” (“Machu Picchu,” www.peru.info).
Machu Picchu continues to occupy space in the national imaginary;
commercial, political, and cultural agents lay claim to its importance
for Peru. When the Intihuatana stone was chipped while filming a beer
commercial in 2000, there were many indignant comments regard-
ing the abuse of national patrimony: “This is an affront to our ances-
tors” (BBC). President Alejandro Toledo also cashed in on the national
significance of Machu Picchu when he carried out a second inaugu-

ration there in July 2001. Nazario Turpo and Aurelio Carmona, sha-
mans, were invited by Toledo to perform ceremonial offerings: camelid
fetuses, two coca leaves, corn bells, red earth, starfish, and chicha corn
beer drink (Krebs, 13). The president’s wife, anthropologist Eliane
Karp-Toledo, explained the choice of the site: “We decided that we
would go to be inaugurated in a place that . . . is part of Alejandro’s her-
itage. Machu Picchu is such a symbol” (Cited in Lubow, 46). So much
a symbol, in fact, that, during Toledo’s presidency, Peru began negotia-
tions with Yale University for the return of some 5,000 artifacts exca-
vated by Bingham and housed in the University’s Peabody Museum.
A “Memorandum of Understanding,” drawn up in 2007, recognizes
that Peru has sole title to the Machu Picchu materials, provides for the
return of museum-quality objects to Peru, and promotes ongoing col-
laboration between Yale and Peru (Klasky). All of these remnants of
Machu Picchu—bones, ceramics, metal loaned under a legal agreement
drawn up in 1912 for several years of research—should be shipped
back to Peru, according to Eliane Karp-Toledo (2008), who criticizes
the agreement.
In the twenty-first century, the ancient site has become a much con-
tested space. Is it a sumptuous winter palace retreat or merely an ancient
burial ground for “Chosen Women”? Who really deserves to be called
the first “explorer”? Should tourism be curtailed in an effort to pre-
serve the ruins? Who owns the artifacts from the site? With legal docu-
ments, laboratory measurements, and ecological charts, Machu Picchu is
increasingly defined in contemporary statistical categories.5 Yet, beyond
economies of space and time, Machu Picchu remains a place where old
and new imaginaries are quarried among the stones.
Notes
1. For varied approaches to ruins, see Huyssen, Roth with Lyons and Merewether,
Unruh, Silverman, Yalouri, and Ginsberg.
2. See Adán, Florián, Valcárcel, and Cosío for more commentary about Machu
Picchu from a Peruvian perspective.
3. See Camayd-Freixas, Santí, Shaw, Enjuto-Rangel, and García Antezana for liter-
ary analysis of Neruda’s Heights of Machu Picchu.
4. I appreciate Don Johnston’s assistance in providing access to the advertising
agency archives in the 1980s, when he was Chairman of J. Walter Thompson.
5. Burger and Salazar’s edited volume examines the archeology from a twenty-first
century perspective and often disputes Bingham’s claims. Flores Ochoa alludes to
local protest that curtailed Fujimori’s planned cable car access to Machu Picchu,
as well as a 1999 UNESCO commission report preserving the world heritage
sanctuary and prohibiting new access roads and new construction. Maxwell also
reports on regional protest in regard to ecological boundary lines in the park as
well as train service that caters more to tourists than local inhabitants. Ethical
and legal issues of repatriation of cultural property are well covered by McIntosh;
the Yale-Peru controversy is detailed in Lubow, Karp-Toledo, and Klasky.
74 Regina Harrison
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Picchu. Lima: Juan Mejía Baca, 1964.
BBC News. “Fury at Sacred Site Damage.” September 13, 2000. http://news.bbc.
co.uk/2/hi/americas/923415.stm.
Bingham, Alfred M. Portrait of an Explorer. Ames: Iowa State University Press,
1989.
Bingham, Hiram. Lost City of the Incas. 2d ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1981.
Bingham III, Hiram. “The Discovery of Machu Picchu.” In Machu Picchu: Unveiling
the Mystery of the Incas, edited by Richard L. Burger and Lucy C. Salazar, 7–21.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Body Mind Spirit Journeys. http://www.bodymindspiritjourneys.com.
Burger, Richard L., and Lucy C. Salazar, editors. Machu Picchu: Unveiling the
Mystery of the Incas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Camayd-Freixas, Erik. “Alturas de Machu Picchu and the Modern Revival of Pre-
Columbian Cultural Artifacts.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 36, no. 2 (2002):
277–91.
Cosío, José Gabriel. “Una excursión a Machu Picchu, ciudad antigua.” In Machu
Picchu: historia, sacralidad e identidad, 44–60. Cuzco: Instituto Nacional de
Cultura, 2005.
Enjuto-Rangel, Cecilia. “Reaching the Past through Cities in Ruins: Itálica and
Machu Picchu.” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 2 (2004): 43–60.
Felstiner, John. Translating Neruda: The Way to Machu Picchu. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1980.
Flores Ochoa, Jorge A. “Contemporary Significance of Machu Picchu.” In Machu
Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas, edited by Richard L. Burger and
Lucy C. Salazar, 109–25. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Florián, Mario. Oda moral a Machu Picchu: último santuario de la cultura andina.
Lima: Editorial Labor, 1985.
García Antezana, Jorge. “Intertextualidad mítica en ‘Alturas de Machu Picchu.’ ”
Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 11, no. 21–22 (1985): 75–83.
Ginsberg, Robert. The Aesthetics of Ruins. New York: Rodopi Press, 2004.
Granado, Alberto. Traveling with Che Guevara. Translated by Lucía Alvarez de
Toledo. New York: Newmarket, 2004.
Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” The Motorcycle Diaries. Translated by Alexandra Keeble.
Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Books, 2004.
Healy, Patrick O’Gilfoil. “Taking the Back Roads to Machu Picchu.” New York
Times, November 12, 2006, travel section.
Holiday. “6 Good Reasons for the Swing to South American Vacations.” February
1958, 152.
———. “Odds Are 1300 to 1 You’ve Never Heard of Machu Picchu.” October
1964, 22.
———. “See Europe First. That’s Natural.” July 1964, 129.
———. “You Can See More at Less Cost when Your Travel Agent Helps Plan Your
Trip.” June 1958, 197.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Nostalgia for Ruins.” Grey Room 23 (2003): 6–21.
Isherwood, Christopher. The Condor and the Cows. New York: Random House,
1949.
Karp-Toledo, Eliane. “The Lost Treasure of Machu Picchu.” New York Times,
February 23, 2008.
Klasky, Helaine. “Yale and the Machu Picchu Artifacts [Letter to the Editor].” New
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“Machu Picchu.” http://www.peru.info.
Maxwell, Keely Beth. “Lost Cities and Exotic Cows: Constructing the Space of
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Issues Surrounding the Repatriation of Cultural Property.” Duke Journal of
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York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1966.
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———. “Grace Line Presents South America.” January 11, 1936, inside cover.
———. “The Next Place.” January 20, 1968, 44–45.
———. “Visit the Difficult Countries before Conrad Hilton Does.” July 31, 1965, 61.
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Unruh, Vicky. “ ‘It’s a Sin to Bring Down an Art Deco’: Sabina Berman’s Theater
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Berg, 2001.
Chapter 6
The Ruins of the Present: Cuzco Evoked
Sara Castro-Klarén
The discourse of archeology as a modern science appears in Peru with

the publication of Mariano Rivero’s (n.d.) Antigüedades peruanas,
printed in Vienna in 1851. For Rivero, archeology and the identifica-
tion, measurement, and general study of Chimu, Moche, Rimac, and
Inca ruins provided a foundational discourse for the nation and dem-
onstrated its intricate relation to the past. Ruins—as objects of con-
templation and study, as both historical and aesthetic sites, and as the
immediate presence of the past—have played a very important role in
countries like Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala. Ruins have invited and
propelled the imaginations of foreign travelers such as Alexander von
Humboldt (1769–1859) and D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), and local
intellectuals such as the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–1787),
Julio C. Tello (1880–1947), and José María Arguedas (1911–1969). In
countries with splendid Amerindian architectural legacies, ruins have
provided an undeniable and immediate reference to the nation’s antiq-
uity. In some cases, profoundly evocative texts have been authored and,
in so doing, an archeo-space for the nation has been produced. This act
of imaginative cognition is, of course, anchored in complex, intertextual
coordinates; on one hand, it involves in situ observation and interpreta-
tion and, on the other, it uses ruins as palimpsests, as sites of free play
where creativity and affect generate layered pages that at times prove
singularly strong and indelible.1
Ruins as sites of imagination and memory, of course, play a central
role in European cultural history, with the Renaissance as a chief exam-
ple. Ruins have never been inert piles of stone. They are the material
and cultural work of generations past. And while often they are taken
as sites removed from present day usage and meanings, they have in
fact proven catalytic in the establishment of key historical and artis-
tic moments. In this regard, it is necessary to consider how both local
78 Sara Castro-Klarén
memory and external memory have intersected in the construction of

images and meaning.
In what follows I will offer a textual analysis of the archeological
poetics of evocation, one of the chief narrative modes and rhetorical con-
structs in the representation of ruins. I am going to focus on Sir Clement
R. Markham’s (1830–1916) Cuzco: A Journey to the Ancient Capital
of Peru, With an Account of the History, Language, Literature, and
Antiquities of the Incas and Lima: A Visit to the Capital and Provinces
of Modern Peru, published in London in 1856 and reissued in New York
in 1973. In my analysis of Markham’s text, I show that a lettered cul-
tural memory shapes Markham’s eyewitness experience of the ruins and
determines the narration he produces. The cultural imaginary operating
on the witness becomes more salient in the act of evocation than the
actual experience of being in the presence of ruins. Ruins, in Markham,
evoke the memory of what he has already encountered by reading
various texts, especially the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s (1539–1616)
Comentarios reales (1609). This already-known cultural memory is in
turn riddled with its own obsessions and nostalgias, a sort of cultural
memory en abyme. However, before I delve into Markham’s journey to
Cuzco I need to frame a little further the question of the nascent archeo-
logical poetics about and in Peru.
The emergence of disciplines such as history and archeology in
nineteenth-century Latin America exacerbated the question of national
origins insofar as historical knowledge, until then, had been linked
exclusively to lettered culture. The absence of alphabetic script in pre-
conquest Amerindian cultures propelled the hermeneutic of ruins to
the forefront of the inquiry on national origins. This is the moment
that marks the emergence of the archeo-space of the nation and its
myriad disciplinary complications. For instance, Rivero’s archeologi-
cal findings appeared intertwined with the linguistic work of Johann
Jacob von Tschudi (1818–1880) on Quechua grammar and literature.
The original intention of the Swiss doctor’s journey to Peru was to
discover medicinal herbs and learn about Inca medical knowledge in
general. However, as a result of his journey, Tschudi became aware of
the need to become a linguist first and an archeologist later. While in
Peru, Rivero’s archeological knowledge had proven indispensable to
Tschudi. When the doctor returned to Vienna, having written the first
modern grammar of the Quechua language, he became the principle
sponsor of Rivero’s archeological work and of the eventual publica-
tion of his Antigüedades peruanas (1851), which was quickly trans-
lated into English as Peruvian Antiquities (1853). Tschudi’s scientific
journey to Peru taught him three things, none of which would be lost
on Markham: that the criollo intellectuals in Lima knew little about
native Andean medicine or any other matter dealing with Andean
civilizations, that the chief impediment to learning about this ancient
knowledge for them and for him was the ignorance of Quechua, and
The Ruins of the Present: Cuzco Evoked 79
that the Comentarios reales were an excellent guide to his questions

and objectives. 2
In recognizing the importance of the Quechua language for ethno-
botany, archeology, and ethnohistory, Tschudi anticipates the discovery
that the Maya epigraphers eventually made in the twentieth century:
that the current speakers of Maya posses knowledges (saberes) that are
indispensable to the reconstruction and understanding of preconquest
knowledges and cognitive modalities. We cannot hope to understand the
meaning of a ruin if we do not know its name in the original language.
We cannot, for example, know the full import of the marketplace on
each ninth day of the month in Cuzco if we do not know that the place
was called kusipata, which in Quechua means the “the place of joy.”
Ironically, in the middle of the nineteenth century, we find that Tschudi
makes the same claims to authority as Garcilaso first did for the writing
of his seminal Comentarios reales: language is the storehouse that con-
tains all possibilities; not the prison house, but rather the kolk’a (“store-
house” in Quechua). Such claims to authority based on knowledge of
the language of those who built the present ruins are exploited to great
advantage by Markham in his sections on Quechua literature and espe-
cially on the play Ollantay.
Postmodern archeologists are keenly aware of the fraught interpreta-
tive discursive conditions in which their discipline operates. In two essays
for the collection Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past
(l995), Ian Hodder and Michael Shanks pull away from “processual” or
positivist archeology and state that the only archeology possible today
is the interpretative kind. The archeologist needs to be aware of his sub-
ject’s position in relation to the past and of the fact that the discourse
he generates is at once creative and critical. Hodder and Shanks write
that we can thus “expect a plurality of archaeological interpretations
suited to different purposes, needs, and desires” (5). Taking their theo-
retical position on discourse from Foucault, they call for an awareness of
how technique and style shape how archeology “designs and produces its
pasts” (24). Such a shift from validation to signification, “from anchor-
ing our accounts in the past itself to the ways we make sense of the past
by working through artifacts” (25), is what Hodder and Shanks call an
archeological poetics. With this framework in mind that accounts for
both the poetics of archeology and the arrival of archeology as a new
science in the Andes, let us now turn to Markham.
Markham, like the English translator of Rivero’s and Tschudi’s works,
introduces his book with a reference to William H. Prescott’s (1796–
1859) History of the Conquest of Peru (2 vols., 1847) and History of the
Conquest of Mexico (3 vols., 1843), which are capital and now under-
studied books in the rewriting of Amerindian societies and the conquest.
Prescott was born in Salem, Massachusetts to a prosperous old-line fam-
ily. He studied at Harvard but was blinded in one eye and wrote with
a special “writing-case” that enabled him to write without seeing. He
learned several languages and had a secretary to read to him and find
necessary materials. By the mid 1820s, he decided to write a three volume
History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (1837), based
on many other books and on manuscripts that he received from Spain.
This original research, based on other sources, won Prescott considerable
praise and esteem as a historian and, in a way, set a new benchmark.
Although he makes no reference to the works of Rivero and Tschudi in his
introduction—he may have read them upon his return to England—in his
later chapters Markham relies on the veracity of the information in both
books for many of his claims about Quechua literature.
In his “Introduction,” Markham attempts to grab the reader’s atten-
tion with promises of tales of great adventures, no less marvelous or less
true than the stories told by the now famous and well-regarded Prescott.
It is not clear whether Markham knows that Prescott is blind. It is nev-
ertheless obvious that he thinks that nothing surpasses the accuracy of
the eyewitness’ personal account, although he is drawn, too, to the high
adventure of medieval epic. The young Englishman is convinced that
tales of the conquest fuse together several types of narrative and are thus
superior to all other accounts of marvel and adventure: “Surpassing in
wonder the tales of Amadis de Gaul, or Arthur of Britain, yet historically
true, the chronicles of the conquest of the New World, the voluminous
pages of the Inca Garcilaso, and the simple record of the true-hearted
old soldier, Bernal Diaz, are the last, and not the least wonderful narra-
tives of medieval chivalry” (2). However, Markham makes clear that “in
the eager search for information with regard to the conquest of America,
the deeply interesting history of its anterior civilization has been com-
paratively neglected; and the blood-thirsty conquerors have been deemed
more worthy of attention than their unfortunate victims” (2).
Markham is not only ready to correct Prescott’s mistake in selecting
the subject of history, but he is also prepared to go further. He seems to
reproach Prescott for having relied exclusively on the chroniclers and
other archival material. For Markham, the thing to do in the travel-
obsessed culture of the nineteenth century is to go out there and see for
oneself (as in the case of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood).
With Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and
Yucatán (2 vols., 1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (2 vols., 1843)
clearly in mind, and keenly aware of the marketing success of these books,
Markham announces that his book, too, is based on an extensive visit
and visual exploration of Peru and the Inca ruins. Students of the Spanish
chroniclers like Prescott, Markham says, “have never themselves gazed
with rapture on the towering Andes, nor examined the native traditions
of the country described, nor listened to sweet but melancholy [sic] Inca
songs, nor studied the beautiful language in which they were written”
(3). From the four points that Markham makes—first-hand visual expe-
rience, examination of native understandings of the world, knowledge
and appreciation of the language, and of its artistic manifestations—we
can clearly see that the explorer and archeologist had profitably assimi-
lated the historiographical lessons taught by the Inca Garcilaso, lessons
that were neither lost on Rivero nor Tschudi.
Moreover, Markham points out that of all the people who had recently
written on Peru, “none [had] visited once the imperial city of Cuzco” (3).
Markham not only offers novelty in his text, but also exclusive claims
to the kind of first-hand knowledge and visual perspective that his text
presents. His “visit to the actual scene of the deeds of the Incas, by one
who would be at pains to undertake such a journey” would thus surpass
anything that historians could craft (3). The new science that Markham
is presenting combines the information that history can offer with the
confirmation and amplification that only eyewitness exploration and
actual sighting of the “scene of the deeds” can provide. The willing-
ness to travel and trek beyond the comforts of libraries and archives
is what singles out the new knowledge that Markham creates—though
Markham, of course, models his contribution on Humboldt’s accounts
of his own expedition to the “New World.”
Markham sailed from England in August 1852. He passed through
New York and Panama on his way to Peru and reached Lima some four
months later. His travel account moves quickly through Lima in order to
open the second chapter with the “Journey to Cuzco.” The first stop on
his ascent to Cuzco is Chilca, and he is quick to remark that “it is inhab-
ited by a race of Indians, who thus isolated in a small oasis surrounded
by the sandy wilderness, have preserved much of the spirit of freedom
and independence” (21). From the following paragraph, it is clear that
Markham already had some ideas about the interaction between Indians
and Spaniards and the importance of the Indians’ cultural resistance for
the production of “authentic” views and scenes: “An instance of their
determined resistance of oppression occurred the morning after my
arrival” (22).
In an even smaller village, in Asia, consisting of no more than ten mud
huts, the savvy traveler finds another longed-for gem: “At this wretched
little place I found an Indian who possessed a copy of the History of the
Incas by Garcilaso de la Vega, and who talked of their deeds as if he had
studied its pages with much attention” (23). Markham’s descriptions are
crisp. His details are always telling, as they are the result of very keen
observation and an excellent background in Peru’s socioeconomic his-
tory. Having spent the night in Cañete, he observes that the proprietors
of the estates are “an excellent class of country gentlemen, upright, hospi-
table, and kind to their slaves and dependants” (25). He then provides his
reader detailed information on the haciendas in the valley, their names,
the names of the owners, the crops, the number of workers and families
on the land. In this “joyful arrangement,” he does not fail to mention if
there is a priest or a chapel on the land, and notes all the different prod-
ucts available in the area (26). Like all European travelers in the period,
Markham sees with a commercial eye. He knows that his readership is
as interested in a good adventure tale—the history of the Incas and the

great ruins of Cuzco—as they are in knowing about the possibility of set-
ting up business in the area. Peru does emerge as an archeo-space, but it
is never just that. As the eye of the traveler reconnoiters the archeo-space,
it maps over that space the topography of commercial value. In so doing,
Markham produces a curious kind of palimpsest, for he layers over the
old and sacred Andean agricultural space the transformed topography of
the encomienda and the hacienda, perceived by the European traveler as
future places of commerce and profit.
Markham remains true to his promise. He takes the reader to the
“scene of the deeds.” As he passes through Pachacamac, the traveler
uncovers the previous identity and meaning of the place. This, to him,
is the great Chimu, “conquered by the Incas, in the time of Pachacutec,
whose son, the renowned Prince Yupanqui, proved the superiority of the
arms of the Sun, in many a fierce battle with the Yunca Indians” (30).
This perspective constitutes nothing less and nothing more than a page
taken from the tales of King Arthur. He does not fail to note that “in
the huacas, or burying places, on the plain of Cañete, many curious rel-
ics of this period have lately been dug up, including specimens of Inca
pottery, stone canopas, or household gods, golden ear-rings, and silver
ornaments of various kinds” (31). Markham does not make mistakes.
His knowledge of Inca and pan-Andean culture is accurate, as his chief
source is Garcilaso.
If his knowledge of pan-Andean culture is always there to inform the
land that he traverses with a sense of the past, Markham shows that
he is just as versed in the events of the conquest as in spotting places
where battles took place and people camped or made significant stays.
As he reaches the gates of the hacienda Larán, he informs us that the
place is said to have been the boundary between the territories granted
by the Crown to Pizarro and Almagro. Markham’s narrator steps for-
ward to write upon this otherwise meaningless spot a narrative steeped
in the past. Although now forgotten, the battle’s significance remains
and reverberates throughout Peruvian history: “It was here that the
Marshal Almagro established his quarters, when returning from Chilé
in 1537[;] he proceeded to the Coast, to claim from Pizarro his share of
the territories of Peru. The stormy interview between those two fierce
adventurers at Mala, led to the retreat of Almagro into the interior, and
his final overthrow in the bloody battle of Las Salinas” (33). Oh yes, the
battle of Salinas: the battle so well chronicled and studied by Garcilaso,
the battle that cost his father his good name and a fall from the Crown’s
graces from which neither father nor son would ever recover.
The growing anticipation that Markham’s narrative creates as he
ascends toward Cuzco finally peaks when he meets with the splendor-
ous object of his desire. Cuzco, first encountered in the narratives of
Garcilaso, Cieza de León, and, of course, Prescott, and later imagined
and caressed in his fantasies, is now within his grasp. Cuzco evoked!
Cuzco as the magnet that pulled him away from England into the rarely
visited Andean mountain range finally appears before the traveler’s eyes
on the unforgettable morning of March 18, 1853. With his fine mem-
ory of the topography of the Tahuantinsuyo, Markham reports that he
crossed the Apurimac river and entered the territory that “[o]nce com-
posed the empire of Manco Capac, the first Inca of Peru” (94). From
there, he retraces the imagined steps of both the Incas in battle and the
Spanish in their conquering marches, the same conquerors who slept in
royal tambos (resting places) as they reconnoitered the socio-space over
which they claimed domain. Markham’s narrative makes visible scenes
of antiquity by weaving strands of imagined memory with present sen-
sory perceptions such that past and present become inseparable. As he
sees and feels the Inca Empire’s living ruins, he imparts to each stone,
each hanging bridge, each flowering tree, and each solar clock an aura
of nostalgia and a patina of its past appearance.
His is a narrative done in pentimento style, in which palimpsest-play
is incessant. It is as if he had been there before. As he writes, he evokes
and also transmits a sense of departing from the beloved space, while at
the same time he registers the excitement and joy of actually being there
in person. His foundational text—Garcilaso’s account of his nostalgia
for Cuzco and his beloved mother country—floods from the pores of
Markham’s prose. He captures and reproduces to a fault the Inca’s own
oxymoron: Garcilaso’s enthused laments for the originality and intel-
ligence that created the now extinct, yet ever-present empire.
Markham’s ascent to Cuzco in February 1853 predictably follows one
of the Inca’s famous routes. Small villages and agricultural fields appear
and disappear as the road winds through the majestic mountains. At
every turn, the traveler spots ruinous fields and walls that at once situ-
ate him in the present and transport him, via evocation, to a Peru before
the conquest’s destruction. Although preconquest Peru is now in ruins,
as ruins the walls and fields bear witness to the bursting of life and
beauty that existed before the Spaniards’ arrival. Ruins and wildflowers
are juxtaposed in Markham’s descriptions to emphasize the conquest’s
destruction. “Slopes covered with lupin, heliotrope, verbena, and scarlet
salvia” (53) frame his reenactment of the battle between a young Almagro
and the viceroy Vaca de Castro in 1542. Markham writes: “The battle
was long doubtful; but at length Castro was victorious, and out of 850
Spaniards that Almagro brought into the field, 700 were killed. The vic-
tors lost about 350 men . . .” (61–62). No more is said about the soaking
blood that must have run over the Hatun Pampa that day. No mention is
made of the thousands of Indian men and women soldiers who made up
the armies against whom the Spanish fought.
Cuzco functions in Markham as an omnipotent object of desire that
dictates the inclusion and exclusion of subject matter. Asia, Cangallo,
and Ayacucho are just stops on the way to Cuzco. After Ayacucho, the
narrative focuses on the particularities of the deep rivers that must be
crossed to approach Cuzco, the difficulty of the terrain, and the marvel
of the hanging bridges. The reader is reminded of the landscapes drawn
by José María Arguedas in Agua (1935) and Los ríos profundos (1958).
Reversing Markham’s route, Arguedas’s young men walk the same
ascending and descending paths, arrive at similar abras (passes), and
view deep rivers as they move away from Cuzco and Ayacucho in pur-
suit of their destiny in coastal cities like Nazca and Lima. On March 18,
1853, Markham crosses the Apurimac River, intensely aware of the fact
that the river’s name means “Apu that speaks,” and that in crossing this
river he has emulated Manco Capac, his cultural hero.
The English traveler is overcome with emotion. To know that he is
standing on the same ground on which Manco Capac stood as he came
upon the Cuzco region is simply overwhelming. The traveler has antici-
pated this moment for many years, and the desire inspired by the reading
of histories overwhelms the real, lived moment. Historical (i.e., textual)
memory overtakes lived experience, which can only be rendered in terms
previously set forth in writing by his inspirational tutor, Garcilaso de
la Vega. He is not yet in Cuzco, but he imagines Manco Capac (via
Garcilaso) thinking about securing the site and deciding to construct
four fortresses: Ollantay-tambo to the north, Paccari-tambo to the
south, Paucar-tambo to the east, and Lima-tambo to the south. Soon
thereafter, the historian-traveler snaps out of his textual indulgence and
returns to the present time of his travel account to provide the reader
with a splendidly vivid scene of the dangers and travails of reaching the
bridge before finally crossing over it to see Cuzco.
The march to the city continues. Two great pampas still remain to be
traversed before Markham can see Cuzco from the summit of the last
pass. At the end of the day, when he finally arrives, Markham boister-
ously exclaims and invokes the city no fewer than four times: “Cuzco!
City of the Incas! City, where, in by-gone times, a patriarchal form of
government was combined with a high state of civilization. . . . Cuzco! The
hallowed spot where Mancos’s golden wand sank. . . . Cuzco! Once the
scene of so much glory and magnificence, how art thou fallen!” (95). It
is in this last elocution that the text undeniably signals Markham’s inter-
textual location as well as the incessant construction of the Garcilasian
palimpsest on which his book relies.
As we can see, the four invocations of Cuzco focus on the city’s his-
torical nature and aura. We read in Markham the Cuzco that Garcilaso
textualized rather than the Cuzco that the traveler’s own eyewitness gaze
configures. The object of his desire is in plain sight, but it comes across
in his book as shrouded by the memory of images that first arose from
reading Garcilaso’s prose—images which themselves came from remote,
youthful memories of the Inca who surveyed the city and its lost splen-
dor. Viewing Cuzco as a living ruin, then, entails a constant interplay
among images that appear in the here-and-now of the traveler’s gaze and
images previously stored in the mind’s eye.
The Cuzco that continues to unfold before Markham’s eyes is a site

of knowledge, ceremony, and glory. As the traveler continues to evoke
Cuzco, we find not a description of Inca architectural ruins, but rather
an evocation of splendid rituals and ceremonies that filled plazas and
streets with theatrical dances, joyous offerings to the sun and the moon,
and, as in imperial Rome, the march of armies back to Cuzco after the
conquest of the great Chimor or Pachacamac. Cuzco’s imperial character
fascinates the English traveler, and while comparisons to the grandeur of
imperial China and India are not missing, also implicit is an allusion to
imperial England and its world colonies.
Perhaps wanting to outshine Tschudi’s recent achievements as an
expert in Quechua (172), Markham seems to be thinking about a sub-
sequent journey to Urubamba from his earliest days in Cuzco, where he
hears that Don Pablo Justiniano, the priest of Laris and a descendant of
the Incas, has in his possession the only known copy of the originally
transcribed play Ollantay. Markham also hears that Don Pablo has
some full-length portraits of the Inca. In the nineteenth-century race for
knowledge and imperial acquisitions, these “ruins” and treasures would
be any traveler’s crowning jewels.
Either before departing for Peru or after his return to England,
Markham read the Ollantay carefully. The account of his journey to
Urubamba and his contemplation of the ruins at Ollantaytambo are
interlaced with the play’s love story. Ollantaytambo’s ruins become a
multilayered and dynamic palimpsest infused with the play’s drama.
Markham preserves the human dimension of the place at the forefront
of his text such that the reader is never just looking at ruins, but is rather
always aware of the Incas’ history as actors in space and time. Like
Cuzco before, Ollantaytambo now comes alive with Markham’s own
narrative rendition of lovers’ adventures, army battles, and an enamored
rebel who risks it all for the forbidden Ñusta’s love.
Markham closes his journey into the past, his passage among the
ruins, with generous translations from the Ollantay and heartfelt praise
for the richness and sweetness of the Inca language. In so doing, he does
not quote Garcilaso, his master text and guide, but he does stress the
notion that knowledge of the language of the (living) culture in ruins is
indispensable to seeing and that seeing is wrapped in language. Cuzco, as
it is evoked in Markham’s intertextual world, a world in which place and
memory interact incessantly, appears less as a ruin and much more as a
powerful, living, speaking scene of history—an indelible memory, an
Apu-rimac with a poetics all its own.
Notes
1. Readers of Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, Guamán Poma de Ayala, and José María
Arguedas, or of modern interpreters of Andean culture such as Tom Zuidema,
Manuel Burga, and Alberto Flores Galindo know that memory and a sense of
community are tied not only to ritual, dance and theater, and to a rich oral cul-
ture, but also and especially to an Andean cosmo-vision in which the land is
a sacred space that memorializes mythical, historical, and present events. The
myths of Huarochiri (1609) alone show how each stone and stream represents
and tells each ayllu’s (communal group’s) story of origin. For more on the ques-
tion of memory and alternative modes of inscription to print culture, see my
article “The Nation in Ruins.”
2. Despite Rostoworoski’s disparaging remarks regarding the value of the Inca
Garcilaso’s work as a source on Andean civilizations, recent work on archeol-
ogy, architecture, and khipu has tended to validate the Inca as a source. See, for
instance, Miles.
Select Bibliography
Castro-Klarén, Sara. “The Nation in Ruins: Archeology and the Rise of the Nation.”
In Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-
Century Latin America, edited by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles
Chasteen, 161–84. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Hodder, Ian, and Michael Shanks eds. Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning
in the Past. London: Routledge, 1995.
Markham, Clement R. Cuzco: A Journey to the Ancient Capital of Peru with an
Account of the History, Language, Literature, and Antiquities of the Incas;
Lima: A Visit to the Capital and Provinces of Modern Peru, 1856. Reprint.
London: Chapman and Hall, 1973. Page references are to the 1973 edition.
Miles, Susan A. The Shape of Inca History: Narrative and Architecture in an Andean
Empire. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002.
Rostoworoski, María. Historia del Tahuantinsuyo. Lima: Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos, 1988.
Chapter 7
Ruins in the Desert: Field Notes by a Filmmaker
Andrés Di Tella
The Desert
As a documentary filmmaker, I deal constantly with ruins. As I write,
I am in the middle of shooting a documentary on La Conquista del
Desierto (The Conquest of the Desert), the official name given to a
late 1870s military campaign that aimed to take over vast regions of
Argentina’s national territory, the Pampas and Patagonia, areas that
were then still dominated by the aboriginal “Indians.” After decades of
frontier skirmishes, isolated attacks, and counterattacks, the campaign
led by General Julio Roca was completed with unexpected swiftness,
in a matter of months, between 1878 and 1879. This effectiveness was
undoubtedly bolstered by the military’s use of the same Remington rifles
that “won the West” in the United States, pitted against the Indians’
spears. Even more decisive was the national government’s decision to
abandon its existing policy of negotiating with the Pampas tribes, for-
saking its previous record of establishing “peace treaties” with the Indian
caciques, as if the negotiations were between two sovereign “nations.”
General Roca and his supporters ridiculed these prior attempts at deal-
ing diplomatically with “the Indian problem” and proceeded to, in his
words, “limpiar la Pampa de indios” (cleanse the Pampas of Indians).
Of the estimated 30,000 people that made up the Indian communi-
ties in the Pampas and Patagonia at the time, almost 3,000 died during
the military campaign. The numbers of dead and captured Indians were
meticulously registered by Roca’s troops, in suit with the positivist ide-
als of the time. However, no one counted the thousands who died of
illness and starvation in the months and years that followed. Hundreds
were confined to concentration camps; many were reduced to a state
of semi-slavery; and the rest were deliberately dispersed to far-flung
areas of the country. In that fateful year of 1879—and it must have been
88 Andrés Di Tella
overwhelming for those involved—the Indian world literally almost dis-

appeared overnight.
While researching the film, I visited the site of the once thriving com-
munity of Salinas Grandes, ruled by the legendary “Sovereign of the
Pampas,” cacique Callfucurá, and was surprised to verify what was
described in the old books I had read: there is still no one, and noth-
ing, there. The Conquest of the Desert had disingenuously designated
its object of pillage as “the desert,” making only certain areas of the
Pampas plains emblematic of the entire region. The Indians were disap-
peared symbolically before they were physically removed from the stage.
The plan was to people the land with colonos: European immigrants,
who with their naturally superior work ethic would make the country
thrive. “The aim is to populate the desert, not destroy the Indians,” went
a well-known slogan of the time. This is not the place to discuss how
that plan did not come to fruition. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
most of the land ended up in the hands of very few landowners and, even
to this day, substantial portions of the Pampas and Patagonia are, for all
intents and purposes, a kind of desert.
The question for me was to find a way to make a documentary about
how that world disappeared. The answer of course was: ruins. But there
are no ruins on the Pampas, at least not easily observable ruins. The
relics found by anthropologists, archeologists, and amateur collectors
are from earlier periods: arrowheads, stone boleadoras (Argentine las-
sos), pottery. But there is very little to be found of the Indians who were
defeated in 1879. I decided to trace the steps of a previous traveler, the
journalist Estanislao Zeballos, who trekked across the territory only
months after Roca’s troops had done the dirty work, and who published
a classic on the subject, Viaje al país de los Araucanos.
Oddly enough, in the first fortín (small fort) he visits, Zeballos antici-
pates the only visible ruins to be found today. The fort was manned by
a tiny garrison of five soldiers. He prefigures the fort as a “primitive
monument” that will recall the epic encounter, not of two civilizations,
but rather of la civilización faced with la barbarie. The area referred to
in those days as La Frontera—the frontier between Christian civiliza-
tion and the Indians’ barbarism—is currently littered by vestiges of that
war. Almost every town throughout the former frontier, situated about
400 kilometers from the city of Buenos Aires, seems to have its little
fortín as a remnant of those epic days. Yet, on closer inspection, it turns
out that they are all reconstructions. In reality, all of these edifications
were built rather precariously and did not survive the test of time (nor
were they intended to, of course). Among the most interesting of the
reconstructions that I came across was that of La Zanja de Alsina, or
Alsina’s Ditch, which recovered a couple of hundred meters of a never-
finished, 700 kilometer ditch dug from the Atlantic coast to the Andes in
the 1870s, as a sort of inverted Great Wall of China designed to prevent
Indian attacks.
Ruins in the Desert 89
Many of these reconstructions were created as a tribute to La

Conquista del Desierto during military governments anxious to recall
and honor the last war the National Army fought ( . . . and won) before
the Malvinas/Falklands conflict of 1982, more than 100 years later.
Much ado was made about the centennial of La Conquista del Desierto
in 1979, at the height of General Videla’s reign of terror. But in the last
couple of decades, with the advent of democracy in Argentina, there is
no longer such guiltless conviction about the worthiness of the cause.
Abandon has crept in, and these once shiny mnemotechnic artifacts are
already crumbling and overgrown with weeds, effectively taking on for
the camera the aspect of veritable ruins. But what they are ruins of is
not of the history of the Conquista del Desierto, but rather of one way
of constructing history. Mementos rather than relics, they are at least
something for the camera to rest its eyes on, allowing us to meditate
about their significance, letting us see the extent to which history is as
much a construct as these reconstructions.
Skulls
But there are other types of remnants of the war against the Indians. One
such remnant is rather more real, yet still fraught with a heavy symbolic
load. Zeballos himself was a devoted collector of Indian skulls, which
were acquired under the guise of anthropological interest in the Indians
and their culture (about which he did write several important proto-
anthropological works). Discerning distinctive features in the skulls of
Indians was, naturally, also a way of establishing essential differences
between the races, even of claiming that the Indians represented an ear-
lier stage of human development. Zeballos would hire Indian guides to
locate Indian tombs, which he would proceed to plunder in order to
take home the skulls, as scientific war trophies, to add to the collection
housed in his private “museum.” Given that the Indians had been only
very recently defeated, it is surprising how much Zeballos emphasizes
that the Indians are a thing of the past, a past that may be studied with
great dedication and respect, so long as it remains in the past.
The skulls of Indian caciques such as Callfucurá were—not surpris-
ingly—the ones he sought the most, providing disturbingly detailed nar-
ratives of such discoveries and disinterments. At one point, one of the
soldiers accompanying him challenges Zeballos regarding the propri-
ety of their gory task. Considering that the Indians had already been
brutally decimated and plundered, the soldier wonders, shouldn’t their
remains be left in peace? Zeballos snaps back: “My Dear Lieutenant, if
Civilization demanded that you, the soldiers, earn your honors by perse-
cuting their race and conquering their land, Science [now] demands that
I serve it by bringing their skulls back to our museums and laborato-
ries.” Zeballos ends with the following prophetic words, worth quoting
90 Andrés Di Tella
in Spanish: “La Barbarie está maldita y no quedarán en el desierto ni los

despojos de sus muertos” (Barbarism has been condemned, and the very
remains of its dead will not be left behind in the desert).
What has happened very recently, however—over the last couple of
years, in fact—is that there has been a renaissance of interest in the Indian
component of Argentina’s national identity. The “human rights” policies
promoted by the Néstor Kirchner administration regarding crimes per-
petrated by the last military government (1976–1983), taken together
with the use of the word “genocide” as a way of referring to the murder
of dissidents during that regime, may have set off repressed memories
of the earlier massacre of the Indians, a situation for which the term
“genocide” is perhaps more strictly applicable. It was David Viñas who
said that the Indians were the first desaparecidos of Argentine history.
And although the figures might seem to indicate a larger scale crime in
the case of the desaparecidos of the 1970s, it could be argued that the
worst crime of La Conquista del Desierto was not the actual massacre
of Indians in combat, but what some call “ethnocide”: the suppression
or destruction of a people’s culture, as opposed to the destruction of the
people themselves.
The long-term effect of suppressing the transmission of culture to
future generations, coupled with displacement, forced labor, degrad-
ing indoctrination over years, et cetera, has led to very few Argentines
admitting to be of Indian descent, despite a recent study that determined
that more than 50 per cent of 15,000 people tested had at least some
indigenous component in their genetic map. The idea imposed in the
aftermath of La Conquista del Desierto is that Argentina is a European
nation, or in any case an American nation peopled by Europeans.
“Mexicans descend from the Aztecs; Peruvians descend from the Incas;
Argentines descend from boats,” as the story goes. Despite this, some
Argentines are discovering their Indian roots. One such group, which
claims descent from the Indios Ranqueles of the Pampas, has recently
set for itself the highly symbolic task of “repatriating” the skull of their
cacique Mariano Rosas, which was part of Zeballos’s collection of 150
Indian skulls, donated by his heirs to the Museum of Natural History of
La Plata. These skulls have been exhibited in the La Plata museum for
years, on par with the fossils and bones of Patagonian dinosaurs and
rock samples from the Andes.
The Ranquel community, advised by anthropologists and lawyers,
managed to retrieve Mariano Rosas’s skull. In a solemn ceremony, it
was placed in a small mausoleum erected in Leuvucó, former home of
the Ranqueles on the open range of the Pampas. Judging by historical
accounts, what used to be a kind of oasis, with a large lake, has now,
oddly enough, turned into the very image of the desert. The lake has
vanished, probably because of changes in water courses due to intense
land irrigation. A recent fire has left burned out husks where caldenes
once stood, the sole native tree of the region (which was there before
the colonists planted other kinds of trees that can be seen in the Pampas
today).
We were allowed to film a Ranquel ceremony there. Much of this
ceremony was, by their own admission, also a kind of reconstruction,
ironically derived partly from “enemy accounts” such as those provided
by Zeballos and others, given the paucity of information the present-day
Ranqueles were able to glean from their undermined oral tradition. We
were allowed to film the skull of Mariano Rosas, now a symbol of iden-
tity for the community. Paradoxically, the Museum of Natural Science
has now removed the entire Zeballos collection of skulls from exhibition
and refused permission to film them, embroiled as they are in a debate
over what to do with this uncomfortable legacy. Zeballos’s collection is
of course a ruin, not just because of the state of abandon it was in by the
time the Ranqueles came for their cacique’s remains. The skulls them-
selves are ruins and, as such, a suitable tool for meditation, as Hamlet
knew so well.
Photographs
The other ruins that we have found to serve as a powerful visual tool
for meditation are, naturally, photographs. There were assumed to be
few determined sources of photographs relating to La Conquista del
Desierto, the main one being the albums put together by the official pho-
tographers who accompanied General Roca’s campaign. These images
are primarily of military personnel, fortines, and landscapes. There are
a few group shots of “reduced” Indians (indios reducidos). And there is
a curious shot of an Indian interment, with bones visible on the surface.
One of these photographers, Enrique Pozzo, also took studio pictures of
some of the captured caciques. There is one famous photograph of the
elderly cacique Namuncurá, bedecked in an Argentine military uniform
as a kind of reconciliatory gesture. Another famous studio picture by the
same photographer is of cacique Pincén, who refused to don the uniform
but finally agreed to pose for the photographer in “native costume” and
with a genuine spear in his hand that was provided for the occasion
by Francisco Moreno, director of La Plata’s Natural History Museum.
These are the photographs that have typically represented the histori-
cal image of the Indians defeated in La Conquista del Desierto. Again,
there is a lot to be discerned from these photographs if one takes them as
ruins, in the sense that the historical project that informed the taking of
these pictures has crumbled, revealing dimensions that were heretofore
hidden from the viewer for as long as that historical project stood firm.
Following the trail of my interest in Zeballos, I chanced upon a less
well-known stash of photographs, lost amid the ruins of the Zeballos
archive, precariously housed in a small provincial museum affected by
flooding some years ago. It is a series of prints made by the photographer
92 Andrés Di Tella
that Zeballos took along on his expedition. Much is made in Viaje al

país de los Araucanos about the photographic equipment, described in
great detail, as a symbol of progress and technological prowess. The
book itself, however, contains no actual photographs, but rather illustra-
tions based on the photographs, with interesting differences. In the por-
trait of Zeballos published as frontispiece to the book, he is seen posing
under a giant caldén tree, the symbolic tree of the Indians, with some
of his technical equipment (Zeballos also did a topographical study of
the region and put together one of its earliest accurate maps in which he
colorfully names the former land of Callfucurá’s tribe Antiguo País del
Diablo, “Former Land of the Devil”!). In the illustration, a skull, which
is not to be seen in the original photograph, has been significantly added
at the foot of the caldén tree.
There is also a rare group picture of a “friendly” Indian tribe. Zeballos
narrates how he was forced to stand with the group in order to allay the
Indians’ “superstitious suspicions” regarding the nature of the photo-
graphic equipment. But he later had himself “erased” (in avant-la-lettre,
Stalinist style) from the illustration published in the book, curiously
enough, to preserve the “documentary value” of the image. (As a mat-
ter of fact, this is not so different from the routine practice of erasing
any trace of the filmmaker’s presence in current documentary.) Aside
from these interesting details, in truth, the photographs in the Zeballos
archive do not differ enormously in their underlying project from the
official pictures taken during the Conquista del Desierto, even if they
are not part of the classic iconography on the subject.
But there was yet another unexpected source of images that I stum-
bled upon, put together laboriously over the last 20 years by a little-
known amateur anthropologist from La Pampa, José Carlos Depetris,
who claims to trace in his lineage not an Indian but a cautiva (cap-
tive). The cautivas were the legendary white women abducted by the
Indians in their attacks on Christian settlements, evoked by Jorge Luis
Borges, for instance, in his story “Historia del guerrero y de la cautiva.”
The women often had mixed-blood offspring and, for that reason, were
considered a source of shame for their white families. Depetris’s great-
grandmother was released from captivity by the Indians after a military
excursion, but back home she was not allowed to show herself in public.
There are different family romances in the Pampas that relate in differ-
ent ways to local history. For Depetris, today, having a cautiva in his
past it is a source of pride and connection to his subject.
But in his quest for photographs of those he calls “the survivors of
the Conquest,” referring to those Indians of the Pampas born before the
Conquest of 1879, Depetris was faced with much resistance and shame.
When going from door to door in towns and little villages in the Pampas
in search of family photographs, bringing up the question of whether
there may have been an “Indian grandparent” in the family often meant
an abrupt end to the conversation or a door shut in his face. Regardless,
with perseverance, he has rescued and rephotographed a miraculous

series of portraits and family pictures of Indians from the Pampas. His
achievement is especially significant in that Depetris has also managed
to match names to each picture and even reconstruct elaborate genealo-
gies from family trees that had been, so to speak, torn asunder.
What is special about the collection is that all these pictures meant
something personal and had specific biographical relevance for the
people and families who owned them. Looking at them, I find myself
wondering about these individual lives, caught up in the pathos of these
unique imagined destinies. At the same time, the reason we are looking
at them—the reason they were collected by Depetris in the first place—is
that they belong to a community that has all but disappeared. Looking
Figure 7.1 Luis Baigorrita, a survivor of Argentina’s 1879 “Conquest of the Desert.”
Photograph courtesy of José Carlos Depetris.
94 Andrés Di Tella
through these pictures, even though they are of “survivors” (as Depetris
is keen to emphasize), I could not help feeling as if I stood before ruins—
not only in Roland Barthes’s sense that photography is essentially about
something that has been. Looking at each photograph, I got the same
ambivalent feeling Barthes wrote about when gazing at the picture of a
prisoner condemned to death: “[H]e is going to die; he is already dead.”
If ruins provoke meditation, it is because they are evidence of something
that is no longer there. It is often when things disappear that we begin to
think about them. The photographs, like so many ruins, are haunted by
something larger: the death of a community.
Paper
There was one last set of telling ruins that I came across in my search for
visible evidence that would allow me to tell the story of La Conquista del
Desierto in cinematic terms. Among the clutter of files, boxes, and fold-
ers stored in the one modest little room devoted to the Zeballos archive
at Luján’s historical museum, I found the ruins that provided me the
most unexpected source of emotion. One day in 1989, while hunting for
Indian skulls to add to his collection, Zeballos walked around the Salinas
Grandes in the Pampas, surveying the recently abandoned headquarters
of the tribe of cacique Namuncurá (the son of Callfucurá). Instead of
skulls, he stumbled upon a leather box that had been hastily buried in the
ground by fugitive Indians who hoped to retrieve it later. Zeballos was
stunned. The box, it turned out, was a kind of “government archive” of
the tribe. It consisted mainly of correspondence between the caciques and
representatives of the national government, and also included newspa-
per clippings and photographs (most of the latter has been subsequently
lost). But the most remarkable piece in the archive, which has survived
the passage of time and the usual abandon of Argentine archives, is a
peace treaty signed by the president of Argentina and the triumvirate of
caciques led by Namuncurá, only a couple of years before the “final solu-
tion” of La Conquista del Desierto, when the Christians still considered
it worthwhile to negotiate with the Indians. Holding the stained yellow
paper, admiring the fabulous blemishes inflicted first by the elements and
then by years of neglect, I had no doubt that these were the most eloquent
and poignant of ruins I had found. The unfulfilled promise of the treaty’s
rhetorical and almost hollow prose, contrasted with the very concrete and
physical ruin of the material support on which it was engraved, almost
moved me to tears. These ruins spoke not only of what was lost, but also
of what could have been.
Chapter 8
The Twentieth Century as Ruin:
Tango and Historical Memory
María Rosa Olivera-Williams
Tango, the popular Río de la Plata phenomenon that encompasses

music, dance, and lyrics, is synonymous with nostalgia. In fact, tango
originated with nostalgic poets and European immigrants who, longing
for home, arrived in Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil to escape
war and misery during Latin America’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century
modernization process. To use Walter Benjamin’s well-known phrase,
at the dawn of the twentieth century the birth of tango “flashed up” an
image of a rural past, just as modernization was driving throngs of coun-
try people toward the outskirts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. In the
city harbors, where nearby slaughterhouses and leather factories were
in need of hands skillful with the knife, former gauchos in the process
of becoming criollos buscavidas (criollo go-getters) found a bridge not
only to their rural past, but also to the multilingual present of European
immigration.
Every study of tango underscores its orillero, or working-class qual-
ity, as well as its double marginalization: tango belonged geographically
to the Río de la Plata’s banks, but also existed at a remove from any
clear-cut circle of origins. On the outskirts of the region’s urban areas,
both rural migrants and European immigrants, especially Genovese
Italians, gave expression to their desire for foundational roots in a hybrid
present—a present that had also produced a hybrid individual, the
guapo or compadrito, whose wealth lay in his blind courage to confront
the vulnerable space between his marginal, telluric, rural reality and an
urban intellectual worldview. According to Daniel Vidart, within the
context of the Cartesian doubt of the Río de la Plata hinterland, being a
guapo meant simply to be (177). The popular language of Montevideo,
Buenos Aires, and Rosario, as Vidart also notes, “synthesized and
96 María Rosa Olivera-Williams
synchronized” in the alchemy of the harbor cities, “the linguistic ele-

ments of the American hinterland, the European patois, and the argots
of the Creole and international underworld” (63).1 Hybrid individuals
with their popular, hybrid language materialized their existential dream
of belonging—their Cartesian crisis of being—in the music, dance, and
lyrics of the earliest tangos, known as milongas. Milongas captured the
sheer joy and urgency of survival.
Nevertheless, these early tangos, which Jorge Luis Borges considered
the true spirit of Argentina and Uruguay and which inspired much of
his poetry and prose, do not give voice to what Svetlana Boym calls
“the conflicting and disharmonious imprints of history,” and there-
fore do not produce in their listener the brand of “reflective nostal-
gia” that characterizes most tangos (78). 2 Argentine and Uruguayan
rural migrants and European immigrants did not share a common his-
tory, even though both groups were touched by history’s radical force
through modernization. Their skills were different. Hoodlums and the
native go-getters had no specialized skills except their artistry with the
knife and the horse; European immigrants were mainly skilled work-
ers, hired by incipient modern industries, especially the dairy industry.
The earliest tangos did not reflect the marks of conflict and dishar-
mony that characterized these groups’ fragile existence. For that rea-
son, Borges enjoyed the first tangos because he saw them as a medium
through which to name the homeland, through which to speak of brave
countrymen from a not-too-distant past. The simple, upbeat lyrics and
fast-moving rhythm of milongas emphasize the survival instincts of a
people who sensed the fragility of their not succumbing to moderniza-
tion’s maelstrom. The Río de la Plata countries’ entrance into the world
market’s dynamics did not appear to negate, at least on the margins of
modernity where tango was born, the possible coexistence of the pres-
ent with another time full of the scents of mate, yuyu weeds, and wild
flowers.
This chapter reads tango as a nostalgic invention that is always frag-
mentary and inconclusive, as an art form that pretends to evoke a past
home, a space in which the seeds of a modern nation of immigrants
could be found, even while singing of home’s impossibility. Tango wants
to name home, whether that home be the parental house (la casita de los
viejos), the lover’s house or neighborhood (bulín, tu casa, Sur), or the
land itself (pampa mía). It conveys home as loss, as an exile’s home that
has already collapsed with the singer’s departure from the homeland.
Home, in the tango, is an irretrievable image of the past.3
But I also want to read the tango as a ruin—not an architectural ruin,
but a textual body that, like archeological ruins, reveals the fragmen-
tary layers that constitute it. Andreas Huyssen studies the contempo-
rary “obsession” with ruins (and a concurrent nostalgia for modernity)
as products of a historical period that not only produced ruins, but
could itself also be considered a ruin. Capitalism’s mechanisms, central
Tango and Historical Memory 97
to modernity and modernization, have proved massively ruinous and

have left rubble, debris, and residues. The long process of ruination,
which has been well documented, was especially intense in twentieth-
century Latin America.4 Focusing on architectural ruins as generators
of nostalgia, Huyssen writes, “In the body of the ruin the past is both
present in its residues and yet no longer accessible, making the ruin an
especially powerful trigger for nostalgia” (7). If the ruin, as Huyssen
argues, evokes the past only as an incomplete, residual space, the tango
makes present far away places and times. These include the sounds of
Africa, Cuba, and Europe, as well as the rural sounds of the pampa,
thus melding physical spaces not far from the city with images of distant
times. Epochs and cultures mix in a musical form that does not harmo-
nize or efface their unique characteristics. Tango music is layered with
diverse traditions: the premodern cultures of the kingdoms of Kongo and
Angola, as well as West Africa (Yoruba, Fon, Nupe, Hausa); the rural
sounds of the vast, treeless plains of Argentina, Uruguay, and southern
Brazil, the pampas, where one hears guitars and the taconeo (stomping)
of the gauchos’ malambo dance; and the sounds of modern European
music, channeled through the accordion-like bandoneón, bass, violin,
flute, harmonica, and piano.5
The music of tango is a great medium for nostalgia. Contrary to
the axiom that music is worldly silence and thus ineffable, music, as
Lawrence Kramer notes, does not deny the possibility of contextual
understanding and historical knowledge.6 In the present of its perfor-
mance, music as a medium for nostalgia alludes to a temporal and
spatial past, gives sound to historical remains. Put another way, the
nostalgic feelings evoked by tango echo the nostalgic effects of moder-
nity’s ruins that Huyssen illuminates. Tango captures a paradoxical
longing for ruins and urges us to listen critically and reflectively to the
multiple fragments of sound that evoke time’s decay, while capturing
us in its ghostly aura. I use “reflectively” in the sense of Boym’s “reflec-
tive nostalgia,” that is, “concerned with historical and individual time,
with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude”; ironically and
humorously, reflective nostalgia “cherishes shattered fragments of
memory and temporalizes space” (49). In contrast to “restorative nos-
talgia,” as Boym argues, reflective nostalgia signals a tendency toward
longing that does not pretend to rebuild a “mythical” past, but makes
it possible for the “the past [to open] up a multitude of potentialities,
nonteleological possibilities of historical development” (50). Ruins
remind us not only of the past, but also “of the future, when our pres-
ent becomes history” (78–79).
As music, tango allows us to hear the historical ruins of the Río de
la Plata region’s modern cities. Tellingly, African sounds resonate even
in the absence of African instruments, because of the way that cre-
olized, European instruments like the bandoneón and guitar are han-
dled and played. Robert Farris Thompson indicates that “[p]ercussive
conceits—drum rolls in melody called arrastres—and strong offbeat

phrasings called síncopas keep a black pulse” (169). The same could be
said of the absent “stomping” of the gauchos’ dancing duels, also repro-
duced in the arrastres. Tango composer Horacio Salgán emphasizes that
arrastres are tango’s essential element, providing its “rhythm, in blurred
sound” (87). Tango makes present what is no longer part of our time
and place, but the present-past in tango is a fleeting image that, to reit-
erate Benjamin’s phrase, “flashes up” and apprehends the force of the
past. The arrastres’ intermittent stomping sounds evoke fragments of
past history and challenge listeners to recognize their call, to seize a
transitory image.
As one of the most powerful ruins of the twentieth century, tango tells
the history of Latin American modernity. It gives an account not of linear
progress, but rather of fragmentary and contradictory developments.
Between Eternity and Modernity:

Borges on the Tango
If we examine the lyrics to some well-known tangos such as “La moro-
cha,” “El choclo,” and “Loca,” we will see that in the first two, espe-
cially in “La morocha,” the rural past lives on in the modernized present
of Buenos Aires’s outskirts. Borges loved these early tangos because they
enabled him to imagine a criollo past for tango.7 Nevertheless, even in
the 1905 tango “La morocha,” the image of a stable, rural past is vul-
nerable in a fleeting urban present that threatens to erase it. In “Loca,”
recent history is presented fragmentarily while the singer relates the
painful past of a girl lost in the city, thus opening a crack in the muddi-
ness of oblivion.
“La morocha” (The Argentine Brunette), with music by Enrique
Saborido and lyrics by Ángel Villoldo, stresses countryside values and
customs and the fresh beauty of a couple forced to move to Buenos Aires’s
outskirts. The woman who sings—the morocha, the female chronicler
of the idealized, everyday life of a young couple in love—has no sorrows
and makes herself happy by singing. She is happy, too, because of her
affection for the noble Argentine gaucho, the land’s true representative.
This tango insists on maintaining a lifestyle that has already changed
because of the couple’s move from the province to the city. Tellingly,
though, the ardent brunette asserts her happiness by means of negation:
“she is the one who does not feel sorrows” (Saborido and Villoldo; my
emphasis). The vulnerability of a transformed subject who struggles to
keep the recent past alive is underscored by the switch from the first
person—“I am the Argentine brunette”—to the third: “the one who
does not feel sorrows / and happily spends her life / with songs.” This
change is common in everyday speech, but in this tango the first per-
son “I’s” identity as an Argentine woman depends on the third person
“she’s” ability to keep alive her love for an Argentine man, who serves as
a synecdoche for the nation.8
I am the graceful companion

of the noble porteño gaucho,
the one who keeps her love
for her owner.
(Saborido and Villoldo)
In 1903, Villoldo wrote the lyrics for his first tango success, “El
choclo” (The Ear of Corn), which premiered on November 3, 1905,
played by the pianist José Luis Roncallo in the exclusive Buenos Aires
Restaurante Americano. “El choclo,” too, transmits positive rhythms
and forges a genealogy between the rural and urban cultures of the Río
de la Plata. The old tango is “dear” and powerful; its cadence enables
one to “remember that period, / so wonderful that it’s gone” (Villoldo).
In this old milonga, idyllic, bygone time does not generate an image of
history. (Borges was right: the milonga exists not inside time or his-
tory, but rather in “eternity”) (133). This song’s significance, like that
of all milongas, lies in its music that “chains” (“chaining me with your
notes sweetly” [Villoldo]) and “overpowers” (“overpowers me / with the
cadence / of its felt music” [Villoldo]).
Interestingly, verses that long for eternity or seek to create a myth
of origin for a young nation feeling overpowered by modernization—
immigration, new industries, technology, changes in the concept of
time and space—are found not in milongas, but in Borges’s poetry. In
his poem “El tango,” for example, the urgency of milonga music yields
courage, innocence, and festivity that recreate the past. The past takes
on the proper names of people and places: Juan Muraña (a legend-
ary guapo from Palermo), the fearful Ibaña brothers and “el Ñato,”
tango composers Eduardo Arolas (1892–1934) and Vicente Greco
(1888–1924), and places like Corrales and Balvanera. If old tangos
evoke eternity with their rhythm’s mythical quality, Borges’s poetic
quest is to tell the tale of the birth of the modern Argentine nation, but
even more concretely and personally, to recover the past of Palermo,
the neighborhood in which he grew up. Without the tango, Borges’s
quest would not have been possible. Bodies entwined in a tight embrace
write mysterious counterclockwise figures with their footwork on pub-
lic streets.9 In Borges’s view, the enigma of those figures is what poetry
must solve:
Where could they be? Elegy asks

Of those who no longer exist, as if there existed
A region in which Yesterday could
Be Today, Still and Yet-to-come.
(888–89)
The mythological, early form of tango that treasures “old things,” such
as “a dagger and a guitar,” in a remote South, replies to this elegy. This
early tango, outside of historical time, “creates a turbid / Unreal past
that nonetheless is true” (889).
Borges substituted “La morocha,” one of his favorite tangos, with
the tango “Loca” (The Mad Woman), and proposed the latter as
Argentina’s national anthem. In 1925, Borges acknowledged that the
idyllic nationalism of Saborido’s 1905 tango, which he found attractive
as a continuation of regionalism in tango, did not symbolize the mod-
ern nation. By proposing “Loca” as the Argentine hymn, Borges was
scandalously ironic, a heretic. This 1922 tango, with music by Manuel
Jovés and lyrics by Antonio Martínez Viergol, points to a modern reality
that breaks with a linear concept of history that understands moderni-
zation as “progress”; instead, it unites the rural traditions that marked
nineteenth-century national identity with the urban culture of an incipi-
ently “modern” Argentina. In “Loca,” a woman who sells her love in
order to survive in the city—a woman who has gone “mad” because of
her suffering—underscores the rupture between her rural childhood and
the urban world in which she suffers adulthood. The female voice sings:
There, very, very far away,

where the sun sets every day,
I had a peaceful home
and, in that home, my folks.
Their life and delight was
a young girl who escaped,
without telling where she went . . .
and I am that girl.
(Martínez Viergol and Jovés)
Unlike “La morocha,” “Loca” sings the impossibility of keeping rural

traditions alive in modern Buenos Aires. The modern world is fragmen-
tary, and the voraciousness of the modern lifestyle only permits traces of
the past to surface as laments. In the case of “Loca,” those laments for
a familiar but remote past are entangled with the effects of alcohol, such
that the here-and-now of the present imposes itself. The woman cries: “I
must drown in wine / the sorrow that devours me . . .” (Martínez Viergol
and Jovés).
Borges was doubly ironic when he proposed “Loca” as the national
anthem, since its composer and lyricist were both Spaniards; Jovés was
born in Barcelona and Martínez Viergol in Madrid. Thus, the young
girl who escapes to the city blinded by modernity’s lights and dreams
cannot be a rural Argentine, but is rather a European girl kidnapped
and taken to the Buenos Aires harbor. In this reading, the “very, very
far away” paternal home could well refer to the remote place where the
young woman spent her childhood. Beginning in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, as Dora Barrancos notes, a large number of broth-

els appeared throughout Argentina in which a great percentage of the
female sex workers were from European countries. Barrancos notes that
in Buenos Aires and other large cities there was a competition between
sophisticated and modest brothels. The expensive, sophisticated broth-
els peddled their “pupils”—a euphemism for the young women living
“inside of the house,” as if in a boarding school—who were treated as
“merchandise” (579). Sarcastically, Borges offered the painful story of
a lost, foreign woman in the muddy whirlpool of modernization as a
national hymn. For Borges, contemporary history was infamous.
Published in the magazine Nosotros, Borges’s proposal stressed the
fragmentary reality of his time and tried to rescue gaucho and criol-
lista traditions of the recent past to illuminate contemporary cultural
hybridity:
I feel that I am more from Buenos Aires than from Argentina and more from
the neighborhood of Palermo than from any of the other neighborhoods.
And even that small homeland—which was also Evaristo Carriego’s—is
becoming part of the city center and I must look for it in Villa Alvear! I
am a man incapable of patriotic exaltations and Lugones-like patriotism:
visual comparisons bore me and I would rather listen to the tango “Loca”
than to the national anthem! (Cited in Garramuño, 118)10
Borges’s declaration of his ineptness for exuberant patriotism points not

only to a personal and intellectual preference, but also to his acknowledg-
ment of the changes that la patria had undergone. If in Evaristo Carriego
(1930) he sought a criollista genealogy that incorporated gaucho poetry,
Carriego’s work, and tango, five years earlier, in the Nosotros piece, he
had already recognized modernization’s invasive, transforming force. His
intimate homeland was no longer the city of Buenos Aires or his Palermo
neighborhood. European immigration, urban changes, and technological
advances had altered both places. With the disappearance of the river
Maldonado, on whose margins his and Carriego’s Palermo was founded,
he felt compelled to keep alive the memory of knives and guitars, of a life
poised between life and death, for which the primitive tango dance was a
synecdoche. In the 1925 article, Borges recognized himself as an orillero,
as marginalized as the characters of tango and Carriego’s poems. He was
progressively losing his small homeland. He did not recognize modern
Palermo as home. The only thing left was to redeem the past. “Loca”
enabled him to see the fleeting past from the perspective of his present, a
past that he redeemed as eternal in his book on Carriego.
The Young Twentieth Century as Ruin: “Cambalache”

Enrique Santos Discépolo (1901–1951) was one of the greatest tango
lyricists and composers. He was also one of the most gifted poets to
unveil the strength of tango as ruin. Thompson refers to Discépolo as

“the darling of the intellectuals” (36). The profound skepticism and
moral gaze running through his varied, humorous, and bitter tangos
made Discépolo, according to Thompson, the unintentional subject of
almost all of the twentieth century’s ideological and aesthetic move-
ments: “The literary elite of Buenos Aires practice their existentialism,
their Marxism, their postmodernism, their whatever, over his searing
language” (36). These words warn anybody approaching Discépolo’s
work to avoid closed readings that obscure the perfect marriage
between poetry and music in his tangos. His compositions “flash up”
the fleeting image of a past that makes itself present via the ghosts
of vanished utopias, like the one conceived in the 1926 tango “Qué
vachaché” (That’s Life): “True love got drowned in the soup / the belly
is queen and money God” (Discépolo, 1926). But these ghosts in ruins
demand to be remembered, to inform the present and make the future
possible.
Discépolo’s poetry, accompanied by the precisely synchronized music
that he also composed, chronicles the leading ideas from the first half of the
twentieth century: from Croce’s idealism and Pirandellian estrangement,
to the grotesque in its dramatic renditions. The strength of Discépolo’s
compositions lies in the mastery with which his most important tangos
create a realm where the present cracks open, allowing the grasp of a
past moment that enables us to see a present in ruins. Along with the
aforementioned “Qué vachaché,” these tangos include “Esta noche me
emborracho bien” (Tonight I Get Wasted; 1928), “Yira . . . yira . . .” (Go
round . . . and . . . round; 1930), “¿Qué pasa señor?” (What’s Up, Sir?;
1931), and “Cambalache” (The Second-Hand Shop; 1934).
“Cambalache” turns the entire twentieth century into a ruin that
demands to be seen and heard. At the time of its composition in 1934,
the century was only three decades old and tango had gained national
and international renown. Argentina, like the rest of the world, suffered
economic and political crises. In the midst of social instability, literature,
live theater, radio, and cinema flourished. Tango singers and movie stars
such as Tita Merello and Libertad Lamarque set continental style trends,
and with civil war imminent in Spain, Buenos Aires became the center
of Spanish language culture. Although on the surface Buenos Aires was
a glittering city with wide avenues, its powerful new Obelisk could not
eclipse its marginalized and unemployed people (Horowitz, 239–82).
Argentina fell on hard economic times in the 1930s.11 The 1900s were
merely entering their fourth decade, but for Discépolo, this short time
span seemed able to summarize an entire century.
When Discépolo composed and wrote the lyrics to “Cambalache,”
he was not alone in his pessimistic analysis of contemporary reality.
Nevertheless, his great success lies in the representation of the twentieth
century not only as ruin, but also as a site in which listeners can find
the ruinous residues of recent modernization. The twentieth century
is portrayed in the tango as a cambalache, a secondhand shop full of

unsavory characters and moral relativity. Surely Benjamin’s “ragpick-
ers” would have been perplexed by the detritus that had accumulated
in only 30 years (Benjamin 1999, 2:310). In the secondhand shop, not
only material objects but also ethics and moral values have become
outmoded:
Mixed with Stavisky, you have Don Bosco

and “La Mignon,”
Don Chicho and Napoleón,
Carnera and San Martín . . .
Like in the disrespectful window
of a second-hand shop,
life is mixed up,
and wounded by a sword without rivets
you can see the Bible weeping
next to a water heater. . . .
(Discépolo, 1934)
The extended simile between cambalache and the past century com-
pares the outmoded sword, Bible, and water heater to a series of odd
and irreverent relationships: the notorious Russian swindler Alexandre
Stavisky is juxtaposed to other figures of the time such as don Bosco,
the Catholic priest who founded the Salesian order; the expensive
callgirl known as “La Mignon”; the cruel Buenos Aires mafia leader,
don Chicho; Napoleon; the Italian boxer Primo Carnera; and the great
Argentine General San Martín, whose role in nineteenth-century revolu-
tionary movements was fundamental for Latin American independence.
In the tango’s last stanza, the simile becomes a metaphor for the twenti-
eth century as a secondhand shop in which material objects and ethical
values are feverishly mixed up.
Ben Highmore argues that, for Benjamin, urban “ragpickers,” out-
moded by modernization, struggle to get by, finding value in what has
been devalued, in “the detritus of modernity” (63). Thus, “debris allows
for a radical refusal of progress; it allows for a vision of history that is
nothing if not attentive to its unreason” (65). Discépolo seems to antici-
pate Highmore’s reading of Benjamin in “Cambalache.” Like Benjamin,
Discépolo refuses progress since “the world was and will be a joke / . . . /
in the year 506 / and in the year 2000, too” (Discépolo, 1934). History’s
unreason shows forth especially for Discépolo in the “display / of inso-
lent malice” that is the twentieth century. As a poeta popular (a poet of
the people), he makes us see modernity’s debris and reminds us that if
we have not yet been outmoded by the cyclone of history, we will soon
be marginalized by it.
Michael Löwy’s reading of Benjamin’s Angel of History illuminates
Discépolo’s tango. Löwy contrasts the different gazes of Benjamin’s
Angel, whose eyes are wide-open to see “the victims crushed beneath the
pile of ruins,” and the “perfectly Olympian gaze of History as described

by Schiller in one of the canonical texts of Aufklärung” (Löwy, 64).
Löwy underscores that ruins, for Benjamin, are not an object of aes-
thetic contemplation, but “a poignant image of the catastrophes, mas-
sacres, and other bloody works of history” (64). Löwy emphasizes
Benjamin’s opposition to Hegel’s philosophy of history, which justified
every historical infamy and ruin “as a necessary stage in the triumphal
march of Reason” (64). Benjamin, as Löwy indicates, demystifies pro-
gress “with a profound moral revulsion [for] the ruins it produces” (65).
The philosophical-composer Discépolo, like Benjamin, sees in the rep-
etition of “malice,” replicated throughout the twentieth century under
the guise of pseudo-progress, the infernal site of ruins. The hellishness of
modern life, with its mechanical repetition and destruction, resounds in
the following lines: “We live mixed up in a mess / and in the same mud /
all spat-upon . . .” (Discépolo, 1934).
So is there a future? For Discépolo—the Benjamin of tango—the
future lay in social revolution, specifically the political program of Juan
Domingo Perón. Coincidentally, for Benjamin, according to Löwy’s
reading, the future depended on a Messianic revolution, which would
remember all victims without exception, making possible “the future
classless society” (Löwy, 67). In “Cambalache,” without going so far,
Discépolo captures that fleeting moment in which history allows us
to see its ruins. Forced to look to the past, to the remote year 506,
forced to gaze upon images of history’s victims flung, as the detritus of
progress, into the chaotic window of a secondhand shop, we are able
to see the present and the future, when our present will also be a ruin
of the past.
In tango, nostalgia and melancholy do not veil our historical gaze. To
the contrary, they ignite our senses and force us to confront both moder-
nity’s ruins and the refuse of modernization.
Notes
1. All translations from Spanish are mine.
2. Borges’s writings inspired by tango include, among others, Evaristo Carriego
(1930), for which he wrote a chapter on tango for the 1955 edition; his short-
story “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (1935); and the poem “El tango,” first
published in a 1958 magazine and later in El otro, el mismo (1964). All are in the
1974 Obras completas 1923–1972.
3. In spite of the tango’s miserable origins, the nostalgia for the lost home that it
reiterates explains why already in the 1920s and 1930s the art form had become
Argentina and Uruguay’s national musical genre.
4. If we frame the twentieth century by the processes of modernization at its begin-
ning and globalization at its end, modernity’s ruinous trajectory becomes clear.
As Nelly Richard states about the Chilean case, the ruin of post-dictatorial neo-
liberalism, accelerated by “the fleeting rhythm of merchandise,” calls for a valu-
ation of historicity in an epoch of historical erasure (15).
5. For Borges, the German bandonéon, invented around 1865, contributed to the
“degeneration of tangos”; its melancholic sounds marked a loss of the bravado
found in primitive tangos (164–65). For Vidart, the bandoneón that initiated
the period of singing-tango constituted the culmination of “a foreseeable
organic process that instead of denaturalizing the dancing-tango confirmed it in
a definitive and effective way” (61).
6. Kramer states that music “is a source of historical knowledge and should there-
fore be a primary resource of critical inquiry.” He opposes those musicologists
and music theorists who believe that “music itself is silent on matters of history
and criticism” (61).
7. On Borges’s use of the early tango to imagine a criollo past, see Berti, Garramuño,
and Vidart.
8. In this tango, nature, country, and love are one and the same: “I sing to the
pampan wind/ to my beloved homeland/ and to my loyal Love” (Saborido and
Villoldo).
9. In the 1920s, Borges was fascinated by the enigma of tango dancing figures. See
his drawing of a couple dancing the tango found at http://www.library.nd.edu/
rarebooks/collections/rarebooks/hispanic/southern_cone/borges/tango.shtml.
10. Borges’s piece appeared in Nosotros 49, no. 191 (1925): 27.
11. For a dramatic portrayal of the period, see Roberto Arlt’s Aguafuertes porte-
ñas, cited in Saítta (390–91).
Select Bibliography
Barrancos, Dora. “La vida cotidiana.” In El progreso, la modernización, y sus
límites (1990–1916), directed by Mirta Zaida Lobato, vol. 5 of Nueva Historia
Argentina, 10 vols., edited by Juan Suriano, 553–601. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamericana, 2000.
Benjamin, Walter. “Excavation and Memory.” In Selected Writings, vol. 2, edited by
Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith and translated by Rodney
Livingstone et al., 576. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1999.
———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64.
New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Berti, Eduardo. “Borges y el tango” (“Eloge tempéré du tango”), translated by Jean-
Marie Saint-Lu. Magazine Littérarie (May 1999): 54–56. http://sololiteratura.
com/berti/bertiborgesy.htm.
Bhabha, Homi. “Introduction.” Dance! Global Transformations of Latin American
Culture. Special issues of ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America 7, no.1
(Fall 2007): 3.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas 1923–1972. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores,
1974.
Discépolo, Enrique Santos. “Cambalache.” 1934. Warner/Chappell Music. http://
www.todotango.com/English/biblioteca/letras/letra.asp?idletra=154.
———. “Esta noche me emborracho bien.” 1928. http://www.todotango.com/
English/biblioteca/letras/letra.asp?idletra=159.
———. “¿Qué pasa señor?” 1931. http://www.todotango.com/English/biblioteca/
letras/letra.asp?idletra=365.
———. “Qué vachaché.” 1926. http://www.todotango.com/English/biblioteca/
letras/letra.asp?idletra=163.
Discépolo, Enrique Santos. “Yira . . . yira . . .” 1930. http://www.todotango.com/

English/biblioteca/letras/letra.asp?idletra=167.
Garramuño, Florencia. Modernidades primitivas: tango, samba, y nación. Buenos
Aires and Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007.
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London and
New York: Routledge, 2002.
Horowitz, Joel. “El movimiento obrero.” In Crisis económica, avance del estado
e incertidumbre política (1930–1943), directed by Alejandro Cattaruzza, vol. 7
of Nueva Historia Argentina, 10 vols., edited by Juan Suriano, 239–82. Buenos
Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1998.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Nostalgia for Ruins.” Grey Room 23 (2006): 6–21.
Kramer, Lawrence. “Music, Historical Knowledge, and Critical Inquiry: Three
Variations on The Ruins of Athens.” Critical Inquiry 32 (Autumn 2005):
61–76.
Löwy, Michael. Fire Alarm. Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of
History.” Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 2005.
Martínez Viergol, Antonio and Manuel Jovés. “Loca.” 1922. http://www.mundo
matero.com/tangos/loca.htm.
Pujol, Sergio. Discépolo: una biografía argentina. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores,
1997.
Richard, Nelly. Residuos y metáforas. (Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de
la transición). Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998.
Saborido, Enrique, and Angel Villoldo. “La morocha.” 1906. Odeón. http://www.
todotango.com/english/biblioteca/letras/letra.asp?idletra=417.
Saítta, Sylvia. “Entre la cultura y la política: los escritores de izquierda.” In Crisis
económica, avance del estado e incertidumbre política (1930–1943), directed by
Alejandro Cattaruzza, vol. 7 of Nueva Historia Argentina, 10 vols., edited by
Juan Suriano, 239–82. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1998.
Salas, Horacio. Borges: una biografía. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1994.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Tango: The Art History of Love. New York: Pantheon
Books, 2005.
Vidart, Daniel. El tango y su mundo. Montevideo: Tauro Ediciones, 1967.
Villoldo, Angel. “El choclo.” 1903. http://www.planet-tango.com/lyrics/elchoclo.htm.
Chapter 9
Modernist Ruins: The Case Study of Tlatelolco
Rubén Gallo
What to Do with Ruins?

Some years ago Rem Koolhaas, the enfant terrible of architecture,
proposed a hair-raising project: to take an entire district of Paris, the
industrial area behind the Grand Arche de la Défense that had become
an eyesore and a postmodern ruin of sorts, and demolish every build-
ing that was more than 25 years old. The process was to be repeated
every five years, until the entire site had been—in Koolhaas’s words—
“laundered,” “liberated,” and made available to an urban planner will-
ing to conceive of new uses for the thousands of meters of empty space
(1090–1096).
Koolhaas’s project never got off the ground, but it did send shivers
up the spine of more than one preservationist. His was an act of prov-
ocation, an architectural crime against what the French have codified
into law as the patrimoine, a cultural heritage to be preserved, main-
tained, restored, and defended against the vandal impulses of mischie-
vous architects. It is significant that Koolhaas chose Paris, the city with
the most auratic architecture in the world, as the site for his proposal.
But Koolhaas’s “tabula rasa,” a project that seems so scandalous and
even sacrilegious in Paris, simply describes the history of urbanism in
Mexico City, where entire areas of the city are periodically “laundered”
and “liberated” to make room for a new generation of urban planners
armed with grand ambitions and an extreme distaste for the past.
Much to the horror of conservative historians and preservationists,
Mexico City has been a city of ruins and radical architectural projects
since at least the sixteenth century. The Spanish conquistadors razed the
Aztec city of Tenochtitlán to build a new European capital. In the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, many of Mexico City’s central buildings
were razed, since they were considered too modest and insignificant for
108 Rubén Gallo
the capital of New Spain, the Spanish Empire’s crown jewel. In their
place, architects erected grandiose palaces and churches in the baroque
style that had become all the rage in Europe. When the nineteenth cen-
tury came along, architects considered baroque buildings outmoded and
clumsy, and a great number of them were given a neoclassical face lift.
In the 1940s and 1950s, entire areas of the city were laundered to make
room for modernist buildings, which in turn were demolished in the
1980s and 1990s to clear the way for new architectural projects.
But what Koolhaas celebrated as “liberation” and “laundering,”
Mexican critics usually decry as an outrage against national culture.
Take, for instance, the critic Guillermo Tovar de Teresa:
We Mexicans suffer from an illness, a rage, a desire for self-destruction,

to cancel and erase ourselves, to leave no trace of our past, or of the way
of life in which we believed and to which we devoted ourselves. . . . We
Mexicans still believe that it is necessary to destroy the past to make way
for the present. More than just a bad habit, this is a serious problem of
national identity. (13–14)
Megalomania
Modernism generated many tabulae rasae: ironically, many modernist
projects have not aged well and have now become architectural ruins
themselves. One of the most interesting examples of this tendency is
the housing complex of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco—Tlatelolco, for short—
completed in 1966 and designed by the architect Mario Pani. Pani was
trained in Paris, where he discovered the ideas of Le Corbusier in the
1920s. La ville radieuse made such an impression on him that it became
his lifelong obsession to create a version of the radiant city in Mexico
(Garay, 17–18).
Some years after his return from Paris, in 1934 Pani won a govern-
ment commission to build a massive housing project in Mexico City.
City officials wanted to build several hundred small houses for workers,
but Pani was convinced that such an idea was out of sync with mod-
ern urbanism. He argued that the city should build housing complexes
modeled on Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. And thus Pani got to
build the first such housing complex in Mexico City, the Multi-familial
Miguel Alemán, completed in 1950. This massive project contained
more than 1,000 apartments distributed in 12 buildings. A year after
the Multi-familial Miguel Alemán was completed, Pani embarked on
a second, even more ambitious government commission. This was a
second housing complex, to be called Multi-familial Presidente Juárez,
which he completed in 1952. By 1964 he was already at work on a
third housing complex, this time more massive, more ambitious, and
more monumental than either of the two projects he had already done.
Pani set out to build a complex with more than 15,000 apartments
Modernist Ruins: Tlatelolco 109
distributed over dozens of buildings in an area of several thousand

square kilometers in Tlatelolco, a decaying industrial neighborhood in
the north of Mexico City.
The area was poor and bleak, and Pani proposed treating it as a
tabula rasa on which to build a complex of modernist apartment tow-
ers. This is the exact same proposal that Koolhaas presented for Paris,
and in his proposal, Pani made the same argument as Koolhaas: that the
neighborhood was in ruins, lacking any historical buildings that merited
preservation, and that the best strategy to regenerate such an urban area
was to raze it. Indeed Pani calculated the expected flux of thousands of
families that had been living in premodern housing and drew a series of
graphs showing their projected orderly flow into Tlatelolco.
The Tlatelolco site measured almost two kilometers from east to
west and 500 meters from north to south. It was a vast area of one mil-
lion square meters, which Pani divided into three “superblocks,” which
were to be filled with apartment towers, ranging in height from four to
twenty-two stories.
In an interview, Pani described his vision for Tlatelolco as follows:
We still need to regenerate over half of Mexico City, which is full of awful
neighborhoods. The one advantage is that most of these neighborhoods
are so awful that they are just waiting to be regenerated, to be torn down
and rebuilt properly. The advantage of poor areas is that all one has to do
is tear them down and rebuild them well. (Cited in Gary, 83)
In “Tabula Rasa,” Koolhaas refers to Le Corbusier’s megalomania, but

when compared to Mario Pani, Le Corbusier, who only got to build one
relatively modest unité d’habitation in Marseille, appears to be a humble
builder. In a 1990 interview, shortly before his death, Pani lamented that
he only got to construct one Tlatelolco. He told an interviewer:
We wanted to continue with more projects, to expel all those who were
living in poor neighborhoods, we wanted to build more and more hous-
ing complexes. I was planning on building five or six Tlatelolcos, with
an extension of over 3 million square meters, 2 million square meters of
gardens, and a capacity for 66,000 families. (Cited in Gary, 87–88)
Had Pani gotten his way, he would have unleashed a thousand Tlatelolcos
on Mexico City, like Shakespeare’s Caliban, who dreamed of propagat-
ing himself onto the world in the form of “a thousand Calibans.” Pani
was a Corbusierian Caliban on steroids.
The Return of the Repressed

As Pani was preparing to launch his most ambitious housing project to
date, an unexpected discovery threatened to derail it. Tlatelolco was the
110 Rubén Gallo
site of an ancient pre-Columbian city, and archeologists had opposed the

project on the grounds that the construction would destroy the historical
artifacts that might lie buried below ground. Then, one day, as workers
were preparing the foundations, they hit an unexpected obstacle: a wall
of stones that turned out to be the base of a pre-Columbian pyramid
which had been razed by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century as part
of their project to turn the Aztec city into a tabula rasa on which they
could build churches and monasteries from scratch.
Pani was mortified. An Aztec ruin did not fit into his vision of a ville
radieuse, and even the lax Mexican authorities would not allow such an
important monument to be razed—not for a second time—in the name
of architectural modernism. What had been repressed by the Spaniards,
the Aztec city with its pyramidal structures, suddenly reemerged with a
vengeance and threatened to derail Pani’s ambitious plans to modernize
Mexico’s urban fabric.
In many ways, the pyramid is the structural opposite of the housing
blocks that Pani hoped to build on Tlatelolco. The block represented
modernity, the pyramid the country’s ancient past. The block was
linked to Corbusierian urbanism, the pyramid to old-fashioned arche-
ology. Pani’s blocks were to rise upward, lifting their inhabitants’ hopes
toward the sky. The pyramid, in contrast, was located in a sunken pit
and its remains pointed toward the earth’s entrails, an apt metaphor
for the sinking feeling Pani must have experienced when he learned of
the archeological discovery. Housing blocks represented the triumph of
order and rational principles over living spaces; the pyramid, in contrast,
was an alarming reminder that the irrational forces associated with the
Aztecs—ritual murder and human sacrifice—persisted in twentieth-
century Mexico. Pani dreamed of erecting buildings on the exact same
site in which archeologists wanted to dig down into the ground to
uncover the ancient city of Tlatelolco.
Mixed-blood Modernism
Pani was a master of public relations and he found a way to turn the
bothersome pyramid to his advantage. He was not allowed to raze the
pyramid, but he was allowed to build around it, and thus dozens of hous-
ing blocks rose around the shell of a pyramid. Pani even found a way to
modernize the pyramid, or rather, to create a modernist reinterpretation
of the cumbersome Aztec structure. The tallest building he designed for
Tlatelolco was a pyramid, but one that was planned according to the
principles of modernism and that rose in all its geometric splendor over
the Aztec pile of stones.
But the Aztec pyramid was not the only element from the past that
would return to haunt Pani’s modernist vision. There was also the
sixteenth-century church of Santiago Tlatelolco and its attached convent,
built by the Spaniards next to the pyramid. The architect incorporated

both the church and the pyramid into his planned city, placing them in
the midst of a large plaza surrounded by modernist towers. In a public
relations coup, Pani promoted this strange amalgam of Aztec pyramid,
Spanish convent, and modernist planned city as the “Plaza of the Three
Cultures,” a name inspired by the theory that modern Mexico was a
new culture born out of the encounter of two previous civilizations: the
Aztecs and the Spaniards.
Pani’s mythological reworking of the plaza deserves some comment. On
one hand, the Plaza of the Three Cultures refers to three historical periods:
there was the Aztec empire, followed by the Spanish viceroyalty, which
eventually gave way to an independent Mexico. The pyramid is a remnant
of Aztec architecture, the church a vestige of Spanish construction, and
the modernist complex an example of modern Mexican planning.
But there was another, more unusual layer to the mythology behind
the plaza: the three cultures refer not only to historical periods and
architectural styles but also to the history of race relations in Mexico.
After the completion of Tlatelolco, Pani composed the following text
and inscribed it on a plaque on one of the structures: “On August 13,
1521, after being heroically defended by Cuauhtémoc, Tlatelolco fell to
Hernán Cortés. It was neither victory nor defeat, but the painful birth of
the mixed-blood country that is Mexico today.” The history of Mexico,
so official mythology proclaims, is the history of three races: the country
was first inhabited by the Aztecs; after the arrival of the Spanish con-
quistadors, the two races combined to create a third race, the modern
Mexicans, a mixed-blood people born, painfully as the sign reminds
us, of the clash between the two earlier groups. The Plaza of the Three
Cultures, then, is also the Plaza of the three races, and each of the dis-
parate buildings emerges as a racial trope: the pyramid represents the
Aztec race, the church represents the Spaniards, and—this is truly sur-
prising—Pani’s housing blocks symbolize modern mestizo identity. In
Pani’s project, modernism no longer represents the purity of forms but
rather the impurity and intermingling of blood. This is surely the first
time in history that Le Corbusier became an apostle of racial mixing.
Pani’s Plaza of the Three Cultures juxtaposes a pyramid, a church,
and a modernist housing complex. In his plans for the ville radieuse,
Le Corbusier sought to separate living, work, and leisure areas. Pani’s
Mexican version of the ville radieuse, took the plan further: it featured
separate areas for Catholic mass, human sacrifice, and obtaining a
passport.
The Revenge of the Aztecs

In 1968, two years after the last structure in Pani’s complex had
been completed, Tlatelolco became the stage of the bloodiest event in
112 Rubén Gallo
twentieth-century Mexican history. On October 2, several thousand

students assembled in the Plaza of the Three Cultures for a rally protest-
ing the city government’s repressive policies. For several months clashes
occurred throughout the city between the police and student demon-
strators: the army briefly occupied the main campus of the National
University of Mexico and dozens of students were arrested and impris-
oned. The students staged several peaceful marches and protests against
what they saw as the government’s undemocratic methods. The pres-
ident, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, ordered the police and the army to fight
back. He feared a local replay of the massive strikes and demonstrations
that paralyzed Paris during May of that same year. He was terrified that
the students and their protests would jeopardize the Olympic Games,
which were scheduled to open on October 12.
The students launched the Tlatelolco rally on October 2, 10 days
before the scheduled inauguration of the Olympics. Hundreds of pro-
testers and sympathizers assembled peacefully in the Plaza of the Three
Cultures, where student leaders gave speeches and read statements.
Suddenly, the army surrounded Tlatelolco, and tanks and helicopters
moved in on the square and opened fire on the students. All entrances
to the housing complex were shut, and the students were trapped inside
Tlatelolco, “as in a mousetrap,” as one of them later recalled (Cited
in Poniatowska, 258). Approximately 300 students were killed and
more than 1,000 were arrested. The Tlatelolco massacre became the
most traumatic event in twentieth-century Mexican history, one that
shattered the vision of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional/
Institutional Revolutionary Party), the ruling party, as a benevolent
institution that had helped Mexico avert the destiny of other Latin
American countries such as Argentina and Brazil, which were ruled by
totalitarian regimes.
In one of the most eloquent texts on the Tlatelolco events, Octavio Paz
argued that the massacre illustrated the return of the repressed. In his
view, what had been repressed and now returned was the Aztec practice
of human sacrifice, a ritual that had been staged atop the pyramids. The
pyramid, argued Paz, represented a powerful archetype with a visible
continuity from Aztec times to the twentieth century. And the pyramid
not only represented the stage for human sacrifice: it was also a meta-
phor for the almost unlimited power exercised by Mexican rulers, from
Aztec emperors to twentieth-century presidents. Power is concentrated
at the pyramid’s top and exerted over the vast population at the base.
Here is Paz’s theory of the pyramid:
Mexico’s geography has a pyramidal shape, as if there were a secret but

perceptible connection between natural space and symbolic geometry,
between the latter and what I have called our invisible history. Archaic
archetype of the universe, geometric metaphor of the cosmos, the pre-
Columbian pyramid culminates in a magnetic space: the platform for
sacrifices. . . . The pyramid, petrified time, locus of divine sacrifice, is also

the image of the Aztec nation and its mission: to guarantee the continu-
ity of the sun cult, the source of life, through the sacrifice of war prison-
ers. . . . The pyramid is the world and the world is Mexico-Tenochtitlan:
a deification of the Aztec nation through its identification with the ata-
vistic image of the cosmos: the pyramid. For the heirs of Aztec power
[modern Mexicans], the connection between religious ritual and acts
of political domination has disappeared, but the unconscious model of
power remains the same: the pyramid and human sacrifice. (395)
There is another reason why Paz might have been so interested in the
dialectic between Tlatelolco and the pyramid. He lived in a building
designed by Mario Pani that had been the country’s first condomin-
ium—an extremely elegant modernist structure on the corner of Río
Guadalquivir and Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s main thorough-
fare. Perhaps Paz feared that, like Tlatelolco, his own modernist home
was sitting on the ruins of an Aztec temple. Perhaps he feared that the
modernist block he called home would also be upturned by the emer-
gence of an atavistic pyramid.
Modernist Reverse Panopticons

Paz associated the massacre with the pyramid, but I would like to
argue that it was Pani’s modernist buildings and his Mexican version
of the ville radieuse that made the massacre possible. As critics from
Foucault to the Situationists have argued, architecture is a means of
exercising control, and nowhere is this more evident than in modernist
housing developments, especially the type of megalomaniac projects
favored by Mario Pani. The Tlatelolco complex was designed to con-
trol the living environment, leisure activities, and even the movements
of its inhabitants. The complex featured only a few access points,
with gates that could be closed in a few seconds, preventing anyone
from entering or exiting. There was only one area in which the crowds
could congregate. And the wide avenues that allowed access to the
complex doubled as retaining walls, preventing anyone from escaping
the complex.
Once the crowds arrived at the Plaza of the Three Cultures, the site
became a reverse panopticon. In the standard panopticon, the guard
occupies the center and surveys the entire prison population from a sin-
gle vantage point. In the reverse panopticon, it is the imprisoned crowds,
the students, who are at the center and can be observed from every
point in the architectural complex. Assembled in the plaza, the students
became easy targets because they could be seen, observed, and targeted
from every building. Army snipers climbed atop the modernist blocks
and had an unobstructed view of the students, who were trapped in the
plaza as if in a mousetrap.
114 Rubén Gallo
In La noche de Tlatelolco, Elena Poniatowska records the voices of

several civilians who were trapped inside Tlatelolco:
I told everyone that the Plaza of the 3 cultures was a trap, I told them so.
¡There’s no way out! It’s so obvious. I told them there would be no way to
escape, that we would all be boxed in, penned in like animals. I told them
so many times.
...
The Plaza of the 3 cultures became an inferno. Every few seconds you
could hear shots and the outbursts of machine guns. I could hear High
power rifles shooting from all directions. (Cited in Poniatowska, 185, 197)
The modernist block not only represented the mixed-blood charac-

ter of twentieth-century Mexico; it also doubled as a modern sacrificial
altar and a totalitarian reverse panopticon. Asked about the 1968 mas-
sacre in an interview, Pani blamed the students. In words that are eerily
reminiscent of President Díaz Ordaz’s justification for the massacre, he
attributed the tragedy to:
A worldwide upsurge of leftist tendencies conspiring against governments

[. . .]. In Mexico, since it was a few days before the Olympic Games, the
students picked the time and place in order to create the biggest possible
scandal. And that it was: a great scandal. And it has given Tlatelolco the
reputation of a place where people are killed. (Cited in Garay, 88)
The Collapse of Modernism

Tlatelolco began as a utopian project, but after 1968 it became the
darkest symbol of Mexico’s dystopian failures. For almost 20 years,
the housing complex was associated not with urban reform, with
Corbusierian plans, or even with Mario Pani, but with the tragic mas-
sacre of October 2, 1968. That would change, although not for the bet-
ter, in 1985. On September 19, just before 8:00 a.m., Mexico City was
shaken by the most powerful earthquake in recent memory, measured at
eight point one on the Richter scale. It lasted under 120 seconds, but in
that short time, dozens of office buildings and apartment complexes col-
lapsed, and the official death toll was put at 4,000, though many believe
it may have been as high as 30,000.
The earthquake leveled many of Pani’s buildings: several blocks of the
Multifamiliar Juárez collapsed, as did one of the tallest apartment towers
in Tlatelolco, the edificio Nuevo León. In Tlatelolco, the high occupa-
tional density of the housing blocks translated into a terrifying number
of casualties. Investigations launched after the earthquake revealed that
the buildings in Tlatelolco had collapsed, in part, due to faulty build-
ing techniques. The construction company, it seems, had increased its
profits by skimping on materials destined for the construction of the
housing blocks. The foundations were not as solid as they needed to

be, and in some cases fewer columns than were required were used to
support the buildings. The use of pilotis, which Le Corbusier had pro-
moted, proved to be a poor choice for an earthquake-prone, urban area
like Mexico City.
Investigators exposed a web of corruption that reached from city offi-
cials to contractors and perhaps even to Pani himself. Asked about his
responsibility in the collapse of the Tlatelolco towers, Pani offered the
following response:
I remember when one of the towers fell in the 1985 earthquake. It was
discovered that the structural reinforcements were made of aggregate and
of metal structures that were not even bound correctly to the main con-
crete structure. There had been an oversight, and I suppose some of it is
my fault, since I should have overseen the workers and made sure they
reinforced the building properly. (Cited in Garay, 80–81)
Building foundations, it seems, were not one of Pani’s strengths.

The collapse of Pani’s buildings is symptomatic of modernism’s fate
in Mexico City. Le Corbusier’s plan for the ville radieuse was imported
to great fanfare, touted as the solution to many of the country’s ills and
as a harbinger of social progress. But in the end the country’s endemic
problems—from corruption to mismanagement—left Mexico’s grand
ambitions in ruins, like the housing blocks after the earthquake, reduced
to a fantasmatic recreation of the tabula rasa.
Lobotomy
Tlatelolco is a perfect example of what Pierre Nora has called lieux de
mémoire, places in which a country’s cultural memory has been inscribed.
Tlatelolco registers the marks of the most traumatic events of twentieth-
century Mexican history: the razing of entire neighborhoods in the name
of a modernist tabula rasa; the 1968 student massacre and the transfor-
mation of the housing blocks into a totalitarian reverse panopticon, and
the 1985 earthquake and the collapse of both buildings and the nation’s
dream of urbanist modernity.
In the end, the pyramid proved to be more resistant to earthquakes
and other catastrophes than the modernist housing block. The ruined
pyramid is still there, and Pani’s modernist pyramid, though damaged
in the earthquake, and abandoned ever since, still stands. At one point,
the city government proposed relocating the police headquarters to the
pyramid, but Tlatelolco’s residents vehemently opposed the project.
Perhaps after reading Paz’s theory of the pyramid archetype, they were
disinclined to place the Mexico City police force at the apex of a struc-
ture that had been read as an archetype of domination, oppression, and
totalitarianism.
116 Rubén Gallo
In 1998, the artist Pedro Reyes proposed an artistic project to reclaim

the abandoned modernist ruin: the empty shell of the pyramid would
be converted into a “vertical garden.” The facade of the current build-
ing would be removed to expose the open floors, which would then be
planted and turned into green gardens. A verdant skyscraper! Reyes’s
project turned on its head one of Pani’s main justifications for building
blocks: that by erecting towers one can maximize the green areas around
them. In Tlatelolco, for instance, Pani reserved more than 50 percent
of the land for gardens. That percentage increased even more after the
collapse of the Nuevo León building in 1985. There were once towers in
the garden, and Reyes inverted that relationship by proposing to place
gardens in the tower. His design is a powerful metaphor of the relation
between collapsed buildings and gardens in Tlatelolco. The gardens in
Tlatelolco are not very inviting: they are fantasmatic spaces, haunted by
the specter of buildings that once stood there but have since collapsed.
If we consider Reyes’s project in light of Paz’s theory of the archetype,
the result is encouraging: the top of the pyramid is no longer occupied
by a despotic ruler or by practitioners of human sacrifice, but by empty
space: nothing occupies the top levels. The pyramid has been decapi-
tated, or as Koolhaas might say, “lobotomized.”
Figure 9.1 “Parque Vertical,” Tlatelolco (Mexico City). Photograph courtesy of Pedro
Reyes.
To Be or Not to Be
If Tlatelolco is, as I have been arguing, the paradigmatic modernist proj-
ect in Mexico, then, to conclude, I would like to ask the following ques-
tions: Where did the tabula rasa lead us? Or, giving the question a light
twist, what was modernism’s fate in Mexico? It is a big question—almost
as big as Pani’s megalomaniac, urban projects—so let me offer a small
answer, gleaned from To Be or Not to Be, the 1942 Hollywood camp
classic directed by Ernst Lubitsch. The film takes place during the World
War II German occupation of Poland. After a terrible performance of
Hamlet by Polish actors, one of the Nazi officers in the film offers the
following assessment of the production: “They do to Shakespeare what
we did to Warsaw.”
The same could be said of Mexico City: “It did to modernism what
they did to Warsaw.” Or is it the other way around? “Modernism did to
Mexico what they did to Warsaw.”
Who did what to whom?
But what did they do to Warsaw? The short answer is: they turned it
into a ruin . . . and a tabula rasa.
Chopping
The history of modernism in Mexico is marked by trauma. It is a his-
tory of disasters, natural catastrophes, political corruption, urban
decay, and utopian dreams collapsing into dystopian nightmares. To
conclude, I would like to return to the project with which I began this
chapter: Koolhaas’s proposal for liberating Grand Arche de la Défense
by razing its old buildings. In his “Tabula Rasa Revisited,” Koolhaas
acknowledges that his plan borrows much from Le Corbusier’s “Plan
Voisin.” Aside from the proposal to regenerate an urban space by a
surgical extirpation of buildings, there is another striking parallel
between Koolhaas and Le Corbusier. Corbusier believed in the primacy
of the building block as the central element in urban development. In
Delirious New York, Koolhaas shows that there were other, more
dynamic alternatives to Corbusier’s monotone blocks, for example, the
chaotic skyscrapers of various shapes and sizes found on the streets of
New York.
But the Corbusierian block returns to haunt Koolhaas, and it emerges
where we least expect it: in the design of his S, M, L, XL, the collection
of his texts that includes the “Tabula Rasa” essay. The book is a massive
block, not unlike the structure so favored by Le Corbusier. As anyone
who has tried to fit this odd volume onto a bookshelf knows, Koolhaas’s
book is a literary skyscraper, one that towers over the other volumes
placed beside it. S, M, L, XL actually has the same shape as some of the
housing blocks found in Tlatelolco.
118 Rubén Gallo
I can think of some uncanny parallels between S, M, L, XL, the book,

and Tlatelolco. The voluminous work could be used as a weapon during
times of student unrest—it could certainly kill somebody with its weight
and mass. And who knows how it would fare during an earthquake. Its
excessive mass might cause it to fall from the shelf and hit the ground
like the housing blocks in Tlatelolco.
Perhaps these morphological similarities between S, M, L, XL and
modernist housing blocks explain the ill treatment Koolhaas’s book has
suffered in Mexico. In 2002, the artist José Dávila presented a project
that treated Koolhaas’s book like a building block, like a material that
could be sliced, disassembled, and reassembled. He then used the pieces
to build a series of sculptures, some of which read like a maquette for
a housing project not unlike Tlatelolco. Dávila did to Koolhaas what
they did to Warsaw: he turned the architect’s magnum opus into a ruin.
Perhaps Dávila’s project is yet another avatar of what Paz called the
archetype of the pyramid and the archaic drives toward murder and
sacrifice. Luckily this time we have not witnessed a human sacrifice, but
simply a literary-architectural one.
Select Bibliography
Garay, Graciela de. Mario Pani: vida y obra. Mexico City: UNAM, 2000.
Koolhaas, Rem. “Tabula Rasa Revisited.” In S, M, L, XL, edited by Rem Koolhaas,
Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, and Hans Werlemann 1091–1135. New York:
Monacelli Press, 1995.
Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1986.
Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad. Madrid: Cátedra, 1993.
Poniatowska, Elena. La noche de Tlatelolco. Mexico City: Era, 1971.
To Be or Not to Be. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Hollywood, 1942.
Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo. La ciudad de los palacios: crónica de un patrimonio
perdido. Mexico City: Vuelta, 1992.
Part Three
The Ruins of Fragile Ceasefires:

Scenes of Loss and Memory
Chapter 10
Pinochet’s Cadaver as Ruin and Palimpsest
Michael J. Lazzara
Dead bodies are ruins that can be hypercharged with meaning, sites
of inscription onto which individual social actors, groups, and entire
nations project their political fantasies, mythologies, and desires.
Performances around ruinous cadavers point to intense struggles over
memory and serve as vehicles for showcasing a society’s allegiances,
resistances, and deepest anxieties (Roach, 39). Just like the rubble of
ruinous physical locales, human remains can be glorified, forgotten, or
desecrated, depending on personal and political motivations. But dead
bodies, particularly those of controversial leaders, are rarely disposed
of quietly or unceremoniously. As Lyman Johnson notes, “disputes over
bodies are disputes about power, power over the past and power in the
present,” and these disputes have played out time and again in Latin
American history since colonial times (23–24). Politicized cadavers such
as those of Túpac Amaru, Evita Perón, Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata,
Álavro Obregón, or Salvador Allende prove that bodies are passionately
contested palimpsests onto which national dramas are condensed and
versions of history staged.
Bodies and the polemics they cause have been particularly central
to Chile’s national drama since 1973. Allende, the desaparecidos, Patio
29, the exhumation and destruction of cadavers, the identification and
archiving of bones at the Servicio Médico Legal, the human remains
that surfaced at Lonquén in December 1978: all of these cases speak
to how the powerful have tried to keep bodies at bay, fragment them,
silence them, or disappear them to avoid scandal or disrupt hegemony.1
Curiously, Augusto Pinochet’s death on December 10, 2006 proved that
a political will to disappear contentious cadavers was something that
existed not only in dictatorial times, but also in democracy. Because
of his abhorrent record of human rights abuses and financial crimes,
by 2006 Pinochet had become a hot potato for just about everyone,
122 Michael J. Lazzara
particularly for the government and rightist politicians who wanted (and
needed) to separate themselves from his legacy. The ex-dictator’s physi-
cal body drew its final breath amid cries of heroism and treason, celebra-
tion and mourning; but as it did, his cadaver caused an “irruption of
memory” (Wilde 1999) that revealed the profound anxieties of a polity
that wanted to believe it had moved beyond its past, yet, despite desire,
could not free itself from Pinochet’s ghost.
Joseph Roach speaks of the “ambivalent emotions human beings har-
bor for the dead,” noting that this ambivalence finds particular expres-
sion in the English and French traditions in the doctrine of the “king’s
two bodies” (38). To guarantee the political and legal continuity of a
leader’s legacy, the sovereign’s sick or dying body natural was often sepa-
rated from his body politic, such that the latter would remain “adult
and immortal” despite the infirmity or degradation that had befallen
him (38). For the Chilean political right, this paradoxical separation of
Pinochet’s body natural from his body politic constituted a political strat-
egy for saving face with the electorate without appearing coldhearted or
unethical. By severing the dictator’s corpse, the right could immortalize
his neoliberal project while chastising his body natural for its earthly
peccadilloes (human rights violations and financial crimes). Leftist
actors, in contrast, dissected the fallen “king’s” body with the intention
of desecrating both his body natural and his body politic. Though the
biological Pinochet has now turned to ash, December 2006 proved that
the ex-dictator’s political body, on some level, still pervades and shapes
Chilean hearts and minds. His death did not bring into relief that Chile
had “turned the page”—as many commentators claimed or wished—but
rather that Chile’s recent past is still a narrative in progress.
The Autumn of the Patriarch

There is general consensus that Pinochet’s 1998 London detention
spelled the beginning of the end for the former dictator, though the ero-
sion of his public image began long before Scotland Yard detained him
(Angell, 140). If the London affair served as a major nail in Pinochet’s
political coffin, his financial crimes sealed his fate even in the eyes of
supporters who, until then, looked beyond the image of Pinochet-the-
assassin, but who, in light of recent developments, could not tolerate
that their “heroic” liberator was a swindler and thief. By the time of his
death, Pinochet had become an inconvenient political body for just about
everyone, but particularly for major politicians of the right (e.g., Joaquín
Lavín and Sebastián Piñera) who were trying to gain electoral support
against the all-powerful, center-left Concertación coalition, which had
held power since 1990. If the stunning revelations of the 2004 Valech
Report confirmed that torture was a massively implemented state policy
under Pinochet, such that the right could no longer flippantly disregard
Pinochet’s Cadaver as Ruin and Palimpsest 123
that human rights violations occurred, the Riggs scandal resulted in

Pinochet’s total abandonment by a good deal of his support base, with
the exception of an inner circle of cronies who remained loyal to the end
(Farfán, Giner, and Minay). Even much of the elite business class that
benefited from the dictatorship’s neoliberal reforms opportunistically
shuttled their support to Ricardo Lagos’s free-market friendly, “reno-
vated” brand of socialism by the early 2000s.
To avoid going to trial in the more than 400 legal cases opened against
him, Pinochet’s final years became a performance of illness. It was in
the dictator’s best interest that his body natural be seen as demented
and sick, precisely because his juridical fate hinged on the gravity of his
infirmity. The media dramatized his infirmed condition: he was always
being poked and prodded to check his insulin levels and his food (sup-
posedly) had to be pureed so that he could swallow it without gagging.
Such images, meant to evoke pity for Pinochet-the-grandfatherly-figure
in civilian clothing, were seemingly disconnected from an earlier ico-
nography of the slick and cunning dictator, bedecked in military garb,
sunglasses, or a Prussian uniform.2 However, Pinochet’s ailing persona
was inconsistent with his occasional strolls through Santiago’s shop-
ping malls or with the lucid and judicially damning interview he gave to
the Miami-based news show María Elvira Confronta. When Pinochet
defended his economic obra (i.e., his political body) on TV, he vainly
and stupidly rationalized his actions instead of clinging to the role he
had learned to play so well: that of a dead-man-walking. In that fleeting
moment, the ex-dictator’s senility seemed a ruse—or minimally a gross
exaggeration—while his real stripes (the phantasm of the slick Pinochet
in sunglasses) flashed up in a moment of truth. The interview was crucial
because it allowed the public to see that Pinochet’s political and natural
bodies were one and the same.
Parsing Pinochet’s two bodies, however, was vitally necessary for
political actors with historical links to pinochetismo. Only through
such a tactic could they address an unresolvable dilemma: how to reject
Pinochet-the-human-rights-violator without rejecting his neoliberal end-
game? These actors, of course, did not acknowledge the ethically dis-
turbing contradictions within their own logic. How could one Pinochet
exist without the other? To wish that Pinochet the torturer would sim-
ply fade away while legitimizing his “economic miracle” amounted to a
morally reprehensible shirking of responsibility.
Media Autopsies
Pinochet’s death resulted in a media autopsy that staged on the dicta-
tor’s corpse a revival of old animosities and competing narratives whose
primary interest was to garner ratings. Although polls indicated that
most Chileans no longer supported Pinochet, the media’s staging of
two Chiles—the Chile of a “nation of enemies” (a move that evoked

the memory of previous, divisive historical junctures such as the 1988
plebiscite)—made for good TV and juicy print fodder. Televisión
Nacional’s news broadcast 24 Horas took to the air proclaiming that
Pinochet’s funeral was a “historic” event, and gave a sense that people
were acutely aware that a battle over history would be waged live on
the air. Everyone seemed to have a prescripted sound-byte ready for the
camera. One of the most extreme pinochetista politicians, Iván Moreira,
from the ultra-right-wing UDI (Unión Democrática Independiente) told
a TVN reporter: “Our task from now on is to keep moving forward, but
we must also attempt for history to record the truth about the military
government” (24 Horas broadcast, December 11, 2006). In the media,
that “truth” was represented as a polarized confrontation between those
who poured champagne and celebrated the dictator’s death in Plaza
Italia, and those who kept vigil outside the Military Academy where
Pinochet’s body lay in state. Each side grittily chanted its fervent beliefs.
“¡Mientras Chile exista, habrá pinochetistas!” (As long as Chile exists,
there will be Pinochet supporters!) stood in stark contrast to cries of
“¡Asesino, asesino!” (Murderer, murderer!). The street became a bat-
tleground whose imagery (water cannons, tear gas) at times evoked the
dictatorship’s darkest days.
The iconography of Pinochet’s death circulated rapidly via new media
such as the Internet and YouTube. Images abounded and all zipped
through cyberspace at warp speed: Pinochet’s bloated face under glass
being revered by 60,000 visitors; a chilling photograph of three young
people giving their hero a neo-Nazi salute; a clown named “Tony”
draped in the American flag leaning over the coffin; photos of street
protests and acts of vandalism. The media allowed spectators to follow
Pinochet’s convalescence, death, wake, funeral, cremation, and burial
step by step and in such minute detail that the Pinochet “reality show”
generated the illusion of being there. Newspapers diagramed his heart
and bodily organs to document exactly how and when they ceased to
function. The funeral procession’s path and the program for his requiem
mass were meticulously detailed and their logic explained. In the streets,
people performed symbolically on the dictator’s body. In Valaparaíso’s
Plaza de la Victoria, for example, Pinochet was burned in effigy by his
detractors as his supporters held mass nearby. In Santiago, a burning
coffin was thrown into the Mapocho River in a vengeful evocation of
the dictatorship’s brutality. Francisco Cuadrado Prats’s transgressive act
of spitting on the dictator’s coffin, perhaps the most radical performance
around the cadaver, received ample media attention as well. 3
The battle for ratings raged. Several media outlets ran stories that
ranked which sources people were watching and reading most. Stark
contrasts in coverage were blatant. While the international press almost
universally condemned Pinochet for his crimes against humanity and his
financial dishonesty, Chile’s press, still largely conservative, proved more
Figure 10.1 Neo-Nazi salute to General Pinochet in The Clinic, December 14, 2006.
Photograph courtesy of The Clinic.
amenable to the dictatorship’s neoliberal project and ran many stories

that either portrayed Pinochet in a positive light or feigned to offer a “fair
and balanced” view that took into account the “pros” and “cons” of his
legacy. For example, conservative La Tercera, Chile’s most widely circu-
lated paper, ran two front section editorials that illustrated the paper’s
overarching ideological tenor. One article, “Una agenda que mire al
futuro,” announced prophetically that Pinochet’s death would open a
new era that would allow Chileans to set aside animosities and shift focus
toward the challenges of fomenting economic “progress.” The article
reproduced the well-worn, future-oriented discourse that had character-
ized the Concertación’s public rhetoric of reconciliation and consensus-
building throughout the transition. Another article, a Spanish translation
of a piece by Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review, admonished
readers that “Irak necesita un Pinochet”: “An Iraqui Pinochet would
impose order and steer the country toward liberalism, democracy, and
the rule of law.” Such an article, chosen from among hundreds writ-
ten abroad, confirmed the rightist media’s ideological slant insofar as it
defended Pinochet as “a successful former dictator.”4
Some of the most authentically critical perspectives on Pinochet

surfaced in the weekly satirical newspaper The Clinic, which ran two
special issues featuring articles by many prominent leftist intellectu-
als. The publication poked fun at the dictator’s made-up, pudgy-faced
cadaver, comparing it to Frankenstein, Liz Taylor, and Jabba the Hut.
The right-wing voices sprinkled throughout The Clinic threw into relief
the paradoxes of pinochetista discourse and were clearly undermined
by the paper’s overall ideological censure of the dictator. To that end,
Figure 10.2 Pinochet’s cadaver in The Clinic, December 14, 2006. Photograph courtesy
of The Clinic.
interviews with pro-Pinochet figures like journalist Hermógenes Pérez

de Arce or Providencia mayor and former DINA agent Cristián Labbé
were subverted by their semantic positioning among caricatures and ver-
bal portraits portraying Pinochet as the devil incarnate.
The Clinic’s coverage contrasted with other publications like the
magazine Ercilla, whose retrospective issue “Augusto Pinochet:
1915–2006” recounted the General’s life and works in sterile, “factual”
terms and played down human rights violations. Ercilla’s cover showed
images of Pinochet as a sweet young boy, a young Pinochet in his mili-
tary uniform, the grandfatherly Pinochet in civilian clothing, and a
family portrait of the Pinochet clan. Ultra-conservative El Mercurio,
for its part, ran articles that stressed Pinochet’s economic “moderniza-
tion” project and interviews with people like General Odlanier Mena
(Carvallo), former director of the CNI, or Pablo Rodríguez, Pinochet’s
attorney, who held that his client “never committed any crime and
that he [had] no legal responsibility” (Molina). Another El Mercurio
article chastised the popular classes for delinquency and looting in the
poblaciones (shanty towns), stressing that carabineros (the police) had
been wounded while using “necessary” force against the celebrators
(Lezaeta, Ávalos, and Águila). The article called for “orderliness” (a
concept clearly linked to pinochetismo) and implicitly connected the
anti-Pinochet factions to civil unrest and the violence of the bad old
days (Lezaeta, Ávalos, and Águila).
Such schizophrenic media coverage seemed to suggest that Chile
had become repolarized. But was this true? Alfredo Joignant offers
the opinion that the media’s polarizing coverage did not represent the
great bulk of Chileans for whom “Pinochet ceased to belong to the
present years ago” (158). Joignant argues that the 60,000 people who
stood in line to pay their respects and the thousands who celebrated
in the streets were relatively inconsequential numbers in a country of
16 million. But Joignant’s argument must be tempered by the obser-
vation that Pinochet’s death unleashed passions that are difficult to
quantify statistically. Despite his steep decline in popularity, the very
mention of Pinochet’s name continues to trigger emotions and memo-
ries, while his legacy still shapes much of Chile’s current political and
economic reality.
In sum, the media’s ratings-driven capitalization on sporadic pock-
ets of polarization cited a-critically (and in watered-down fashion)
the extreme (and very real) political passions of previous eras. In most
instances, the media failed to analyze the very juxtaposition of pro- and
anti-Pinochet images and discourses it proffered. Subsumed within neo-
liberal logic, large sectors of Chile’s media sought to seduce spectators
with an unreflexive collage of forms that insulted the victims by plac-
ing their voices on an even playing field with pro-pinochetista factions.
Each side was given equal air time in what amounted to little more than
a violent offense to memory.
Political Wakes
If the neoliberal-minded news media capitalized on the Manichean per-
formances around Pinochet’s cadaver to garner ratings while relativizing
antagonistic memory narratives to sell a debatable dramatization of a
repolarized Chile, the pillars of society—the government, the military,
the political parties, the Catholic Church—also seized on Pinochet’s
death to deploy his ruinous cadaver in a different way. Rather than
autopsy the body to exploit its tensions, in an ironic citation of the dic-
tatorship’s own practice of disappearing politically contentious corpses,
the pillars of society were more inclined to wake the body—to say a few
well-placed, parting words—so that it could be more expeditiously bur-
ied and, they hoped, forgotten.
For politicians, the battle over Pinochet’s cadaver began long before his
death. During the dictatorship, when Pinochet feared possible attempts
on his life, a funeral plan was devised, full of pomp and circumstance,
in case of assassination. Concerned with erecting a final resting place
befitting a hero and liberator, Pinochet charged his cousin and Minister
of Justice, Mónica Madariaga, with the task of constructing a family
mausoleum in the General Cemetery (Villagrán and Mendoza, 13–18).
After the dictatorship’s defeat, the Concertación governments devised
their own secret plans for the dictator’s funeral, keeping them under lock
and key in what came to be known as the “black folder.” When Ricardo
Lagos passed the presidential sash to Michelle Bachelet in March 2005,
he offered her the folder containing the protocols. Its contents have never
been made public. Aware of Pinochet’s political demise and the divisive-
ness of his legacy—while taking into account her own personal history
as an ex-detainee of Villa Grimaldi and the daughter of a general exe-
cuted by the regime—Bachelet made the bold decision in December 2006
to deny Pinochet an official state funeral. Following a series of meetings
and negotiations with army commander in chief Óscar Izurieta, Bachelet
extended the government’s condolences to the army, while simultaneously
informing Izurieta that Pinochet would not be buried as an “ex-presi-
dent,” nor would she participate personally in any ceremonies. 5
Naming Pinochet’s cadaver was crucial for Bachelet. The government
claimed that because Pinochet had not been elected by the people, he
would not be entitled to the honors customary for a statesman; instead, he
would be buried as an “ex-commander in chief,” strictly within military
protocols. The Pinochet family accepted this plan, having debated whether
to keep the funeral a private family affair or to give Pinochet a public fare-
well. Although they opted to go the public route, they ultimately respected
Pinochet’s own decision, made during his final years, to be cremated so as
to avoid grave looting and the desecration of his remains. Even in death,
Pinochet and his family knew his cadaver would stir passions. According
to their logic, the best thing for everyone would be for the ex-dictator to
turn into un desaparecido más (one more disappeared person).
The only government official to attend Pinochet’s funeral was

Defense Minister Vivianne Blanot, who was greeted by jeers and hiss-
ing upon her arrival at the Military Academy. Though most members of
Pinochet’s family rejected Blanot’s attendance, her presence was adver-
tised as a symbol of Chile’s “healthy” civilian-military relations. Blanot
made clear, however, that she thought Pinochet to be an “aberrant dicta-
tor” and kept her distance from the family, sitting next to Commander
in Chief Izurieta (Trajtemberg). Only Jaqueline Pinochet, the dictator’s
daughter, extended her the sign of peace.
Following the funeral, Blanot was forced to respond to two controver-
sial speeches offered by military representatives during mass. The first
was an unauthorized speech by Pinochet’s grandson, Augusto Pinochet
Molina, in which the 33-year-old officer broke protocol and lauded
his grandfather as “a man who in the thick of the Cold War defeated
the Marxist model.” He also accused the judges who had prosecuted
Pinochet of seeking personal fame and advancement rather than justice.
After these polemical remarks that, according to TVN’s reporters, “se
salieron de libreta” (deviated from the script), Blanot pressured the army
to discharge Augusto III immediately. It behooved the army to stress that
such bold remarks would not be tolerated among its rank and file, and
discharging Pinochet’s grandson was a way to prove that point.
Yet, a second controversial speech given by Óscar Izurieta affirmed
that the army was uncomfortably caught between its loyalty to Pinochet
and its fervent desire for modernization. After discursively passing the
buck to future historians who, free from political passions, would bet-
ter be able to examine Pinochet’s legacy “objectively,” Izurieta benignly
recapped Pinochet’s military biography, portraying him as a great public
servant who did his duty for his country. Measuring his words, Izurieta
avoided taking a direct political stand on the dictatorship, but commit-
ted a fatal blunder late in the speech when he reminded mourners that
the coup must always be contextualized within the “dialectics of the cold
war.” He added that “the situation of human rights constituted the most
controversial aspect of [Pinochet’s] rule,” thus reducing, by his use of the
word aspect, thousands of abhorrent human rights abuses to a worth-
while utilitarian price for achieving Chile’s present. He closed by not-
ing that the army’s position on human rights “is well known” and had
been “well-established by his two predecessors.” Consciously, Izurieta
avoided a direct restatement of the institution’s position. Soon thereafter
Blanot rushed to his defense, claiming that “we have to be careful not to
analyze every comma of a speech” and instead attend to its overall spirit
(Trajtemberg). But a careful reading of Izurieta’s words demonstrates
that the army, too, remains caught in a volatile juggling act around the
Pinochet issue. His intervention constituted an implicit validation of the
coup. Commentators speculated that Izurieta’s speech and missteps in
planning the funeral represented a serious step backward for the mili-
tary’s own “transition” and its much desired des-pinochetización.
Political organizations, too, issued official statements that spun rhe-

torical webs around the dictator’s cadaver and revealed present politi-
cal desires. While the Pinochet Foundation reiterated its tired defense
of the ex-dictator as a hero who “rescued Chile from the ruins and
transformed it into the country in which all Chileans today take pride,”
the Communist Party capitalized on the tone of fiesta popular elicited
by Pinochet’s demise, calling for full truth and justice and refusing to
accept his death as a punto final for human rights cases. The Socialist
Party’s “Public Declaration” wrote Pinochet into history as a “traitor,”
“a usurper of power,” and a “dishonorable man,” while supporting
President Bachelet’s decision not to grant Pinochet a state funeral. The
right-wing Alianza parties (Renovación Nacional and UDI, respectively)
issued the longest, most nuanced statements. While UDI, like the mili-
tary, discursively passed the buck, leaving “historical judgment” about
Pinochet to new generations that would ponder more dispassionately
the metaphorical “luces y sombras” (lights and shadows) of his legacy,
UDI politicians agreed wholeheartedly with their more moderate RN
counterparts that Pinochet did deserve a state funeral. RN’s declaration
spouted a page of bitter invective against the government for its handling
of the event. RN carefully avoided direct condemnation of the dicta-
torship’s human rights violations, holding that although the violations
cannot be justified, they also cannot be attributed solely to Pinochet or
his regime; without stating it overtly, they reminded the country that
the leftist revolutionary movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s
were also instigators of violence. Of all the political parties, though,
perhaps the centrist Christian Democrats made the most meaningful
statements around the cadaver. Known to have shifted their support
away from Popular Unity in 1973 and to have ratified the military coup,
the DC politicians, via their leader and spokesperson Soledad Alvear,
used Pinochet’s cadaver to inscribe an official mea culpa for the party’s
abandonment of Allende.
The Chilean Catholic Church is well known for its valiant defense of
human rights during the dictatorship. Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, a
revered figure for many, championed the struggles of victims and their
families from the earliest days of military rule. For that reason, when
Santiago’s Archbishop Francisco Javier Errázuriz lent legitimacy to
Pinochet’s legacy at the funeral, many Chileans accused the Church of
betraying Silva Henríquez’s memory and the work of many others who
helped defeat the dictatorship. Not only did Errázuriz visit Pinochet in
the hospital, he also agreed to say the dictator’s funeral mass (Azócar).
Such details are all the more pertinent if we recall that Pinochet’s funeral
was supposed to be a private army affair, theoretically disconnected from
the state; consequently, Errázuriz was under no obligation to acknowl-
edge Pinochet or his funeral, much less participate in it directly. To make
matters worse, during his homily, the archbishop thanked God for the
outstanding qualities he bestowed on Pinochet and gave thanks for “all
the good [Pinochet] did for our fatherland.” “We know,” the cardinal
said, “that the higher the authority, the more his virtues and his errors
shine forth” (Errázuriz in López). In 1998, when Pinochet was detained
in London, Errázuriz lobbied the Vatican to pressure Great Britain for
his return to Chile. Eight years later, now archbishop, he euphemistically
insinuated (with similar logic to RN and UDI) that Pinochet’s errors
(i.e., human rights violations) must be balanced against his virtues (i.e.,
neoliberal reforms). Although Errázuriz affirmed that God would be
Pinochet’s judge, he took comfort in the fact that the dictator was now
“looking at God’s face.”
Indeed, Pinochet was a contentious phantasm for the Catholic Church
in 2006. If it is true that the Church played a prominent role in the
human rights struggles of the 1980s, the transition to democracy saw
a fractioning and, in some cases, an avoidance of memory within the
institution; while its most conservative factions tended to silence the past
in the interest of “national reconciliation” and depoliticizing the institu-
tion, its so-called liberationist current was more apt to condemn the dic-
tatorship publicly and laud the Church’s role in the anti-Pinochet fight
(Cruz, 145–57). Errázuriz belongs to the “reconciliatory” faction for
whom Pinochet’s ghost is an anvil-like weight at odds with the Church’s
profound desire to “modernize” for the new millennium. By playing his
discourse both ways—that is, by speaking of Pinochet’s “errors” and
“virtues”—Errázuriz was trying to appeal to the broadest possible pub-
lic and curb the political charge of his words. His words, nonetheless,
were eminently political. We must not forget that Errázuriz’s desire to
leave the judgment of Pinochet to “history”—echoed by so many other
political actors and commentators—is, in and of itself, a historical (and
political) judgment.
Postmortem
When Pinochet died, his body was whisked from the Military Hospital
to the Military Academy at one o’clock in the morning to avoid creating
a scene. TVN reported that the route was rehearsed and secured so that
the dictator’s remains would arrive at their destination expeditiously and
unharmed. Until the helicopter landed at the Parque del Mar cemetery
near Viña del Mar, neither the military nor the family revealed where
the body would be cremated or the ashes buried. A comical interview
published in The Clinic, entitled “I Cremated Pinochet,” claimed that
“Leandro,” a pseudonym for the cemetery employee who incinerated
the body, was the only eyewitness to see Pinochet disintegrate at 750
degrees Celsius. His affirmation assured the nation that the dictator was
really gone. Leandro astutely observed that after death a body becomes
nothing more than an “object, inorganic material” (Hernández, 9). But
Pinochet’s cadaver, as we have seen, was anything but inert matter.
Discussions of building a mausoleum, constructing monuments, placing

a bust in La Moneda, or naming Santiago streets after him (Hite and
Loveluck) remain pending issues for a nation still uneasy over how to
write the dictator’s ruins.
The drama over Pinochet’s cadaver continues even beyond his death.
On July 3, 2008, visual artist Gonzalo Díaz cried censorship when his
art installation, “Poetry and Judgment,” was canceled by its sponsor,
the Gasco Foundation, one of Chile’s major companies and, one might
argue, a symbol of the reigning neoliberal economic order. When Díaz
decided to include an image of Pinochet’s cadaver, his illustrious spon-
sor no longer considered his material appropriate for the prestigious
Sala Gasco de Arte Contemporáneo. Gasco explained as follows: “We
avoid welcoming art shows that involve figures—dead or alive, public
or private—who may be controversial” (Cited in Gastine). How curi-
ous that a full year-and-a-half after Pinochet’s death Gasco decided that
his cadaver was “too controversial” for Chileans to see. The anecdote
is a chilling reflection of Chile’s post-Pinochet reality. For Díaz (and
many others), Pinochet’s cadaver is what Chile needs to acknowledge,
address, debate, and rectify; for Gasco (and others entrenched in neolib-
eral logic), it must stay forgotten, an unvisited ruin, so as not to disrupt
a fragile present.
The stark truth of Chile today is that even if most Chileans have turned
their backs on Pinochet the man, fewer (including some “leftists”) have
rejected the systemic reforms for which he stood. Some of today’s most
hotly contested political debates are inextricably tied to the dictator’s
economic obra. A binomial electoral system that excludes underrepre-
sented groups, a nondemocratic constitution that has only been partially
reformed, sporadic repression against students and indigenous people,
an educational system that benefits the rich and discriminates against
the poor, enormous economic disparities, insufficient justice and truth:
these are the ruins—or, better put, the ruin—of Pinochet that a single
disappeared corpse cannot assuage. Chile will only leave its past behind
when these issues are seriously addressed and solutions reached.
Notes
1. Allende’s burial on a remote family plot in Viña del Mar is a salient case of how
the Pinochet regime enacted a body politics that sought to inter the martyred
president’s memory (Del Campo, 99–159; Navia, 157; Wilde 2008, 134–136). It
was only with the return to democracy that the socialist president’s remains were
reincorporated into the body politic with a symbolic and ceremonious burial.
2. For an excellent analysis of the changing iconography of Pinochet’s persona, see
Oquendo-Villar. For other reflections on Pinochet’s death, see also Oquendo-
Villar 2007 and Joignant 2007.
3. Francisco Cuadrado Prats, an artist, is the grandson of “constitutionalist” gen-
eral Carlos Prats, who was killed in a car bombing carried out by DINA agents
in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974.
4. I borrow the term from Jon Lee Anderson (1998): “Augusto Pinochet, all quib-
bling about definitions aside, is the rarest of creatures, a successful former dicta-
tor.” I thank Carmen Oquendo-Villar for calling my attention to this quote.
5. Bachelet’s own position on Pinochet’s death sounded like a typical, forward-
looking concertacionista memory script. In response to the violence, celebration,
and mourning in the streets, Bachelet commented that “we are seeing expressions
of division that at times recall the sad episodes that Chile overcame” (Cited in
Miranda). Bachelet’s use of the past tense—“overcame”—indicated her political
wish to make those divisions a thing of the past. She cautiously added, however,
that she did not feel that Pinochet’s death signaled the beginning of a “new era”
(“Bachelet: Muerte de Pinochet . . .”).
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Gastine, Alice. “Award-Winning Chilean Artist Claims Censorship.” Santiago
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Goldberg, Jonah. “Irak necesita un Pinochet.” La Tercera, December 17, 2006.
Hernández, Daniela. “Quemador N.N. del cementerio Parque del Mar: ‘Yo cremé
a Pinochet.’ ” The Clinic, December 21, 2006.
Hite, Katherine, and Eliana Loveluck. “No Memorials for Pinochet.” Foreign Policy
in Focus online. http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3878.
Huneeus, Carlos. Chile, un país dividido: la actualidad del pasado. Santiago:
Catalonia, 2003.
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del ex CJE, CGL Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. Public discourse. December 12,
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Johnson, Lyman L., ed. Body Politics: Death, Dismemberment, and Memory in
Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004.
Joignant, Alfredo. Un día distinto: memorias festivas y batallas conmemora-
tivas en torno al 11 de septiembre en Chile, 1974–2006. Santiago: Editorial
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La Tercera. “68% rechaza las celebraciones por la muerte de Augusto Pinochet.”

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Chapter 11
Spatial Truth and Reconciliation:
Peru, 2003–2004
Jill Lane
In present-day Peru, remembering is no simple act. From 1990 to 2000,

the country suffered a period of brutal civil violence that claimed more
than 69,000 lives. Known to many as “manchay tiempo”—a Quechua/
Spanish hybrid phrase meaning “the time of fear”—this period was
shaped by conflict between the Marxist-Maoist group Sendero Luminoso
(Shining Path), led by Abimael Guzmán, and the military, ultimately led
by the president-turned-dictator, Alberto Fujimori. In the aftermath of
such violence, creating civic and social spaces in which to engage memo-
ries of national horror has been the ongoing objective of artists, intel-
lectuals, and community leaders. These efforts have emerged alongside
the work of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), whose
Final Report was released in August 2003. One of the report’s primary
findings was that Peruvians had not only failed to remember fully this
experience of atrocity, but that for a privileged majority, “not even the
memory of what occurred exists” (Informe; my emphasis). Previous esti-
mates of the loss of life, the TRC found, were less than half the real fig-
ure. Salomón Lerner, President of the Commission, asked, “What does it
say about our political community now that we know that 35,000 more
of our brothers are gone, without anyone missing them?” (Lerner; my
emphasis).1 Remembering, then, takes on a particular meaning in this
context: it is about allowing the traumatic memory of the victims into the
present so that others can create memories of what they did not know in
the first place. Lerner concluded: “In a country such as ours, combating
forgetting is a powerful form of practicing justice” (Informe, 4).
Here I will examine two important projects that use material remains
of the nation’s past to create new strategies against forgetting and to fos-
ter memory as a practice of renewed citizenship and social justice. The
136 Jill Lane
first project is the photo exhibit Yuyanapaq: para recordar (the Quechua
and Spanish terms for “for remembering,” respectively), created as part
of the TRC in 2003 and in which photographs of the conflict were staged
in the space of a half-ruined home. The second is a theater production by
Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, entitled Sin título: técnica mixta (2004),
which used material fragments of the past to create an environment of
memory that responded to the TRC Report and its reception. Using
these two works, I explore the production of social memory as explicitly
embodied and spatial practices, ones in which embodied performance
negotiates and potentially alters the ways in which power, identity, and
difference are spatially distributed. Both productions, as we will see, rely
on environmental staging for moving audiences through the visual and
textual remains of Peru’s internal violence to create a viable memory of
and political agency toward the atrocities suffered by the nation, par-
ticularly Peru’s indigenous populations.
Exploring performance in relation to truth commissions and other
human rights practices, I join others in asking how embodied culture—
theater or performance—might create the agency through which human
rights and other political claims would be advanced. 2 These questions
lead us to the complex terrain of embodied rights, a term I borrow from
gender and human rights theorist Jacqueline Bhabha. Focusing on refugee
asylum cases that directly involve sexuality or gender persecution, Bhabha
explores ways in which gender-based claims are often at odds with the
doctrine of universal human rights. “The common dignity supposedly
inherent in all human beings is, it emerges, differentially coded” through
the systems of adjudication that arbitrate asylum cases (Bhabha, 18).
Contexts of explicitly gendered persecution—restrictions on sexuality or
reproduction—illuminate those differentials and belie the universality of
human rights, revealing its underlying gendered dimension. Embodied
rights suggest a human rights practice that acknowledges the conflicted
diversity of bodies and their public claims.
I link this perspective to the well-known critique within contemporary
anthropology and cognate fields of the material production of space. In
their influential 1992 essay, “Beyond ‘Culture,’ ” Akhil Gupta and James
Ferguson argue that space has been a presumed neutral grid on which
“cultural difference, historical memory, and societal organization” are
inscribed (7). Thus, space is a central organizing principle of the social
sciences—but also of studies of literature, theater, and performance—
even as it disappears from analytical view. Like the idea of universal
rights, applied only in theory uniformly across diverse bodies, space is
similarly imagined as empty, homogenous, and free of power differen-
tials. What happens in space, in turn, is understood primarily through
an imaginary of difference and rupture. Gupta and Ferguson write,
Representations of space . . . are remarkably dependent on images of break,

rupture, and disjunction. The distinctiveness of societies, nations, and
Spatial Truth and Reconciliation: Peru 137
cultures is based upon a seemingly unproblematic division of space, on

the fact that they occupy “naturally” discontinuous spaces. The premise
of discontinuity forms the starting point from which to theorize contact,
conflict, and contradiction between cultures and societies. (6)
Gupta and Ferguson suggest, then, that this idea of space is an ideo-
logical position that allows, in their terms, “the power of topography to
conceal the topography of power” (8).
In Peru, national space has long been imagined as a geographical
container for contiguous but separate regional ethnic identities, shaded
on a map as the indigenous Andes of Quechua and Aymara speakers,
the indigenous Amazon (primarily Ashaninka), and the coastal, urban
region of white, European-descended Lima, in a process “whereby eth-
nicity is naturalized as geography” (Cánepa Koch, 19). Many have drawn
on such maps to illustrate and explain the deep ethnic and social divi-
sions that have riven Peru and that mark a failure of integration on the
geographic, social, and national levels. These divisions were, indeed, the
axis on which the internal war turned to such fatal effect. The social,
ethnic, and political divisions by which Peru has so long lived meant—in
this spatial imaginary—that the relatively wealthier, European-derived,
and largely white populace of the country’s coastal capital, Lima, lived
through those horrible years set apart from the violence of the Andes, and
thus without appreciation for their deep and disproportionate effect on
indigenous communities. Lima did not take serious notice of what was
happening in the Andes until violence crossed into their space, literally
crossing the spatial line that divided them. Only then—and far too late—
did limeños begin to recognize and address the severity of the crisis.
One way to state the TRC’s goals—and those of the exhibit and
play to which I now turn—is that they are all engaged in a project of
national integration: their goal is, and remains, to bridge the differences
that divide Peru’s peoples, finding ways to better cross, suture, and heal
divides whose consequences were so painfully revealed through this
traumatic history. But to put it this way is again to represent social space
as a landscape of “natural” fragmentation and division. Instead, I want
to look at how these productions, which rely so much on their public’s
embodied participation, can illuminate and engage the underlying spatial
connections among people: the lines that separate Lima and Ayacucho
were produced by a long history of unequal power between white Lima
and the indigenous Andes; they are not geographic, but ideological, and
they produced this spatial mapping, rather than being a product of it.
The fact that limeños could not “see” Ayacucho is not an unfortunate
fact of geography, but the privilege of a system of spatialized power that
their own political elite created and has long maintained. This vantage
allows for an ideological critique not only of the different perpetrators
of the violence, but also a critical assessment of the project of national
integration proposed as its cure.
138 Jill Lane
Yuyanapaq: para recordar

As part of its two year process of investigation, the TRC gathered a
vast photographic archive to “document the sad legacy of the era of
fear,” culled from public and private collections of newspapers, the
army, police, churches, human rights organizations, photographers, and
affected families. From this 1,700-image bank, curators Mayu Mohanna
and Nancy Chappell were asked to create an exhibit to accompany the
Commission’s work. The result was Yuyanapaq, which featured 200
photographs organized around a series of key events or focus areas
studied by the Commission. A smaller version of the exhibit traveled
throughout the country before and after the presentation of the Final
Report and was inaugurated (like the Final Report) in Ayacucho as a
gesture that acknowledged and aimed to redress symbolically the obliv-
ion and neglect to which that region had been relegated throughout the
war. The larger exhibit was installed in a semirestored colonial estate
home in Lima where it remained through March 2005.
In Lima, unlike Ayacucho, the exhibit was organized and staged
explicitly to enable visitors to remember events for which the memory—
as Lerner said—did not yet exist. How was this possible? The photo-
graphic itinerary mapped a relation to time by marking key events from
1980 to 2000 and a relation to space by featuring key geographic sites,
including the southern Andes, the Amazon, and Lima. This mapping
repeatedly interpolated the viewer as a member of the national body
politic: these are the unevenly remembered memories of the nation, now
lived through the bodies and experience of the viewers. The iconic image
used on the exhibit’s publicity and as the cover of its companion catalog
enacts the presentational logic of the exhibit as a whole. In Vera Lenz’s
1984 photograph entitled “Denuncia,” we see the sorely weathered,
dark hands of a woman cupped around a tiny black and white identity
card photograph of her disappeared husband. The hands seem to offer
up the photograph, and all the loss and searching pain it carries, to us,
the viewers on the other side of the camera. The gesture is at once a
testimony of lives lived and lost, a memorial to those whose deaths were
never honored, and a tenuous offering toward a future reconciliation. As
a photograph of a photograph, it captures the complicated role that pho-
tography is here called upon to perform. As is the case with other uses of
identity card photos in other political struggles on behalf of the “disap-
peared,” the ID photo was, presumably, created at the state’s behest for
reasons of bureaucratic control; that same photo, now probably the only
remaining evidence of the missing man’s existence, is presented back
to the state as a demand for justice when the state either perpetrates or
ignores his disappearance. Lentz’s image amplifies the woman’s denun-
cia by amplifying her tiny photo, even as it amplifies her loss and its lack
of redress. The photo did not help her find her missing man in 1984. Will
this new photograph help her now?
The TRC expressed no doubts about photography’s persuasive power.

At the exhibit’s opening, Salomón Lerner championed this “visual leg-
acy,” saying: “Images do not change, but the eyes that see them do”
(“Legado Visual”). Within the discourse of truth and reconciliation, the
photographs are enlisted to anchor the truth in the realm of the visual,
offering scenes to which all viewers—past, present, and future—can
become witnesses. Questioning any assumption of the transparent access
to truth of these or any photographs, I prefer to analyze how they were
staged, how they were called upon to make meaning within the exhibit.
That staging was an exquisite (if not unproblematic) dramaturgy that
called on the public to be moved in a precise way: literally to move on
a journey through time and space, and metaphorically to move firmly
into a position of national subjectivity. If the eyes that view these pho-
tographs are changed, it is less because of any inherent or lasting truth
within the photos than because of an embodied relation to the itinerary
they chart within this specific space.
Housed in a dilapidated estate home that was only partially restored
to accommodate the exhibit, Yuyanapaq stages the photographs in what
is, literally, a ruin from Peru’s past: photographs adorn walls without
ceilings; they hang above partially tiled, sand-covered floors; or some-
times they take the place of missing walls or windows. One of the first
images the public encounters, for example, is enlarged to cover the entire
wall of a room otherwise missing a floor and complete ceiling: it pictures
a man carefully rolling up a rescued portrait of then-elected-President
Fernando Belaúnde in the ruins of the Town Hall of Vilcashuman,
Ayacucho, in August 1982 after an attack by Shining Path. The image
captures the symbolic end of civil society: the man rolls up the presi-
dent’s image as the social infrastructure that elected him comes under
siege. The man seems to mourn the “fallen” president as he folds away
his image, but at the same time, his action—carefully retrieving the
image from the rubble—belies a continued commitment to safeguard
civil society in the face of brutal, arbitrary violence. Placed at the begin-
ning of the exhibit, the ruins of the 1982 Ayacucho Town Hall are
extended visually and architecturally into the present, as the crumbling
walls of the image blend into the museum’s crumbled wall, as the debris
under the man’s feet meets the dirt floor, and as the natural light falling
through the missing ceiling echoes the same kind of light falling onto
the bent man cast from a different shelled ceiling over 20 years earlier.
Spectators are challenged by such dramaturgy to position themselves in
relation to the images and the history they document: like the man in
the image before them, they too stand in a ruined building, filled with
related debris—the photographs—created by acts of violence; they too
will have to choose whether and what to salvage from the ruins.
The curators provided a map of the house’s 27 rooms that plots
an ideal itinerary through it, one that moves chronologically through
time and marks most of the “paradigmatic” cases studied by the
140 Jill Lane
Figure 11.1 Yuyanapaq: para recordar (Lima, Peru, 2004). Photograph courtesy of Jill
Lane.
Commission—events or issues deemed consequential to the unfolding

of the violence. Rooms are devoted, for example, to the “Uchuraccay
Case” from 1983, the highly publicized assassination of eight journal-
ists at the hands of Uchuraccay residents; or the later “Killing in Barrios
Altos,” in which the massacre of 15 civilians in Lima was attributed to
a state-sanctioned death squad, “La Colina.” These events are framed
by intervening rooms devoted to the steady rise of the conflict: “The
Tragedy in Ayacucho,” “The Unfolding of the Violence,” and “Extreme
Crisis.” Other rooms focus on key players—perpetrators or victims—
including the “widows,” “orphans,” and “rondas,” or civilian defense
squads, along with the key sites in which the violence developed, such
as prisons that quickly became senderista strongholds. The plot mounts
an unrelenting case against Sendero Luminoso and (in the exhibit’s lan-
guage) the “excesses” of the military and paramilitary response. In the
process, history is spatialized and given visual iconicity.
Yet the presentation itself is limpid, minimalist, and remarkably
intimate. Sketched in a palette of grays, black, and white, and relying
primarily on an archive of previously unpublished documentary-style
black and white photos, the images have formal consistency even as they
depict once mutually exclusive realities: black-clad, veiled widows flung
across their military husbands’ shining black coffins echo the same stark
contrast of color found in images of indigenous women mourning their

own dead. In the midst of these chiaroscuro portraits of pain, images of
white-gray gauze reappear throughout as an index between death and
cure. On one hand we see, for example, an unidentified corpse wrapped
in gauze stretched out before a woman who is scouring the morgue look-
ing for her husband. On the other, we see an image in which a gauze ban-
dage covers half the face of a man who has survived a gruesome machete
attack. Where the first bandage seals the victim’s fate, consigning him to
the anonymity of those found in mass graves, the second offers a prom-
ise of healing. The curators used thin white linen as curtains or dividers
throughout the house, repeating this formal image to echo the gesture of
both pain and healing.
The space of the half-ruined home becomes a correlative for the
nation—no longer an imaginary neatly divided into three regions (the
urban coast, the Amazon jungle, and the mountain Andes), as we might
imagine a museum of Peruvian natural or ethnic history to be. No. Here
harrowing photographs are hung on the deteriorating walls of a build-
ing caught in stasis between dilapidation and renewal. From reviews
and published comments, we see that this ruinous house was under-
stood by many as an allegory for the nation: Peru, like this home, needs
reconstruction, needs to become “whole” again. Those reviews, which
may reflect the experience of many viewers, accept the basic premise
that an encounter with these images is a step toward that reconstruction
(Chappell). This view assumes that the missing roof or tiles represent the
damage done to the house/nation; these are gaps that may be filled by
sharing the truth, the memory, of the nation’s past.
Yet I find it productive to read those “gaps” as sites of connection,
rather than rupture, in the production of national space: the inconsistently
missing floors, walls, and windows cast Peru as an inconsistently prac-
ticed place where the differential space that connects the different Perus
might be made visible. Moving through the space of the ruined home
is, yes, a movement toward creating a visceral and cumulative memory
archive. At the same time, it enables recognition and mourning for the
memories that were not there: each missing wall or floor seems to frame
the absent memories of so many limeños. Such a rehearsal may prompt
Lima spectators to be transformed from historically and spatially dis-
tant bystanders—with all the complicity in the violence such distance
implies—into a present public: subjects do not so much learn what
“really” happened, as recognize and assume their not-knowing. Perhaps
the crumbling house is an allegory less of an enduring nation whose
damage must be repaired than of a broken national project. A question
written in the guestbook by a visitor, Anita, was echoed by many other
visitors as well: “After all this, I ask myself: where was I living all this
time?” Apparently Peru is not the place she thought it was; the experi-
ence has shaken her confidence in the usual criteria and coordinates we
use to know where and who “we” are. While, yes, the journey through
142 Jill Lane
the broken house may invite hopeful wishes for reconstruction, it also
enacts, perhaps despite itself, the ruin of Peru as a particular national
idea, project, and place.
Sin título: técnica mixta

The well-known Peruvian theatre company Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani
has spent its more than 30-year history exploring performance as a
site for imagining national integration and national memory. Its name,
Yuyachkani, shares with Yuyanapaq the Quechua verb yuya, meaning
“remember”: both use the Quechua term to envision a national frame
that includes indigenous ways of being and knowing. In 2004, they cre-
ated Sin título: técnica mixta, a performance intended to reflect on the
crisis of social memory revealed by the TRC’s Final Report.
Like most of Yuyachkani’s work, the piece was created collectively
under the direction of Miguel Rubio, without a preexisting script or
score. They began, recounts Rubio, with an empty room. It was liter-
ally the empty room of their performance space, which was emptied
of everything, including the seating risers that normally occupy half of
it. Even the customary relation between audience and stage was up for
revision. Metaphorically, it became a kind of repository: the actors were
asked to bring objects, images, and textual artifacts from Peru’s his-
tory into the room, anything that seemed compelling to them for think-
ing about national memory. The objects were many and varied: clothes,
historical documents, little boxes, a glass case with old books, photo-
graphs, mannequins, uniforms, school textbooks, posters, flags, and so
on. The imaginative space of Sin título, then, is the museum-before-the-
museum, a space in which pieces and shards of memory exist before they
become memorialized or interpolated into national space or national
narrative. These are the fragments of memory that—like that snapshot
tenderly cupped in the woman’s hands—beg to be seen and held for
future safekeeping.
Working with these objects, at first Yuyachkani tried to construct a
story, but the director confesses that the process was more difficult than
expected: “All our [usual] efforts to create a ‘story’ were useless; neither
the ones we imagined nor those we tried worked.” Apparently, they were
challenged by the same condition they aimed to analyze: the seeming
difficulty faced by the Peruvian body politic in creating and sustaining
a coherent national memory in the first place. “All that was left,” says
Rubio, “was to confront the chaos that we did not want to see, but that
lay before us, this vortex caused by the proliferation of different materi-
als” (165; my translation). They rejected a narrative line, and began to
function instead like museum curators, trying to figure out how their
materials might be meaningfully arranged for public consumption. By
what criteria should they be classified? One signature of the company is
its detailed work with objects and masks; in this case, its improvisations
with different materials pushed Yuyachkani to find new kinds of con-
nections among the objects, connections that could defy the ideological
meanings with which they were otherwise imbued and that could be
expressed through other registers of meaning, particularly through the
corporeal, material, and visual.
In its final form, the performance was called an “InstalAcción,”
a cross between installation and theater that dramatized the relation
between objects and movement and favored “folios” of performance
action over dramatic narrative. These folios, which focus on key histor-
ical moments (the War of the Pacific) or places (Ayacucho), do not tell a
chronological or causal tale, nor are they presented sequentially. Instead,
each folio focuses on a recurrent issue that seems both constitutive and
constant in the struggle for national cohesion. These are interwoven
over the course of the performance. The effect is a dizzying encounter
with the past in the present, a recognition that the present in many ways
repeats patterns and practices of the past. Citations, images, and objects
are presented in ways that challenge narratives we might find in official
textbook histories. They are recollected using an alternative temporal
and spatial logic.
For the spectator, the experience of entering the space of Sin título is
that of entering a disorganized museum: hundreds of images, objects,
puppets, and live bodies are arranged, seemingly at random, around the
space. The museum frame is reinforced by the lack of seating one finds
at theater events; but here, unlike in Yuyanapaq, there is no clear itiner-
ary or map for moving from one installation to the next, nor are there
explanatory notations on the wall as in a museum. Instead, fragments
of 120 years of history are evoked throughout the space, animated, and
juxtaposed through the ensuing action. Large platforms on wheels move
the different episodes across the space, also causing the audience to move
throughout the performance.
In the relation among movement, objects, and the histories they
evoke, the audience finds scattered meanings, critique, and openings for
alternative renderings and endings to the history that is told. Sin título is
certainly not the first production to use environmental theater to allow
audiences to engage more fully with the subject or story portrayed. But
the underlying proposition is striking: the group suggests that by mov-
ing in this particular “empty” space, the spectators’ memories will be
stimulated. Memory is treated like an atrophied muscle that needs a
particular exercise to be strengthened. Rubio comments, “[We created]
something like a memorial with all the people and objects that arrived,
[ . . . ] as a kind of evidence, as testimony, as necessary information, ulti-
mately as an image that activates memory at the same time that it invites
spectators to move and choose a point of view, to decide what to look at,
what to hear, or where to stop” (162–63). Like the long journey through
the ruined home of Yuyanapaq, the performance of Sin título becomes
144 Jill Lane
Figure 11.2 A scene from “Sin título,” by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Peru). Photograph
courtesy of Elsa Estremadoyo.
a space of national memory: not a place to keep memories or even house

them, but a place for embodied engagement with the spatial character
of memory itself. Will you choose a point of view that allows you to see
and remember? Will you move past and look beyond the boundaries—
geographic, racial, linguistic—that kept you from knowing the reality of
political atrocity?
As with Yuyanapaq, the frame through which memory will emerge—
along with any claims for justice and change staked on that memory—is
insistently national. In the final, breathtaking image, we watch as what
seemed to be a heap of rags is pulled into the air to reveal an enormous,
20-foot-high Peruvian flag, made entirely of knotted cloth fragments.
Like the ruined home of Yuyanapaq, the image is ambivalent. The ele-
vating rise of the accompanying music suggests that this is intended as a
hopeful symbol of the nation, rising from its devastation upward, even
with its evident scars and pain. Yet, perhaps in spite of itself, that flag
also seems to represent what the nation now may be: rags, a ruin, an
idea held together by a few loose knots. Even as Sin título invites audi-
ences to find and situate themselves as Peruvians (for, indeed, they are
the ones who will recognize and reorder this assemblage of objects, peo-
ples, and meanings), the walk through this museum-before-the-museum
seems to call into question the viability of that very interpolation. Both
Yuyanapaq: para recordar and Sin título ask spectators to become aware
of their lived positions in relation to the histories embodied in a material
archive of photographs, texts, or objects; both ask limeños in particu-

lar—those who never imagined or never cared to imagine the horror
that had been unleashed on their brothers and sisters in the Andes—to
explore new positions, new ways of placing themselves, literally and
metaphorically, that would allow them to accept the violence and their
own failure to act as memories of their own.
Notes
1. All translations are mine.
2. See Bharucha, Foster, Taylor, and Sommer.
Select Bibliography
Bhabha, Jacqueline. “Embodied Rights: Gender Persecution, State Sovereignty, and
Refugees.” Public Culture: Bulletin of the Project for Transnational Cultural
Studies 9, no. 1 (1996): 3–32.
Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in
an Age of Globalization. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
Cánepa Koch, Gisela. “Geopolitics and Geopoetics of Identity: Migration, Ethnicity,
and Place in the Peruvian Imaginary.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003.
Chappell, Nancy, and Mayu Mohanna. “Yuyanapaq: In Order to Remember.”
Aperture 183 (Summer 2006): 54–63.
Foster, Susan. “Choreographies of Protest.” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (2003):
395–412.
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the
Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 6–23.
Informe Final. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación. http://www.cverdad.org.
pe/ifinal/index.php.
“El legado visual.” http://www.cverdad.org.pe/apublicas/p-fotografico/index.php.
Lerner Febres, Salomón. “Discurso de presentación del Informe Final de la Comisión
de la Verdad y Reconciliación.” http://www.cverdad.org.pe/informacion/discursos/
en_ceremonias05.php.
Rubio, Miguel. El cuerpo ausente (performance política). Lima: Didi de Arteta,
2006.
Sommer, Doris. Cultural Agency in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006.
Taylor, Diana. “Performance and/as History.” TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 1
(Spring 2006): 67–86.
Yuyanapaq=Para recordar: relato visual del conflicto armado interno en el Perú,
1980–2000. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2003.
Chapter 12
“Words of the Dead”: Ruins, Resistance, and
Reconstruction in Ayacucho
Leslie Bayers
The landscape of Ayacucho, Peru is scattered with reminders of violent

encounters, including the ruins of pre-Hispanic cultures, monuments
to the decisive independence era Battle of Ayacucho, and vestiges of the
recent civil war between the Shining Path and government forces. The
very designation Ayacucho, which descends from Quechua and means
“corner of the dead,” seems emblematic of a haunted terrain (García,
39). Marcial Molina Richter’s La palabra de los muertos o Ayacucho
hora nona (1991), a visuo-verbal poetic text that evokes both vanguard
formal experimentation and Andean alternatives to Western writing, viv-
idly depicts the devastation wrought by war.1 At the same time, this work
resists a discourse of ruin, countering dehumanizing projections of a shat-
tered, terror-beset Ayacucho with empowering portrayals of vibrant and
resilient communities. Molina’s semantic and typographic innovations
simultaneously create and subvert images of ruin, figuratively recon-
structing not only an alternative representation of Ayacucho, but also the
voices of ghosts rendered silent by physical and rhetorical violence.
The 41-page tripartite work, in which two sections of poetry frame a
central poetic-prose segment, starts out resembling conventional verse.
The orderly form of the first stanza accentuates the poetic speaker’s
insistence that all is well in Ayacucho:
Aquí nada ha pasado

nadie ha venido
ninguno se ha ido
menos nadie ha muerto. 2
(Here nothing has happened / nobody has come / no one has gone / nor has any-
one died.) (7)3
148 Leslie Bayers
At the time of the book’s publication, however, Ayacucho was the epicen-
ter of what the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
recognized in 2003 as “the most intense, extensive, and prolonged epi-
sode of violence in the entire history of the Republic” (TRC, 2003). Still,
the second stanza paints a picture of colonial serenity:
Nuestras casas solariegas

exhalan el mismo aroma colonial
nuestros campanarios dormitan en sus torres
nuestras 33 iglesias tienen el mismo icono
y nuestras calles permanecen adoquinadas
con las seculares piedras de Huamanga.
(Our ancestral homes / exhale the same colonial aroma / our belfries sleep in
their towers / our 33 churches have the same icon / and our streets remain paved /
with the secular stones of Huamanga.) (7)
Though the poetic voice suggests collective ownership (repeating “our”)

of an unchanged, tranquil region, insinuations of tension in these lines,
not to mention the historical record, belie this facade. The modern-day
department of Ayacucho has been the sight of several historic military
encounters, from pre-Hispanic Wari and Inca occupations to subse-
quent Spanish, independence, guerilla, and government campaigns. The
supplanting of names for what is now the department’s capital city—
christened “San Juan de la Frontera de Huamanga” by conquistadores
but officially renamed “Ayacucho” by Simón Bolívar after the nearby
defeat of the colonial regime—bespeaks recurring shifts in political
power (González Carré, Gutiérrez, and Ceruti, 1995, 13–14).4 To this
day, however, locals call the city “Huamanga,” an aboriginal designa-
tion whose usage in these lines hints at popular resistance to official
dictates (González Carré and Carrasco Cavero, 13).
The description of the city’s streets, paved with “the secular stones of
Huamanga,” also suggests both hegemony and resistance in Ayacucho.
The phrase evokes indigenous masonry and the colonial structures
that subsumed it, yet the specific modifier “secular” suggests underly-
ing opposition to the “33 churches”—symbolic of Catholic authority—
mentioned by the speaker (7). 5 The phrase also alludes to statuettes
sculpted in local alabaster known as piedra de Huamanga (stone of
Huamanga), both an established regional art form and contemporary
souvenir product. Though in colonial times piedra de Huamanga was
exploited primarily to reproduce Catholic imagery, the sculptures pro-
gressively took on secular motifs as well (Majluf and Wuffarden, 17).
While religious, secular, commercial, and artistic ends varyingly inspire
piedra de Huamanga production today, Molina’s emphasis on “secular”
stones suggests a certain decolonizing of local artistry.
Yet hints of resistance remain subdued as orderly stanzas boast of
Ayacucho’s immaculate streets, abundant marketplaces, enchanting
Ruins, Resistance, and Reconstruction in Ayacucho 149
music, and robust children. By the book’s second page, however, this pic-
turesque scene begins to crumble; though the poetic voice continues to
protest that “nothing has happened” and “no one has died,” the stanzas
break down into disjointed phrases. Furthermore, the negations of vio-
lence become excruciatingly detailed and thus increasingly suspect. One
fragment, for example, insists that the mothers of Huamanga are “crazy
with happiness” since their children are safe and sound, but indirectly
reveals the dismemberment of innocent bodies:
Y no saben cómo dejar de ser felices

porque sus hijos siempre están con ellas
Nunca se desaparecen
ni nadie los tortura
menos los descuartizan,
primero los dedos,
las manos después
los brazos luego
seguidamente las piernas
la lengua
las orejas
y finalmente la cabeza,
ni sus cuerpos se comen las alimañas de Purakuti
(And they don’t know how to stop being happy / because their children are
always with them / they never disappear / nor does anyone torture them / or tear
them apart / first the fingers / then the hands / later the arms / next the legs / the
tongue / the ears / and finally the head / nor are their bodies eaten by the vermin
of Purakuti.) (9)
These severed phrases and the knife-like edges created by their arrange-
ment visually signify corporeal fragmentation, contradicting the seman-
tic denials of violence. While the poetic speaker only tacitly discloses this
horror, the author’s appendix, which glosses the boldfaced terms of the
poem, offers a chillingly direct note: Purakuti is a ravine on the outskirts
of Ayacucho into which the bodies of massacred victims were thrown
during the dirty war (48).
As the poem continues, historical contextualization becomes essen-
tial to decoding its verbal simulacra. Ayacucho enjoyed an intellec-
tual renaissance in the 1960s when the Universidad Nacional de San
Cristóbal de Huamanga—established in 1677 but closed down in
the 1800s—was reopened and generously subsidized by the govern-
ment to promote development in the historically marginalized region
(Klarén, 367).6 This revitalization, however, also helped spawn Sendero
Luminoso, the Maoist insurrection founded by then-professor of phi-
losophy Abimael Guzmán. While drawing followers from a range of
backgrounds, Guzmán’s magnetic persona and radical doctrine initially
held particular appeal for students and teachers from the surrounding
150 Leslie Bayers
countryside (Klarén, 366–71; García, 40). Despite its alleged cam-

paign on behalf of the peasantry, however, Sendero was a ruthless,
top-down movement that in fact “demonstrated tremendous hostility
toward indigenous practices and traditions,” as María Elena García
observes (39).7 By the early 1980s, Sendero had gained control of the
department of Ayacucho and was expanding elsewhere. The govern-
ment placed Ayacucho under military control in 1982, unleashing more
than a decade of civil war (Klarén, 380–81). An estimated 69,280 vic-
tims, more than 40 percent from the department of Ayacucho and the
majority Quechua-speaking peasants, were killed or disappeared, while
approximately 600,000 others were forced to flee their homelands,
leaving behind ghost towns and disjointed communities (TRC, 2003;
Theidon, 437; Kirk, 370–83).8
Given this violent backdrop, the repeated negations of harm in La
palabra de los muertos o Ayacucho hora nona seem incongruous.
Manuel Baquerizo insightfully compares this verbal masquerade to
qenqo, a Quechua mode of indirect speech that circles around the truth
when candor is risky (12). During the war, amid the constant threat of
listening senderista or military informants, speaking openly could be
deadly and discursive ambiguity was often key to survival (Theidon,
24–27). I see the poem’s typographic performance of unspeakable vio-
lence as analogous to such fear-induced evasions of direct speech. Joanna
Drucker observes that visual poetry “has the qualities of an enactment,
of a staged and realized event in which the material means are an inte-
gral feature of the work” (131–32). In a comparable manner, concrete
segments of Molina’s poem enact nonverbal expression upon the page,
creating a textured visuo-verbal expression whose expressive ability goes
beyond, and at times subverts, that produced by linguistic signs alone.9
While clearly evocative of vanguard experimentation, in the particular
context of this poem, visual elements further allude to Andean alter-
natives to alphabetic writing—including quipus, textiles, pottery, and
others—suppressed by the establishment of a lettered tradition in the
Americas. While Molina’s work embraces Western writing, his merger
of alphabetic and visual languages at the same time implicitly condemns
the correlation between the pen and the sword in the subjugation of
indigenous communities.
Drawing on Bakhtin’s treatment of the carnivalesque, Baquerizo fur-
ther associates Molina’s doublespeak with the parodies, inversions, and
other discursive subversions of authority that ensue during carnival, one
of the most deep-seated popular traditions of Ayacucho (12–13). Indeed,
the poem’s celebration of Ayacucho’s colonial splendor and ardent nega-
tions of harm seem to mock official discourses, particularly those that
aim to conceal violence. Yet I see the trope of denial in this poem as
polyvalent: it also hints at the genuinely distorted sensibilities created by
terror and functions as a defensive counterpoint to detached media pro-
jections of Ayacucho that rhetorically dehumanized the violence of the
war, diminished its cultural legacy, and devastated hope. Such humiliat-
ing reports are depicted here as even more damaging to Ayacuchans than
armed conflict itself:
porque ningún bombazo,

menos dinamitazos
sobresaltan el feliz sueño de sus habitantes.
Pero unos folicularios pasquineros,
lenguas de trapo sucio,
dijeron que nuestro cielo no tenía estrellas
por tantas ráfagas de tartamudas disparadas
de morteros
lanzallamas,
bombas,
misiles,
cohetes
trabucazos,
granadas de fósforo
y otros mil disparates.
(because no bomb explosion, / or dynamite explosions / startle the happy dreams
of its residents. / But some pamphleteer journalists / with tongues of dirty rags
/ said that our sky did not have stars / because of so many bursts of stuttering
fire / of mortars / flamethrowers / bombs / missiles / rockets / jumbled catapults
/ match grenades / and thousands of other stupidities.) (10–11)
The visually plunging inventory of rhetorical weapons intensifies the

ruinous impact of media attacks on Ayacucho. Later, the poetic speaker
emphasizes the root problem of decontextualized hearsay:
Eso dijeron, es decir, dice que dijeron,

—porque aquí—
han llegado sus voceros de todas partes
y jamás se entrevistaron con uno de los nuestros,
ni conversaron
o conocieron
a nuestros escritores
(That’s what they said, that is to say, it says that they said, / —because here— /
their spokespeople have arrived from all around / and they never interviewed
one of ours, / nor conversed / or met / our writers.) (22)
The repeated variants of “to say” in the first line signify a distorted
chain of reporting, aptly preceding this comment on the lack of first-
hand testimonials in stories about Ayacucho.
Though the poetic speaker criticizes dehumanizing representations
of Ayacucho in general, these lines allude to a particularly controversial
report prepared by novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and a commission of
152 Leslie Bayers
investigators to explain a tragic 1983 incident: eight journalists, on

their way to investigate the alleged murders of senderistas at the hands
of residents in another Ayacuchan community, were brutally killed by
villagers in Uchuraccay (Mayer, 466).10 While the debate surround-
ing the Vargas Llosa commission’s inquiry is too complex to rehash
here, one point of contention evoked in Molina’s poem is the dearth
of first-person testimony included in the report; as Enrique Mayer
observes, “People in Uchuraccay come through to us in the third per-
son plural and in indirect speech” (490). Nonetheless, the report, and
subsequent writings on the matter by Vargas Llosa, portrayed the
incident as symptomatic of the great divide between “westernized”
and “archaic” Peru (Vargas Llosa, 187–99), which led the residents
of Uchuraccay—framed as premodern, ignorant, and endemically
violent—to mistake the journalists for senderistas (Mayer, 467–68;
Theidon, 22–24; García, 43). This essentialist characterization, which
aggravated centuries of racist discourse on indigenous populations,
resonates ironically in Molina’s poem:
Así dijeron algunas ratas uñudas

sin respetar que la ley es un agujero sin fondo
sobre todo en los inhóspitos parajes de Uchuraqay
donde esos descendientes de los pterodáctilos
no conocen
ni máquinas
radios
maestros
armas
ni taparrabos de montar.
(That’s what some clawed rats said / without respecting that the law is an
endless hole / especially in the inhospitable places of Uchuraccay / where
those descendents of the pterodactyls / know of / neither machines / radios/
teachers / arms / nor loincloths.) (23–24)
These echoes of Vargas Llosa’s degrading rhetoric suggest the complic-

ity of the “lettered city” in ongoing discrimination against indigenous
communities.
The poetic speaker intermittently offsets such rhetorical attacks with
representations of Ayacucho’s rich legacy, describing “hundreds of years
of popular memory” that have shaped dynamic agricultural, artistic,
musical, and other cultural traditions (14). The speaker also contrasts
detached and organic intellectual production; local poets, for example,
are likened to factory workers who “construct beautiful book build-
ings” for the community’s benefit (20). Empowering typographic images
sustain these affirmative portrayals; the following cresting lines, for
example, envision the voices of Ayacuchan poets traversing the three
realms of the Andean world, Hanan Pacha (the celestial world), Ukhu
or Hurin Pacha (inner earth), and Cay Pacha (the human, or surface,
world) (Steele and Allen, 19, 23):
Sus voces
c
o
r
r a
e b h
n i a
d r c
e r i
a a
a
b
a
j
o
por la vena del universo
y
traspasa el tímpano de los cielos del orbe
y se posa melancólica en el corazón de la tierra,
desde donde irradia calor por dentro
como el sol calienta por fuera.
(Their voices run up and down / through the vein of the universe / and / traverse
the eardrum of the skies of the world / and alight upon the heart of the land, /
from where heat is radiated from within / as the sun heats from without.) (21)
This imagery also alludes to several sacred manifestations in traditional

Andean cosmology, including deified mountains, the Milky Way (a
celestial river linked to the earth’s waterways), and lightning (revered
for its intense radiation of the sun’s energy) (Steele and Allen, 26; Allen,
37). Unlike fragmented images that suggest ruin elsewhere in the poem,
alternative signs like the above accentuate tradition and resistance.
The central portion of Molina’s book, four pages of dense poetic-
prose, seems to be the cornerstone around which this alternative view of
Ayacucho is constructed. The segment articulates a creation story that
intertwines the legacies of the Wari and their predecessors, the Incas,
the Spanish, and additional contemporary cultures in Ayacucho. These
strata are depicted as simultaneous presences in a circular history, evok-
ing the Andean concept of pachakuti, which views the world in con-
tinuously overlapping cycles of apocalyptic destruction and recreation
(Allen, 275, 46–47). The speaker, in fact, directly refers to the related
myth of Inkarrí, which predicts a cataclysmic end to Spanish domina-
tion and a return to Inca rule (Urton, 73). The term’s fusion of the words
Inca and rey (king) embodies the imbricated traditions created through
154 Leslie Bayers
pachakuti and evoked in Molina’s own layering of temporal and literary

legacies (Urton, 73). The poetic-prose segment closes by envisioning a
palimpsest-like poem engraved in stone, which a “linguist in the year
2000” will stumble upon and translate (31). This poem, described as a
“new Stone of Huamanga,” can be understood as Molina’s text itself,
and the “linguist,” the reader before it (31).
The third segment of the work returns to a concrete poetic style.
Here, this “new Stone of Huamanga” becomes a complex sign bearing
meaning in more than one language. The speaker thus interrogates the
relationship between language and cultural identity, and the particular
tension between—and at times fusion of—Spanish and Quechua in the
Andes. In Molina’s poem, the first three letters of “Ayacucho” become a
metaphor for this linguistic interplay:
pero esa palabra mágica empezaba con tres letras
en protolengua Quechua AYA que auscultándola con
los aportes del Mono Gramático
era una Rueda de la Historia.
A
Y Y
A A
Y Y
A
(but that magic word began with three letters / in the protolanguage Quechua
AYA that hearing it with / the contributions of the Mono Grammar / was a
Wheel of History. / AYAYAYAY.) (33)
The circular arrangement of “AYA” precedes a contemplation of the

interconnectedness of all language. To emphasize this point, the speaker
lists several concepts (in Spanish) that may be signified in Quechua or
Spanish through varying combinations of “a” and “y,” beginning with:
“muerte” (“death,” related to aya, or cadaver, in Quechua); “dolor”
(“pain,” associated with yaya, or wound, and the interjection ay in
Spanish); “afirmación” (“affirmation,” signified by ya in Spanish); and
“sacerdote” (“priest,” signified by yaya, or father, in Quechua) (Molina
Richter, 34; Lara, 54, 284). The speaker lists 21 significations in total,
but suggests the infinite potential of these letters in multiple languages.
Collectively, the concepts listed hint at an overlapping not only of uni-
versal signifying systems, but also of life and death, as expressed in sub-
sequent lines:
Esa era la palabra misteriosa que se nos gravó

la vez del viaje a Wari en el siglo V de esta era.
Nacimiento y muerte
muerte y nacimiento
hasta por los siglos
unidos, pero ya no antagónicamente, ésa era

LA PALABRA DE LOS MUERTOS.
(That was the mysterious word that burdened us / that time of the voyage to
Wari in the fifth century of this era. / Birth and death / death and birth / until
through the centuries / united, but no longer antagonistically, that was / THE
WORD OF THE DEAD.) (36)
Here, another explanation for the emphatic and reiterated declara-

tion that “nobody has died” becomes clear: despite multiple waves
of violence, the “dead” are still alive. This perspective is consistent
with traditional Andean perceptions of the deceased, who cohabitate
with and counsel the living while journeying on a cycle of death and
regeneration (Steele and Allen, 84, 151–54, 201–203). On a more
symbolic level, while political and rhetorical subjugation has rendered
even living indigenous communities a ghostly presence, Molina’s text
creatively reasserts their agency, thus pronouncing the “words of the
dead.”
Closer to the end of the work, the poetic voice returns to a con-
templation of the role the “lettered city” has played in silencing those
voices. One segment alludes to how eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury paternalistic authors like Alonso Carrió de la Vandera, Ricardo
Palma, and José Joaquín Olmedo symbolically distorted, diminished,
or erased autochthonous agency (37). However, the poetic speaker also
tells of a subsequent “rain of letters” that fell from the sky, suggest-
ing the fragmentation of authoritarian pens. The verse correspondingly
plunges:
U u l c e
n v e a l
a i t y c
l a r ó i
l d a d e
e s l
o
Habían volado una fabulosa imprenta
(A rain of letters fell from the sky / they had exploded a fabulous print.) (38)
This imagery evokes a vanguard dismantling of tradition, recalling in

particular a line from Vicente Huidobro’s “Arte poética”: “Una hoja
cae; algo pasa volando” (A page falls; something flies by) (29). Vicky
Unruh sees Latin American vanguard linguistic experimentation as at
times motivated by “the search . . . for a ‘ground zero’ of verbal expres-
sion that becomes entangled with vernacular concerns” (210). Molina’s
project is reminiscent of the avant-garde in this sense; his explosion of
conventional form creates a textual “ground zero” that on the one hand
conveys the physical annihilation and reconstruction amid the war in
156 Leslie Bayers
Ayacucho and on the other hand embodies a space of literary destruction

and reinvention from the ruins of tradition.
The symbol of the “fabulous print” above also hints at the aesthetic
of the marvelous and the post-vanguard “boom” of Latin American
writing, phenomena more directly referenced in a subsequent fragment.
Here, the poet employs veiled allusions to works by Alejo Carpentier,
Miguel Angel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo
Neruda, and possibly other canonical writers, to depict the fallout of the
war in Ayacucho:
Desde entonces po coa pocoempezóareinareldesordenl

anochesehizomásintensaynoscogióunsueñogeneralmientrasunaam
nesiakolektibanoshazíaolbidarlaskozasdeelreinodeestemundo
parecíamosdesgranarnos
komoloshombresdemaízenunllanoenllamas
yentramosenotrossiglosdesoledad.
(Since then li ttleby littledisorderbegantoreignt / henightbecamemore Intense

andageneraldreamovertookuswhileac / ollectiveamnesiamade Usforgetthethings-
ofthekingdomofthisworld / weseemedtobleedtodeath / likethemenofmaizeina-
burningplain / andweenteredothercenturiesof solitude.) (39)
The allusions to these groundbreaking works suggest an appreciation

for the innovative and often critical representations of Latin America
that they disseminated to a wide public. At the same time, the dis-
tortions of their titles and their representational integration of war’s
devastation hint at how their totalizing narratives also symbolically
fractured autochthonous voices by either omitting them or speaking
for them.
A visuo-verbal beam of light and renewed structural clarity that
directly follows, however, suggest the illumination of truth alongside the
literary—and, by extension, political—self-expression of marginalized
voices:
Descubrimos entonces que la verdad

era indivisible
que resplandecía con su
propia
l
u
z
(We discovered then that truth / was indivisible / that it shone with its / own
light.) (39)
A subsequent segment, capped by a concrete rendering of the moon and

a beam radiating from it, projects the conception of a reconstructed lit-
erary tradition:
y
como
teníamos
todo el tiempo
para pensar y pensar
descubrimos árboles con hojas
de papel de donde colgaban libros
mágicos sonoros y brillantemente coloreados
El tronco estaba c
sostenido por o
gigantescas fo- m
rmas líticas don- o
de la escritura Nuevos cua-
era entendible dernos de Nue-
sólo para los vas quejas y
que sabían Nuevos Con-
amar a los hom- tentamientos
bres de buenas concien-
cias de todas las raíces y todos
los tiempos de todas las épocas del Universo.
(since / we had all the time / to think and think / we discovered trees with
leaves / of paper from which hung books / that were magic sonorous and bril-
liantly colored / like / New note- / books of n- / ew complaints and / new con- /
tentments / The trunk was / supported by / giant li- / thic forms wh- / ere the
writing / was understandable / only for those / who knew / how to love peo- /
ple of good con- / science of all races and all / the times of all the epochs of the
Universe.) (42)
The “new books,” fertilized by the bloodshed of the past and cultivated
from multiple written, oral, and visual stories, blossom on a symbolic
tree. This image brings to mind the Quechua term mallqui, which can
signify not only “ancestor” but also “young sapling,” since the ancestors
are believed to channel energy from the inner world to the roots of trees
in a cycle of death and regeneration (Steele and Allen, 202). The “new
books” thus also elucidate one of the poem’s leitmotivs: the “dead” are
animate. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker questions the silence
of the “dead” and declares that they are, in fact, collectively voicing the
“new book” before the reader: “¿Pero LOS MUERTOS somos L o s M u
e r t o s!” (But THE DEAD? we are T h e D e a d!) (44). The poem soon
visualizes a defensive march of this collective body. As Baquerizo notes,
158 Leslie Bayers
the arrangement of these lines accentuates the accumulation of strength

in the resistance (15):
y
en
esa
especie
de
Gran
Marcha
se
sumaban
unos y otros
y así íbamos creciendo
armándonos de valor hermanos.
(and / in / this / sort / of / Great / March / more and more / piled up / and we con-
tinued growing / arming ourselves with courage brothers.) (46)
In addition to evoking a growing indigenous rights movement in general,

this portrayal brings to mind the rondas campesinas, or armed peasant
patrols (supported by the government), that eventually became key to
defeating Sendero Luminoso (García, 44–45). As María Elena García
points out, beyond the mere outcome of community defense, “the rise of
the rondas had a clear effect in relocating indigenous people within the
national imaginary,” countering racist images of “ ‘subversive antination-
als’ or simply ‘ignorant peasants’ belonging to an archaic Peru” (45).
This confident tone, however, is subdued at the end of the poem, where
what was once a brilliant fusion of life and death becomes a destabiliz-
ing confusion of dreams and reality, conveying once again the altered
sensibilities provoked by terror. Though the last stanza offers a final
reiteration of the now-familiar refrain that initiates and runs through the
poem—“nothing has happened . . . “—the uncertain words that precede
it, along with a visual rearrangement of its lines, fractures a poetic circle
nearly created by the duplication:
y nosotros
aquí
no sabemos
si seguir
diciendo:
Aquí
nada ha pasado
nadie ha venido
ninguno se ha ido
menos nadie ha muerto.
(And we / here / do not know / whether to continue / saying: / Here / nothing has
happened / no one has come / nobody has gone / nor has anyone died.) (48)
By ending with a gap in the poem’s conceptual loop, Molina keeps the
figurative book on Ayacucho open and avoids the sort of totalizing voice
his poem strives to dismantle.
The book remains open as Peru continues to work through the leg-
acy of war. While Guzmán was captured in 1992 and the war was offi-
cially declared over in 1995, President Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian
rule during the same period maintained a culture of fear and compro-
mised national recovery (García, 37). Following Fujimori’s notorious
2000 departure and democratic transition, Peru continues to pick up the
pieces. While the TRC’s comprehensive investigation and 2003 report
represented an important step toward healing, it also exposed an incon-
ceivable level of violence and acknowledged the persistence of social
inequities that initially fed the war. Furthermore, critics have accused
the government of being slow to incorporate institutional changes and
reparations recommended by the TRC (Escobar; Pez). Yet the end of
the war did bring renewed optimism, increased social activism, and the
rebuilding of communities in Ayacucho. Marcial Molina Richter’s La
palabra de los muertos o Ayacucho hora nona seems to envision this
regeneration amid ruins, rewriting Ayacucho’s “ninth hour” as a time of
hope, resistance, and reconstruction.
Notes
1. Molina is an Ayacuchan poet and intellectual. This text was first published in
1988 and entitled Ayacucho hora nona. An augmented second edition, upon
which I base my study, was published in 1991 and entitled La palabra de los
muertos o Ayacucho hora nona. A third edition, with no major changes to
the main text, was published in 1997. John J. Winters translates hora nona as
“ground zero,” a term that effectively frames Ayacucho as both an epicenter of
war and a promising space of reconstruction (67). I employ the more direct trans-
lation “ninth hour,” which, particularly through biblical evocations of the cruci-
fixion and apocalypse, also suggests a simultaneously ruinous and regenerative
“final hour.”
2. Page numbers following poetry citations correspond to the 1991 edition of
Molina Richter.
3. All translations are my own and claim no literary value. I thank José Ballesteros
for his keen input.
4. The city’s original name also bespeaks hegemony, prefixing Spanish Catholic
and military markers to a Quechua spiritual term (González Carré and Carrasco
Cavero, 13).
5. Ayacucho is known for its 33 colonial churches, though there are even more than
that emblematic number (González Carré, Gutiérrez, and Ceruti, 169).
6. Molina attended the Universidad Nacional San Cristóbal de Huamanga, was a
professor there when La palabra de los muertos o Ayacucho hora nona was pub-
lished, and is currently the director of the university’s cultural center.
7. The original name of the group, “Partido Comunista del Perú en el Sendero
Luminoso de Martiátegui,” misleadingly incorporated the name of the pro-in-
digenous founder of Peru’s first Socialist party (García, 38–39; Klarén, 369).
8. The TRC attributed 54 percent of the deaths to Shining Path (TRC).
160 Leslie Bayers
9. Joanne Rappaport, referring to performance, uses the term “texture” to describe

the “non-discursive experience which is less likely to be interpreted coherently,
but which is infinitely more powerful than narrative” (61). In a similar vein,
Rosaleen Howard-Malverde observes that both “text” and “textile” descend
from the Latin textere (to weave), expanding the notion of “texts” to include
woven and other nonwritten modes of expression (3).
10. Though the incident was justifiably upsetting, Enrique Mayer noted in 1990
that “many Peruvians have shuddered that the murder of eight journalists gen-
erated such outrage . . . while thousands of humble peasants have simply disap-
peared without a trace, and those responsible cannot be ferreted out through
any kind of legal actions” (494).
Select Bibliography
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Community. 2d ed. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2002.
Baquerizo, Manuel J. Prologue to La palabra de los muertos o Ayacucho hora nona,
by Marcial Molina Richter, 3d ed. Lima: Lluvia Editores, 1997.
Drucker, Joanna. “Visual Performance of the Poetic Text.” In Close Listening:
Poetry and the Performed Word, edited by Charles Bernstein, 131–61. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Escobar, Ramiro. “Peru-Rights: Backward Justice Follows Commission Report,”
IPS—Inter Press Service/Global Information Network, August 26, 2005. Lexis-
Nexis Academic. http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe.
García, María Elena. Making Indigenous Citizens: Identity, Development, and
Multicultural Activism in Peru. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
González Carré, Enrique, and Teresa Carrasco Cavero. Huamanga: fiestas y cer-
emonias. Lima: Lluvia Editores, 2004.
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Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, 1995.
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29. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 1993.
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Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Robin Kirk, 370–83. 2d ed. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
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Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lara, Jesús. Diccionario Queshwa-Castellano, Castellano-Queshwa. 3d ed. La
Paz: Editorial “Los Amigos del Libro,” 1991.
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y lo profano. Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 1998.
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Reexamined.” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 4 (November 1991): 466–504.
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Lima: Lluvia Editores, 1991.
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Chapter 13
Tlatelolco: From Ruins to Poetry
Sandra Messinger Cypess
Just as one of the myths surrounding Quetzalcoatl refers to his depar-

ture and subsequent reappearance, so too did the place in Mexico now
called the Plaza of Three Cultures—or simply Tlatelolco, its former
Aztec name—witness destruction and death only to reemerge as a site of
reconstruction and modernization. At least three times, this geographic
location has endured catastrophic ruin. Somehow, the Mexican people
have returned to rebuild and revive the memory of its grand meaning in
their cultural history. Like all signs, “Tlatelolco” is not a stable, objec-
tive image, but a symbol constructed from a web of political and cultural
ideas generated by many sources from the conquest period onward. At
the turn of the twenty-first century, Tlatelolco is identified less with the
physical remains of the Aztec pyramid than with the political and spir-
itual ruin that resulted from the massacre of students and workers on
that site on October 2, 1968. Of the many literary texts associated with
Tlatelolco, here I focus on two poems whose particular forms reflect
the physical nature of the Plaza of Three Cultures: Marcela del Río’s
“Tlatelolco, Canon en tres voces” (Mexico, 1968-Prague, 1975) and
José Emilio Pacheco’s “Lectura de los ‘Cantares Mexicanos’: manu-
scrito de Tlatelolco” (Mexico, 1968).1 As complex intertextual collages,
both poems not only demonstrate the fragmented, physical traces of the
past, but also incorporate artifacts of the three major civilizations that
comprise Mexican cultural identity: Aztec, Spanish, and Mestizo. The
themes of these poems also reflect the paradoxes inherent in a site that
is at once a ruin and an integral, functional part of Mexico City’s urban
landscape.
As described and analyzed by scores of writers and critics, the trag-
edy of Tlatelolco in 1968—the violence and the betrayal of the students
by their government—has overpowered other memories associated with
the site and generated major shifts in Mexican political life and Mexican
164 Sandra Messinger Cypess
literature. “In literature, we can now speak of authors writing before or

after Tlatelolco,” writes Luis Leal (4). He concludes:
The most important consequence of Tlatelolco, in literature, is the deep

impression it left in the minds of the intellectuals and creative writers. All
of them agree that the year 1968 marks a break with the past, a break
with the period characterized by changes brought about by the Revolution
of 1910–1971. . . . The literature of Tlatelolco revealed that the ideals of
the Revolution so strongly defended by the party in power had become
empty.” (13)
Some writers, in their disillusionment and also as part of their world-

view, saw the events of 1968 as a sign of Mexican history’s repetitive
nature. One thinks immediately of Paz and Fuentes, whose works con-
nect with the idea of the cyclical nature of Mexican life. The question
for many was whether Mexico could rise from the ruins of 1968 and
regenerate once again. Ironically, the message of revitalization was the
very idea put forth by President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s government in
offering Mexico as a site for the Olympics that year. The image was to
be a Mexico ready to enter the “First World” of democracy and stability.
Instead, provoked by the students, who in turn had been ignited by dis-
crepancies they saw between official rhetoric and their country’s realities,
Tlatelolco became a site of governmental aggression against its own peo-
ple when military forces opened fire on protesters assembled peacefully
in the Plaza. After the initial volleys, all attempts at a peaceful settlement
or, indeed, any objective reckoning of what took place were destroyed,
and, as of this writing, no complete record of what happened exists.2
While the names of many who lost their lives in 1968 appear on one of
the monuments erected at the site, no one knows how many were actu-
ally killed and how many stories of torture and false imprisonment were
suppressed. Moreover, in 1985, the high-rise housing units bordering
the Plaza as signs of renewal were destroyed by the powerful earthquake
that hit Mexico City. Once again the space was equated with ruins, this
time from a combination of natural forces and—considering the poor
construction practices marking the buildings—human treachery.
On the other hand, a review of the historical record reminds us that
the Plaza de Tlatelolco had also once been a vibrant place, a major
market area for the Aztecs and later, during the colonial period, the
site of the first European school of higher learning in the Americas,
the Colegio de Santa Cruz. In 1967, representatives of Latin American
and Caribbean nations met in the Tlatelolco district to formulate the
Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and
the Caribbean, known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco, associating the site
with positive efforts in international peacekeeping. Thus, from a broad
perspective, Tlatelolco also evokes a different set of past associations: a
marketplace of encounter and negotiation, an assembly site of communal
Tlatelolco: From Ruins to Poetry 165
interactions. Similar to the way Tlatelolco functioned over time as a

market, a library, a place of dialogue and knowledge exchange—as well
as a site of tragedy—so, too, I suggest, do the poems I address here—
Marcela del Río’s “Tlatelolco, Canon en tres voces,” and José Emilio
Pacheco’s “Lectura de los ‘Cantares Mexicanos’ ”—serve as storehouses
of knowledge and memory by incorporating physical fragments of texts
representing the conquest and colonial periods as well as the testimony
of the poets themselves in reaction to the tragedy of 1968.
Unlike Teotihuacán outside of Mexico City and other pre-Columbian
ruins throughout Latin America, the Plaza of Three Cultures can be
considered exceptional in its negation of the conventional concept of
ruins. Ruins may provide us lessons for today but are typically aban-
doned fragments, self-contained and detached from their surroundings.
Compare the nineteenth-century poems “En el Teocalli de Cholula,”
by José María Heredia (1803–1839) or Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: these
poems use the ruins motif to mock previous generations and their pre-
tensions to grandeur and immortality. The Plaza of Three Cultures, in
contrast, encompasses the remnants of the past that are contiguous with
contemporary buildings and homes, suggesting not their isolation but
their integration with the moment. In contrast to the Pyramid at Cholula
(“silent and deserted / now you see yourself, pyramid”) as envisioned by
Heredia, or the remnants of Ozymandias (“colossal wreck, boundless
and bare”) that lay among the desert sands for Shelley, Tlatelolco, as a
site, is far more than an isolated ruin that stands for “irresistible decay.”3
It is an evolving presence, not only a marker for memories but also a vital
meeting ground for contemporary Mexicans, and a reminder of future
possibilities. In that way, both the Plaza and the texts I examine here
work at breaking down barriers among memory, history, and fiction
by deliberately blurring temporal, spatial, and textual boundaries. The
writers fit the form of their poems to the matter at hand, that is, events
continuing to transpire at the Plaza of Three Cultures.
Marcela del Río (b. 1932) is known for her historical novels and plays
as well as essays and criticism on Mexico’s past.4 She set out to write
a poem about the Aztec downfall of 1521, which as she began writing
was the only massacre that had taken place on the site. It is important
to note that, on October 2, 1968, as she composed her poem, she was in
the Chihuahua building that overlooks the Plaza. Without warning, at
the very moment when del Río looked out the window, what should have
been an empty square of ruins and reconstruction was soon populated
with live bodies of students and workers gathered peacefully to protest
the government’s policies. As if her creative efforts in describing the 1521
massacre had magically found embodiment in the Plaza, she witnessed
the arrival of government forces that began to fire on the protestors. The
panorama before her eyes paralleled—in real time—the scene she was
describing on paper in that two sets of warriors were being attacked in
a brutal assault. Her poem, “Tlatelolco, Canon en tres voces,” inspired
while writing a tribute to the victims of the original war in 1521, fit the
circumstances of this second battle; as the lines of her poem make clear,
she is shocked to see the massacre played out in “live time.” She repeats,
“it can’t be true,” even though her physical senses tell her a battle is in
progress as she attempts to write of the past combat.
Just as history suddenly seems to have morphed into the present time
before her eyes, the poem’s structure also reflects a loss of chronological
distinction. Although she begins her long, multistanza poem with three
brief lines in the present tense that describe the poet’s situation as she
writes, subsequent stanzas alternate freely between the conquest events
and the present massacre; in some cases, past and present events are
described in the same stanza. To help the reader, the three different nar-
rative voices are marked by different fonts: a first person, who describes
what the “I” is doing, appears in boldface; another voice, in italics,
describes from the outside what the “I” is seeing and doing; a third nar-
rative, in small typeset, comes from the Florentine Codex and recounts
the fall of Tlatelolco as perceived in the sixteenth century. 5 (I maintain
del Río’s typographical distinctions for passages cited here.) By incorpo-
rating quotations from the Florentine Codex, del Río’s poem includes
the material remains—the ruins—of the past civilization, reflecting the
geography of the Plaza itself.
As Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney remind us, “ ‘remembering the past’ is
a matter not just of recollecting events and persons, but also often of rec-
ollecting earlier texts and rewriting earlier stories” (112). Furthermore,
recollecting texts is integral to cultural remembrance. When del Río
decided to re-cite the Florentine Codex within her text, she in effect
offered what Erll and Rigney call a “pious commemoration” (113). By
inserting text from the Florentine Codex, del Río selects one particular
source of cultural memory from among many possibilities. She privileges
the indigenous perspective over the (formerly) canonical accounts offered
by the conquerors. Moreover, nowhere in the poem does del Río use the
terms “Aztec” or “Mexican” to refer to the victims of the carnage; rather
she calls the victims of 1521 her ancestors, whose blood courses through
her body. This identification with Amerindians is strong in the poem
and places del Río in opposition to those who denigrate Mexico’s indige-
nous heritage.6 To highlight the identification, she describes the students
with images echoing her descriptions of her valiant ancestors, whom she
memorializes poetically with details of their suffering.
In her litany of weapons and gore, del Río’s text makes remembrance
“observable,” to use Erll and Rigney’s term (112), creating in her act
of remembering a new memory of what is transpiring—what she as a
witness is being stimulated to record. The reader also witnesses how
she remembers what went on in the past and how she responds to the
present. She engages in a dialogue with the past and the present so that
the earlier narrative’s meanings are actualized and intermingle with the
present political disturbance. A good example is the placement in del
Río’s poem of the following fragment from the Florentine Codex, which
describes at once the Spanish conquistadors’ massacre of the Aztecs as
well as the invasion of the Plaza by the soldiers or granaderos:
While the fiesta is being enjoyed

and the songs are like the crash of waves
in that precise moment, the soldiers
make the determination to kill the people.
(Del Río, 268; boldface in original)
Here del Río makes it clear that what happened in 1521 was reoccurring
in 1968, not as an accident of destiny, but as a conscious government deci-
sion: the soldiers were determined to kill the students in the Plaza, just as
the Spanish had been determined to kill the Aztecs.7 Ignoring Paz’s desig-
nation of Aztec culture as the root of Mexican violence (Postdata), del Río
represents the Amerindians as victims rather than promoters of bloodshed.
She creates her own continuity of community by identifying the poem’s
narrative “I” with the ancestors who had been killed and the young people
she sees before her in the Plaza as she writes. Echoing Nahuatl imagery,
she uses the word fiesta throughout the poem to describe the activities tak-
ing place.8 The phrase “fiesta of furious youth” creates a succinct image of
the young students who had assembled at the Plaza in 1968. Those who
gathered did so in good faith, and with a sense of community, for as she
notes, the students arrived in growing numbers, but never “singly” (3).
The poem describes del Río’s impotence to stop the tragedy at the
same time that she is assaulted by smells, sounds, and sights of the mas-
sacre. On the one hand, she suggests in the following lines that intellec-
tuals like her would have preferred to be surrounded by their books to
avoid witnessing the massacre:
The woman hidden, fortified behind the laminated wall,

Barricaded with books, does not dare to look out at the plaza. . . .
(270; italics in original)
She, on the other hand, is unable to escape into her books. She has genu-
inely been transformed from a remote narrator into a witness to a contem-
porary battle, an aspect reflected by her inclusion of bellicose language
(“fortified,” “barricaded”); nevertheless, she is powerless to challenge the
government’s violation of the site. Ironically, the students cannot escape
either, for as her poetic lines bring out, the soldiers ignominiously closed
off all exits so the students would be trapped in the Plaza. Del Río recre-
ates for the reader the immediacy of her own experiences and the multiple
ironies she perceives in her description of the soldiers:
They come in green, too, like the light,

Robbing the trees of the color of their leaves
But through them sap does not run

Nor does life course through them.
(270; boldface in original)
The soldiers, dressed in green, belie the traditional symbolism of green

as a color of life, of nature. The idea of the green leaves being “robbed”
of their color and of being “denatured” strongly conveys that the govern-
mental forces are acting against nature, against the natural order. How
do they dare bring death to the innocent youth who, as “white birds” in
their sincerity, had gathered at the sacred plaza to “sing” (280)?
Del Río decides that through her text she will be more than a witness
to the assault; she will pass judgment as well: “I shall be an accuser”
(280). Her horror as a witness to the second massacre is exacerbated
by the perpetrators’ identity: “But those who have broken your wings /
Were not strangers / It was your own race, your friends, your fathers”
(280). Mexico’s treasures—its youth—have been turned into masses of
cadavers whose blood soaks the site. One detail sums up the carnage:
“Look at the plaza that before was colorful, with song / and with flow-
ers; all that remains are shoes / without a foot to fill them” (282).9
In the final stanza, del Río describes an anticlimactic scene in which a
soldier, as young as the students who have been killed, stands on guard,
but to pass the time, reads a comic book in the “first light of dawn” (284).
At dawn, there is no question that the blood, fire, smoke, and ashes of
battle still remain in the Plaza. Yet the soldier’s posture is an indication
of the government’s official stance: complete disregard for the massacre.
The newspapers and official history books would not acknowledge the
original Aztec massacre until 1993. By writing about both tragedies and
including her emotions, del Río not only invalidated her government’s
denial of wrongdoing, she also brought to life the indigenous civilization
that historically had been equated with the ruins. In a sense, her poem
is based on a definition of Mexican national identity that seeks to incor-
porate the Indian within the paradigm. Her position as narrator is not a
contemplative one about ruins but involves an active, performative state
in which she is both witness and bard.
José Emilio Pacheco (b.1939), like del Río, brings into focus the conti-
nuity of the cycles of violence marking Mexico’s history and the tragedy
of the Mexican people who have lived under such political practices.
Pacheco was also a witness to the events of 1968 and several poems in
his bilingual collection Don’t Ask Me How the Time Goes By: Poems
1964–68 reflect his personal reactions to the Tlatelolco massacres.
Three are titled “1968,” followed by the numerals I, II, and III; brief
verses, they express great disillusionment with life, yet with a sense of
possibility for change: “there is no hope / there is life and everything is
ours” (1978, 27). A reader knowledgeable of the 1968 historical context
could well relate to the poet’s angst in response to Tlatelolco. However,
the poem that precedes these verses offers another approach to the topic.
“Lectura de los ‘Cantares Mexicanos’: manuscrito de Tlatelolco,”

includes a note from Pacheco to inform his reader that verses of his text
are based on passages that Father Ángel María Garibay translated from
Nahuatl.10 When these poems reappear in 2000, in the collection Tarde
o temprano, Pacheco had changed the poetic text and added yet another
poem to be subsumed under one title: “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco.” The
new poem is subtitled “Las voces de Tlatelolco: 2 octubre 1978; diez
años después.” Just as he had integrated elements of the Aztec manu-
scripts translated by Father Garibay, he now incorporates some of the
same voices that Elena Poniatowska had reproduced in her landmark
testimonial, Massacre in Mexico.
In the 1968 poem, were it not for the addition of the date in the
subtitle—“2 October 1968”—the reader might regard it as a mere para-
phrase of the Nahuatl texts, since there are no specific references to the
Tlatelolco of 1968. Not only does Pacheco play off of two historical
contexts, but also, as Ronald Friis observes, “[m]eaning is somehow sus-
pended between two dates and two languages, even though there are
three apparent versions here: the Nahuatl original, Padre Ángel María
Garibay’s translation, and Pacheco’s reworking of the Spanish version”
(95–96). The three versions incorporated into this poem lead me to con-
sider this series as another reflection of the Plaza of Three Cultures itself,
a way of incorporating the remains of the past so they are not forgot-
ten. In this way, Pacheco also values the indigenous contributions to
Mexican national identity.
Another aspect of Pacheco’s technique relevant to the theme of the
cyclical nature of events is his constant rewriting of his own work. He not
only rewrites/re-cites texts of others, for example, Garibay’s translation
of Nahuatl manuscripts, but also revises his own work as if there were
no set piece possible. As he notes: “I do not accept the idea of a defini-
tive text. While I live, I shall continue to correct myself” (Cited in Díaz,
78–79). Just as the concept of intertextuality in literary studies suggests
the “multitude of ways a text has of not being self-contained, or being
traversed by otherness” (Johnson, 264), so do Pacheco’s poems avoid self-
containment and ask instead to be read in relation to other texts, either
his previous versions of the poem or other pieces such as Garibay’s trans-
lations or Poniatowska’s testimonial. In her study of Pacheco’s poetics of
reciprocity, as she calls it, Mary Docter suggests that “Pacheco’s dialogue
of multiple voices does not involve violating, destroying, or eliminating
one’s predecessors, but rather becomes a collaborative process in which
both works are energized, transformed, and given new life” (376). In this
Tlatelolco series, which recalls del Río’s work in that it originates with
texts from the conquest period and incorporates materials from 1968,
Pacheco participates in an “endless chain of borrowings” (Docter, 378)
that affirms his membership in a community, not only of writers but also
of his Mexican compatriots, some of whose voices he includes in the poem
or who are addressed as narratees. He has created a palimpsest which,
like the construction practices of indigenous peoples and Spaniards after

them, builds layer upon layer of texts and images.
The 1968 version of the poem that offers Pacheco’s reading of the
“Cantares” is comprised of ten stanzas, while the 2000 version has been
pared down to three brief stanzas. In both versions, the cadences of
Nahuatl echo, although there are noticeably few references to proper
names or ethnic identities. In the 1968 version, a first-person reference
does not occur until stanza five, and in stanza seven, the voice identi-
fies itself as “Mexican”—a suffering, grieving Mexican who laments the
fighting (“I see the doom hover above the temple / when all the shields
erupt in flames”) (1978, 25). Notice that the poetic voice uses the con-
temporary designation of his identity—Mexican, not Aztec or Mexica—
thereby uniting the suffering of the conquest with the current scene. I
agree with Leal’s reading of these lines that points to the importance of
community: “the contemporary inhabitants of Mexico feel a strong kin-
ship with their ancestors and at the same time [the similarity of tragic
events] awakens in them a sense of a common faith” (8).
In the terser 2000 version, the image concluding the first stanza is a
graphic synesthesia that technically reflects the poet’s coupling of tem-
poral periods: “The smell of blood stained the air” (2000, 67). This line
follows a previous description of the auditory aspect of the killings—
“The uproar of death was heard” (67)—so a reader must employ sight,
sound, smell—only touch and taste are not called upon—to concretize
the tragic experience of long ago. The second stanza’s first line can also
be read as a reference to 1521: “Shame and fear covered everything”
(2000, 68). The unexpected presence of the first-person plural in the
next line helps project the narrative voice into 1968: “Our luck was
bitter and lamentable” (2000, 69). This inclusion of the speaker in the
action is repeated in the poem’s final lines, which could be referring to
both 1521 and 1968:
We banged against the walls of adobe

All our inheritance is a web of holes.
(2000, 68)
The poet’s references to “our luck” and “our inheritance” are a simple
and elegant way to align his contemporary persona with the Aztec war-
riors of the past. He writes of the past and the present simultaneously,
dissolving temporal categories; he suggests that there is no evolutionary
development, but rather an enduring need for accounts of victimization
and the call for remembrance.
Perhaps the poem that is even more representative of the multiple fac-
ets of the Plaza of Three Cultures is “Las voces de Tlatelolco,” also pub-
lished in various versions. With numerous short stanzas, many of which
consist of merely one or two lines of dialogue, it is obvious that the poem
deals with 1968 even without the clarifying subtitle: “2 octubre 1978;
diez años después” (2000, 68). In this second poem, first published in
Proceso in 1978, Pacheco is more concrete in his incorporation of details
and dialogue from the real tragedy, including those found in the testi-
monials: helicopters, tanks, the green flares, the Chihuahua Building,
the Olympic Battalion, and the panic ensuing as the peaceful demon-
strators began running for cover to avoid gunfire. By using “Voices” as
his title, he indicates that he is attempting to recreate poetically the plu-
rality of voices that Poniatowska included so famously in La noche de
Tlatelolco. Although the narrator speaks out in the first-person singular
in the first stanza (“I was afraid”), other general comments are included
that highlight the confusion, terror, and pain of the tragedy. The single
plaint, “Who, who ordered all this?” (also found in Poniatowska, 193),
becomes a refrain along with “Here, here, Battalion Olimpia” (2000, 69).
It becomes clear that the government has perpetrated this carnage in the
interest of protecting Mexico’s national image on the eve of the Olympic
Games. How ironic that the Olympics, which seek to foster commu-
nity among athletes, should have provoked the government to attack its
own citizens. Part of the propaganda regarding the Olympics, found on
the first page of the International Olympic Games Web site, says that
“[t]he Games have always brought people together in peace to respect
universal moral principles.” Díaz Ordaz’s government made a mockery
of acting “olympically,” for it violated its citizens’ human rights and acted
in a high-handed, arrogant, and authoritarian manner. Pacheco’s poem
depicts the Mexican authorities’ utter disregard for their people:
The women lacerated by the bullets,

Children with their skulls shattered,
Passersby bullet-riddled.
Young women and men everywhere.
Shoes filled with blood.
Shoes filled with no one filled with blood.
And all of Tlatelolco breathes blood.
(2000, 70)
Notably, the poem repeats certain details and expressions found in

Poniatowska’s testimonial and in del Río’s poem—the shoes without
bodies, the multiple images related to the blood that covered the site
(Pacheco writes of “our blood” [2000, 71])—since all three writers share
an identification with the victims and suffer the same horror at the loss
of so many lives. Also, both del Río and Pacheco note with irony how the
paramilitary, dressed in “white gloves,” were firing at the students. The
use of white gloves, ordinarily a sign of civility, is just another perversion
perpetrated by the government forces, another sign that they would try
to cover up their horrific actions.
For readers of Pacheco’s and del Río’s poems, the depiction of the
devastation becomes a cry for recognition of the heroism of the fallen
(“eagles” and “treasures,” as del Río calls them, selecting words that
relate them to the past Aztec civilization). Both del Río’s and Pacheco’s
poems enter into dialogue with the past to create a continuity connecting
their readers with that past and to one another. The distance between
past and present, experience and recollection is diminished as both poets
stress their solidarity with the wounded and the dead whose stories popu-
late the poems. If Tlatelolco had become once again the place of sacrifice
and bloodshed, it also had become a site of blending “three cultures,” in
that—as the very structure of these poems attests—it confirms a sense of
community and dialogue among Mexico’s diverse peoples.
Pacheco asks at the end of his poem, “What will happen now?” (2000,
71). One response, the official government response, is anticipated in
the soldier’s indifference in del Río’s poem, in the purposeful erasure
of references to the massacre. Yet, the poems of del Río and Pacheco
suggest another reaction: they provide dignity and a memorial to those
who were not granted it in their time, as part of their community’s long
memory of events on that site. If “ruins stand for an ethical acknowledg-
ment of that which has been” (Merewether, 34), these poems, in their
ethical acknowledgment, pay proper respect to the ruins and tragedies
of Tlatelolco. It is pertinent to recall that soon after the conquest, the
university founded on that site by Sahagún and other Franciscans was
engaged in gathering and preserving Nahuatl documents in written
form, so that much of what we know today of Aztec civilization—and
all that del Río and Pacheco draw on in their poems—is a result of the
Franciscans’ efforts. The Colegio’s work “represents the most significant
attempt ever made to link the two civilizations” (González, 32). That
model of dialogue between the two civilizations that contributed to the
formation of mestizo Mexico, as much as the tragic nature of ruins, is
recalled in the structure of the Plaza of Three Cultures and echoed in the
Tlatelolco poems of Marcela del Río and José Emilio Pacheco.
Notes
1. Translations from del Río and Pacheco (2000) are my own.
2. For documents on the Tlatelolco massacre, see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
NSAEBB/NSAEBB99/.
3. I draw the phrase “irresistible decay” from Roth with Lyons and Merewether
who draw on Benjamin.
4. Del Río’s historical texts include the novel Proceso a Faubritten (1976) and the
plays Tlacaél (1988) and El sueño de la Malinche (2005).
5. Del Río’s fragments from the Florentine Codex also refer to the Plaza of Three
Cultures, as Father Sahagún’s trilingual (Nahuatl, Spanish, Latin) students com-
piled the Codex in the Colegio de Santa Cruz.
6. On Mexican identity politics, see Schmidt and Cohn.
7. Like del Río, Poniatowska uses the metaphor of festive celebration and innocent
children being slaughtered. See Sorensen, 312–13.
8. On Aztec feasts, see Carrasco.
9. Del Río’s reference to empty shoes, repeated by Pacheco, calls to mind Luisa
Valenzuela’s story “Los mejor calzados.”
10. Garibay’s Historia de la literatura náhuatl presents translated extracts from
Cantares Mexicanos, sixteenth-century Aztec poems and songs.
Select Bibliography
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———. Tarde o temprano. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000.
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Chapter 14
Sites of Memory, Emptying Remembrance*
Nelly Richard
The experience of wandering through the city past the facades of sites
that the military dictatorship once used as detention and torture centers
seems to tell us that, in the present, almost no eloquent sign forcefully
denounces that condemnable past. What has transpired between the
cruel and tormenting past being cited by these dramatic sites and the
forgetful everyday malaise of neighborhoods trusting that anonymity
will dissipate guilt? The impassibility of walls—apparently free of any
stigma—announces that the traumatic remembrance of human rights
violations has been gradually losing intensity, to the point where it has
become fused with the sedimentary indifference of passive forgetting by
a quotidian city in which the past’s monstrosity cannot manage to turn
criminal evidence into social shame. It seems necessary to reintroduce
the transposing force of remembrance into these tranquil facades, to lac-
erate this urban quietude with the warning sign of a memory for which
the act of remembering continues to signify danger, emergency, and
catastrophe. But how to agitate the temporalities of this empty memory
in order to break with the citizenry’s apathy and distractedness? How to
depacify the remembrance of history so that the explosions of memory,
its resplendence and discontinuities, can rattle the complacent everyday-
ness of a society of tranquil habits?
The dictatorship erased the signs of its criminality, making it so
that the act of disappearance would leave no trace of the regime’s well-
perfected terrorist tactics of suppressing bodies and names. Under such
circumstances, where horror and terror have been eclipsed, any gesture
that forces the accusatory remains of homicidal violence to inscribe
themselves in some medium (monument, document, or testimony), chal-
lenges the strategy of memory obliteration through which the military
dictatorship sought to whitewash its chapter of annihilation. Yet mem-
ory is not a repository of definitively completed historical meanings that
176 Nelly Richard
remembrance recovers simply by looking backward. The formulation of

memory undergoes an incessant dispute among different conceptualiza-
tions of what and how to remember. The social will to inscribe the mem-
ory of the past in a circuit of public referentiality, then, assumes a critical
debate about the links between event and representation, links that
memory is called upon to unmake and remake every time one intends to
move the past beyond the simple revelation of facts to a complex process
of critical understanding.
The relationships among public art, social memory, and urban con-
text undergo diverse commemorative strategies (rhetorical expression
and symbolic montages) through which memory politics elect to give
form to historical trauma. I propose here to invoke some of these strat-
egies as they manifest themselves in three specific memory sites that, in
Santiago, Chile, seek to remember a dictatorial past marked by torture
and disappearance.
Villa Grimaldi
The “Group of Survivor-Witnesses of Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38, José
Domingo Cañas, la Discothéque, la Venda Sexy and Other Torture
Centers” saved Villa Grimaldi from a premeditated disappearance—a
double erasure: to disappear the place where disappearances were car-
ried out—that, under the modernizing guise of constructing an urban
condominium complex, planned to liquidate the memory-balance of
offenses whose ethical drama had become incompatible with neoliber-
alism’s trivial market of consumerist gratification. Stopping the prop-
erty at Villa Grimaldi from being swept away by the tide of capitalist
investment and urban planning saved it from a functional conversion
whose goal was to cast out of the city any vestige of a past morally recal-
citrant to the cynical advances of rational progress (the same cynical
rationality that resulted in the conversion of Santiago’s public prison into
a government ministry and of northern Chile’s Pisagua detention center
into a tourist hotel). Villa Grimaldi, at least, demarcated a self-signaling
zone of memory (as both remainder and subtraction) that would func-
tion as a site marked by the language of loss amid a landscape entirely
oriented toward the gains promised by an extravagant profit-mongering
economy.
Yet what map of memory do the shards of stone and the gardens at
Villa Grimaldi actually draw?
The visitor wanders through a “Park for Peace” that stages memory
at ground level, on a flat open surface teeming with horizons when com-
pared to the degree of confinement in the tenebrous memory it seeks to
evoke. How can a space so free and unobstructed recreate the asphyxia
of enclosure (the confinement of a cell, the blindfold over the eyes), the
relegation into darkness, and the imprisonment of the senses that the
Sites of Memory, Emptying Remembrance 177
detainees experienced? What relationship is generated between the cavi-

ties of a mind perforated by the fear experienced while incarcerated and
the flatness of a system of lines and regular proportions that provides
today’s strolling visitor with the tranquil neatness of a spatial order that
prisoners, disoriented by the darkness of isolation, clearly lacked?
Villa Grimaldi’s flat geometry trusts in the predominance of the gaze
to read, from above, the memory-laden remains of violence mapped on
the ground. But the eye and the gaze are distancing mechanisms that
physically displace the object, turning it into an abstraction, due to the
supervisory control of the one who looks. The spatial homogeneity and
geometry of Villa Grimaldi make an ordered field of vision out of what
was once a lacerated texture of experience, disembodying the lived mat-
ter of remembrance, whose deep subjective fractures are unrecognizable
in this flat, serene, uninterrupted map. And what can be said about the
recycled mosaics that, in Pompeii-like fashion, adorn Villa Grimaldi’s
plaques and fountains, hoping to recall the tile floors of bathrooms in
which torture occurred, but which do so in such an inoffensive way
that the lacerating memory of torture winds up couched in a decora-
tive landscape that turns the remembrance of the sinister into something
completely anodyne?
Many victims’ testimonies refer to Villa Grimaldi’s hellishness. They
are testimonies that, from the depths of torture (whose apparatus aimed
to pulverize the link between body and word), have attempted to narrate
Figure 14.1 Villa Grimaldi, “Park for Peace”: “El Patio Deseado” (Santiago, Chile).
Photograph courtesy of Michael J. Lazzara.
178 Nelly Richard
what is unnarratable in the limit experience: to overcome screams and

muteness and cross the threshold of destruction to find words capable
of articulating fissured speech and subjective disturbances. The startled
voices that bore witness to torture, threatened by the loss of reason and
sense, powerfully staged their protests through a process of renaming,
such that horror would become signify-able and, consequently, con-
demnable. Without the overwhelming echo of these assaulted, tortured
voices, born at the limit between corporeal disintegration and the reartic-
ulation of voice (voices that today are inaudible in Villa Grimaldi’s mute
landscape), the place names inscribed on the park’s ceramic plaques—
“Torture chambers, metal beds with electricity, the grill”; “The Tower:
place of loneliness, torture, and extermination”—seem to harbor an
ingenuous didacticism whose literal nature, in the park’s calm silence,
betrays the psychic and bodily decomposition that characterized Villa
Grimaldi’s depraved past. The composed and arranged writing of these
names (“loneliness, torture, and extermination”), which now blend so
harmoniously with the mosaic tiles that mark the inferno’s physical
locales, ignores the dissolution of the victims’ referential and seman-
tic universe, perversely reduced to inarticulateness, babbling, and trem-
bling through methodical procedures whose aim was the eradication of
consciousness.
Santiago’s General Cemetery: Memorial to

the Detenidos-Desaparecidos
Cemeteries are places designated for burying the dead, but also for cir-
cumscribing death: for demarcating and separating the scene of death’s
ritual from the rest of life that continues to take place on the outside. In
the case of the Detained-and-Disappeared, to relegate their errant ghost-
like bodies to a cemetery (as a permanent residence) is to assuage the
pain and uncertainty of those condemned by disappearance to wander
eternally as specters, without a final resting place. The cemetery, as a
designated site, compels an unverifiable death—the nonplace of disap-
pearance—finally to take refuge in a conventional domicile that rescues
the disappeared ghost’s errant traces.
In the General Cemetery, on both sides of the Memorial to the
Detained-and-Disappeared, there are empty niches waiting to be filled
with the remains of the still-unidentified bodies of the disappeared. The
predetermined number of these niches is noteworthy insofar as it does
not match the number of people that the monument announces still to be
“disappeared.” The nonequivalence between the fixed number of slots
reserved for the still-to-be-identified bodies and the accounting of names
listed on the memorial calls to mind a need to stipulate arbitrarily the
tally’s finality such that a simulacrum of certainty might compensate for
the unsettled feeling evoked by the unending, suspended death that is
Figure 14.2 Empty graves awaiting the remains of the disappeared, General Cemetery
(Santiago, Chile). Photograph courtesy of Michael J. Lazzara.
disappearance. This numerical arbitrariness also symbolizes the ethical

aberration of the lack of all measure. The magnitude of this lack (the
painful, unbearable interval between the knowledge of disappearance
and the body that never returns or that returns unrecognizable) is immea-
surable. Nor is the damage quantifiable within any economy; there will
never be an acceptable proportionality among the loss of a loved one, the
remains of the disappeared that only permit a memory in part(s), and the
quotas of justice that seek to repair the damage partially.
In front of the Memorial to the Disappeared and Politically Executed,
four faces sculpted out of stone (looking toward heaven with their eyes
closed as a sign of retreat and piety) seek to symbolize the human,
the essential humanity that was trampled by the dictatorship’s sinis-
ter machinery of disappearance and death. Stone—and its rhetoric of
the public monument—affixes and eternalizes. The four stone-sculpted
faces in front of the memory wall seek to universalize suffering but, in
so doing, petrify the self as an archetype. The archetype of the human
face, monumentalized in stone, undermines the uniqueness of physiog-
nomies that, to the contrary, vibrated in the photos of the Detained-and-
Disappeared. The metaphysics of pain that gives the stone sculptures
their transcendent quality, undoes the nontransferable particularity of
facial features that were apparent in the family album and ID-photos
of the disappeared. In opposition to the machinery of suppression and
disfiguration that the dictatorship deployed, the photographic portraits
of the disappeared combated the serialization of nonidentity, restoring
180 Nelly Richard
the details of the victims’ facial features and personal characteristics.

By abstracting and essentializing, the stone of the public monument
remains indifferent to the biographical singularity with which pho-
tographs restored to the disappeared individual trajectories that were
stolen from them not only by disappearance but also by being labeled
generically as “Detained-and-Disappeared.” Moreover, the eternalness
of rock, as a substance that transcends the contingency of the human,
kills the latency of the what has been and the yet to come that vibrated
implicitly in photography’s tensions among presence and absence, the
real and the unreal, the tangible and the intangible.
Puente Bulnes
Puente Bulnes (Bulnes Bridge) is crossed by multiple signs of the military’s
violence and its remembrance. Various plaques at the site commemorate
the death of Father Juan Alsina (a working-class priest executed in 1973)
as well as the murders of seven functionaries from the San Juan de Dios
Hospital, and of five priests and 14 pobladores (shantytown dwellers)
from Puente Alto. All of these deaths occurred at Puente Bulnes at dif-
ferent times, under different circumstances. In addition to the commem-
orative plaques, on the opposite side of the bridge stands a mural by
the Camilo Torres Muralists (1999) inscribed with the legendary phrase
“Kill me head on so that I may see you and forgive you,” in memory of
the Spanish priest Juan Alsina. The photographers, Claudio Pérez and
Rodrigo Gómez, chose this site to erect a “Wall of Memory” (Muro de la
memoria) comprised of photographs of 936 Detained-and-Disappeared,
fired onto ceramic tiles.
Located at this already memory-charged site, the photographic “Wall
of Memory” is superimposed on and interferes with the other monumen-
talizing forms that mark Puente Bulnes (the sculpture and the mural)
and that seek to honor the protagonists of the past. By territorializing
its marks of memory in a place where various figurative strategies com-
pete with one another, Pérez and Gómez’s photographic wall implicitly
invites the public gaze to become part of a critical reflection on the strat-
egies for making memory visible and legible, on the media and opera-
tions that materialize the will to remember, on the figures, forms, and
techniques that express memory narratives symbolically.
In choosing this site, the authors of the “Wall of Memory” deploy a
gesture that stands in opposition to the one used in the General Cemetery
to pay homage to the disappeared and grant them a fixed resting place.
Instead of commemorating death in a demarcated place set apart from
the everyday life of the living, the “Wall of Memory” chooses a bridge
as a point of convergence for multiple urban trajectories whose day-to-
day meanderings will be interrupted by these signs of memory. Instead
of concentrating memory in a cult-like place (the cemetery) that invites
both inwardness and exclusion from the city’s dynamism, the wall at
Puente Bulnes wants to deprivatize the act of remembering and force
the memory of the disappeared to intersect with the routines of a liv-
ing community whose members, in turn, can disseminate their mem-
ory unpredictably in their daily comings-and-goings. Instead of being
reduced to an agreed-upon ritual site, remembrance moves throughout
the city, mixing with the flow of passers-by, opening the possibility that
the conformity of their conduct (their social conscience turned away
from a focus on memory) might be modified, virtually, by their head-on
encounter with the photographic images of the victims.
The drama of disappearance has been emblematized by the black-and-
white photographs of the disappeared, which serve as reminders of a violent
past worn on the family members’ chests. The photograph, as a technical
medium, speaks of an absence through a presence-effect, within the tem-
porally fractured register of the “living-dead.” The album-like photos that
dominate the “Wall of Memory” at Puente Bulnes are identifying-signs
that add to the will to remember the disappeared a specificity of biograph-
ical detail that both the machinery of torture and disappearance—the
suppression of persons and the denial of their human condition—and the
dry language of the Human Rights Commissions—that buried data in
the numerical mass of archives and documents—erased.
Many of the portraits of the disappeared fired onto the mural’s tiles
show them in everyday, photo-album poses—poses in which they appear
tranquilly confident in a normalcy of life that, soon thereafter, will sud-
denly be torn asunder by a homicidal violence that, in such a defenseless
state, cannot be foretold. The victims’ photos capture the innocence of a
before that ignores evil and an after that becomes charged with auratic
vibrations because it retains that moment of life-past in which the dis-
appeared person still believed himself to be safe. The abyss between,
on the one hand, the carefree faces of the disappeared in the past time
of a photographic-take that does not yet know the imminence of the
dramas they will suffer and, on the other hand, the present time from
which today we tragically gaze upon the visages of those who would
later become victims of history, constitutes the desperate punctum that
emotionally charges and moves these photos of the disappeared.
These dramatically charged photographic portraits were fired onto
ceramic tiles. How can we not read in the decision to use ceramic mate-
rial a symbolic tension between memory and its lack? By its very nature,
through the relationship between adherence and permeability, the
ceramic medium speaks to us about the transience of what is imprinted,
of markings and erasures. The tiles bear witness to a tension between
that which seeks to inscribe itself (memory) and the smooth materiality
that sentences its residues to be swept away by the aseptic character of
an inalterable surface. To oblige the tiles to register the mnesic marks of
photographic memory is to interrupt a path toward forgetfulness that
seeks to dissolve the opacity of the remains of a residual time: a time that
182 Nelly Richard
Figure 14.3 Muro de la memoria, by Claudio Pérez and Rodrigo Gómez, Puente Bulnes
(Santiago, Chile). Photograph courtesy of Michael J. Lazzara.
historical memory considers to be threateningly turbulent and contam-

inated by a dirty history (marked by conflicts and antagonisms) that is,
for that reason, an infectious agent.
In order to evoke 256 photographic portraits that the artists could
not find, the “Wall of Memory” at Puente Bulnes is missing various
tiles. The lack of these portraits bears witness publicly to the unfin-
ished memory of disappearance. Unlike certain monuments whose
rhetoric of weight and solidity seeks to stabilize and affix historical
memory definitively, the photographic mural at Puente Bulnes wagers
that memory should begin with the precariousness and inconclusiveness
of a process of remembrance that remains open to suspense, interrup-
tion, fragmentation, correction, and lapse. That which is lacking—the
nonexistent portraits of the missing bodies—points to the interminable
wait as a condition for reflection and for the deciphering of an unsat-
isfied memory. The “Wall of Memory,” by Claudio Pérez and Rodrigo
Gómez, is a counter-monument that, by calling attention to what is
unfinished, pending, and in suspense, opens the fissures of remembrance
toward the always unresolved debate between memory and its narrative
inscription.
Note
* Translated by Michael J. Lazzara.
Chapter 15
History, Neurosis, and Subjectivity: Gustavo
Ferreyra’s Rewriting of Neoliberal Ruins
Idelber Avelar
Of all visible countries, the present is the most extensive.
—Sergio Chejfec
While during the first wave of postdictatorial literature, from the 1980s
to the early 1990s, Argentine fiction was marked by the question of how
literature was to understand history, a few contemporary Argentine nov-
els have revisited the dictatorship in ways that avoid allegorical, histori-
cal, or memorializing narratives (Sarlo, 471). In fact, one could devise a
typology of the first generation of postdictatorial novels by establishing
each author’s position on the dialectic of history and memory. That first
wave was marked by struggles about the codification of the past and
by clashes between the old Left and new Left, arrepentidos and non-
arrepentidos, los que se fueron and los que se quedaron, avant-gardists
and populists.1 At that moment, the role of literature—or better yet, the
question of a role for literature—was still the object of heated argument,
and novels played an important part in propelling that debate. Juan José
Saer’s work was the pinnacle of an Argentine tradition characterized by
delving into the workings of memory. His characters’ occasional inter-
secting with the collective—particularly in Nadie nada nunca (1980),
El entenado (1983), Glosa (1986), and La grande (2005)—constitutes
some of the most enduring reflection on subjective memory’s engagement
with history. Furthermore, from Ricardo Piglia’s restitutive cyberpunk
allegories in La ciudad ausente (1992) to Tununa Mercado’s psycho-
analytic grappling with writing as a medium for mourning work in En
estado de memoria (1990), the best Argentine fiction sided with those
184 Idelber Avelar
who sought aesthetic experiences able to counter the peril of postapoc-

alyptic forgetting. In 2009, it is apparent that all that has changed. As
Beatriz Sarlo maintains, today knowledge of postdictatorial memory
“circulates even in the most banal forms, in memory texts and audiovi-
sual fiction-journalism” (472). Consequently, writers who return to the
topic of dictatorship today do so in an atmosphere of media saturation
on the theme of memory. It is no surprise, then, that they would address
their country’s violent past with strategies other than those consecrated
in the literature of 20 years ago. This chapter contributes to mapping
these new strategies for engaging the memory of dictatorship. I argue
that some key contemporary Argentine texts develop a particular kind
of subject who embodies the idea of subjectivity as ruin.
A tension between memory and forgetfulness was always at stake in the
first wave of postdictatorial literature. In bringing literature to restore,
restitute, or retell something that had been broken in experience, those
novels cast characters representing certain profiles of subjectivity under
or after authoritarianism. Those subjects operated in a space marked by
a dichotomous split between two basic positions vis-à-vis memory and
the past, which was not surprising considering the abyssal fissure that
permeated Argentine society since the mid-1970s. Limiting my examples
to La ciudad ausente and En estado de memoria (of course, the reader
could also find parallels in works by Daniel Moyano, Andrés Rivera,
Ana María Shúa, Osvaldo Soriano, Héctor Tizón, and others), partic-
ular images of subjectivity come to mind: counterhegemonic subjects
reconstituting the past, such as Junior, in Piglia’s novel, or Mercado’s
protagonist; complicit, oblivious figures, such as Julia Gandini, the
lobotomized arrepentida in La ciudad ausente, or the self-help, new age
therapist in En estado de memoria; the political administrators of for-
getting, such as paranoid state lobotomists in Piglia, or the wall and
watch-all gaze in Mercado’s memoirs. Yet over time the metaphors of
recovery, recuperation, and restoration have lost relevance. Without
attempting to postulate any clear-cut breaks, I have recently turned
my attention to several newer writers—for example, Alan Pauls, Sergio
Chejfec, Juan José Becerra, Martín Kohan, and Gustavo Ferreyra—who
return to Argentina’s dictatorial past in quite different terms from those
made canonical in the historical, allegorical, and memorializing narra-
tives of the 1980s. Here I take a closer look at Gustavo Ferreyra, who
has lately published novels that recast the vexed question of representing
Argentina’s dictatorial past.
Ferreyra’s El director (2005) situates its protagonist in a relation with
the dictatorship that is neither that of a victim nor that of an accom-
plice. This is of the utmost importance insofar as Ferreyra creates a sub-
ject living under dictatorship who is neither for nor against the regime,
someone who neither suffers direct oppression nor engages in overt
complicity. His is a protagonist who is sheer amorality and egotism,
someone who neither seeks liberation through memory nor falls prey to
Rewriting Neoliberal Ruins 185
forgetting, as postdictatorial protagonists tended to do. Ferreyra’s char-

acter is, instead, a slave to memory, entrenched in a theater of mnemonic
asphyxia. El director is severely critical of memory as a necessarily lib-
erating or oppositional act. Ferreyra presents us with a past that weighs
like a nightmare and to which his protagonist cannot relate in ways
beyond the limitations of his purview. Ferreyra’s character points to a
conception of subjectivity understood as the perennially failed rework-
ing of past ruins. El director, in effect, is a poignant depiction of a sub-
ject defined through his relation with the ruins of previous experience.
Sociologist Gustavo Ferreyra (b. 1963) is the author of a short-
story collection, El perdón (1997), and five novels, El amparo (1994),
El desamparo (1999), Gineceo (2001), Vértice (2004), and El director
(2005). The imaginary universe of his gray middle-class characters is
crafted with such hallucinatory paranoia that, upon the publication of
El amparo, his wife is said to have asked: “What am I doing married
to this monster?” (Cited in Casas). In a review of El director, Patricio
Lennard noted that “Ferreyra writes as if all neuroses could be his own,
as a minute entomologist of minds in jeopardy. The proof of this is a
narrative work populated with tormented, obsessive, paranoid, and
non-conformist characters” (5). Ferreyra’s characters relentlessly inter-
pret their own fantasies, the reality around them, and the trajectories of
others, especially women, whose actions acquire the status of symbolic
riddles hiding some fundamental yet-to-be-unveiled secret. The world
of Ferreyra’s novel is a nightmare of endless interpretation. His char-
acters attempt to “counter the fate of a world ruled by irrational and
secret laws” (Coelho). One could, in fact, nuance Lennard’s remark to
claim that although Ferreyra’s characters are certainly tormented and
paranoid, they cannot be properly called obsessive because they drift
through so many semi-hallucinatory states that they never achieve an
obsession that could be deemed “stable.” Rather, they live in a state of
relentless imaginative activity, in contrast to which a fully constituted
obsessive neurosis would be a respite, if only they could achieve it. In El
director, each of the protagonist’s acts potentially triggers a catastrophe,
a total collapse of the subject. Teeming with memory and drifting from
one paranoid interpretation of his existence to another, he invariably
reinvents himself, taking as a starting point a previous collapse. Ferreyra
thus weaves a unique subject, who is best understood as the repeated
recodification of his own ruins.
My use here of gender-specific pronouns is deliberate, as the subject
that Ferreyra’s novels submit to a ferocious autopsy is undoubtedly male.
Women figure prominently in his texts, most emphatically in El director,
but are so distorted by the male protagonists’ lenses that their existence
says more about the protagonists’ breakdowns than about the women
themselves. Ferreyra’s prose combines referential, nineteenth-century-
like, Flaubertian sentences with narrative structures that borrow much
from the modernist patchwork. This is an interesting combination, as
186 Idelber Avelar
fragmented narrative structures do not usually coincide with realist,

Flaubertian prosody. They do, however, in Ferreyra’s work. Reading
Ferreyra, one gets the distinct feeling that his writing is not heavily
indebted to recent Argentine tradition. There are no visible debts to Saer,
Piglia, or Aira. His novels are also quite original in that they depict hard-
core insanity not through a third-person narrator, but by giving voice to
that insanity. Nevertheless, with Ferreyra, we are in a rigorously realist
universe, far from any “fantastic” effect. Particularly unique is the fact
that the author’s monstrously ill protagonists narrate their stories as if
we had never left the terrain of banal normalcy. The reader slowly gains
access to a universe of masculine pathology that comes across as if it
were the world’s true state of normality. While these formal and the-
matic elements might be individually found in other novelists, I have
never seen them combined quite this way in any writer. Pathological
characters are granted narrative voice and produce rigorously believable,
realist narrative sequences from their own delirium.
El director is a first person narrative that recounts 40 years in the
life of a Buenos Aires elementary school principal (1966–2006). 2 The
novel abruptly juxtaposes a section written in 1972 with another from
2002, only to go back to 1966 and pick up again in 1992, and so on
for 420 tightly woven pages. These temporally juxtaposed sections are
also interrupted by a novel the protagonist is writing, a story of blissful
incest beyond all morality. Ferreyra’s school principal goes through a
vertiginous set of drifts. He finds himself skeptical of politics in 1972,
vigorously desires the arrival of socialism in 1975 and, in spite of the fear
caused by the disappearance of a schoolmate, ultimately welcomes the
military in 1977. He goes from being a voice in a 1982 rally to support
the Malvinas War to participating a few weeks later in a march for Raúl
Alfonsín’s presidential campaign. Ferreyra’s accomplishment is that his
character’s reasoning is invariably amoral and egotistical, though always
rigorously sincere. “Cynicism” would be an appropriate word, were it
not so charged with value judgment inherited from a morality that is
alien to Ferreyra’s novels. The protagonist’s constant shifts mirror a his-
torical experience shared by millions of Argentines of being neither a
direct victim nor a direct accomplice, but someone trying to make sense
of those years while, above all, surviving. The split between accomplices
and victims gives way to far less definable characters that are somewhat
gray or neutral and remain politically amorphous or go through several
political metamorphoses. We are now far from allegorical characters
that emblematize forgetting and complicity or the subversive recupera-
tion of memory per se. Ferreyra, instead, plunges into the minds of those
figures of gray neutrality who offer quite a different picture of the urban
middle class that came of age in the 1970s.
“If the guerrillas could just make up their minds . . . that would be
best. Socialism, like in Cuba. A couple of messy months and then every-
thing settles into a new order. It’s preferable that socialism come once
and for all, rather than this life of chaos and constant fighting. With
socialism, things just find their course and one lives more peacefully,”
writes the school principal in 1975, as clashes between left- and right-
wing Peronists climax in the wake of Perón’s death, opening the way for
the 1976 military coup (289).3 Note that what the principal likes about
socialism is the opportunity to live in oblivion and not worry about what
to do or what choice to make. In 1977, a year after the coup, knowing
that a colleague has disappeared and that, in spite of his own negligi-
ble political participation, his name might be found in the disappeared
man’s address book, he mutters, hopefully:
It’s starting to become evident that the military will win the war and
this breeds hope. Four or five years ago I hated the military and marched
against it myself, but I see that the military’s victory leads us somewhere:
to a state of rebirth. Those of us who survived have the right to live again.
And the military will win. It’s a fact. How can you fight the facts? When a
power appears seamless and triumphant, there is no way to hate it. (173)
Because such examples of political mutation appear throughout the novel,

it would be simple to write this character off as a cynic. But Ferreyra’s
narrative universe does not offer any vantage point from which to judge
him. The character is thoroughly amoral, and his distorted lens is the
reader’s only means of accessing experience. The first-person narration
is, thus, essential to the novel’s effect. He delimits the totality of the
diegetic horizon. We are fully immersed in the immanence of his drifting
through life, and we can certainly distance ourselves from him, but the
novel provides no alternative morality against which to judge his quin-
tessential amorality.
In the 1982 sequence opening the text, when it becomes clear that
Argentina will lose the Malvinas War, the protagonist again wavers
ideologically. While in April most people had been enthusiastic about
the war and were now “awaiting democracy with a peasant’s patience,”
he notes that, in contrast to such feelings, losing the war fills him with
inexplicable effervescence (7). He then takes a bus to a demonstration
whose nature he ignores. Are the demonstrators marching in protest
or defense of something? If he were to get too close, could he be mis-
construed as one of them if repression ensued? Conversely, if he were
not to approach them enough, could they perhaps judge him as hos-
tile? Ferreyra’s character is not what the Left might once have called
un alienado. He is well-informed politically and his narration advances
with sharp, though paranoid, intelligence. However, the plots and con-
spiracies toward which he gravitates change throughout the novel with-
out ever coalescing into an obsession. Indeed, in 1982 Argentina could
be particularly confusing, as massive support for the military adven-
ture gave way to disillusionment, in turn succeeded by euphoria in the
opposite direction when Alfonsín won the first democratic elections.
188 Idelber Avelar
The protagonist reacts to that whirlwind of political emotions in the

most mundane, believable way for what one might call “the ordinary
Argentine.” His ideological morphing is a novel occurrence within the
trajectory of Argentine postdictatorial fiction, since on the whole, until
the publication of Ferreyra’s novel, Argentine writers had not dealt con-
vincingly with the theme of political drifting.
All the major events of recent Argentine history leave their imprint on
the protagonist’s 40-year life trajectory: the chaos of 1974, the military
coup of 1976, the Malvinas War, Alfonsín’s election, the World Cup
of 1986, all the way to the pot-banging protests of 2001. Yet they are
present obliquely, as he does not relate to them as if they were endowed
with preordained meaning. In 2001, following the fall of four Argentine
presidents in a little over a week, the school principal, now in his sixties
and compelled to look for his retirement savings, stumbles across the
novel he had been writing and for years thought to be lost. (If we look
closely at the nature of the protagonist’s novel, we note that on the meta-
fictional level, too, history overtakes characters abruptly, naturally and
inevitably, providing them small windows through which to articulate
perverse individual fantasies.) The emergence of the piqueteros in 2001
brings the narrator full circle, as he changes position again, identifying
with them as seen on TV, and imaginarily breaking with the middle class
he has come to despise, only to start fantasizing about a selfishly heroic
death that might lead the female teachers at school not to perceive him
as a loser. Heavily influenced by the media—he thinks all of this while
watching the protests on TV with his mother—he concludes that he is a
“fan rooting for the losers” (323). This image becomes emblematic of the
character’s relation to the very ruins that constitute him.
Ferreyra’s entire narrative structure is set in motion by the protago-
nist’s pathological mind, not by Argentina’s political history. There is
no diegetic space that escapes his twisted, but all-too-human neuroses.
After breaking up for no clear reason with Antonia, his wife of a decade
and a half, the school principal wishes he had approached her immedi-
ately to dismiss the breakup as a joke. Ensnared in self-reflection, how-
ever, he never does this. Stunned, he learns that Antonia does not miss
him and has elegantly remade her life as if he never existed. After the
divorce, he is haunted by self-deprecating fantasies in which, humili-
ated, he is forced to line up behind other men and pay for sex with
his ex-wife. He fantasizes about seducing a substitute teacher, solely to
show contempt toward a senior colleague. When he is dumped by one of
his post-divorce girlfriends, his first thought is that she has found and
burned his unpublished novel. When his montonero school colleague
Juan Carlos disappears, he firmly believes that the other teachers (all
female) secretly reproach him for not having disappeared too. When he
is diagnosed with cancer, he fantasizes either about committing pub-
lic, political suicide (with the selfish, sole purpose of salvaging a heroic
legacy for himself) or about the meaninglessness of his death for the
school kids: “My death would cause them certain happiness. . . . They
would even get a day off for mourning. They would go home and watch
cartoons, blissful from unexpected enjoyment” (30). Facing such a mis-
erable legacy, he turns to fantasies of public self-immolation that might
earn him martyr status (preferably taking some deserving bastard with
him). These impulses dialogue with a long Western literary tradition,
harkening back to Homer’s Iliad, in which characters fantasize about
their own deaths and the ensuing mourning of others. The only meaning
to be found in the death of Ferreyra’s protagonist is the appeasement of
his personal narcissism. At the core of his fantasies, we find an empty
scene of mourning. Though the object to be mourned is visible, readers
are taken on detours into elaborately plotted, narcissistic fantasies that
foreshadow spectacular failures to come. Defeat is anticipated in fantasy
itself.
Ferreyra’s school principal is also the author of a novel about a father’s
incest with his teenage daughter. He is terrified to tell anyone about the
text, as he fears they will conflate him (the author) with his protagonist.
The incest described in the novel is unique insofar as neither the reader
nor Alice, the mother, can be sure that Jorge (the father) and Victoria
(the daughter) ever had sex. In fact, it is almost as if the confirmation
of intercourse were superfluous, as Jorge and Vicky repeatedly laugh
together. Incest, here, consists of nothing more than Jorge’s engulfment
by Vicky’s “nervous laugh,” which begins to consume him. As they share
the complicity proper to true lovers, Alice stares in disbelief from afar,
unable to hate them because they look so blissful. This story unfolds in
short installments ranging from the couple’s search for a cure for Vicky’s
nervous laughter (or Alice’s search, while Jorge indifferently joins, after
losing his job), to the confirmation of an amorous relationship between
father and daughter (which never implies sex, as if sex had somehow
been abolished, or transcended into a higher plane), to Alice’s eventual
departure. This incest is unique because it is never disturbed by any hint
that morality might have something to say about it. Ferreyra’s school
principal, impotent and unable to establish lasting relationships with
women, imagines an incest that lives in a sort of prelapsarian temporal-
ity of sheer enjoyment.
The protagonist writes this novel for more than a decade, finishing it
in 1987. In 1995, after being certain for years that the only original of the
text was safe in a closet, he fails to retrieve it and goes through almost
complete collapse, as he is forced to admit he has lost the only thing he
ever wrote. His hypotheses at that moment are two: (1) that his mother
has seen and destroyed it, which he attempts to confirm by subjecting
her to countless persecutory interrogations, a process of psychological
torture contributing to her eventual death; (2) that Virginia, his married
lover at the time, had been horrified by his confession of the novel’s con-
tent and, fearing that he would become incestuous with the children they
might eventually have, had stolen and burned the text. Elaborate pages
190 Idelber Avelar
present the protagonist’s musings that Virginia—a married woman who

ended her marriage to be with him but left him two months later—was,
in fact, obsessively hanging around just to steal the manuscript. It turns
out, of course, that the protagonist had not placed it where he thought.
After the economic collapse of late 2001, as he searches for receipts that
would guarantee his retirement in 2002, he finds the novel buried under-
neath them, a full seven years after presuming it lost. He goes through
the horror of not knowing if he wants to reread it after not seeing it
for 18 years. He publishes it in 2006, only to find out that the scandal
he feared never materialized. (Of course, in the meantime he weaves
a fantasy about journalists calling his house, lawsuits, and miraculous
escapes.) After some lukewarm reviews, the novel fades into oblivion
and cannot be found in bookstores, an all-too-coherent conclusion for a
trajectory marked by the excess of catastrophic fantasy vis-à-vis reality’s
predictable banality.
Although the subjective world is certainly in ruins in Ferreyra’s novels,
significantly, the author does not give in to the temptation of allegorizing
the character’s trajectory in a postcatastrophe urban scenario. Absent
are the customary visual markers suggesting that the urban space some-
how reflects the subjects’ histories. Ferreyra’s texts are unmistakably set
in Buenos Aires, but his characters’ itineraries never include the places
consecrated in Argentine fiction, film, TV, or music. There is no such
postapocalyptic local color in Ferreyra’s prose; his is a visible refusal of
the Romantic equating of subjective fall and objective ruins. The sen-
sation that everything is in collapse is entirely predicated, then, on the
subject. Since his characters are primarily defined by the functioning of
their particularly perverse imaginary, readers receive access to the outer
world only via a distorted, monstrous lens. This annihilates any possi-
ble objective correlative in the city. In a first-person narrative such as El
director, the aesthetic effect of all that is considerable. Ferreyra’s subjects
become victims of their own choices, assuming that it makes sense to
speak of “choice” for characters so thoroughly framed by their imagi-
nary. These are, then, subjects who repeatedly constitute themselves as
ruins of their previous actions (or inactions), which might not, in fact, be
a bad definition of what a “subject” is, tout court.
In writing novels about the constitution of subjects as the phantasmal
elaboration of their own past understood as ruin, Ferreyra amplifies to
an overwhelming degree what is, in a way, the fundamental process of
self-constitution of the incomplete, barred, post-Freudian subject. The
absurd effect produced by Ferreyra’s prose stems from the fact that his
protagonist is so thoroughly complex in his pathology, yet so completely
ignorant of it, that many readers will burst out laughing while follow-
ing the labyrinthine path of his paranoid fantasies. He is a complete
compendium of the neuroses mapped by Freud, yet he narrates his
pathologies with the innocence of a nineteenth-century realist narrator.
Particularly in a country such as Argentina so thoroughly saturated with
the discourse of psychoanalysis, the humorous effect produced by such

a strategy is considerable.
Beatriz Sarlo has proposed the concept of “ethnographic fiction” to
designate a contemporary trend in Argentine literature: a gradual shift
from novels primarily concerned with interpreting the past toward nov-
els more commonly focused on the present (473). This is not to say that
historical novels do not continue to be published, but rather that the
present has seemed to impose itself as the primary riddle for a num-
ber of writers, even while their texts take place in the past. If, until the
early 1990s, deciphering the past seemed almost a sine qua non for prose
fiction in Argentina, now the task of grasping a fleeting and at times
incomprehensible present imposes itself.4 I believe to have demonstrated
that Gustavo Ferreyra’s fiction is at the forefront of this revision.
Sarlo’s dichotomy between “ethnographic fiction” and “historio-
graphic fiction,” like all dichotomies, classifies some texts better than
others. Ferreyra’s novel occupies a curious position within that binary,
as the author explodes upon the fabric of a paranoid character’s life a
host of events from the last 40 years of national history. Those events,
however, happen in a Buenos Aires deprived of mnemonic, historical
markers. To be accurate, Argentine history does erupt in El director
from time to time, but the novel refrains from any local associations
with the character’s environment or any mutual allegorizing between
self and world. Over the course of the narrator’s labyrinthine and para-
noid account, this placelessness reinforces the text’s effect of universal-
ity. Historical events appear not to be there for interpretation by anyone.
Ferreyra’s subject reacts to history in a desolate way, always outside
the polarity between victim and accomplice and alien to the dichotomy
between memory and forgetting. It would make no sense to approach
Ferreyra’s character in 2006, in his old age, with questions regarding
the “recuperation” of memory after the 40-year trajectory narrated in
the book. His subjectivity, constructed out of the ruins of his previous
trajectory, cannot pose to itself any tasks that go much beyond mere
survival.
The metaphors of recovery, recuperation, and restoration have, then,
visibly lost relevance in some current Argentine fiction. Ferreyra’s work
demonstrates that, even as the historiographic narrative of the first
postdictatorship wave gives way to various kinds of ethnographic fiction,
not all forms of engaging the memory of dictatorship are exhausted. El
director offers a subject who has also been shaped by the savagely selfish
logic of neoliberalism, imposed in Argentina by the Menem government
in the 1990s and directly responsible for the 2001 economic collapse.
Ferreyra’s characters are clearly indebted to the individualistic, com-
modified ethos of neoliberal Argentina, but they have been deprived of
the triumphalism of those years. The reworking of ruins, then, is an apt
metaphor to describe not only the subject’s relation to his past, as argued
earlier, but also the polis in which he operates. The commodification of
192 Idelber Avelar
every corner of social life, followed by the economic and political col-
lapse that it produced, has left Ferreyra’s protagonists wrestling with
what we might call the neoliberal ruin. Ferreyra’s uniqueness consists in
crafting a representation thereof that is both hallucinatory and realist,
offering what is perhaps the best aesthetic response to the ruins left by
the destructive utopia of privatization.
Notes
1. In the Argentine context, arrepentido alludes to those on the Left who later
regretted the option for armed struggle in the 1960s and 1970s. The range of
revisions to which that option was subjected is wide. Los que se fueron and los
que se quedaron became the most illustrious designations for those who went
into exile and those who remained. For an important document of the latter
tension, see Sosnowski. On the literature of that period, see Reati and Avelar.
For a useful overview of exile narrative see Diego, and for its periodization and
analysis, see Dalmaroni.
2. El director continues one of three plotlines structuring Ferreyra’s previous novel,
Vértice. In it we gain insight into the protagonist’s troubled relation to his father’s
death, his fantasies about female students, his cancer, his life with his mother, and
his incestuous novel. These elements are fully developed in El director. Vértice is
also a remarkable reflection on sexuality and on postcrisis Argentina. I hope to
devote a future study to it.
3. All translations from Ferreyra are mine.
4. Many examples of this decline in the past’s symbolic relevance come to mind.
Daniel Link’s recent statement of his aesthetic preferences is indicative of a
broader perception: “For me it is well and good to read Proust, who is historic,
but if someone wants to write like Proust today, I’m not sure I can handle it; I
prefer something that intervenes in relation to the present; I mean, of course,
critically, ironically, with some kind of distance” (Quoted in Klinger, 154; my
emphasis).
Select Bibliography
Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdicatorial Latin American Fiction and
the Task of Mourning. London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Casas, Fabián. “Gustavo Ferreyra: Recursos de amparo.” http://elremiseroabsoluto.
blogspot.com/2005/08/gustavo-ferreyra-recursos-de-amparo.html.
Chejfec, Sergio. Los planetas. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1999.
Coelho, Oliverio. “Fracturas de lo real.” http://www.bazaramericano.com/resenas/
articulos/coelho_ferreyra.htm.
Dalmaroni, Miguel. La palabra justa: literatura, crítica y memoria en la Argentina,
1960/2002. Mar del Plata and Santiago: RIL and Melusina, 2004.
Diego, José Luis de. “Relatos atravesados por los exilios.” In La narración gana
la partida. Vol. 11 of Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, edited by Elsa
Drucaroff and Noé Jitrik, 439–58. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2000.
Ferreyra, Gustavo. El amparo. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1994.
———. El desamparo. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1999.
———. El director. Buenos Aires: Losada, 2005.
———. Gineceo. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2001.
———. El perdón. Buenos Aires: Simurg, 1997.

———. Vértice. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2004.
Kohan, Martín. Dos veces junio. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2002.
———. Museo de la revolución. Buenos Aires: Mondadori, 2006.
Lennard, Patricio. “Conciencias en peligro.” Página 12. February 26, 2006. http://
www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-1973-2006-02-26.html.
Link, Daniel. “Entrevista a Daniel Link.” By Diana Klinger. Grumo 3 (July 2004):
150–55.
Reati, Fernando. Nombrar lo innombrable: violencia política y novela argentina,
1975–1985. Buenos Aires: Legasa, 1992.
Sarlo, Beatriz. Escritos sobre literatura argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2007.
Sosnowski, Saúl, ed. Represión y reconstrucción de una cultura: el caso argentino.
Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1988.
Part Four
Ordinary People: Inhabited Ruins,

Precarious Survival
Chapter 16
All in a Day’s Work: Ruins Dwellers in Havana
Vicky Unruh
Some ruins are inhabited, not only by specters of a conflictive past but also
by the laboring bodies of a quotidian present. During the post-Soviet era,
the dilapidated buildings of turn-of-the-millennium Havana—propped
up on the precarious divide between repair and demolition—served as
homes to numerous city inhabitants. But with the economic disaster of
the “special period in times of peace,” paralleling the Soviets’ departure
in 1991,1 Cuban ruins ascended to the international status of artistic
cliché. In the contest between crumbling Havana buildings and their res-
toration through negotiations between a socialist state and international
investors, the ruins trope is anchored in everyday projects of a city that
was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1982 and that undertook
selective restoration of Old Havana under the guidance of city historian
Eusebio Leal.2 Yet, as envisioned from afar during the 1990s, Havana’s
dilapidated buildings also exuded nostalgic yearnings for a Cuba of
ideologically variegated lost dreams.
As exemplified in Wim Wenders’s Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
and numerous photography books, ruins are as common in the epoch’s
fiction and film as resourceful recipes for transforming cardboard into
steak. Thus the apprenticeship in Cuban culture in Tomás Gutiérrez
Alea’s 1993 film Fresa y chocolate experienced by the communist youth,
David, under the tutelage of the gay intellectual, Diego, includes a tour
of Old Havana’s disintegrating buildings. But when enveloped in nos-
talgia, the ruins motif is troubling. Emma Álvarez Tabío proposes that
the international gaze on Havana displays a morbid fascination with
decaying buildings, a “trivialization of nostalgia” in the mass media’s
iconic images that juxtapose the city’s “ruinous splendor” with shots
of fleeing balseros (raft people) (99). Inside Cuba, she argues, the focus
on ruins mythologizes memory and elides critique: “The active gaze on
what might have been and was not is transformed into an uncritical
198 Vicky Unruh
gaze on what was” (99; italics in original).3 José Quiroga argues that
through the foreign voyeur’s morbid fascination with a city’s demise “the
commercial traffic in objects” becomes traffic in symbolic referents (97).
Thus tourists find this description of Havana on the Lonely Planet Web
site: “Crumbling, withered, exotic, and alive” (“Havana: Overview”).4
A trenchant, counternostalgic critique of the obsession with Havana’s
ruins emerges in the essays and fiction of Antonio José Ponte (b. 1964).
As a self-styled “ruinologist” who searches Havana’s collapsing build-
ings for a “newly opened rich vein” that might provide aesthetic stim-
ulus, Ponte questions whether such finds may obscure the suffering of
others and wonders “how much immorality exists in writing about an
accident . . . instead of offering assistance to the victims” (2003, 15–16).
Having deployed the ruins motif in poetry, fiction, and essays, Ponte
makes the compelling argument—in writing and in the 2006 documen-
tary Habana—Arte nuevo de hacer ruinas by German director and
writer Florian Borchmeyer (b. 1974) and producer Matthias Hentscher
(b. 1972)—that the buildings abandoned to ruination feed the ideolog-
ical justifications of a state invested for more than four decades in por-
traying itself as a nation at war with the United States.5
Implicit in Ponte’s argument is that ruins are pressed into service for
cultural or political agendas of the present. Based on an analogous con-
ception of the ruin’s theoretical power, I want to shift the focus here
to argue that, in their literary and cinematic representations, Havana’s
post-Soviet urban ruins bear witness to an intense cultural conversa-
tion about the ideology of work as one of the founding tenets of revolu-
tionary discourse and one acutely challenged by the economic crisis. In
making this argument, with examples from films by Fernando Pérez (b.
1944), Borchmeyer and Hentscher’s documentary, and fiction by Abilio
Estévez (b. 1954), I adhere to a conception of the ruin as process, or as
Ponte himself would say, drawing on Jean Cocteau’s portrayal of the
ruin as an “accident in slow motion,” as a “negotiation” (2007, 168,
196). The ruin in my analysis is a structure undergoing decomposi-
tion, signaling movement rather than stasis.6 This conception draws on
comparisons between performance and archeology theorized by Mike
Pearson and Michael Shanks, who argue that by resisting the impulse to
fully restore a site “in ruin,” archeological investigation—like theatrical
performance—can yield a “deep map” of cultural narratives in contest
(92, 158–59; my italics). A concept of ruination as process showcases the
unfolding of history, as in Walter Benjamin’s widely cited metaphor of
the angel of history, propelled toward the future by the debris of the past
(257–58). For Cuba, this conception of ruins undercuts stereotypes of a
society supposedly frozen in time. Ponte, too, questions this image when
he notes its profound “disadvantage of denying a life history to millions
of individuals” (2003, 15).
In foregrounding ruins as the stage for revealing those life histories,
the artistic works examined here refashion cultural debates about work
Ruins Dwellers in Havana 199
that, although dating back to nineteenth-century independence strug-

gles, intensified in the socialist era, and resurged with the post-Soviet
crisis. By considering the ruin as a historical process, I do not reject
Quiroga’s conception of contemporary Cuban reality as a palimpsest
of time frames in uneasy coexistence. To the contrary, the contending
conceptions of work exemplified in post-Soviet artistic expression dem-
onstrate that the discourse of dedication to work on which thousands of
Cubans were weaned did not vanish with the socialist nation’s economic
crisis and transition to an uncertain future. Rather, the revolutionary
work ethic coexists dynamically with its own rejection, critical reitera-
tion, or creative refashioning within new economic times. Moreover, the
architectural ruin, requiring constant upkeep to fend off collapse, offers
a rich scenario for a critical and creative recycling of a reverence toward
work that, while perhaps under threat of being forgotten, is certainly
not gone.
Home Improvements: Recycled Bodies at Work

In a powerful moment of Fresa y chocolate, the intellectual Diego, hav-
ing lost his job as a journalist for supporting unorthodox artists, asks
his communist friend, David, how he can survive in Cuba with only
manual labor as an option: “What am I to do with a brick in my hand?”
Here the film takes aim at a party line privileging physical over cul-
tural labor. The debates spawned by the Revolution about the relative
value of physical and intellectual work are well-known and are embod-
ied in Fidel Castro’s 1961 lecture, “Words to the Intellectuals,” which
allowed intellectual activity as long as it served revolutionary goals,
or in Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memorias del subdesarrollo (1967), which
portrayed the radical isolation of a bourgeois intellectual remaining in
Cuba with no clear tasks to perform. In the 1970s, as Desiderio Navarro
details, Cuban mass culture depicted intellectuals as out of touch with
hard work (198). This debate about work, as I have detailed elsewhere,
was ongoing throughout Cuba’s twentieth century and anchored in its
first modern intellectual, José Martí. Martí’s literary metaphors elided
boundaries between physical and intellectual labor, legitimating the
latter by equating it with the former, as when he likened thinking to
“open[ing] furrows” or “lay[ing] foundations” (2: 473).7 Post-Soviet
Cuban visions of work staged in Havana’s ruins flip this equation, vali-
dating physical work through its power to stimulate imagination.
The poster art of the Cuban Revolution provides a visual rendition of
official work discourse through metonymies between workers’ power-
ful bodies and those of athletes or revolutionary soldiers. For example,
Heriberto Echeverría’s “Harvest Quota Achieved (sugar)” (1972) depicts
a harvester’s arm holding up cane stalks whose smoke-like emanations
resemble fumes from discharged rifles (Reproduced in Cushing, 46). Work
200 Vicky Unruh
imagery was also often collective and projected toward the future. René
Mederos’s “To Camagüey—With the Faith and Valor of the Attackers of
the Moncada” (1971?) overlays a colorful sky of stacked rifles on a scene
of faceless farmers marching behind a (tank-like) tractor (Reproduced
in Cushing, 45; question mark in original). Post-Soviet representations
of work, by contrast, draw metonymies between individual bodies in
disrepair and buildings in ruins, both requiring constant upkeep for sur-
vival. Ranging from flat out rejection to sardonic humor and pathos,
these portrayals give testimony to the enduring power of the directive
to work. Zoe Valdés, for example, categorically rejects this directive by
depicting characters in jobs with nothing to do, people enacting what
Estévez has called “the productivity of idleness” (December 2002).8
But artistic deployments of ruins offer more ambiguous interpretations
of bodies at work. For example, the protagonist of Ena Lucía Portela’s
novel Cien botellas en una pared (2002), a victim of domestic abuse,
inhabits a space under perpetual renovation: “the Corner of the Joyful
Hammer” (15). More searing is the 1994 debut of the solo composition
Fast Food by Marianela Boán. As Magaly Muguercia describes it, Boán,
carrying an empty plate and “prison-like utensils,” met spectators at the
theater entrance: “Suddenly, the dancer came through the doorway and
displayed her thin body, which seemed . . . to be charged with a strange
excess of energy. . . . Her body, that of a virtuoso dancer, broke up and
recomposed itself fleetingly in a minimalist combat that posed strength
and assertion against tiny microscopic movements. And this incandes-
cent body executed at the end the horrendous, impeccable act of eating
its own fingers” (Muguercia, 181).
The substitution of fingers for sustenance in this endgame restora-
tion hyperbolizes the creative recycling designed to keep both working
bodies and declining buildings standing, acts that can either accelerate
their decline or keep them afloat. Thus, in Ponte’s story “Un arte de
hacer ruinas,”9 an apprentice city-planner, writing a thesis on Havana’s
inward expansion through the creation of internal lofts within over-
crowded buildings, learns from his advisors about the pulls between
the “miraculous statics” (2000, 31) that sustain bulging structures and
their occupation by relocated inhabitants, whose internal expansion that
resembles the dancer’s consumption of her fingers, hastens the buildings’
fall. Such refurbishing scenarios deploy both bodies and buildings for
innovative ends, substitutions key to survival, fending off collapse, or
even generating hope.
Two films also portray, from different ideological optics, workers
engaged in jobs other than those they were trained for against a backdrop
of crumbling buildings: Borchmeyer and Hentscher’s aforementioned
documentary, Habana—Arte nuevo de hacer ruinas and Pérez’s Suite
Habana (2003). Through a metonymic recycling of bodies and buildings,
both films blur the tensions in revolutionary discourse between physical
labor and the work of the imagination, rendering them compatible and
intimating that the former generates the latter. With Ponte’s observations
weaving through it and a title that echoes his story, Arte nuevo counters
romantic images of ruins used for aesthetic and philosophical inspira-
tion with the labors and reflections of seven inhabitants of Havana’s
collapsing buildings, Ponte among them. These buildings serving as
“home” are recycled from other incarnations: the plumber Totico lives
in the old Arbos building turned tenement; the aspiring writer Misleydis
occupies a dilapidated garret in the former Hotel Reina; the custodian
Reinaldo lives in the abandoned Campoamor theater; the aging, disaf-
fected revolutionary Nicanor ekes out subsistence farming on a nearby
one-time country estate. Whatever their past or imagined occupations,
these characters are now all maintenance workers, engaged not in Old
Havana world heritage restoration, but rather in what Esther Whitfield
aptly designates in another context as “a sequence of modest labors”
(154). Focusing on the minutiae of upkeep, this film foregrounds weary
but committed bodies working to sustain themselves (cooking, eating,
laundering, weeding) and their sheltering edifices (cleaning up rain and
sewage, patching, repairing). The film casts its characters as the build-
ings’ loving caretakers who, appreciative of their beauty and history,
refuse to move, an implicit condemnation, articulated more openly by
Ponte, of the abandonment of buildings and occupants attributed to the
state.
Less condemnatory, Pérez’s Suite Habana, which he describes as a
hybrid of documentary and film (2004, 193; 2007, 73), follows a day
in the life of 12 actual Havana citizens, ages 10–97, from sunrise till
bedtime. With no dialogue except stray phrases in a background mix of
street sounds and music, the film interweaves fragment scenes alternat-
ing among individual protagonists moving through their day. Subtitles
identify them by name and age, and in conclusion, still shots with sub-
titles sum up characters’ dreams for the future. The journey from day
to night is framed by shots of two city landmarks: the searchlight of
Havana’s harbor lighthouse and the shift changes of citizens guarding
the revered bronze sculpture of John Lennon seated on a park bench in
the Vedado neighborhood. In addition to extensive national and inter-
national recognition, as Elliott Young details, Suite Habana generated
strong responses in Cuban audiences, including public weeping and
standing ovations (36).10
The film’s ruined buildings provide a more mundane background
than their center staging in Arte nuevo, but the peeling paint and decay-
ing walls flash in and out of focus. More dramatic is the closing scene
of Havana’s renowned malecón (breakwater), whose fragile buildings,
battered by waves, exude a ghostly aura as the new day dawns to the
crescendo of Omara Portuondo singing the timeworn bolero “Quiéreme
mucho.” Against this dilapidated backdrop, the film magnifies the pains-
taking physicality of the characters’ daily work with sustained close-ups
of simple acts—ironing a shirt, picking through grains of uncooked rice,
202 Vicky Unruh
jack-hammering a street—whereby laboring bodies and the objects with

which they work conjoin in a single image. As Ana Serra points out, on
one level Suite Habana reinforces longstanding revolutionary values of
education, resistance, and perseverance (2006, 98). At the same time,
however, the film critically recasts those values, particularly the values
of work. Not all are caretakers of ruined habitats as in Arte nuevo, but
several Suite Habana characters hold day jobs in repair or recycling:
Heriberto (37) repairs railroad tracks; Julio (67) rebuilds shoes; Iván
(30) launders hospital sheets; Francisco (55) patches and reconstructs
walls; and Ernesto (20), who lives in his mother’s collapsing house, is
Francisco’s apprentice. As in Arte nuevo, these characters recycle them-
selves into new jobs required by changing economic realities. Thus Norma
(70), a former art teacher, now cares for her Downs syndrome grandson,
Francisquito (10; Francisco’s son); Waldo (71), Francisquito’s grandfa-
ther and a retired Marxism professor, engages in overseas shortwave
radio exchanges; Amalia (79), a retired textile worker, sells peanuts on
Havana streets; and Francisco, a former carpenter with a state job, is
now a freelance construction worker, referencing changes in permissible
work in transitional Cuba. Although the film has moments of pathos
(Amalia, we learn in her closing shot, is the only one who “no longer has
any dreams”), it envelops these characters who shore up a dilapidated
material world and a work ideology under siege in an aura of subdued,
reflective hopefulness and imagined change.
In both films, the recycling anchored in ruins is potentially trans-
formative, promoting critical thought in physical laborers who are also
would-be creators. A common feature generated by the intense focus on
bodily minutiae is the projection of labor as the most intimate of individ-
ual acts and one that encourages reflection. This optic generates a sense
that characters are engaged in deep thought and provokes spectators’
curiosity about its content. Arte nuevo satisfies this curiosity through
character narrations that intertwine their life histories with those of the
buildings they labor to maintain. The tone, in contrast to Suite Habana,
is often elegiac: Misleydis laments that the beautiful building that houses
her garret is dying, and Totico compares the crumbling Arbos building
he maintains to an “old lady with lots of rouge on her cheeks.” But the
characters plumb their buildings’ cultural history that, for Misleydis, the
aspiring writer, and for Nicanor, the custodian turned opera aficionado
living in the old theater, provides an education for imagining alternative
futures. For Suite Habana’s characters, the reflection stimulated by their
daytime material labors unfolds into their almost universal transforma-
tion by night into creative artists. Thus, Iván the launderer wears the
platform shoes repaired by Julio to perform as a female impersonator;
Ernesto, the construction worker’s apprentice, dances ballet; Juan Carlos,
the doctor working for a food service performs as a clown; Heriberto,
the train-track repairman, plays the saxophone with a band; Norma, her
grandson’s caretaker, paints; and Francisco climbs onto the roof of his
decaying building and teaches Francisquito about the stars. Pérez’s pur-
suit of an aesthetic of the fragment, whose metaphoric musical “suite”
and visual patchwork of characters’ labors constitute his own creative
refurbishment of the decaying city, establishes a metonymy between his
work and theirs and creates a new kind of filmmaking from his lengthy
experience as a documentary director for the Revolution’s national film
institute, ICAIC, combined with his later work on feature films.
Each One Teach One: (Cultural) Literacy

Campaigns in the Ruins
In these two films, recycling a splintered cityscape’s bodies and buildings
yields a new image of cultural work. Literary and filmic ruins also pro-
vide a scenario for reconfiguring the Revolution’s most lauded cultural
worker: the teacher. Widely recognized as one of the state’s early successes,
the volunteer literacy campaigns of 1960–1961 sought to span the divide
between educated workers and peasants. Quoting from Che Guevara’s
Socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (1965), Serra describes the goal to trans-
form Cuba into a gigantic school (2007, 31) and describes this bridging
dynamic between cultural and physical labor. “The literacy workers,” she
explains, were to emulate and somehow “incarnate” the peasants’ “rev-
olutionary spirit”; they, in turn, would “become teachers and transmit
their knowledge to others” (2007, 29). In her analysis of Daura Olema
García’s 1962 novel Maestra voluntaria (Volunteer Teacher), Serra dem-
onstrates the novel’s acknowledgment of the campaign’s “failed identifi-
cations between teachers and students” (2007, 28–52).
Critiques of the Revolution’s utopian pedagogy abound in post-Soviet
literature and film. Returning to Fresa y chocolate, for example, Diego
explains to David that he, too, tried to join the literacy campaigns but
instead was reassigned for sexual-orientation reprogramming in the
labor camps of the mid-1960s. Not surprisingly, then, Diego’s friendship
with the loyal revolutionary, David, whose cultural education, the film
implies, has been stunted by state pedagogy, unfolds as a private, illicit
tutorial in the riches of Cuba’s artistic and literary past, including the
city’s architectural ruins. Diego’s dilapidated garret, secluded within a
populous Havana tenement, overflows with remains from this past com-
bined with the contraband culture of the present: photographs, banned
books, scratchy records, and yellowing magazines. This image of the
Havana ruin as a cultural archive harboring renewable hidden treasures
is reiterated in multiple scenarios that, to evoke Diana Taylor’s archive
and repertoire dynamic, generate new performative scenarios, recycling
the Revolution’s literacy campaigns into new conceptions of teaching
and learning.
Madagascar (1994), the first of Pérez’s trio on late-twentieth-century
Havana, portrays timeworn revolutionary pedagogy as a discourse
204 Vicky Unruh
emptied of content. The film, whose technical imperfections reflect the

material scarcity of the special period’s worst months, enacts the gen-
erational conflict between a dedicated revolutionary, Laura, a physics
professor in a state institution, and her adolescent daughter, Laurita,
who rejects her mother’s world, drops out of school, and threatens to
move to Madagascar, her utopian designation for not-Cuba. Laurita’s
grandmother appears to side with the teenager and plays Monopoly with
the girl’s boyfriend, evoking an earlier time and a postsocialist future.
Opening and closing scenes of countless habaneros walking their bicy-
cles through the Havana tunnel conjure up unending cycles of monoto-
nous work. The dilapidated dwellings occupied by Laura and Laurita in
a succession of economically necessary moves provide a ruinous setting,
and close-ups of people laboring through the sustaining acts of chewing
and breathing (with enhanced sound effects) forge the link between a
crumbling city and its beleaguered bodies.
In this setting, the film enacts a contentious, generational debate
between traditional revolutionary pedagogy and contemporary life
experience, a dynamic framed by Laura’s voice-over conversation with a
doctor, to whom she affirms more than once “I like my work.” But we
see her at work only in a decaying institutional library overflowing with
disintegrating newspapers and journals, a place where exhausted col-
leagues clean their foggy spectacles and execute repetitive note-taking
and erasures. At an awards ceremony ostensibly honoring them, Laura
and her colleagues stand in an empty urban lot where a loudspeaker
announcement reiterates a disembodied party line: “We are proud of
you all.” Laura’s conversations with colleagues after the ceremony fur-
ther undermine the pedagogic enterprise when she learns that one of
her weakest students is achieving success in Paris and a longtime col-
league is quitting teaching to raise goats in the countryside. Scrutinizing
old photos of her student years during the Revolution, Laura despairs
at not finding her own face, a recognized disconnection from the uto-
pian pedagogy that motivated her own career and for which the school
library constitutes a crumbling archive. For her part, Laurita balks at her
mother’s help with schoolwork and seeks a different education through
alternative repertoires of real-world experience, an autodidactic cultural
literacy campaign of rock music, evangelical church singing, meditation,
classical art, opera, and—most important—a spontaneous tutorial for
hungry, Afro-Cuban street children whom she gathers in her home. The
fact that Laura, who evicts this improvised class, fails to see the connec-
tions between Laurita’s pedagogic outreach and the revolutionary roots
of her own career underscores an educational discourse in ruins, but one
out of which Laurita’s new experiential literacy emerges.
Pérez’s La vida es silbar (1998) teases out these notions of new peda-
gogy and refurbished cultural repertoire. This film presents three char-
acters—the nursing home attendant, Julia, the prima ballerina Mariana,
and the fisherman, hustler, and would-be musician, Elpidio—who
eventually liberate themselves from the repressive guilt generated by a

utopian society’s unreasonable expectations and learn that they need
not choose between useful lives and creative pleasures. Bebé narrates the
story and intervenes in the characters’ lives to encourage this perspective
shift that will, she hopes, make them happy. Mariana, Elpidio, and Bebé
are connected because they all grew up in the same orphanage-school;
Bebé is Julia’s out-of-wedlock daughter, delivered to the orphanage in
infancy. As Serra astutely details, Elpidio, in particular, embodies the
failed Guevara-model “New Man” of revolutionary pedagogy (2006,
94–95), a failure manifested in his acute sense of abandonment by Cuba
Valdés, the Afro-Cuban mother-teacher who directed the orphanage-
school.
This school provides the film’s opening ruinous site. It also constitutes
an archive of contradictory teaching models, one evoking the orthodoxy
of literacy campaigns and the other offering the improvisational, cul-
turally rich alternative of whistling. An unnamed teacher performs the
first model by calling on students to parrot words like “i-gual-dad” in
syllabified form. This teacher disciplines her students’ literacy through
punishment, as when Bebé refuses to speak or, worse yet, whistles, and
is isolated in the basement. By contrast, Cuba Valdés’s classes include
dancing and singing, an education on the work of Cuban musicians
Benny Moré and Bola de Nieve, whose facial expression in the adult
Elpidio’s fantasies register a mentor’s alternating disappointment and
approval. In contrast to the reading teacher, Cuba allows whistling in
her dance classes. This improvisational activity, performable by a body’s
most basic resources, provides a through-line when Elpidio, Mariana,
and Julia, at Bebé’s instigation, meet again at the Plaza de la Revolución
and, in an act of recognition, Elpidio sets them all to whistling, an
activity also taken up by countless Havana citizens as the film ends.
Moreover, a renewed performative literacy in an enlarged repertoire of
Cuban life—developed through tutorials with other characters—has led
each character to this encounter. Elpidio, who stakes out his habitat in
a malecón tenement, acquires a new perspective on Havana through a
romantic liaison with a tourist who takes him on an air balloon ride,
and reconnects with Afro-Cuban rituals and the music of his childhood.
Julia, whose repression makes her faint every time she hears the word
“sex,” relearns how to dance and enjoy life through a dialogue with
her therapist. Mariana, whose punitive ballet teacher has ordered her
to forego passion in order to earn the lead in Giselle, learns through
her male dance partner and a paradoxical reconnection with Catholic
ritual that she need not choose between artistic discipline and pleasure.
For all three characters, relearning to whistle embodies renewed ties to
the improvisational creativity ascribed by the film to the Cuban cultural
forms to which they were exposed in the orphanage.
Estévez’s novel Los palacios distantes (2002) enacts a more explicit
cultural literacy campaign in new repertoires generated by the archive
206 Vicky Unruh
of a Havana theater in ruins. As the novel opens, the central character,

Victorio, quits his day job, an act accompanying his contemplation of the
fragile architectural supports of his dwelling in a palace once owned by
a slaveholder and now transformed into a tenement: “these boards aim
to prevent a collapse that in any case seems imminent,” he observes (3).11
This imminence permeates the novel’s conception of ruins as the site for
creative work in progress. When the state demolition brigade condemns
the building for renovation, Victorio leaves a bureaucratic position at an
aqueduct and takes up wandering the ruined city fulltime. Ruins provide
the sites of Victorio’s engagement with the present and his providential
encounters with two other characters, Salma and Don Fuco. Nourished
by dreams of Hollywood stardom, Salma supports herself through pros-
titution for tourists and flees physical abuse by her pimp. Don Fuco, a
virtuoso clown whose mercurial persona synthesizes adolescence and
decrepit old age in one fragile body, gives refuge to Victorio and Salma
in the ruined theater he inhabits, aptly named the Pequeño Liceo de la
Habana, that is, a small lyceum or arts school.
Kindred to Diego’s garret in Fresa y chocolate, this performative site
of cultural memory harbors the dynamic ghosts of a rich Cuban and
Western artistic past, including multiple international luminaries who
once performed in Havana. In this ruined theater turned school, Don
Fuco trains Victoria and Salma to join him in a performing trio. This
apprenticeship regenerates a repertoire ranging from the Commedia
dell’arte and Shakespeare through Stanislavski, Grotowsky, and Peter
Brook. Juxtaposing high art with popular culture, the pedagogic enter-
prise also includes stories, characters, and artistic phantoms and dreams
harbored in the theater’s dressing rooms, archives of past and future
performances. Victorio and Salma’s apprenticeship in Havana’s prerev-
olutionary cultural history constitutes the kind of “reinscription” of a
“repressed aesthetic” that James Buckwalter-Arias lucidly identifies with
the special period (364–67). Yet the trio’s artistic refuge in the ruined
theater shares porous boundaries with everyday Havana, and in coun-
ternostalgic moves that display the city’s enduring twentieth-century
inequalities, the three also demythologize that tradition, stripping it of
regressive nostalgia.12 Taking their show on the road in the surrounding
city, moreover, subverts the epoch’s tourist Havana and enacts a new
pedagogy that critically relocates the Revolution’s literacy campaigns in
a celebration of creative, cultural work. In contrast to the performing
troupes that parade daily through old Havana’s tourist sector, Don Fuco
and his protégées perform in hospitals, asylums, funeral homes, ceme-
teries, and neighborhoods tourists do not see. These shows privilege the
performing teachers as those with keys to the cultural archive housed
in the ruinous theater, a renewable repertoire they profess to deliver to
ordinary Cubans.
The collective quality of this trio’s pedagogic ventures counterbalances
the representation of physical labor in post-Soviet Cuba as a sometimes
isolating solo act that I have described in Arte nuevo and Suite Habana.
In fact, while focusing on individual life histories of contemporary
Havana ruins dwellers, the works I have explored here also link the crea-
tive reflection generated by ruins to community, though different in kind
from revolutionary norms for solidarity. Totico’s ex-wife in Arte nuevo,
for example, leaves the ruined Arbos building to live in eastern Havana’s
Alamar, a massive modern housing project built by state microbrigades
in the early 1970s.13 Yet she misses a sense of history and community
in the ruined tenement and often returns. In Suite Habana, community
emerges in the night life that transforms the daytime workers into crea-
tive artists in vast group scenes that critically evoke and replace the mass
political rallies that the film’s oldest characters watch on state television.
La vida es silbar reunites its characters through creative ventures, and
the film’s closing scene assembles countless Havana citizens through
improvisational whistling as they roller blade along the malecón. If the
closing scene of the 1967 Memorias del subdesarrollo contrasted the iso-
lated intellectual Sergio to the armed workers’ brigades protecting the
city during the Cuban missile crisis, post-Soviet literary and filmic rep-
resentations of individual work-in-progress challenge the divide between
everyday work and art and, from within the ruins of a splintered utopia,
rehearse an emergent, if precarious, new kinship of Cuban citizenry.
Notes
1. Castro decreed the special period in January 1990. See Gott (286–98).
2. See Scarpaci, Segre, Coyula (310–45), and Estrada (55–58).
3. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.
4. Dopico also comments on tourists’ voyeuristic scrutiny of ruins (451).
5. For an excellent analysis of Ponte’s war argument in his writing, see Whitfield’s
Chapter 5. Fernandes also analyzes portrayals of special period Havana as
“postwar reconstructions” (135–42).
6. See Unruh, 2007.
7. See Unruh, 2005. Fernandes details the revolutionary work ethic’s historical
origins (26).
8. See Valdés’s La nada cotidiana (1995), whose portrayal of work I address in
Unruh, 2005 (26–28).
9. “A Knack for Making Ruins” titles the English translation.
10. On Suite Habana’s awards, see Elliott (37).
11. The citation is from Frye’s translation.
12. Here I depart from Casamayor, who sees the theater as disconnected from
Havana.
13. See Scarpaci, Segre, and Coyula on Alamar (218–20).
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ensayistas nacidos con la revolución imaginan el futuro, edited by Iván de la
Nuez, 83–105. Barcelona: Mondadori, 2001.
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Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
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nuevo de hacer ruinas. Raros Media (Berlin), 2006.
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Casamayor Cisneros, Odette. “¿Cómo vivir las ruinas habaneras de los años
noventa?: respuestas disímiles desde la isla en las obras de Abilio Estévez,
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez y Ena Lucía Portela.” Caribbean Studies 32, no. 2 (July–
December 2004): 63–103.
Castro, Fidel. “Words to the Intellectuals.” In Radical Perspectives in the Arts,
edited by Lee Baxandall, 267–98. Hammondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972.
Cushing, Lincoln. ¡Revolución: Cuban Poster Art! San Francisco: Chronicle Books,
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Dopico, Ana María. “Picturing Havana: History, Vision, and the Scramble for
Cuba.” Nepantla: Views from the South 3, no. 3 (2002): 451–93.
Estévez, Abilio. Distant Palaces. Translated by David Frye. New York: Arcade,
2002.
———. “No hay modo de ignorar la vida: de una conversación con Abilio Estévez.”
By Arturo Arango. TeatroenMiami.com (December 2002). http://www.teatroen-
miami.net/2002/e-view/12-02/abilio.htm.
———. Los palacios distantes. Barcelona: Tusquets, 2002.
Estrada, Alfredo José. Havana: Autobiography of a City. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007.
Fernandes, Sujatha. Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of
New Revolutionary Cultures. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press,
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———, director. Suite Habana. ICAIC, 2003.
———, director. La vida es silbar. ICAIC, 1998.
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Chapter 17
Witness to the Ruins: An Artist’s Testimony*
Rolf Abderhalden Cortés
I am only the spokesperson for the project I am going to discuss here,

one of its many authors, one of its many actors.1 This project, which
forms part of the work that Heidi Abderhalden and I have produced
over the past 20 years in Mapa Teatro, has brought together a diverse
group of people—artists and nonartists—from different fields and dis-
ciplines. It has also linked us to a significant area of Bogotá, the Santa
Inés-El Cartucho barrio. Between 2001 and 2005, in this place—a place
that has since disappeared from the city map—Mapa Teatro carried out
a transdisciplinary artistic project: the Proyecto C’ùndua. This project
demonstrates the intimate relationship that can be forged between art
and the city. Its unique resonance was due to its particular qualities
and implications, which were not only aesthetic but also ethnographic,
anthropological, sociological, and above all, human and relational. In
fact, the Proyecto C’ùndua can be characterized as belonging to the
sphere of what some theorists now call relational art. 2
In 1998 the local administration undertook an ambitious urban
renewal plan in Bogotá, whereby it made radical decisions that had
important consequences for the city’s social makeup. Because of geo-
graphic proximity, the community of the Academia Superior de Artes
de Bogotá experienced at close range the impact of the transforma-
tion suffered by the Centro zone in particular. At that time, the Santa
Inés barrio, commonly known as El Cartucho, was a stigmatized area,
burdened not only by its own long, rich urban history, but also by a
plethora of mythologies that we all carried with us to varying degrees,
depending on our proximity or distance from that physical and sym-
bolic location. For me, as a child growing up in a distant neighborhood
to the north where I had little contact with the Santa Inés barrio, it was
the object of fears and fantasies. It was a specific site of fear—the city’s
center of fear.
212 Rolf Abderhalden Cortés
The Santa Inés barrio, now an empty space in the collective memory of
our urbis, has a long history: it is one of the foundational neighborhoods
of Bogotá. The decision made in 1998 to demolish it completely—to turn
it into a tabula rasa and replace it with a park, an empty space covered
in greenery—put an end to part of our history, a part of our social,
urban history that constitutes, in short, a history of ways of doing, of
unprecedented social practices, histories of irreplaceable lives, unparal-
leled stories of survival. It is the end of the history of a local singularity
that, upon disappearing, becomes a homogeneous and global nonplace.
El Cartucho, that floating street that lent its name to an entire neigh-
borhood, was a site for the creation of what Giorgio Agamben calls
a “virtual field.” For Agamben, a virtual field is the physical space in
which the establishment legitimizes a state of exception, whereby a por-
tion of territory remains outside the established juridical order. In this
virtual field of the city, a modus vivendi sui generis, with its own laws
and rules, organized itself under the state’s blind eye. For decades, an
extraordinarily heterogeneous human community lived there: recyclers,
shopkeepers, small business owners, prostitutes, single men, and fam-
ilies. Because of the affordability of the multiple forms of lodging and
housing in the area, it was also home to immigrants displaced by hunger
or violence from other regions of Colombia. Due to the particular state
of exception that characterized it, the area became a strategic point in
the city for all sorts of business and transactions, legal and illegal, as
well as for the most ingenious activities of the economía de rebusque
(informal economy).
From 2001 to 2005, Mapa Teatro-Laboratorio de Artistas developed
an artistic project, with the initial support of a new local administra-
tion led by Antanas Mockus (2000–2003), and later independently until
the project’s end in 2005. Despite the financing awarded by the Bogotá
mayor’s office for developing its first phase, the C’ùndua project always
maintained a critical distance and complete freedom of action in relation
to the local administration. In 2001, when we arrived in Santa Inés-El
Cartucho, the Mapa Teatro team was confronted by a partially devas-
tated urban landscape. The construction of the first phase of the Parque
Tercer Milenio was advancing in tandem with negotiations for and the
purchase of the remaining buildings. The terrifying image of the demo-
lition of vacated houses immediately made us want to stop time, to keep
the tangible traces of history from being erased. The city’s architectural
patrimony was collapsing before our eyes and those of its inhabitants.
Throughout this experience, which was devastating in every sense of the
word, we became conscious of the fact that each and every demolition of
a building erased the perspective of a fundamental—and foundational—
memory of the city. This was not only an architectural memory and a
social and cultural memory, but also an intangible patrimony, consti-
tuted by a kind of narrativity that relies on nothing but orality as the
ground of its existence.
Witness to the Ruins 213
Our project began with an initial artistic action whose starting point
was the myth of Prometheus: Prometheus: First Act. Why did we resort
to myth? Myth is the consummate story. Its generative nature makes
it a catalyst for stories that repeat themselves like dreams, continually
configuring and reconfiguring themselves in a mobile structure that
always reanimates itself. The community’s stories were a substantive part
of the architecture of the neighborhood’s memory: a form of resistance
in the face of oblivion, a potential footprint among the ruins. Along with
the eagle, Prometheus is the fundamental figure of this myth. Prometheus
steals fire from the gods and gives it to men, and, in so doing, trans-
gresses a law, a pact he has made with the gods. When the gods discover
that Prometheus has transgressed the law, he is condemned to exile in
the Caucasus. There, he is chained to a rock where an eagle feeds every
day on his liver. In turn, Prometheus nourishes himself with the eagle’s
excrement, maintaining a cycle that makes survival possible for both the
eagle and himself. Three thousand years later, the gods decide that his
punishment has lasted long enough, and they send Heracles to free him.
Once he is in the Caucasus, Heracles must surmount the wall of filth that
surrounds Prometheus in order to liberate him. For us, this image and
the description of this place corresponded to Santa Inés-El Cartucho’s
devastated landscape.
This myth, translated and reinterpreted by authors in every era, among
them Kafka and Gide, was also taken up by one of the most important
playwrights of our time, the German Heiner Müller. This “postdramatic”
author revises the myth, updating it, but unlike his predecessors, places
it in a new perspective: a kind of paradoxical tension, a contradiction
that makes it impossible for his fable to conclude in a definitive, univocal
way. We chose Müller’s version of the myth because here Prometheus,
once he is face to face with Heracles, isn’t so certain that he desires his
freedom. Heracles doesn’t understand how Prometheus cannot want to
be free after so many years and so much struggling. Prometheus hesi-
tates and indicates that he has grown accustomed to the eagle; he doesn’t
know if he’ll be able to live without it. At precisely this turning point of
the fable, the story’s “center of fear” emerges: Prometheus is more afraid
of freedom than he is of the bird.3
Abandoning El Cartucho represented many things for its inhabitants,
including the possibility of liberation and, at the same time, exile. That is
how we arrived there: with the intention of proposing possible readings
of this myth to a group of neighborhood residents.
At this point, I think it is important to underline that, at the outset,
the artist and the ethnographer maintain different viewpoints and posi-
tions in relation to the same object or, in this case, the same subjects. In
general, a social scientist arrives with hypotheses that will be the object
of verification. The artist has, above all, intuitions that will allow him
or not to make visible objects, practices, images, stories. Although this
opposition might seem a bit reductive today due to the transversal optic
that both artists and social researchers now apply in their work, it is
interesting to observe that the end point or destination of a project like
ours would not have been the same from the perspective of a “pure”
social researcher.
So, without knowing quite how we were going to do it or, even less,
how it was going to end, we approached a small, heterogeneous group of
the great community of El Cartucho, represented by women and men of
different ages, socioeconomic strata, and origins. With this experimental
community, over the course of a year we carried out a creative laboratory
that took Müller’s text as its point of departure. Müller’s text functioned
as a readymade, as a found object taken out of its context to be inter-
preted and resignified by a multiplicity of readings, gazes, and gestures.
As the text was being read, each person reinvented his or her own story,
updating the original text and rewriting his or her own myth.
This laboratory took the form of a “laboratory of the social imagi-
nary,” as Müller calls it. At its conclusion, one night in December 2002
in a half-destroyed neighborhood, we staged Prometheus: First Act, a
performative act, an install-action, in which a group of residents partic-
ipated. In this public presentation, attended by many neighborhood peo-
ple but also by people from other parts of the city, we staged the stories
and the visual, aural, and gestural narratives born from the laboratory
experience.
A year later, on a December night in 2003, we presented Prometheus:
Second Act. Among the neighborhood’s ruins, thousands of candles once
again marked out streets and the walls of some houses of former inhabi-
tants. In the absence of any trace, we had proposed that each participant
choose the most meaningful place in the house: some chose the bedroom
or the living room, others the bathroom or the kitchen, depending on the
relationship they may have had with those spaces. In that temporarily
reconstructed fragment of the neighborhood, we installed their furni-
ture and chosen objects and, right there, each one of the participants
reinstalled himself or herself for the space of one night. Small actions—
individual and collective—alternated with video projections on huge
screens, chronicling what had happened over the past year in the former
inhabitants’ lives and in the neighborhood. At the conclusion, the group
of participants, along with approximately a hundred former residents
of Santa Inés-El Cartucho, danced on the neighborhood’s ruins to the
music of a bolero. As when the god Shiva dances on destruction, some-
thing in life is reborn and regenerated.
The project’s third artistic action took place in the Mapa Teatro head-
quarters: a republican era house, with architecture very similar to that
of some Santa Inés houses. Physically, the house functioned as an instal-
lation, while it served symbolically as a metaphor for the neighborhood:
through different interactive devices, each space activated a particular
dimension of the living memory of Santa Inés-El Cartucho. We installed
a device at the threshold that activated the neighborhood bell-ringer’s
call whenever a visitor entered. Remnants of the last house to be demol-

ished—rubble, doors, windows—were placed in the central courtyard
beneath two facing video projections, in which that same house was
being simultaneously demolished and endlessly reconstructed by the
image shown in reverse. Recycling, a principal activity of the area’s
informal economy, materialized in another bedroom in the form of tra-
ditional recycling carts; television monitors took the place of recycled
objects and showed images of diverse routes taken by recylers through
the city. A scale allowed the spectators to weigh themselves and, at the
same time, view their equivalent in recycled material on a projected
image. The sound, smell, touch, and image of thousands of bottles sus-
pended from another room’s ceiling generated a sensorial and semantic
experience that was at once simple and complex. The projected image
of the facade of the last house to be demolished appeared in an empty
room whenever someone crossed the threshold. When the spectator went
through that door (a hole in the wall) into the adjoining room, he or she
entered—literally—the interior of a room in Santa Inés-Cartucho: there
one could see, projected onto a wall, the image of a former neighbor-
hood resident’s room as he or she described it, enumerating each one of
its objects. In another “empty” room, the visitor could perceive cracks
and holes in the walls. Drawing closer to the cracks, one could hear
the voices of former inhabitants telling stories about their scars; near-
ing the holes, visitors could see those scars projected onto the adjoining
room’s wall. Upon leaving the room, the visitors would find themselves
in a hallway closed off by wooden crates blocking the path. A televi-
sion monitor placed in between these crates allowed one to see identical
wooden crates being recycled and the recycler’s route through different
locations in the city. Finally, the visitor entered one last room with old
illuminated radios, each one broadcasting a particular narrative about
the neighborhood’s life.
The fourth action, The Cleaning of the Stables of Augeas, began in
2004 with the construction of the Parque Tercer Milenio and took place
in two locations: on the lot of the former neighborhood of Santa Inés,
where the park was being built, and in the Museo de Arte Moderno
de Bogotá. This work’s title once again referenced a mythic narrative:
“The tasks of Heracles,” one of which is “the cleaning of the stables of
Augeas.” This piece, a sound video-installation, linked the two loca-
tions in realtime by transporting into the museum space two images of
the lot under construction: the image of the fence that enclosed it and
the lot’s interior. On one side of the fence, we installed 12 television
monitors that transmitted looping footage of the demolition of the last
house in El Cartucho, on the so-called Callejón de la muerte, or Alley
of Death. Across from these 12 “windows into the past” we built three
columns, each containing a camera. Whatever the cameras recorded
was transmitted via Internet into the museum room, where the life-
size image was projected onto a huge wall. Another camera installed
on the roof of the only building that was not demolished (Medicina
Legal) recorded, also in real time, the park’s construction in progress.
This process was otherwise invisible to the city’s public. Thus, in the
setting of the Salon of National Artists, there was a back-and-forth
movement between the project’s original site, Santa Inés-El Cartucho,
and a public space like the museum. However, in neither of these spaces
was it possible to grasp the entire project. Those who wanted to see
the transmission had to go to the museum, while those who wanted to
see the actual object and the installation had to go to the park. This
back-and-forth between two physical sites in the city also involved a
displacement in time: a continual movement between images of the past
and images of the present. This was not a mechanical exercise of recall
but a dynamic experience of memory, understood in Walter Benjamin’s
sense as a “constellation” of heterogeneous times. Likewise, the pro-
ject spurred a movement of people between city locations; workers and
former residents of Santa Inés-El Cartucho visited the Museo de Arte
Moderno for the first time and the typical museum visitors went to the
former Barrio Santa Inés, also for the first time. Contrary to what many
expected, the 12 television monitors installed on top of the fence were
left untouched until the exposition ended: for the area’s residents, the
images were worth more than the objects. Symbolic necessity took pre-
cedence over economic necessity.
The city’s renovation plan was a project under continuous construc-
tion, which, like our work, culminated with Parque Tercer Milenio’s
inauguration in August 2005. Using all the material we had gathered
since the beginning of the demolitions in 1998 until the park had
been completed, we created one final artistic project: Witness to the
Ruins. This piece, which combines audiovisual materials and perfor-
mance, condenses our experience as witnesses to one of the city’s most
ambitious urban projects on the threshold of the third millennium. It
synthesizes our choice as artists confronted with the great paradoxes
of the real: our testimonial role. Presented in theatrical and museum
settings, as well as in nonconventional spaces, Witness to the Ruins
brings together, on an apparatus of four moving screens, the images,
testimonials, and stories of the area’s former inhabitants before, during,
and after the disappearance of the Barrio Santa Inés and the appear-
ance of a nonplace, the Parque Tercer Milenio. Through the gaze of
El Cartucho’s last inhabitant, who performs the same action that she
performed every day during her final years in the neighborhood—
preparing arepas and chocolate—we witness the farewell ceremony
of an important episode in our city’s history. Yet this act of leave-
taking constitutes an act of resistance in the face of oblivion and the
disappearance of the trace. This woman’s vitality—her final burst of
laughter amid the park’s solitude—is a resounding testimony to the
vital force of human beings in the face of the disaster produced by the
vagaries of power.
Figure 17.1 Juana Ramírez in Mapa Teatro’s Testigo de las ruinas (Colombia).
Hemipsheric Institute Encuentro, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina
(2007). Photograph courtesy of Marlène Ramírez-Cancio.
In 2006, the Parque Tercer Milenio was awarded the prize for best
public works project at Colombia’s Bienal de Arquitectura. In truth, it
was a prize awarded to a cemetery.
Notes
* Translated by Sarah Townsend.
1. This text is part of a talk given in December 2006 at the Academia Superior de
Artes de Bogotá.
2. See, for example, Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses
du réel, 2002).
3. A text’s “center of fear” is comparable to the “punctum” that Barthes identified
in the photographic image: it is the return of the dead.
Chapter 18
Coming Home to Praia de Flamengo:
The Once and Future National Student Union
Headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Victoria Langland
For much of the past 25 years, the curious parking lot at Praia de
Flamengo 132 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil attracted attention only for its
seeming incongruence with the surrounding location. Bordered by ele-
gant high-rise apartment buildings, it faces the city’s largest and most
picturesque park, and beyond this, Flamengo Beach and the Bay of
Guanabara. One could ride the many city buses that traverse the busy
boulevard or walk through the park out front and barely perceive the
scruffy parking area. If one noted the space at all, it might only be for
the fact that the modest lot of dirt floors and makeshift stalls seemed an
odd use of such prime real estate. That the site held a rich and contested
history from 1942 to 1964 as the location for the headquarters for the
National Students’ Union (UNE, União Nacional dos Estudantes), a
once elegant three-story building now long ago demolished, would not
be obvious to anyone who did not already know so. As memory scholars
such as James Young have noted, “without a deliberate act of remem-
brance, buildings, streets, or ruins remain little more than inert pieces of
the cityscape” (62).1 In fact, for long periods in recent history, Praia de
Flamengo 132 lay in abeyance.
Nonetheless, during brief but recurring flashes of activism, students
have periodically shattered this inertia by mobilizing to reclaim the area.
In 1980, the last year of the building’s existence, UNE members vehe-
mently protested the government’s decision to tear down the structure
by holding increasingly large demonstrations to save it. For weeks, enor-
mous banners, graffitied walls, and even the painted trunks of street-
side palm trees marked the area, announcing students’ claims to the site
with statements such as “We want our building” and “The memory of
220 Victoria Langland
the people will not be destroyed.”2 Seven years later, in 1987, with the
building long gone and the parking lot erected in its place, UNE com-
memorated its fiftieth anniversary with a concert there. Another seven
years after that, following extensive lobbying, students in 1994 won legal
rights to the terrain from then-President Itamar Franco, an accomplish-
ment they celebrated with both solemnity and lighthearted beers, first
in a formal ceremony at the Hotel Gloria, and then in a neighborhood
bar known for its historic ties to UNE, Café Lamas (Gusmão). Legal
disputes with the parking lot owner subsequently interfered, however,
and the union was unable to establish its possession of the site. Although
UNE’s lawyers worked to enforce their ownership, until recently these
struggles were confined to the courtroom, and Praia de Flamengo 132
remained an anonymous parking lot, unmarked and unremarkable.
On the February 1, 2007, however, the site of the former UNE building
came alive once again. On that day some 5,000 students ended a week-
long cultural festival with a march down Praia de Flamengo. Carrying
banners and balloons, and accompanied by both musicians and former
student leaders, the festive yet purposeful demonstrators sang and cheered
their way to the parking lot. Once there, they broke down the flimsy
gates, entered the site, and, amid choruses of the Brazilian and UNE
anthems, declared themselves home to stay. “We’re going in because this
is our house,” said current UNE President Gustavo Petta through a loud-
speaker; “this is the history of the student movement” (EstudanteNet,
“O dia dos bons filhos”). And move in they did. Replacing the parked
cars with tents, to be supplemented later by portable bathrooms and
showers, office space, storage lockers and a small theater, rotating teams
of students pledged to stay permanently at the site to protect their recent
“reconquest,” as some soon came to call it. Within days, they replaced
the billboards and advertisements out front with colorful murals depict-
ing UNE and UBES (União Brasileira de Estudantes Secundários), the
union of secondary school students, and began hosting a steady stream
of visitors to the site, ranging from former student activists to current
political and artistic figures. Naming their campaign “UNE Goes Back
Home,” they also kept a running report of their events on the UNE Web
site, replete with digital photographs, links to media coverage, and even
YouTube videos of the occupation. Using this blend of Movimento Sem
Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement), political strategy, and sophisti-
cated media savvy, this twenty-first-century student action has brought
new attention to the old lot at Praia de Flamengo.
In stimulating this new attention to the site, students have claimed for
themselves a double role of making history and resurrecting memory. In
making history, their occupation of Praia de Flamengo 132 has been an
important political step for the organization. Perhaps most obviously,
by staking physical claim to this site, students powerfully advanced
their material goal of obtaining a prestigious new headquarters build-
ing in Rio de Janeiro, one that would have an illustrious location and
Coming Home to Praia de Flamengo 221
an equally significant architecture, as Oscar Niemeyer has consented to

design the new building. The spectacle also elicited a good deal of pos-
itive media exposure, welcomed by a student movement that had seen
its share of criticism, at the same time helping UNE draw attention to
the union’s then-impending seventieth anniversary in August 2007. No
less significant is the fact that mounting such a prolonged event required
and encouraged a significant degree of commitment and organization,
which became a galvanizing force for the unions. As one participant
told reporters: “This is a historic moment and we all want to participate
in it,” suggesting the appeal of being part of history that helped entice
students to join in (EstudanteNet, “O dia dos bons filhos”). Another
student expressed a similar sentiment, stating: “Fifty years from now
maybe we’ll pass by here, see our building, and remember this day,
remember that we were a part of it” (EstudanteNet, “Acampamento
da UNE”). 3 And as testament to the potential significance of students’
efforts to regain the site, Artur Poerner, author of the most cherished
history of the Brazilian student movement, Poder Jovem (Youth Power),
in its fifth edition as of this writing, not only participated in the occu-
pation, but also declared he would have to add a new chapter to his cel-
ebrated tome in order to recount this latest struggle (EstudanteNet, “O
dia dos bons filhos”).
In resurrecting memory, what gave weight and meaning to the stu-
dents’ efforts was the mnemonic potential of the site itself. While the
terrain no longer held any material traces of the UNE building, these
having been long ago carted off by demolition crews, the physical space
was seen as both harboring and fostering lasting connections to ear-
lier times. Hence, students invited those with memories of the building,
from former student activists to local residents, to visit the occupation
and share any stories of their past experiences there that the visit helped
evoke. They also made the construction of a small theater one of their
first tasks, and soon began hosting public film screenings of documen-
taries about student movement history. Moreover, as numerous former
student leaders and contemporary political and artistic figures began
dropping in, student occupants transformed these visits into small pub-
lic discussions, posting photographs and summaries of these events on
their Web site daily. Indeed, even a quick overview of this site reveals the
extensive amount of activity in which students engaged, as they truly
labored over memory, rapidly transforming the former parking lot into a
thriving mélange of commemorative acts and spaces. Like the “memory
entrepreneurs” conceptualized by Elizabeth Jelin to describe those who
advocate for particular memories of the past, the students mobilized
around the site of the former building as both a reservoir of stories about
the student movement of the past and a stage from which to project these
narratives into the present and future (33–34). On the site of the now
absent building, making history and preserving memory were intimately
intertwined.
An examination of the stories elicited and projected from this site

reveals a seeming irony, however, for during the period of UNE history
to which students most often refer—the late 1960s era of strident student
opposition to the government, a government led by the military between
1964 and 1985—the union in fact had no central, physical location,
and hence the building played a very small role. The headquarters had
been stripped from UNE on the same day as the coup d’état that over-
threw then-President João Goulart and ushered in 21 years of military
rule. Nevertheless, in students’ appeals to the mnemonic significance
of this terrain, the mobilizations of the late 1960s consistently figure
as a fundamental part of the memory they seek to recover and assert.
Examining the students’ narration of the recent military past as part of
their reoccupation of the former UNE headquarters reveals that Praia de
Flamengo 132, despite the fact that it was not an important player in the
past drama, has nevertheless come to stand in for that past in important
ways. In fact, I would argue, the very lack of material ruins at the site,
rather than rendering the site less meaningful, serves to emphasize the
loss students continue to commemorate.
What is immediately apparent when looking at the students’ contem-
porary claims to the former building is that its legacy is intimately tied
up with that of the military regime of 1964–1985. On the day of the
February 1, 2007 occupation, for example, UNE Vice President Maurício
Piccin declared: “This space is ours in homage to the victims of the mil-
itary regime” (EstudanteNet, “Moradores visitam acampamento”),
while the Niemeyer-designed plans for the new building prominently
include a monument to former UNE President Honestino Guimarães,
imprisoned and disappeared by the military in the early 1970s. One
of the volunteers who camped out at the site even proclaimed their
current occupation an extension of this period of military rule, say-
ing: “[I]t’s our way of continuing the struggle of those who fell in the
standoff with the dictatorship. . . . Here we will finally bury the military
regime” (EstudanteNet, “Praia de Flamengo”). More than 20 years after
the return to civilian rule in 1985, students still saw the UNE grounds as
hallowed space, a potential memorial to the disappeared and graveyard
for the repressive past.
In many ways these references to the military period appropriately
correspond to an important aspect of UNE’s history, as the student
movement was a critical force of opposition to the regime and garnered
intense national recognition in this role. While UNE’s founding dated
back to 1937, and through much of the 1940s and 1950s the union’s
leaders became recognized political figures, it was the organization’s
massive antidictatorship demonstrations—particularly during the year
1968—that catapulted it to a newfound position of national impor-
tance. On the one hand, students’ relatively privileged social positions
as the sons and daughters of the Brazilian elite, coupled with military
officials’ belief that the leftist political stance of the UNE leadership did
not represent the majority of students, initially granted them a certain

degree of protection from military repression. Hence, while the labor
unions and peasant leagues met with extensive and prolonged persecu-
tion immediately following the 1964 coup d’état, university students,
after an initial purge of UNE leadership and the withdrawal of offi-
cial recognition for and funding of UNE, were generally less severely
harassed. This meant that, following a brief period of paralysis, UNE
members were able to reshuffle the union, and by 1968 they came to
spearhead the largest and most important opposition movement to the
regime to that date. On the other hand, even this traditionally privi-
leged group soon came to feel the sting of police aggression, as students
and police faced off in increasingly violent street demonstrations, and
newspaper photographs of bloodied, beaten, and in some cases, assas-
sinated student protestors made up some of the most iconic images of
that year. Moreover, by the end of 1968, the regime took a much more
hardened stance toward student dissent, outlawing all forms of student
political organizing, expelling and often imprisoning those who contin-
ued to engage in it, and resorting to the systematic torture and disap-
pearance of political opponents. Following this turn, UNE continued to
function clandestinely for a few years, but eventually collapsed after the
October 1973 imprisonment of its last president, Honestino Guimarães.
Students were only able to reorganize the union in 1979, after the mil-
itary’s announcement of its intention to step down and to promote the
gradual restoration of some civil liberties. And although the reorganized
UNE never amassed the kind of enormous following it had earlier enter-
tained, it was still officially banned by the regime and continued to enter
into conflict with it. UNE’s 1980 attempt to reclaim its building and the
regime’s response in destroying it constitute one example of UNE’s con-
tinued opposition to the dictatorship. Despite the wide variation in these
different moments of student movement activity spanning from 1964 to
1985, in general the student movement played a prominent oppositional
role in the military period; hence, the attention of later generations of
students to this historical legacy is well founded.
In addition, the symbolism of the UNE building as a player in this
historic drama resonates well with a contemporary narrative of student
opposition to military rule. For, as students in 2007 and other times have
often noted, the UNE building itself was attacked and burned on the
same day as the military coup, no doubt targeted in part because of the
large banners reading “Students mobilized against the coup” that UNE
members had draped from the front balcony several days earlier. On
April 1, 1964, as word of the military’s successful overthrow of President
João Goulart spread, a rowdy group of coup supporters gathered outside
the UNE building on Praia de Flamengo to deride this symbol of leftist
organizing. In the steadily falling rain they jeered and taunted the UNE
“Communists” still inside,4 set fire to barricades students had erected
to protect the site, and eventually raided and ignited the building.5
UNE was never again able to operate in the building, and the archives
it housed there were either confiscated or destroyed (Martins Filho). In
subsequent years, this temporal coincidence between the end of UNE’s
physical home and the beginning of military rule was oft-repeated in
histories of the UNE building, such as in the remarks of an artist affili-
ated with UNE who later recalled fleeing the burning building. In 1980
he wrote: “A little bit of the Brazilian intelligentsia died there, sacrificed
in those flames and ashes of UNE, marking the date of the long night of
darkness into which Brazil plunged from April 1, 1964 on” (Varneiro). It
was thus fitting that one of the first visitors to the Praia de Flamengo site
following the UNE occupation in 2007 was a local resident who recalled
seeing the original building in flames (EstudanteNet, “O dia dos bons
filhos”). And a few days later Carlos Lyra, a musician who composed the
UNE hymn and who had also been at the building that night in 1964,
came by to express support and share his story of seeing people invade
and destroy the theater inside. “Those guys didn’t even spare the theater
so they could do right-wing plays there,” he joked (EstudanteNet, “Do
CPC ao CUCA”). Notwithstanding the humorous tone of his comments,
the fire on the day of the coup wrapped the story of UNE’s history and of
the military regime in a single temporal narrative of destruction. These
stories confirmed the building’s connection to the coup and ensuing dic-
tatorship, as well as UNE’s national and historic importance.
In keeping with the apparent irony noted earlier, however, during
the years in which UNE was most active in antidictatorship mobilizing,
the building played almost no role. Not only had students been driven
from the site by the fire of April 1964, and then kept away by the new
government’s rescission of UNE’s official status, but the nature of stu-
dent mobilizing in these postcoup years was also incompatible with the
maintenance of a stationary location. Not for nothing did 1968 become
known for the students’ tactic of “lightning demonstrations,” in which
protesters assembled to deliver brief speeches and unfurl small banners,
dispersing quickly as police arrived, only to reassemble a few minutes
later at prearranged locations elsewhere around the city. Moreover, the
police had gradually begun utilizing more drastic means to quiet dis-
senting students, and by 1968 they were employing mounted cavalry,
tear and nausea gas, electrically charged nightsticks, water cannons, and
gunfire, while state intelligence services scrambled to uncover and pre-
vent future protests by infiltrating universities and student gatherings.
UNE leaders were sometimes so rigorously sought after by the police
that they took to assembling their own squadrons of student bodyguards
to protect them, and the annual UNE congresses at which such lead-
ers were elected became elaborate clandestine affairs held in the base-
ments of monasteries or at remote farms. In the cat-and-mouse conflicts
between students and the police in these years, students’ use of the UNE
building, had that even been an option, would have rendered them peril-
ously easy marks. Given this situation and in light of the other pressing
political matters students engaged in during these years, from organiz-

ing against the military’s usurpation of government to confronting the
regime’s proscriptions against UNE itself, students entertained no plans
to recuperate the building until 1979, and they made almost no refer-
ences to the site in speeches or publications. The antidictatorship strug-
gle for which students became famous took place on the streets, not in
the UNE building.
Even at the two moments in 1968 when students did return to Praia de
Flamengo, the UNE building was not the principal focus of their efforts.
In both cases, they turned to the site to reassure themselves and others
that UNE itself continued to exist. In the first instance, on March 29,
following the death the evening before of Edson Luís de Lima Souto, the
first student slain by the police that year, the massive funeral procession
that wound its way through Rio de Janeiro en route to the cemetery,
stopping repeatedly for brief speeches of protest, suddenly found itself on
Praia de Flamengo near the now vacant building. According to Vladimir
Palmeira, then-leader of the Rio de Janeiro-based student union (União
Metropolitana de Estudantes, UME), their arrival there was purely coin-
cidental. “Look here, we didn’t go to the building; we went to Edson’s
burial . . . and we passed the building on the way,” he later explained
(Palmeira). Yet once they noticed where they were, Palmeira and another
student leader immediately found their way inside the building, climbed
to the second floor, and addressed the crowd from the balcony, criticiz-
ing the dictatorship’s recent brutality and leading students in chanting
several UNE slogans. But as Palmeira explains, the cheers for UNE were
mostly wishful thinking: “In truth, at that point in [March] 1968 UNE
was still very disorganized and so we made it a point to say that UNE
still existed, that UNE was still ours. We climbed up to the window,
made a speech. We said that UNE was resisting; it was directing our
movement. It wasn’t always exactly the truth . . .” (Palmeira). If stopping
at the site during the funeral procession was spontaneous, it was also
judicious, for the building’s presence gave material weight to their claims
that UNE persevered. Six months later, on October 15, students engaged
in a similar occupation following the early morning police raid of the
annual UNE congress. With most of the UNE leadership now under
arrest, along with some 700 members, those who remained at large
sought a way of demonstrating that UNE would nonetheless continue
to function. “With the little bit of strength we still had in Rio,” wrote
leftist activist Fernando Gabeira in his memoirs, “we went on the coun-
terattack, like a team that’s looking for an honor goal in the last minute
of the game. We planned a demonstration in UNE’s own building at
Praia de Flamengo 132” (81). In this case, around 1,000 students entered
the building and occupied it for 15 to 30 minutes, chanting UNE slo-
gans and painting UNE graffiti on passing buses (Villarinho).6 During
both of these historical moments, the building’s materiality served as an
important backdrop to students’ claims on UNE’s continued presence,
but the structure itself did not become a focus of their efforts. In March
1968, just as UNE began to mobilize mass numbers of participants, and
then again in October 1968, as the arrest of huge numbers of members
marked the union’s imminent decline, Praia de Flamengo represented a
stage from which to proclaim UNE’s perseverance, but it did not itself
become a staging ground for student opposition.
If at the time of these two brief occupations neither one represented
students’ lasting interest in the building itself, by the time of the 2007
occupation, the first of these moments—March 29, 1968—was reveren-
tially and repeatedly evoked. While describing the festive march down
Praia de Flamengo toward the UNE site on the day students reclaimed
the building, for example, a reporter for the Jornal do Brasil compared
the participants’ cheerful mood with the sobriety that had marked this
earlier period. “Many remembered a different emotion they experienced
along that same trajectory, when they carried the coffin of the student
Edson Luís,” she wrote (Angel). Indeed, the death, funeral, and Seventh
Day Mass of Lima Souto became some of the defining moments of 1968,
and in retrospect can be seen as the beginning of UNE’s ability to inspire
massive participation and considerable popular support. Moreover,
Edson’s death gave rise to some of the most stunning and frequently
reproduced photographs of that year; once he was killed, students laid
out the boy’s body overnight in the State Legislature’s chambers, to
which both journalists and floral displays arrived in tremendous num-
bers. So if during the funeral march itself the stop at Praia de Flamengo
was but one of many, and the event as a whole was expected to lead to
less repression and more political change, in later years the passage by
Praia de Flamengo became one of the critical signifiers of 1968, a som-
ber marker of the destruction wrought by that period.
When seen in this light, contemporary students’ references to the
UNE building as part of the story of 1968 student protest become not so
much ironic as merely representing new meanings. For if in 1968 Praia
de Flamengo 132, when referenced at all, primarily signified the union’s
hopeful perseverance in the face of great odds, by 2007 students used
the site to commemorate the union’s eventual destruction. Hence their
proposed monument to Honestino Guimarães, the disappeared UNE
former-president who undoubtedly never set foot in the former UNE
headquarters (as his involvement in national student politics began too
late), would nevertheless fit appropriately in this disappeared building.
Meanwhile, students’ recurrent activity at the UNE site—including
President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva’s August 2008 visit there to announce
proposed funding for the new building—suggests a future UNE head-
quarters that will continue to stage such stories about the military past.
Andreas Huyssen has written of monuments for which, “[a]t stake . . . is
the power of a commemorative site to keep the story alive as opposed
to entombing it in the realm of the unspoken, of a past that is made to
disappear once again” (101). As students continue to find creative new
ways of projecting their collective memories, we can imagine that Praia

de Flamengo 132 will not soon revert to silence.
Notes
1. This is Young’s explanation of Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire.
2. See the photographs of the 1980 student demonstrations in the Arquivo Estadual
do Rio de Janeiro, DOPS, Setor Estudantil, Pasta 69-A, Folha 34, and in the
photo archives of the Jornal do Brasil, especially those of Cynthia Brito and
Delfim Vieira. Unless otherwise noted, the translations of these slogans from
Portuguese, and of all other citations, are my own.
3. Indeed, sometime following the occupation, students mounted a large metal
plaque on the wall at Praia de Flamengo commemorating the participants in
2007. The sign reads, in part, “In homage to all those who, on February 1,
2007, walked from the Lapa Arches to the well-known address of the student
movement—Praia de Flamengo, 132.”
4. In fact, there were no university students still inside the UNE building when the
coup supporters gathered outside to taunt them. Instead, a group of artists and
actors had stayed behind to defend the theater, recently constructed as part of the
Popular Cultural Center tied to UNE and also housed at the building. Several of
them have left written accounts of that night. See, for example, Vianna.
5. For an analysis of how people remember this pro-coup crowd as actually being
military officials themselves, see Langland. Current UNE leaders and members
quoted on the UNE Web site about the 2007 reoccupation also repeatedly refer
to the April 1, 1964 fire as having been perpetrated by “the dictatorship.”
6. Villarinho’s report includes newspaper clippings from the October 15, 1968
occupation.
Select Bibliography
Angel, Hildegard. “Antigos militantes da UNE retomam seu prédio histórico.”
UNE de volta pra casa. http://www.une.org.br/home3/acampamento/m_7441.
html.
EstudanteNet—Site Oficial Une e Ubes. “Acampamento da UNE na Praia do
Flamengo já tem mais de 150 barracas.” UNE de volta pra casa. http://www.
une.org.br/home3/acampamento/m_7411.html.
——— “O dia dos bons filhos.” UNE de volta pra casa. http://www.une.org.br/
home3/acampamento/m_7417.html.
——— “Do CPIC ao CUCA: Uma semana de pé, acampamento recebe visita do
músico Carlos Lyra.” UNE de volta pra casa. http://www.une.org.br/home3/
acampamento/m_7439.html.
——— “Moradores visitam acampamento e declaram apoio aos estudantes.” UNE
de volta pra casa. http://www.une.org.br/home3/acampamento/m_7416.html.
——— “Praia de Flamengo, 132—Sai decisão da justiça: o terreno é nosso!” UNE
da volta pra casa. http://www.une.org.br/home3/acampamento/m_9022.html.
Gabeira, Fernando. O que é isso companheiro? Rio de Janiero: CODECRI, 1979.
Gusmão, Fernando. Interview by Victoria Langland. October 20, 1999. Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Translated by Marcial
Godoy-Anativia and Judy Rein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003.
Langland, Victoria. “La casa de la memoria en Praia de Flamengo 132: memorias
estudiantiles y nacionales en Brasil, 1964–1980.” In Monumentos, memoriales
y marcas territoriales, edited by Elizabeth Jelin and Victoria Langland, 57–96.
Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2003.
Martins Filho, João Roberto. Movimento Estudantil e Ditadura Militar 1964–
1968. Campinas, Brazil: Papirus, 1987.
Palmeira, Vladimir. Interview by Victoria Langland. October 20, 2000. Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil.
Poerner, Artur. O Poder Jovem: Historia da participação política dos estudantes
brasileiros. 2d ed. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1979.
Varneiro, Ferdy. “A Última Noite da UNE.” O Pasquim 9, no. 554 (February 1980):
8–14.
Vianna, Deocélia. Companheiros de Viagem. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984.
Villarinho, Manoel. Inquérito No. 48/68. March 18, 1969. Archives of the
Departamento de Ordem Política e Social, Setor Secreto, Pasta No 42, Arquivo
Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.
Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary
Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Chapter 19
Fernando Vallejo’s Ruinous Heterotopias: The
Queer Subject in Latin America’s Urban Spaces
Arturo Arias
Following the success of the film version of Fernando Vallejo’s 1994 novel
Our Lady of the Assassins, directed by Barbet Schroeder, and of his 2001
novel El desbarrancadero, the Colombian writer attained star status in
the Spanish-speaking world. However, Vallejo’s prominence did not tem-
per his hostility toward readers or make his work less resistant to simple
readings. On the contrary, the celebration of his best-known novels only
highlighted the ironies underlying his narrative technique. Vallejo likes to
appeal to readers’ nostalgia, and then reveals that the past they long for
is no less ruinous than the present they lament. He seduces readers with
the images that Western modernity uses to discipline society—such as
that of the noted author or the public intellectual—only to subject them
to insult for their complicity in upholding that order, which excludes
or marginalizes nonhegemonic subjects. Thus, in Vallejo’s texts, what I
call a ruinous heterotopia ultimately undermines nostalgic Westernizing
myths of origin, and “home.”
My conceptualization of ruinous heterotopia borrows Michel
Foucault’s idea of heterotopia, defined most simply as the opposite of a
utopia, but nuanced as follows:
There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—
places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—
which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia
in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the
culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. . . . I shall
call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (3–4)1
Foucault elicits six principles characterizing heterotopias, includ-

ing “sacred or forbidden places,” and “heterotopias of deviation,” a
230 Arturo Arias
classification for individuals whose behavior is “deviant” in relation to

required norms (4–5).
To Foucault’s definition of a heterotopia, understood as a site where
queer subjects can enact their dislocation by writing over the site’s origi-
nal signifiers, I add the qualifier “ruinous”; the spaces drawn as “hetero-
topias of deviation” in Vallejo’s novels are always represented as being
in ruins. I use the term “ruinous” for what remains after the destruction
and reconstruction of urban sites, a dynamic that not only evokes Walter
Benjamin’s tension between demystification and the mythologizing at
play whenever people try to preserve what no longer exists, but also
points to “an allegory of modernity’s self-devouring process of constant
reinvention and self-destruction” where “spleen and ennui replace awe
and nostalgia” (Enjuto-Rangel, 155, 140). Thus, for Vallejo, a ruinous
heterotopia is a crumbling, imaginary place based on an originary con-
struction of that same place, which exists in memory yet provides the
allegorical grounding for another space that, looking just like it, offers
an inverted symbolism. It is a space closed in on itself and given over to
infinite referential representations.
In all his works, Vallejo narrates using the subjective voice of
Fernando, a queer antioqueño from Medellín, easily confused with the
author himself. Medellín is ever present, regardless of whether Fernando
is in New York, Rome, or Mexico City. This ubiquitous homeland sig-
nals Fernando’s “deep though subconscious” attachment to it, which
comes “with familiarity and ease, with the assurance of sounds and
smells, of communal activities and homely pleasures accumulated over
time” (Tuan, 159).2 Yet to such “typical” Medellín attachments, Vallejo
adds another layer for Fernando, for whom Medellín constitutes an inti-
mate, expansive, and endless gay network, a decentered site of “devi-
ation” in the Foucauldian sense that becomes an imaginary site at the
service of homosexual needs. Vallejo’s work reveals hidden emotional
territories, “illuminate[s] fields of human care,” and draws “attention to
areas of experience that we may otherwise fail to notice” (Tuan, 162).
The revealed spaces are invisible but also invisibilized, the symbolic clos-
ets that heteronormative society requires for its definition of order. For
straight readers, then, Vallejo’s urban space is simultaneously familiar
and foreign, shared and different, normal and perverse.
Vallejo’s literary recreations of Medellín interrogate the prevailing
nostalgic construction of “home.” Rather than present a timeless urban
image or sentimentalized utopia, Vallejo reveals the extent to which
home is merely a phantasm of the desire for nurture and support, stabil-
ity and permanence. His images also exact implied revenge on the injuri-
ous site of origin by representing childhood places not as unproblematic
locales marked by seamless attachments, but as ruinous heterotopias,
always already complicated by ex-centric desires interrupting the narra-
tive of origin. This chapter illuminates these childhood places and their
association with sexuality and Colombia’s ruinous present in Vallejo’s
Fernando Vallejo’s Ruinous Heterotopias 231
novels El desbarrancadero and Our Lady of the Assassins. It also

explores these novels’ work with space, not only physical locales, but
also symbolic spaces, extensions of urban configurations beyond phys-
ical borders and reconfigured by queer desire. I argue that this desire
destabilizes the borders of Latin American narrative canonicity, pushing
the limits of memory, desire, revolution, and liberation beyond the lit-
erary “boom’s” innovations, in a critique of those authors’ patriarchal
disregard for questions of gender and sexuality.
Mapping the Urban, Mapping Memory

In Our Lady of the Assassins, Fernando, a 50-year-old writer, returns
to Medellín from abroad and meets Alexis, a handsome gay boy. The
two begin a relationship and move in together. Fernando tells Alexis
how beautiful the city was when he left and how it has changed for the
worse. Alexis explains to Fernando the ins-and-outs of everyday vio-
lence. Fernando soon discovers that Alexis is a professional sicario (gun-
for-hire), sought by members of other gangs. After several assassination
attempts, Alexis is killed by two boys on a motorcycle. Fernando then
wanders aimlessly through Medellín’s streets until he meets Wilmar,
a boy with a striking resemblance to Alexis. The two begin an affair,
rekindling the kind of relationship Fernando had with Alexis. Wilmar
is also a sicario, but Fernando is shocked to learn that Wilmar is also
the person who shot Alexis. He vows to kill Wilmar, but then learns it
was Alexis who started the cycle by killing Wilmar’s brother in the first
place, thus forcing the latter to seek revenge. Disgusted, Fernando con-
vinces Wilmar to leave the country with him. When Wilmar goes to say
goodbye to his mother, he is killed as well.
The plot of El desbarrancadero is simpler. Fernando returns from
Mexico to Medellín to care for his brother Darío, dying of AIDS in the
crumbling house where they were raised. Fernando becomes his broth-
er’s nurse and doctor, evoking their good times as wild teens enjoying
gay sex in an old Studebaker. The novel idealizes the Medellín of yester-
year and what it offered gay boys, while condemning its present condi-
tions. Fernando also concocts sundry cures for Darío until his inevitable
death, whereupon Fernando returns to Mexico.
Our Lady of the Assassins begins with a reflection on the past:
There was on the outskirts of Medellín a quiet and peaceful village

called Sabaneta. I know this for a fact because near there, on one side
of the road coming from Envigado . . . on the Santa Anita property of my
grandparents . . . was where my childhood took place. (LA, 3)3
This incipit evokes apparent childhood innocence and an earlier configu-

ration of Medellín and its outskirts. In a similar tone, El desbarrancadero
232 Arturo Arias
begins when Fernando’s brother Darío enters the family house, walks
silently to his bedroom, and collapses. The text contrasts a peaceful,
idyllic past and a ruinous present marked by illness and impending
death: “[Darío] spent what I think were his only peaceful days since his
distant childhood”; after New Year’s he got back to reality, to “the dusty
mental hospital that was his house, my house, crumbling in ruins” (D, 7;
my emphasis).
Both texts open with literary figurations that produce childhood
socio-territories as unembellished, peaceful spaces contrasting with the
calamitous present. This strategy induces disequilibrium between past
and present, overcome as the two novels unfold. Still, the present’s ruin-
ous condition, associated in El desbarrancadero with AIDS (the ruin of
the body), clearly evolves from a process beginning in childhood that
isolates certain kinds of people from their families and communities.
Not surprisingly, this “idyllic” childhood is ultimately revealed as an
imagined age of tranquility rather than an actual paradise. Nevertheless,
this discrepancy between an idealized past and present reality dawns
on readers slowly because Vallejo’s signs resist decoding and disguise
his intentions. On the surface, his texts appear to be about the mel-
ancholic remains of Fernando’s family’s past: ruins, memoirs, clothing,
sexual trysts. But conflicting codes impinge obliquely on these elements,
transforming them into signs of the affective failure of decorum, social
convention, polite conversation, and proper manners. Without mention-
ing gay rights or a gay agenda overtly, through the tension of the sign,
Vallejo signals a normative reality that silences difference and consigns
gay subjects to new forms of marginalization.
The opening of Our Lady of the Assassins deals ambivalently with
childhood and simultaneously points to the subtle ways in which Vallejo’s
work reflects on memory’s artifice. Fernando explains the making of glo-
bos (hot air balloons), then digresses, wondering whether readers know
what a “Sacred Heart of Jesus” is. His reminder that there was one in his
family’s house evokes traditional religious values. He then resumes the
balloon story, in which the uncertain trajectory of a balloon that once
floated toward Sabaneta represents the oscillations of his own memory:
“[A]nd [there we were] following it along the road in my dear grandpa’s
Hudson. No, it wasn’t in my grandpa’s Hudson, it was in my pa’s old
jalopy. Yeah, it was in the Hudson for sure. I don’t remember now, it was
so long ago, I don’t remember now” (LA, 4). Vallejo creates the illusion
that narrative can scrupulously recreate remnants of personal history or
faithfully depict involuntary subjective associations. The use of precise
names, such as Fernando or Darío, seeks to convince the reader of his
diligence. However, the exactitude of his recollection is questioned when
he equivocates: was it the Hudson or not? Thus, beneath the precise
geographical detail lies the recognition that memory is flawed. Still, his
oscillating rhetoric also entices the reader with the notion of memorial
exactitude: it was the Hudson indeed.
This example reveals one hidden sense of the sign in Vallejo’s texts:
although it is impossible to recreate the past, the creative process can
reinvent it. Creative reinvention is not the same as representing real-
ity because the text is an arbitrary, fortuitous arrangement whose signs
offer myriad connotations. This is particularly true in Vallejo’s repre-
sentations of home. He spoon-feeds the reader fantasies of an older,
smaller Medellín without comunas (shantytowns) and with Finca Santa
Anita standing at the center as an omphalos, a space from which to con-
front the decay of a present-to-come. Gayatri Gopinath explains that
gay diasporic subjects often represent home as a broken space imagi-
natively recomposed elsewhere. Curiously, in Vallejo’s case, Fernando
performs this reconfiguration while remaining within Medellin.4 By
omitting references to Fernando’s gay sexuality in his nostalgic recrea-
tion of family history, Vallejo shows that the affection defining the het-
eronormative family is possible only if queer elements are repressed. This
enables Vallejo to underscore what happens when a gay subject inhabits
“home.” Rather than resign himself to an exilic relationship to his child-
hood home (though Vallejo himself has chosen exile in Mexico City),
Fernando transforms the space with his desire. Hiram Perez asserts that
being gay requires travel, actual or imagined, away from the “heteronor-
mative confines of the traditionally defined ‘home’ and ‘family’ ” (177).
In Vallejo’s fictional universe, this traveling occurs without geographic
displacement, as he insists on a return to Medellín that reconfigures it.
Urban spaces lie at the center of this textual process. The opening set-
tings of most Vallejo books are old Medellín neighborhoods: Sabaneta,
Envigado, Laureles, Boston, Prado, La Toma, Guayaquil. His stories all
begin in an idealized past, accessed “over the ruins of [his] memories”
(D, 51). Foundational scenes of “home,” cemented by affection, evoke
a time when the ruins of the present were seemingly not yet so. Yet the
texts also problematize that paradise by altering, through subtle nar-
rative techniques, depictions of Colombian society and Fernando, thus
subliminally situating shame as a presence-in-absence in his identity
formation. Indeed, the injurious nature of Fernando’s speech defies the
divisive epistemological family framework of “us” and “them,” a reac-
tion to unnamed heteronormative mores and a response to the implicitly
injurious speech directed at him.
Vallejo writes using a narrative “I” with which he identifies only par-
tially and problematically. He continually experiments with the con-
struction of a false subject configured by false memories. 5 Memory and
time embroil this subject within an urban itinerancy that obscures the
phobias of institutionalized patriarchy. These are never staged textually
(say as hypothetical family confrontations about sexual orientation or
accusations of deviance from legal authorities), yet they imply a rene-
gotiation of identity.6 Thus Vallejo (the writing subject), Fernando (the
subject constructed through writing), and the space where Fernando
operates are all transformed into amorous, sensuous signs, interfaced
234 Arturo Arias
to create alternative spaces depicted as “ruins.” Vallejo’s rhetoric air-

brushes the fault lines and sutures that bisect the issue of Latin American
gay identity. Paradoxically, Fernando can be truly himself only in a space
conformed by ruins.
A Vision of Ruins as an Inversion of

the Family Panopticon
The connection between literariness and reality is depicted primarily
through the representation of urban ruins but is filtered through the
disciplinary structure of family, with which Fernando maintains an
ambivalent relationship of resistance and desire. Although to preserve
kinship ties he conforms to his family’s prohibitions against naming
his desire, the shame and trauma of leaving it unnamed generates anger
and resentment. In other instances, however, the family is represented
not as a disciplinary force but rather as an ethos that might gener-
ate communality.7 In this contradictory logic, ruins, more than “old
buildings,” become fragmented signs of Fernando’s “distant child-
hood” (D, 8) that illuminate contradictory relations with home. These
configurations oscillate between heterotopic and dystopic thinking,
as memory play not only transforms the past into the narrative ruins
of the present but also conflates domestic with national space.8 Thus,
as El desbarrancadero opens, Fernando evokes Medellín’s river in this
fashion:
The days, the years, life, had gone by as furiously as that river in Medellín
that they turned into a drainage ditch so that it would drag away in its
dirty waters, in its whirlpools of rage, not the gleaming sabaletas of the
olden days, but shit, shit, and more shit down to the sea. (8)
This image is emblematic of the collapse of Fernando’s space, his perpet-

ual disappointment with his world, and his turn to compensatory subjec-
tivism. Fernando’s personal space appears as the “the dusty madhouse of
his house, of my house, that was falling down in ruins” (D, 8).
Whereas El desbarrancadero is allegedly about Darío’s death from
AIDS, the novel actually ascribes death to Colombian society because it
turns people like Fernando and Darío into outcasts from home. Thus,
upon returning Fernando claims he “saw Death standing in the staircase”
(D, 10). He associates the image with his mother, also in ruins from his
perspective. Fernando immediately adds: “[T]he bathroom didn’t have a
light bulb, or more accurately, it did have a light bulb, but it was burned
out, and the toilet paper had run out so long ago” (D, 12). “[U]nder the
shower,” he continues, there was “a little stream, cold, cold, cold, that
fell drop by drop at the angle formed by the other two frozen walls” (D,
12). Such images form a metonymic chain of metaphors of impending
death, a descriptive network that enables Fernando to formalize his

phantasmal space:
At this point I remember that, a year before, I climbed up the building

next door with papi . . . and I saw the garden of my house for the first time
from above: a little square, green and alive, to which the birds came. [The
building was] one of the last ones left in the Laureles barrio, whose houses
had been falling one by one at the blows of picks, purchased and razed by
the mafia to build mafioso buildings on the land. (D, 13)
From high above, the space of his primary perception is ethereal and
homey. Yet it becomes deadly for gay subjects because the internal rela-
tions defining the site are structured around tropes of heteronorma-
tive oedipality that inevitably fracture functional conceptions of home.
Accompanying this bifurcated gaze is what Edward Soja, in theorizing
postmodern space, would call the search for an appropriate ontological
and epistemological location for spatiality (119). Echoing Soja, Vallejo’s
technique reasserts literary space as meaningful and on an equal foot-
ing with subjectivity. This attitude signals Vallejo’s unwillingness to
stage the particularities of his rupture with family. For Vallejo, space
is socially produced, and the subject is produced within space. Thus he
spatializes narrative, while undermining the privileged flow of subjec-
tive, personal history. The gaze from above is reproduced by the emas-
culating mother, who, looking down from the second floor, thinks how
great Darío and Fernando look together, while, from below, Fernando
curses her, remembering the many times she tried, without explanation,
to separate them when they were young. Nevertheless, Fernando implies
that his mother’s rejection derived from the brothers’ homosexual com-
plicity. Vallejo then adds an image that not only emblematizes his view
of the subject and space as being in ruins, but also adds to his metonymic
chain the more extreme metaphor of death:
After struggling for an hour and a half to open the door (the hard door,
the old door, the fucking door), it fell. It went “boom!” and fell apart in a
fantastic dust cloud. Still left standing before our stunned eyes, outlining
the dust, was the door frame. (D, 107)
Such images condense symbolic references that operate like a Leibnizian

monad; that is, they allude to an identity in tension with space and signal
a break with the subject’s historical continuity.9
Vallejo’s narratives favor space because showcasing the ruinous conse-
quences of humanity’s destructive nature can make “deviant” sexuality
appear tangential to a recognized grand récit of modernity recomposed
as a spatial vision of entropy. This not only explains the sequential flow
of material and bodily ruins. Vallejo’s lateral mappings always strive
to destroy all illusions of modernity while also destabilizing critical
236 Arturo Arias
interrelations among masculinities within his images of space. Space is

simultaneous, but the exercise of language requires a sequential succes-
sion, what Soja calls “the impossibility of two objects (or words) occu-
pying the same precise space (as on a page)” (2). Vallejo’s solution is to
rewrite the alleged story of his life continuously, telling it differently
every time. By keeping the question of the past open (through disparities,
hiatuses, ruptures, and lacunae), he prevents readers from apprehending
the whole. Ruins stand less as emblems of time’s passage than as remind-
ers that there is no edifice there. The illusion of presence is a resistance to
cohesion. The coexistence between present and past effaces all possibili-
ties of continuity between them, thus preventing the narrative coherence
of a bildungsroman.
The Nation as Space

Unlike erotic works by Julio Cortázar, Salvador Elizondo, or Juan
García Ponce, there is nothing mystical about Vallejo’s gay erotics.10
Here there is only a secularist will to be gay and an implied rage
because of heteronormative restrictions impeding it. Vallejo’s novels
direct this anger at national identity: for Fernando, to have been born
Colombian is an “aberration.” But the protagonist insists that his rage
comes from love, if by “love” Fernando means not simply the desire
for a (male) sexual partner, but an affective connection between self
and nation. The reader must infer the subliminal connection between
self and sex, the self and “perverted” love. Fernando exists because he
is able to love boys and Colombia simultaneously, while denigrating
romance and nationalism because both point toward an illusory stable
subjectivity.
Colombian-ness in Vallejo is thus neither a broad national epic nor
an all-encompassing canvass. One finds the homeland not by explor-
ing ideologies, geographies, or public identities, but through a trip into
the self. Vallejo finds the concept of home and its intimate contradic-
tions by deciphering phobias, flaunting vices, and insulting everything
sacred to convention and decorum, while inverting traditional dis-
cursive constructs to signal the perversion of national values and the
lack of space for queer subjects. This explains why the personal is not
strictly autobiographical in Vallejo’s work. Rather, similar to what José
Quiroga observes about other artists, Vallejo “uses autobiography as
a way of commenting on issues beyond the strictly personal,” a way
to reinvent the personal to include issues traditionally associated with
the social (194). This process, common in works about sexual politics,
explains Vallejo’s accrual of events and objects to prove a Nietzschean
point: that the collapse of language implies the comprehensive collapse
of the nation and spiritual collapse of the world. In this context, only
the aesthetization of a repetitive language whereby a subject trapped
in a metaphorical swamp narrates the very end of time enables him to

endure:
My barrio died, they tore down the carboneros, the shadows went up in
smoke, the breeze got tired of blowing, the rhapsody ended, and this city
went to hell, heating up, heating up, heating up, because of this thing, of
the other, of the other, because of so many streets, so many cars, so many
people, so much rage. (D, 101)
Repetitions of “heating up,” “the other,” and “so many” emphasize the
extent of destruction and create a climactic rhythm, a “rhapsody” of ruin
that preserves the narrative subject’s creativity, despite Vallejo’s claims
that “Our Lady of the Assassins is the inventory of a total failure . . . of a
language, of a society” (Quoted in Fonseca, 87; my translation).
Vallejo and his narrative alter egos, situated as queer Colombian
subjects, reappropriate Colombia symbolically as a flawed homeland,
a homophobic paradise that has cast them out, but for which they feel
nostalgia and love, coupled with rage at its failings and exclusions.11
Nostalgia is deployed strategically for imagining oneself within spaces
from which one is excluded. Vallejo’s rage is therefore a productive liter-
ary tool for revealing repressed realities and guaranteeing that nothing
remains “in the closet.” His is not a gay rights literature because he is not
interested in representing politically correct sexual mores. Instead, he
uses discourse in ways that emasculate and erase the male heterosexual
subject (and make female subjects invisible altogether), exacting revenge
on both the mother and the madre patria (motherland): “That which
we call Colombia is not viable; it is not possible as a nation. It cannot
exist because it began badly, and it is bad from its rudiments . . . We have
no salvation” (Quoted in Fonseca, 100; my translation). Vallejo thus
obliterates the homeland for its gaze on a primordial, idealized subject
that represents the past, even though he resurrects its hidden grids of
affection because he desires its affective space from within the logic of
queerness.
This conflict between the desire for the homeland and for its destruc-
tion is represented in Our Lady of the Assassins when Fernando adopts
Alexis, his underage assassin lover. Alexis is willing to kill anybody who
annoys Fernando, which reveals the enormous disconnect between the cou-
ple and the heteronormative community to which they belong.12 Through
this disconnect, an alternative queer logic displaces heteronormativity,
and a critique of the hegemonic construction of nation is launched from
the vantage point of two “impossible” subjects. But when Alexis is killed
by Wilmar, who becomes Fernando’s new lover, this gesture functions as
a Deleuzian machine forming its own order of truth, whereby children
are reduced to mere bodies awaiting certain annihilation. For Fernando,
Alexis and Wilmar live only for the fleeting moment when community,
sex, and love are imaginatively conflated. As with Darío’s death in El
238 Arturo Arias
desbarrancadero, Our Lady of the Assassins stages the death of the sub-
ject, in addition to the literal deaths of Alexis and Wilmar.
In Vallejo’s work, Colombia is a death machine, but it is also the
balloon that flies away at the beginning of Our Lady of the Assassins,
emblematic of nostalgia. The balloon is a trope of youth, the fullness of
life, and naïve happiness. Ephemeral and constructed of fragile materi-
als, it stays afloat for a mere instant before disintegrating. Yet the balloon
enables Vallejo to cast emotions as a faux-literal order, an image with
which he attempts to naturalize queerness by transforming pathos—the
tangled wilderness of emotional suffering—into an ethos—the constitu-
tion of a moral subject—in the Nietzschean sense.
Vallejo’s literary rhetoric destabilizes the subject within a ruinous
national space. His prose’s rhythmic tone becomes a hermeneutic princi-
ple of emotion (Terada), under which allegories are constructed by signs
that, while designating particular objects or events, always signify some-
thing else, revealing the absence of fixed referents. For Fernando, only
the sublime—an excess of signifiers in semiotic terms, a state in which
meaning is never overdetermined and that operates as a phantasm of
transcendental beauty—can overcome the passage of time:
A dense vapor rose from the cobblestones in the garden, the breath of the
stones. Then, as the internal mirage echoed the external mirage, I thought
I understood something that others before me also thought they under-
stood. . . . Nothing has its own reality; everything is delirium, a chimera:
the wind that blows, the rain that falls, the man that thinks. That morn-
ing in the wet garden drying under the sun, I felt deceit with the clearest
of certainties, in its most vivid truth. As Darío was dying, vapor ascended
from the stones, vacuous, fallacious, cheatingly. And in its ascent towards
the lying sun it denied itself just like any thought. (D, 158–59)
Here the hieroglyphs of nature are patterns traced by the subject to place
nation and individual subjectivity within the same illusory realm.
Conclusion
The issues presented here challenge orthodox interpretations of Vallejo’s
work in relation to his deployment of space. Often readers process
Vallejo’s texts by reacting to his offensive words or trying to decipher
a vast autobiographical history entwined with the social production of
space. Readers might perceive the displacement of time by space, but its
ultimate purpose often remains unclear. Yet when Fernando is drawn
out of himself and opens up his personal history to an interpretive space
vécu, a socially created spatiality, his intentions become evident.13 Vallejo
narrates Fernando’s life not as a chronology of his youth, but in tandem
with a present marked by near-death or death-in-life. At the same time,
his “deviant sexuality” appears extraneous to a recognized gran récit
of modernity. Still, by inscribing gay sexuality within his construction

of spatiality and geography, Vallejo recreates that history as essentially
queer. Queerness, then, is anything but tangential to Vallejo’s literary
project: it is its defining characteristic. Thus he reconfigures from the
perspective of queer desire the tropes of genealogy, normative masculin-
ity, and patrilineal inheritance that structured canonical “boom” nar-
ratives. In so doing, his ruinous heterotopia also undermines Western
myths of origin and “home” linked to those tropes.
Vallejo’s polyrhythmic texts denote an endless combat between the
ruins of modernity’s heteronormative matrix and the yearning for free-
dom and transgression that postmodernity inscribes on queer subjects.
Inadvertently, the explicitly geographical and historical configuration
and projection of Vallejo’s phantasms provide the seeds for a brutally
accurate critique not only of patriarchy and empowered masculinity but
also of the literature that naturalizes them.
Notes
1. The manuscript for Foucault’s “Des Espace Autres” was released into the pub-
lic domain shortly before his death.
2. Here I distinguish between “Vallejo,” the author, and “Fernando,” his literary
subject.
3. In subsequent citations, D stands for El desbarrancadero, LA for Our Lady of
the Assassins in translation.
4. Gopinath’s analysis of V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and the South
Asian-British films East is East and Surviving Sabu is uncannily similar to my
focus here.
5. Thompson and Madigan note: “[T]here is no generally reliable way of distin-
guishing between true and false memories” (159).
6. Vallejo mentions antigay violence in Medellín only in El fuego secreto, natural-
izing it as part of Colombia’s intrinsic violence.
7. La desazón suprema, a documentary about Vallejo’s life, expresses nostalgia
for the family home via descriptions and photos.
8. In contrast to anti-utopias, dystopias were never meant to be utopian.
9. Leibniz argues that monads must be the universe’s fundamental constituents,
because they alone have the necessary simplicity.
10. On Cortázar, Elizondo, or García Ponce, see Ubilluz.
11. Vallejo notes that had he been born American or French, or in another time,
he would have written a different kind of literature. But, “this was the country
and epoch I was dealt, so I did what I could do” (Quoted in Fonseca, 93; my
translation).
12. Though impossible to determine in all cases, Alexis’s victims appear to be het-
erosexual males.
13. L’space vécu is Lefebvre’s concept.
Select Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
240 Arturo Arias
Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New York:
G. Braziller, 1972.
Enjuto-Rangel, Cecilia. “Broken Presents: The Modern City in Ruins in Baudelaire,
Cernuda, and Paz.” Comparative Literature 59, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 140–57.
Fonseca, Alberto. “Against the World, Against Life: The Use and Abuse of the
Autobiographical Genre in the Works of Fernando Vallejo.” Master’s thesis,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2004. http://scholar.lib.
vt.edu/theses/available/etd-08052004-133514/unrestricted/2fonseca.pdf.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Translated by Jay
Miskowiec. http://homepage.mac.com/allanmcnyc/textpdfs/foucault1.pdf.
Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public
Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Perez, Hiram. “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” Social Text 23,
no. 84–85 (Fall/ Winter 2005): 171–91.
Quiroga, José. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New
York: New York University Press, 2000.
Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Social Theory. London and New York: Verso, 1989.
Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject.” Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Thompson, Richard F., and Stephen A. Madigan. Memory: The Key to Consciousness.
Washington: Joseph Henry Press, 2005.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
Ubilluz, Juan Carlos. Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in
the Latin American Erotic Novel. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006.
Vallejo, Fernando. El desbarrancadero. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2001.
———. Our Lady of the Assassins. Translated by Paul Hammond. London: Serpent’s
Tail, 2001.
———. El río del tiempo. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 2002.
———. La virgen de los sicarios. Mexico City: Alfaguara, 1994.
Chapter 20
Charges and Discharges*
Diamela Eltit
How can we understand the body in the midst of a crisis that, in every
history and throughout the ages, has revealed a political program that
proposes the body to be outside of itself, and in which being outside of
itself changes the body into a diffuse or confusing dream marked by nos-
talgia, discontent, or the naïve desire for the body to become present and
belong, belong to itself at last?
We cannot. Because, ultimately, the body belongs to those discourses
that have evicted it from itself in order to capture it as booty or as a
social hostage for experimentation. The woman’s body is doubly hostage
because it is also trapped in the category of the feminine, that “femi-
nine” which has been the most imperious object of certain discursive
constructs that, in every historical epoch, have had the final and defini-
tive word on determining what turns out to be inextricable: the body.
But there, too, is the body of poverty: that massive, proliferating
agglomeration of humanity that, devoid of stories, is deposited in social
spaces today like etched coins that, on one side, operate as cheap cogs in
the labor wheel and, on the other, as avid agents subjugated to restricted,
yet constant, patterns of consumption. And for that reason, on these two
sides of the coin, or perhaps it would be better to say between them, the
poor hide themselves, devour themselves, torn between the most precar-
ious jobs and debt’s unfathomable abyss, like Sisyphus condemned to his
unending toil with the rock.
Today, in social imaginaries, the popular subject maintains his threat-
ening aura of revolt and pillage, yet no longer as a sign of political rev-
olution, but rather as a marker of criminality that aims to undermine
private property itself. The panic about the appropriation of the means
of production prophesied by Marx has dissipated. Instead, the new ter-
ror is of bodies that, in the most nagging of fantasies, rob and attack
any and all material wealth. These robberies are circumscribed in their
242 Diamela Eltit
scope, but devastating; they mirror the current economic system’s logic
of rapid and targeted investment.
Women who inhabit popular spaces are still tied to old images, to
the traditional production of meaning that has linked them to poverty
and prostitution. However, the possibility or the phantasm of prostitu-
tion does not necessarily play out in what happens to women in reality
or practice. The so-called oldest profession in the world functions as a
mechanism of control and punishment that corrals women in ways that
exceed their social condition. This symbolic construction has been one
of the greatest and most powerful instruments for estranging the body
from itself and, consequently, for favoring not only subjectivity’s instabil-
ity but also, especially, the production of suspicious identities located in
a discursive realm that hovers over all representations of the feminine.
I would like to concentrate here on scenes and scenarios of ruined
female bodies marked by poverty to make visible the tragic spaces they
inhabit, as well as those spaces from which parody erupts, or in which
the macabre propels the body toward nothingness: incomplete scenes
and scenarios in which reality and fiction mix without canceling each
other out. I mean fiction and reality: both.
In the realm of literary fiction, we must remember that, in part, the
naturalist novel of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twen-
tieth was based on a determinism whereby poor women ended up going
straight into prostitution and, from there, descended into sickness, mad-
ness, or crime. In Chile, Juana Lucero (1902), by Augusto D’Halmar,
emerged as a foundational text that articulated the descending steps
of a social tragedy. The story, written from an emancipating position,
denounced the social framing of impoverished women and of those
without families. Nevertheless, D’Halmar’s work, which made sexuality
its tragic axis, reproduced the stereotypes with which the dominant class
maintained its position of power.
Juana, the illegitimate daughter of an important conservative poli-
tician and a seamstress who succumbs to a dreadful premature death,
suffers her drama, her misfortune, and her sensational downfall without
solidarity; rather, she is treated scornfully by women who look down on
her from superior social positions. Men, on the other hand, instead of
protecting Juana, subject her to sexual abuse. In the text, she functions
solely as a victim, her virtue progressively profaned by an escalation of
excesses that not only deform her but also unhinge her, and that, in a
world run by men, push her to become a fragmented body split from
itself, a body that becomes servile and beholden to madness and death’s
dehumanizing imprint. In this way, prostitution acquires a devastating
connotation since it transforms the poor woman into a mere category
whose existence can be understood as that of a ruined body devoid of
being.
I am interested in examining the woman-poverty chain and in seeing
how, at the end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first,
Charges and Discharges 243
Chilean versions and visions of the inaugural Juana Lucero continue to

be produced. Taking Juana Lucero as a reference point, I want to exam-
ine the novel Hasta ya no ir (1996), by Beatriz García Huidobro, and the
film B-Happy (2003), by Gonzalo Justiniano. The novels and the film are
about poor adolescents, and perhaps the most decisive feature that con-
nects them is that in all three works the mother dies: the maternal figure’s
intense role is markedly absent. The mother’s death signals not only the
loss of an essential source of affect, but also the destruction of a socially
protective shield. This is because the mother is the one who “defends”
her daughter from the system’s sexual assaults when the daughter’s only
possession is her own body. The mother seems to function, in Lacanian
terms, as a transmitter of the law of the father, lacking her own word.
Thus, the mother’s absence marks the decline of the law and exposes the
daughter to an imbalance that confronts her with the illegality of her
sexuality.
In the film B-Happy, melodrama operates with its usual impeccable
and implacable force, with a level of intensity that recalls the old Italian
new-Realism or, perhaps, that opens a door to what could be consid-
ered post-Realism. This situation assumes human form in a new, glob-
alized proper name: not Juana, but Kathy, a poor adolescent northerner,
immersed in an incessant escalation of catastrophes without limit.
The mother supports her two adolescent children, Kathy and her
brother, while the father, a thief, serves time in prison. The mother,
besides working in a store, must sexually satisfy her boss in what is
apparently part of her contractual obligation. When the father is released
from prison, he is incapable of reintegration into society. He starts rob-
bing again and abandons his family. Kathy’s mother dies; her gay brother
leaves home with his lover; and Kathy, after consciously and deliberately
losing her virginity to a schoolmate, leaves school, setting out to find
her father, who is in a hospital in Valparaíso. A world of cruel reversals
threatens Kathy; prostitution and a vagabond existence seem to be her
only possible future. When the father dies in the hospital, Kathy is alone
in the world. But—and this is the twist that the film proposes—she is
alone in a world that she knows well, and, moreover, that she under-
stands well and therefore navigates well.
Kathy is not Juana Lucero, despite the strong similarities between
the social conditions in which she lives and those of the 1902 novel.
She is not the victimized Juana, but rather the lucid and perspicacious
Kathy. From within the tenets of melodrama, the film attempts to under-
mine stereotypes of the feminine that are founded on sentimentalism
and the guilt generated by sexual practice. The film proposes to explore
what could be a new impoverished subjectivity, one that transcends mere
sexuality and appears in a more integrated light. For Kathy, occasional
prostitution is not cataclysmic; it is a circumstantial event that allows
her to deepen her—shall we say—knowledge, and from which she can
retreat, generating distance and self-awareness. What is most important
244 Diamela Eltit
is that Kathy sets a utopian course. The idea of the journey and of myth-
ical space characterizes northern bodies. The city of Arica is the site so
often dreamed about by Kathy’s father, brother, and former school boy-
friend. But the only one who physically makes the journey is Kathy. She
journeys to a triple frontier (Arica marks the territorial limit with both
Peru and Bolivia) in a displacement that could be considered symbolic
and, especially, liberating.
The director, Gonzalo Justiniano, immerses himself in a cultural
project bordering on parody in order to deconstruct, and perhaps
reconstruct, the arbitrary categories in which the feminine is plotted.
Although the film is at once an example of kitsch and a festive parody
of melodrama, B-Happy opens the possibility of being exactly that—
happy—through the indisputable act of being nothing more than—but
also nothing less than—a subject.
From the space of literature and seeking to recover something through
the detailed task of writing subjectivity, the novel Hasta ya no ir, by
Chilean novelist Beatriz García Huidobro, revisits the impoverished
rural world, an always-marginalized and retrograde space that preserves
premodern characteristics not only in the persistence of its rituals, but
also, especially, in the psychic constitution of its subjects.
Hasta ya no ir rejects melodrama and rescues the figure of the think-
ing girl who, in the process of navigating through the sexual landscape
that emanates from her condition (i.e., from the feminine that corrals
and defines her), manages to establish a gaze (like Kathy) on the external
world and, in this way, to become part of the trembling and fragile con-
text in which her shortcomings are inscribed. What I want to emphasize
is that this narrative contains a procedure rooted in the distribution of
violence. There are different types of violence—political, corporeal, and
familial—that circulate in different ways throughout the plot, but that,
when set in motion in the novel’s successively narrated locations, achieve
democratization even amid crises that disturb lives time and again.
In this way, the adolescent girl’s body, repeatedly used by the adult
(also proprietor of a business), is dramatically de-sanctified and enters
into a relationship of morbid dependency between victim and victim-
izer. Nevertheless, despite this dependency, the girl manages to main-
tain some distance; she generates her own mental space. She does this
because sexuality and its practice do not trigger in her the traumatic
symptoms that, in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, locate neurosis (if not
psychosis) in female bodies.
Hasta ya no ir alludes to a complex sexuality that—by official stric-
tures—might even be considered sordid, but whose sordid nature is com-
partmentalized within the protagonist’s life. This sexuality neither seizes
nor annihilates her whole psychic space, in part because the entire social
fabric is riddled by potential life trajectories in which necessity and
transgression are constant threats. The novel does not tackle marginality
openly, as in the film B-Happy, but rather explores the secrets harbored
by impoverished subjectivities, an aggregate of secrets that ultimately

permits the founding of a community. The novel Hasta ya no ir, despite
everything, proposes a humanity based on the construction of a subject
who is more than just sexuality-in-practice, but is connected to others
who permit her to define her belonging, or perhaps to define a collective
non-belonging that, paradoxically, allows all of them to belong.
The novel does not renounce drama’s classic tenets, basically the loss
of the mother. Like in Juana Lucero and B-Happy, after the mother’s
death the protagonist suffers a solitary and anguished process of self-
formation. With the death of the mother, the protagonist confronts her
condition as a sexual object, but (despite the sexual violence to which she
is subjected) this objectification of the body is partial and is resisted by
the adolescent as being constitutive of her entire identity. In this sense,
it is only one among other possible circumstances. Although the loss of
the mother opens a dangerous horizon marked by siege and even tor-
ture, both the novel and the film B-Happy mold adolescents endowed
with thought, and it is this thought that both shapes them and makes
sustained resistance possible. In B-Happy and Hasta ya no ir, the pro-
tagonists are not destined for the reclusion and exclusion of the brothel.
Instead, they abandon spaces of oppression, repression, and sexual vio-
lence to construct an undetermined destiny, an uncertain one to be sure,
but undoubtedly a singular destiny, a place that is theirs alone.
In the context of classic and chronic poverty, literature and film are
starting to explore new cultural references regarding the project of gen-
der. The old image of Juana Lucero is now becoming diluted or blurred
such that it no longer stands as a univocal sign of mere destruction.
Nevertheless, in the reality of daily life, official discourses seem to be the
guarantors of these old assumptions. In some cases, the official attitude
toward poverty propitiates the most devastating social tragedies.
Perhaps one of the most lamentable and spine-chilling events to occur
in Chile after the Pinochet dictatorship took place in Alto Hospicio, a
name both symptomatic and significant because it cites the fragile ele-
ments of a border landscape that was to become the breeding-ground
for a profound marginalization. Alto Hospicio has been considered one
of Chile’s largest slums. Located in the country’s northern region, in a
desert landscape, it grew out of successive land grabs in the moments
when the city of Iquique, near the slum, attained its greatest economic
prosperity as a free port. In vast sectors of the slum, one could see not only
poverty but also overt indigence, not only violence, drugs, and chronic
unemployment but also a palpable abandonment of the people by insti-
tutions. The poor sanitary conditions, the dramatically wretched quality
of housing, made of Alto Hospicio a model space of social exclusion.
Nevertheless, on a national level, Alto Hospicio was not very well
known. Its legendarily negative reputation was familiar only to those in
the north, largely because of the rampant crime that unjustly compro-
mised its population. The slum’s inhabitants were collectively labeled
246 Diamela Eltit
“undesirables” because of a proliferation of drugs, prostitution, and

other diverse crimes that the police made their central focus. During
those years, there was a small northward migration of young women
who traveled to work as prostitutes in Peruvian border towns. Moreover,
because of poor living conditions in Alto Hospicio, some families suf-
fered internal strife that forced their young members to leave home
prematurely.
When an underage girl was reported missing by her family, the police
initially passed judgment on her disappearance, claiming that she had
run away or that she had fled to Peru to participate in the sex trade. The
authorities’ conclusions stuck to that line and, despite her family’s allega-
tions and the conditions of her disappearance (she did not take with her
any personal effects and had no communication whatsoever with family
or friends), they searched no further to determine her whereabouts.
This situation repeated itself in similar ways: adult women as well
as female primary and secondary students disappeared on their way to
school. They disappeared silently, leaving no trace, without any com-
munication, without taking any personal belongings. The first disap-
pearance occurred in 1998, and it was followed by another and another.
Nevertheless, despite the systematic proliferation of crimes, the region’s
police and judicial powers stuck to their original thesis: runaways, drug
addicts, juvenile prostitutes. A group of relatives, notwithstanding their
meager means, traveled to Peru to test the authorities’ thesis. One father
printed fliers bearing his daughter’s face and distributed them in various
places. Alarmed at the adolescent girls’ fates and even more alarmed
when the clothing of one of them appeared in a garbage dump, the fam-
ilies formed an improvised organization. The case began to circulate
by word of mouth, like a myth, until it reached the newspapers, which
broached the question of the mysterious disappearances of the young
women from Alto Hospicio.
For more than a year the police stuck to their version, an immovable
thesis whose main axis was the sex trade, without really listening to the
families’ arguments. The authorities discounted the families’ claims and
instead privileged theories based on norms and generalities. The disap-
pearances took on greater public notoriety when Orlando Garay, the
father of one of the missing girls, Viviana Garay, managed to organize
the families more effectively to take action in the courts and the media.
They were even able to corner then-President Ricardo Lagos during one
of his official activities to request a meeting whose goal would be to
inform him of the drama and institutional negligence they had expe-
rienced. At the same time, they requested that the president appoint a
visiting minister to accelerate the investigations. President Lagos did not
meet with the families.
In the end, it was not the police who solved the puzzle, but rather
a 13-year-old girl, Barbara N (an eloquent name). After being raped,
pelted with stones, and given up for dead by her attacker, she managed
to survive her wounds and was able to reach the highway where she
was rescued by a passing driver. She identified her aggressor, Julio Pérez
Silva, who between 1998 and 2000 had killed 14 women, three of them
adults and 11 adolescents. In this way, the public learned of the longest
string of serial killings in Chilean history.
Without discounting the murderer’s responsibility, his annihilating
pathology, which is a recurring element in the history of how violence
against women is written and inscribed, what has moved me to write
and what I wish to show in this text is that the state, in the final assess-
ment, shares responsibility for the deaths because of its snap judgments
about the victims.
When the Alto Hospicio crimes were brought to light, the upper ech-
elons of the police force were fired. It was impossible to hide a tangible
fact: the crimes were the result of a fatal chain of prejudices. The police
and the justice system, taken together, had failed to function profes-
sionally; they clung to their own premises without really investigating the
cases or paying attention to the particularities of the disappearances.
Nevertheless, the ease with which the Alto Hospicio crimes were com-
mitted cannot be attributed solely to a particular police force or group
of judges. Instead, we must read in this case a conglomerate of societal
(masculine) voices that prejudged the young victims: the girls were guilty
of their own disappearances, just as the poor families were guilty of
the destitution that obliged their daughters to disappear. If the author-
ities had really cared—in the most concrete, professional, and human
sense of the word—the majority of the crimes would have been avoided.
The maniacally serial nature of the murders was possible only because
the authorities neglected their duties, a neglect whose origin lay in an
incredible social contempt toward the affected families simply because
they lacked the money, connections, knowledge, and power to mobilize
material and symbolic resources that would have made possible a greater
and better institutional response.
From this perspective, the Alto Hospicio crimes have a strong politi-
cal edge. Even more, one could say that they are, in part, political crimes
in the sense that the state, responsible for its citizens’ integrity, devalued
the life of 11 adolescents and three adult women. What is most striking
about these crimes is that they happened in Chile, where the fate of the
prisoners disappeared by Pinochet is still one of the sore spots in the
national drama. We must remember that the authorities in times of mil-
itary rule did not respond to the habeas corpus writs filed to protest the
disappearance of thousands of citizens between 1973 and 1988. Given
the resonance with the Alto Hospicio disappearances, it seems neces-
sary to reiterate that the dictatorship’s repeated explanation, both to the
families and to the general public, was that the disappearances were a
fraud and a political farce because the missing persons had left the coun-
try of their own volition. Despite pleas, negation of these claims, and
proof provided by the families, the military stuck to a single version: the
248 Diamela Eltit
prisoners had fled, or more accurately put, they had fled clandestinely to
abandon their families and shirk their responsibilities. In this sense, the
form taken by the case of the murdered young women of Alto Hospicio
is inescapably connected to the methodology employed to hide the dic-
tatorship’s crimes.
More than as serial murders, I think that the Alto Hospicio crimes can
be, and perhaps should be, analyzed as well through the lens of impu-
nity, an impunity steeped in abandonment and total institutional indif-
ference. These were the circumstances that permitted and even fueled
the commission of these serial killings. The murderer’s omnipotence was
deepened and expanded because the law abandoned its functions. Or, as
Giorgio Agamben would say, a state of exception existed in these cases:
a void, a vacuum of the state.
In the wake of Alto Hospicio, or based on the Alto Hospicio case, new
questions need to be raised to examine the extent to which the old Juana
Lucero model operates as an immovable paradigm of the ruined female
body. In what sense did Augusto D’Halmar’s protagonist capture that
angle of the male gaze whose power and control stem from the exalta-
tion of women’s sexuality? While Gonzalo Justiniano or Beatriz García
Huidobro try to free female bodies from the charge of the sexual, Alto
Hospicio resexualized them to the point of producing genocide. After
a century, Juana Lucero, a determinist novel on poverty founded on
the negative sanctification of female sexual practices, asserts itself as a
primordial text. It seems outrageous, but Juana Lucero still structures
psyches, powers, and catastrophes.
Note
* Translated by Susan García, Bernardita Llanos, and Leslie Marsh.
Chapter 21
Angels among Ruins*
Sandra Lorenzano
Para Marisel y María
I
Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” touches a wound in our memory: a
wound that we would rather ignore or cloak with a disguise made from
the thrown-away trappings of the carnival of “progress.” Wreckage
upon wreckage, ruin upon ruin. The frightened face of Klee’s “Angelus
Novus” is a link between past and future, a link that encompasses hor-
rific memories upon whose foundation we construct a heartless and
exclusionary modernity. Paris, 1940: on the verge of being sent to a ref-
ugee camp, Benjamin writes this text for a posterity that, unlike the
angel, rarely gazes back toward the victims being trampled in a race
to nowhere. The melancholy Jewish thinker knows that “progress” is
unmoved by the destruction left in its wake. It seems that rather than
bringing us closer to a desired future, progress distances us from a foun-
dational utopian paradise. Bodies of the conquered pile up along the way,
and only through an ethics of memory can we reconstruct Ariadne’s lost
thread. “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it
‘the way it really was’; it means appropriating a memory as it flashes up
in a moment of danger”; it means bringing memory into the present to
reread it, reconsider it, resignify it (Benjamin, 391). Memory, then, is the
bond that links past and future in the present.
The “weak messianic force” that we have inherited commits us to
those who have gone before us and to those yet to come; it commits us to
account for the ruins, for the marks they bear, for the scars, for the (hi)
stories. This is a commitment to the living and the dead (which is also
resistance, time yet to come), because even they will “not be safe from
the enemy if he is victorious” (Benjamin, 391).
250 Sandra Lorenzano
II
The poet preserves the tribe’s memory. The poet and the angel know that
our bodies bear memory’s marks, the often broken and painful traces
of our own lives. History’s machine writes upon each of us, but it is no
longer a question of just a single word—the sentence that eventually
killed Kafka’s character in “In the Penal Colony”—but of a complex,
uneven, heterogeneous palimpsest. Someone once said that the defin-
ing question for each human being is deciding what to do with that
mark, how to live with it. How might these scars not just remain a dis-
tant memory, but rather become an impetus to make history present, as
in Andreas Huyssen’s idea of “present pasts”? How might they avoid
being filed away in neglected archives, so as to remain with us every
day, accompanying us without paralyzing us? Only when these ques-
tions can be answered can memory be resistance; only then will memory
manifest its destructuring potential, its discomfort. An uncomfortable
memory (mutable, mobile, fragmented) is the only kind that allows a
society to grow in tolerance, solidarity, and brotherhood, opening up
spaces for pleasure and escape, leaving no room for absolutes or imposed
homogeneities.
III
From the heterogeneous territory that is Latin America, a territory
marked by inequality, violence, and injustice; a territory where more
than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty, 16 percent in indigent
poverty; a territory littered with scars left by multiple brands of author-
itarianism and composed of multiple chronologies and incongruous
desires; a territory of migrants by necessity, of bodies that defy borders
no matter how many walls are built, of bodies that disappear into the
machinery of horror (Guatemala, Santiago de Chile, Tlatelolco, Acteal,
Ciudad Juárez).1 To think about the role of memory from Latin America
transcends the limits of theoretical, academic discourse, and moves us
into the ethical realm, as Benjamin proposed. Here memory becomes
an intersection of tensions, conflicts, and misunderstandings; memory
is what makes us who we are. An evocation of the past in the present,
a “flash” that illuminates a moment of danger, memory is identity: a
changing face, “singular and multiple,” as the poet said.
If we are hopelessly immersed in a globalization that is turning us
not into world citizens—as the early twentieth-century cosmopolitans
wanted and as the mass media would have us believe—but rather into
cheap manual labor for industrialized nations, hubs for sexual tourism
and drug trafficking; if economic neoliberalism has counteracted any
labor or social development in the region; if in recent decades we have
lost quality and coverage in public health and education; if social fabrics
Angels among Ruins 251
have unraveled with profound losses in human and civil rights . . . if all
this is so—and we know the list is actually much longer—memory is
one of the only remaining spaces of resistance. Of what, if not of resis-
tance, are the bedtime stories that Zapotec mothers tell their children?
Of what, if not of resistance, are the moving words that Comandanta
Esther speaks before the National Congress? Of what, if not resistance,
are the Spanish verses that English-speaking Chicano poets incorporate
into their texts, or the more than 50 indigenous languages spoken in
Mexico City? Or the Cueca sola that mothers of Chilean desaparecidos
dance without partners? Or the burial rituals performed for the bodies
found in mass graves in Chichicastenango? Or the poetry passed down
through oral tradition? Or lullabies?
Some speak of “counterhegemony.” I prefer, like the Indian historian
Ranajit Guha, to speak of “the small voices of history,” the ones that slip
through the cracks of hegemony.
“If history is written by the winners, then that means there is another
story,” Juan Carlos Baglietto and Lito Nebbia used to sing in the 1980s.
Another story, other histories, and other memories—“the small voices
of history”—voices that weave webs of solidarity, recovering such seem-
ingly tired notions as citizenship, rights, autonomy, participation. I real-
ize that I am mixing registers, semantic fields, areas of reflection. I know
that this subject is intersected by diverse projects, gazes, disciplines and
“anti-disciplines.” But being attentive to these “small voices” is a chal-
lenge we can only aspire to meet by looking within the cracks, probing
the interstitial spaces that the lightning flash illuminates for the briefest
of moments.
IV
Latin American and, specifically, Argentine history can be seen as a long
chain of violent erasures, of exclusions and suppressions of the Other, of
difference: Indians, “barbarians,” the poor, women. The desaparecidos,
in this sense, are not a creation of the last military dictatorship (1976–
1983), but rather a foundational figure for the nation. Since its origins,
the Argentine state has built its legitimacy upon the disappearance of
bodies and Other voices. For example, one might think of the geno-
cide of the Conquest; the late nineteenth-century Campaña al Desierto
(Conquest of the Desert) that consolidated the liberal project through
the massacre of southern indigenous peoples;2 the 1919 Semana Trágica
(Tragic Week) of citizen killings by police in confrontations between
striking workers and the Hipólito Yrigoyen government; the 1956 José
León Suárez shootings during an anti-Peronist coup; or the various mil-
itary dictatorships in Argentina’s modern history. Indeed, hegemony
has been founded on the violent nullification of difference, either by an
essential revocation of citizenship or outright extermination.
In recent decades, inequalities have only been exacerbated as Argentina

embarks on a new era of wealth accumulation on a global scale. 3 As neo-
liberal policies were established, alternative projects for the nation were
necessarily crushed. Nowadays, the 30,000 “disappearances” perpe-
trated by the dictatorship have become protracted through exclusionary,
impoverishing policies that have dismantled the Welfare State. Yet, not-
withstanding its inherent limitations and inequalities, welfare succeeded
in producing a degree of social cohesion in Latin America’s unequal and
heterogeneous societies. Consequently, its reduction or outright abate-
ment accentuates the region’s structural inequalities and generates new
processes of social exclusion.
In Argentina, structural reforms were accompanied by a new model
of political domination. These transformations, which began in the mid
1970s, culminated during the administrations of Carlos Menem (1989–
1999) and his successors, provoking a ruthless dynamic of social polar-
ization and fragmentation.4 The exclusion and marginalization of vast
sectors of the working classes was one of the “most lasting contours of
the new nation, of an exclusionary society structured upon the crystalli-
zation of economic as well as social and cultural inequalities” (Svampa,
12). Through the cracks in this new structure, one can hear the small
voices that have forged minoritarian spaces of resistance and generated
strategies for social survival. They are memories of the present. Amid the
ruins left in the wake of neoliberal “progress,” these small voices salvage
the memory of all the desaparecidos of our history, and with them, con-
struct a new individual and collective dignity.
V
The cold Patagonian wind swirls around octogenarian Don Justo, who
has just traveled more than 250 miles in search of his dog Malacara,
“the only one who really knows me,” he says. The wind swirls around
María, who travels a great distance to claim the computer “multiproces-
sor” that she won on a television game show (tellingly, her opponent asks
if she has electricity at home). It swirls, too, around Roberto, a business
traveler courting a young widow, taking her a birthday cake for her son.
The cold Patagonian wind swirls around the protagonists of the three
intersecting stories in Historias mínimas (2002), a film by Carlos Sorín,
shot during the peak of Argentina’s economic crisis. It is the third feature
film by this meticulous director, who cultivates cinematic interventions
with the style of an artisan rather than a commercial filmmaker. 5
Historias mínimas, set in some remote region of the Patagonian prov-
ince of Santa Cruz, is, as its title suggests, about the small stories of ordi-
nary people. This stark and daring film was made far from the city lights,
and starred not professional actors but people who lived on location; it
was made quietly, on a shoestring budget and with little arrogance. I
would like to think of Historias mínimas as a metaphor for Argentine

society in the early twenty-first century, an Argentine society born out
of the ruins upon which the angel of history gazes in fright. It was filmed
during one of the nation’s most critical periods, a period characterized
by the stripping of state assets; by a political system in crisis; by an
economic apparatus dismantled through a perverse agreement between
Argentina’s political and financial sectors and international organiza-
tions such as the IMF and IDB; by sectors of the police and armed forces
nostalgic for the “orderliness” imposed by past dictatorships; by a bat-
tered population that had seen the gradual disappearance of prior gains
in labor, health, and education; by the impoverishment of its middle
sectors and the marginalization of a once combative, organized working
class.
Any analysis of contemporary Argentina thus begins with a paradox,
an ambiguity that keeps us from gaining a single perspective or painting
a homogeneous picture. Just as the country weathered one of the worst
periods in its history, Argentine society proved more alive than ever. As
is evident in Sorín’s film, gestures of solidarity, generosity, and commit-
ment poured forth from diverse sectors, most often not from well-known
public figures, but from ordinary people. These gestures alone do not
constitute a political alternative to the economic crisis in the traditional
sense. Soup kitchens, bartering networks, respect for the cartoneros
(cardboard collectors), childcare centers created by piqueteros (unem-
ployed worker activists), among hundreds of other grassroots actions,
were not ways to redesign the state, nor did they establish the basis for
a new national pact required for imagining a viable future political pro-
ject. Yet, these gestures were crystal clear signs that being fed up and
exhausted can awaken creative social forces.
VI
The drawing portrays a grave; the tombstone indicates the birth and
death dates: March 24, 1976–December 19–20, 2001. The name of the
deceased: none other than “Fear.” This comic by Rep appeared on the
back page of the newspaper Página/12 one year after Argentines took to
the streets to demand the resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa. This
popular mobilization, known as the argentinazo, seemed, as the comic
indicates, to have marked an end to the fear imposed by the last military
dictatorship (1976–1983), a fear linked to realities like death; impunity;
30,000 desaparecidos; and deep wounds that for so long remained (and
still remain) unhealed. Although Rep’s comic may be a bit of an exag-
geration, it is symptomatic of the larger political scene. People had long
ago lost the fear that impeded them from taking to the streets to demand
their rights. The comic reads like a visual allusion to the often-heard slo-
gan that united Argentines in late 2001: ¡Que se vayan todos! (Out with
them all!). Out with corrupt politicians, inept officials, crooked busi-
nesspeople, and the accomplices of the saqueo (the foreign plunder of
national assets under neoliberal privatization)! Out with crooked judges
appointed during the Menem administration! Out with the perpetra-
tors of human rights violations! “¡Que se vayan todos!” was the cry
that united piqueteros and students, the ever-marginalized and the “new
poor,” the destitute and the middle class whose bank accounts had been
frozen by Economic Minister Domingo Cavallo. Yes, the people took to
the streets and invaded the hypersymbolic Plaza de Mayo. They flooded
streets and symbolic spaces in every province throughout the nation.
And they did so because outrage trumped fear, because the collective
will proved stronger than individual complacency.
The numbers that fed popular discontent are well known: 53 percent
of the population was living below the poverty line; 24.8 percent were
considered indigent and could not afford a minimum food basket; the
unemployment rate hovered at 20 percent. The historically poor prov-
inces (primarily those of the northeast and northwest) shared the highest
unemployment rates with previous centers of industry such as the city
of Rosario. In the province of Tucumán, 18,000 children suffered from
various stages of malnutrition. The “fat cats,” as always, saved their
own hides: between February 28 and December 10, 2001, 19 billion
dollars in withdrawals poured out of the nation’s banks, continuing a
hemorrhage that the country’s most powerful sectors had set in motion
some time before.
Many popular, grassroots initiatives stemming from the 2001 eco-
nomic crisis have now changed or deviated from their original purpose.
Yet, at the time, they allowed the country to imagine new ways to escape
the violence imposed by the crisis and to overcome the stupidity and
insensitivity of a ruling class that had not learned to listen to what soci-
ety was saying, that paid no attention to the common people and their
minimal stories.
VII
“Vamos pibe, aguantá . . .” (Come on, kid, hold on . . .), Héctor “Toba”
García said to a young man with dreadlocks whose skull had been
pierced by a police bullet in downtown Buenos Aires on December 20,
2001. “Vamos pibe, aguantá . . . ,” said the former 1970s militant who
just months earlier had turned his house, in an area with one of the
highest unemployment rates in Buenos Aires, into “Pancita llena” (Full
Belly), a cafeteria that feeds more than 150 youths daily. Hundreds of
cafeterias and soup kitchens now exist throughout the country. Some
receive support from human rights organizations or charities, but many
are created and sustained by the very people who have almost nothing
to eat, who prefer to share what little they have with others, like Toba,
or like the smiling woman who runs the “El cariñito” (Tiny Caress)
cafeteria in a shantytown and poses for photographers’ cameras, always
surrounded by children.
“Vamos pibe . . . ,” Toba said to Martín Galli, the kid with dreadlocks
whom he had just met. Toba saved Martín, who, in one of the small
plazas along Avenida 9 de Julio had been shot down by police during the
December 20 protests at 7:20 in the evening. Toba kept pressure on the
wound on the back of Martín’s neck and twice brought him out of car-
diac arrest with CPR. If Toba had not helped that young man, who had
gone, like so many others, to express his outrage and yell “Que se vayan
todos,” or had he been unable to save the young man’s life, the victims
of police repression during those two historic days would have increased
to 31. Unlike Diego Lamagna or Gastón Riva, who were killed by the
police, Martín Galli is alive, thanks to a man he met randomly. Toba
has a wound that will never heal: his desaparecidos. His fellow mili-
tants, sister, brother-in-law, and niece were all victims during the last
military dictatorship. Perhaps for this reason Toba told Miguel Bonasso,
the author of one of the best books about the events of December 2001:
“When I saw Martín fall, the police were coming, and I said to myself:
‘They are not going to take this one away from me.’ They were going to
have to kill me to take him away.”6 Toba’s is just one more minimal story
among many.
VIII
“Isn’t it true that the opposite of forgetting is not memory but justice?”
Yosef Yerushalmi asked himself on a sunny Monday morning in front
of the Buenos Aires courthouse, reminded of the question by one of the
“witnesses” who had been invited by the Memoria Activa organiza-
tion to participate in its weekly ceremony (26). For more than 14 years
now, every Monday morning at 9:53 the shofar has sounded in this
place in homage to the 86 people killed in the attack on the AMIA,
the Israeli Argentine Mutual Benefit Association, perpetrated during
Carlos Menem’s administration and as yet unpunished, like so many
other crimes in the country. The voice of the ancient Jewish instrument
sounds at once like sobbing and anger, history and pain. It is an act
of memory and a demand for justice, not only for the 86 victims, but
also for the countless casualties of the economic and political model
that destroyed the country, for children dying of malnutrition in a land
once considered the “breadbasket of the world,” for the unemployed,
for victims of police repression, for the many lined up outside of embas-
sies to reverse the voyages made by their grandparents, for those per-
petually excluded. The members of Memoria Activa, which organizes
this weekly ceremony, know that the attack of July 18, 1994 has every-
thing to do with the “attacks” carried out on Argentine society every
day. They know full well that the same intolerant people who reject and
exclude the Other—Jewish, poor, indigenous, female, black, gay—also
plant bombs, open fire, hoard money in foreign bank accounts, seek
admittance at the doors of military barracks, applaud those in uniform,
abuse deadly force, discredit human rights movements, long for author-
itarianism’s firm hand, and attempt to assassinate the president of the
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. The shofar sounds not only for the AMIA
deaths, but for everyone, those who are here and those who are gone.
The shofar sounds for us all.
IX
Heads covered by kerchiefs, a hallmark of the Madres de la Plaza de
Mayo, are visible in the front rows, scattered among members of other
human rights organizations. The auditorium of the Public College of
Lawyers (Buenos Aires) is packed. It is September 18, 2002 and Memoria
Abierta (Open Memory) is about to present its “Oral Archive.” On
every face, the joy of celebration mixes with the pain of 30,000 absent
compañeros. The memory of the victims and incessant calls for justice
intertwine with the conflicts and struggles of the present. Human rights
organizations march in the streets alongside demonstrators protesting
the economic crisis. They walk with piqueteros, teachers, retired work-
ers, and employees of more than 130 fábricas recuperadas, factories
taken over by worker cooperatives. They are here today but know they
must also protect the memory of yesterday. For what good is memory
if it is stagnant, static? Memory allows us to think about the present,
to know who we are and what we seek. Memoria Abierta is a space of
reflection created by five human rights organizations to strengthen the
country’s democratic culture by preserving the memory of what took
place during the era of state terrorism. The organization promotes a
brand of social awareness that values active memory. Among its most
important commitments is to “prevent every form of authoritarianism”
(“Nuestra misión”).
The “Oral Archive,” one of its projects, collects interviews with imme-
diate families of victims of state terror, ex-detainees, or political prison-
ers, those who were militants during the dictatorship, and exiles. As of
2008, they have registered and catalogued several thousand interviews,
a priceless resource for researching, documenting, and communicating
what happened. Presiding at the presentation of the “Oral Archive” is
a Madre de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora who spoke to the crowd:
“The people who contributed stories and memories of their own experi-
ences play an essential role in the construction of collective memory and
in relaying those experiences to present and future generations. Many
thanks to all who gave their testimonies.”7 This oral archive bears wit-
ness to history, to minimal stories emerging from the ruins.
X
“The neurological damage of malnutrition causes irreversible mental
deficiencies in children under three. One baby dies of malnutrition every
40 minutes, producing 13,000 deaths per year. Two children under five
die of preventable causes every 53 minutes, for a total of 17,000 per
year. In La Matanza (the most heavily populated district of the province
of Buenos Aires, with a population of 1.5 million and the third highest
unemployment rate in the country behind the cities of Rosario and Mar
del Plata), 6,900 babies were born during the second trimester of 2002;
1,600 of them were malnourished at birth. Seventy percent of children
under 14 are poor, and half of those are indigent. The childhood mor-
tality rate is three times higher here than in Singapore, 90 percent higher
than in Cuba, and 35 percent higher than in Chile. Twenty-nine percent of
maternal deaths are caused by clandestine abortions. For every 100,000
births, 35 mothers die of hemorrhages, hypertension, and other prevent-
able causes.”8
This statistical portrait of Argentina’s ongoing health crisis headed
one of the expositions inaugurated on December 19, 2002 at the Centro
Cultural Recoleta in the city of Buenos Aires. It was the collective show
“Las camitas” (The Little Beds) held by the Asociación de Artistas
(Association of Visual Artists of the Argentine Republic). Under the
motto “A work of art for you works for the good of those who need
it most,” more than 500 artists were invited to create artworks using
wire doll beds as a platform. The doll beds resembled those found in
public hospitals. The works were sold and the funds raised were used to
purchase essential supplies for the Hospital Paroissien de La Matanza:
another minimal story of solidarity to help ease the pain.
XI
On a street in La Boca, very close to the stadium, César Aira, Ricardo
Piglia, Martín Adán, Haroldo de Campos, Leónidas Lamborghini,
and Enrique Lihn are symbolically present. They are among more than
100 authors published by the Eloísa Cartonera house. Every book is a
unique creation, handcrafted by the cartoneros themselves. But Eloísa
Cartonera is much more than that: it is an artistic, social, and commu-
nity project, created by writer Washington Cucurto during the worst of
the 2001–2002 crisis. In the space of the “No hay cuchillo sin rosas”
(There is no thorn without roses) cardboard store where the publishing
house is located, cartoneros converse and commingle with artists and
writers in search of an original, unprejudiced aesthetic. The book cov-
ers are made from cardboard purchased directly from the collectors at
a higher than normal price, and they are hand painted by youths from
the streets who join the project. Because every publication is unique, the
books have attracted the attention of several modern art museums and
are displayed next to the most avant-garde Latin American artworks.
And the project grows and grows: shows, literary contests, blogs. This,
too, is creativity, life emerging from the ruins.
Eloísa Cartonera, which now has several “sisters” throughout Latin
America (Chile, Bolivia, Perú), was formed in a spirit of solidarity and
as a response to the ghostly presence of the hundreds of thousands of
cartoneros who took to the streets of Buenos Aires night after night,
rummaging through the trash in search of something that could be sold.
For many, collecting recyclables was the only available source of income.
This was one face of the crisis, a face that forced the “good consciences”
of Buenos Aires society to confront what they would rather not see:
the excluded, the unemployed, the marginalized, those living in shanty-
towns, los de abajo. What so many preferred to ignore became visible
every night.
XII
There they are, watching us from a past that we cannot and do not want
to forget, smiling in photographs from the family album or straight-
faced in the photos from the rigid state registries. There they are to
remind us that the struggle for memory is the struggle for justice. They
will be there forever, calling to us from the death notices that appear
in the newspaper every day of the year. The 30,000 victims of the last
military dictatorship are joined today by those killed by the police dur-
ing the historic days of December 19 and 20, 2001, by those who have
fallen victim to the “gatillo fácil,” by the mafias that protect the privi-
leged (I am thinking of Cabezas, of the Cromañón kids, of Fuentealba,
and so many others).9 Despite President Néstor Kirchner’s commitment
to human rights, despite the upturn in the national economy, repression
continues to appear throughout the country. Opening the newspaper
and gazing on those faces is to claim our responsibility to pass down
memories and demand justice, to be with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo
every Thursday as they repeat their heartbreaking rounds, to cry out
for the end of impunity and dishonesty, to become piqueteros, to form
a cooperative and take charge of a factory, to cook for a soup kitchen,
to listen to the cries of the children of Tucumán, to join Don Justo as he
looks for Malacara, to strain to hear, amid the ruins, the murmurs of
minimal stories.
Notes
* Translated by Laura Kanost.
1. Data from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean (ECLAC).
2. The “Conquest of the Desert,” organized during the presidency of Nicolás

Remigio Aurelio Avellaneda (1874–1880), sought to annex large expanses of
land and subdue the peoples of the pampas. The “indigenous problem” was elim-
inated by their defeat.
3. See Svampa, Calveiro, and Argentina ante la crisis, a special issue of the journal
Pensamiento de los confines 11 (September 2002).
4. The Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner governments have gen-
erally sought to break with the preceding model.
5. Carlos Sorín’s other films are La película del rey (1983), El perro (2004), and El
camino de San Diego (2006).
6. For Toba’s story, see Bonasso (7–12).
7. I heard this quote personally at the event.
8. This paragraph is a compendium of statistics from placards accompanying the
“Camitas” exhibit.
9. José Luis Cabezas, reporter for the magazine Noticias, was killed on January 25,
1997 because of his investigation of businessman Alfredo Yabrán, closely tied to
Menem. The discotheque “Cromañón” caught fire by a flare on December 30,
2004, shedding light on irregularities. Nearly 200 young people died. Carlos
Fuentealba was shot dead by Nequén police during a teachers’ demonstration in
April 2007.
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Svampa, Maristella. La sociedad excluyente: la Argentina bajo el signo del neolib-
eralismo. Buenos Aires: Taurus, 2005.
Yerushalmi, Yosef. “Reflexiones sobre el olvido.” In Usos del olvido: Comunicaciones
al Coloquio de Royaumont edited by Yosef Yerushalmi et al., 13–26. Buenos
Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1989.
Contributors
Rolf Abderhalden Cortés is a professor at the Universidad Nacional de

Colombia and the co-director, with Heidi Abderhalden, of Mapa Teatro-
Laboratorio de Artistas. He was trained in Paris at the Jacques Lecoq
Theater School, the Laboratory of Movement Studies, and Philippe
Gaulier and Monika Pagneux’s Theater Training Workshop.
Arturo Arias (Ph.D., L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris) is professor of
Latin American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His most
recent scholarly books are Taking Their Word: Cultural Dialogues,
Central American Signs (2007) and The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy
(2001), an edited volume. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film El
Norte (1984) and is the author of six novels. His most recent novel in
English is Rattlesnake (2003). He was also the 2001–2003 president of
the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Idelber Avelar (Ph.D., Duke University) is professor of Latin American
literatures and intellectual histories, critical theory, and cultural studies
at Tulane University. He is the author of The Letter of Violence: Essays
on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (2004) and The Untimely Present:
Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning
(1999), winner of the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Katherine
Singer Kovacs prize. His monographs in progress include “A genealogy
of Latin Americanism: An Essay on the Disciplinary Uses of Identity”
and “Timing the Nation: Rhythm, Race, and Nationhood in Brazilian
Popular Music.”
Daniel Balderston (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Mellon professor of
Hispanic languages and literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His
numerous books, chapters, and articles focus on Borges, gender and sex-
uality studies, translation studies, and literary relations, and his edited
volumes include several encyclopedias and reference works. His most
recent books are El deseo, enorme cicatriz luminosa: ensayos sobre
homosexualidades latinoamericanas (2004); Borges, realidades y simu-
lacros (2000); and, with Francine Masiello, the edited book Approaches
to Teaching Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (2007). He is the current
president of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.
262 Contributors
Leslie Bayers (Ph.D., University of Kansas) is assistant professor of

Spanish at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, specializing in twentieth-
century Latin American literature and culture and with a special interest
in contemporary Andean poetry and performance. Her current book
project focuses on the intersections of poetry and performance in the
Andes.
Sara Castro-Klarén (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) is
professor of Latin American literature and culture at Johns Hopkins
University. Her numerous books and articles focus on José María
Arguedas, Julio Cortázar, Diamela Eltit, Rosario Ferré, women writers,
feminism, colonial studies, and postcolonial theory. She has also con-
tributed many essays to such volumes as The Latin American Subaltern
Studies Reader (2001). Her coedited volume, with John Chasteen,
Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in
Nineteenth-Century Latin America appeared in 2003. She is currently
finishing a book on historiography and political theory in Guaman
Poma and Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca.
Sandra Messinger Cypess (Ph.D., University of Illinois) is professor of
Latin American literature and culture at the University of Maryland,
College Park. Her research focuses on Latin American theater,
Mexican literature, women writers, and representations of women in
Latin American literature. Her books include La Malinche in Mexican
Literature: From History to Myth (1991), supported with an NEH
Fellowship, and several edited volumes. She also authored the chapter on
Latin American theater for The Cambridge History of Latin American
Literature and one on Caribbean Theater for A History of Literature in
the Caribbean.
Andrés Di Tella (Argentina) is a filmmaker, director, and screenwriter,
whose recent films include El país del diablo (2008); Fotografías (2007);
La televisión y yo (2003); and Montoneros, una historia (1995). He has
published film reviews and essays on documentary and cinematography.
In 1999, he founded the Buenos Aires International Independent Film
Festival, which he directed in 1999 and 2000, and since 2002, he has
directed the Princeton Documentary Film Festival.
Diamela Eltit (Chile) is one of Latin America’s most daring experimen-
tal writers and is highly regarded for her avant-garde initiatives in the
world of letters. Author of nine novels, she entered the literary world
during Pinochet’s rule, participating in the neo-vanguard art scene, stag-
ing art actions against the dictatorship. She has been honored by such
international literary organizations as the MLA in the United States
and Casa de las Américas in Havana. She has held posts as writer-in-
residence at prestigious universities in the United States, Europe, and
Latin America.
Contributors 263
Rubén Gallo (Ph.D., Columbia University) is Old Dominion Fellow

and associate professor of Spanish American Literature at Princeton
University. His books include Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde
and the Technological Revolution (2005); New Tendencies in Mexican
Art: The 1990s (2004); The Mexico City Reader (2004); and, with
Ignacio Padilla, Heterodoxos mexicanos: una antología dialogada
(2006). His current monograph in progress is “Freud in Mexico: The
Neuroses of Modernity.”
Regina Harrison (Ph.D., University of Illinois) is professor of Spanish
and comparative literature and affiliated professor of anthropology at the
University of Maryland. Her books include Signs, Songs, and Memory
in the Andes: Translating Quechua Language and Culture (1989), win-
ner of the first MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, and Entre el tronar
épico y el llanto elegíaco (1997). She is also the creator, with indigenous
Ecuadorians, of the collaborative video Cashing in on Culture: Indigenous
Communities and Tourism (2002). She is currently completing a book on
confession manuals and sermons written in Spanish and Quechua, a pro-
ject supported in its initial stages by a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Jill Lane (Ph.D., New York University) is assistant professor of Spanish
and Portuguese at New York University. Her publications include
Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895 (2005), recipient of the ASTR Erroll Hill
Award; The Ends of Performance (1998), coedited with Peggy Phelan;
and articles in major theater journals. She is Deputy Director of the
Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and editor of its jour-
nal E-misférica.
Victoria Langland (Ph.D., Yale University) is assistant professor of his-
tory at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on
twentieth-century Latin American social, cultural, political, and gen-
der history; history and memory; and transnational American history.
Her publications include the coedited volume Monumentos, memo-
riales, y marcas territoriales (2003, with Elizabeth Jelin) and numer-
ous articles. She recently completed the book manuscript “Speaking of
Flowers: Student Movements and Collective Memory in Authoritarian
Brazil” and is preparing edited volumes on 1968 in Latin America and
on inequality and development in Latin America.
Michael J. Lazzara (Ph.D., Princeton University) is associate professor
of Latin American literature and culture at the University of California,
Davis. He is the author of Luz Arce: después del infierno (2008); Chile in
Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (2006); Diamela Eltit:
conversación en Princeton (2002); Los años de silencio: conversaciones
con narradores chilenos que escribieron bajo dictadura (2002), and sev-
eral articles on Latin American literature and culture. He is also transla-
tor of Ana María del Río’s allegorical novel Carmen’s Rust (2003).
264 Contributors
Sandra Lorenzano (Ph.D., UNAM) is a professor at the Universidad

Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM); a member of the Sistema
Nacional de Investigadores de México; and vice-chancellor of the
Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, all in Mexico City. Her pub-
lications include Escrituras de sobrevivencia: narrativa argentina
y dictadura (2001); Políticas de la memoria: tensiones en la palabra
y la imagen (2007), coedited with Ralph Buchenhorst; and the novel
Saudades (2007). She directs “Primero Sueño,” a Latin American lit-
erature collection edited by Editorial Alfaguara and is the editor of the
academic review Signos literarios and of Prolija memoria: revista de
cultura virreinal.
Francine Masiello (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Sidney and Margaret
Ancker Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and a member of the
Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese at
the University of California, Berkeley. Her extensive list of publications
includes the books Lenguaje e ideología: las escuelas argentinas de van-
guardia (1986); Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation,
and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (1992); La mujer y el espa-
cio público (1994); The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and
Neoliberal Crisis (2001); the critical edition Dreams and Realities: The
Writings of Juana Manuela Gorriti (2003); and, with Daniel Balderston,
Approaches to Teaching Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (2007).
Sylvia Molloy (Ph.D., Sorbonne, Paris), Albert Schweitzer professor
of the humanities at New York University, has been one of the most
influential critical voices of Latin American literature and culture in
Argentina, France, and the United States. She has written extensively
on Spanish American literature, especially on the literary trends of the
twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges’s work, gender issues, and women
writers. Her numerous publications include such widely read works
as Signs of Borges (1994); At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing
in Spanish America (1991); and, with Sara Castro-Klarén and Beatriz
Sarlo, Women’s Writing in Latin America (1991).
María Rosa Olivera-Williams (Ph.D., Ohio State University) is asso-
ciate professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame. Her research
encompasses nineteenth through twenty-first-century Latin American
literature, Southern Cone literature, women writers, and feminist criti-
cism. Her publications include El salto de Minerva: intelectuales, género,
y estado en América Latina (2005), coedited with Mabel Moraña; La
poesía gauchesca de Hidalgo a Hernández (1986); and numerous arti-
cles. She is completing a book on “The Art of Creating the Feminine:
Power, Sexuality, and Desire in Spanish American Women Writers of the
Southern Cone.”
Nelly Richard (Chile) is a prominent Latin American cultural theorist
and a 1996 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the founding
Contributors 265
editor of Chile’s Revista de crítica cultural and currently directs the

Master’s in Cultural Studies Program at Santiago’s Universidad ARCIS.
Among her many books are Feminismo, género, y diferencia(s) (2008);
Fracturas de la memoria: arte y pensamiento crítico (2007); Residuos
y metáforas (ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el chile de la Transición)
(1998); La insubordinación de los signos (cambio político, transforma-
ciones culturales y poéticas de la crisis) (1994); and Márgenes e institu-
ciones: arte en Chile desde 1973 (1986, republished in 2007).
Diana Taylor (Ph.D., University of Washington) is professor of perfor-
mance studies and Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Her
books include Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America
(1991), Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in
Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1997), and The Archive and the Repertoire:
Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003). She has also
edited or coedited seven critical collections or anthologies, among them,
with Sarah J. Townsend, Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of
Latin American Theater and Performance (2008); and with Roselyn
Constantino, Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (2003).
Vicky Unruh (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is professor of Latin
American literary and cultural studies at the University of Kansas. She
is the author of Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious
Encounters (1994) and Performing Women and Modern Literary
Culture in Latin America (2006), the latter supported by an NEH
Fellowship. Her articles and chapters on Latin American narrative, the-
ater, and literary culture have appeared in such journals as PMLA, Latin
American Research Review, Hispanic Review, Revista iberoamericana,
Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Revista de estudios his-
pánicos, Romance Quarterly, and Comparative Drama, among many
others, and in critical book collections published in the United States
and abroad. Her current projects include a cultural study of work in
Post-Soviet Cuba and essays on turn-of-the-millennium Latin American
theater and performance.
Index
Abderhalden Cortés, Heidi, 22–23, 211 archeological poetics, 66, 77–80, 85

Abderhalden Cortés, Rolf, 7–8, 22–24 archeology, 5, 40–46, 60, 79, 110, 198
“Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su archeo-space, 77–82
laberinto” (Borges), 41–42 architecture, 6, 19, 47 n7, 66–67, 97,
Acevedo, José María, 53 107–13, 199, 203–206, 212–14
Adán, Martín, 73 n1, 257 “The Argentine Brunette” (“La
Agamben, Giorgio, 25, 212, 248 morocha”), 98–100
Agua (Arguedas), 84 Arguedas, José María, 77, 84
Águila, F., 127 Arias, Arturo, 8
Aira, César, 257 arrepentido, 183, 192 n1
Aizenberg, Edna, 47 n4 “Arte poética” (Huidobro), 155
Alfonsín, Raúl, 186–88 Arteaga, Melchor, 64
Allen, Catherine J., 153, 155, 157 Association of Visual Artists of the
Allen, Esther, 54–55 Argentine Republic (Asociación de
Allende, Salvador, 121, 130, 132 n1 Artistas), 257
Alliance for Progress, 59 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 3, 35, 156
Alsina, Juan, 180 Augustine, 47, 47 n12
Alsina’s Ditch (La Zanja de Alsina, Ávalos, H., 127
Argentina), 88 Avelar, Idelber, 4, 7, 192 n1
Alto Hospicio crimes, 245–48 Avellaneda, Nicolás Remigio Aurelio,
Álvarez Tabío, Emma, 197 259 n2
Alvear, Soledad, 130 Ayacucho, Peru, 7, 83–84, 137–40, 143,
Amaru, Túpac, 121 147–59, 159 n5
Ameghino, Florentino, 44
Americanness, 54–59 B-Happy (Justiniano), 243–45
AMIA (Argentine Mutual Benefit Bachelet, Michelle, 128–30, 133 n5
Association), 255–56 Baglietto, Juan Carlos, 251
Andersmann, Jens, 47 n6 Baigorrita, Luis, 93
Anderson, Jon Lee, 133 n4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 150
Angel of History (Benjamin), 2, 103, 198, Balderston, Daniel, 4–5, 47 nn1–2
249, 253 Ballesteros, José, 159 n3
Angell, Alan, 122 Baquerizo, Manuel, 150, 157–58
“Angelus Novus” (Klee), 249 Barrancos, Dora, 101
Antigüedades peruanas (Rivero), Barthes, Roland, 6, 34, 94, 217 n3
77–78 Baudelaire, Charles, 56
Antiquities of the Incas and Lima: Bayers, Leslie, 7
A Visit to the Capital and Provinces Becerra, Juan José, 184
of Modern Peru, 78–85 Belaúnde, Fernando, 139
268 Index
Benjamin, Walter, 2, 4, 8, 26 n4, 29, 34, Carrasco Cavero, Teresa, 148, 159 n4,
56, 63, 95, 98, 103–104, 172 n3, 172 n8
198, 216, 230, 249–50 Carrió de la Vandera, Alonso, 155
Bergson, Henri, 33 cartucho. See El Cartucho neighborhood
Bhabha, Jacqueline, 136 (Bogotá, Colombia)
Bharucha, Rustom, 145 n2 Carvallo, Mauricio, 127
Billy Budd (Melville), 34, 36–37 Casamayor Cisneros, Odette, 207 n12
Bingham, Hiram, 2, 5, 45, 63–65, Casas, Fabián, 185
67–68, 73 Castañeda, Quetzile E., 26 n1
Blanot, Vivianne, 129 Castro, Fidel, 199
Boán, Marianela, 200 Castro, Vaca de, 83
Bogotá, Colombia, 1, 8, 13, 21–24, Castro-Klarén, Sara, 5
211–26 Catherwood, Frederick, 51–53, 59,
Bolívar, Simón, 2, 148 60 n3, 80
Bonasso, Miguel, 255, 259 n6 Catholic Church, 128, 130–31, 148, 205
Borchmeyer, Florian, 198, 200 Cementerio General (Santiago, Chile). See
Borges, Jorge Luis, 3, 5, 39–47, General Cemetery
47 nn9–10, 92, 96, 98–101, 104 n2 center of fear, 211–13, 217 n3
Bourriaud, Nicolas, 217 n2 Cervantes, Miguel de, 45
Boym, Svetlana, 2, 4, 63, 96–97 Ceruti, Jaime Urrutia, 148, 159 n5
Brackenridge, Henry Marie, 54–55 Chappell, Nancy, 138, 141
Brecht, Bertolt, 25 Chejfec, Sergio, 184
Bremer, Frederika, 61 n15 Cien botellas en una pared (Portela), 200
British Museum, 54 Cieza de León, Pedro, 83
Brito, Cynthia, 227 n2 Clark, Gordon Matta, 30
Brooks, Van Wyck, 59 Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 77
Buckwalter-Arias, James, 206 Cocteau, Jean, 198
Buena Vista Social Club (Wenders), 197 Coe, Michael, 61 n6
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1, 27, 36, 95, Coelho, Oliverio, 185
98–103, 190–91, 254–58 Cohn, Deborah, 172 n6
Bulnes Bridge (Puente Bulnes, Santiago, Cole, Thomas, 59
Chile), 180–82 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 40, 46
Burger, Richard L., 73 n5 Comentarios reales (Garcilaso de la Vega,
Bulwer Lytton, 28 el Inca), 78–79
The Condor and the Cows (Isherwood), 67
Cabezas, José Luis, 258, 259 n9 Confessions (Augustine), 47
caciques. See tribal chiefs Conquest of the Desert (La Conquista del
cadavers, 6, 121–32, 168 Desierto), 87–94, 251
Calveiro, Pilar, 259 n2 Copán, Honduras, 51–56, 60 n4, 61 n13
Camayd-Freixas, Erik, 73 n3 Cortázar, Julio, 236
“Cambalache.” See “Second-Hand Cortés, Hernán, 111
Shop” Cosío, José Gabriel, 73 n2
Campos, Haroldo de, 257 Coyula, 207 nn2,13
Cánepa Koch, Gisela, 137 Crary, Jonathan, 33
Canto, Estela, 47 n10 Cruger, John Church, 59, 61 n15
Canto General (Neruda), 3 Cruz, María Angélica, 131
Capac, Huayna, 2 Cuban Revolution, 1, 7, 199–207
Capac, Manco, 83–84 Cucurto, Washington, 257–58
Carmona, Aurelio, 73 C’ùndua project (Mapa Teatro), 24–25,
Carpentier, Alejo, 156 26 n6, 211–12
Index 269
Cushing, Lincoln, 199–200 El perdón (Ferreyra), 185

Cuzco, Peru, 5, 66–68, 78–85 El señor presidente (Asturias), 35
Cuzco: A Journey to the Ancient Capital “El sueño de Coleridge” (Borges), 46
of Peru, With an Account of the “El Sur” (Borges), 46
History, Language, Literature, and “El tesoro de los Incas” (Gorriti), 32–33
Antiquities of the Incas (Markham), Eliot, T. S., 44
78–85 Elizondo, Salvador, 236
Eloísa Cartonera, 257
Dalmaroni, Miguel, 192 n1 Eltit, Diamela, 8, 35
Darwin, Charles, 61 n8 Ely, Albert Welles, 58, 61 n13
Dávila, José, 118 embodied rights, 136
de Andrade, Mário, 3 En el Teocalli de Cholula (Heredia), 2, 165
de Certeau, Michel, 22, 37 En estado de memoria (Mercado),
de Diego, José Luis, 192 n1 183–84
de la Rúa, Fernando, 253 Eng, David L., 2
Del Campo, Alicia, 132 n1 Enjuto-Rangel, Cecilia, 73 n3, 230
del Río, Marcela, 7, 163, 165–72, Enriquillo (Galván), 2
172 nn1, 4–5, 173 n9 Erll, Astrid, 166
Deleuze, Gilles, 30, 35 Errázuriz, Javier, 130–31
Depetris, José Carlos, 92–94 Escobar, Ramiro, 159
desaparecidos. See disappeared people “Esta noche me emborracho bien.” See
D’Halmar, Augusto, 242, 248 “Tonight I Get Wasted”
Di Tella, Andrés, 5–6 Estévez, Abilio, 198, 200, 205–206
Díaz, Gonzalo, 132 Estrada, Alfredo José, 207 n2
Díaz, Mónica, 169 Estremadoyo, Elsa, 144
Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 112, 114, 164, 171 ethnocide, 90
DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia “Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain”
Nacional), 16, 26 n2, 127, 132 n3 (Borges), 41
disappeared people (desaparecidos), 18,
90, 251–55 Fabian, Johannes, 59
Discépolo, Enrique Santos, 101–104 Facundo (Sarmiento), 34–36
“The Discovery of Machu Picchu” Falabella, Soledad, 16, 19
(Bingham), 64 Farfán, Claudia, 123
Docter, Mary, 169 Fast Food (Boán), 200
Dome of the Rock (Jerusalem), 51 Faulkner, William, 34
Dopico, Ana María, 207 n4 Felstiner, John, 66
Drucker, Joanna, 150 Ferguson, James, 136–37
Fernandes, Sujatha, 207 nn5,7
Echeverría, Heriberto, 199 Ferreyra, Gustavo, 7, 184–92
El amparo (Ferreyra), 185 Florentine Codex, 166–67, 172 n5
El Cartucho neighborhood (Bogotá, Flores Ochoa, Jorge A., 73 n5
Colombia), 1, 8, 13, 21–24, 211–26 Florián, Mario, 73 n2
El desamparo (Ferreyra), 185 Fonseca, Alberto, 237, 239 n11
El director (Ferreyra), 184–92, 192 n2 Foster, Susan, 145 n2
El entenado (Saer), 45, 183 Foucault, Michel, 79, 113, 229–30,
“El hombre en el umbral” (Borges), 46 239 n1
“El inmortal” (Borges), 43–44 Franco, Itamar, 220
“El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” Franco, Jean, 3, 4
(Borges), 41 Frank, Waldo, 59
El libro de las ruinas (Borges), 44 Fresa y chocolate (Gutiérrez Alea), 197, 199
270 Index
Freud, Sigmund, 2, 34, 46, 60, 190 Gruman, Alejandro, 16

Friis, Ronald J., 169 Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, 6–7, 136,
Frye, David, 207 n11 142–44
Fuentealba, Carlos, 258, 259 n9 “Gubi Amaya” (Gorriti), 33–34
Fuentes, Carlos, 164 Guevara, Ernesto (Che), 67–68, 121,
Fujimori, Alberto, 135, 159 203, 205
Futoransky, Luisa, 27 Guha, Ranajit, 251
Guimarães, Honestino, 222–23, 226
Gabeira, Fernando, 225 Gupta, Akhil, 136–37
Galindo, Juan, 60 n3 Gutiérrez, Yuri, 148, 159 n5
Galli, Martín, 255 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 197, 199
Gallo, Rubén, 6 Guzmán, Abimael, 135, 149, 159
Galván, Manuel de Jesús, 2
Garay, Graciela de, 108–109, 114, 115 Habana—Arte nuevo de hacer ruinas
Garay, Orlando, 246 (documentary), 198, 200–202, 207
Garay, Viviana, 246 Harrison, Regina, 5, 66
García, Daura Olema, 203 Hasta ya no ir (Huidobro), 243–45
García, Héctor “Toba”, 254–55 Havana, Cuba, 1, 7, 197–207
García, José Uriel, 66 “Heights of Machu Picchu” (Neruda), 28
García, María Elena, 147, 150, 152, Hentscher, Matthias, 198, 200
158–59, 160 n7 Heredia, José María, 2, 165
García, Susan, 248 Hernández, Daniela, 131
García Antezana, Jorge, 73 n3 heteronormative society, 8, 230–39
García Márquez, Gabriel, 156 Highmore, Ben, 2, 103
García Ponce, Juan, 236 Historias mínimas (Sorín), 8, 252–53
Garibay, Ángel María, 169, 173 n10 History of the Conquest of Mexico
Gasco Foundation (Chile), 132 (Prescott), 79
Gastine, Alice, 132 History of the Conquest of Peru
General Cemetery (Santiago, Chile), 128, (Prescott), 79
178–80 History of the Reign of Ferdinand and
genocide, 90, 248, 251 Isabella the Catholic (Prescott), 80
Gineceo (Ferreyra), 185 Hite, Katherine, 132
Giner, Claudia, 123 Hodder, Ian, 79
Ginsberg, Robert, 4, 47 n11, 73 n1 Homer, 44, 189
Glosa (Saer), 183 Howard-Malverde, Rosaleen, 160 n9
“Go round . . . and . . . round” Huidobro, Beatriz García, 243–44, 248
(“Yira . . . yira . . .”), 102 Huidobro, Vicente, 155
Godoy, Marcial, 26 n5 human rights, 20, 90, 121–31, 136, 171,
Goldberg, Jonah, 125 175, 181, 254–58
Gómez, Rodrigo, 180, 182 Humboldt, Alexander von, 77, 81
González, Eduardo G., 172 Huyssen, Andreas, 4, 28, 73 n1, 96–97,
González Carré, Enrique, 148, 159 nn4–5 226, 250
Good Neighbor Policy, 59
Gopinath, Gayatri, 233, 239 n4 Iliad (Homer), 61 n13, 189
Gorriti, Juana Manuela, 30–37 Incidents of Travel in Central America,
Gott, Richard, 207 n1 Chiapas, and Yucatán (Stephens),
Goulart, João, 222–23 51, 60 n5, 80
Gradiva (Jensen), 46 Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia
Granado, Alberto, 67–68 Petraea, and the Holy Land
Great Wall of China, 39–40, 46, 88 (Stephens), 51
Index 271
Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, “La escritura del dios” (Borges), 44, 47 n5
Russia, and Poland (Stephens), 51 “La flor de Coleridge” (Borges), 40
Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (Stephens), La grande (Saer), 183
51, 80 “La morocha.” See “Argentine Brunette”
indigenous resistance, 61 n9, 92, 136–37, “La muerte y la brújula” (Borges), 41
141–42, 150–59 “La muralla y los libros” (Borges), 39
install-actions, 8, 24, 214 La palabra de los muertos o Ayacucho
Isherwood, Christopher, 67 hora nona (Molina), 147–59,
Izurieta, Óscar, 128–29 159 nn1,6
“La quena” (Gorriti), 33
Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard (Le “La secta del Fénix” (Borges), 46
Corbusier), 108–11, 114–15, 117 La victoria de Junín: canto a Bolívar
Jelin, Elizabeth, 221 (Olmedo), 2
Jensen, Wilhelm, 46 La vida es silbar (Pérez), 204–205
Johnson, Barbara, 169 La virgen de los sicarios (Vallejo). See
Johnson, Lyman, 121 Our Lady of the Assassins
Johnston, Don, 73 n4 La Zanja de Alsina (Argentina). See
Joignant, Alfredo, 127, 132 n2 Alsina’s Ditch
Jovés, Manuel, 100 Labbé, Cristián, 127
Joyce, James, 34 Lagos, Ricardo, 123, 128, 246
Juana Lucero (D’Halmar), 242–48 Lamagna, Diego, 255
Justiniano, Gonzalo, 243, 248 Lamarque, Libertad, 102
Lamborghini, Leónidas, 257
Kabah, Mexico, 58–59 Lane, Jill, 6, 140
Kafka, Franz, 34, 213, 250 Langland, Victoria, 8
Kanost, Laura, 258 Lara, Jesús, 154
Karp-Toledo, Eliane, 73, 73 n5 “Las ruinas circulares” (Borges), 42–44
Kasner, Edward, 42 The Last Days of Pompeii (Bulwer
Kazanjian, David, 2 Lytton), 28
Kiefer, Anselm, 30 Laub, Dori, 25
King, David, 47 n9 Lavín, Joaquín, 122
Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de, 259 n4 Lawrence, D. H., 77
Kirchner, Néstor, 90, 258, 259 n4 Lazzara, Michael, 6, 26 n3, 47 n13, 177,
Kirk, Robin, 150 179, 182
Klarén, Peter Flindell, 149–50, 160 n7 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard
Klasky, Helaine, 73, 73 n5 Jeanneret), 108–11, 114–15, 117
Klee, Paul, 249 Leal, Eusebio, 197
Klinger, Diana, 192 n4 Leal, Luis, 164, 170
Kohan, Martín, 184 “Lectura de los ‘Cantares Mexicanos’:
Koolhaas, Rem, 107–109, 116–18 manuscrito de Tlatelolco” (Pacheco),
Kramer, Lawrence, 97 163, 169–72
Krebs, Edgardo, 73 Leibniz, Gottfried, 239 n9
“Kublai Khan” (Coleridge), 46 Lennard, Patricio, 185
Lentz, Vera, 138
“La biblioteca de Babel” (Borges), 46 Lerner, Salomón, 135, 138–39
“La casa de Asterión” (Borges), 41 Levinas, Emmanuel, 28
La ciudad ausente (Piglia), 183–84 Leyendas de Guatemala (Asturias), 3
La Conquista del Desierto. See Conquest Lezaeta, P., 127
of the Desert lieux de memoire, 115, 227 n1
“La creación y P. H. Gosse” (Borges), 44 Lihn, Enrique, 257
272 Index
Lima, Peru, 1, 70, 78, 84, 137–41 Melville, Herman, 30–31, 34, 36–37
Lima Souto, Edson Luís de, 225–26 Memoria Abierta. See Open Memory
Link, Daniel, 192 n4 Memorial to the Detained-and-
Lizarraga, Augustín, 64–65 Disappeared (Santiago, Chile),
Llanos, Bernardita, 248 178–80
Lo íntimo (Gorriti), 33–34 Memorias del subdesarrollo (Gutiérrez
“Loca.” See “Mad Woman” Alea), 199, 207
Lorenzano, Sandra, 8 memory:
Los palacios distantes (Estévez), 205–206 absence of, 135–38
Los ríos profundos (Arguedas), 84 acts of, 24, 255
Los vigilantes (Eltit), 35 the body and, 13–26, 31, 121–34,
Lost City of the Incas (Bingham), 65, 67 175–82, 211–18, 229–40, 241–48
Loveluck, Eliana, 132 cadavers and, 121–31
Löwy, Michael, 103–104 cultural, 5, 56, 78, 115, 166, 206, 212
Lubitsch, Ernst, 117 ethics of, 249–58
Lubow, Arthur, 73, 73 n5 in Gorriti, 31–33
Lula da Silva, Luis Ignacio, 226 historical, 95–104, 136, 182
Lyons, Claire, 4, 73 n1, 172 n3 mapping, 231–34
Lyra, Carlos, 224 in Markham, 78, 83–85
national, 51–62, 87–94, 95–106,
Machu Picchu, Peru, 1, 5, 45, 63–73 121–34, 135–46, 147–62, 163–74,
Macunaíma (de Andrade), 3 219–28, 249–59
“The Mad Woman” (Loca), 98, 100–101 nostalgia and, 97
Madagascar (Pérez), 204–205 resurrecting, 220–21
Madariaga, Mónica, 128 sites of, 13–26, 27–29, 69–73, 77–86,
Madigan, Stephen A., 239 n5 87–94, 107–18, 135–42, 163–74,
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. See Mothers 175–82, 203, 205–207, 211–18,
of Plaza de Mayo 219–28
Maestra voluntaria (García), 203 social, 6–7, 136, 142, 176
Majluf, Natalie, 148 traumatic, 19–25, 29–34, 117, 135,
Malvinas War, 89, 186–88 176–77
manchay tiempo. See time of fear voluntary, 2
Manifest Destiny, 58 Memory Room (Sala de la memoria, Villa
Mapa Teatro Laboratory of Artists, 8, 13, Grimaldi), 19
21–25, 211–12, 214, 217 Mena, Odlanier, 127
Markham, Clement R., 2, 5, 78–85 Menem, Carlos, 191, 252, 254–55
Marsh, Leslie, 248 Mercado, Tununa, 183–84
Martí, José, 199 Merello, Tita, 102
Martínez, Luciano, 47 n13 Merewether, Charles, 2, 4, 73 n1, 172,
Martínez Viergol, Antonio, 100 172 n3
Martins Filho, João Roberto, 224 Messinger Cypess, Sandra, 7
Marx, Karl, 129, 241 Mexican-American War, 57
Masiello, Francine, 4–5 Mexico City, Mexico, 1, 6, 13, 15,
Matta, Pedro Alejandro, 16–20, 23, 25 107–18, 163–65, 230, 233, 251
Maxwell, Keely Beth, 69, 73 n5 Mexico City earthquake of 1985, 6,
Mayer, Enrique, 152, 160 n10 114–15, 164
McIntosh, Molly L., 73 n5 Miles, Susan A., 86 n2
media, 72, 123–29, 150–51, 184–88, 197, milongas, 96, 99
220–23, 250 Minay, Sebastián, 123
melancholy, 2, 4, 8, 63, 104, 249 Moby Dick (Melville), 36–37
Index 273
Mockus, Antanas, 212 Otras inquisiciones (Borges), 44

modernism, 6, 34, 108–17 Our Lady of the Assassins (Vallejo),
Mohanna, Mayu, 138 229–39
Molina, Pilar, 127, 129
Molina Richter, Marcial, 7, 147–59, Pacheco, José Emilio, 7, 163, 165,
159 nn1,6 168–72, 172 n1, 173 n9
Molloy, Sylvia, 5 Palenque, Mexico, 54, 55
Monroe, James, 54 Palma, Ricardo, 155
Monroe doctrine, 59 Palmeira, Vladimir, 225
Moreira, Iván, 124 pampas, Argentina, 87–94, 97
Moreno, Francisco, 91 Pani, Mario, 6, 108–18
Morgenstern, Oscar, 42 Park for Peace (Villa Grimaldi, Chile), 4,
Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Madres de la 16–21, 176–78
Plaza de Mayo), 19, 256, 258 Parque Tercer Milenio. See Third
The Motorcycle Diaries (Salles), 67–68 Millennium Park
Moyano, Daniel, 184 Parque por la Paz (Villa Grimaldi, Chile).
Muguercia, Magaly, 200 See Park for Peace
Müller, Heiner, 213–14 “Parque Vertical,” 116
Multi-familial Miguel Alemán, 108 Parthenon, 35, 54, 67
Multi-familial Presidente Juárez, Patagonia, Argentina, 44, 87–90, 252
108, 114 Pauls, Alan, 184
Muro de la Memoria (Santiago, Chile). Paz, Octavio, 112–13, 115–16, 118,
See Wall of Memory 164, 167
Museum of Natural History (La Plata), Peabody Museum (Yale University), 73
90–91 Pearson, Mike, 198
Pedro Páramo (Rulfo), 35
Nadie nada nunca (Saer), 183 Peñalosa, Enrique, 22
Nahuatl texts, 167, 169–70, 172 Pérez, Claudio, 180, 182
Naipaul, V. S., 239 n4 Pérez, Fernando, 198, 200–204
National Students’ Union (UNE), Rio de Perez, Hiram, 233
Janeiro, Brazil, 1, 8, 219–27 Pérez de Arce, Hermógenes, 127
Navarro, Desiderio, 199 Pérez Silva, Julio, 247
Navia, Patricio, 132 n1 Perón, Evita (Eva Duarte de Perón), 121
Nebbia, Lito, 251 Perón, Juan Domingo, 104, 187, 251
neoliberalism, 6–7, 104 n4, 122–28, Petta, Gustavo, 220
131–32, 176, 191–92, 250–54 Piccin, Maurício, 222
Neruda, Pablo, 3, 28, 66–67, 156 piedra de Huamanga. See stone of
Newman, James Roy, 42 Huamanga
Niemeyer, Oscar, 221–22 Piglia, Ricardo, 183–84, 186, 257
Nonoalco-Tlatelolco. See Tlatelolco Piñera, Sebastián, 122
Nora, Pierre, 28, 115, 227 n1 Pinochet, Augusto, 1, 4, 6, 16–18, 20,
121–32, 245, 247
Obregón, Álvaro, 121 Pinochet, Jaqueline, 129
Old Patagonian Express (Theroux), 69 Pinochet Molina, Augusto, 129
Olivera-Williams, María Rosa, 6 pinochetismo, 123–24, 126–27
Ollantay (play), 79, 85 piqueteros, 188, 253–54, 256, 258
Olmedo, José Joaquín, 2, 155 Plaza de Mayo, 19, 254, 256, 258
Olympic Games, 112, 114, 164, 171 Plaza of the Three Cultures (Tlatelolco,
Open Memory (Memoria Abierta), 256 Mexico), 6–7, 108–18, 163–72
Oquendo-Villar, Carmen, 132 n2, 133 n4 Poerner, Artur, 221
274 Index
poetics: Roach, Joseph, 4, 7, 121–22

archeological, 78–79, 85 Roberts, Jennifer L., 56, 61 n11
of evocation, 78 Roca, Julio, 87–88, 91
of the fragment, 45 Rodríguez, Pablo, 127
of reciprocity, 169 Roncallo, José Luis, 99
Poniatowska, Elena, 112, 114, 169, 171, Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 30–36
172 n7 Rosas, Mariano, 90–91
Ponte, Antonio José, 4, 47 n13, 198, Rose, Phyllis, 71
200–201 Rostoworoski, María, 86 n2
Pope, Alexander, 61 n13 Roth, Michael, 4, 73 n1, 172 n3
Portela, Ena Lucía, 200 Rowe, John, 67
Portuondo, Omara, 201 Rubio, Miguel, 142–43
Pozzo, Enrique, 91 ruin/ruins:
Praia de Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, aesthetics of, 29, 45
219–27 archeological excavations of, 2, 15, 40,
Prats, Carlos, 132 n3 68, 73
Prats, Francisco Cuadrado, 124, 132 n4 bodies and, 241–48
Pratt, Mary Louise, 43 Borges on, 5, 45
Predmore, Richard, 58 in Borges’s works, 39–47
Prescott, William, H., 79–80, 82 cadavers as, 121–32
Proust, Marcel, 31, 192 n4 civil war and, 1, 6, 31–32, 147–59
Proyecto C’ùndua (Mapa Teatro), 24–25, commemorative strategies and, 176
26 n6, 211–12 counter-monument and, 182
Puente Bulnes (Santiago, Chile). See dark, 4, 13, 18, 20–21, 25
Bulnes Bridge desert, 87–94
dualism and, 35
“¿Qué pasa señor?” See “What’s Up, durational performance and, 14, 19
Sir?” ethics of, 4–8, 28–33, 102–104, 123,
“Qué vachaché.” See “That’s Life” 175–82, 186–89, 249–50
Quechua language, 65, 72, 78–80, 85, European cultural history and, 77
88–91, 135–37, 142, 147–57, 159 n4 evocation of, 5, 8, 52, 78–85, 96–99,
Quilmes Indians, 27 143, 231–34, 250
Quiroga, José, 198–99, 236 experience of visiting, 14–15
globalization and, 104 n4, 250
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg), 65 glorious, 4, 13, 18, 20–21, 25
Ramírez, Juana María, 21, 25, 217 heterotopias and, 8, 229–30, 239
Ramírez-Cancio, Marlène, 217 as historical process, 198–99
Ranqueles community, 90–91 as in-betweenness, 30
Rappaport, Joanne, 160 n9 “in ruins” vs., 52–53
Reati, Fernando, 192 n1 memory and. See memory
Reisner, Steven, 26 n7 mixed-blood modernism and, 6,
relational art, 211 110–11
Reyes, Pedro, 116 modernist, 107–18
Ricci, Franco Maria, 44 as monument, 15
Richard, Nelly, 3, 4, 7, 104 n4 neoliberalism and, 132, 183–92,
Richarte, Melquíades, 64 250–52
Rigney, Ann, 166 nostalgia and, 96–97
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1, 8, 219–27 ownership of, 5, 51–60, 63–73, 77–85,
Riva, Gastón, 255 87–94, 107–18, 220
Rivera, Andrés, 184 paper as, 94
Rivero, Mariano, 77, 79–81 performing, 13–25
Index 275
photographs as, 91–94 Sendero Luminoso. See Shining Path

poetry as, 28, 147–59, 163–72 Serra, Ana, 202–203, 205
as postmodern site, 28 Shakespeare, William, 91, 109, 117, 206
preservation of, 4, 39–47, 73, 107–109, Shanks, Michael, 79, 198
172, 230 Shaw, Donald Leslie, 73 n3
queer subject and, 230–33, 236–39 Shelley, Percy B., 165
reconstruction and, 3, 5, 30, 45, 91, Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), 63, 70,
141–42, 155–59, 163, 165, 214–15 135, 139–40, 147, 149–50, 158,
recycling and, 1–5, 7, 53, 63–75, 160 n8
199–203, 212, 215, 219–27, 258 Shúa, Ana María, 184
renovation, 13, 25 Silva Henríquez, Raúl, 130
Romanticism and, 2, 28–34, 190 Silverman, Helaine, 73 n1
simulating, 59 Sin título: técnica mixta (theater
as sites of ethical possibility, 4, 28 production), 136, 142–45
skulls as, 89–92, 94 Sitwell, Sacheverel, 68–69
social memory and, 6–7, 135–45, 176 Soja, Edward, 235–36
study of, 1–4 Sommer, Doris, 61 n9, 145 n2
subjectivity and, 183–92, 230–33, Sorensen, Diana, 172 n7
236–39 Soriano, Osvaldo, 184
tango as, 6, 95–104 Sorín, Carlos, 8, 252–53, 259 n5
tourism ads for, 69–71 Sosnowski, Saúl, 192 n1
translating, 51–60 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), 34
types of, 2, 13–25 Steele, Paul R., 153, 155, 157
use of the term, 13–16, 52 Stephens, John Lloyd, 2, 5, 45, 51–60,
witnessing and, 16–25, 211–17 60 nn2–5, 61 nn7, 10–15, 80
work and, 198–207 stone of Huamanga (piedra de
Rulfo, Juan, 35 Huamanga), 148, 154
Russell, Bertrand, 42 Suite Habana (Pérez), 200–203, 207
Svampa, Maristella, 252, 259 n3
Saborido, Enrique, 98–100
Saer, Juan José, 45, 183, 186 tango, 6, 95–104
Sahagún, Bernadino de, 172 Taylor, Diana, 4, 15, 16, 18, 145 n2, 203
Said, Edward, 35 Tello, Julio C., 77
Salazar, Lucy C., 73 n5 Templo Mayor (Mexico City), 13, 15, 18
Salgán, Horacio, 98 Testigo de las ruinas. See Witness to the
Salles, Walter, 67 Ruins
Santa Inés barrio. See El Cartucho “That’s Life” (“Qué vachaché”), 102
neighborhood (Bogotá, Colombia) Theidon, Kimberly, 150, 152
Santí, Enrico Mario, 73 n3 Theroux, Paul, 69
Santiago, Chile, 4, 13, 16–22, 25, Third Millennium Park (Parque Tercer
123–32, 176–82, 250 Milenio), 1, 13, 22, 212, 215–17
Sarlo, Beatriz, 183–84, 191 Thompson, Richard F., 239 n5
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 31, 33–37 Thompson, Robert Farris, 97, 102
Scarpaci, Joseph L., 207 nn2,13 The Time Machine (Wells), 40–41
Schiller, Friedrich von, 104 time of fear (manchay tiempo), 135
Schmidt, Henry, 172 n6 Tizón, Héctor, 184
Schroeder, Barbet, 229 “Tlatelolco, Canon en tres voces” (del
Sebald, W. G., 47 n8 Río), 163, 165–69
“The Second-Hand Shop” Tlatelolco, Mexico, 6–7, 108–18, 163–72
(“Cambalache”), 102–104 “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Borges),
Segre, Robert, 207 nn2,13 40–41, 44–47
276 Index
Todras-Whitehill, Ethan, 72 ville radieuse, 108, 110–11, 113, 115

Toledo, Alejandro, 72–73 Villoldo, Ángel, 98–99
“Tonight I Get Wasted” (“Esta noche me Viñas, David, 90
emborracho bien”), 102 virtual field, 212
torture, 4, 6, 17–21, 122–23, 164, Volney, Constantin-Francois, 28, 31
175–78, 181, 189, 223, 245 von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang, 60 n1,
Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo, 108 61 nn14–15
Townsend, Sarah, 217 von Neumann, John, 42
Trajtemberg, Karen, 129
trauma, 4, 14, 19–20, 24–25, 29, 34, 117, Wall of Memory (Pérez and Gómez,
135, 137, 176, 234 Santiago, Chile), 180–82
travel industry texts, 69–71 The Waste Land (Eliot), 44
tribal chiefs (caciques), 87–91, 94 Wells, H. G., 40–41
Trilce (Vallejo), 35 Wenders, Wim, 197
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Western Wall (Jerusalem, Israel), 47 n11
(TRC), 135–39, 142, 148, 159 “What’s Up, Sir?” (“¿Qué pasa señor?”),
Tschudi, Johann Jacob von, 78–81, 85 102
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 230 Whitfield, Esther, 201, 207 n5
Turpo, Nazario, 73 Wiesel, Elie, 25
Wilde, Alexander, 122, 132 n1
Ubilluz, Juan Carlos, 239 n10 Williams, Mac, 47 n3
Ulysses (Joyce), 34 Winters, John J., 159 n1
“Un arte de hacer ruinas” (Ponte), 200 Witness to the Ruins (Testigo de las
União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE), ruinas), 13, 21–24, 211–17
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. See National witnessing:
Students’ Union act of, 7, 16–25, 139, 166–68, 216
Unruh, Vicky, 3, 7, 47 n13, 73 n1, 155, cultural memory and, 5, 78–80
207 nn6–8 Woodward, Christopher, 4, 46–47,
Urton, Gary, 153–54 47 nn7–8
“Utopía de un hombre que está cansado” Wuffarden, Luis Eduardo, 148
(Borges), 44
Uxmal, Mexico, 55, 58–59 Yabrán, Alfredo, 259 n9
Yale University, 64–65, 73
Valcárcel, Luis, 73 n2 Yalouri, Eleana, 73 n1
Valdés, Zoe, 200, 207 n8 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 255
Valenzuela, Luisa, 173 n9 “Yira . . . yira . . .” See “Go
Vallejo, César, 35 round . . . and . . . round”
Vallejo, Fernando, 8, 229–39 Young, Elliott, 4, 201
Van Buren, Martin, 51, 60, 60 n2 Young, James, 219, 227 n1
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 151–52 Yrigoyen, Hipólito, 251
Varneiro, Ferdy, 224 Yucatán, Mexico, 5, 45, 51, 54–55, 57–59
Vega, Garcilaso de la (el Inca), 78–85 Yuyanapaq: para recordar (photo exhibit),
Vértice (Ferreyra), 185, 192 n2 136, 138–44
Vidart, Daniel, 95–96
Videla, Jorge Rafael, 27, 89 Zaehner, R. C., 42
Vieria, Delfim, 227 n2 Zalcman, Lawrence, 47 n1
Villa Grimaldi, 4, 13, 16–22, 25, 128, Zapata, Emiliano, 121
176–78, 250 Zeballos, Estanislao, 88–94
Villarinho, Manoel, 225 Zoroastrianism, 42–43
Previous Publications
Michael J. Lazzara
Luz Arce: después del infierno (2008)
Prismas de la memoria: narración y trauma en la transición chilena
(2007)
Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (2006)
Los años de silencio: conversaciones con narradores que escribieron
bajo dictadura (2002)
Vicky Unruh
Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America
(2006)
Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters
(1994)

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New Concepts in Latino American Cultures

A Series Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & José Quiroga

Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age

Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place

Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women’s

The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise

Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity: From Sensuality

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

Essays in Cuban Intellectual History

Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing

Confronting History and Modernity in Mexican Narrative

Cuban Women Writers: Imagining a Matria

Other Worlds: New Argentine Film

Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s

Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal

Telling Ruins in Latin America

New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone

The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901

Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities

Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature

Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations

Jose Martí: An Introduction

New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s

The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics

An Intellectual History of the Caribbean

None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era

The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World

Violence without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South

Redrawing the Nation: National Identity in Latin/o American Comics

Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh

Introduction: Telling Ruins 1

Part One What Are We Doing Here?:

Part Two Whose Ruins?: Ownership and

Part Three The Ruins of Fragile Ceasefires:

Part Four Ordinary People: Inhabited Ruins,

1.1 Templo Mayor (Mexico City) 15

Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh

Between 2001 and 2005, displaced citizens from Bogotá’s condemned El

banish them from view—unleashes compelling social, ethical, or politi-

avant-garde originality with an imagined ground zero of pre-Columbian

in postauthoritarian art and testimony; dystopian representations of urban

“frontiers of action” and “collective thinking.” Balderston, in analyzing

As with photograph for Barthes, Di Tella sees in genocidal ruins not

stories, Yuyachkani turns the residues of violence into pliable, powerful

Abderhalden Cortés, codirector of the Bogotá Mapa Teatro Laboratory

critical and constructive—ruins also stimulate future imaginings. The

What Are We Doing Here?:

governmental, military, or economic violence. Ruin (as verb) yanks us

A miniature scale model of the extermination camp positions us as

too, was transformed as words were outlawed: crímenes, desapareci-

practice. I, too, am part of this scenario now; I have accompanied him.

Although this is not environmental theater in the 1960s understanding of

Cortés, clearly refers to ruins as more than physical remains, rubble, or

Arhuaca mythology refers to “the place where we will go after death.”6

extremes of “then” and “now,” between totality and infinite fragments,

The ruins stage an in-betweenness: on the one hand, a connection

on the surface, are beyond comparison; yet more importantly, he invites