Círculos viciosos: migración y violencia en la narrativa y el cine trans-centroamericanos

Abstract

Migration both within and outside the Central American isthmus has marked the lives of millions of Central Americans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This essay analyzes two works representative of the recent narrative subgenre centered on Central American migration: the novel The Tattooed Soldier (1998) by Hector Tobar and the feature film El camino (2007) directed by Ishtar Yasin. It argues that both texts approach the migration of Central American citizens through a narrative strategy identified as “deterritorialized circular violence” in which the initial violence (national, territorialized) migrates with the protagonists of both stories to their recipient countries, transforming along the way into a transnational, deterritorialized phenomenon. Due to the transnational, circular nature of this violence, the characters are not able to escape it and rather end up in worse circumstances after their voyage to their supposed “promised land.” Through this narrative
strategy, The Tattooed Soldier and El camino make powerful commentaries on the way vulnerable Central Americans have become victims of structural, institutionalized violence that extends beyond the national territory—and whose origin and common cause is the socioeconomic inequality and precariousness that impact these individuals before and after becoming migrants.