currents Reimagining Contemporary Latin American Cities Gisela Heffes In recent years, contemporary Latin American writings have privileged the city over any other space. The writers featured here propose a reconfiguration of the Latin American city in light of the postmodern theme of disenchantment as well as a preoccupation with the “end of utopia.” I n 1972 Italian writer Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a catalog of imaginary cities that presents an archetype of the city from which all possible cities may be deduced. This model of the city can help us to reflect both on a particular city and on all cities at once, for as Calvino reminds us in his renowned work, cities are spaces where we exchange not only commodities but also words, desires, and memories. In recent years, contemporary Latin American cities have also become distinctive places where a wide range of exchanges has taken place. While a sense of disbelief and skepticism regarding the implementation of progress and modernization has called into question the most basic premises of its political and economic policies, Latin American cities have created a setting for the trading of both literal and metaphorical dreams. No longer are they a part of nations striving toward collective justice or some degree of egalitarianism; rather, over the last two decades, they have come to constitute an atomized urban space in which the impoverished majority are preoccupied with the basic needs of personal survival. In response to this changing urban landscape, new Latin American literary representations of the city have emerged. These narratives 42 ı World Literature Today call into question the benefits of globalization and progress— indeed the very notion of progress itself—and are imbued with the postmodern ethos of disenchantment. Nostalgia and above all urban violence emerge as the most illustrative and recurring aspects of these recent literary works. On the one hand, some authors have chosen to fictionalize real cities such as Bogotá (Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras [1999]), Buenos Aires (César Aira’s Villa [2001]), Medellin (Fernando Vallejos’s La Virgen de los Sicarios [1994]), and Rio de Janeiro (Paulo Lins’s Cidade de Deus [1997]). On the other hand, other writers have devised nonexistent, wholly imaginary cities. These include Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, Venezuelan José Balza, Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince, and Cuban José Antonio Ponte. Imaginary cities can be found in Balza’s novel Percusión (1982), Belli’s Waslala (1996), Abad Faciolince’s Angosta (2004), and Ponte’s short story “Un arte de hacer ruinas” (2000; An art of making photo: tracy collins ruins). In both instances, the reader encounters a city—be it “real” or “imaginary”—plagued by small-scale violence and armed conflict verging on civil war, which has its basis in the sharp economic stratification resulting from a global economy that benefits a small minority while exploiting the masses of the Third World. One of the texts under consideration in this article indeed refers to Latin America as a veritable “garbage dump” for the First World. This article briefly examines some representative examples of the second trend, as we still know frustratingly little about how imaginary cities figure in recent literary production in Latin Amer- ica. All these texts share a nostalgic yearning for an irrecoverable space, furnishing their narrative with both nostalgia and violence. Furthermore, in spite of their imaginary attributes, these cities lose their fictional quality and depict instead a space in a more “real” or mimetic way. From the very last decades of the twentieth century to the opening years of the twenty-first, Latin American cities have reimagined their urban configuration, shaping themselves in light of the postmodern theme of disenchantment with the idea of progress and globalization as reflected in recent literature. José Balza’s novel, Percusión, recounts the fictional itinerary of the unnamed protagonist through a sequence of mostly imaginary cities. Departing from Caranat, he then continues on to the city of Dawaschuwa, followed by México City, Shamteri, Den Haag, Ereván, and Szamarkand. The last stop on his journey is Caranat, his initial starting point. This circular itinerary thus represents in Balza’s novel a search for knowledge that can also be translated as a quest for the self. Throughout the novel, the narrator refers to this trip as an individual quest, and by the end of the story the main character ends up finding a “man identical to himself.” Although the narrative advances, it does not do so in a categorically linear fashion; each scene resembles a frozen snapshot, where both past and future fuse into a temporary and spatial scenery—that of the memory of the character. Additionally, as he advances toward the future, he carries along the experience of the past, engraving on every new city a previous image, an older impression that preserves his former perspective on the world. From this standpoint, every city represents a refuge that reappears under a similar shape and where, rather than finding himself transformed, the character realizes that he has ultimately remained unchanged. What is finally at stake is the corroboration that two different beings can inhabit one uniquely distinctive individual. The character concludes, therefore, that just as the self can be fragmented, so too is it possible that two different places remain the same through his seamless glance. Balza’s cities thus represent imaginary landscapes anchored in inner territories where such concepts as history and progress disappear. In Percusión we no longer have a tendency toward the future; the linear progress of the main character is confined to a cyclical individual quest tainted with a nostalgia that revolves around the self rather than a communal project of transformation. March – April 2009 ı 43 wOrkS CItED Abad Faciolince, héctor. Angosta. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2004. Balza, José. Percusión. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2000. Belli, Gioconda. Waslala: Memorial del futuro. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1997. Ponte, Antonio José. “Un arte de hacer ruinas.” In Nuevos narradores cubanos. Ed. Michi Strausfeld. Madrid: Siruela, 2000. 44 ı World Literature Today This same tendency is noticeable in Gioconda Belli’s novel, Waslala. It is the main character Melisandra’s quest for finding herself that triggers the plot. Whereas “Waslala” constitutes a mythical utopian city, Melisandra’s itinerary to uncover the lost utopia traverses a cluster of nonexistent cities, such as Las Luces, Cineria, and Timbú, within the also imaginary country of Faguas. And because her parents disappeared in their own journey to uncover Waslala some years prior, finding the city signifies learning more about her own origins and understanding the reasons that guided her parents to abandon her. Similar to Balza’s, Belli’s territories consist of spaces that, instead of having evolved, regressed, “beginning their return to the Middle Ages,” becoming desolate “green patches” embedded in contemporary maps, “isolated regions detached from modern development, civilization and technology.” After Melisandra’s encounter with Raphael (a name that directly refers to Raphael Hythlodaeus, the sailor who discovered the island of Utopia in Thomas More’s celebrated work), Melisandra embarks in the pursuit of the mysterious city. If the utopian Waslala represents in Belli’s novel a chimera, the “real” cities that surround Melisandra’s quest embody the First World’s “garbage dump” after having been exploited and plunged into oblivion, misery, and ostracism. It is in these cities that the so-called developed nations throw their radioactive and industrial wastes, leading to countless diseases, clandestine wars, and illegal smuggling. Waslala thus embodies a dream and a hope, a desire that emphasizes the possibility that a different and better destiny for Latin America is feasible. When at the end of her pilgrimage Melisandra discovers the legendary Waslala, she finds out that the city is nearly completely empty; her mother is the only remaining inhabitant. Echoing the main character’s intimate journey in Percusión, this encounter of both the city and the mother in Waslala represents a recognition of Melisandra’s self, for she finds that her image and that of her progenitor converge: they both were “the same.” Abad Faciolince’s novel divides the imaginary city of Angosta into three sharply demarcated zones or “sectors”: Tierra Fría (cold land) or “paradise,” where the first-class citizens dwell; Tierra Templada (temperate land), a narrow valley occupied by second-class citizens; and finally Tierra Caliente (hot land) or “Hell’s Mouth,” where reside countless beings piled up in the basest inhuman conditions. This division corresponds visibly to contemporary global borders, for it functions as a microscopic example of the uncomfortable cohabitation of the developed, emerging, and underdeveloped nations. Urban reconfiguration therefore consists of the coexistence between two different antagonistic temporalities: while we find territories whose inhabitants imitate the social behavior of the First World, they also exist simultaneously side by side with the most outrageous poverty. So while many of these territories “progress” toward the future, many others regress backward, falling into obscurity. It is this distinctive element of hybridity that most clearly differentiates Latin American cities from other urban spaces. Furthermore, these cities preserve a living connection with the past that embodies a temporality before the establishment of checkpoints and visas, instruments that prohibit anyone but first-class citizens from circulating within their borders. Accordingly, Angosta displays in a brutal fashion the paradoxes of postmodern Latin American cities. The existence of urbanized territories in the novel is due to the complicity between the old Latin American oligarchy (which in the novel seeks to whiten itself by any possible means) and a military regime that exercises its ruthless power over the excluded territories. As a result, their national policy of segregation is named “Apartamiento” (from the Spanish verb apartar, to separate), an obvious reference to Apartheid. The novel centers around the lives of the residents of the dilapidated hotel La Comedia (The Comedy) in Tierra Templada. Some of the long-term guests include Jacobo Lince, owner of a bookstore; Andrés Zuleta, a poet that works in Lince’s bookstore; Camila, the girlfriend of a thug who belongs to a paramilitary group with ties to the government; Candela, a third-class citizen; and Dan, a Jewish mathematician. Since in Angosta urban mobility is almost impossible (it is very difficult to receive a visa to leave either Tierra Templada or Tierra Caliente), most of its characters feel confined to a state of solitude and seclusion. According to Dan, this imprisonment transforms its inhabitants into “islands, or an archipelago . . . a herd of scattered loners.” Therefore, Angosta is an “accursed” city, sliced into pieces, like the contemporary world. Moreover, in this territory, we no longer find a plurality of individuals coexisting with each other but instead discover a number of atomized beings, paralyzed by the limits the official authority has imposed in order to preserve Angosta as a divided and compartmentalized city. The last city to which I will refer is the unnamed urban setting of José Antonio Ponte’s short story, “Un arte de hacer ruinas.” It traces the relationship between the narrator and his dissertation adviser in a city that grows “inward.” In this city—which resonates with Havana—student and adviser gather frequently; these meetings are shrouded in mystery. The student’s dissertation project deals with urbanism, specifically roof dwellers throughout the city. Eager to help his advisee, the adviser arranges a meeting with a retired professor who lives in a building that has been declared uninhabitable. Amid ruins and dust, the adviser cannot even recognize his former colleague. It is through this peculiar figure of the emeritus professor that the student learns that, while roof dwellers in the city are growing, many “explosions” are simultaneously occurring at the underground level. The professor explains that as a building becomes completely engorged with inhabitants, it will eventually collapse under its own weight. It is paradoxical that while the city’s citizens “squeeze” themselves together in order to carve out some modicum of living space, it is this very action that results in them being buried under rubble. Such a view on the city’s urban living environment represents a counterweight to the official line taken by the government; the National University propagandistically denies that any such building collapses have occurred. As noted above, we have here a sort of immobility prevailing over the free movement of citizens. The city is not merely a “small island” but also a space with no easily accessible exit; escape is only possible by digging underground in an attempt to locate “the subterranean connection between the island and the continent.” Isolation in this story is therefore multiple: it may be seen at the level of urban space, as in earlier works, but also in the wider geographic setting in which the city is situated. One therefore perceives through Ponte the degree to which Cuban literature both converges and distinguishes itself from Latin American temporality and historicity. For Ponte, transformation of the self once again manifests itself as the only meaningful way through which the “outside” may be reached. If external space represents an oppressive territory surrounded by numerous fences, the inside, on the contrary, embodies the only private area where citizens may discover a means of escape. By the end of the story, both the adviser and the retired professor are found dead, since they were involved in a clandestine project that aimed to build up an underground city which counterbalanced the repression of the external one aboveground. Furthermore, if the latter constituted a “garbage dump,” the subterranean city consisted of a neat and tidy space, where everything would have been preserved beautifully. Like Calvino’s archetypes, Ponte’s underground urban project sought to become all cities at once: the one above and the one below, all the possible cities that continually overlap with one another in the present. In all these works, Latin American cities have become spaces that are looking backward rather than forward. Nostalgia for the past predominates, as the immediate present is plagued by both small-scale violence and guerrilla wars. All these contemporary narratives seek to capture the intimate self, a quest that is fundamentally anchored in the memory and experience of the characters. The past therefore becomes the last remains of a shipwreck, a refuge that shields Latin Americans from being dragged into a whirlpool of disgrace and degradation. Consequently, these narratives call into question many of the policies that constitute global economics and politics. To celebrate the global city in Latin America, these writers suggest, is to overlook the reverse of the medal: the “progress” of globalization has brought with it unparalleled misery and poverty, turning these urban spaces into waste dumps where living and working conditions are marginal at best. Mobilizing the postmodern theme of disenchantment, they argue that if any real “progress” is occurring, it is confined to an exclusive minority. In this sense, the representation of nonexistent Latin American urban spaces in the most recent literary trends not only calls into question some of the basic premises of the modernization process in Latin America today; by yearning for the past, it also offers an alternative reconfiguration of urban space that can resist both the local and global violence that encloses it. gisela heffes teaches Latin American literatures and cultures at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of the annotated edition Judíos/Argentinos/Escritores (1999) and has published numerous articles, reviews, and interviews in both Spanish and English. her recent book, Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana, is a study of the literary representations of nonexistent urban spaces and their significance in the wider political and cultural framework of Latin America. Besides her academic work, she is also an active fiction writer, having published the novels Ischia (2000), Praga (2001), Ischia, Praga & Bruselas (2005), and several short stories and fictional chronicles in Latin America and the United States. University of Oklahoma March – April 2009 ı 45