Identity in Latin American and Latina Literature by Quinn-Sánchez Kathryn;Quinn-Sánchez Kathryn;

Author:Quinn-Sánchez, Kathryn;Quinn-Sánchez, Kathryn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Contesting the Nation-State’s Abuse of Power

Marcela Serrano’s La llorona

While Chávez takes on the role of popular culture, specifically through film with the use of humor to highlight how women define love and their place within a romantic relationship, Marcela Serrano has a larger aim in contesting the insidious role that governments can have upon families, citizens, and children in their desire to satisfy the Nation-State’s lust for hegemonic power.

Marcela Serrano rewrites the national allegory from the point of view of the marginalized in La llorona (2008). Unlike the Latin American novels of the nineteenth century where the reader equated the protagonist with the ideal citizen in the project of nation building, and unlike the mid-twentieth-century narratives where the author reimagined the concept of the ideal citizen, La llorona contests the absolute power of the State’s reach into the lives of the poor, the ignorant, and, especially, young women. In the new millennium, the genre used to rewrite the nation is not the romance, the fairy tale, or a legend, as Jean Franco underscored in the late 1980s; rather it is the realist novel narrated in the first person and centered on the contestation and subversion of the State’s abuse of power.[1] La llorona defies the place to which uneducated, poor women are still relegated, by representing several characters who consciously decide that it is time to battle the forces that would keep them powerless in the public arena. Above all, this novel is anti-power. The narrator/protagonist refuses to accept the societal forces that constantly barrage her, defining her as worthless. In an attempt to defend herself and her child, she disputes her social class (poverty), argues against her husband (gender), clashes with the hospital (institutional power), and struggles against her imprisonment in the psychiatric ward (society deems her unfit). The protagonist challenges everything that historically has kept women relegated to a space of weakness. In addition, she refuses to accept the other women’s deafening repetition that she is “la llorona.”[2] This chapter serves to demonstrate the ways that Serrano contests how power and space exploit young women while simultaneously subverting the Nation-State through reimagining a counter-space where a new definition of family lies beyond power’s reach.

The exploitation of young women is the focus of the novel’s plot, which portrays a society where the wealthy steal children from the ignorant and the poor. The hospital employees, doctors, and in some cases nurses, benefit from the hefty sums of money that are exchanged. No country is specified, although it is implied that these events take place in the southern cone of Latin America, perhaps Chile or Argentina. Also, few characters are named, which is another indication that this terrible abuse could happen in many different locales. By avoiding names, Serrano brings attention to the social class and the gender of the victims, more than to a particular individual. She allows the experiences of these women to represent all women who are systematically abused by institutional power. Furthermore, Serrano questions the current

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.