Seismic Moves: Migration and Identity in Alberto Fuguet's Películas de mi vida

Abstract

This essay focuses on Alberto Fuguet's 2005 novel, Películas de mi vida, to make two arguments: (1) Fuguet's novel reinterprets seismic movements as events that permanently disrupt the ground upon which we build our foundations and uses seismology as a metaphor for the profound effect of immigration on people's lives; (2) Fuguet's focus on issues central to migration—identity, language, and memory—offers a model for (re)conceptualizing immigrant identity as a subtle, yet fraught, negotiation between externally imposed binaries like home/away, past/present, and citizen/alien. More specifically, I contend that Fuguet's focus on migration as a means of undermining binaries offers a model for migrant belonging in the United States, one that neither depends on the outright rejection of the country of origin and the wholesale commitment to the receiving country nor one that depends on an unassimilable devotion to one's place of origin.

Keywords:

• assimilation
• bilingualism
• immigration
• Latin American/Latino identity
• memory
• translation

Notes

¹The McOndistas were never really “a generation” in any formal sense, but the anthology marks a general, and widespread, feeling of discontent that some younger Latin American writers felt with regard to the particular pressures that literary markets were exerting on their creative impulses. McOndo is, of course, a pun on Garcia Marquez's mythical village of Macondo. The general contention of the McOndistas is that it was time to move beyond the ritualized folklore of magical realism and into the world of popular cultures perhaps best represented by the “Mc” of McDonalds.

²Diana Palaversich's “Entre las Américas latinas y el planeta USA. Dos antologías de Alberto Fuguet” is, perhaps, the most scathing but also the most insightful of the critiques regarding Fuguet's anthologies. Palaversich takes Fuguet and Gomez to task for their “arrogance” in assuming that the world of middle- and upper-class privilege invoked in their anthologies is somehow representative of a larger Latin America that is emphatically neither middle nor upper class. She then condemns their “grave” error of including NO women authors in their McOndo anthology, rightly cataloging it as a sign of a retrograde machismo that puts into doubt the merits of the project.

³In her search for a middle ground between absolute assimilation and absolute cultural resistance, Ritivoi's argument shares much in common with the work of Paula Moya. Moya uses Juan Flores's notion of being asimilao to examine the ways in which assimilation is, by nature, mutually constitutive in that it inevitably implies a change for the immigrant but also for the guest culture. Asimilao is precisely the notion of being assimilated while still retaining important cultural aspects from the home culture.

⁴I will say more about the concept of “comprehension” later in this essay.

⁵That the colonial dynamic can be reversed (as when a dominant language is translated into a colonial language) does nothing to ease or surmount the necessary inherent violence of the act of translation.

⁶I am here thinking about works as disparate as Jumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Daniel Alarcón's War by Candlelight, and Dinaw Mengestu's stunning novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.