Post-Conflict Central American Literature

Yvette Aparicio is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Grinnell College.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionCentral America in Pieces: Dismembering the Isthmus(Re)membering Central AmericaThe Stench of BelongingTouring the HomelandAlmost Home: Central America in a Virtual WorldConclusionBibliography

This interesting book concerns representations of home and homeland by contemporary poets and short story writers from postconflict (1990s on) Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. According to Aparicio (Grinnell), memories and associations, positive and negative, during this period express nostalgia for what could have been if the utopian desire for social transformation of revolutionary poets such as Cardenal, Rugama, and Dalton had been realized. Dashed hopes soon become bitter despondency as poets like Salvadoran Susana Reyes contemplate their degraded, 'dismembered' homelands. Some, such as Nicaraguan Juan Sobalvarro, vent their sense of alienation and displacement via naturalistic depictions of poverty, pollution, and decay. Others, including Costa Rican Luis Chaves, become emotionally detached from their decomposing homeland, experiencing it as if they were tourists, while longing to belong somewhere. Nicaraguan Eunice Shade's narrators 'leave' the homeland, but in a virtual sense only, seeking home and homeland in the globalized, digital world of consumerism, the 'banal nationalism' of shopping malls and computer screens. Aparicio's study shows that globalization cannot successfully substitute virtual realities for local belongings, and that although cultural referents have become less local and more global, the need to belong, to feel rooted somewhere, runs deep in Central America. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.