Crossing the Threshold of the City: Urban Refugees in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier

ABSTRACT

One of the few novels in contemporary American literature representing the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier serves as a historical text providing insight into a tumultuous moment in American history. This article examines The Tattooed Soldier as a literary documentation of the pre-uprising period at a time of severe distress in the city. The depiction of the Los Angeles uprising at the end of the novel dramatically draws a parallel between the civil war in Guatemala and urban discord in the US, with the violence reviving the traumatic memories of Central American refugees in the host country. The narrative framework gradually unravels the threads of an urban tension that has accumulated in the deeper layers of the city and finally erupts into “the great burning.” The documentation of a specific period before the uprising not only reveals the workings of spatial injustice in the city but also provides an alternative to the mainstream discourse that associates the Los Angeles riots with stereotypical images of African-Americans destroying public property. More importantly, Tobar’s representation of an urban everyday life that remains outside the official geometric city grid serves as a critical esthetic that contributes to the discourse of resistance among urban study scholars.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. First used in a poem of 1999 by Maya Chinchilla, entitled “Central American-American,” the term is no commonly used in scholarly works referring to people of Central American descent who live in the United States.

2. Arturo Arias categorizes Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier “as the first novel written in English by a Guatemalan author,” noting that other critics have pointed to Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) as the first Central American Latino text. However, Arias counters this claim based on the fact that Goldman’s father is an American citizen, and that his knowledge of Guatemala is limited as he only lived in Guatemala briefly during his childhood. Marta Caminero-Santangelo, on the other hand, questions such strict identity formulations.

3. Leading scholars who work on the history, identity and politics of Central American-Americans emphasize the significance of the specificities of separate minority groups that have been reduced to a single category of US Latinos (See Arias; Rodriguez; Chinchilla and Hamilton).

4. For further reading, (see Miller; Rodriguez).

5. Ryan Gattis’s All Involved (2015) and Aris Janigian’s This Angelic Land (2012) are two other novels set before and during the 1992 uprising, but neither have received much critical acclaim.

6. Most critical works on the The Tattooed Soldier focus on the issues of national trauma, diasporic memory, and Latino collectivity within the framework of Central American-American literature (Arias; Kim; Minich). Only a few have discussed it as a contemporary novel that deals with the urban question as a central motif. Caren Irr reads the novel through the lens of Umberto Eco’s neologism “neomedievalism,” the postmodern version of medieval practices outside the boundaries of the homogeneous nation-state. In Tobar’s postmodern version of neomedievalism, global supra-national organizations function in a similar way to the medieval communities of power, now involved in urban affairs in the form of a neomedieval practice. The dynamics of the global city, in this case, repeat the social and economic disparities of the medieval city-state (Irr 41–44). Caminero-Santangelo, on the other hand, reads the novel as a transnational work that uses pan-ethnicity as a subversive stance against US-made identity categories: “A homogeneous notion of ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ identity,” in the book, Caminero-Santangelo states, “is revealed as an impossibility in part because nation itself is utterly disrupted; political divisions, as well as ethnic divisions, rip apart the category of “Guatemalan” (186, italics in original). The city, in this case, becomes a focal point for alliances between ethnic categories against such reductive notions, offering the possibility of alternative pan-ethnic coalitions that are “forged in the urban crucible of poverty and disenfranchisement” (189).

7. See, for example, Mike Davis’s (City of Quartz) and Edward W. Soja’s (Thirdspace).

8. In a recent article, Eric Vázquez discusses the ending of The Tattooed Soldier, particularly Antonio’s taking revenge on another refugee and a victim of war, within the framework of US interventionist policies. “Giving an account of these factors,” Vázquez argues, “both prevent readers’ mistaken interpretations that vengeance represents a kind of poetic justice” (See “Interrogative Justice”).

9. For comprehensive studies on LA uprising, (see Baldassare; Leong and Chang; Ong and Hee).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Esen Kara

Esen Kara currently works as a full-time lecturer at Yasar University, Turkey, where she teaches contemporary American Literature and Turcophone Literature.