Living With/Through Loss and Grief in Lisa Loomer's Bocón!

Abstract

In Lisa Loomer's Bocón (Big Mouth), Miguel—a 12-year-old boy—has to travel north to the United States after witnessing soldiers arrest his parents. My reading of Bocón relies on asking how the process of holding on to intense loss may actually serve to counter the process of assimilation as a particular form of national integration. I then turn to Bocón as a dramatized rendition of one boy's journey in which the salient feature is the persistent deploying of an idyllic recollection of his parents—which constructs for him a reassuring point of ethical comparison by which to judge an impoverished present.

Notes

¹Excerpts come from Rosenberg's Aplauso (1995), 33–71.